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Windsor Report: Two Observations on Its Ecumenical Content, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Wright, J Robert

This essay comments on the ways in which two important international ecumenical dialogues of the Anglican Communion are treated in the Windsor Report: misleadingly in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, and hardly at all in the case of the Orthodox. The authority of Scripture and that of the Pope are contrasted within the Report in a way that plays off the one against the other, rather than illustrating the considerable range of agreement that ecumenical dialogue has produced. Also, no mention is made of the tolerable organizational diversity that allows the various Orthodox churches to coexist without any one centralized authority, an ecclesiological option that might be favored as an alternative structural model by some Anglicans in the current situation.

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In "Tradition and Innovation in Anglicanism," a paper I wrote for the first Fellows Forum sponsored by the Episcopal Church Foundation, I concluded with the question,

Who decides whether some proposed development is really an innovation that so contradicts the tradition that it cannot be tolerated? In the Anglican Communion we have been asking these sorts of questions in recent years with increasing frequency and urgency, especially since the last Lambeth Conference but even before. In spite of such evolving developments as the Anglican Consultative Council and the Meetings of the Primates, there are still no effective means for mutual consultation that go so far as to produce common and agreed decision making that can facilitate the reception, or rejection, of proposed innovations that may be good or may not be. My view, my conclusion, is that we need a way to do this.

Then I summarized the way in which the Virginia Report, prepared for the 1998 Lambeth Conference, put the question to us: Can we go on as a world Communion, with morally authoritative, but not juridically binding, decision-making structures at the international level?

These questions have been pressed to the top of the Anglican agenda by events of more recent years, and the Windsor Report, at long last, does present a tentative and imperfect indication of the direction that the Anglican Communion may wish to move in such matters. The present essay will not attempt to chronicle or interpret the vast and generally negative response that the consecration of Bishop Robinson has received at the official level from a significant number of the Episcopal Church's ecumenical partners.2 Rather, this essay will focus upon two particular observations about the Report in relation to ecumenical frontiers with the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches. It is my conviction that the Report does less than full justice to classical Anglican hopes for ecumenism in both of these directions.

The Roman Catholic Church

The first frontier comes to the fore when one asks what the Windsor Report says about the Roman Catholic Church, especially as regards authority. Already in 1997 the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commissions Virginia Report had posed to Anglicans the question: "Is not universal authority a necessary corollary of universal communion?" (chap. 5, para. 20). The ARCIC Final Report (1981) and subsequently The Gift of Authority (1999) have raised a similar question. All of these have pointed, within limits, in the direction of a closer relationship to the Roman see. And yet one now reads in the Windsor Report paragraph entitled "Authority" (para. 42), the firm statement that "The Anglican Communion does not have a Pope" (which is certainly true) but also the claim that "The Anglican Communion has always declared that its supreme authority is scripture." This contrast-as though for "us" the authority is the Bible and for "them" the authority is the Pope-is further reinforced in paragraph 70 where it is stated that in the Roman Catholic Church "the Pontiff, with the support of the Curia, enjoys 'supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power,' which he can always freely exercise," whereas,

The Anglican way, theological, symbolic and practical, is diffused among the different aspects of the life of the Communion precisely in such a way as to give supreme authority, in the sense outlined above, to scripture as the locus and means of God's word, energising the Church for its mission and sustaining it in its unity.

In these two paragraphs, the Windsor Report is contrasting two very different kinds of authority, a human person and a written book. There is little or no acknowledgement that in the Roman Catholic Church today there is a marked increase of reliance upon God's written word and a much greater tendency to seek God's will by prayerful study of Scripture. At the same time, in the Anglican Communion (for better or for worse) there has been an increased tendency to regard the Archbishop of Canterbury as a personal focus, especially in some parts of the global South. The Windsor Report describes the Archbishop of Canterbury as one of the Anglican Instruments of Unity. I do not object to any of these developments. But it is somewhat unfair to suggest that for Anglicans Scripture is virtually the only textbook for theological education, whereas Roman Catholics still must depend upon an infallible Pope. Certainly Anglicans might not particularly welcome the papacy just as it stands as a common and agreed way of decision making for the universal church, but neither can the text of Scripture (on its own and with no interpretation) be seen as a viable candidate for that function. Rather, Scripture and personal ecclesial authority are both necessary, and the AnglicanRoman Catholic ecumenical dialogue is suggesting revisions towards that common purpose.

Windsor Report: Two Observations on Its Ecumenical Content, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Wright, J Robert

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