text:
This addition is of crucial importance. The gospel now preached in The Episcopal Church rarely focuses on reconciliation with God. Its more usual focus is a range of moral, social and political issues about which God is said to have very particular opinions. I do not wish to be misunderstood. I believe there are compelling reasons for Christians to be involved in the moral, social and political issues of their time. I do not, however, believe that these concerns comprise for Christians the matter of first priority. I do not believe either that there are clear Christian answers to most of these problems. Most importantly, I do not believe that the primary reference of being a servant is care for one's neighbors. For Christians, the primary reference for the word servant is Jesus Christ. This is the way Paul describes himself. The Letter to the Romans begins, "Paul, a slave (servant) of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the Gospel of God."
Members of a reformed and renewed church will understand themselves first not as good, justice seeking citizens but as "slaves" or if you prefer "servants" of Jesus Christ. The question before us is how, in our present circumstances, we are to live as servants of the Lord. My grandson recently made the importance of this question clear to me. He has just begun study to become a Roman Catholic Priest. Not long ago, he brought home a young Hispanic man he has come to know through his work in an Austin parish. The young man posed a question that my grandson could not ignore. He asked, "What is the one thing in your ministry you wish to accomplish?
My grandson's question has become mine. So my question to you today is not what it is about the present life of our church that disturbs you. My question is what is the one thing you would like to accomplish in your ministry. To stimulate your thought, I will give you my answer to this question. Though it took me some years to come to it, my answer is this. I want, as a servant of Jesus Christ, to do my part in forming communities in which Christ is taking form. I say it took me some time because when I was a lot younger my answer would have been I want to awaken my church to its social responsibility. Ten years in Africa and a number of years teaching in the Seminaries of our church have changed my emphasis. Over the years my focus has changed from making a Christian impact on American society to convincing my students that their primary calling is to be servants of Jesus Christ involved in building communities in which Christ is taking form.
This change in focus has presented me with a host of questions that are rather different from ones I once might have asked. My question is no longer of this type; "What stance ought Christians to take to Obama Care?" and "How can I lead them to the morally right answer to this question?" My first question now is "Given the fact that most Americans come to church to find personal satisfaction or useful services, how does a parish community become a body in which is Christ taking form?"
When we are confronted with questions we cannot avoid (as I believe this one to be) we naturally turn to the traditions we have inherited. We have no choice. We can only think within a tradition. I am prepared to argue that the tradition Anglicans have inherited has its foundations in the work of St. Benedict and Thomas Cranmer. Benedict saw each community of monks as a school for the service of the Lord. Their way of life together was intended to shape lives that take their form from that of their Lord. In the Benedictine tradition, that way of life is shaped by four key practices—common worship, study, labor and stability.
When Cranmer put together a Book of Common Prayer he hoped to render the parishes of the Church of England as schools for the service of the Lord. So he developed a Book of Common Prayer designed to provide parishes with forms of worship that shaped the lives of their members "in Christ" through each day and all the seasons of the year. He developed pastoral offices that addressed the primary transitions of life and life's major crises. He had the Bible translated into the language of the people so that Biblical knowledge was open to each and every person within the parish. He developed homilies so that the Christian Gospel was preached in its fullness. And he located these practices within the labor and stability of rural England. Stability and labor were built into the settled lives of most Englishmen. Common forms of daily worship, open bibles and prescribed sermons in the context of such stability served to guarantee true worship and basic Christian knowledge within a settled community.
This is the tradition we have inherited, but times have changed. Cranmer could easily imagine the parish church as a school for the service of the Lord. Clearly, however, we inhabit a very different social world. Our congregants are in constant motion. They shop for their church as they shop for everything else. If they don't like what parish X has to offer, they don't have to leave town to find an alternative. All they have to do is hop in their car and try another vendor. Religion in the minds of most people is not built upon daily practice within a settled space but upon interest and feeling that may or may not be occasioned by their experience of parish life.
To think of the parish as a school for the service of the Lord, or as a body in which Christ is taking form, I am certain appears to the eyes of most people as a way of imagining church life that has long outlived its shelf life. If we want to revive the church we would be better served, as many of our leaders suggest, by a systems analysis that allows us to make maximal use of the resources of the diocese and its parishes. Better to promote church growth and maintenance through maximal use of resources than the formation of communities whose form of life reflects that of Christ
Please do not misunderstand me. I do not object to meshing the resources of dioceses and their parishes in an effort to attract new members and hold their interest. My question is why might we want to do this. My answer is so that their members might become servants of Jesus Christ and together comprise a community in which Christ is taking form. The question, of course, is just how is such a miracle to occur? In the remainder of these remarks I will share some of the thoughts that have come to me as I search for an answer. I do so in hope that you will catch a vision of a new possibility for our church.
The question is where to begin? I propose to begin where Benedict and Cranmer did, with our worship. Here it appears we have a lot going for us. I know a number of young people along with a number of new members of my wife's parish who, despite all our bickering and division, have become Episcopalians. They have done so because they have been drawn into a form of worship that has been shaped through the ages—one that both retains contact with the early church and renders present God's glory.
They like that; but I am not sure that their interest lies deeper than taste coupled with a desire for a richer religious experience. It is this doubt that prevents me from regarding the current interest in our worship in an entirely positive manner. I often wonder if the attraction is not a prime example of what Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "religion"–a well-meaning attempt to bring God on our own terms and for our own satisfaction down into our everyday world.
Be that as it may, no matter what the problems may be, we must begin where our tradition leads us—with worship. What would change our worship from an expression of taste and personal desire into the identifying mark of our lives? What would it take for our worship to reflect the fact that we are "Servants of the Lord?" What would it take for our worship to be the defining occasion for Christ to take form among us? The answer to this question does not lie in fiddling with the liturgy. The answer lies in changing the reason we are there. What if we were there because have been commanded to do this in remembrance of our Lord? What if we were there "to show forth the Lord's death until he comes?" What if we were there because once more we enter into the reconciling act of Christ's death and resurrection? What if we were there because we are reconciled sinners who now live in peace with God and one another? What if we were there because there we receive grace to live a form of life that reflects that of our Lord? What if we were there because once more we join the Angels and Archangels in the worship of God our Savior and so show forth the end for which the worlds were made?
If such a change were to occur, worship on the Lord's Day would not be an activity we fit in as family demands and the soccer schedule allow. It would be an occasion from which we would never absent ourselves save for illness or extraordinary exigency. It would become the center of our lives–the place where God grabs hold of us and Christ is formed in us. It would be the place where we become more faithful servants of the Lord. It would be the place where the first commandment indeed becomes the first—the place among all places where we learn to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.
What if? What if? There are so many others! For example, what if the common life of the parish, its meetings, its organizations, its social events, its outreach programs, its care for the elderly, the little children, the sick and the needy were understood not simply as good works but as occasions for Christ to take form among us? What if the activities of a parish were understood in the first instance as classrooms in a school for the service of the Lord? What, for example, would change if we understood the first importance of a vestry meeting differently than now we do. What if the primary point was not to approve a budget but to take on the form of Christ through our conversations, friendships, common projects, differences, gripes, arguments and personal differences? What if in the midst of these interactions we expected to acquire the simple graces Paul speaks of in his Letter to the Ephesians—truthfulness, humility, gentleness, patience. Our common life would become a space where we learn to bear with one another in love. It would become a space where we become eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. It would become a space wherein we learn to put away bitterness, wrath and anger. It would be place where we learn to be tenderhearted and kind one to another. It would be a space in which we learn to forgive as we have been forgiven.
Should such a miracle occur, I believe the whole point of church would change. It would become the place we learn to be servants of the Lord. It would be the place we put off an old self and put on a new one (Eph. 4:22-24). It would becomes a place where are born again to a new life. It would become, in short, a community in which Christ is taking form. And should such a miracle occur, our parishes would become evangelical. That is, they would become communities dedicated to drawing others to Christ through speaking and living in ways that show forth the Lord's death until he comes. Put quite simply our parishes would discover that the point is evangelism before it is church growth.
Evangelism is an aspect of the vision of our future I am here to advocate. I am aware, however, that here I tread on tender toes. Episcopalians are more comfortable with church growth than with evangelism; and because we are not Baptists, we are also uncomfortable with Revival. Among us advocacy for evangelism (that is witness with hope of conversion as opposed to revival or church growth) places one beyond the pale. Dick Reed, the former Dean of Virginia Seminary, once said to me, "Philip, where you come from in Virginia being an Episcopalian is something that happens in certain families. Evangelism is rude and Revivalism is in bad taste."
Sadly, most of the Episcopalians for whom evangelism is neither rude nor crass have left TEC for what seem to them greener fields. Our parishes can envision themselves as providers of religious services and good works, but not as a living testimony to the saving action of God in the cross and resurrection of Christ. A close friend of mine was asked shortly after he was thrown out of Burundi, what was most striking to him about his time there. His answer was immediate. "For the first time in my life I met people for whom belief in Christ is a matter of life and death and so also a matter for which they are willing to die."
For the people my friend grew to know in Burundi, communication of faith in Christ Jesus was a matter of life and death. For us, Christian belief is in large measure a matter of personal taste, moral commitment or comfort in times of trouble. And for the first time, in recent years Christian belief has become for many a matter of no concern at all. We have a new and fast growing category of religious identification in our country—people who call themselves "Nones"–meaning no religion at all.
The churches in America are now confronted with circumstances in which neither Revivalism nor Church Growth provide an adequate understanding of their relation to the larger society of which they are a part. The appeal of Evangelical Churches that focus on revival or Pastoral Churches that take pride in their interesting programs and popular services is in rapid decline. The churches of America are in competition for an ever shrinking demographic. They exist in a society whose ethos is no longer Christian in a way that either Benedict or Cranmer would recognize.
Do not these facts suggest to us that we need to reappraise what it is to be a Servant of the Lord and to think again about how our parishes and congregations are to understand their identity? Do these facts not pose a question to the churches of America? And does this question not provide a particularly difficult challenge for Episcopalians? The question is this. Is it not the case that a call to serve the Lord implies that one has been given a truth that is a matter of life and death, and does this fact not imply that our parishes and congregations are to become schools for the service of the Lord where that truth is both worshipped, taught, proclaimed and lived?
What I have said this afternoon is this. If we are called to be servants of the Lord and members of a community in which Christ is taking form we will have to change the way we think about our worship, the way in which we understand the purpose of our common life and the way in which we understand our mission. If I had more time I would go on to say something about the way in which we might form our brothers and sisters so as to become contributing members of a society in which our beliefs are shared by fewer and fewer people.
The relation of Christians to the social, economic and political issues of their time is a very important part of the vision that has become mine, but there is not time here to share my thoughts on this matter. Indeed, I have time only for one concluding comment. If the vision I have sought to share is to become a reality, there must arise among us leadership on the part of people who share that vision. Our church will be neither renewed nor reformed save for the presence among us of clergy and lay persons who, in a reflective way, "are the truth"—persons in whom Christ is taking form and so people who are recognizable as people who are called to be Servants of the Lord.
It may seem to you that I am dreaming the impossible dream. I do not think so. I believe God honors and upholds those who dare to hope in him and, no matter how unlikely it seems, dare to follow in the way he leads. I believe that if we follow in this way, God will establish us and in doing so renew that little part of his church to which we belong. I believe also that if we do not follow we will find ourselves among the branches he has trimmed from the vine.]]>
First, I need to say why I believe that Taskforce's proposal will stoke division, rather than heal it. While I do not wish to evaluate the theological essays of the Report, I do need to say something about Theology at this point. But that is only in order to get to the question of the canonical proposal itself, and its form within a conflicted church such as ours.
And our church is conflicted, precisely on the matter of sexuality and marriage. The Taskforce Report seems to demonstrate no interest in this reality. Most significant for my argument here is the fact that there is little to no engagement in the essays with classical views on marriage and sexuality. Such classical views are held by many, if perhaps not a majority (as in the church's long history) within TEC; it is fair to say they are held by most in the Anglican Communion. These classical views, furthermore, have generated a fair amount of scholarly and popular discussion. Oliver O'Donovan? Christopher Roberts? Scholars like these are simply not engaged. The Taskforce's Report, that is, represents a fundamentally single point of view.
While I am decidedly critical of this, I am also well aware of the strategic attractiveness of having such a single point of view inform the Report. The last time the House of Bishops tried to get a commission to talk about sexuality – not that long ago, in fact (2011) – it issued in two reports, not one. That is, there was no agreement within the commission. In this, the House of Bishops Theology Committee was more representative of the church, both today and in time. But the result was that there was no common recommendation for TEC to follow. The Commission's work was thus impractical.
And as things stand, such a bifurcated report was inevitable. There are today, after all, two decisively different theological presuppositions at work regarding Scripture that inform our views about sexuality and marriage. I will call them the "historicist" and "classical" approaches. The Taskforce adopts a historicist reading of Scripture. Classical interpretation, in comparison, has not made historicism its fundamental lens in reading Scripture, but has relied instead primarily on categories like the Word of God, canon, unity, tradition, scope, end and purpose.
The historicist reflex at work in the Report is most evident in – not surprisingly – the Taskforce essay on "the history of marriage". In that essay, the approach made to Scripture is one that mirrors its approach to cultural practices: it focuses on change, cultural diversity and so on, with the implied hermeneutic of difference and inevitable development. (A classical reader of the Bible might respond to this by saying: compare, by contrast, the scriptures' own account of history in the movement across Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, where the reality of "development" is problematic at best; or in the ebbing and flowing of church history itself.) Although the Taskforce essay on the Bible does not deal directly with these matters, the historicist presuppositions are at work, and largely rule out a discussion of those texts that the classical tradition generally engages. One need only ask the question: would the essay on scripture and marriage written by the Taskforce be even vaguely comprehensible, let alone acceptable, to any Jew or Christian between the year 0 and 1960?
The answer is surely "no". That is because, until recently, the meanings of these texts were not open to the developmentalism of interpretation the Taskforce writers reflexively assume. Instead, until only recently, these texts were interpreted within what interpreters would have said is a stable set of coherent meanings. These include the realities of sexual difference, generation, homosexual behavior, and the rest that are in fact dealt with in the Bible, but are left out of extended discussion by the Taskforce due to its historicist assumptions (e.g. they are relics of a past practice, historical data to be mined archaeologically, or subject to the testimony of new local experience in the West and so on.) Thus, demotion by the Taskforce of procreation as an "essential" element of marriage (let alone assuming that marriage and ethics are not a "core" aspect of Christian truth), is something that could not be suggested except within an historicist outlook: what once was essential and core, no longer is; the times have changed.
The classical tradition, to be sure, is also aware of historical change and difference; and would agree that the Taskforce is certainly right to point out varieties of marriage practice in this or that place and culture. But, in contrast with the Taskforce's approach, classical Christian readers of the Bible have instead suggested that the Scriptural accounts, as much in their silences about current topics as in their positive statements, will always form a stable touchstone of accountability to these diverse practices and movements we see in history. The contingent elements of this diverse practice must always be judged by just that touchstone, whatever their seeming acceptance for this or that period. The process of applying this touchstone has, of course, been contested here and there. But rarely – except perhaps in the Jovinian controversy of the 4th century, and with lamentable results – have such debates revealed the vast chasms of opinion that we see today. That is largely because there was indeed a stable set of meanings that were attributed to Scripture's discussion of marriage, and these were viewed as divinely organized and so trans-historical. And the stability of these meanings was a feature of Scripture as a divine "oracle", as many described it. The oracular character of Scripture – and I deliberately use a somewhat provocative word here, at least for modern ears – would have prevented the kinds of interpretations of Genesis 1 and 2 that the Taskforce takes up, largely because the gendered figures of Adam and Eve were seen as, in themselves, revelatory of "essential" human purpose, rather than as symbols open to changing historical and cultural referents. Even the modernist term 'myth' rising up within the welter of historicism at least sought to hold on to a frame of reference open to eternity and transcendent truth through time.
I am not evaluating these two presuppositions, although I am obviously oriented by the classical tradition, and value it more than its alternative. But my purpose is to underline the fact that the historicist and classical assumptions are antithetical, at least in their broad approach: each says "reality works this way", but the two ways are not congruent. The classical approach simply has a very different account of history altogether.
So here we come to my main question: What to do with a church that has within its membership (and leadership) such incongruent approaches to a deeply contested issue? Kevin Ward, in his response to the 2011 House of Bishops report explicitly raised this question. Curiously, the Taskforce gives little attention to it. And, in fact, churches as a whole have, in the past, had little to say about such challenges, outside of embracing the dynamics of power politics. But if not with respect to churches, there has nonetheless been much attention given to the question of vying basic commitments within political and social contexts. Over the last century especially, indeed in just the last few decades, political challenges dealing with divided groups, including nations, have taken up enormous energies, study, and practice. The church can learn from this body of experience and research. I wish it would.
There are various responses that political leaders have taken to incongruent beliefs within a single society. I will list four of the major ones.
Let us be clear what the Taskforce's approach entails in political terms: it is (d.), the Balkan Solution. The erasure of alternative views, and the proposal for a canonical change that will demand church-wide acceptance in dioceses, is one of enforced unity.
To be sure, the Taskforce does not speak explicitly to any of this. But the change of canon – the only concrete element in the Report – seeks to define (rather arbitrarily and counter-intuitively, in my view) the meaning of specific words in the Book of Common Prayer (and hence of Scripture itself, which the Prayer Book cites). The words "man and woman" and "husband and wife", which will remain in both Scripture and Prayer Book, will now signify to Episcopalians "two people" or "two persons".
First, this represents an imposition of linguistic transformation by fiat, demanding that very particular words that mean one thing in customary usage and traditional interpretive habit, will now mean another. (The change is very different, in this regard, from the understanding of "man" as including "male and female", something that biblical usage itself engages, let alone normal English usage.) Second, this change deliberately opens the door to church-wide same-sex marriage rites; that is the stated purpose of the canonical change. Third, the change will as well open the door to the potential for attempts at nullifying diocesan and episcopal jurisdiction on the matter, and will significantly alter traditional notions of episcopal authority. Fourth, given that one conscience clause allowing priests to refuse to marry a couple on the basis of their individual views of the matter is left in "tension" with another existing canon that forbids discrimination on the basis of sexuality, the canonical change also opens the door to disciplinary and perhaps legal challenge to individual clergy who maintain classical views about Christian marriage. Finally, the proposal dispenses with the notions of consultation or mutual decision-making, especially at the Communion level: the proposal has not been shared systematically with Anglican bishops around the world, or with other representatives from international Anglican or ecumenical partners, and the few months that remain before GC cannot come close to providing an adequate time for response to the Report now released. Whatever "Christian communion" might have meant in the past, the Taskforce has made a decision about TEC autonomy that is decisive: we will simply go forward in the face of Anglican and ecumenical opposition elsewhere.
I believe that we need to be clear about the trajectory of this approach to divided views. Within the church, the Balkan solution has consequences that are analogous to those experienced by political societies where it has been adopted: conflict, litigation, disciplinary disputes, and exit. This is not idle speculation. In fact, each of these elements is already well-established in TEC's profile over the past 15 years, a period in which litigation, disputed discipline, significant exit of membership, estrangement of relations with many other Anglican churches, and finally a general contraction of resources has piled up. In this respect, the Taskforce is expressing an established habit of thinking and acting, rather than pondering it critically. It is reflecting the past, not the future. And its Balkan solution must be seen as potentially another push in the direction of our church's conflicted dissolution.
Are there alternatives? Personally, I believe that (a.) is a more productive line to pursue at this point: arbitrated and formalized negotiation between estranged groups within the church, and between TEC and other Anglican churches. This kind of path was sought in the Dar es Salaam agreement of 2007, followed by the Windsor Continuation Group's work. But neither the agreement nor the follow-up were well-explained, promoted, or supported, and the proposal had obvious holes. But it is time for Canterbury and others – like General Convention itself — to step up to the plate, drawing into negotiated engagement TEC leadership from within, and then moving from TEC to ACNA and Gafcon from without. These are complicated tasks. But if they can be accomplished by secular entities as at Arusha, they can surely be accomplished among Christians (!).
Meanwhile, I would hope that General Convention, in its two houses, will reject the Taskforce's proposal, and instead consider keeping the "provisional" status of those rites it now has on paper, which I recognize are not simply going to disappear, while pressing for the kind of negotiations from within and without that I have suggested. That seems both reasonable and fair, given our currently incongruent beliefs. As for the Taskforce itself? I encourage it to rethink its approach, if not formally since its Report is already out, then as individuals capable of admitting to the serious limitations of its work and proposals.]]>
Courts also struggle with the confusion arising from different understandings of marriage. Consider the following cases that courts in my home state of New York have wrestled with in recent years:
Can any of these be valid civil marriages in New York? The courts' answers: no; yes; yes; yes; no (New Mexico)/yes (Vermont).
Many of the responses to the Marriage Pledge from both sides of the divide on same sex marriage have reflected substantial confusion over the distinction between Christian and civil marriage and what the role of the clergy is in the marriage ceremony. My purpose here is to clarify that distinction and then to evaluate criticisms of the Pledge in light of this discussion.
Civil Marriage
My consideration of civil marriage is based on the law of New York where I live and practiced law, but it is obvious to all that the regulatory framework for civil marriage varies from state to state. In one respect discussed below, the law of New York is different from most other states.
The first section of the article on marriage in New York's consolidated laws defines civil marriage as "a civil contract, to which the consent of parties capable in law of making a contract is essential." Like any other contract, the marriage contract requires consent. Most contracts are formed and have legal force upon the manifestation of that consent—offer and acceptance—without the need for any special formalities. Some contracts, however, do require special formalities before they have legal force, e.g., they must be in writing or recorded at the courthouse. As everyone knows, a contract to convey real estate must be in writing and the conveyance itself must be filed and recorded at the courthouse.
A civil marriage contract is one that has its own special formalities. First, the parties must obtain a marriage license, which in New York is valid for 60 days (after a 24 hour waiting period). Second, the contract must be "solemnized" in statutorily-defined ways. Third, the details of the solemnization must be recorded on the license, which is returned to the county clerk. Finally, the clerk sends the married couple a "certificate of marriage" as proof of the legal validity of the civil marriage contract.
One of the defined ways in which a marriage contract can be solemnized in New York is by "written contract" witnessed and acknowledged before a judge "in the manner required for the acknowledgment of a conveyance of real estate." Since the statue requires no particular form of words, I suggest the following language would meet the legal requirements in New York:
Whereas, a civil marriage contract is defined in Article 3 of New York's Domestic Relations Law; and whereas, such contract can be terminated at any time by either party pursuant to the procedures specified in the Law of the State of New York,
Therefore, the undersigned hereby agree to form such a marriage contract and to take each other as "husband and wife" (as those terms are construed in a gender-neutral manner as specified in DRL Sec. 10-a) with all the rights and liabilities as may be defined from time to time by the law of the State of New York.
Some may quibble that this formulation lacks the elegance and beauty of the Book of Common Prayer, but that book is not a legal formbook for civil transactions analogous to real estate conveyances. Lawyers seek precision, not poetry. And this is a very clear-eyed and precise statement of the nature of the civil marriage contract formed under New York law.
However: a written contract acknowledged in the manner of a real estate transaction is not the only way in which a marriage contract can be solemnized in New York. The contract can also be solemnized orally before a civic authority, such as a judge, mayor, clerk or marriage officer, or before a clergyman "of any religion." (In the past New York has not recognized contracts solemnized before internet-ordained Universal Life Church "ministers" on the grounds that this organization had no place of worship within the state, but this ruling is currently "under review" due to the large number of New York weddings officiated by such ministers.)
The New York statute is clear that "no particular form or ceremony is required" when the contract is solemnized orally, but "the parties" must "solemnly declare" that they "take each other as husband and wife," such terms to be "construed in a gender-neutral manner." Thus one form of words that can be used to satisfy the requirements of the statute is the following:
In the Name of God, I, N., take you, N., to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.
But we must be clear: to the State of New York those words mean exactly the same as, and no more than, the words of the proposed written contract I suggested above. Is it any surprise that Radner and Seitz would want to disentangle these words from the interpretation given to them by the civil law in New York?
Christian Marriage
Christian marriage is defined in the opening rubric for the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer: "Christian marriage is a solemn and public covenant between a man and a woman in the presence of God." The opening words of the rite then describe the result of this covenant as "the union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind." Canon I.18.2 of the General Canons of The Episcopal Church elaborates this definition: "Holy Matrimony is a physical and spiritual union of a man and a woman, entered into within the community of faith, by mutual consent of heart, mind, and will, and with intent that it be lifelong." The climax of the matrimony rite in the Book of Common Prayer, the pronouncement of marriage, indicates using the words of Jesus that God is the creator of this union: "Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder." The current rite is based on and substantially similar to that found in the first TEC Book of Common Prayer in 1789.
In the western tradition, the bride and groom are the ministers through which in the exchange of their vows the marital union is created by God. In the eastern tradition, the priest is the minister, but the effect is the same: upon the covenant of the bride and groom, God creates through His ministers a lifelong marital union.
It is important to emphasize that the rubrics and canonical language quoted above are from the current Book of Common Prayer and canons; they are not outdated traditional formulae now superseded.
The differences between Christian and civil marriage in New York (and note once again that the nature and terms of civil marriage vary from state to state) could hardly be more stark. Christian marriage is a lifelong union created by God between a man and a woman; New York civil marriage is a terminable contract between any two eligible people—no bigamy or incest—with terms specified and amended from time to time by the legislature and courts of the state of New York.
Practical Implementation of the Marriage Pledge
The purpose of the Marriage Pledge is to keep these radically different concepts of marriage distinct so that no one, whether inside or outside the church, thinks they are the same. How might the Pledge work in practice?
The primary rite used for Christian marriage in The Episcopal Church makes no reference to civil marriage or even to the civil law. In two places at the outset of the ceremony, the priest establishes that the couple can be "lawfully" married, but the law being referenced there is God's law, not the civil law. This point has been obscured in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, but it is explicit in the immediate antecedent to this language in the 1928 edition in a provision virtually unchanged since 1789:
I REQUIRE and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it. For be ye well assured, that if any persons are joined together otherwise than as God's Word doth allow, their marriage is not lawful.
Both the rubrics and Canon I.18 require that the marriage conform to the laws of the state, but since states require neither that any religious ceremony be used for civil marriages nor that religious marriages be accompanied by a civil contract, this requirement of conformity to state law has no effect on the rite to be used or the understanding of marriage created through this rite. One interpretation of this canonical language might be that it requires that the couple also enter into a valid civil marriage contract, but the language itself does not say that. A better interpretation is that this language prohibits marriages that would be "void" or prohibited under state law: bigamous or incestuous relationships. This understanding is supported by the language in the canon requiring "that both parties have the right to contract a marriage according to the laws of the State." The only restrictions on the "right" to contract a marriage in New York are those related to bigamy and incest. There is certainly nothing in either the rubrics or the canons that requires that the rite of matrimony be used in any fashion as part of the civil contract process.
Given these considerations, any of the following options would be available to the couple and priest subscribing to the Marriage Pledge:
In New York, the first of these options would be the preferred one since New York has an incoherent law on the necessity of marriage licenses: one statute states that "it shall be necessary for all persons intended to be married in New York state to obtain a marriage license" while another reads "nothing in this article contained shall be construed to render void by reason of a failure to procure a marriage license any marriage solemnized between [eligible] persons." A recent court decision characterized this latter provision as
an obscure, arcane provision, one that is likely little known to judges, lawyers and legislators alike. And it would undoubtedly come as a surprise to all those couples who patiently wait on the long lines at the Marriage License Bureau at the Office of the City Clerk in lower Manhattan to learn that, despite the instructions they were given, a marriage license is not really a requirement for marrying after all. Ponorovskaya v. Secklow, 2014 NY Slip Op 24140 (Sup. Ct., New York County, May 29, 2014).
Under this "archaic statute" New York probably would recognize the formation of a valid civil marriage from the exchange of vows during the matrimonial rite in the Book of Common Prayer, regardless of the intent of the couple and priest or the absence of a marriage license. The Ponorovskaya court invited the legislature to repeal this "forgotten relic from an earlier time" noting that its original purpose was to protect religious marriage from government intrusion:
the Legislature enacted DRL sec. 25 at a time when traditional religious practices continued to hold sway and governmental regulation of marriage was still relatively new. Consequently, the statute was likely meant to protect the old ways by insuring that the validity of a proper religious marriage would not be jeopardized by the failure to obtain a marriage license, a requirement that in 1907 must still have struck many legislators as a mere legal technicality….
Whereas in 1907 a wedding in a church or a synagogue, with the attendant formality, recognition in the community and ecclesiastical record-keeping, was the norm, it is now on its way to being the exception. Thus, the basic rationale for the existence of DRL sec. 25 — the need to protect the sanctity of traditional, formal religious marriages from the threat of government imposed legal requirements — is no longer relevant.
The last sentence is a rather chilling reminder of why the principle in the Marriage Pledge is so important: "the need to protect the sanctity of traditional, formal religious marriages from the threat of government imposed legal requirements is no longer relevant."
Objections to the Marriage Pledge
It is in light of the above what to make of the objections made thus far to the Pledge?
What would we be doing in the rite of matrimony if not solemnizing civil marriage? Something new?
Not at all. The couples married in a Christian marriage would be doing what they have always been doing since the earliest days of the church—and doing in the Episcopal Church since the publication of the 1789 Book of Common Prayer: entering into the "holy estate" of matrimony, the physical and spiritual union created by God upon the making of a public covenant by the bride and groom through their vows. In contrast, as the Ponorovskaya court noted, marriage licenses are "a relatively recent innovation, with statewide registration of marriages not having begun until 1881 at the earliest."
Clergy taking the Marriage Pledge are leaving the distasteful actions to the couple rather than doing that work themselves and getting their hands dirty.
Hardly. Nothing in either the Pledge or the light of reason suggests there is anything "dirty" about civil marriage. It provides tax benefits to many couples and opens up useful strategies for maximizing Social Security benefits. It is often necessary in private commerce for securing benefits such as health insurance. The fact that non-believers, adherents of other religions and those not eligible for Christian marriage enter these civil contracts as well has no moral significance. They also obtain passports and drivers' licenses, both of which can be useful to Christians as well. Civil marriage is not distasteful; it can be good. But it is not Christian marriage—although many (including some of the objectors) confuse the two. Hence the need for the Pledge.
This means abandoning the fight for traditional civil marriage in the public square.
Not at all. The fight for traditional civil marriage is based on natural law and the protection and flourishing of society. It cannot be based on an identification or conflation of Christian and civil marriage for they are not and never have been the same thing. The fight to preserve civil marriage, however, is not the same as the fight to protect and strengthen Christian marriage. As public surveys, divorce rates and even the responses to the Marriage Pledge demonstrate, too many people both inside and outside the church equate Christian marriage with whatever the state authorities determine civil marriage to be at any given time. The Marriage Pledge is one effort to change that misconception.]]>
Rightly Handling the Word of Truth: Scripture, Canon, and Creed
A Theological Conference of the North American Lutheran Church, The Citadel, 21-22 July, Charleston, SC
"The Ethics of Sex, Marriage, and the Family"
C. Seitz
Personal Remarks
When Carl Braaten emailed me to participate in this conference, he likely knew Charleston would conjure up memories of past events and make the invitation all the more enticing. The Anglican Communion Institute hosted regular January conferences in Charleston for about ten years, beginning in 1996. We started a three-book series on the Nicene Creed, The Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer, with contributions by Carl, Robert Jenson, and David Yeago—from the Lutheran Tribe—as well as Methodist, Roman Catholic, Reformed, Orthodox and Free Church authors. "The Future for a New Ecumenism" was one book's optimistic subtitle. But church politics overtook us, and looking back it seems like a slow-moving train wreck was only beginning, leaving us with the break-up and carnage all of us in our various Christian tribes are now surveying. I started my teaching career 30 years ago as the first non-Lutheran to teach at the seminary in Philadelphia, and ate a frequent lunch at 2900 Queen Lane at the then Fortress Press. So your world and my own denominated world have intersected for many years. Though most of my PhD students at Toronto now come from the Missouri Synod Lutheran branch, I have never felt far from the wider Lutheran universe, here and in Germany, which under the hand of God is now not what you or I might have expected 30 years ago.
I. General Challenges
I want to mention a couple of challenges before I begin. They inform what I will say and guide the selection of what I choose to focus on. I recall speaking on homosexuality at Brite Divinity School in the late nineties and vowing never to do another conference on the topic, whose format featured a "diversity of viewponts." Something had obviously broken in our appeal to scripture that would not be resolved by everyone trying a bit harder or with more charity.
Secondly, the topic as sketched out seems to require the services of a paid-up Ethicist and I am a biblical scholar. So I am not going to wander too far from my own area of training. But I will try to embrace the challenge in this specific way. I will take Ethics to mean the way the biblical teaching from Genesis to Revelation takes practical form in our world of living the Gospel faith. Unavoidably, I believe that takes us straight to the marriage rites of the church. I know these differ amongst our Christian tribes, but they have had far more in common in their present various guises than ones that will soon be upon us. We may disagree about whether Christian marriage is a sacrament and what that means, but we can all agree that standing before God and making solemn vows and receiving the church's blessing constitutes an ethical act. Something is being agreed to, before God. And most importantly, what warrants the blessing of God Almighty is being set forth, heard by all, witnessed to and affirmed on those terms and not others.
The marriage rite in the Episcopal BCP will guide my ethical reflections because that is the tradition I am familiar with. I would be surprised if the basic warrants and contours, biblically rooted and biblically norming, were not familiar to you on similar terms. An important point is thereby registered. Mine will not be an examination of the crucial character of this or that marriage rite, as somehow more decisive than the scriptural landscape that gives rise to them. Every marriage rite assumes as much as it expresses explicitly, through its specific language and form. The relationship, then, between the whole scriptural landscape and what it expresses on this subject and what the rites functioning in the church foreground is a symbiotic one. A good rite follows what has been traditionally called the rule of faith, and the rule of faith is a faithful, proportional, comprehensive coming-to-boil of what scripture as a whole commends, under the lordship of Jesus Christ, who is its everlasting Word. Christian Ethics points to that place where scripture, in accordance with the rule of faith, comes into life and practice. This means when Christians make marriage vows in a rite of the church an ethical form of life is being embraced by us, bigger than us, and worthy of being bigger because warranted by God in creation, in Christ, and in his church from all eternity.
I am prepared to speak on this topic yet again because we now face a particular challenge in culture and in the church in understanding Christian marriage and family. The word 'marriage' is likely to be/is being taken over by culture and altered in respect of the goods formerly implied thereby. This won't be the first time language of the church has been bent to new purpose, and it won't be the last. But that gives the church the responsibility to be clear about what it means by the word 'marriage' when it finds its place within the ethical decision making inherent in a solemn rite, with scripture readings, solemn charges, vows, prayers, and blessing. It is to this 'marriage' that I will be speaking, and not to newer efforts to commandeer the word and alter the 'estate' to which we have been called by scripture through the rites of the church's ruled life.
Two final comments. Anticipating my conclusion, I believe it is clear that churches will alter marriage rites consistent with their altered understanding. They will create what they call gender- neutral rites, or they will seek to make a progressive new rite range alongside a former one, or they will eliminate a former one altogether and aggressively so; all three options are on the table.
In the light of this it is important to keep in mind and heart that what they cannot succeed in doing is erasing from the church's life and time the logic and ethical contours of a former one I will be working with today. They will believe they will be doing that, but in point of fact, ethically speaking, they cannot. Rather, what they will succeed in doing is not so much changing a rite, but changing the nature of the church into a very different one, one which will no longer be ruled and normed on these ritual terms and not by others. In spite of all that, the rites we have traditionally used and the scriptural and dominical warrants they presuppose will not vanish from the earth. Those who wish to enter into this traditional marriage estate, and understand it as the arena in which God's blessing is made possible in Christ, by action of the Holy Spirit, will continue do so and will thereby bear witness to a specific set of scriptural convictions. One may change a word. One may create a new self-understanding and call it church. One cannot vaporize an understanding of marriage whose sacred character will outlive semantic changes.
Second. In so much of the rhetoric of the modern and post-modern world we find the appeal to something called identity. Not a verbal but a nominal state of affairs, called "being Gay," or "LGBTi." Is this state of affairs socially constructed and so generated by specific cultural conditions, and if so, is it a desirable outcome or one that is corrigible of change, given other possible constructive forces? I believe this topic represents the coal-face of our modern and postmodern evaluation, and it is a deeply ethical question we are likely too in-the-middle-of- things for time in God's hand to have rendered a sufficiently clear verdict. But there is also a deeply biblical question about what the term "identity" might mean for those of us Paul describes as having died and been buried in Christ, whose present identity, as men and as women, is hid with him.
Do we speak far too confidently than God would allow us, in Christ, of any identity, as finally determinative of who we are in him? Perhaps the most Christian answer to the question of identity is permanently to confess that we do not fully know who we are, because day by day, as men and women, we are being made new creations in him, if indeed we are allowing his life to be the measure of who we are becoming. An entire lecture could be dedicated to this very important ethical question. I have said enough to indicate my own deep skepticism about whether there is something like a clear 'gay' or 'straight' identity, much less one that could be determinative in any major way for what it means to be a Christian.
II. The Character of the Biblical Witness and Christian Marriage
Now to the heart of the present challenge, which I believe is a familiar one in the ancient church as well.
Every opponent of Christianity—real or perceived—was an ardent scripture reader. We know this clearly from reading the works of the early church fathers. There we see steady and sustained engagement with rival views of scripture and interpretation, as they struggle to defend the church's faith and practice on the basis of the scriptures. It was said one time, 'there is no such thing as an impious heretic.' It could equally be said, 'there was no false or misleading account of Christian faith that did not take the form of an argument from scripture.' And how scripture delivers its proper sense.
Three examples.
If we are going to reflect on a theme like "The Ethics of Sex, Marriage and Family," and presume to be doing so on the basis of the canon of scripture, we must be prepared to accept a cardinal reality. To speak of Christian Ethics is to speak of scripture in action, in the lived life of Christian formation and catechesis. Increasingly, very few progressives dismiss the scriptural record on sex, marriage and family. Some of course still do. They are bold to proclaim that the biblical witness is not just wrong in its parts (Genesis 1-3 as ancient Hebrew musing, Paul as wrong or speaking about something else, Jesus as all loving and disinterested in a modern phenomenon like gayness, which exists in a timeframe the bible does not nor could ever be expected to comprehend). The Bible is wrong, outdated, or just not addressing the matter of the challenge of new understandings of sex and human thriving, altogether. If it gets things right, it does so accidentally or inferentially, like the proverbial blind hog finding an acorn.
I mention this right up front because, as with the early church, what we now see is something else: a heavy assault mounted from within Christian circles themselves on prior understandings of the estate of marriage and its goods. Not from cultural despisers or secularists, but from those who purport to argue that their new understanding is indeed scriptural after all. Many secular and religious proponents of same-sexuality had concluded earlier that marriage was a patriarchal invention that no card-carrying proponent of sexual liberation—gay or straight—ought to go near. Inside Christian circles, this has changed.
So alongside those dubious about scripture having anything to say, accidentally or properly, are those who argue that their new understanding of sexuality is somehow biblical after all. In this sense, the debate over marriage, sex and family is one in which both sides, or several sides, all appeal to scripture. That is, not unlike the early church examples just cited. So we must ask: What account of scripture is it that has been brought to bear on our present and older understandings of sex, marriage, and family. Because of its scale, depth, and complex two-testament character, Scripture is infinitely capable of producing multiple interpretations. Irenaeus used the image of a mosaic. One receives a gift of scripture with all its myriad pieces, and the goal of interpretation is to see the face of the king, Jesus Christ, when all the pieces are properly and proportionally assembled. But equally, one could toss out pieces that do not seem to fit what one is looking for. Or one could assemble them and produce a fox, or a mirror of one's own self: our needs and rights and our individual paths to thriving. Gregory spoke of scripture as a river in which infants could wade and elephants swim, at one and the same time. But he could equally have said, elephants drown and infants plumb false depths.
The church fathers appealed to a rule of faith when it came to proper interpretation of scripture. Much of the rule wanted to clarify that the scriptures of Israel, over their total warp and woof, spoke of Christ. He was the word to patriarch, lawgiver, prophet, the word that brought a good creation into being, one with the father. "In the beginning (arche) was the word" rhyming with "in beginning—in arche, in Christ—God created the heavens and earth." John 1 and Colossians 1 were telling us what the referents of the Old Testament truly were in the light of the Incarnation's filling full of them. In arche, in beginning the Word, rhyming with bereshith, in beginning, in Christ, God created the heavens and the earth. The triune God at work in his own special way inside Israel's scriptures, under cover within the privileged life God shared with the people of Israel. The logos asarkos—the word not yet made flesh—alive within the first testamental witness, because one with the only Lord God. In the language of Martin Luther, "Christ Jesus it is He, LORD Sabaoth his name, from age to age the same."
But several other things the rule would be seen to do. It ruled out pitting scripture against itself, so as to produce hotter or colder parts, some then to be rejected as false parts. It required that the totality of the witness be held in creative tension in one Lordly and coherent whole. It asked that prayer and humility accompany reading, because the difficult parts were likely to be where we would most learn, reliant now on a higher teacher than our first likes or instincts.
Sometimes their appeal to the rule of faith sounds like, the rule that the faithful possess and live by, and which we simply do not recognize in your reading of scripture or your account of Christ or his church. That is, its sounds like, something is missing or wrong or dangerous in what you are proposing, and we know that because it collides with our own present practices and handling of scripture. A kind of 'what we have you do not have' and therefore it lacks the right rule. Catholic faith is not monolithic, but is exists within a circle outside of which you have strayed. Through attenuation, selection, wrong priority, higher spiritual ascent beyond the apostolic witness, rejection of major parts, a refusal to countenance the need to be taught, favorite books, and making the first testament Christ-less. Someone else's religion en route, maybe, but only partially, if at all, to a new religion.
How the faithful sensed these outside-the-rule-of-faith threats also arose as on collision with early baptismal rites, the preaching of the church, its sacramental self-understanding in the form of emergent rites and practices, its liturgical life in time, all emanating from the scripture's total impress on the church as the Logos alive via the Holy Spirit.
This brings me to my first main biblical/ritual point. The Bible exists in relationship to the church's ruled life, which gives expression to its totality, its order, the fittingness of its parts. We have marriage rites. We ought to be able to see in them the rule of faith ordering how scripture comes to boil. When we look at them, what account of scripture do they provide?
I want to mention four components that are either given clear expression or are assumed.
The first arise in the conjunction of Genesis 1 and Christ's teaching in Matthew 19: male and femaleness as integral to the purposes of God in creation. God creates by bringing into being by his word, Jesus Christ, and by ordering. Day and night. Waters above waters below. Big light and lesser light. Male and female.
Within the modern debate, various conservative readers have sought to see in the Genesis account some deep structure of binary or complementary creational order. This could be a possible deduction, but it runs the risk of abstraction. The verbs used in Genesis 1 are not all the same from day to day. There is 'create.' There is 'let there be'. There is 'separate' (five times). There is 'gather.' Some binary separations emerge as a bulwark against the chaotic 'formless and void' over which the Spirit of God brooded.
On the fifth day living creatures of various kinds are brought forth and for the first time the word 'blessing' appears, strikingly, in conjunction with the command to be fruitful and multiply. Now we are not speaking of ordered separation that will remain permanent and fixed—creation versus chaos—but of separations in the forms of species that nevertheless come together and propagate, in the light of God's blessing them.
Day six forms the denouement not simply because God announces through a first-time 'very good' it to be so, but also because the creatures blessed and so capable of multiplying, we learn, are to be overseen in a special way by the male and female separated pair that are blessed and commanded to be fruitful and multiply. This humankind, this very good creation, is male and female, in the image of God. The fundamental act of differentiation is somehow mysteriously grounded in God's own character. God creates everything through every day through his word, arche, with the Spirit of God mysteriously and sacramentally present. Christ is the true image and likeness of God. Male and female are created with reference to him, and in some sense mirroring the differentiation of the One God who is a fellowship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in overcoming love.
The Rule of Faith understands the NT's penetration into the literal sense deliverances of Genesis 1 to be faithful purchases on the eternal truth there imprinted. And they do this in no small part because in the NT, in Matthew 19:3-8, Christ refers to the 'from the beginning' purposes of God as eternally expressed in Genesis 1 and inseparably connected to Genesis 2. Ephesians 5:31 and 1 Corinthians 6 track along this same exegetical logic. The Rule of Faith sees to it, then, that the parts of scripture rhyme with each other. The Genesis 1 account tells of creation through the Word, through arche, and it is not a Hebrew myth, a past word trapped inside a history of religion (the 'P' source), but a Word speaking to Israel and over Israel to the church and the created world itself eternally. Even subsequent adjustments concerning divorce, such as are referred to in Matthew 19, are but hard-rhyming necessities, brought about by the hardness of human hearts as lesser evils, as the law of Moses seeks to regulate sinful, east of Eden, human falleness.
The permanent purposes of God in Genesis 1, then, are a regular feature in marriage rites because they are reinforced in myriad ways across the mosaic of scripture whose central and focusing image is the eternal Lord Christ.
The BCP (so too the LBW) opens with this clear reference to blessing in Genesis 1: "We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony. The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation." The "from the beginning" purpose of God as Christ refers to it in Matthew is the lens on which the marriage ceremony opens.
What is now frequently referred to as the second creation account goes over the same ground as Genesis 1 with more specificity. Human begetting is made possible by the stability of the heavens and the earth, and their generations: Genesis 2:4 closes account one and carefully prepares for what follows. The complementarity, the overlapping character of the accounts is what has always been assumed in the tradition as critical to how they deliver their deepest sense. Male and female are in the image of God (1:26-27). It is not good for them to be alone, 2:18 then clarifies. A helper fit for/over against the man is found, that exists nowhere else in the created realm. For the ish, there is the separated ishah, taken from him and to whom he cleaves. A man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh. Leaving father and mother does not result in being alone but in being joined and in the creating of new life. This is the life God blessed in Chapter One.
The marriage rite speaks of this second key component when it states: The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God's will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Many biblical couples have no children. Indeed often this becomes the arena in which God's mighty and wondrous, free and untamable action can occur, as with Abraham and Sarah, Elkanah and Hannah, until culminating in Mary and the Holy Spirit. Mutual joy, help, and sexual cleaving, making possible children, is fundamental to the work of God, whether such children are forthcoming or not. That remains within the mysterious purposes of God himself, inside his ordering and oversight of creation.
The marriage rite, in accordance with the rule of faith, unites the intention of God in creation with the dominical adornment and Yes in John 2. Here is the third key component. The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.
The word present at creation and in the ordering purposes of God becomes flesh and now is present at a wedding at Cana. His mother—styled by John as 'woman' here and at the Cross—is a new woman/Eve. She proposes ('do whatever he tells you') and he disposes ('fill the jars with water'). The water of first creation becomes by his word the wine of his abundant, blessed, present-time creational 'very good.' His act of new-wine creation is the completion by God through the image of God, his son, of the first creational purposes of God. Working in conjunction with the obedient woman/Eve, the obedient Adam reverses the act of the first Adam. The obedient woman/Eve ('do whatever he tells you') and the New Adam manifest the glory of God made known in him. The marriage rite uses the language of adornment to capture something of the grand sacrament of John 3. Who is the man and who is the woman present at this marriage? In the rites of the church, it is the couple now standing before the selfsame work of God in Christ which the rite itself embraces and calls upon for blessing. The consistent reference to John 2 in marriage rites is the third key component.
Ephesians 5 is the next text the rite calls upon consistent with the Rule of Faith's amalgamating and according purpose. It signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people. Paul uses the language of mystery (sacramentum) when he concludes his commendation to the Christian household. Quoting Genesis 2 explicitly, he writes, "For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying it refers to Christ and his church." The sexual differentiation of man and woman, and the love that overcomes and joins them, is but a figure, a mystery, pointing to the love of God in Christ for the church of his claiming and redeeming. Here is the fourth scriptural component.
The collect of the marriage service helps us understand that it will require God's sustaining grace to bring forth the love and fidelity necessary for the solemn vows undertaken to be honored and kept. There is nothing natural or created of itself that brings about the conditions for right or lasting desire, fidelity, honor or blessing. We call upon the ever-living God, through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit to bless what Christ blesses as the Word of Creation made flesh, as at that signal adornment in Cana of Galilee.
O gracious and everliving God, you have created us male and female in your image: Look mercifully upon this man and this woman who come to you seeking your blessing, and assist them with your grace, that with true fidelity and steadfast love they may honor and keep the promises and vows they make; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
As the rite proceeds, we then hear read aloud from sacred scripture those same texts that rule and order the rite being enacted (Genesis 1; Genesis 2; Song of Solomon; Tobit), reminding us of their norming character. Not as differing options, but as all together speaking forth the selfsame mystery. The same is true of NT and Gospel texts, and the Psalms appointed. Two psalms (127 and 128) speak of the gift of children. Psalm 67 speaks of the blessing of God in creation. That one Psalm may be more important given the age and hopes of the couple does not mean they are not all operating according to the same rule of faith. The earth bringing forth its increase (Ps. 67) bespeaks the blessing of Day Five, and his blessing of us through this evokes Day Six's culminating purpose. "Let all the earth fear him," picks up the solemn final line of the opening address to the couple and the congregation: Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God.
The final blessing points to the final eschatological purposes of God, which far from eliminating the creational blessing enacted for the couple crowns and projects it.
We thank you, also, for consecrating the union of man and woman in his Name. By the power of your Holy Spirit, pour out the abundance of your blessing upon this man and this woman. Defend them from every enemy. Lead them into all peace. Let their love for each other be a seal upon their hearts, a mantle about their shoulders, and a crown upon their foreheads. Bless them in their work and in their companionship; in their sleeping and in their waking; in their joys and in their sorrows; in their life and in their death. Finally, in your mercy, bring them to that table where your saints feast for ever in your heavenly home; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The prayer unites the protological purpose of God in Genesis with the eschatological hope of Revelation, inside of which the joyous and gracious notes of Song of Songs give refrain.
What the Rule of Faith guards against is selection and discrete literalism, whereby texts are not brought into conjunction and seen to be mutually illuminating, but played off of one another via chronology or simple preference. The Rule allows to arise the full-orbed network of associations the texts themselves call forth, from Genesis 1 to Genesis 2 to Hosea to the Psalms to Song of Songs to Matthew 19 and John 3, Ephesians 5, Colossians 3 and right up to the close of the NT canon (Revelation).
III. Conclusion
To speak of ethics is to speak of the scriptures' making their force known through the rites of the church that solemnize marriage in accordance with the logic of the rule of faith. I am providing only one example of such a rite from my own context. Thomas Cranmer's greatest accomplishment was the production of deeply scriptural rites that operate within the fullest scope of the rule of faith.
Over against this accomplishment, proponents of same-sex marriage will therefore have several choices before them.
They can reject the plain sense articulation of the rites as such, and try to bring in a generic version that avoids the specificity of the biblical texts. This resembles the gnostic appeal to scripture as metaphor or a "for-instance," en route to a present improvement enlivened by appeals to higher insight.
They can declare the rites impossible to retain and construct altogether new ones. This is closer to the marcionite instinct. Search about within the canvass of scripture for those bits that reinforce what is wanted: Jesus as engendering virtues like love and hoped-for permanence in relationships, unrelated to male and female differentiation and difference.
They can let either of the above options co-exist with rites such as are described above, in the between-time march for their eventual elimination.
I mention this in conclusion because these things will happen or have already begun to happen. The word 'marriage' is being altered and the goal of 'marriage equality' is now fully part of our confused cultural and religious landscape.
What Christians can do is explain, commend, and defend the logic of the rites presently in place; maintain these as a rule of faith best capturing the totality of the scripture's witness, including Christ's own stated logic over the breadth of the scriptural testimony to him; and be prepared to understand the identity of the church as an increasingly minority witness to the truth as handed down from scripture and the scriptural impress on preaching, catechesis and liturgical ethics over the ages. Others will operate with versions of scriptural witness that should be familiar to us from the life of the early church, where they represented distinct challenges. We may take it as a given that we will have to be as robust and clear about how scripture informs the rites we are unwilling to forfeit, no matter what other options others wish to pursue, for this present season of confusion and a poverty of rightly hearing God's word. It can surely be no bad thing, and requisite upon us, to go to school again and hear how it is that God speaks through the totality of his word.
Especially critical will be learning how to hear the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, through the fog of developmentalism, historicism, consumerist choice, and individual preference that now blankets our churches, our culture, and our theological training centers. When Christ appeals to God's purposes in creation he is allowing the scriptures of Israel to rhyme with his own eternal life with God, as those scripture set him forth, and as the early church will proclaim when it declares his life, death and rising as in accordance with them (1 Cor. 15:3).
As one church father put it, the rule of faith is the harmony of the covenants at the coming of the Lord. That harmony one must seek through prayer and fasting to discern. Difficulty is not overcome by selection or pitting one portion against another, but by deep penetration into the scripture's totality, where Christ lives. This is the accomplishment of the marriage rites as ethical works norming the life of those who come for His blessing, as once he adorned the marriage at Cana of Galilee.
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First, the report is very conscious of the church's context and the demand it find a fresh way to address the issue of sexuality, particularly same-sex relationships (although it touches also on heterosexual non-marital cohabitation at paras 138, 148). This demand arises pastorally with gay and lesbian couples who are Anglicans and with Anglican clergy being approached for spiritual support by gay and lesbian parishioners. There are also the missional demands, particularly in the public square in the light of the legislation introducing same-sex marriage. It is noteworthy that the practical recommendations end by stressing that they are "the pastoral response which the majority of our group believe the Church of England should make as a result of the missiological challenges we identified earlier" (para 414, italics added).
These demands are pressing, second, because of the clear distance that has opened up between the church's teaching and the wider culture, particularly among young people and the political and media elites. This can lead to a strong sense of cultural dissonance. The report, after explaining its origins and task, begins here (paras 39-54) and frequently highlights this as a major new challenge the church must address (e.g., paras 123-173, Recommendations 8-12). This is particularly pressing in a national, established church, as demonstrated for example in Sweden. During my evidence to the group, when pressed on whether we did not therefore need to change I replied that the point may come when we have to decide whether we are primarily the Church of England or the church of Jesus Christ.
Third, the demands and dissonance are strong because of the recognition of homophobia, which the report stresses "is still as serious a matter as it was" (Recommendation 5) for which the church needs to repent, although it is clear that "no one should be accused of homophobia solely for articulating traditional Christian teaching on same sex relationships" (Recommendation 6). To counter this problem, its first recommendation, presented as the foundation of the report, is that "we warmly welcome and affirm the presence and ministry within the Church of gay and lesbian people, both lay and ordained" (Recommendation 1).
In this context the fourth reality is that of significant and increasing diversity and disagreement within the Church of England about how the church should respond. In relation to the church's teaching and practice the range can be categorised in terms of different mixes of reassertion, reassessment and revision. The group (a lay Chair, four bishops and three advisors) embodied a wide spectrum of views (although its weight, given known personal views, would appear to be between reassessment and revision) and was left in no doubt about the extent and strength of views in the evidence it received. The report encourages greater openness about this diversity, particularly among the bishops who have tended to seek to hold a common line, recommending that "all, including those with teaching authority in the church, should be able to participate openly and honestly" in debate and discernment (Recommendation 12).
This diversity and disagreement relates, fifth, to church teaching or doctrine. Here the report sets out, with extensive quotations, what the church has taught (paras 101-122) but offers little substantive explanation, let alone defence, of "the current teaching" in the face of the four challenges noted above. Although subtle, and under the guise of presenting something which all agree upon, the moral doctrine of the report itself — from the otherwise brilliant opening Prologue by Jessica Martin onwards — works with a paradigm focussed on virtue and the qualities of sexual relationship ("permanent," "faithful," "stable") as the key determinant in a Christian sexual ethic (e.g., paras 123-148). Little or no attention is given to divine commands or natural law or the created order or the witness of Scripture as providing a normative structure for sexual relationships. Indeed, on the key question of Scripture, one of its central arguments is that "we do not all believe that the evidence of Scripture points to only one set of ethical conclusions" and "Christians who share an equal commitment to Scripture do not agree on the implications of Scripture for same sex relationships" (para 235). Two alternative views are set out in the appendix with no evaluation by the group, although one suspects most are closer to the revisionist position of David Runcorn than the reassertion of a traditional reading offered by fellow group member Keith Sinclair.
Despite this, the report states "at the level of declared doctrine, we are agreed that there is not sufficient consensus to change the church's teaching on human sexuality" (para 349) and so "we uphold the church's official teaching whilst recognising that it is important for alternative views to be explored openly as part of an ongoing process of discernment" (para 350). However, why the teaching of the church should remain unchanged is never explained with reference to Scripture or tradition but left as simply a pragmatic judgment that "there is not sufficient consensus to change."
The diversity and disagreement relates also, sixth, to discipline, or how the church orders it own life, in particular its public worship and its requirements for clergy conduct. Here the upholding of doctrine leads to no change in one sense: there should be no formally approved liturgy for a service for a same-sex relationship (para 384) and all ministerial candidates should still "order their lives according to the will of the Church on matters of sexual conduct, and they should be asked to give an assurance that they will seek to live by that standard" (para 411). In relation to the latter area the only slight change is to stress that "whether someone is married, single or in a civil partnership should have no bearing on the nature of the assurances sought from them" (Recommendation 18), although it is said that the church needs to consider "the extent to which different disciplines on sexual conduct should be required of bishops, clergy and laity" (para 373). It is left unclear whether "married" here would include clergy legally married to someone of the same sex, an issue the House of Bishops will have to address in the near future.
It is in relation to public worship that the most significant change is made. Here it is argued that whereas in the past "the Church has resisted calls to celebrate civil partnerships in any formal or liturgical way" (para 380), "we believe that parishes and clergy, who conscientiously believe that celebrating faithful same sex relationships would be pastorally and missiologically the right thing to do, should be supported in doing so" (para 391). Although not authorised at a national or diocesan level, "it may be that the House of Bishops should issue guidelines" (para 393). The language of "blessing" is avoided (but the Chair reportedly said he would not write a letter of complaint if the press used such language) and reference made instead to "celebration" (paras 391, 392) and "an act of worship to mark the formation of a same sex relationship" (para 399, Recommendation 16) which it appears the majority thought could extend to same-sex marriages although it is stressed the service must nor resemble a marriage service.
Among the many serious questions this recommendation raises, four areas in particular are worth noting. First, although presented as a form of "pastoral accommodation" its institution of "local option" at a parish level does not fit well with the need for great care to ensure that, in the words of the FAOC report which used this terminology, any service is "bearing witness in special ways to the abiding importance of the norm" and will "proclaim the form of life given by God's creative goodness and bring those in difficult positions into closer approximation to it." It represents "local option" at the most local level and is more congregational than Anglican in its ecclesiology. Second, it appears to be more of a political accommodation or compromise within the group — conservatives get to uphold the doctrine but concede a change in discipline (this is almost hinted at in para 391). In practice it will lead to services being constructed by those who do not wish to uphold the doctrine and so are unlikely to do so in practice. Third, explicitly following the Church of Scotland's approach, it creates a disjunction between the church's teaching and its practice, risking the establishment on a formal level of precisely the hypocrisy that many have complained has existed informally for decades. It officially puts the practical cart before the doctrinal horse. Fourth, if approved by the bishops, this proposal appears to violate the Communion moratorium given the Joint Standing Committee made clear in 2007 that "the celebration of a public liturgy which includes a blessing on a same-sex union is not within the breadth of private pastoral response envisaged by the Primates in their Pastoral Letter of 2003" and the American bishops' assurances therefore were only acceptable if they meant that "the use of any such rites or liturgies will not in future have the bishop's authority."
Alongside these attempts to navigate the differences over doctrine and discipline the central proposal of the report is, seventh, dialogue. The group argues that this is the next step for the Church of England at a national and diocesan level. It prefers to speak of "facilitated conversation" rather than "indaba," although this appears to be a very close relative of the latter (paras 352-68). This should take the form of "consultation on this report … with a sense of urgency, perhaps over a period of two years" (Recommendation 3) and be "in close dialogue with the wider Anglican Communion and other Churches" (Recommendation 4). This is explicitly modelled on the group's own working pattern (paras 55-83) and although it recognises "we are not certain that consensus … is possible" (para 70) it believes that it may enable people "to recognize, first all each other's humanity, and then, perhaps, our shared belonging to one another in Christ through our common baptism" (para 71). Its purpose should be "relational, not institutional," listening "so the journey can continue in an atmosphere of respect for difference"(para 357). Although it is said there would need to be "clear plans for evaluation and determining next steps" (para 365) it is unclear how such a process will relate to and shape the necessary formal corporate decision-making. A weakness of the report is that by choosing to set out and argue for its own vision, it largely fails to set out clearly the arguments on key decisive questions and issues that need to be discussed in a way that enables the wider church to understand the range of views that exist. Here the report Some Issues in Human Sexuality, although ten years old, remains a far superior guide to the theological debate than this new report.
Eighth, the report clearly represents a proposed development in the Church of England's stance that may set a new trajectory. This is evident in both some of its substantive proposals developing the Church of England's position and in the methodological approach to this issue that it embodies and recommends. Although this may appear to be only small, gradual, and evolutionary on the surface, it is arguably revolutionary in both substance and method in that it represents at its heart a departure from received doctrine.
To draw together the various areas above, the report and what it recommends appears to be driven by the need to respond to perceived pastoral and missional demands in a changed culture and to combat any hint of homophobia. Alongside this is put a claim that the existence of diversity and disagreement means that we need facilitated conversations based on acceptance of that diversity, and claimed consequent uncertainty, as the only way forward. In addition, to honour that diversity the church's discipline must change and develop as soon as possible in order to reflect the diversity and reduce cultural dissonance and apparent homophobia. Throughout this, received doctrine in the form of church teaching and its sources in Scripture and tradition is effectively reduced to a silenced spectator. Although it is said that this is currently left unchanged, doctrine is explicitly detached from discipline (a move the Chair reportedly described as "Anglican in the best sense of the word") and implicitly detached from Scripture whose teaching it judges unclear. It is noteworthy that the only substantive sections of the report not cited to explain its recommendations are those on Scripture and theology and that the wording in recommendation 2 that the conversations "should continue to involve profound reflection on the interpretation and application of Scripture" appears to be a last minute "fig-leaf" addition (it is missing from p. 22).
Christian doctrine, rooted in Scripture, rather than providing a basis for assessing and critiquing other factors such as context and practice, is now to be reshaped by them. As a result, the quality of life and the life expectancy of "the current teaching of the Church of England" appears to be much reduced by the Pilling Report.
The final feature of the report to note is the present and looming reality that this explosive cocktail will likely result in division or at least differentiation among Anglicans in England as it has in North America. This is evident on the face of the report in that, very unusually, it includes a significant "dissenting statement" from the one evangelical bishop on the group, the Bishop of Birkenhead, the Rt. Rev. Keith Sinclair. The report offers no basis to support the view that further dialogue is likely to prevent this outcome and yet it appears to have nothing to say to the bishops about how best to address this situation other than further dialogue about sexuality. Yet this focus for dialogue is one where it is clear many — across the range of views — believe that diminishing returns set in some time ago. As illustrated by initial responses to the report, there are such strongly held but incompatible theological and missiological worldviews driving people that the dialogue, when it is not simply the dialogue of the deaf, is increasingly more akin to interfaith dialogue than even ecumenical dialogue.
What the Pilling Report and its reception will perhaps show us is that rather than following its recommended departure from doctrine under the guise of "pastoral accommodation" or simply more talking about sex, what we urgently need are facilitated conversations that focus on the reality of our deep-rooted divisions on doctrine and the need to discern what differentiated church structures should be created in response to this reality. If some new structures can be found, that would mean that Anglicans committed to different patterns of doctrine, rather than continuing to struggle to establish their view as that of the Church of England, could be given the security and freedom to respond as they believe right. Shaped by their different doctrines, they could each address the real and challenging pastoral and missional demands, respond to the experience of cultural disconnect and dissonance, combat homophobia as they understand it, and establish their own form of church discipline in terms of clergy conduct and public acts of worship. If we can find a way to put such structured freedom and security in place so that we can all bear witness with integrity to what we believe is true and represents good news for our nation, we may, paradoxically, find it much easier to dialogue and work together across our diversity and disagreements. Then, as each approach seeks to share faithfully in God's mission as they understand it, we could follow the Gamaliel principle cited by Runcorn and leave God to judge which developments and which trajectory is more faithful.
Andrew Goddard is associate director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics based in Cambridge and has taught Christian ethics at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and Trinity College, Bristol, and is an adjunct professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. He is a canon at Winchester Cathedral and assistant minister at St. James the Less, Pimlico, where his wife, Lis, is vicar. He is author of a number of books, most recently Rowan Williams: His Legacy (Lion, 2013).]]>
1. Claim:
"Final authority in matters concerning all was vested in General Convention and, in due course, Executive Council between Conventions [5]…. From the beginning until now, [the General Convention] has limited its decisions with respect to specific local situations, but in making decisions for the whole church, its authority is supreme [9]…. Episcopalians have, since 1785, consistently assigned final authority and function in our church to the General Convention itself [10]."
ACI Response:
It is likely that the sole purpose of this Primer is to make these two (related) claims about final authority and supremacy. We note the following:
2. Claim:
"Article VII (now Article VIII) required all members of the clergy to "conform" to the "doctrines and worship" of the Church — which are decided by the General Convention [6]."
ACI Response:
This references the Declaration of Conformity, often referred to as the ordination "vows." The current declaration of course refers to the "doctrine, discipline and worship" of the Church. But the Primer misrepresents the Ordinal and the pledges it requires of ordinands.
3. Claim:
"From the beginning, the first Constitution made it clear in its second Article that "if … no deputies either lay or clerical, should attend at any General Convention, the Church in such state shall nevertheless be bound by the acts of such Convention [6]."
ACI Response:
This claim is legally uninformed and intellectually irresponsible. The legal language "bound by" as used in the 1780s has been analyzed in one of the most influential law review articles of recent years. This language does not mean what the authors of this paper imply. In any event, this language was completely removed from TEC's Constitution over a hundred years ago.
4. Claim:
"That third [1789] General Convention met and adopted the first Constitution and Canons (unlike the United States Constitution, which was ratified by the individual states) [6]…. So the General Convention created and adopted the Constitution, without referring it first to the several state conventions (in fact it was originally their reason for being) [9]."
ACI Response:
This is a misrepresentation of the process by which the Constitution was adopted. It was not adopted by General Convention as an entity, whether by a majority of votes or even by a majority of votes by orders or states. It was adopted by the duly authorized representatives of each state church, who signed the Constitution on behalf of their state churches.
5. Claim:
"There is no record of any congregation in the United States that did not accede unconditionally and irrevocably to the authority of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church [7]."
ACI Response:
Again, this misrepresents the constitutional process. Dioceses do not accede to "the authority of the General Convention."
6. Claim:
"Over and over, the foremost nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators on the government of The Episcopal Church have refuted this ["states' rights"], and General Convention has never accepted any legislation tending in that direction. While each diocese has significant latitude in ordering its life in adaptation to its local needs, it cannot make decisions that affect the whole Church, including itself [9]."
ACI Response:
7. Final ACI Response:
The paper ignores the legal structure of TEC, which is that of a voluntary association of dioceses.
The Bishops' Statement on the Polity of The Episcopal Church (April 2009) can be read here.
The Affidavit of Mark McCall (April 2013) can be read here.
The revised Primer can be read here:]]>
I am someone who once assumed that TEC was a single entity, and that dioceses were an integral part of this entity, gears in a larger machine. The notion of a diocese "leaving" TEC never crossed my mind, and in fact seemed simply antithetical to the meaning of "Church". I still think this, deep down, and much of my academic writing on the Church has been devoted to trying to understand how Christian unity properly founds the very nature of our Christian faithfulness, as it is engaged by God's gracious gift of Himself to our rebellious hearts and hands: God for the godless.
Nonetheless, this past year I found myself on the side of supporting just those arguments that Judge Ortbal made upholding the Diocese of Quincy's departure from TEC. I did so for two reasons. The first was a more limited one: several years ago I had become convinced by the careful work done by my ACI colleague Mark McCall on the legal and procedural significance of TEC's Constitution for our polity, framed within its historical context as well as its formal meaning. This work has yet to be answered in any convincing way by those who disagree, and now appears to be persuading courts over and against 815's expert witnesses. McCall's thesis, in sum, argues that the Constitutional framework in which TEC was set up and long continued to operate into the present, was one in which separate dioceses gathered and worked together on the basis of each diocese's willingness to participate. TEC is a "voluntary association" of dioceses, in which member dioceses are free, under certain procedural constraints, to disassociate, just as they were to join. As I said, I have found it difficult to escape the conclusion of McCall's reading of our Constitution on this matter, even though it has gone against instincts I had previously trusted.
But just this sense of contradiction has also forced me to reconsider the character of our church's life more theologically. This brings me to the second, and more profound, reason for my support of Judge Ortbal's reasoning: at the root of TEC's fracture lies our General Convention's failure to engage our church's own identity, an identity rooted in the deeper character of unitive mission that ought to inform our life. In brief, the Church's unity is given in her "apostolicity", her apostolic mission. When the latter is subverted, unity disintegrates, and this is what we have seen happen in TEC. The result is not a "good" – I continue to believe that the disassociation of dioceses like Quincy, Fort Worth, South Carolina, and San Joaquin constitutes a failure of the Christian life. But the reversion to diocesan "independence" represents the almost natural reassertion of the will to apostolicity that one would expect in a situation of profound ecclesial dysfunction. And that reversion has something to teach us.
The polity question has to do with General Convention in this case. Dioceses, at least in theory, joined the Convention because such joining represented the furtherance of the apostolic ministry of the Church. They have disassociated themselves when that ministry was being impeded by General Convention. Part of the demanded reconsideration of our common life has to do with figuring out why this has been the case, and on what basis.
As I have tried to do this, I can articulate the following explanation, identifying basic theological claims as they work themselves out within the limits of our particular life as an Anglican church.
In the first place, I think it important to understand the Church as an entity of organic unity, rather than in simple structural terms. The Church is "united" as she lives in time, lives in a certain way while doing certain things, and does so through the concrete lives of her members. Individuals make up the Church, and hence it is called "the people of God". The organic life of the Church, in unity, is thus constituted by actual people who follow Christ, make choices about this, and live in and through Christ Jesus. If there is to be a "oneness" to the Church, it is only as these individuals live together in a certain way, and subject themselves mutually to one another, much as in a marriage. (Ephesians 5 is a crucial text here.) And the Church's mission is given in just these kinds of actions by people for the sake of such actions by other people. The "apostolic" character of the Church lies in the outgoing life of her members as they give themselves – what we might call "self-expenditure" – for others in the truth of Jesus. The web of mutual subjection grows, even as the sign and reality of God's self-giving in Christ takes ongoing shape in time. Properly speaking, "apostolic ministry" is that ministry that furthers this reality. And the focus of apostolic life – not its exhaustive reach – has been given, we believe, in the Church's episcopal ministry of Bishops.
The second step, in this reflection, is to place General Convention within this broad theological framework. General Convention was set up, in the 18th century, for the purposes of furthering the ministry of that "communion" identified formerly with the Church of England in America. But its purposes were facilitative, not essential. It held key duties – guarding the BCP, and integrating ministries of various kinds. But these duties were diaconal, in a real sense. If General Convention was a synod, it was one that served other synods, both those on the diocesan level, and those that bound this local "communion" to the larger Church's broader communion (a possibility that did not take flesh until almost a century later). Synodal life, after all, is also something that is bound by the apostolic calling of the Church, and General Convention's function is properly judged by this calling.
Evaluating the recent shape of General Convention's life, I see a tremendous set of failures in the Convention's inability to further this apostolic ministry. On the one hand, General Convention has herself failed in the outgoing life of subjection in Christ; and on the other, Convention has subverted the ability of her members to do the same in their own spheres of personal life, especially bishops acting as pastors with their flock, or dioceses. One can outline this briefly:
What can I conclude from this albeit broad and incomplete assessment? Only that General Convention has ceased to be a truly apostolic synod. Its procedural and relational myopia has robbed it of its capacity to fulfil, at least for the moment, its apostolic calling. And not all synods, after all, are apostolic, something that is known only by a synod's fruits. When the fruits of a synod subvert the apostolic unity of a church, that synod has simply ceased to fulfill its function. And thus, the relationships of bishops and dioceses to this gathering become ipso facto, matters of prudential deliberation, not essential ties. It is not odd if, say, the Diocese of South Carolina, has chosen to disassociate from General Convention: where a bishop and diocese find their ministries, construed as best they can to be faithful, to have been subverted by their association with the Convention, they are bound, in our polity, at least to consider this option.
To me, this began to become clear already before 2003. The past decade has confirmed General Convention's problematic ministry. The point isn't that leaving General Convention is somehow demanded; I don't think it is. (The apostolic calling of bishops and dioceses works in both directions). But this period has nonetheless underlined the more basic responsibilities of bishops and their dioceses, which properly exist independent of General Convention (although not independent of the larger Church). Bishops represent the personal form of the Church's apostolic calling, and their diocesan ministries embody this in a more immediate organic sense than do the larger councils of the Church. This is why the Lambeth Conference and other Pan-Anglican gatherings have consistently held dioceses to be the "fundamental units" of the Church in Anglican understanding. Councils are not personal entities, but rather serve them. Bishops and their dioceses, instead, are the objects of God's judgment in the way that larger councils cannot be, for just this reason. The fact that American dioceses, as it seems, can disassociate themselves from General Convention is a purely local legal matter (in other Anglican churches, let alone other traditions, they cannot). But their ability to do so, in TEC, at least underscores this more fundamental reality of apostolic faithfulness and judgment: bishops and their flock are accountable before God for the witness of self-giving to the sinner in Christ's truth. They are accountable, for they carry out personally the choices of faith that lie before all disciples.
But this personal accountability before God that falls on bishops and dioceses also provides American Anglicans with a constructive opportunity – this would be a positive outcome to the "After Quincy" moment. That is, our bishops and dioceses have the responsibility and means, as personal agents, to respond to those who have disassociated themselves from TEC, with actions of apostolic holiness. Those bishops and dioceses who remain in TEC and understand their vocation as here described should seek to win back, through their witness and love, those who have disassociated themselves. As Paul reminds us, even enemies can be persuaded by our acts of faithful outreach towards them. How might this happen? My goal here is not to outline this aspect – which involves, obviously, not just being "nice", or dropping lawsuits, and the rest; it involves the hard work of rethinking decisions, articulating dogma, re-establishing relationships of trust with the larger Communion, and providing space for the flourishing of reconciled brethren, on terms that are mutually acceptable. These would all be aspects of "apostolic holiness", because they will require the cost of self-giving to those deemed "far off", out of a love for God's truth and glory in Christ.
But my point here is that, whatever is involved in such efforts, they would amount to a personal act, bound to the personal Lord whose personal words call us forth into life. The "fundamental unit" of the Church has a fundamental responsibility, one that no one else can assume. This is all the more true when we find ourselves in a time of fracturing. This is not a matter of the House of Bishops taking some initiative. It is the responsibility of each and every bishop and diocese taken as accountable agents, "builders" who stand before God on their own terms (1 Cor. 3:1; Gal. 6:4-5). I am appealing here to individual Bishops to reach out on whatever terms they can.
That General Convention's actions seem to limit such personal witness is, from the start, a mark against its synodical integrity. That litigation and legal repudiation have been the order of the day on the part of General Convention's servants only underlines this failure. Rather, "After Quincy" seems to be a clear call to the permission of a distinct agency of apostolic life on the part of bishops and dioceses to pursue responses of repentance, reconciliation, concession, and self-giving, quite apart from what we might judge to be the indifference or opposition of a General Convention meeting every three years If we have anything to learn from the civil judgments against TEC's institutional claims over individual dioceses, it is that these dioceses and their bishops bear a responsibility, greater than perhaps they had realized, to make those decisions necessary for the healing of Christ's body. There are, I would guess, more bishops and dioceses who are up to this, even seeking this, than the weight of General Convention has allowed to flourish. This calling is one that falls on dioceses and bishops that have disassociated themselves from General Convention as much as on those that have chosen to remain (sympathetic as they may be with their departed brethren, given the deteriorating state of affairs).
In a providential arc of history, Episcopal churches have begun to revert to the condition of the Anglican "communion" prior to General Convention's invention. We are all "missionary dioceses" in a way. And ones, I pray, on the way to a more faithful union.]]>
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Toronto, Ontario
September 20, 2013
Greetings to the Faithful of the Anglican Communion and all our Friends in Christ:
We write to you from a conference in Toronto, Canada, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1963 Pan-Anglican Congress held here. We are Primates and bishops representing the Anglican Global South, including the chairmen of the Global South Primates' Steering Committee, Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa (CAPA), and Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON).
We thank Wycliffe College and her friends for hosting us.
We have heard talks recollecting our Anglican legacy from this 1963 Congress, and gave thanks in worship and fellowship for the astonishing missionary growth to which the congress both called and pointed us. In the midst of our gathering, we were blessed by a live address from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, commenting on the Congress theme of Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ.
We commend the calls we received in the conference talks, which included:
Our final talk inspired us to a revival of the missionary spirit of the Toronto Congress.
In this spirit, we lay before you the following:
We ask that our Communion consider our offering and our desire to be faithful in it to the vision laid out not only 50 years ago at the Toronto Congress, but for many years before in our common life.
Finally, please know that we rejoice that Jesus is the center of our unity, amidst all our hopes and struggles. "We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete." (1 Jn. 1:3-4)]]>