Notes on the Talk by The Rev. Canon J. Robert Wright

At St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, June 5, 2008

By

The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

 

Fr. Wright has been the professor of Patristics and Liturgy at General Seminary and a major figure in ecumenical dialogues. His paper centered on the history of the primacy of Canterbury.

 

Fr. Wright started with a quote from the Psalms, “I shall not give my glory to another.” This psalm was invoked by an early holder of the See of Canterbury when it was suggested that the primacy be moved. Today, Fr. Wright said, charity and humility are needed, not pride of place.

In 596-597 Pope Gregory sent Augustine to Canterbury with the Papal pallium, a form of the stole which signified archepiscopal authority. In 601, Bede refers to Augustine as the Archbishop of Britain. The term Metropolitan was first used at Nicea as outlined in Canon 28. The Metropolitan was to be a bishop chosen by all the bishops of his province and who then had the power to confirm subsequent episcopal elections and to perform the consecrations.

By a Papal decision of 1326 the Archbishop of Canterbury was styled the Primate of all England and the Archbishop of York the primate of England. Diocesan bishops were understood as suffragans or helpers to the primate “forming a college or chapter under his primacy.” Both Archbishops Ramsey and Runcie thought that York and Canterbury had been given providentially to England to keep Canterbury from becoming a papacy.

The Lambeth Conference of 1908 rejects jurisdiction for the Archbishop of Canterbury outside of England. In the language of the conference, “a primacy of honor but not jurisidiction.”

The presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church is not styled primate until 1982. The presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church is unique in not having a diocesan cure.

Fr. Wright summarized that the Archbishop of Canterbury has had by wide acceptance a primatial role in the Anglican Communion that is similar to the moral and spiritual primacy of the Roman See but dissimilar in that Canterbury claims no universal jurisdiction like Rome.

The paper ended with a summary of ecumenical documents on the Primacy of Rome and noted both Orthodox statements and ARCIC agreed statements that were willing to entertain the possibility of a non-juridical primacy for Rome even before full organic reunion takes place as a sign of unity among Christians. Fr. Wright ended with a provocative proposal that if one of the historic primatial sees of Canterbury, Rome and Constantinople needed to make a sacrificial move in order to allow the emergence of a primate who could speak for a uniting Church, let Canterbury make the first offer as a service to the Church universal.

There were a number of questions that discussed the difference between a diaconal primacy and one that was primarily juridical. Kallistos Ware rose to object to the fundamental distinction saying that he thought the distinction overdrawn and that in Biblical terms that jurisdiction was the authority to exercise one’s diakonia.

Notes on the talk by Bishop Keith Ackerman

At St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, June 5, 2008

By

The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

 

The second presenter at the conference was Bishop Keith Ackerman, bishop of the Diocese of Quincy in The Episcopal Church and president of Forward in Faith, North America, the Anglo-Catholic society which is best known for its opposition to the ordination of women. Bishop Ackerman opened with the proclamation that “Christ is Risen” in Greek and Russian and was heartily answered by the assembly that Christ is Risen indeed. He spoke of the mystical oneness of the church. That despite the apparent divisions of the church, the church can only be one because Christ is one. The bishop identified three sorts of authority in the church; magisterial, confessional and synodical and proposed that all three of these types of authority are properly exercised for the continuing reformation and renewal of the church in faith, love and service. He quoted Richard Hooker about the reality of the church that “from Him who is its head it has descended to us now.” Bishop Ackerman said that the bishops properly have the spiritual jurisdiction in the church but that this jurisdiction must be exercised for “the health and salvation of souls.” He quoted the monk of the East, “where Jesus is there is the church.” The proper exercise of authority in the church is, to quote Cranmer, “that we might evermore dwell in Him and He in us.”

Bishop Ackerman gave a precis of the thought of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey from Ramsey’s book The Gospel and the Catholic Church, “institutionalism fails without mindfulness of the faith and the faith fails without mindfulness of the historic church.” Ramsey emphasized the vital connection between a consciousness of the passion of Christ and a consciousness of the church as the Body of Christ and the tendency in Protestantism to lose this connection. The Bishop made a case that a Eucharistic church that longs for union in Christ “must be a church with spiritual disciplines.” Unity must be based on doctrinal agreement that is made real and practical in spiritual discipline.

Bishop Ackerman spoke of the longstanding connections between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy in this country, including the relationship between Bishop Grafton of Wisconsin and St. Tikhon the great missionary of Alaska and later Patriarch of Moscow. Bishop Ackerman quoted Bishop Grafton that “in times of confusion Anglicans turn East for inspiration.”

The Bishop then spoke about the doctrinal incoherence of The Episcopal Church, and the emergence in the midst of the ecclesial chaos of North America of an “extra-denominational church on pilgrimage” that is truly “convergent,” that seeks to be truly catholic, orthodox, confessing and renewed for the sake of mission. The Bishop expressed hope in the power of God to overcome the divisions of the churches and to use the Fellowship in fostering ecumenical convergence amongst apostolic Christians of all denominations. “How God will use our divisions for reform and renewal God knows.”

Notes on the Conference at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary

June 4 through 7, 2008

Meeting of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius

Rome, Constantinople and Canterbury, Mother Churches?

By The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

 

The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius is eighty years old. It was founded in England to encourage person to person ecumenical dialogue and fellowship between Anglicans and the Eastern Orthodox. The fellowship publishes the highly respected journal Sobornost. The mission of the Fellowship has been expanded over the years to include Christians of other traditions who are committed to East-West dialogue. The Fellowship website is http://www.sobornost.org/. MP3s of all the talks are available at http://ancientfaith.com/specials/svs_jan2008/.

The conference was held at St. Vladimir’s in Crestwood, New York which is in a leafy suburb just outside New York City. The facilities were lovely. The conference began and ended each day with Orthodox liturgies in the beautiful but intimate chapel and on Saturday there was an Anglican Eucharist celebrated in the Anglo-Catholic style by Bishop Keith Ackerman in the Church of St. James the Less in Scarsdale, N.Y. The rector there, Fr. Tom Newcomb is an old friend from S.E.A.D. days. The conference was international with many attendees from England who were supporting the re-launch of the Fellowship in North America. There was quite a wonderful atmosphere of genuine Christian hospitality and charity generated by the Orthodox and one could not doubt the genuine desire on the part of our hosts to have real koinonia with Christians of other traditions. Of course this fellowship could not extend to sharing the Eucharist. There was a good showing of Anglican participants both as presenters in attendance. I saw many friends from S.E.A.D. days and from Mere Anglicanism. There were faculty from Trinity, Nashotah House and Berkeley at Yale.

The topic of the conference was the meaning of primacy both in terms of the primacy of a mother church and the meaning of episcopal, regional and universal primacy. The topic is pertinent to the ecclesiological crisis in the Anglican world. The Orthodox world is split into competing jurisdictions which means that a given city may have as a dozen or so different Orthodox bishops. The Orthodox are painfully aware of the negative impact of this reality on mission. There is also a hot discussion in the Orthodox world about whether the Ecumenical Patriarch, the first among equals of all the Orthodox primates, should be the bishop of an old imperial capital with a dwindling flock and who is compromised by the interference of a government hostile to Christianity.

The first speaker was Metropolitan Phillip (Saliba) of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. This is the Orthodox jurisdiction that has ordained a number of former Evangelicals including Peter Gilchrist, the former Intervarsity worker. They have also developed a Western rite liturgy that is oriented toward former Anglicans. His topic was “Canon 28 of the 4^th Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451, Relevant or Irrelevant Today?” Canon 28 of the Council proclaimed that Constantinople as the new Imperial capital or the New Rome should have the same dignity and authority as the old Rome in ecclesiastical matters and that the Metropolitan of Constantinople should be Patriarch and Primate of the churches in the old Eastern Roman provinces and that all the metropolitans of these provinces should be ordained by him. Metropolitan Phillip identified three kinds of canons; dogmatic canons, contextual canons and dead canons. He identified as dead canons several canons that were essentially anti-Semitic including a canon that forbade the Orthodox to consult Jewish doctors or bathe with Jews. He said that he had Jewish doctors and also bathed in the ocean where certainly Jews had bathed and so had run afoul of these “dead canons.” Dogmatic canons are things such as canons defining the Incarnation. Contextual canons are canons developed to respond to particular historical situations and ++Phillip put Canon 28 in this category. He pronounced the idea of Rome, second Rome (Constantinople) and third Rome (as Moscow is called) “absurd.” These sees have had pre-eminence in the past because of their political significance. These canons defining their primacy have been historical and administrative and they are no longer relevant. Jerusalem alone has a claim to primacy which is not contingent on changing historical and political circumstances.

The application of Canon 28 in North America has created chaos and led to a proliferation of competing jurisdictions. Metropolitan Phillip gave a very scathing indictment of the ethnocentrism of Orthodoxy in North American and their lack of missionary and evangelical zeal. He spoke very forcefully against the notion of the Orthodox in North America as a diaspora. This concept encourages overlapping Orthodox jurisdictions. He spoke of the need for a united Orthodox jurisdiction in North America and of the failures of SCOBA (Standing Committee of Orthodox Bishops in America). He ended by saying that the church in North America was mature enough to govern itself and should not be organized ethnically and encouraged the beginning of unity with the clergy and laity on the local level. He called for the creation of an inter-Orthodox commission in Geneva to vigorously address these problems.

As an aside in his lecture Metropolitan Phillip told the story of Peter Gilchrist coming to him. It was very moving story told with great humility by a man with a warm missionary heart who felt that the Lord was presenting him with a clear challenge to respond to the Great Commision.

After each talk there was a time of questions and answers. There were a number of thoughtful comments but I noted the response of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware who is one of the most widely published Orthodox authors in English. He has been a long time Oxford Don and supervised the thesis of Rowan Williams among others. His comment was that the purpose of the church is to celebrate the Eucharist which unites all people of all races. He said that the Orthodox needed to get away from autocephalous ecclesiology (each national church as independent and self-governing) and should not practice canonical fundamentalism, taking canons out of context.

I will be putting up over the next several days notes on the recent conference of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. I encourage my readers to join the society which exists to promote one to one ecumenical fellowship between the Christians of the East and West. I believe that it is vital for missionary purposes to cultivate an ecumenical consciousness. The spiritual skills and disciplines which are necessary for ecumenical fellowship and dialogue are the same skills and disciplines needed to hold local churches together. The unity of the churches is vital to the Gospel mission.

You can find out more about the Fellowship and join by paypal here 

Report from the Conference, “Rome, Constantinople, and Canterbury, Mother Churches?” Sponsored by The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius

Held at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary, June 4 through June 7, 2008.

 

I have been attending a really fascinating conference at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York the last few days. The topic of the conference has been the meaning of mother churches for the identity of local churches and how primacy is to be properly understood. There have been Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican speakers including such luminaries as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Bishop Keith Ackerman and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. I hope to put up a summary of the conference at a later time. This morning we were addressed by Fr. Jonathan Goodall, the chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who read us a paper by Rowan Williams which the Archbishop had hoped to give in person. Rowan Williams has belonged to the society of St. Alban and St. Sergius since he was nineteen and is a patron of the society which exists to promote ecumenical fellowship between the Eastern and Western churches. Below I am putting up some quick impressions of this talk. It bears importantly on the crisis of authority in Anglicanism. As of yet I do not see the text of the talk on the internet. MP3s of all the talks are available at http://ancientfaith.com/.

Rowan Williams’ paper read by Fr. Goodall was extremely clear and lucid. It began with greetings to the society and a commendation of the theme of the conference, the meaning of primacy. “The subject matter could hardly be more timely.” The ABC repeatedly made the point that every church is a daughter church except the church in Jerusalem. Each church receives the Gospel from elsewhere and this dependence on that which is received is vital because it reminds each local church that it is not self-sufficient.

There followed a recommendation of the communion ecclesiology of John Zizioulas and others which emphasizes the church as local Eucharistic fellowship gathered around a bishop and which critiques institutional and bureaucratic understandings of church authority. “The church is not an organization controlled from a single point.” However, the ABC went on to say in his paper that “the pendulum has swung too far.” Communio ecclesiology is sometimes taken in a way that encourages an understanding of the church which misses the necessary interdependence of local churches and their existence in an economy of giving and receiving the Gospel. “One bishop is no bishop.” I didn’t get the exact words in my notes but the ABC said in effect that one local church is not the church, again stressing the interdependence of churches.

The paper continued with a reflection on the role of the bishop and of primacy. “The bishop sustains and nourishes his churches’ dependence on the larger church especially as the celebrant of the catholic oblation.” “Identification of primacy apart from the fellowship of all the bishops is questionable.” Primacy should be exercised in terms of sharing the gift of the Gospel and the Spirit. The exercise of the primatial office in the promulgation of a Gospel that cannot be shared outside of the context of one local church and culture is a contradiction of the office of episcopacy and primacy and this is a problem on both the left and the right in Anglicanism.

The paper then went on to criticize Roman Catholic conflation of primacy with legalism and juridicalism and the rigidity of the Orthodox limitation of primacy to the ancient sees. He critiqued Anglican understandings of primacy for not having thought through the necessary structures that would be required to allow an appropriate primacy to work and for the consequent inadequacy of the current structures of church discipline. He urged all three traditions to rethink episcopacy and primacy in terms of mission.

This is my best reconstruction on the basis of my notes. I will be happily corrected by others who were in attendance or by the subsequent publication of the text. It was a very lucid and well reasoned paper that gave an encouraging display of Rowan Williams talents as a theologian. It was also very clear and not couched in excessive theological jargon. In my view though no explicit mention was made of the American House of Bishops, the vision of the church and the episcopacy and primatial ministry that was outlined in this paper describe recent actions of the House of Bishops of TEC, beginning with the consent to the ordination of Gene Robinson and subsequently, as culpably communion breaking and a contradiction of the proper role of bishops in the church. In Rowan Williams’ ecclesiology as articulated in this paper there is no room for such unilateralism as has been exercised by the American church. How the ecclesiology of Rowan Williams the theologian is expressed in the actions of Rowan Williams the primate remains to be seen. I pray that this paper represents a vision for which he is willing to give the most robust leadership in the coming weeks.

 

Comments on The Pope’s Ecumenical Address

April 19, 2008

I heartily recommend the Pope’s address to the ecumenical audience given at St. Joseph’s church in New York City. The full text can be found here.

The Pope’s message makes the important connection between unity and mission. The proclamation of reconciliation with God and our fellow human beings in Jesus Christ is contradicted by our sad divisions. Unity and mission are inextricably intertwined. Furthermore the breaking of unity with the faith and practice of the church of ages in the name of “prophetic action” and “local option,” demonstrates a loss of grip on the nature of Christian truth which transcends time and culture. The Pope of course is making a reference to among other things the unilateral actions of the Protestant Churches including The Episcopal Church in authorizing same-sex blessings and the ordination of actively homosexual clergy.

The Pope warns against the temptation to try to find an ecumenical unity which is not also a unity in faith and doctrine. The downplaying of the role of doctrinal agreement in the search for unity is according to Benedict the result of alien and secular ideologies taking root in the church.

“My dear friends, the power of the kerygma has lost none of its internal dynamism. Yet we must ask ourselves whether its full force has not been attenuated by a relativistic approach to Christian doctrine similar to that found in secular ideologies, which, in alleging that science alone is “objective”, relegate religion entirely to the subjective sphere of individual feeling. Scientific discoveries, and their application through human ingenuity, undoubtedly offer new possibilities for the betterment of humankind. This does not mean, however, that the “knowable” is limited to the empirically verifiable, nor religion restricted to the shifting realm of “personal experience.”

For Christians to accept this faulty line of reasoning would lead to the notion that there is little need to emphasize objective truth in the presentation of the Christian faith, for one need but follow his or her own conscience and choose a community that best suits his or her individual tastes. The result is seen in the continual proliferation of communities which often eschew institutional structures and minimize the importance of doctrinal content for Christian living.

But the uncritical acceptance of this reduction of dependable knowing to scientific knowledge by the intellectual elites of the mainline churches has led to exactly the marginalization of the dogmatic tradition which the Pope rightly sees as the enemy of any true ecumenism. (The Pope is here making a philosophical critique of popular epistemology similar to that made by Michael Polanyi and others. See my remarks given at GTS below.) The result is an acceleration of the momentum toward a kind of anti-ecumenism with the church breaking into more and more idiosyncratic communities.

Without what Lesslie Newbigin calls proper confidence in the truth there can no true community and a church which has lost its proper confidence in its own proclamation cannot effectively evangelize a world which hopes for truth but doubts its existence. As the Pope puts it:

Only by “holding fast” to sound teaching (2 Thess 2:15; cf. Rev 2:12-29) will we be able to respond to the challenges that confront us in an evolving world. Only in this way will we give unambiguous testimony to the truth of the Gospel and its moral teaching. This is the message which the world is waiting to hear from us. Like the early Christians, we have a responsibility to give transparent witness to the “reasons for our hope”, so that the eyes of all men and women of goodwill may be opened to see that God has shown us his face (cf. 2 Cor 3:12-18) and granted us access to his divine life through Jesus Christ. He alone is our hope! God has revealed his love for all peoples through the mystery of his Son’s passion and death, and has called us to proclaim that he is indeed risen, has taken his place at the right hand of the Father, and “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead” (Nicene Creed).

The St. Andrew’s Draft of the Proposed Anglican Covenant

Instrument of Oppression and Exclusion or Instrument of Inclusion and Justice?

By

The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology

Trinity School for Ministry

 

Actions of The Episcopal Church and the Diocese of New Westminster in Canada have precipitated a crisis in the Anglican Communion. These actions have brought to the surface a deep divide in the communion which has been a long time developing. A number of provinces and dioceses have concluded that they have impaired or broken communion with the Anglican churches in North America. In the face of demands that The Episcopal Church and New Westminster be in some fashion officially sanctioned and excommunicated, the Anglican Communion through its instruments of unity established the Windsor Committee which proposed as the way forward the development of an Anglican Covenant which would identify core beliefs and the practices of ecclesial decision-making necessary to maintain a world wide communion of churches. Thus in answer to the demand to exclude from communion those churches making revolutionary innovations in a unilateral fashion, the Windsor Report proposed that the Anglican Communion engage in a process of mutual consultation leading to a consensus on the minimums of faith and practice necessary to maintain communion, and then let member churches decide for themselves whether they could abide by such common commitments.

 

The first thing to be said about the covenant strategy is that it is an inclusive strategy which places on local churches the responsibility to decide whether they shall or shall not be a constitutive part of the communion of a world-wide church. All the member churches have been invited to contribute to the drafting of the covenant. It is clear that the existing instruments of unity and the existing articulations of Anglican faith and practice such as the Lambeth quadrilateral are not able by themselves to hold together the communion. Without some new feature the communion is certain to break apart along racial and cultural fault lines. It is part of the Gospel that God is making a new people out of many peoples, and a church that breaks apart along a North-South fracture line would be a counter sign to the Gospel in our time. Without a new articulation of the consensus of faith and a new agreement about the means to settle serious theological disputes we will not have the tools to hold the communion together but neither will we have the tools to hold together the various provinces. The skills and spiritual disciplines that will come from striving to maintain the worldwide communion are exactly the skills and spiritual disciplines needed to hold together our own dioceses and parishes. Sacrificing global communion on the altar of local communion is certain to lead to the intensification of the local momentum toward schism.

 

The main debate now in The Episcopal Church is not over the content of the covenant but whether the very idea of covenant is legitimate or not. Any possible covenant is seen by many in leadership in The Episcopal Church as an immoral example of over-reaching and over-definition and as an attempt to constrain consciences in an unacceptable way. I see an emerging negative consensus in The Episcopal Church with regard to the very idea of a covenant. This emerging negative consensus about the concept of a covenant is, I believe, based on an unexamined and to a degree unconscious commitment to a paradigm of knowledge that is part of the mental furniture of the West. This paradigm has been described and critiqued by the philosopher, Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge. The missionary theologian, Lesslie Newbigin, has applied this critique to the crisis of theological confidence in the churches of the developed world in a series of books, including The Gospel in a Pluralist Society and Proper Confidence.  

 

There has arisen in the West what Polanyi calls a false scientism that divides knowledge into two categories. There is the relatively small category of facts and in this area certainty is possible. There is a larger realm of beliefs and values and in this realm by the nature of the case certainty is never possible. There may be commitments that “work” for people. In this sense there is my truth and your truth but to treat a belief as though it were certain is seen in this paradigm as a category mistake and an inherently immoral and oppressive act.

 

 The proposed Anglican Covenant is felt by many of the leaders of The Episcopal Church to represent an improper and even backward understanding of the nature of truth. The logic as I see it goes something like this, “Everyone knows that the proposed covenant requires the submission of individual consciences to a consensus about the truth of Christian beliefs and everyone knows that there is no public truth in the arena of beliefs and faith to which all consciences should submit. Hence the very idea of a covenant is an attempt to coerce uniformity where it should not be attempted.”

 

Everyone knows? Everyone who lives uncritically within the paradigm that Polanyi calls scientism or objectivism. But this is not the only paradigm of knowledge going and it is among other things, including its inability to actually account for the demonstrable nature of scientific knowing, inadequate to the sort of knowing which is the knowledge of faith. This paradigm is inadequate to what Leslie Newbigin calls the proper confidence of faith.  It is not so that belief is an inferior sort of knowledge but rather belief is the necessary prerequisite of knowing anything at all. Scientists are able to discover and know because of preceding beliefs. Their famous methodological doubt is based on deeper commitments and beliefs. Science does not provide certainty but proper confidence, and in a similar way faith produces its own proper confidence. Both Polanyi and Newbigin think that Augustine got it just right, “I believe in order that I may understand.” It is necessary for Christians to articulate their common beliefs just so they can engage together in a common search for a more comprehensive truth and so they can adjudicate true and false implications of the faith.

 

Radical pluralism is an inevitable consequence of the theory of knowledge that makes belief into an inferior sort of knowledge. If there is no way to establish a proper confidence about particular beliefs, then any attempt to establish authoritative beliefs will be thought an exercise in tyranny. This conviction is often expressed in what has now become the canonic parable of the blind men and the elephant. A group of blind men so the story goes are exploring an elephant by touch. One feels the tail and says the elephant is like a rope and one feels the leg and says the elephant is like a tree and one feels the ear and says the elephant is like a large leaf. Each has a piece of the truth. No one of them has it all. To apply the parable to our current controversy, many in The Episcopal Church see the establishment of a covenant as an attempt by one of the blind men to make his perspective the one authoritative perspective and thus a power play and an immoral case of over-reaching. Lesslie Newbigin points out that there is a problem with this parable. The parable is told from the point of view of the King and his courtiers who take in the whole scene. The parable is told from the point of view of a supposedly neutral observer who is able to see the partial and limited nature of all other perspectives from the vantage point of the one perspective which is not subject to any critique. The parable is told from the imperial point of view of the theory of knowledge that Polanyi critiques as scientism. The teller of the parable adopts the pose of tolerance but this is surface camouflage behind which the King asserts the right to relativize and marginalize all other claims to truth but his own. Of this Newbigin says, “In a pluralist society such as ours. . .any claim to announce the truth about God and his purpose for the world, is liable to be dismissed as ignorant, arrogant, dogmatic. We have no reason to be frightened of this accusation. It itself rests on assumptions which are open to radical criticisms, but which are not criticized because they are part of the reigning plausibility structure.” (Gospel in a Pluralist Society, page 10.)

 

The established churches of the West are deeply permeated by the philosophy of pluralism and the epistemology which generates it. The established churches of the West are profoundly influenced by an understanding of tolerance which is really tyranny in disguise, a tyranny which is inherently hostile to the confident expression of apostolic faith. If the very concept of an Anglican Covenant is rejected in the name of Western pseudo-tolerance, it will be an exercise not of inclusion but of exclusion and what will be excluded will be the very possibility of building a consensus and proper confidence about the essentials of Christian faith and practice necessary to maintain the life and order of a world-wide church.

 

Without the renewal of consensus in faith and practice that a covenant represents, the imperial pluralism that really governs much of the common life of the churches in the West will continue without challenge. The result will be Orwellian. There will be continuing talk about the provisional quality of all truth claims and the need for tolerance and respect for conscience while unilateral innovations which ride roughshod over the consciences of others continue apace. I predict that the pace will in fact accelerate. If theological argument cannot by definition come to a consensus about the minimally authoritative truths of Christian faith and practice, and it cannot under the aegis of the sort of imperial pluralism I have described, what is to restrain the one who perceives that personal conscience demands unilateral action?

 

 The adoption of an Anglican Covenant allows us a chance to renew our commitment to the basics of the apostolic faith and to develop a suitably Christian and Anglican process for engaging and settling debates about the common boundaries of faith and practice. Within the parameters set by a common covenant real tolerance of differing opinions is possible with the confidence that they can be adjudicated justly according to mutually agreed principles. In the West the alternative is a church life based on a pseudo-tolerance behind which lurks the intolerance of an imperial pluralism which will inevitably encourage those who happen to be in power toward the unilateral imposition of their enthusiasms over what they see as the blind commitments of others. It is life under the reign of imperial pluralism that is unjust and exclusionary. The logic of church life under this sort of pluralism is the logic of finesse and fait accompli and power politics. The adoption of an appropriate Anglican Covenant has the chance of creating a more just and inclusive community and a global church which is not merely the extension of a Western cultural hegemony.

 

 

 

 

Thank you to the Bishop and people of Dallas for the great privilege of participating in the election leading to the selection of the next bishop suffragan. My wife and I were treated with great courtesy and grace. It is always wonderful to get to meet other Christians and to have a chance to talk about the deep things of the faith, the ministry and our common life in Christ.

Congratulations to Canon Lambert. My prayers are with the Diocese of Dallas for a speedy confirmation of this election and for joy in the service of our Lord.