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News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
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October 2006
On a Communion in Crisis: Taking the Windsor Report seriously.
Catherine Sider-Hamilton
The choice for Anglicans, in the continuing controversy over homosexual practice, is often presented as either/or; stay or leave; truth or unity. On both sides of the debate, people wonder whether unity can be purchased at the price of truth (or justice, depending on your theological stripe). On both sides, people seek a ‘moment of clarity’ which will provide sufficient cause to part ways, either with the world-wide Communion or with an ‘errant’ bishop. Such a moment of clarity is a long time coming. Though a gay bishop has been consecrated and gay ‘blessings’ approved, the vast majority of conservative Anglicans in North America still count themselves members of their provinces. Though Nigeria has established its own church in the US, TEC still counts it a sister province.
It is worth paying attention to this reluctance to part decisively – because it suggests that the way forward is more complex than the ‘either/or’ choice allows; because it suggests that truth and unity may in fact necessarily belong together; because it reveals a surprising depth of affection for this church that is in such a mess. What are the options, as we sift the consequences of TEC’s General Convention and as we prepare in Canada for our next General Synod? Is there something to guide Christians who would be faithful, who believe in truth and who love their church, beyond a stark ‘either/or’?
Two years ago an international commission, made up of Anglicans from all over the world and of various theological leanings, issued the Windsor Report. It is a remarkable document, remarkable for its grounding in Scripture and its balance. It resolutely defends the idea of orthodoxy and the primacy of Scripture, yet insists on the informed interpretation of inherited teaching and of the Bible. And, in the diversity of its members, it speaks to the Communion with a single voice. Let traditionalists and true liberals (those seekers after intellectual freedom) alike take note: this is a user-friendly product. The Windsor Report has been noticed mainly for its insistence on ‘expressions of regret,’ and for the way those expressions have, when offered, smacked more of cunning than of repentance. But to limit it to this is to miss the point entirely. The Windsor Report offers a vision of Communion and a proposal or two for preserving it that go to the heart of what it means to be Anglican. If we care to heed it, there is something here that just may save the ship. At the very least, there is here reason to question the either/or terms in which the way forward is now so often presented.
The Windsor Report notes that the way Anglicanism has historically worked – through a structure both episcopal (and so hierarchical) and synodical (and so democratic), without a central authority figure – is based in the primacy of Scripture: authority belongs first and finally to Scripture; even the bishop stands under its truth, even the synod is directed by it. Moreover, it is in Communion – in the teaching of bishops and the resolutions of synods, but above all in the interplay of its many voices, ordained, lay, academic, of every race and nation – that we hear Scripture truly. If Anglican polity is unwieldy in a crisis, that is because it refuses to grant ultimacy to any one structure or voice within the church, insisting on Scripture’s primacy and holding up the church as a whole as its legitimate interpreter. It is a vision that manages to be both modest and sweeping at the same time; it is recognizably Johannine. Everything he has heard from the Father, Jesus gives to his followers together, and it is in their mutual love and adoration of their Lord – as they abide in him and he in them – that they know the truth. If this is Anglicanism, it is worth preserving.
Accordingly, the Windsor Report offers a few suggestions – again both modest and potentially sweeping. “Communion,” it says simply, “is all about mutual relationships.” We are held together not by a Pope or by a Confession, but by “bonds of affection”: our common Anglican inheritance; our worldwide fellowship. It is, in other words, mutual love and the patience and absolute commitment to the other that such love implies which enables unity even in the heat of bitter disagreement. For this commitment – even to those who are in the wrong -- there is good precedent. “Having loved his own,” John relates, “Jesus loved them to the end.”
This commitment is worked out practically through the instruments of Anglican polity: through the episcopate, the synod and ‘instruments of unity.’ So communion – putting the needs of the global fellowship before one’s own – becomes the guiding principle behind the actions of bishop and synod alike. This is the real meaning of “expressions of regret”: they enact the mutual love that is the heart of Communion and the seat of truth. The church’s various gatherings – Lambeth, the ACC, the Primates’ Meetings – become the places where truth may be sought in fellowship on behalf of the whole church.
What is exciting in this is to recognize that, although our polity seems unwieldy in times of crisis, we have in it precisely what we need to find a way through the storm – not just to a safe harbour, but to a place of truth. The question is whether we have the patience and forbearance – the mutual love – that is necessary.
To this end, the Windsor Report makes two practical proposals. It calls the churches of the Communion to recognize their necessary fellowship, the mutual love and enduring commitment, the patience to which they are called for the sake of truth, in a formal act of covenanting which has binding force. And it asks the whole church to recognize in the Archbishop of Canterbury a symbol and focus of the Communion that defines us – so that in times of crisis he can serve as the voice of the church to the churches.
Is there a beacon here for a storm-tossed ship? There is at least that moment of clarity. This is what Anglicanism is all about: this insistence on the primacy and power of Scripture, and therefore this loose polity; this openness to debate, this mutual love, this patience. This is who we are, this collection of disparate peoples knit together in Christ, in whose Communion we believe we will find the truth.
These are the necessary virtues for a communion people: patience, forbearance, truthfulness, mutual love. And these ‘instruments of unity’ are the tools available to us through which to exercise that love, that truthfulness, that patience. There are no fireworks here, no deus ex machina to lift us miraculously out of the storm. Yet there is a deep truth, a vision of the way in which our own church may be the place in which Christ abides – in us and we in him – even in the midst of struggle, so that the world may see in us something of the glory of God. We could do worse than to heed this truth, to catch the Windsor vision – to lash ourselves to it as to a mast, and sail on, past the Sirens, through the storm, with the ship.
in the Diocese of Toronto and a PhD student in New Testament Studies at Wycliffe College.
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The
Rev. Catherine Sider Hamilton is a priest |
Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2006 |