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Thoughts on the Windsor Report: What Went Wrong?
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Zahl, Paul F M
I kept thinking, the more I read the Report in its function as Bible interpreter: It speaks with a forked tongue.
Now is such doublespeak, which is what I think it adds up to finally, a characteristic of Anglicanism qua Anglicanism? I believe Presbyterians and Methodists and Lutherans, too, would recognize it as part of their baggage. They tell me this all the time. They complain that official "church statements" are constantly crafted to speak to differing constituencies. Therefore they usually say nothing. At the same time, you can sometimes detect such doublespeak in our own prayer book tradition. Is our American 1928 Communion service "protestant" or "catholic"? The answer is, a little bit of both. But is the 1662 Church of England service "catholic" or "protestant"? Clearly "protestant." We are, in other words, capable of speaking with one single voice, or better, one consistent voice, sometimes.
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I think the Windsor Report speaks with two voices. Every time one finds oneself almost safely set within its pages, one gets ejected three pages later.
The second concern I have with the Report is the bigger one. This has to do with its intentional and very emphatically stated rejection of what should have been its primary work: theological engagement with the subject of homosexuality in biblical and historical Christian perspective. People tell me all the time: "Don't you realize, the Commission could never, ever have come to one mind on that subject! The only way they could possibly have produced a Report without a minority filing was to say, 'Hands off the big one and focus on the little one.'"
I cannot agree. Such is not honest intellectual practice. Not at all. They could have fissured on the theme but then come together on the communion theme. But they should have dealt with the theme. What happens in the church is that we major in process when we cannot come together on substance. Then the process finally fails, too. Remember what Noam Chomsky said so bitingly about the Israeli/Palestinian "peace process": "It is not a process and it is not about peace." It is invoked precisely to prevent peace! We need to listen to Chomsky when it comes to "process."
If you are a "liberal" reading this, do you not agree? And if you are a "conservative"? Can you really sign up for something that is pasting over the real issue? I think of an episode in Inginar Bergman's heavy television play thirty years ago entitled "Scenes from a Marriage." One of the early episodes was called, "Papering over the Cracks." The Windsor Report, in avoiding by design the issue that caused it to be appointed, has papered over the cracks. That is why it will never decide the questions it addresses. It is founded upon sand. It is the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes."
In conclusion, here is a word of interpretation, or theological and ecclesiological reflection, which arises from this critique of the Windsor Report.
What is the future of Anglicanism? Or at least for our lifetimes, what is the future of Anglicanism? If "facing both ways" is the essence of the project, then it cannot stand. It will not stand. I do not say this because I do not wish it to stand. I say it because the truth-and I am not speaking in the exalted sense of "apostolic truth" or something like that but rather in the simple sense of what is conceptually and also empirically verifiable-has to underwrite whatever a person does. We cannot live out of an evasion. Evasion never stands. Evasion is always submitted to the light, eventually. There are no exceptions to this. You cannot live from a falsehood, or a conscious attempt to short-circuit discussion. Marriages that do this, family relationships that do, falter. Old love letters are discovered, people write memoirs, protagonists "come out." It is also true in the life of the mind. Ernst Kaesemann told me bluntly and passionately when I first saw him in the Spring of 1992, "Herr Zahl, you must follow ideas wherever they lead. It is the first requirement of research that you be prepared never ever to shrink from the implications of the data. If you do, you are bankrupt to your cause." Kaesemann added that this principle holds true in theology as well as in everything else.
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