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Covenant, Contract, and Communion: Reflections on a Post-Windsor Anglicanism
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Lewis, Harold T
Since the time of Richard Hooker, Anglicanism has been covenantal. In a church predicated on mutual trust, room was traditionally provided for many divergent views to find a happy home under a protective umbrella. Anglicanism was supple, and its membership guided by the wisdom of Isaiah: "Come let us reason together though our sins be like scarlet." The Anglican Communion in this post-Windsor era seems to be characterized by distrust; it is becoming rigid and legalistic. To many, human sexuality has become the quintessential litmus test, and the views of individuals, parishes, dioceses, or provinces on that issue determine their fitness for membership. Our default position seems to be changing from a propensity to be inclusive to a tendency to remove from Anglican fellowship those who do not meet a standard of "orthodoxy." Contract has replaced covenant as the way Anglicans live, move, and have their being.
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The definition of covenant, according to The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, is "a bond entered into voluntarily by two parties by which each pledges to do something for the other." It would be impossible to study the Bible without grasping the importance of covenant. It characterizes, in the first instance, the relationship between the God of Israel and the people of Israel. The concept is developed further by the prophets, who make righteousness on the part of God's people the prerequisite for our entering into true covenantal fellowship with God. Our Lord takes the concept a step further, asserting that he is the very embodiment of the perfect covenant between God and humankind, because God's people, instead of offering animals or other sacrifices in their behalf to atone for their sins, can now depend on Jesus, the great high priest (Heb. 4:14). Superseding the offerings made in the old dispensation, he offers himself as "the full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world."
Throughout our lives, we enter into some kind of covenant-a covenant not only between God and the people of God, but also between ourselves and other human beings. The Prayer Book describes baptism as an indissoluble bond between ourselves and God, and then calls upon the candidate to "seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself." It refers to Holy Matrimony as "the bond and covenant of marriage . . . which signifies the union between Christ and his Church," but also calls upon the bride and groom to love and to cherish each other until they are parted by death. Ordination is not simply the conferral of an ontological status. The newly ordained person is called upon to "love and serve the people among whom" he/she works, "caring alike for young and old, strong and weak, rich and poor." A dual covenant exists even in death. In the Burial Office, we are committed to God's care, as a "lamb of his own flock and a sheep of his own fold," but we are also "knit together" with the elect "in one communion and fellowship . . . in paradise and on earth." In a covenantal life we are called to love one another, because "he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).
A standard dictionary might give "contract" as a synonym for "covenant." It is not. In a legal contract, the only pertinent relationship between the parties has to do with the specific matter outlined in the contract itself. When we obtain a mortgage, for example, everything is specified in black and white. There is no love between us and the bank. Indeed, one of the documents we have to sign states that anything that is not in writing and witnessed by both parties is not binding.
One of the positive fruits of the current situation in the Anglican Communion is that we all have a deeper knowledge of church polity. We have learned, for example, that the Episcopal Church is not simply an upscale homogeneous ghetto of rather well-heeled, well-educated, urbane Americans, but that we are part-and indeed a tiny part-of a worldwide group known as the Anglican Communion, the second largest group of Christians on the planet. The strength of the Anglican Communion is not in the British Isles, to which it traces its roots, but in the global South. This is because the cross followed the Union Jack into the uttermost parts of the British Empire, giving license to missionaries to make newly minted British subjects into Anglicans. While, over time, the Church of England has fallen into decline, the church in Africa, Asia, and the West Indies has grown by leaps and bounds. Indeed, one in ten Anglicans in the world is a Nigerian! We know that the decennial Lambeth Conference, which takes its name from the Archbishop of Canterbury's London residence, can no longer fit in the palace and so meets at the University of Kent. We know that the Lambeth Conference photographer has to make serious adjustments to the cameras f-stop each decade, because the hue of Anglicanism is changing. At the first Lambeth Conference in 1867, there were no bishops of color; there was only one at the second. In 1998, bishops of color far outnumbered those of Anglo-Saxon stock.
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