Tag Archives: Anglican Covenant

Covenant and Coercion

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The Episcopal Lead points to an essay by Savi Hensman that explores the disciplinary regime laid out in Part 4 of  The Anglican Covenant. Beginning with the baptismal vow to resist evil, she asks whether individuals or a church resisting evil (e.g., the oppressive treatment of GLBT persons) must submit if other churches object:

This might imply that member churches seeking to be faithful to their Christian calling, and to experience and reflect the love of the Holy Trinity, should never do anything to which certain other churches strongly object, if those objecting can convince the Standing Committee that the action would be wrong or harmful to unity.

But is achievement of a ‘common mind’ – or appearance of this – and greatest possible degree of communion always the highest good? In a world where evil can often seem plausible, even moral, there are many occasions when this is not so.

She goes on to cite the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted Hitler and was martyred for it. More importantly for her purposes, Bonhoeffer was among the leaders of those German Protestants who refused to participate in the German Christian movement. She quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury writing about Bonhoeffer:

[I]f we ask about the nature of the true Church, where we shall see the authentic life of Christ’s Body – or if we ask about the unity of the Church, how we come together to recognise each other as disciples – Bonhoeffer’s answer would have to be in the form of a further question. Does this or that person, this or that Christian community, stand where Christ is? Are they struggling to be in the place where God has chosen to be? And he would further tell us that to be in this place is to be in a place where there are no defensive walls; it must be a place where all who have faith in Jesus can stand together, and stand with all those in whose presence and in whose company Christ suffers, making room together for God’s mercy to be seen.

That is how Bonhoeffer had already come to the paradox of saying – as he did in 1936 – that unity between Christians could not be the only thing that mattered – if all it meant was good will towards everyone who claimed the name of a believer or everyone who satisfied some limited definition of human decency and fluency in religious talk.

One of the things that I was trying to get at in my previous post on Hooker is the issue of coercion. Coercion operates on many levels. Historically, as in the case of Elizabeth I and the other Tudor monarchs, coercion takes the form of state action to enforce conformity. In contemporary institutional Christianity, state action is not an option. However, there are other means at hand in some churches. The Vatican can suppress dissent by silencing theologians, but in other denominations, excommunication has become a rarity.

Part of the struggle in Anglicanism is a struggle over definition–What is it? Who are the members of the Anglican Communion? Since its beginning in the 19th century, the Anglican Communion has lacked clear boundaries, a clear definition of what it is and what it isn’t. The Covenant is part of a process aimed at defining boundaries, and certainly distinguishing members of the Anglican Communion from those churches that do not belong to it. Defining boundaries and membership involves enforcing conformity, at least on some level. And enforcing conformity requires coercion.

Hensman’s question comes down to “At what cost conformity?” At the cost of resisting evil? Or breaking our baptismal vows to “respect the dignity of every human person?” And here’s where Hooker comes in. Elizabeth and Hooker both were saying to nonconformists that they had to submit to doctrine and practice which they regarded is evil. Conformity was more important than faithfulness to the truth of the Gospel. The disciplinary  measures of the Anglican Covenant make the same argument against those who accept the ordination of Gays and Lesbians (and women, and perhaps the presidency of laypeople at the Eucharist in the Diocese of Sidney).

 

Hooker, Covenant and No-Covenant: Or, the uses and abuses of history

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For Anglicans and Episcopalians, the big news this morning wasn’t the election results in the USA but the announcement of a new coalition directed against the Anglican Covenant. Called noanglicancovenant, it has a website, a facebook page, press–at least among bloggers–and its own logo:

 

Thinking Anglicans announced:

International Campaign Seeks to Stop Anglican Covenant

It wasn’t a coincidence that the announcement came on November 3, the date of the commemoration of Richard Hooker in Anglican calendars:

Susan Russell wrote to members of the Anglican Resistance Movement’s facebook page,

It is no coincidence that today — November 3rd AKA the Feast of Richard Hooker — was chosen to launch an international campagin to oppose the proposed Anglican Covenant.

The new website — No Anglican Covenant: Anglicans for Comprehensive Unity — offers an impressive wealth of resources, background information and context to inform, empower and engage in the process of pushing back on this ill conceived proposal. And I am honored to listed among a truly amazing cloud of witnesses calling our communion to reclaim its foundational value of Anglican comprehensiveness.

Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the current proposal is coercion in covenant clothing. Scripture and tradition tell us to value the ideal of Covenant. Reason tells us to reject this proposal lest we throw out the baby of historic Anglican comprehensiveness with the bathwater of hysteric Anglican politics.
Tobias Haller chimed in: Richard Hooker’s Smiling
Don’t misunderstand me. My sympathies lie with the No-Anglican-Covenant group. I think it’s a bad idea on several levels. My problem is with the attempt to bring in Hooker to support it.
The church and the world in the twenty-first century are very different than they were in the 1590s when Hooker wrote The Laws of Ecclesiastical Piety. To appeal to him for support is misguided. Today scholars debate the extent to which Hooker was Reformed in theology and whether he can be seen as the architect of the via media or of what later came to be called Anglicanism.
What is certain is the immediate context in which he wrote The Laws. In 1593, Parliament was debating a series of laws that would increase penalties against Roman Catholics and introduce new restrictions on radical Calvinists. Hooker wrote The Laws in an attempt to convincing wavering members of the House of Commons that the restrictions against the Radical Protestants (later called Puritans) were necessary and legitimate. In other words, Hooker was writing in support of the Crown’s use of coercion to enforce uniformity.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Church of England was the Established Church (it still is, of course) and Elizabeth demanded outward conformity to the Church from her subjects, while famously admitting that she couldn’t “see into men’s souls.”
We can debate Hooker’s contributions to Anglicanism; we can’t debate the fact that he wrote in support of forced outward conformity.

The Presiding Bishop’s visit to the Diocese of Milwaukee

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This weekend was Annual Convention for the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefforts Schori and her husband Richard Schori were in attendance. Yesterday morning, the PB spent two hours with diocesan clergy while her husband met with clergy spouses. She began her session with us by asking us to meditate on the words Jesus heard as he came out of the Jordan River after being baptized, “You are my Beloved. In you I am well pleased.” After meditation and conversation in small groups about what we heard during our time of meditation, and how we responded to those words, we had the opportunity to ask questions of her.

During that time, and later in the afternoon during an open conversation with clergy, lay delegates, and other interested people, the Presiding Bishop spoke about what she saw as she traveled around the church in the US and the world. One of the things she stressed repeatedly is that the Episcopal Church is a world-wide church. It is not just an American, or even North American denomination.

She was honest about all of the ways Episcopalians do mission, both here and abroad, and she had a lot of positive things to say about the impact of the emergent church on our denomination. But she was also honest about the challenges facing us. One of the greatest may be demographic. According to her, while the average age for Americans is 37, the average age for Episcopalians is 57. Another theme that came back both in her remarks and in questions from the floor was the challenge we face with our aging physical infrastructure. To one question, she answered bluntly that some buildings need to be abandoned, given over to other purposes, while others can be revitalized and can continue to be the focal point of ministry. She also stressed that we have to get out of our buildings to do ministry in new places and in new ways. “Those churches that thrive,” she said, “are more than a worship space; meaningful to the larger community; while some of them are albatrosses.”

There were questions concerning the Anglican Covenant, to which she pointed out that “covenant” can mean very different things in different cultural contexts. For the Maori of New Zealand, who were victimized by a treaty that the settlers labeled a “covenant,” the term is deeply painful.

It was a good visit, an opportunity to hear from someone who has a much wider perspective on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion than we can have in the local parish. It was also a powerful reminder of the challenges that we face as well as the world of possibilities that lies before us.

 

More on the Anglican Covenant

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Today came word that the Church in Mexico has approved the Anglican Covenant. The Bishops of the Church of England have commended it to the General Synod for approval.

Provocative comment in The Guardian today that describes the proposed covenant as a “power-play.”

Meanwhile, Presiding Bishop Jefforts Schori is visiting Australia, where she has received a hearty welcome from the Primate of [All] Australia.

More Anglican developments

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There continue to be interesting responses to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter and the disinvitation of Episcopal participants in ecumenical dialogues. Inclusive Church, a movement within the Church of England has spoken sharply against the ABC’s actions. They did it in an earlier letter, but now have responded forcefully to this week’s developments. Most criticism has focused on the unequal treatment of the different moratoria breakers–the Episcopal Church is sanctioned, but those who “crossed borders” have not been punished.

But there’s another important issue raised in the Inclusive Church letter and in the blogosphere as well. That is the matter of inculturation. In other words, in our contexts, it seems to many to be a gospel mandate to be inclusive, to open our churches fully to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

There is also growing resentment of the Church of England’s hypocrisy, which I’ve mentioned before. With animosity growing toward British Petroleum in the States, there seems to be something of a snowball effect among progressives.

Coincidentally, both the Anglican Church of Canada and the Scottish Episcopal Church were meeting this week. Presiding Bishop Jefforts Schori attended and spoke at both, and ironically, Kenneth Kearon, General Secretary of the Anglican Communion spoke to the Canadian Church on the very day that his letter was made public.

The Canadian church debated the Anglican Covenant as well as issues of sexuality. The primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church offered a thoughtful discussion of the covenant.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of the State of Virginia decided in favor of the Diocese in a long-running property case with dissident parishes.

It’s early in the game yet (strange to say, since we’ve been arguing over this stuff for over a decade), but I think we are beginning to see real fracture in the communion. My sense is the Episcopal Church is beginning to make its peace with the future, and seek alliances with like-minded folk across the communion, whatever the ABC may say.

The ABC lowers the boom

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In his Pentecost letter, the Archbishop of Canterbury asked that the Episcopal Church’s representatives to interfaith and ecumenical conversations be lowered to “consultant” status. This week, the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, Kenneth Kearon, did his master’s bidding, effectively disinviting Episcopal involvement in dialogues with the Orthodox, Lutherans, and Methodists.

The internet is abuzz with stories concerning the “sanctions” imposed on the Episcopal Church. There’s a wonderful irony here, because the Lutherans and the Methodists have each seen controversy in the US over sexuality, although apparently the Lutherans’ decision last year to permit the ordination of gays and lesbians went relatively smoothly.  Even more amusing is the fact that last year there was great concern when the Church of Sweden voted to allow gay marriages. Not only that, the Bishop of Stockholm, Eva Brunne, is a lesbian in a registered partnership, with a three-year old son. Because of the Porvoo Agreement, the Church of England is in full communion with the Church of Sweden. As a punishment, it seems rather silly to prevent Episcopal representatives from meeting with Lutherans whose policies on sexuality are more clear and more open than ours.

Of course there are other matters at stake. One of the key issues in the reception of the Anglican Covenant is section four which deals with disciplinary action. There has been some resistance from various sectors of the Anglican Communion to these proposals for a more tightly-run ship. I suspect the ABC would have liked to do something a little more ruthless to the American Church but lacked the nerve. Where’s Ratzinger when you need him?

There’s a local connection to this controversy. Tom Ferguson, who is Chaplain at St. Francis House and who also works for the national church on ecumenical matters, is one of those who has been disinvited. He was a participant in the Anglican-Orthodox dialogue.

The Presiding Bishop has also commented on recent developments.

As always, you can follow developments at Thinking Anglicans and The Episcopal Café.

More turmoil in Anglican-land

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The Archbishop of Canterbury wrote a Pentecost Letter to the Anglican Communion in which he responded to the consecration in May of Bishop Glasspool in the Diocese of Los Angeles. In the course of that letter he wrote:

I am therefore proposing that, while these tensions remain unresolved, members of such provinces – provinces that have formally, through their Synod or House of Bishops, adopted policies that breach any of the moratoria requested by the Instruments of Communion and recently reaffirmed by the Standing Committee and the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO) – should not be participants in the ecumenical dialogues in which the Communion is formally engaged.

This seems to imply that the Episcopal Church (and the Anglican Church of Canada) should absent themselves from inter-Anglican activities. One might debate whether the Episcopal Church has “formally” breached any of the moratoria (on blessings of same-sex relationships, ordinations of gay and lesbian clergy, and border-crossing).

Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefforts Schori responded powerfully this week to Williams’ letter. She argued that Williams was seeking to centralize authority in Anglicanism in ways that had been resisted throughout its history. She also pointed out that whatever “formal” decisions had been made by particular provinces, there were many places, the Church of England chief among them, where both ordinations and same-sex blessings occurred regularly and that any move in the Episcopal Church was nothing more than recognizing the reality on the ground.

This exchange has received considerable exposure both in the press and on the internet. Diana Butler Bass, an Episcopalian herself and one of the leading commentators on religion in contemporary America commented that the conflict between Jefforts Schori and Williams is not a clash between liberal and conservative. Both are theologically liberal. Rather, it is a clash between competing visions of Anglicanism—one hierarchical and centralized, the other more democratic.

Jefforts Schori (and Bass) point out the origins of the Episcopal Church in the US in the American Revolution and in the desire to develop independently of the Church of England. Jefforts Schori cites as well the origins of the Church of England in the desire to be independent of the papacy. She goes too far when she tries to connect that with Celtic Christianity and the conflict in the early Middle Ages between Celtic Christianity and the missionaries sent from Rome.

The rise of individualism and of democracy are two long-term trends that have changed all institutions and the ways in which individuals come together to form institutions and relate to institutions. Once centralization and authoritarianism give way to localization and autonomy, it is impossible to recapture them. The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion are becoming new things because of those developments. The internet has changed how we communicate and how we connect. It has helped us create like-minded communities that span the globe, but it cannot create closer ties or strengthen central authority.

What Jefforts Schori is saying in her response is that the sort of Anglican Communion Williams is imagining is not something the Episcopal Church wants to be a part of. Rather, we want to work together with those who are willing to work with us, whatever our theological views. We will also build networks with people and churches across the world who share our views. Yes, this may mean loss, but it has been happening de facto for over a decade. In fact, this was begun not by the Episcopal Church but by those disaffected with the Episcopal Church who made alliances with (and were consecrated Bishop by) conservative African and Asian archbishops.

As I reflect on recent events and on the controversy that has been going since 2003 (well, in fact, much longer than that), it seems to me that the dust has largely settled. Those who were going to leave the Episcopal Church have left. New structures have been created but how they will develop remains to be seen. I’m sure there are places and people where the controversy rages, but my sense is that in those places and people, controversy will always rage. I will never forget what David Anderson said in response to a question about why he didn’t just leave the Episcopal Church. “I love a good fight,” he said.

I don’t. I love God, Jesus Christ, and the body of Christ in the world. I want to be about the ministry and mission of Jesus Christ in this world. Frankly, I don’t care any more what the Archbishop of Canterbury has to say about the Anglican Communion and about the Episcopal Church’s place in it. Frankly, I don’t care about the Anglican Communion. I care about the Church of Jesus Christ, but of course, the Church of Jesus Christ will take care of itself. It has for two thousand years. It has survived, in spite of the members, laity and clergy, who have done whatever was in their power to destroy it.

The Anglican Covenant

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I suppose I ought to make some comment on recent doings in Anglican-land. Truth be told, I’ve come to find it rather tiresome. In December, the latest draft version of the Anglican Covenant appeared. Some of the background and the full text is available here. There has been considerable commentary on it. As always, one can keep abreast of the latest developments at Thinking Anglicans.

Among the saber-rattling is a statement from someone that any province that doesn’t sign on to the covenant by the end of 2011 will be excluded. Unfortunately, the Episcopal Church cannot sign on before General Convention 2012, and if canonical changes are necessary, until 2015. In other words, the lengthy process continues.

As the years have passed and the conflict within Anglicanism continues to boil, I am more and more inclined to say the Communion is simply not worth the hassle. One of my greatest concerns has always been the increasing centralization of power and the disenfranchisement of lay people in communion structures.

There have been enormous theological disagreements in Anglicanism for generations–deep fissures between Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals, for example–and now there are deep divisions on matters of sexuality. It really is hard to see what a church that elects Rev. Glasspool bishop has in common with a church that seems to be pushing for a law that would punish gays and lesbians with execution.

Unity for unity’s sake is meaningless and overcoming diversity by centralization of power will never succeed. It seems to me that the communication and media revolution of the last decades has brought us closer together but has also heightened awareness of our differences. What it has not done is led to increased understanding.

It may be that the idea of “national churches” which is at the heart of the traditional notion of Anglicanism no longer has any meaning. Certainly, to call the Church of England a national church is misleading. It is the church of a small portion of people in England, and in fact the various parties within it have stronger ties within themselves than to the national church.

In the US, with its long history of denominational diversity, it is relatively easy for like-minded people to break off and form their own church. That has happened repeatedly, and among Anglicans in the US, it continues to happen. But whether groups from different perspectives (Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical) can remain united in spite of their theological and liturgical differences remains to be seen.

One of the most perceptive comments on the Anglican Covenant was written by Scott Gunn.