In times of change and conflict it is unsurprising that voices arise to point out the inevitable failure of this or that institution or program. We’re all familiar with this phenomenon in the political realm; during George W. Bush’s presidency, some who opposed his policies did so with the conviction that he was charting a path of destruction for the nation. A quick survey of talk radio reveals plenty of people who believe the same about President Obama’s leadership.

As in secular politics, there are passionate people within the church who allow their strong feelings to lead them into making pronouncements that seem based more on fear or frustration than fact. In the case of the Anglican Communion, the voices crying out that the Anglican experiment is over may be one example. Anglicanism as an institution is certainly under strain, but does that void the entire tradition? The accusation that the Anglican experiment is over should motivate us to reflect upon what that experiment (if it’s right to use that term) has been, and what it — what we — have to offer to the broader church catholic.

Last June 29 marked the end of the Year of St. Paul. At the time I found myself reflecting on the Apostle and his ministry quite a bit. Specifically, as I considered the current conflict in the Anglican Communion, I recalled Paul’s words to the Corinthians:

I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings (1 Cor. 9:19-23).

We don’t often hear the phrase “all things to all people” in a virtuous light today. When it is used, it is often presented as a critique or an accusation that someone is trying too hard to please others. While Paul was speaking specifically of presenting the gospel, Anglicanism has taken upon itself a similar calling in the service of Christian unity, which is a gospel imperative.

There have always been plenty of voices within and outside of Anglicanism that have accused it of an ill-conceived attempt to be all things to all people, and thus of being impure, haphazard, or uncommitted. “Complete the Reformation and do away with the vestiges of papist idolatry,” some would say. “Reject the inherently heretical and schismatic nature of Protestantism,” others would admonish, “and return to full fidelity to the ancient churches of Rome and Constantinople.” Anglicans must choose, according to these critics, past and present. In the words of Walter Cardinal Kasper during the runup to last year’s Lambeth Conference:

Does [Anglicanism] belong more to the churches of the first millennium — Catholic and Orthodox — or does it belong more to the Protestant churches of the 16th century? At the moment it is somewhere in between, but it must clarify its identity now and that will not be possible without certain difficult decisions (The Catholic Herald [London], May 6, 2008).

Those who have left the Episcopal Church over theological issues are not immune to such criticism. The presence at the recent inaugural convention of the Anglican Church in North America of megachurch pastor Rick Warren, a Baptist, Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America, and the Rev. Dr. Todd Hunter — formerly of the Vineyard, now of the Anglican Mission in America — all testify to the theological breadth within the Anglican tradition, and irrespective of whether it holds together, the ACNA shares some degree of this, at least for the moment. It was interesting that in his address to the convention, Metropolitan Jonah called for the ACNA to fully renounce women’s ordination and — of all things — to condemn Calvinism as heresy. The constant companion of Anglicans, whatever their stripe, seems to be the assumption by some fellow Christians that Anglicanism is a sort of ecclesiastical Frankenstein’s monster that needs to be saved from its own doctrinal incoherence by those of correct and consistent opinions and beliefs.

Such criticisms have their counterpart in the seemingly innocuous notion that Anglicanism is a bridge between Protestants and the ancient churches of the Catholic world. Most of the time people use “bridge church” as a compliment, but at least one underlying assumption is pejorative. The Rt. Rev. William Weinhauer, the late Bishop of Western North Carolina, once told me a remark he had often heard in ecumenical dialogues: “Who wants to live under a bridge?” This phrase neatly captures the problem with “bridge church” — it is an image of transience and rootlessness.

Calls for purification often seem to assume Anglicanism to be a sort of framework or shell into which various doctrines and beliefs can be added or removed at will. Likewise, the metaphor of the bridge risks presenting Anglicanism as a continuum through which people move in one direction or the other until they arrive at their true home. In each case, Anglicanism is presented as an empty husk, lacking essential substance or identity.

And yet, while Anglicans may have refrained from writing confessions or precisely defining certain doctrines (settling on a single understanding of the Atonement or one explanation of the Eucharist), that does not mean the tradition lacks substance. Whether one looks to Jewel’s Apology, Hooker’s Laws, or the works of the Caroline Divines, there is clearly an Anglican identity, expressed more clearly in the manner and tenor of interpretation and in the particular sources of authority than through specific doctrines. Binding it all together, and connecting all of us to this tradition most fully, is the worship of The Book of Common Prayer (in its various iterations) down to today.

Changing political circumstances and the very success Anglicans have experienced in spreading the Christian faith have resulted in dramatic changes, what the most recent Ridley Cambridge draft of the Anglican covenant referred to positively as “our ongoing refashioning by the Holy Spirit.“ As the Communion has grown and changed, there have naturally been growing pains that strain the bonds that hold us together. At the same time we are being summoned “into a more fully developed communion life” (§2.1.2) and through that deepening relationship, as well as those we cultivate with our ecumenical partners, into the reunited Church of the future. But if Anglicanism is not to be seen as a “bridge church,” what role are Anglicans called to play?

In The Church Idea, which served as a precursor to the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, William Reed Huntington issued the call for us to “press our reasonable claims to be the reconciler of a divided household, not in a spirit of arrogance (which ill befits those whose best possessions have come to them by inheritance), but with affectionate earnestness and intelligent zeal” (Huntington, The Church Idea: An Essay Towards Unity [New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1884], 211). The quadrilateral was conceived as a way to extend the hand of fellowship to other Christian traditions, and to bring unity out of division. It seems appropriate, then, that the proposed Anglican Covenant would begin with many of the elements of the quadrilateral — those dealing with the Holy Scriptures, the creeds, dominical sacraments, and the historic episcopate, for example — as a starting point to begin mending the fractures in our common life.

We are called, as Anglicans, not to be a bridge but rather to be interpreters for our brothers and sisters of various traditions to one another. In the comprehensiveness we have traditionally modeled, if not so comfortably embraced — and governed by, as Archbishop Michael Ramsey put it, “Scripture, antiquity, and reason” — Anglicans are capable of comprehending (in the sense of embracing internally as well as understanding intellectually and in practice) Christians of diverse theological commitments and sensibilities, from the evangelical to the Catholic. This is why, for example, early Anglican missionary societies reached out to Lutherans from the Berliner Missionsschule and — sometimes without re-ordination — sent them out to serve in the Middle East and Africa. Such comprehensiveness has been sought not to avoid conflict — for as any casual student of history can attest, such diversity has only rarely been peaceful — but because we have sought, as the prayer for the commemoration of Richard Hooker puts it, “comprehension for the sake of truth” (Lesser Feasts and Fasts [New York: Church Publishing, 2003], 427). This comprehensiveness is one of our claims to catholicity (Michael Ramsey, The Anglican Spirit [New York: Seabury Classics, 2004], 13).

We are called to be reconcilers of a divided house, and we can look around us and see many fruits of this vision, whether in our engagement with our brothers and sisters in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, or in the newest proposal for full communion between the Episcopal Church and the Moravians. All of these agreements, however complex or imperfect, stem from the great gifts of Anglicanism: theological comprehensiveness within, and a humble ecclesiology when looking outward (a refusal to deny that others are the Church), and an overarching commitment to common prayer. Indeed, I have experienced our tradition in such a reconciling role in my own life as it was Anglicanism that mediated the broader Catholic tradition and presented it to me in a way that I, a young man from a traditionally Baptist family, could understand and embrace.

And yet, the voices that call for a clarification of Anglican identity are not all wrong, and as our brothers and sisters they deserve to be heard. One of the great difficulties we face today is a crisis of identity. Our diversity is in danger of becoming unmoored from the anchors of Scripture, antiquity, and reason, and threatens to permanently fragment the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Without the binding qualities of a coherent Anglican identity — a shared commitment to the basics of the Christian faith, a common recognition of sources of authority — our comprehensiveness breaks down and becomes factionalism.

Our role as interpreter between varied traditions and spiritualities is lost as we lose the ability to understand one another. When this happens our role as a valuable contributor to the ecumenical movement is called into question because some of our partners no longer see us as faithful to our shared Christian inheritance, and therefore as incapable of speaking to them in an intelligible way.

It is not enough to say that Anglicanism offers a vision of comprehensiveness, for without a clear vision of what it means to be Anglican, and more important, to be Christian, comprehensiveness dissolves into petty disputes, that weakness of which Bishop Stephen Sykes warned when he spoke of “the all-consuming ruthlessness of the campaigners, for whom politics is all” (S.W. Sykes, “Odi et Amo: Loving and hating Anglicanism,” in One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, ed. Marsha L. Dutton and Terrell Grey [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006], 207).

I am hopeful, however, because of our Lord’s promise to be with us in our worship, to be present in the sacrament. I am hopeful because of friends, colleagues and parishioners. And I am hopeful because as a Communion we have the opportunity to maintain the most important elements of our comprehensiveness while clarifying our identity, if we choose to walk the road together.

The Ridley Cambridge draft of the Anglican covenant takes the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral as a starting point and fleshes some of the thinking out a bit, but it also presents some important things that, if affirmed, can help to once again set Anglicanism on the path of a coherent, credally circumscribed, and scripturally committed comprehensiveness. The proposed covenant does this not only in what it says, but also in the way it says it. When I read the covenant, I sense an importance not merely in its specific points but also in its process.

People rightly crack jokes about process today. We’ve all been in places where we feel ourselves being processed out of existence. Yet one of the strengths of the covenant is that a group of Anglicans sat down together and hammered it out and have done so by looking to points of common authority and identity. Once it goes to the provinces, this inspires hope that it will make all of us revisit these sources of identity and authority for ourselves if we have not already done so.

The covenant by itself cannot save Anglicanism — I’m not sure it’s structured in a way that would allow it to do that — but the process of studying the covenant, responding to it, receiving it, and recommitting ourselves to one another may do so, and it will leave the Anglican Communion stronger. A strengthened Anglican Communion will be confident in itself while actively working for Christian unity through joining with our brothers and sisters in mission and by standing ready to share the understandings born from our comprehensiveness.

Two points in the Ridley Cambridge draft seem especially important in such a task and in light of a call to be reconcilers and interpreters. The first is in §2.1.5, which affirms that “our common mission is a mission shared with other Churches and traditions” and recognizes that “the ecumenical vocation of Anglicanism to the full visible unity of the Church in accordance with Christ’s prayer that ‘all may be one.’ ”

The other is §4.1.5, which states:

It shall be open to other Churches to adopt the Covenant. Adoption of this Covenant does not bring any right of recognition by, or membership of, the Instruments of Communion. Such recognition and membership are dependent on the satisfaction of those conditions set out by each of the Instruments.

Leaving open the possibility that other churches might adopt the covenant is, in my mind, a wonderful gesture that seems born from reflection on the ecumenical vocation of Anglicanism mentioned in section two. This provision has inspired resistance in some quarters of the Episcopal Church, for fear that it might play into the perceived schemes of some of our departed brothers and sisters to replace the Episcopal Church as the officially recognized Anglican body in the United States. While I understand the origins of such concerns, I wonder if they are the fruit of a conflict mentality that is unhelpful and could lead to an even longer period of being internally focused. The key portion of the provision for those who have these concerns would seem to be that any body’s acceptance as part of the Communion would come only with the approval of all the Instruments of Communion, not simply one or two.

In the end, the inclusion of this provision within the covenant prevents it from being a document purely internal to the Communion as it is, and instead turns a portion of it outward in a gesture of invitation and welcome. In this sense, it seems to be both consistent with and an expansion of the original spirit of the quadrilateral as a means of ecumenical engagement. It only seems appropriate, at such a contentious time in the life of our Communion, that we look outward — if only in such a small way — even as we seek to heal the divisions within. By looking outward and refusing to become mired in our own conflict, as well as by returning to the sources of Anglican Identity in such a time of division, we can find a way to come through this uncertain time and be stronger for it. If we can do this, if we can embrace our heritage and if we are able to say, with St. Paul, that we “do it all for the sake of the gospel,” then we all have reasons to be hopeful.

The Rev. Joseph B. Howard is vicar of St. Francis Church, Goodlettsville, Tenn., and blogs at frjody.com.

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