A Communion Covenant Conversation

EpiscoPod has a new episode featuring a conversation that I had with a church historian, a sociologist, and a theologian shortly after the release of the St. Andrew's Draft of the Anglican Communion Covenant.

On February 14, 2008, I sat down in the faculty lounge at Church Divinity School of the Pacific with Dr. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Assistant Professor of Church History at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley; the Rev. Dr. Paula Nesbitt, Visiting Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Rev. Dr. Jay Johnson, Adjunct Faculty in Theology at Pacific School of Religion and the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, to discuss the newest draft of the Anglican Communion Covenant. The conversation covered a range of issues raised by the Covenant draft, and delved into some deeper consideration of the nature of covenant, and what it means to be Anglican.

I invited several theologically trained members of the Diocese of California to join in the conversation. Not all of them were able to make it, but I have received some written responses and others have told me that they would send theirs and I plan to post those here. Following is a written response by the Rev. Dr. John Kater, who is an emeritus faculty member at CDSP. Then following that is the written response by Jay Johnson who is a part of the podcast.

                                                                                                

SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE DRAFT ANGLICAN COVENANT
John Kater

I am sorry to miss the meeting to discuss the draft Anglican Covenant, but happy to be able to offer some very preliminary and probably scattered comments. 

Let me begin with a few general thoughts about the intent of the covenant and the understanding of the nature of the relationship between member Churches which it assumes.

I am pleased that the current draft under discussion uses the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral as its starting point, since that is the only ecclesiological document that has been widely accepted by the member Churches and by a number of Lambeth Conferences since it was first articulated in the 1880s. 

The early paragraphs of the draft covenant seem to me to confuse God’s mission with the Church’s mission, but later in the text there is a clear awareness of the primacy of the missio Dei over the mission of the Church, which is always subordinate to what God is doing in the world, both through and beyond the Church.  I appreciated the reference to the churches as signs of God’s reign.

I also appreciated the clear affirmation of the autonomy of member Churches within the Communion, and while the Instruments of Unity are affirmed, the document makes it clear that member Churches are not bound by any Communion-wide “legislative, executive or judicial authority.”  I wonder, though, if the effect of the proposals at the end of the draft, and especially in the draft Appendix, in fact create a set of de facto legislative, executive and judicial structures that temper the strong affirmation of autonomy:  While no church is forced to accept the Communion-wide rulings, it is obvious that if they do not, they face – what?  Ostracism?  Excommunication?  The phrases that describe the results of a failure to acquiesce in time of conflict leave the consequences unclear. 

Here are a few comments on specific aspects of the draft.

Paragraph 3.2.3:  This paragraph assumes that there are some matters of “essential concern” but fails to offer any criteria for deciding what they might be.  Para. 3.2.5 seems to allow any member Church or Instrument of Unity to flag any action of any other Church as of “essential concern.”

3.2.5.d.:  Doesn’t the process as outlined make the “moral authority” of the Instruments of Unity into “legal authority?”

Draft Introduction:  This section claims that “covenant emerges out of communion” and also “serves communion.”  While this has quite a nice and pious ring to it, I am unclear what it means.  Obviously the Anglican Communion existed for many years – or centuries, depending on when you consider it came into being – without the need for such a document or, indeed, such a concept.  Covenant as a principle of Christian relationship or unity is obviously by no means necessary.  The Lambeth Quadrilateral specifically declines to take this approach in defining the necessary conditions for inter-communion; a number of elements considered quite significant or even de rigueur by most Anglican churches – for example, the diaconate as one of the threefold orders of ministry or an ordered liturgy – were not, and apparently are not, necessary for churches to be in communion.  The concordat with the ELCA makes no mention of either.  I belabor this point simply to emphasize the revisionist nature of the very idea of covenant as a necessary aspect of a relationship of inter-communion between churches.

Revisionist innovation is even more apparent in the Draft Appendix.  Three spots that particularly raised red flags for me are:

Appendix 3.1.2.3:  The role given to the Archbishop of Canterbury is a completely new one; whatever disclaimers are offered, it in fact gives him a primatial role, not only in the Province of Canterbury, but throughout the Anglican Communion. 

4.2:  In the same way, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meeting, both designed as consultative bodies, are given a new (revisionist!) role as a court of appeal.  This would seem to contradict clearly the affirmation made in Paragraph 3.1 of the draft Covenant.

7.6:  The credibility of a member Church’s mission is to be determined by outsiders who may have neither insight nor experience that would make them competent to evaluate whether a specific action or policy furthers or fails to further the mission of the member Church.

I have repeatedly used the term “revisionist” in order to emphasize how far this document takes the Anglican Communion from its historic identity, forged and refined over centuries.  While the American Church is accused of being revisionist, it is in fact the purveyors of the Covenant who are attempting to make of Anglican Christianity something it has never been or wanted to be. 

Faithfully,
John Kater

The Anglican Communion Covenant
St. Andrew’s Draft

Preliminary Reflections
The Rev. Dr. Jay Emerson Johnson
February 14, 2008

Any analysis and reflection on the current “covenanting process” in the Anglican Communion needs, it seems to me, to keep two historical touchstones in view. The first is that what we call the “Anglican Communion” today is a thoroughly modern invention. It is therefore steeped in colonial-era Christianity and especially of the British Empire variety. The second is that what we mean by the “Anglican Communion” has undergone nearly constant change, revision, reassessment and “realignment” from the very beginning. What the Communion is today is not what it was at the beginning of the eighteenth, the middle of the nineteenth, or the even the end of the twentieth centuries. The Communion’s malleability is, I believe, one of its historical strengths; I worry therefore that the current covenanting process could call that strength into question.

I believe there is much to commend in the St. Andrew’s draft of the covenanting process. My concern however is with the process itself and the felt urgency in adopting a covenant at all. The urgency with which this process has been undertaken references, among other documents, the Windsor Report. But in so doing the assumption here is that such documents have achieved a quasi-official status in the Communion that highlights the underlying reservations I have about the process. The Windsor Report, in other words, has barely been digested, let alone “received” by the worldwide Anglican Communion, yet it is now being referenced as an authoritative document upon which the current covenanting process is based. In my view, this is highly problematic from at least a procedural point of view if not an Anglican theological one.

These very preliminary reflections then are offered against the backdrop of those concerns. Broadly and briefly, I want to reflect first on the post-colonial situation in which this process has emerged. Second, I want to highlight some examples in this draft of why more work on notions of ecclesial identity needs to be done before moving forward with the covenanting process. Third, I want to suggest that procedural appendix illustrates well the concerns I have about the process. And finally, I want to make a modest proposal for what the Anglican Communion might want to do in response to this draft.

The Post-Colonial Situation
The felt need for a covenanting process of this type reflects what has been emerging worldwide since at least the 1998 Lambeth Conference, though I would argue even ten years earlier, in terms of a post-colonial situation in the Anglican Communion. This “situation,” however, remains largely unacknowledged and unaddressed in both the Windsor Report and both drafts of the Covenant. One way to frame this situation is to ask whether the communion we seek can derive from and refer to the North Atlantic generally and the Church of England more particularly as its center. The multiple references to Canterbury, the Thirty-Nine Articles and footnotes referencing English canons in this draft suggest that the drafters of the Covenant believe such centering is still possible. And that reflects a thoroughly modern presupposition.

To put this in another way, the fact that this covenanting process is now felt to be necessary at all discloses the extent to which our post-colonial situation must be more explicitly addressed in light of the fact that the Church of England, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and Canterbury no longer work as sufficient touchstones for articulating what it means to be an Anglican Christian. More pointedly: If English canon law is not applicable to Anglicans in Kenya or Singapore – or really anywhere but the Church of England – why cite it in a document like this that is meant for the Communion as a whole? This prompts one of my key questions about this process:

Does this covenant merely perpetuate the avoidance of addressing our post-colonial reality as Anglican Christians? And if so, then much more extensive re-thinking of ecclesial identity is needed before any covenanting process will find significant traction in a worldwide communion of churches. I worry, in other words, about putting the cart before the horse in our rush to ease the sense of “crisis” and anxiety in the Communion.

Re-Thinking Ecclesial Identity
The need for more sustained theological work around ecclesial identity appears in a number of key terms in this draft that are left undefined or uncritically assumed but which are precisely what is at issue in the felt need for this covenanting process in the first place. Just three examples:

“Autonomy”: While I would not say that this is entirely a modern concept, I would say that it is thoroughly western. Neither the Windsor Report nor this draft of the covenant deals adequately with the potential difficulties in translating the notion of autonomy into non-western locales, where more social and communal anthropologies, for example, inform cultural sensibilities. Moreover, even in western, North Atlantic contexts many will find it at least curious if not incoherent to suppose that “autonomy” and “interdependence” can comfortably co-exist in the proposed structure of this covenant, especially in light of the drafters’ insistence on avoiding any centralized juridical authority.

“Scriptural Authority”: The appeal to this notion as a foundation for the Communion is not nearly as self-evident as either the Windsor Report or this draft covenant seems to suppose. “Authority” can be defined and can operate in a number of ways. The authority of a tyrant and the authority of communal consensus are both “authoritative” but with significantly different consequences. To leave this term undefined with reference to Scripture merely begs the question of what kind of authority the drafters have in mind. (This, I would argue, has been at the root of biblical debates for nearly all Christian communities for decades.)

“Common Prayer”: This is likewise treated as a self-evident reality and in some surprising ways. In some instances of it in this draft one might suppose we’re still living in the Elizabethan settlement with a single prayer book. How we understand the remarkable range of diverse liturgical styles and multiple prayer books (the New Zealand Prayer Book and the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer are really quite different) as constituting “common prayer” in the Anglican Communion ought to prompt some serious reflection on how “unity-in-diversity” appears in other areas, but this is both unacknowledged and unaddressed.

The Procedural Appendix
While the drafters are quick to note that the appendix of proposed procedural processes for adjudicating disputes is in its earliest stage, I do think it sheds light on the covenanting process itself. I also think it illustrates my conviction that adopting a covenant like this is premature.

Perhaps any evaluation of the procedural appendix should be done by actually testing it with the issue of women’s ordination. Among many others I was rather startled by the remarkably sanguine posture toward that issue adopted in the Windsor Report, as if there were no longer any controversy over the ordination of women in the Anglican Communion.

If we were to test the proposed procedures appended to this draft with that issue, I believe we would quickly discover how much more preliminary work needs to be done on emerging post-colonial conceptions of ecclesial identity before a covenanting process like this could achieve any significant traction among twenty-first century Anglican Christians.

A More Modest Proposal
Again, while I believe there is much to commend in this draft of the covenant, I do worry (for the reasons noted above and others) that this covenanting process has proceeded too quickly and from a place of anxiety rather than from a place of mutual trust and “affection” (to evoke the Windsor Report). I worry as well that if this covenanting process is perceived as being imposed on the Communion rather than emerging organically from a sense of shared faith and mission, then the very purpose of the covenant would be subverted (and perhaps not even qualify as a “covenant”).
Rather than moving toward adopting a covenant for the Anglican Communion (whether with this draft or subsequent ones), perhaps this St. Andrew’s draft could be used as the basis for Communion-wide conversation on ecclesiology in light of post-colonial sensibilities. It seems to me that we need much more data and personal experience of how Anglicans in, for example, Kenya, Brazil, Hong Kong and Chicago understand and live their faith before we can create a covenanting document among them. Indeed, if such encounters and conversations were engaged and sustained, we may discover that a formal, institutional covenanting process is actually unnecessary.

A rather rich place to begin such conversations and encounters might be found in what seems nearly a throw-away line in the commentary on the draft by the drafters (page 6, concerning clause 3.2.5):

“Communion is founded on the mutual recognition that each Church sees in the other evidence of our communion in Christ.”

In my view, this elegant claim about ecclesiology reflects a biblically rooted approach to the issues we seek to address (this claim, for example, echoes rather strongly the approach taken in the Acts of the Apostles concerning the inclusion of Gentiles in the Christian community). If we were to create opportunities across the Communion for Anglicans to discern and discuss “evidence of our communion in Christ,” I believe we would discover that what unites us is far greater than what presently seems to divide us. We would also likely discover a far richer and more diverse treasure chest of “evidence” for our shared communion in Christ than we have yet imagined and, perhaps, that we are already engaged in covenanted mission through the Spirit – quite apart from any institutional or procedural documentation of it.