Content provided in partnership with
After Dromantine
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Sumner, George
Surely in this case too the Windsor Report is an implicit answer to the question posed to the Canadian commission. For the Report states that the traditional teaching on human sexuality pertains to all Anglicans, and that divergence from that teaching constitutes "walking apart." This is a highly effective practical definition of doctrine: teachings with comprehensive reach, whose abandonment amounts to departure from communion. So the Canadian commission is still completing its work, but in a changed environment where a working definition had been offered and the issue at hand placed very definitely under its purview.
To What Does the Windsor Report Point?
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
The strength of the Windsor Report and the primates' recommendations is as much in their modesty as in their assertions. The Windsor Report laid out a path, but left open the question how it would be trod. The primates proposed small steps, through the direction of corporate discipline in which they moved. Nothing has been said about what would become of parishes, clergy, or dioceses in a church which walks apart. The panel of reference does not yet have a shape. The Report left these matters for another day; "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
These half steps are consistent with the kind of renewed Anglicanism the Windsor Report imagines. The fears that Anglicans are now steamrolling toward a Roman-style magisterium are altogether inconsistent with the Report itself. The more likely danger is that all the nuance and care the Report has shown will prove insufficient for our time of driving ideology and media boil. The Anglican authority imagined is of a minimalist sort; limits to diversity and articulation of what we cannot change are discerned occasionally, slowly, diplomatically, painfully. Other matters are left to local decision. Matters such as human sexuality that are absent from formal doctrinal articulation simply because they are tacitly assumed to be part of the universal tradition will rightly be the most stubbornly resistant to change. Logically, a tradition with minimum definition and formal magisterial structure must maintain just such an inherently conservative doctrinal model; the alternative would be to be "blown about by every wind of doctrine" (2 Tim. 4). In other words, we are stumbling haltingly toward a greater maturity in doctrinal adjudication. Neither Newman nor Gore could have imagined that the evangelical mission churches of the global South would prompt an international system of checks and balances.
None of which means that this story will turn out happily. There is a certain determination in the battle over same-sex blessings that contrasts sharply with the restrained reasonableness of the Windsor Report. For a full generation liberal Episcopalians have been insisting to conservative colleagues that this issue should not be a church-dividing one. Those same liberals may force same-sex unions to be just such a cause of church division. The Windsor Report holds the hope of being a real step forward, not only in this crisis, but for Anglicanism in general. More profoundly, it represents a small but admirable blow against the relativist empire. What a shame it would be if the arrival of a remedy should coincide with the patient s demise.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Technology
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »