Editor’s Note: This essay is part of an extended series, February 10-21, focused on the related subjects of the succession at Canterbury and the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals.
The Nairobi-Cairo Proposals of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith, and Order (IASCUFO) is surely one of the most remarkable theological documents to emerge from the Anglican Communion’s working commissions in the past century. The document testifies to hard work, faithfulness, historical care, and a real scriptural consistency and depth. Yes, from one perspective, the report is quite narrow. It aims at laying the groundwork for a few practical structural proposals that less reflect some grand ecclesial reality than simply touch on governance challenges of the moment.
Still, the narrow discussion is built on a much broader and quite sweeping vision of the church that has a real beauty and persuasiveness. Unfolding under the banner of Ephesians 4, the report articulates a way of common life that, however strained, is willing to be constrained by the dispositions of Jesus and by the currents of his Spirit. The scriptural heading to the report is worth reproducing here because, far more than a proof text, it marks the substance of what the report uses as its lens of understanding, as its ideal of life, and as the test of any practical response to the challenges of the Anglican Communion’s travails:
Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, … Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching. … Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. — Eph. 4:2-5, 14-15
The argument of the report is thoroughly consistent on this scriptural basis: the Anglican Communion has failed in embodying the virtues outlined in Ephesians (humility, gentleness, patience, and more); but in the midst of our failures, we are called to engage these virtues in practical ways that can in fact permit their healing power to do their work upon us. The virtues of Ephesians 4, that is (my gloss), are lively enough to permit a flexible ecclesial adjustment to these virtues’ historical contradiction. This is the case, of course, because these virtues are bound to the person of God, who is sinned against, yet is at the same time the author of our salvation. Concretely, however, this almost ascetic argument is after one thing: finding a way to buy time among the communion’s churches before schism becomes permanent.
So, the report looks for institutional ways of remaining in some kind of engaged relationship, even when, as churches, we disagree profoundly. The report begins by explicating both the shape of some of these Anglican divisions, and then theologically frames their mostly negative significance in light of the four creedal “marks of the church” (unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity). This is interesting and crucial work. The report then proposes two practical changes (see 90-98, which is earlier specified in 76 and 84). First, we should decouple ecclesial membership in the Anglican Communion from “communion with Canterbury.” (We’ll accept, for membership, a “historic connection” with Canterbury.) Second, and rather procedurally, the report proposes that we reorder the makeup of the ACC in a more regionally “representative” manner, including having a rotating president from among the global set of primates. With these two proposals there would follow a less Canterbury-centered Lambeth Conference and other related events.
Some of the implications of these redefinitions and reordered expectations are mentioned in the report, some only alluded to. Hence Anglican churches would be acknowledged as being in a range of “degrees of communion” one to another, on the model of certain ecumenical relationships. But, even if not in “full” communion with each other, churches would still stay in a formal relationship with other Anglicans (“walking together at a distance”) by participating in common counsel especially.
Perhaps they would not share the Eucharist with each other (many do not today). But they would show up at a meeting; or join in a common a meal; or pray with or at least for each other. At the same time, Anglicans would acknowledge an array of locally developed and differentiated relationships across both the communion (like the Global South Fellowship) and with other Christian traditions; and in the midst of this evolving set of relationships the communion’s decision-making bodies, like the ACC, would seek to be more representative of the geographical (and thereby cultural and thus theological) diversity of member churches. The details of all this are generally unarticulated, the most daring of them explicitly left for another discussion (see 64-71, 79).
The proposals are, in my mind, self-evidently necessary. I will say here, straightforwardly, that I am strongly in support of the report’s ecclesial vision and its two practical proposals. Rather than defend this support, however, in what follows I want to reflect on what the report leaves unstated. For these unmentioned realities form the deep ballast of our communion’s “ecclesial vessel,” only the visible top of which is in fact engaged by the report. These visible signals, however, depend for their compelling truth upon the hidden mass below the institutional waves.
To repeat, the report seeks to facilitate a single practical goal, though one driven by a theologically grounded argument: “organize for ongoing counsel among the divided”; keep our communion churches talking, engaging somehow, with a modicum of Christian charity and hope. That means loosening some structural demands for membership and giving permitted space for new forms of relationship. The theological presuppositions for this include the following: the only way that true unity will be restored or achieved is through the growth of charity among churches; since charity is not something we can simply orchestrate, but is in the hands of God to infuse by grace, any kind of ecclesiastical structure that dilates patience among Anglicans — no final schisms, acceptance of loosened bonds of communion, and common counsel — will offer an expanded space for such divine work to touch the church.
But what is the theological character of this time, as the report imagines? What happens in time, what has happened in past times of the communion, and what does the report think will happen in the time that these structural readjustments might help gain for our churches? There is a certain reluctance to clarify this, which I believe masks some of the deeper realities running beneath the surface of the communion’s life. One of the essential characteristics of the ideal of Ephesians 4 is, ironically, the strategically ineffective nature of the church’s life. The church’s virtues, that is, are rooted in the Christological figure, the incarnate form of Jesus, the God-Man, the most divinely powerful ineffective human person there has been or ever will be. To propose the virtues of Ephesians 4 as a practical means to unity is not so much false as it is paradoxically dangerous: it requires both enormous risk on the part of any institution, as well as a profound realism, “counting the cost” of ecclesial discipleship. Let me touch on some of the strategically ineffective aspects of those elements that the report ostensibly relies upon in its hopes, in an effort to indicate how radically daring, as well as frightening, the report’s vision really is.
1. Conciliar Life
The report seems to put a lot of its eggs into the conciliar basket: churches, and the communion’s churches especially, are called into the kind of common and extended counsel that will prove the vehicle for their healing. Even if our communion is imperfect, “we meet” (I quote the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu). Indeed, the virtues of Ephesians 4 are honed for such common counsel.
The problem here is that common counsel, in its focused conciliar form, has been long disdained by Anglicans (and by many others, and pace 49). Historically, we might rightly be able to describe long periods of discernment over some matters (though perhaps fewer than we imagine), in which successive Anglican synods revisit an issue, and eventually rearticulate (“develop”) formulae and refashion ecclesiastical order. But if synods are not submitted to by member churches or leaders, their gathering comes to resemble less the Ephesian church ideal than the seething and metamorphosing political legislatures designed to mirror the changing will of citizens (52 contrasts contestation within the church with true schism; but in a political arena, that line is blurred). Political parliaments are not holy synods governed by the kinds of spiritual gifts and fruit outlined in Ephesians 4.
Indeed, if this is so, I admit that we may need to modify claims to sanctity by many synods of classical standing! In any case, the fact that synodical decisions — even when they are not officially labeled as such (e.g., Lambeth, Primates’ Meetings, ACC) — have consistently been flouted by bishops and priests, have undermined trust in the “conciliar” vision altogether, and garnered deep skepticism among observers. “The next season of Anglican life should focus on perseverance amid disagreement about important questions of orthodoxy and ethics, on the way to a commonly discerned holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the one Church of Christ” (39). Is it reasonable to believe (cf. 43) that more counsel will resolve the current disagreements on sexuality? Or is such an extension of time for the historical practice of Anglican counsel a call to a rather peculiar form of faith?
2. Are There Structures That Support “Holy” Council?
The report tells us (4) that the governing issue of “character,” based on Ephesians, is the necessary motive and informer of the communion’s demanded structural adaptation. How shall we then untangle the linkage between character of structure, given the particular history of conciliar degradation? This ought to be the test of the report’s concrete proposals: does “de-centering” the communion’s ordering current from Canterbury — both in definition and in the way meetings/councils are held — spring from and reflect Ephesians 4? If not, what would or would do so more “effectively” (assuming that is even possible)?
Ephesians fits uncomfortably within a clear organizational pattern. St. Paul emphasizes the “one” body, of course, and mutual offering and sharing of gifts. But he also emphasizes “subjection” — “mutual” in a general way, but also in other quite specific ways with respect to this or that particular relationship (husband and wife, children and parents, slaves and masters). At the same time, St. Paul, on another level of relationship, describes himself as an apostle, and thus as someone whose ministry is “foundational” for the church in a way that is distinct.
Finally, and most especially, the Ephesians’ structures of identity are cast in terms of the “old” and the “new” human being (Jesus being the antitype of the latter), darkness and light, the forms of which are given primarily in moral terms — speech, honesty, sexual purity, correction, and (as in the report’s cited passage) relational attitudes of humility, forgiveness, patience, and love. How do organizational models and adaptations reflect any of this, let alone promote it? The report does not speak to this. Nor can it! While St. Paul can urge his readers to pursue the life of the “new human being,” that life is given by God “through grace” in a divine “quickening” (Eph 2). If perseverance in counsel is a means of healing for the communion, it is so because it is also the gift of God.
3. God’s Intervention
The report notes that “Anglicans disagree, however, about what constitutes the holy life” (43). As in other letters, St. Paul speaks of the life redeemed by God in Christ in terms of contrast between darkness and light. The contrast is not really given in terms of degrees of illumination, although obviously Christians themselves live, at any given moment, in places of seeming instability. If that were not case, apostolic exhortations would themselves be pointless. Still, the “disagreements” in play within the Communion today are themselves are exceedingly deep, and reflect the radical contrasts at work in the redemptive framework St. Paul describes.
The verses of Ephesians 4 that the report underlines are written in a context of other verses (not cited in the report) that engage a range of moral acts: sex, the body, and — tied to other discussions in the Scriptures — death and creation. Thus, the points of Anglican “contestation” are not accidental features of Christian self-understanding and witness. Indeed, one of the sources of division is deep disagreement over what constitutes in fact these embodiments of darkness and light, over the very character of human life as made by and lived before God more broadly. There is a reason why our institutional structures have not been able to bear the load of the passions surrounding these differences: everything depends on them.
One might argue, in response, that there is some hierarchy of virtues in play in the Scriptures, with humility and patience at the top, and other forms of life and relationship noted by St. Paul (what we do with our bodies) at the bottom. But the report makes no sign of asserting such a thing. Instead, the report lays out a paradox: we disagree about holy living, but we will live together according to the standards of holy living. This amounts to an astonishing sentiment that the report then commends to Anglicans as a special vocation: “a dogged refusal to give up on each other” (45). The whole sentence is worth quoting:
A dogged refusal to give up on each other, to remain in relationship despite deep and significant disagreement, can be a remarkable witness to the power of Christ to bring unity in a divided world, and a foretaste of the day when all things in heaven and on earth will be brought together under Christ (Eph. 1:10).
The meaning of this phrase is left hanging, perhaps because its implications, bound to the person and work of Jesus, are so difficult to hear.
4. The Divine Burden of Unity
The report, in discussing potential ways of approaching intra-Anglican division, makes use of a rich array of ecumenical exemplars and agreements that Anglicans have reached with Christians of over traditions. Although there is an acknowledgment that the ecumenical analogues only go so far (cf. 37), the reader is nonetheless left with the impression that Anglicans can at least treat each other with the same kinds of creative ecclesial adjustments that we have been afforded by working with our ecumenical partners.
This is only true, however, if we take the moral demands of these ecumenical relations far more seriously than we do, or than the report seems to indicate. To overcome our separations with Catholics and Orthodox is to engage a path that is hardly inviting; and the appeal to ecumenical relations can seem like an offer of benign possibility that in fact reality contradicts. Is it even plausible to think that, within a single Anglican province, like the Episcopal Church, we would be willing to offer each other such patient latitude?
In any case, Anglican Communion divisions, contemporary and embodied in current judgments and antipathies, are experientially quite distinct from today’s historically evolved separations between other Christian traditions, lamentable as these may be. Anglicans today are not to each other convivial ecumenical partners. We are, rather, Cain and Abel. Behind this lies the reality of bitter sin and rebellion, crouching by the door and actually leaping. Those familiar with my views know that this way of looking at Christian division — as a sin against God and at the same time as, in its embodiment, a judgment by God for the sin against charity — has been my particular concern. Perhaps it is a narrow one, but I have pressed it over and over because I believe it is foundational to the reality of Christian ecclesial existence, Anglican and ecumenical.
The antipathies that reign within the Anglican Communion are widespread, deep, and toxic. Behind them is a history of real mischief, deceit, thievery, and malice that colors the Anglican Communion’s relations over the past few decades. Its tokens are scattered across the internet and a wide web of personal human memory. They now inform a range of local ecclesial habits and reactions in North America, the United Kingdom, Africa, Asia, and beyond.
Perhaps the report does not acknowledge these realities in their specificity out of courtesy, or discretion, or a sense of the protocols demanded by the genre of ecclesiastical reports. That said, the report’s cunning innocence may lie in letting these deeper and more troubling realities rise up through the simple process of reflection. Love covers all sin; but time perhaps must first set such sin in the light, to be seen, and even wither.
Here we come, at last, to the character of time that the report presses upon Anglicans with its modest proposals for recasting the shape of communion counsel. “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:8-9). This, at least, is my interpretation of the report’s underlying premise, applied to our church: time is a divine gift, irrelevant to God, except insofar as it can be used by human creatures for repentance. Our churches desperately need this time into which we can be led and be changed into the image of our Lord. All the intrinsic ineffectiveness of our structures — old, renewed, adapted — is, in our perseverance within their weak scaffolding, but the mirror of our willingness to be “carried” where we do not wish to be taken (John 21:18).
This, it seems to me, is the main reason to support, and support wholeheartedly, the report’s proposals. It is not because the proposals will change the heart of our leaders. Thus far, Anglican counsel has proven strategically ineffective. Given that efforts to deploy its forms — Lambeth, Primates, Windsor, Covenant, and more have not been able to dislodge the grip of that history of stubborn Anglican resistance to this Ephesians ideal, it is unlikely that even a revamped structure of discussion and decision will suddenly offer powerful new tools of ecclesial repair. Even the report wonders, at one point, if its discussion sounds like a “counsel of despair” (44), though it firmly rejects such a characterization (as it should).
Time, buying time, extending time, persevering in time, with whatever grudging or even grinding movement and difficulty — enduring even our rejection of time, as it were — is a gift to be seized, quite simply, because, in its Pauline form of patience and humility, trust and faith uttered in Ephesians, it represents the way of Jesus, of the Cross (46, “the soil of his sacrifice”), indeed of the whole directed frame of the universe as God’s cherished work. This endurance of time is what we are living, because God has made it so. To specify the claim of 45 further and necessarily: a dogged refusal to give up on the other means dying for the other.
That being the case, however, no one should be lulled into thinking that a church that “perseveres” in discernment amid disagreement, that keeps coming to the table with whatever reluctance, that drags out the postponement of definitive schisms while figuring out new ways to protect personal conscience by this or that form of distancing and realigning, that wonders when it is that God will vindicate the truth among us, and thus that prays over and over again for God’s effective illumination, and that in the meantime keeps adjusting ineffective structures and rationales for such adjustment — no one should imagine that this is anything other than a kind of death to self. And thus, those who would embrace this vision are called to something far more profound than rephrasing the constitution of the Anglican Consultative Council.
There is something else that must accompany this report and the various steps of its positive reception, should, God willing, such steps be taken. While it may or may not result in any new form of behavior or decision-making, surely the first, the primary, the foundational act that should form the soil of this report’s proposals is a communion-wide liturgical act of penitence, the substance of which is assumed by each bishop, each priest, leader, and member. Not simply a new Lambeth Conference in Africa or Asia or Latin America, but a Lambeth Litany, grander even than the Great Litanies of the past. Repentance, of course, cannot be orchestrated anymore than unity can be strategized. Head offices have their limitations. Still, someone must pray, and pray fervently: “turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my God” (Jer. 31:18).
The Rev. Ephraim Radner, PhD is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. The author of over a dozen books, Dr. Radner was previously rector of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado. His range of pastoral experience includes Burundi, where he worked as a missionary, Haiti, inner-city Cleveland, and Connecticut.