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Unopened Gift, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Steenson, Jeffrey

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The burden of The Gift of Authority is the re-reception within Anglican life of the historic ministry of Peter. It is a gift that remains unopened, and one senses that the opportunity for Anglicans to open this gift as a family, qua Communion, may be slipping away. The Windsor Report may be the last reasonable hope to gather together a contentious and strong-willed family that is in imminent danger of drifting apart. The irony is that the discipline of communion the Report commends is the very gift that has already been offered. Consider this remarkable appraisal from the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément, which so closely parallels the Windsor Report's finding that the Anglican Communion needs a ministry of primacy: "The role of Rome, its petrine charism, is therefore to keep watch over the communion of local churches, to prevent them from breaking away, to intervene at the request of any one of them (as at Corinth in 96 or again around 170), to serve as a point of reference to anyone seeking insertion in one of the most prestigious of the apostolic traditions."12 The question then seems to be, if primacy is a necessary condition of communion, why would we not want the real thing?

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1 Journal of the General Convention (New York, 1967), 379.

2 Lambeth Conference 1930, Resolution 49. The Lambeth documents are published online at www.anglicancommunion.org.

3 I am indebted to James M. Stanton, Bishop of Dallas, for making this connection.

4 Lambeth Conference 1988, Resolution 18.2a.

5 Lambeth Conference 1998, Resolution III.8h.

6 The Virginia Report 6.6.

7 Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation I.23-33.

8 Lambeth Conference 1998, Resolution III.8h.

9 Lambeth Conference 1998, Resolution III.8i.

10 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 199. This so-called "Ratzinger formula" dates back to a 1976 address and has attracted much attention from the Orthodox; see Olivier Clément, You are Peter (New York: New City Press, 2003), 84.

11 The Gift of Authority (New York: Church Publishing, 1998). see J. Robert Wright's appraisal, "The Possible Contribution of Papal Authority to Church Unity: An Anglican/Episcopalian Perspective," in Carl F. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, eds., The Ecumenical Future (Grand Rapids, Midi.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 138-144.

12 Clément, You Are Peter, 29.

JEFFREY STEENSON*

* Jeffrey Steenson is Bishop of the Diocese of the Rio Grande.

Unopened Gift, The

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Steenson, Jeffrey

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