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Windsor Report: Communion, Structure, and Covenant, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Wondra, Ellen K

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In a similar vein, Harold Lewis notes the importance of covenant in framing our lives sacramentally and relationally. Until recently, covenant has held Anglicanism together, despite the many challenges facing it (not the least being the provincialism of many North Americans). However, a shift to law and contract has taken place (and with it the "centralized curialization" of Anglicanism), giving evidence of distrust and unwillingness to tolerate difference and disagreement. But, Lewis reminds us, appealing only to contract or law may well indicate that the battle for workable relationships has already been lost, and with it the capaciousness found in Anglicanism since Hooker.

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Ephraim Radner likewise addresses the tensions inherent in covenant relationships, with particular attention to the Windsor Reports proposed Anglican Covenant. The Episcopal Church's commitments to unhindered autonomy and exercise of conscience (similar to those advocated by John Milton in Areopagitica) distorts its "prelatical" heritage, with its emphasis on the freedom-in-community of the early church. The proposed Anglican Covenant holds together autonomy and community and maintains Anglicanism's commitment to episcopal focus within the context of consultation. Finally, Radner says, the covenant points to "the divine character of freedom exercised in mutual subjection for the sake of unity, in the character of 'the mind of Christ.'"

The Windsor Report argues that unity-in-diversity requires structures of authority and accountability that keep the local churches (dioceses) in communion with each other and with whatever global Instruments of Unity may exist. William Carroll argues that the Report s proposals reflect colonial Anglicanism s impulse to regulate and control from the center. In that framework, the notion of subsidiarity is used not to strengthen the work of local communities, but to centralize authority. Then, it is tempting to preserve unity at the cost of justice. True communion grounded in "the 'dangerous memory' of Jesus" does not diminish freedom, but enhances it. What is needed, Carroll maintains, is a "genuinely polycentric and postcolonial Anglicanism" that relies not on its own structures but on "God's mercy, the Spirit's guidance, and the responsible use of human freedom."

The issues addressed by the Windsor Report are not unique to the Anglican Communion; they have been the subject of long and fruitful ecumenical dialogue. J. Robert Wright finds that the Windsor Report largely ignores the international Anglican dialogues with the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches. And the report is the weaker for it. The Reports paragraphs 42 and 70 set up a false contrast between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism in matters of the primary authority of Scripture and of the desirability of a universal primacy. Further, the Orthodox tradition, with its autocephalous churches and sufficiently full agreement in doctrine, presents an alternative to centralized authority. Wright considers the Orthodox paradigm of a "quasi-federation" more realistic for North American Anglicans than the Windsor Reports proposals for a more nearly Roman Catholic model.

Windsor Report: Communion, Structure, and Covenant, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Wondra, Ellen K

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