Unpacking the Gift: Anglican Resources for Theological Reflection on "The Gift of Authority."

Unpacking the Gift;: Anglican Resources for Theological Reflection on "The Gift of Authority. " Edited by Peter Fisher. London: Church House Publishing, 2002. vi + 122 pp. £8.95 (paper).

This set of essays has two goals in mind, one very specific and the other wide ranging. On the one hand, it is part of the process of reception of the 1999 document on authority produced by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). Though it is not an official response, the Church of England's Faith and Order Advisoiy Croup produced the collection, and its authors are all past or present members of the group, writing to "stimulate discussion" (p. ii). Even so, their reflections touch on matters of broader interest, and amount to a study in the method of ecumenical theology-which is the larger purpose acknowledged in the editor's postscript.

As a contribution to the public reception of a particular document, the book is poorly targeted. It has none of the apparatus of a study volume, and its conceptual vocabulary belongs to the sphere of ecumenists and ecclesiologists, not to a general audience. Only one paper, authored by the church's local unity officer, situates the discussion in the parish context: it is by far the briefest and reads as an afterthought.

There is irony here, since one of the strongest themes emerging from the other essays is a desire to address authority in the church from an empirical standpoint, in contrast to the idealism perceived in The Gift of Authority. Each author points in some way to the paradox involved in trying to speak of authority apart from the church's historical experience, and several of them question whether ARCIC's standard approach (which involves looking past historical conflicts) can deal effectively with this subject.

In places this critique becomes pointed, as when one author makes the case that ARCIC's language and method fail to make contact with evangelical Anglicanism (p. 35) and another proposes the "gift of uncertainty" as an Anglican counterpart to Rome's gift of authority (p. 83). Even two largely positive evaluations of Gift include some strong questions: Mary Tanner asks whether the document takes seriously enough its own acknowledgement of the corruptibility of structures (p. 30), and Christopher Hill points to the exercise of papal jurisdiction as a neglected area (pp. 73-74) while appealing for an "ecumenical hermeneutic of trust."

Elsewhere the authors' range of opinions and perspectives generates material for ongoing debate. While Hill emphasizes the authority accorded to the laity in Gift (p. 64), Martin Davie finds an episcopal bias in several aspects of its argument, and Tanner sees a lack of clarity in the relationship between lay and episcopal roles (p. 23). There is also disagreement about whether authority is inherently constraining or whether we are culturally conditioned to think so-and, if the latter, whether that makes ecumenical debate on the issue irrelevant or vital to the church's engagement with the world.

In other respects the book adds to the literature on Anglican-Roman Catholic relations. The opening chapter, by Stephen Platten, helpfully locates the current state of the dialogue within both its own history and the contemporaneous movements of theology and church politics. And in chapter 5, Martyn Percy creates an unusual but successful pairing between the disciplines of contextual and ecumenical theology. It is his essay which makes the strongest case for requiring that authority be treated empirically, and with regard for social history (pp. 83, 88).

This remains a powerful criticism of The Gift of Authority and may help to explain some reasoned but negative reaction to the document in the Anglican world. ARCIC's method of proceeding from first principles has served the churches well and earned the Commission a hermeneutic of respect (if not trust), but it appears to be getting a rough ride in this round of dialogue. With the addition of a tantalizing concluding remark from a biblical scholar about ARCIC's use of Scripture (pp. 105-106), this volume provides some of the theological resources Anglicans will need if we attempt to return this gift for one that fits better.

IAIN LUKE

St. John's College

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Spring 2004
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