Anglican Theological Review: Windsor Report: Two Observations on Its Ecumenical Content, The

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Windsor Report: Two Observations on Its Ecumenical Content, The

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.

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.

Surely neither church need any longer accuse the other of being seriously flawed because of some deficiency that is already in process of correction. Surely the Roman Catholic Church would claim that the place of Scripture in the ritual of Vatican Council II or in the funeral of Pope John Paul II was every bit as important as the Anglican affirmation "scripture takes first place" (as the Windsor Report reads the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, para. 53) and that for the Anglican tradition bishops especially are the "teachers of scripture" (para. 58). Surely both churches can agree that Scripture is held as a "universal authority" by both of them, but that a personal living focus of leadership is also desirable in both for the sake of "energising the Church for its mission and sustaining it in its unity." To contrast the supreme authority of Scripture with the supreme pontiff in Rome is to mix two very different factors, when in fact each church is trying to accord some kind of authority to each phenomenon on its own terms. Thus, there could well be some clarification or elucidation in the Windsor Report, lest paragraphs 42 and 70 be read as retreating from the Anglican position affirmed in the ARCIC Final Report and in The Gift of Authority or from the process toward full communion that was conceived by the 1966 Joint Declaration of Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey It is all the more incongruous to find the Windsor Report arguing for an enhanced dependence upon the see of Canterbury (para. 110), while the Anglican primates are concerned lest this might detract from their own "proper provincial autonomy."

I also note, finally, the statement in the Windsor Report that Scripture is the "central fact of unity within the Anglican Communion" (para. 63). One wonders whether this too was intended as a contrast to the Roman Catholic Church. Or is there some uniquely superior way in which this is thought to be more true for Anglicans than for other churches? Is this the beginning of a process to declare Scripture, by itself, another "Instrument of Unity"? Or is this assertion made for the sake of those parts of the globe where there is a more exclusive allegiance to scriptural primacy than in England or the USA?

The Orthodox

If it be the case that the Windsor Report drives an unnecessary split between papacy and Scripture in not doing justice to the agreed results of the international Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue, so also the Report, which itself purports to be about ecclesiology could further benefit from attention to the "communia ecclesiology" that has been fruitfully considered in the international Anglican-Orthodox dialogue. This can be seen especially in the agreed Dublin Statement (1984).3 Collectively, the Orthodox churches at present are composed of various groupings, in which the special place of honor is accorded to the four ancient autocephalous or self-governing patriarchates (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem), followed by eleven other autocephalous churches, and then another group of churches described as autonomous but not autocephalous. Timothy Ware described all these churches and their organization as a family of self-governing churches, "held together, not by a centralized organization, not by a single prelate wielding absolute power over the whole body, but by the double bond of unity in the faith and communion in the sacraments."4 "Each church," he went on to assert, "while independent, is in full agreement with the rest on all matters of doctrine, and between them all there is full sacramental communion." The Ecumenical Patriarch (of Constantinople) holds a position of special honor but does not have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other churches.

This paradigm for ecclesiology derives from the patristic period of the early church and has its theological model in the Greek term perichoresis, a dance among equals in mutual relationship. As John of Damascus explained the relationship of the persons of the Trinity, "They are made one not so as to commingle, but so as to cleave to each other, and they have their being in each other without any coalescence or commingling."5 Beginning with a Trinitarian paradigm in which the fullness of the Trinitarian God dwells in each person of the Trinity, the Russian Orthodox theologian Nicholas Afanassieff and others have reasoned that the unity and fullness of the whole church likewise belongs to each local church and dwells especially within its eucharistic celebration rather than to one universal superchurch. Thus, "the local church is autonomous and independent, because the Church of God in Christ indwells it in perfect fullness."6 From this Orthodox perspective it seems that there is full agreement even on every major point of doctrine.

A modern Western church historian might well want to question whether such assertions are adequate to support claims of "full agreement" (emphasis mine). But the fact remains that the Orthodox churches of the East do present an appealing picture of unity-incommunion that depends much less upon any central and enhanced role for their leader than that which is advocated for the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Windsor Report (para. 105-110). Given the long history of agreement in Anglican-Orthodox dialogue on such matters (for example, the Dublin Statement, para. 13), it does seem somewhat surprising that the Windsor Report (whose purpose was to explore the riches of ecclesiology) has not presented a quasi-federation paradigm analogous to the autocephalous Orthodox patriarchates of the East as an alternative to the much more centralized pyramid topped by the Archbishop of Canterbury that it has offered. One need not concede that unless there is a convenant one can believe whatever one wants (see para. 92 and Appendix Two). The Orthodox model of ecclesiology does seem to allow for more flexibility and variety without an overarching control from the top.

One cannot help but suspect that the pressing influence of the Roman Catholic model and the understandable demand for someone to tell the Roman Catholic Church authoritatively what Anglicans believe may have weighed heavily upon the Lambeth Commission, no matter what leanings towards the Orthodox have been observed in the present Archbishop of Canterbury. I myself see problems in the Orthodox model, but it seems curious that more was not made of Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology in the Report itself. The "universal authority" in a "visibly united Church" that the Virginia Report (chap. 5, para. 20) longed for and that the Windsor Report seems to advise is, quite frankly, less of an ideal, less appealing, to many American Anglicans now in view of the present situation. After all, one would not say that the Eastern Orthodox churches have chosen to "walk alone," even apart from each other, but in them there does seem to be less than the full visible unity and less than the complete agreement that would seem to be demanded by the Windsor Report's following a more Roman Catholic model. For the Orthodox, the "highest degree of communion possible" (Lambeth 1988) may not mean agreement on every significant point. Nor does it seem necessary for Anglicans all to agree on such things as women bishops, allegiance to all of the Thirty-Nine Articles, monogamy rather than polygamy, full interchangeability of diaconate, invariability of ordination not just by bishops but by bishops in the historic succession, and other theoretically "bearable anomalies." There is an Orthodox ecclesiology that at least deserves our notice.

Conclusion

It is my contention that the Windsor Report does less than full justice to the hopes and achievements of the Anglican international dialogues with the Roman Catholic Church and with the Orthodox churches. I do not object to the Report itself. Indeed, I can affirm most of what it says, and I think it is remarkable that it was produced on such short notice. But I do think it could have offered a picture with richer nuancing and with greater flexibility for the ecumenical future, had it harvested the results of these two dialogues.

1 J. Robert Wright, "Tradition and Innovation in Anglicanism: Is Tradition Always the Enemy of Innovation? Some Historical and Ecumenical Examples," Anglican Theological Review 82 (2000): 765-778, at 777-778.

2 See the Windsor Report, para. 28, 130.

3 Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue: The Dublin Agreed Statement 1984 (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1985).

4 Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1st ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., 1963), 15.

5 John of Damascus, "An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith," translated by S. D. F. Salmond, book 1, chap. 8 in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, second series, vol. 9 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons; Oxford and London: Parker and Company, 1899), 11.

6 Nicholas Afanassieff, "The Church which Presides in Love," chap. 4 in J. Meyendorff, N. Afanassieff, et al., The Primacy of Peter (London: Faith Press, 1963, reprint. The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiologij and the Early Church, edited by John Meyendorff, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1992), 108-110, at 109.

J. ROBERT WRIGHT*

* J. Robert Wright is the St. Mark's Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the General Theological Seminary, New York City. He served on the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission from 1983 to 1991.