AKMA’s Random Thoughts

High Degree

My new colleague Ellen Wondra is giving her inaugural lecture to the assembled alumni, students, staff, faculty, and guests of Seabury-Western. Her lecture concerns “The Highest Degree of Communion Possible,” the goal of the Windsor Report.

She begins by rehearsing some of the headline recommendations from the Report. She’s concentrating, though, on the proposed changes in the Anglican Communion’s self-understanding that would shape the way forward that the Report envisions. The Windsor Report deals with the tensions inherent in global communion emphasizes unity, centrality, and authority over diversity, locality, and autonomy. The Report proposes an Anglican Covenant that would bind provinces to the Instruments of Unity (Archbishop of Canterbury, Anglican Consultative Council, Lambeth Conference, and the Council of Primates). It defines and limits the autonomy of diverse provinces; a province would be free to amend its prayerbook, unless the changes injure the unity of the whole (as, for example, by substituting a local creed for the Nicene Creed). Ellen observes that the overall tendency of these proposals would be to vest the principal responsibility for upholding unity in the office of the bishop (especially a small number of prominent bishops)

Anglican provinces need to “consult” one another before proceeding with dramatic changes, but the verb “consult” may be read either as “talk to people” or “reach an agreement.” On one reading, the US church did consult its Anglican partners (however feebly); on the other, we did not.

She observes that the Instruments of Unity have typically come into being not on the basis of harmonious agreement, but because of besetting conflicts (cf. the first Lambeth Conference, relative to the Colenso case). She notes that the Agnlican Communion, with its loose organization, is constitutively unsuited to articulate unified doctrinal or disciplinary positions.

The Windsor Report thus advocates strengthening the Instruments of Unity — though, ironically, we cannot strengthen the Instruments of Unity without a worldwide consensus, which is precisely what we presently lack. Ellen notes the weakness of the proposed gestures involves precisely the possibility of recognizing the grounds for innovation or development; where the Anglican Communion has hitherto benefited from its flexibility, adapting productively to local or cultural circumstance, the strengthened Instruments of Unity batten down the hatches and seal the cracks by which the Spirit might infiltrate the conservative momentum of the institution.

Ellen follows through by pointing out the way that the Report makes a spotlight case of the ordination of women. If the innovation of women’s ordination worked through the Instruments of Unity, then questions of sexuality ought to be handled in the same way. She alleges that the Windsor Report caricatures the vitriolic controversy over ordination of women; she cites the absence of any reference to the actual schisms, the actual restrictions on ordained women’s ministries, and the extra-canonical actions of U.S. bishops that precipitated such (limited) acceptation of women’s ministries as we have presently obtained. The first Eames Commission Report concerned exactly this issue, and concluded that the church would have to learn to live with ambiguity, and would need a long period of reflection and deliberation to come to terms with.

But, Ellen notes, the Windsor Report constructs a version of history and current events that serves its goal of advocating strengthened Instruments of Unity — at the cost of falsifying, both explicitly and by omission, the way things came about. The cogency of the claims on behalf of the Instruments of Unity rests on the contrast of the [domesticated] process on behalf of the ordination of women with the [disorderly] process on behalf of recognizing the theological validity of lesbian and gay relationships. On matters of common concern, no province may act until one or all of the Instruments of Unity say that they may.

This weights the whole process significantly toward traditionalism, especially since all the deliberation in view must take place in theory, not at all in practice. We cannot find out whether the church can function if divorced people can remarry, if women can function in ordained ministry, if lesbian and gay people can flourish in theologically-endorsed relationships.

Ellen makes the point that one of the hallmarks of God’s way as known in Scripture and church history consistently shows that God operates in ways that we cannot and ought not try to predict and contain. Further, Ellen asks whether truth exists in a rarefied, abstract realm of theory, recognizable by a small cadre of bishops, or through the combination of action and reflection, through conflict and uncertainty. The truth, on Ellen’s account, emerges through the consensus fidelium that emerges from critical reflection on the life of the church.

All of this would constitute both a dangerous rupture in the constitutive fluidity of the Anglican Communion, and a dangerously theological move. Whether we agree with the actions of the U.S. church or not, the whole Anglican Communion benefits from the looseness of its present structure.

We do need stronger Instruments of Unity — but these proposals envision too tight a unanimity. The best way forward would involve strengthened Instruments of Unity, and a minimal communion-wide code of canon law, but also an acknowledgment that provinces may push the boundaries of controversy at the risk of schism and pain, for such experimentation itself tests the soundness of the controverted topic’s validity.

[Warning: I’m not a good note-taker. Don’t bind Ellen to what my fingers think she said! I know that I flattened out lots of nuance, and I expect that I totally missed some points, too.]

Posted by AKMA at October 28, 2004 10:32 AM | TrackBack