Autonomy or communion? The passion of the Episcopal Church

From the beginning of its life independent of the Church of England after the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church in the United States had to contend with accusations of being an ‘English Church’. As late as 1830, Henry Caswall, an English student at Kenyon College (an Episcopalian college on the Ohio frontier established with English support), was told by a veteran of the American War of Independence, ‘I know [the British] would not contribute so many thousands to build a college in Ohio without a sinister object. I am, therefore, convinced that Bishop Chase is an agent employed by them to introduce British domination here. The college is in fact a fortress, all you students are British soldiers in disguise, and when you think you have an opportunity, you will throw off the mask, and proclaim the king of England.’ ¹ The English and wider Anglican connections have been a source not only of rich blessings to the American church but also of a sense of fragmented loyalty. The Anglican Covenant process raises again perennial questions. Is the Episcopal Church first of all an American church accountable to its own people, or an Anglican church accountable to the worldwide communion? Is it autonomous in an absolute sense, or is its autonomy qualified by membership in a communion of churches? Is it possible somehow to balance these loyalties? The current debate among Episcopalians about their place in relation to the Anglican Communion is evidence that this tension is still unresolved.

The first test of the identity of the independent American church was the character of its liturgy. Freed from Parliament’s unwillingness to countenance liturgical revision in the eighteenth century, Americans were free to make use of Latitudinarian and Nonjuror currents toward revision that were such a feature of eighteenth-century church life. ² Those churchmen led by William White, later the first bishop of Pennsylvania, who were commissioned to come up with a Book of Common Prayer for the American church had to produce something that reflected the reality of the new political situation they found themselves in – no more prayers for the monarch. These enlightenment churchmen took the opportunity to reshape the Prayer Book according to their ideological ends even though they claimed in the preface to the proposed Prayer Book of 1786 that ‘the doctrines of the Church of England are preserved entire’. ³

It is highly important to note this declared intention to be faithful to the inheritance from the Church of England. It is a regular refrain throughout the history of the Episcopal Church that has in fact often signalled significant alterations to that inheritance. This proposed Prayer Book deleted the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds and omitted the descent into hell from the Apostles’ Creed, along with parts of the Psalter and the lectionary that were deemed to be ‘hurtful’, the sign of the cross in baptism, various of the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis from Evening Prayer. Anything that the revisers did not deem ‘rational’ was chopped. With the best will in the world, it’s difficult to see how they could say that ‘the doctrines of the Church of England are preserved entire’ with these changes.

If the rational enlightenment assumptions of William White marked one pole of Episcopalian believing in this period, Samuel Seabury, who had already been consecrated bishop of Connecticut by the Scottish Episcopalians, represented the alternative. ⁴ The New England Anglican tradition had its origins in the conversion of several leading Congregationalist clergy and scholars to the Church of England, who had been convinced by their reading of the ancient Church Fathers of the necessity of Episcopal ordination. Despite having started out as a tiny, oppressed minority in puritan New England, they were a dynamic and influential high church movement drawing significant numbers of converts from the Congregational established churches. ⁵ In his analysis of the proposed Prayer Book, Seabury rightly perceived the influence of Deism (God as a distant clock-maker), Unitarianism (denial of the Trinity) and Arianism (denial of the divinity of Christ) at work. His brand of Anglicanism insisted on fidelity to the witness of the early Church, a catholic adherence to the inheritance of faith: he wrote, ‘the surest way to guard against this mischief, is to attend to the interpretations of the oldest Christians and of the universal Church’. ⁶ And so Seabury fought a rearguard action against these changes. The desire for the unity of the Church was sufficiently strong that he was able to reverse the most serious of the changes. In this he was aided and abetted by the bishops of the Church of England, who refused to consecrate bishops for America unless the American Prayer Book remained more faithful to the inheritance of 1662.

This telling vignette from the history of the Episcopal Church is a reminder that the tensions in the life of that Church today are no new phenomenon. They have been present at least since the beginning of its independent history. The doctrinal issues under consideration then – the divinity of Christ, the trinitarian nature of God – were of far greater import than the issues that divide Anglicans now. The danger today is that Episcopalians (and other Anglicans) no longer care enough about unity to hold on to it.

Unity is not an idea that means much in the context of American religious life. Americans are strongly imbued with a sense of their own ‘exceptionalism’, and this is (if possible) even more true of their religious than of their political and social life. ⁷ The particular extreme reformed Protestantism that arrived with the early settlers has formed the theological habits of the continent, with a conviction that in the new world the original humanity, before-the-fall humanity, could be recovered. This assumption has been further shaped and expanded by Americans’ experience of the land: as settlers moved west, inescapably they were always encountering new sights, new opportunities, new peoples. If ever there were a land in which humanity thought it could reinvent itself, this was it. When the historian Frederick Jackson Turner formulated his ‘frontier’ thesis of American history, ⁸ he perceived that persistent adaptation to frontier living allowed the constant reinvention of civilization from its barbarian beginnings. As the philosopher Joseph Needleman commented in Ken Burns’s documentary on the Shakers, ‘America is the land of zero. Start from zero, we start from nothing. That is the idea of America. We start only from our own reason, our own longing, our own search.’ ⁹

The American religious experience is like no other, and even if American Anglicans have historically identified themselves as standing apart from evangelical Protestantism, as being a cut above it socially and intellectually, their actual experience is nevertheless deeply imbued with these same primordialist assumptions. From the beginning of the Republic, American Anglicans assumed their church was ‘purer’ than the Mother Church of England because state establishment had been taken away from them. America is a self-referring cultural power; it does not occur to most Americans to consult others, politically or spiritually, to arrive at an understanding of truth and right. The leading American literary scholar Harold Bloom, a secular Jew, has argued that virtually all Americans, whatever their religious disposition or denominational label, are Gnostics. ¹⁰ What does he mean by this?

That there is no higher religious authority than the private individual.

That every individual can reach religious truth by his or her own efforts.

That external expressions of formal religion (churches, worship, creeds) are unnecessary, and potentially a harmful block to true spirituality.

That any attempt to tell the individual what to believe is a threat to religious freedom.

In such an approach to religion, there is no place for the fall, no place for the assumption that our human condition is fundamentally flawed by disobedience, such that we need to be redeemed from sin and death through the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ.

This ‘American Religion’ has a powerful influence over the life of the Episcopal Church. If ‘personal experience’ has absolute authority, if finding the ‘real me’ is the central quest of human existence, then the individual requires complete freedom of choice unconstrained by any authority outside the self. A church inculturated in such a setting will affirm the individual quest in all its forms. Inclusion becomes a fundamental value for the church, the unconditional affirmation of all personal experience of whatever race, creed, gender or sexuality. The purpose of the church is to validate those who have found their true identity and have thus found God. This would seem to be the thinking behind a recent orthodoxy of the Episcopal Church, the welcoming of all of whatever faith or none to communion. ¹¹ This is arguably a much more serious issue than the current disagreements over sexuality. By obviating the need for baptism, it leaves no space for the atoning power of Christ’s death and resurrection, repentance, faith or holiness of life.

And if the individual is sure that no institution or system of belief can have any authority over the self, then it is equally true that no other church can have any authority over an autonomous national church. The attitude of the Episcopal Church is very firmly, ‘No one can tell us what to do.’ The response of the American House of Bishops to the proposal by the Communion Primates in 2007 for a scheme to provide pastoral oversight for congregations alienated from their own bishops was ‘It violates our founding principles as the Episcopal Church following our liberation from colonialism and the beginning of a life independent of the Church of England.’ ¹² These words and the rest of the reply are arguably an exercise in historical self-deception and wishful thinking. ¹³ Like Henry Caswall’s revolutionary veteran, it sees the Covenant process as a fortress full of English clerics ready to leap out and reassert control over the American Church.

The Anglican Church in the American colonies had an ambiguous relationship with the Revolution – some supported it, but many were firmly opposed to it, remaining loyal to the British crown. The only ‘liberation’ the Revolution brought Episcopalians was from much of the church’s financial assets and historic influence. White Americans in the eighteenth century did not experience ‘colonialism’ in the same sense as African and Asian nations in the twentieth century, yet the statement equates the current Episcopalian experience with that of African and Asian post-colonial societies.

The further irony is, of course, that the Anglican Communion would not exist as it does without the efforts of the American Church to force the calling of the first Lambeth Conference in 1867. Their bishops wanted to have a chance to condemn the liberal theological tendency represented by Essays and Reviews and biblical criticism and Bishop Colenso. Then they wanted the Communion to be mutually accountable and interdependent. Now the issues are different and the roles are reversed. Now it is the American bishops who resist claims of reciprocal obligation. So what is it about the Covenant that so offends and frightens them? Why does it have them running for their muskets to repel the new imperialists?

Since the majority of diocesan synods in the Church of England have rejected the Covenant, there is an assumption among its opponents that the covenant process is now dead in the water. It may be that the proposed approach to dispute resolution is unacceptable, but the theological underpinnings of the Covenant, developed over a period of at least fifty years, has not been discredited. It is the only sustained, agreed, communion-wide initiative to enable Anglicans to understand their common life, and there is nothing else to take its place.

The theology of the Anglican Covenant is an expression of an approach to ecclesiology called conciliarism. This is the view that the authority of councils of the Church is above that of popes. It emerged in the face of papal claims of supremacy in the Middle Ages, was submerged by the power of papal autocracy from the fifteenth century onwards, and only re-emerged in the Roman Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council. For Anglicans who regard themselves as both catholic and reformed, conciliarism has been an important foundational principle, a reflection of their accountability to the faith of the whole Church. It takes them away from a centralized model of church authority to one where authority is dispersed throughout the Body of Christ; the body needs to speak in common to reflect its unity. This belief is reflected in the enunciation in the Windsor Report (§51) of the principle, ‘what affects the communion of all should be decided by all’. ¹⁴ It is an expression of what is meant by ‘catholicity’, the orientation of lives according to the unity of the whole Body.

In contemporary ecumenical discussions, the tradition of conciliar theology is represented by the prominence of ‘communion’ (in Greek koinonia) as the heart of the life of the Church. The fellowship of the Church is inseparable from the life of God the Holy Trinity, the mutual self-giving love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The God who creates human beings in his own image and likeness creates them for communion with him and with one another in the Body of Christ. The communion principle is crucial for ecumenical relations for obvious reasons. If, as is commonly acknowledged, all Christians are united by baptism in the Body of Christ, then it is impossible for any denomination to dismiss any other, to say of other Christians, ‘I have no need of you’ (1 Cor. 12.21). Christ has broken down the dividing walls of human sin and estrangement and made them one (Eph. 2.12–22). Therefore they have an obligation to listen to and belong to one another, to live as those who know themselves to be new creatures in God through baptism and the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Communion ecclesiology has been the foundation of the recent Anglican examination of their common life in the midst of disagreement. The Anglican Congress held in Toronto in 1963 offered a report entitled ‘Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ’. The Eames Commission Report of 1989/90, the Virginia Report of 1997 and the Windsor Report of 2004 have all insisted that communion principles are the only conceivable foundation for the renewal of the common life of the Anglican Communion, now falling prey to fraction and schism. ¹⁵ Rather than living as citizens of Christ’s kingdom here on earth, the advance guard of his reign of justice, mercy and peace, Anglicans are living as creatures in a Darwinian jungle, ‘red in tooth and claw’, using every available legal and illegal, political and verbal means to slash and savage one another, and all for what end – the right to claim the label ‘Anglican’?

Covenant theology seeks a way out of this mess. The Anglican Covenant document points to the virtues of Ephesians 4, ‘Faithfulness, honesty, gentleness, humility, patience, forgiveness and love itself, lived out in mutual deference and service (Mark 10.44–45) among the Church’s people and through its ministries’ (§3). These are the necessary corollaries of communion theology and living. Unfortunately there are seemingly insurmountable cultural and religious barriers to this mode of life. Communion theology assumes that hearing the Scriptures proclaimed is a communal practice, that the teachings of tradition and reason need to be communally discerned. But the assumptions of a common mind, a common listening, a common discerning in patience and love over time seem to be incompatible with the assumptions of what are characterized here as ‘American Religion’.

American individualism, which is now the common currency of much of Western culture, is in many ways a valuable inheritance. It rightly insists on the equal value and rights of every human person. But the Christian gospel calls for more from its adherents, for sacrificial, mutual self-giving by each person for the sake of the whole. The gift of freedom in Christ challenges Christians freely to offer themselves to one another in loving interdependence.

When religion is fundamentally about an individual quest for the ‘real me’, about continually moving on to new frontiers, about the utter irrelevance of any authority outside the self, then reference to the authority of a common reading of Scripture, the common understanding of tradition, the common discernment of reason have very little meaning. So (from an American perspective) if our partners in the gospel don’t agree with our understanding of Scripture, tradition and reason, it becomes necessary to change the parameters of our relationship.

One approach has been, in place of responding to the challenge of mutual accountability, that American church leaders have claimed that communion theology puts an unacceptable priority on unity over truth and justice. Whose truth and whose justice are not issues up for debate. Nor is the idea that justice, truth and communion might have something to say to one another. The American Church is prepared neither to accept further consultation or dialogue over same-sex relationships nor to wait for the rest of the Church to catch up with its own understanding of their place in the life of the Church. Whatever is acceptable and right in a particular American cultural context must be universally applicable to every other culture and context. There is more than an element of cultural imperialism in these American attitudes. Ironically, they resonate strongly with the gung-ho combination of domestic isolationism and foreign interventionism of American political life which so many American liberals deplore, and yet they don’t seem to be able to see the parallels here.

Another way to skirt around the challenges of accountability has been to reformulate the understanding of the office of bishop. This is necessary because the documents leading to the Covenant have expressed the role of bishop in entirely communal ways. The Virginia Report states, ‘The episcopate is the primary instrument of Anglican unity’ (3.51) and that episcopal oversight is properly personal, collegial, and communal (5.5–16). It is personal because ‘Bishops are called by God, in and through the community of the faithful, to personify the tradition of the Gospel and the mission of the Church’ (5.7). It is collegial because they share with other bishops ‘the concerns of the local church and the community to the wider Church’ and they ‘bring back the concerns and decisions of the wider church to their local community’ (5.9). It is communal, because bishops exercise their authority ‘in synod’, within the community of local churches and in communion with one another (5.11).

This understanding of the bishop’s office is now being jettisoned by bishops around the communion, both on the left and on the right. American bishops on the left tend to justify this in the name of a ‘prophetic’ understanding of their office, giving expression to the doctrine of radical inclusion, stepping out ahead of the Church in ways that are meant to expose its weaknesses and disobedience. Within the Episcopal Church, ‘prophetic’ action has become a favoured way of effecting change in place of prolonged investigation and theological debate. Likewise, bishops on the right have launched missions within the jurisdiction of other churches in defiance of collegiality in order to proclaim their own versions of truth and justice.

A yet further way of avoiding the claims of mutual accountability has been to hide behind a particular understanding of the autonomy of the national church. The definition of autonomy becomes a legalistic claim to the entire independence of the national church from influence or interference from any other church. The communion relationship is cast in political rather than ecclesial terms: rather than being engaged in a common discernment of truth, the sides must be willing to compromise; one side or other must admit being in the wrong, or else this will necessitate a break-up of the Communion. Many of the more conservative churches have expressed dismay that the Covenant offers no punitive sanctions to punish the Americans and so they want nothing more to do with it.

The Covenant understanding of autonomy is very different, expressed as ‘autonomy in communion’. Autonomy in this sense does not imply unfettered freedom. Communion is not a human device for better relations. It is a gift from God and is therefore not something that human decision can break. Therefore, in this sense, ‘autonomy’ is a relational rather than an independent term. Each church is to be self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating – in this way they are autonomous. But, according to the principle of communion, they are to exercise that autonomy in mutual subjection and with regard for the common good.

Covenant theology is not about punishing wayward churches. It is about helping them discern the Body of Christ, in which African conservative and Western liberal have already been made one, however much they may resist and resent the fact. Will they recognize the imperative to be gathered into a closer, more mutually accountable relationship, or will they not? If they don’t want to be closer, the global effectiveness of the mission of the whole Communion will be diminished and weakened. Such choices have consequences.

Anglicans around the Communion often think about the Covenant in relation to their own church political objectives. It’s often said, ‘If we had to wait for the slowest members, women’s ordination would not yet have happened.’ In fact, over this issue the Episcopal Church was very careful to consult and accept the strictures of communion. That has not been the case in the more recent issue of same-sex relations. Here the Episcopal Church has in practice refused to be bound by Communion-wide restrictions. If the principles of communion are right, if the gospel calls Christians to be subject and accountable to one another, then they must be obedient and patient and trust in the rightness of the outcome under God and through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It may mean that they won’t have what they want when they want it. But, if this way is Christ’s way, it is the way of the cross. If the journey to unity is to be true to him, then it must be costly and sacrificial.

Anglicans find themselves in a situation where they profess belief that unity is what God is, what God does in the world, and what he calls them to be, but they find themselves in danger of giving up on that unity and accepting the disintegration of communion and of affirming our separation. The theology of the Covenant is the fruit of hard-won gains in ecumenical theology. It would be an ecumenical as well as Anglican tragedy if it goes the way of so many of the advances toward unity made in twentieth century because the goal of unity in the Body of Christ is judged too costly to local priorities. We have no alternative theological programme. Those who commit themselves to it will do so because they wish to grow closer to others in the bonds of unity, not because it will enable them to punish wayward churches. They will continue to work for unity because communion is what God is and what he calls us to in Christ. Communion is our starting point, God’s gift to us in baptism. It must also be the end for which we strive.

The Covenant process is seen by the American Church much as that old Ohioan saw Kenyon College as a Trojan horse full of enemies ready to subvert America’s freedom. Episcopalians have chosen fearfully to hide behind defensive walls of exceptionalism and autonomy. Covenant theology, however, has no hidden teeth. It is instead an empty tomb. Those who enter it have no certainties to grasp or to hide behind. Instead they entrust themselves to the power of a risen life that bids them not to be afraid, that sets them free from the deathly grip of a self-righteous knowledge of God’s will. Covenant theology holds the promise of Pentecostal freedom from the Babel confusion of political and local priorities that divide us because it is founded on the conviction that all Anglicans have much to learn from their brothers and sisters in Christ, even those with whom they most profoundly disagree.