After Dromantine

Sumner, George

The besetting problem of our epoch is relativism. In Anglicanism, this plays itself out as reticence about any kind of doctrinal definition, so that neither Scripture, creeds, nor church can make any strong claims on us. For all its moderation, qualification, and minimalism, the Windsor Report dares to commit an act of judgment. In so doing it points a way forward for a truly global Anglican polity. Anglicanism, precisely because it does not have a Roman-style magisterium, must be conservative about doctrinal innovation.

More than enough has been said, and spun, about the Windsor Report, the Primates' Communiqué, and their implications. Even the combatants in their respective trenches have long been exhausted by endless debates about homosexuality. My aim in this essay is to observe an underlying cause, and hence a wider accomplishment, of the Windsor Report and its reception by the primates in Ireland.

The Sickness that Lays Waste

In the modern/postmodern era, the perduring problem is relativism. In the dimension of time it appears as historicism, each occasion encased in its own context. In space it appears as cultural relativism: the anthropologist in us wonders how one can presume the portability of moral criteria from one people to another. The immediate implication is moral relativism as well, since any standard proposed was constructed by someone or other somewhere and sometime, a cruel inversion of the Vincentian Canon. "Different strokes for different folks" spreads itself across our culture like an oil slick. The fit with the proliferation of arbitrary choices in our economic polity is perfect, and who can say which is cause and which effect?

Nor has the church in modern times been spared. Historical criticism shows this same relativism: Are these Hellenistic texts we call "New Testament" not reducible to their own contextual meanings as well? Over the last two centuries, Anglicans who would make their stand on the creeds or the first five centuries soon found that relativism was at work behind the lines. Newman came to see how the crisis of authority endemic to Protestantism was connected to relativism and was expressed outwardly in endless fissiparous possibilities. Gore saw the seriousness of the problem and sought late in his life to stem the tide.1

The Symptom

The debate over the place of homosexuality in church life has taken place at several levels at once, and in each the shadow of relativism is cast. The behavior is clearly and repeatedly rejected in various books of Scripture. But, some argue, if the meaning of these passages is somehow limited to the context in which they were originally written, the prohibitions no longer have a claim on us. If, for example, Romans 1 speaks of a relationship between men and boys particular to the Hellenistic world, then it cannot be brought to bear on our present debate. Likewise, the continuous prohibition throughout most of Christian tradition may be put aside if this is derived from contexts judged to be lacking the insights of "modern science" or suffering from persistent homophobia. More recently, some have argued that same-sex unions must be allowed, since the ordination of women and Prayer Book revision have been introduced. On what grounds may we say that one kind of innovation is allowable while another is not? In other words, the possibility of one change opens the door to another, since they all expose the historical relativity of church practice. Finally, some say the objections of Anglicans from the global South may be disregarded even as they are granted their own contextual due: such negative views can be understood in light of tribal taboos, or struggles with Islam, and need not inhibit us where these contextual factors do not pertain.

The same-sex debate has also intensified the debate over the nature of Anglicanism and its sense of authority. How the doctrinally central (and hence abiding) is related to the secondary and relative underlies the distinction between things essential and adiaphora. The effort to cordon off "essentials"2 has floundered for several reasons, not least because there has been disagreement over what is "essential"; the articles of the creed have been submitted to historical criticism; and seemingly minor issues can put at risk something that is essential. So Newman once commented that an artery is a small point on the body, but from it one could bleed to death.3

A whole generation of Anglican scholars, clergy, and leaders has accepted the notion that Anglicanism is hopelessly indefinite and conflicted. They have even worked to make its indeterminacy its virtue. In an age where people want to "design their own," the church that embraces the questions, the church that is "always open," can be appealing.4 The trick has been to maintain just this détente with relativism while appearing to have some continuity with traditional Anglicanism that clings to the notion of essentials and adiaphora. In this regard, the Righter Trial verdict was an accomplishment for contemporary liberal Anglicanism. In acquitting Bishop Righter, the episcopal judges distinguished between "core doctrine" and "doctrinal teaching." Yet the former could not be identified with the creeds, for example, for they only gave expression to the kenjgma, a "canon within the canon." The creeds make no claims on us, for as soon as they become controverted, the judges stated, they cease to have authority. Add these ideas together and doctrines can never make a claim of authority on us that would make a difference. Or, to put the matter another way, any doctrinal content is an ideal safely unattainable, like a receding horizon. This widespread strategy allows liberals to feel secure in an orthodoxy that can barely make a claim.

What Would an Answer to Relativism Look Like?

From the perspective of the modern Christian community, relativism is inevitable: there is an enduring plurality of points of view, each dependent on its own premises. Furthermore, reductive critiques are in effect relativizing moves: reducing all argument to their underlying exterior causes levels them all and limits them to their causal contexts. Relativism-the surrender of claims to ultimate truth-cannot find its antidote through philosophical arguments abstracted from specifically Christian claims, though such arguments must at times be deployed. It requires a response grounded in the specific claims Christians make.

In On Thinking the Human,5 systematic theologian Robert Jenson poses perennial philosophical questions, showing that we know less about each question than we supposed. He then argues that the real answer lies in a Christian doctrine. For example, the conundrums of human freedom lead to the following conclusion: "first, that the church is the polity in which freedom is native, and second, that the freedom spoken of and practiced by the polities of this world is but aspiration to the church's freedom."6 The question is familiar but the answer would surely bring a philosopher up short, as if there had been a category confusion. Something similar is true in the case before us: the answer to the modern problem of relativism is the church catholic. By this I mean the gestalt of a working theological tradition, the virtues and sensibilities that allow one to think with that tradition, its sacramental life with its round of listening to the canon of Scripture, and its communion of churches throughout the world in different cultures and climes. The church catholic acknowledges and sublimates cultural locality into a larger collective truth claim.

What's at Stake

The 1866 call by Canadian Bishop John Strachan for a worldwide synod of Anglican bishops-a prequel to the current crisis of Anglican authority-was squelched, due in no small measure to anxiety on the part of the evangelical wing about too much prelatical power in what seemed to them the Romish model. The irony here is that today the theologically traditional wing of the international communion, spearheaded by the evangelical Anglicans of sub-Saharan Africa, is in the forefront of advocating some kind of means for international judgments about the limits of diversity.

Today what is at issue is, quite simply, the catholicity of Anglicanism. Are we to he part of the church catholic, or are we to devolve in North America into two more sects, only with vestments? sect status is the sociological correlate of relativism. So, the second irony is that the leadership in both ECUSA and the Anglican Church of Canada think of themselves as liberal catholics, and yet are now putting that very mark of the church in jeopardy. One key question is whether they can come to see protecting catholicity as more important than promoting this particular cause.

In response, liberal catholic leaders might insist on the autonomy of the national church as an essential feature of Anglicanism (while not addressing the limits of that autonomy). They might underline the legal right of national churches to make their own decisions. They would perhaps claim that the worldwide church is already deeply divided, and so a few more fragments will hardly matter (though this is a counsel of despair, a close spiritual cousin of moral relativism). They might suggest that the real catholic unity of the church is in a broader sense of identity overarching actual divisions. Each of these arguments tracks closely the justifications of Protestant denominationalism, confirming the sectarianism of their stance. Finally, they might suggest that their position is aligned with cultural progress, a view at odds with a perspective of cultural relativism. But this last argument is a throwback to nineteenth-century liberalism, and it degenerates, eventually, into the Troeltschian end point of its intellectual forebear.

The Nature of the Windsor Report's Answer

In part to counter such arguments, let us consider the specifics of the Windsor Reports proposal. First of all, it gives full scope to the rightful claim of national churches to autonomy. The Report reiterates that individual churches can decide their own direction, though it rightly insists that they cannot thereupon demand that their sibling churches remain in communion. Second, the Report insists that its purpose is to repair and preserve communion, not to punish its violation. It is an exercise in "restorative justice"; as such it offers a patient and gradated process. Third, it leaves plenteous room for continued debate and diverse private opinion about the issue. It cleaves stringently to its mandate of preserving unity, carefully stating that Anglicanism does have a teaching on the topic of human sexuality. Whether this could ever be changed is an open question, but until such time as a new consensus emerges, the teaching stands. Fourthly, it is evenhanded in cautioning both liberals and conservatives whose acts make it harder to maintain unity in teaching. Fifthly, both the Report and the Primates' Meeting display the dispersed authority distinctive in Anglican accounts and called for in the Virginia Report and the influential ecclesiological proposals of Stephen Sykes. In sum, the Windsor Report shows a lightness of touch, a tendency to "treat people like adults,"7 and a balance which are admirable.

For all that, the Windsor Report is upsetting to many in the Anglican world, simply because it is an act of judgment and discernment. It commits an act of doctrinal authority, transgressing the assumptions of relativism. For example, the Report states clearly that the case of homosexuality is different from that of women's ordination, not fitting in some vague category such as "change" or "context." Indeed, evangelical African Anglicans make this discrimination as well, for though they sometimes object to the ordination of women, they have never raised the same sort of hue and cry. The Windsor Report is implicitly an act of thinking with the tradition which can differentiate the weight of different issues.

It is noteworthy that Canadian Anglicans asked their Primate's Theological Commission to figure out whether the question of samesex unions was one of doctrine (requiring a single nationwide decision with higher requirements) or of "local option" to be decided by dioceses. The notion of "local option" is itself a vivid example of relativism in that it would leave each locale to make up its own practice, and thereby its own teaching, since for Anglicans the former implies the latter. Never mind that the matter coincided with a national political debate about same-sex marriage. Never mind that the matter would involve performative liturgical acts binding couples together for life, changing the rubric of the Prayer Book marriage rite. The question was posed to the commission, recapitulating the key question of modern Anglicanism in the face of relativism. Can we discern something to be our own teaching and take responsibility for its protection or revision? Or will doctrine again serve as a receding horizon? It is to the commission's credit that, in contrast to the Righter decision, the issue was seen rightly to amount to a redefinition of marriage, and hence to be a matter of doctrine requiring national agreement.

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?

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.

1 James Carpenter, Gore: A Study in Liberal Catholic Thought (London: Faith Press, 1960), chap. 1.

2 See Stephen Sykes on "essentials" in Stephen Sykes and John Booty, eds., The Study of Anglicanism (London: SPCK; Philadelphia: Fortress: 1988).

3 This is from a comment by George Lindbeck at a Scholarly Engagement with Anglican Doctrine (SEAD) conference in Stamford, Connecticut in 1996.

4 See Richard Giles, Always Open: Being an Anglican Today (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2005), especially the sections "Core Doctrine" and "Tensions in the Teaching of Sexuality."

5 Robert W. Jenson, On Thinking the Human: Resolutions of Difficult Notions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003).

6 Jenson, On Thinking the Human, 44.

7 This is from Ephraim Radner's "Notes on the Windsor Report" posted on the Anglican Communion Institute website.

GEORGE SUMNER*

* George Sumner is Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto.

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2005
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