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Freedom and Covenant: The Miltonian Analogy Transfigured
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Radner, Ephraim
This essay draws positive attention to the Windsor Report's "Proposed Anglican Covenant." The primates' February 2005 Communiqué commended the proposal in general, and asked that steps be taken quickly by the Archbishop of Canterbury to have it considered by provinces before Lambeth 2008. The Covenant is a critical, even essential piece through which "autonomy in Communion" can be lived. For U.S. Episcopalians, the Covenant-even in its proposed particulars-may well prove the best means of maintaining the proper tension and balance between two often competing values at the heart of our Christian identity. The goal is to lay out these two values-the "Miltonian" and "prelatical" commitments of ECUSA-and then ask if the Covenant is not a clearly effective way of granting these elements a constructive life together.
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The Religious Value of Autonomy
Insofar as the Windsor Report is concerned, the commitment to ecclesial "autonomy" in ECUSA's provincial self-understanding goes to the heart of the current conflict in the Communion. Numerous responses to the Report by U.S. bishops and the advocates of General Convention 2003's actions point to the "peculiar" character of ECUSA's democratic culture, as it properly informs our ecclesial life. ("The General Convention is the single magisterium in our most democratic polity," according to one bishop.1) The long-standing claim to autonomy has been repeated frequently by Presiding Bishop Griswold, who has sought to explain ECUSA's actions as based in a polity that is "open, democratic, and participatory-flowing out of the life of the community."2 "Autonomy" within a culture of "democracy" represents a vital piece of self-imaging for Episcopalians.
But is this understanding simply the result of ECUSAs long immersion in an American culture, an appropriation of the secular foundations of American government? Surely, some of this is right. But just as surely the claims to "open democracy" made by ECUSA leaders in the present debate over "communion" are not bound to or simply expressive of this cultural-political reality. Most apologetic rationales-despite the rhetorical calls to "new revolutions against the monarch" that one comes across on the House of Deputies listserv-are more purely theological: they claim that the values of openness, legislative participation, and democratic decision-making all represent enactments of the religious virtues of diverse processes of truth-seeking, of "growing into" deeper unity through dynamic engagements with "difference," of an ecclesial structure that allows the Holy Spirit to speak in the unfolding work of historical debate, experiment, and correction.3
There is a theology here. It does not, however, look much like the theology expressed by the eighteenth-century organizers of the Episcopal Church, whose interest in democratic voting was real, but limited (and certainly not universally shared). Instead, the biggest theological problem confronting the inventers of American Episcopalianism was bishops themselves, and how to justify them in a political and religious context in which "prelacy" was often attacked as intrinsically oppressive and seditious. While eighteenth-century Revolutionary ideals were extended by some into organizational reflection, this was not the case for most American Anglicans. William White's goal for the yet-to-be established Anglican body in the United States was that it should provide a religious option for those who were drawn to "episcopal" forms of ecclesial life and worship.
Today's historical-pneumatic claims to liberty on the part of defenders of ECUSA's autonomy are something else altogether. I have no interest in tracing the exceedingly complex genealogy of these claims.4 But their shape, within the context of historical Anglican debate, is quite surprising: it turns out to be far closer to the reformed congregationalist radicalism of someone like John Milton than to anything resembling "Episcopal" values. This similitude demonstrates the paradox-and irony-of current ECUSA official theology in the debate about Anglicanism and the Anglican Communion. It appears as if the most extreme of anti-episcopal ("anti-prelatical") theologies is now wedded to an American ecclesial body distinctive precisely through its commitment to "prelacy."
The Miltonian Analogy
We know Milton as a supreme poet of the English language, and less so as a brilliant religious controversialist and theologian;5 his last work, in Latin, was a systematic scholastic dogmatics. Still, his intellectual evolution moved in a clear direction: from a young conformist Anglican of Protestant (Reformed) leanings, to a political and ecclesial radical who understood Christian identity in terms of the individual conscience freely conformed to the truth of Christ. The connection between individual and freedom became absolutely key for Milton, and dictated the shape of church and society that he labored incessantly to promote. His famous discourse Areopagitica (1644) against Parliament's "licensing" (censoring) authority has a limited focus, yet it represents an entire theology of Christian life that remains consistent, if not sharpened, through his disappointment with the Commonwealth.
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