Freedom and Covenant: The Miltonian Analogy Transfigured

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.

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.

First, Milton was committed to a notion of society and church as a gathering of intellectually unconstrained religious seekers. Laws governing speech and limiting publication on the basis of putative religious truth were contrary to Christian liberty. Why? Because, secondly, human apprehension of the Christian "truth" is so clouded by sin as to demand constant debate in order to be unveiled, however partially, in time. The Christian soul itself is served in open and unregulated debate as it is pressed towards the truth through a honing of intellectual and inner virtue. So, thirdly, ecclesial (and civil) constraints upon the promotion of opinions and doctrines-however wrong-is anti-Christian. Milton's consistent, violent attack upon bishops derives directly from his conviction that ecclesial hierarchy, exercised authoritatively and regulatively, "quenches" the Spirit, setting in motion an array of social corruptions and disorders. True "unity" is provided as Christians struggle together for the truth.6 (Echoes of current ECUSA arguments are obvious here.)

Two more theological convictions undergird Milton's promotion of unregulated discourse. Divine providence works to ensure that the truth will certainly emerge through disputation.7 This conviction implies a more startling consequence: the truth itself continually "emerges" through time as of "continuing revelation" in the Spirit.8

The demand here, politically and spiritually, was for the encouragement of individual pneumatic freedom to grow into the many-corridored dwelling of God's truth, in the Scriptures as much as in anything. Milton was happy to restrict the speech and writing of Roman Catholics-but precisely because their constricted "orthodoxy" (joined to threatened political sanction) put obstacles before what ought to be the individual's unimpeded quest for truth. Milton's almost counterintuitive observation has entered the mainstream of American social understanding: the imposition of conformity actually leads to greater division9-a charge frequently made by liberal against conservative Episcopalians debating "who is causing division."

With age, Milton's opposition to organized constraint upon individual religiosity grew. Initially this was limited to the "prelacy" of Anglican episcopacy; but in time he turned against Presbvterian religious/political ordering, and later against other forms of religious control. Milton eventually dropped his early, Scripture-based concern for "church discipline" not because of a rejection of the scriptural demand for it, but because of its corrupting character. In the last analysis, it is the individual's sense of conscience that provides the only acceptable Christian "disciplinary" control.10

Milton's more particularly religious beliefs, bound up with his system of "emergent truth through disputation," strangely follow the justificatory line of many ECUSA leaders and members. We see in both a focus on individual happiness understood in terms of the free exercise of conscience before God, a cultural relativism regarding otherwise universally held norms, a clear Arianism and Nestorianism in doctrines of God and Christ, and a certain Pelagianism with respect to human spiritual progress.11 Milton's intense scripturalism may seem at odds with all this. But because he had finally done away with the necessary communal character of Christianity and its apprehension of the truth, evincing the epitome of individualized Protestantism, his own speculations could go off in strange directions, despite their scriptural focus.

Prelacy and ECUSA

Milton provides only a typological analogy to contemporary ECUSA apologists. But Milton's influence in the formative years of the United States was not negligible. He was read carefully by Jefferson, and the Areopagitica became a classic text for First Amendment and educational mythology.12 Still, his incorporation into the public pantheon of American liberty was partly accomplished by neglecting his primarily religious vision, which for a long time remained outside the accepted mainstream.

But the Miltonian analogy should make clear that ECUSA's adoption of this religious vision places it at odds with its own genetic ecclesial identity. ECUSA's episcopal identity stands in an almost suicidal relationship with the Miltonian anti-episcopal understanding of religious liberty. Certainly the interest of early U.S. Anglicans lay exactly in embracing this episcopal identity, whatever character of "democratic" processes were lodged in its conventional life. While not all early Episcopalians were "Seaburyites" in their views of episcopacy, the entire organizational drama of PECUSA focused on this question. Practically, the avenues for embracing the episcopate formally tied the Episcopal Church to the Church of England. For example, the revision of the American Book of Common Prayer and the doctrinal constraints around creeds and organization finally accepted by the new church were tied to the episcopal dependence of the Americans upon the English.13

Second, there is the theological import of the American church's commitment to episcopacy. William White's use of the term "communion" in his famous case refers not only to the relationship held among American Episcopalians, but describes also the relationship they held with the Church of England.14 Theologically, part of the deep and common bond they experienced and expressed in the ordering of the church by bishops lay in the Americans' commitment to "apostolicity." White makes this case overtly, informed by the deep theological bequest from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the high church primitivists. The episcopacy was "apostolic," furthermore, because it was scripturally given and upheld by the early church. This twofold criterion became the centerpiece of standard self-understanding by Episcopalians until relatively recently. The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral represents a clear, evolved, and self-conscious embrace of this prelatical-scriptural identity, and its implications continue to bear fruit in ecumenical theology. It lies at the foundation of ECUSA's consistent embrace (until recently) of the ideology of the Anglican Communion itself.

Yet none of this precluded a consistent celebration of American "exceptionalism" with regard to the Episcopal Church's character. Especially in the context of missionary apologias, Episcopalians emphasized the distinctions between PECUSA and the Church of England precisely in terms of the former's wonderful system of self-governance. But this defense was based on "apostolic" considerations, the necessity of elections and of connection between people and leaders all being part of the original apostolic practice of the early church.

So now we are at a place where Miltonian character, allied perhaps to this American distinction but very different in its impulse, has appeared within ECUSA with astonishing vigor. We use the term "provincial autonomy" to describe the ecclesial virtue we seek to protect, but in a very particular way these days. The Miltonian similitude connotes the nobility of the commitment; Milton's mythic status rightly underlines the values of freedom and justice and the intrinsicgood of commitments to these things. ECUSA, in engaging in a Miltonian task-whether specified in terms of oppressed persons or in systems of ecclesial government-has not taken hold of something base. But the new Miltonianism of ECUSA policies also points to a profound inner tension (contradiction?) that is pulling the church away from her innate "apostolic" ordering and constraints. The Miltonian element strangely distorts the residual, essential prelatism of ECUSA as it asserts itself in conflict (see the conflict in Connecticut between the bishop and some priests). Unless the Miltonian streak of ECUSA is submitted to organic constraint, prelatical aggression becomes personalized self-assertion, exceeding all bounds of social control. If the heart of ECUSA is exploding, it is because we do not have an ecclesial mechanism for resolving this tension theologically.

The Windsor Covenant as a Way Forward

I suggest that the Windsor Report, in its proposal for a Covenant, offers an arena in which the American Church can be true to her dual character. After all, the Covenant attempts to hold together, by constitutional agreement and representative functions, the autonomous character of particular Anglican churches (a "voluntary association of churches"-para. 119) within each church's "calling" to communion (which is "inviolable"-Appendix Two, Art. 6, para. 3). As a whole, the Covenant is designed to act as the "communion's visible foundation," even while it "protects [the] distinctive identity and mission" of her churches (para. 119).

The Covenant, in its particulars, is committed to an episcopal focus, through which Communion life will be ordered. The Windsor Report as a whole places great emphasis on the bishop s character as teacher of Scripture, and as instrument of collegial unity (para. 58, 63-66); and the Covenant spells out this prelatical ministry with clear force, placing great responsibility for maintaining communion upon the choices of individual bishops (Appendix Two, Art. 13).

But the Covenant also seeks to place these responsibilities within a context of "adjustable" consultation and/or mediation and resolution. The doctrinal substance of the Covenant's agreed definitions is relatively thin, and great weight is placed upon the constraints of "communion concerns" that are not defined in advance. Thus, individualsbishops accountable to their churches and to one another-are given enormous responsibilities to listen, discern, and choose rightly within a process of common decision-making around the world. The onus of the constraining mechanism remains one of freedom assumed and limited collegially within the constitutional systems of local churches and provinces.

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.

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.

4 See my "Children of Cain: The Oxymoron of American Catholicism," in Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner, The Fate of Communion (forthcoming); also available at anglicancommimioninstitute.org

5 See the groundbreaking work of Christopher Hill in Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1978) and his earlier The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). See also Roy Flanagan, ed., The Riverside Milton (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998). Quotations here are from John Milton, The Prose Works of John Milton: With a Biographical Introduction by Rufus Wilmot Griswold. In Two Volumes (Philadelphia: John W. Moore, 1847).

6 "Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. . . . What some lament of, we rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of their religion into their own hands again. A little generous prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain of charity might win all these diligences to join, and unite in one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but forgo this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men" (Areopagitica; citations are taken from the University of Oregon Renascence Editions of the Areopagitica, 1997, available online).

7 "For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power. . . . Yet is it not impossible that she may have more shapes than one. . . . How many other things might be tolerated in peace, and left to conscience, had we but charity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging one another?" (Areopagitica).

8 "Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers" who mutilated her wholeness. "From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth . . . went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection" (Areopagitica).

9 "There be who perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims. 'Tis their own pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing, who neither will hear with meekness, nor can convince. . . . They are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity. . . . To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it . . . this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a Church; not the forced and outward union of cold, and neutral, and inwardly divided minds" (Areopagitica).

10 "But there is yet a more ingenuous and noble degree of honest shame, or, call it, if you will, an esteem, whereby men bear an inward reverence toward their own persons. . . . But he that holds himself in reverence and due esteem, both for the dignity of God's image upon him, and for the price of his redemption [cannot] fear so much the offence and reproach of others, as he dreads and would blush at the reflection of his own severe and modest eye upon himself (Reason for Church Government [1641], book 2, chap. 3).

11 Christopher Hill has made clear that Milton's Christianity hovered on the outer limits of the "tradition," however construed, and certainly moved beyond the realm normally associated with "catholic" commitments.

12 Vincent Blasi, "Milton's Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment," Yale Law School Occasional Papers, second series, number 1 (2002).

13 See Nancy L. Rhoden, Revolutionary Anglicanism: The Colonial Church of England Clergy (luring the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

14 William White, "The Case of the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered" (1782), can be found in Robert Prichard, ed., Readings from the History of the Episcopal Church (Wilton, Ct.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1986), 61-80

15 See J. H. Burns and Thomas Izbicki, eds., Conciliarism and Papalisrn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

EPHRAIM RADNER*

* Ephraim Radner is Rector of the Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado. He is a board member and theologian for the Anglican Communion Institute.

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