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Freedom and Covenant: The Miltonian Analogy Transfigured
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Radner, Ephraim
For all the Miltonian dismay expressed by some Americans and others at a set of constraining commitments across provinces, the actual mechanism of this constraint is the "voluntary" responsibility of self-restraint and mutual accountability. Obviously, mutually agreed sanctions of discipline are possible. But the sanctions are taken up in an amazingly unfettered liberty of decision. At the same time, one of the benefits of the Covenant the Commission proposes is that it will serve to protect the freedoms of local and provincial churches, vis-à-vis state regulations, by making clear that the Christian commitments of Anglicans are tied up with a complex international web of mutual concerns and constraints (para. 119). There really is a concern about liberty in the proposal, but it is a liberty that finds its home within the transformed Christian body.
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If the peculiar character of ECUSA is seen simply in terms of vying Miltonian and prelatical values, the Covenant's hedging of autonomy by the mutual accountabilities of communion might seem to some a compromise to save an institution (and saving the Communion is, in fact, one of the rationales given for the proposed Covenantpara. 119). But the Covenant's "conciliar" character points to something much deeper, which is now reemerging in the present larger debate over the nature of "communion": the divine character of freedom exercised in mutual subjection for the sake of unity, in the character of the "mind of Christ" described in Philippians 2:1-11. The elements of election, representation, common dependence, and subjection to the whole-all within the ambit of scriptural revelation, offering, demand, and coherence-constitute traditional conciliar theology, dating from the Middle Ages,15 and groped after now by Anglicanism in an ecumenically pioneering way. These characteristics stand, not as the affirmation of ECUSAs war within her heart, but as the transfiguration of the warring players themselves. I have avoided explicitly theological arguments here. But if they are to be pursued, they must begin here.
If there is any value to this imaginary reading of ECUSA as it confronts the Windsor Report, it is this: it makes clear that the rejection of a covenantal embrace by ECUSA will mark her as something other than a "communion" church, just as the Report indicates. Such a rejection would constitute the choice for a pure Miltonianism, and ECUSA would thereby declare herself as being a Protestant body whose commitments to individual autonomy are moving in the direction of a radically new religion altogether. Just as did her illustrious paragon.
1 Richard Shimpfky, "The Bishop's Friday Letter to the Clergy of El Camino Real," March 12, 1999.
2 Frank T. Griswold, letter to Lambeth Commission, February 6, 2004.
3 See these views fully articulated in ECUSA's formal paper written for the Anglican Consultative Council (June 2005), To Set Our Hope on Christ (New York: Office of Communication, Episcopal Church Center, 2005), published after this paper was written.
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