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Covenant, Contract, and Communion: Reflections on a Post-Windsor Anglicanism
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Lewis, Harold T
I contend that this quintessential Anglican trait of an ability to allow for such differences, this covenantal existence that has, since the time of Richard Hooker, allowed for divergent views under the Anglican umbrella, no longer obtains. Anglicanism today has ceased to be guided by covenant, which understands the church to be supple. Instead, it is beginning to be guided by contract, which understands the church to be rigid. In an assiduous and tenacious reverence for and reliance on laws-biblical, constitutional, canonical-Ecclesia Anglicana is exhibiting an unprecedented sense of distrust among the provinces that make up the Anglican mosaic today. Moreover, such distrust stems almost solely from the existence of divergent views on the subject of human sexuality. Specifically, many opine that any individual, diocese, or national church body that believes that homosexual persons can be fit for ordination, or that the church should consider recognizing same-sex blessings, has removed itself from the ranks of orthodox Christians. Questions were raised as to whether Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold should have been invited to preach at a service in Belfast that preceded the Primates' Meeting in Ireland, because "a primate representing the historical teaching on human sexuality" had not also been invited.4 The primates requested that representatives from the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada not attend the 2005 meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council. Some archbishops refused to receive communion in the presence of the primates of those churches because of their theological views on human sexuality. More recently, the invitation to a member of the Presiding Bishop's staff to preach in a diocese in the Province of the West Indies was withdrawn because she believes that the church should participate in a dialogue on the question of same-sex unions.
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What makes such actions so troubling is that the theology of those who hold such views is deemed suspect, and their very fitness for ministry is called into question. Actions arising from such suspicions can have serious consequences. As the Irish delegates to the Anglican Consultative Council commented about the proposed absence of North American delegates, "their churches [are] precluded from participating in other important discussions which could both enhance fellowship and create perspective. What better way both to cement division and to compromise the independence of the ACC?" But the basic question is whether such participation and fellowship are desired by those Anglicans who believe that their North American brothers and sisters have by their actions already severed those bonds. As Robert Duncan, Bishop of Pittsburgh, has stated, "the Episcopal Church has been . . . asked to choose between repentance marked by a real returning to the Anglican mainstream or 'walking apart' from the rest of the Anglican Communion."5 But there is a more subtle problem emerging from the primates' action. The Irish Anglican Consultative Council delegates warned that "for the ACC, a genuinely synodical international gathering [since it is the only one of the four Instruments of Unity that includes clergy and laity], to have its membership and atmosphere adjusted essentially at the behest of the Primates' meeting would severely damage the balance of dispersed authority within Anglicanism."6 They further caution that the Windsor Report runs the risk of becoming a Trojan horse, and that a precedent might be set for a "centralized curialization" of the Anglican Communion-in other words, it would become, in some ways, more like the Roman Catholic Church in its governance, thereby abandoning its historic Anglican ethos.
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