Editor’s Note: Part One may be found here.
Part Two
Degrees of Communion
There are several examples of differences that have been church-dividing in some contexts but not in others. In fact, the church that seemed to be the bulwark against both of these two contested issues — the Catholic Church — has experienced serious internal tensions on these matters. As I wrote about last year, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) issued a document, Fiducia Supplicans, which permits blessings of persons in same-sex relationships while claiming that such blessings are of persons and not of relationships. While a schism has not taken place, the rejection of this document by many conferences of bishops throughout the world was a singular event in modern Catholicism.
In Part I, I looked at the state of play in the Episcopal Church, in which we now have two teachings on marriage that are in tension with one another, and how this phenomenon of two teachings is neither unique to Anglicanism nor foreign to its history. In fact, it can be found in the Anglican Church in North America, which was founded precisely because of the two teachings on marriage in the Episcopal Church.
In Part II, I will gesture toward an answer to the question, What are we to make of this, by looking to the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council and seeing how it can be identified in the Anglican tradition.
The first thing to say is that some degree of contradictory teaching within churches will be a feature of ecclesial life for the foreseeable future. I do not pretend that this is a desirable reality. Unless one is a Unitarian Universalist, I doubt there are many people who wake up hoping for more conflicting teachings in their churches. But my sense is that we will see more of this, not less, in the coming decades. The fact that there is substantial ambiguity within the Catholic Church over an issue like the appropriate pastoral response to same-sex couples tells us that even the churches with the most hierarchical magisterial structures of teaching authority and who we would expect to be the final bulwark against such developments are not immune.
Degrees of Communion in the Second Vatican Council
This state of affairs in another reminder to return to one of the most important ecclesiological features of the Second Vatican Council. It almost seems constituent of much of Protestantism to think of the notion of “communion” or of being “in communion” like an on/off switch. Hence the radical proliferation of denominations. The Anglican tradition has not been immune to this, of course, both in terms of the choice of visible separation as a solution to doctrinal disagreement and the claim that one is either in or out of communion with this or that group.
The ecclesiological point (which my predecessor, Christopher Wells, made over and over) is as simple as is it profound: “Christ the Lord founded one Church and one Church only.” Thus begins the Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis redintegratio):
However, many Christian communions present themselves to men as the true inheritors of Jesus Christ; all indeed profess to be followers of the Lord but differ in mind and go their different ways, as if Christ Himself were divided (1 Cor 1:13). Such division openly contradicts the will of Christ, scandalizes the world, and damages the holy cause of preaching the Gospel to every creature (Unitatis redintegratio 1).
If there is only one church, this principal supersedes the scandal of vision, at least formally. Those who have been baptized into Christ Jesus are members of the Body of Christ. Full stop. Thus, we can never say that we are “out of communion” with another Christian. This is both absurd and an oxymoron. Those who are “in Christ” cannot be divided from one another.
The conceptual and linguistic solution offered by Vatican II is to speak of “degrees” of communion:
The differences that exist in varying degrees between them and the Catholic Church — whether in doctrine and sometimes in discipline, or concerning the structure of the Church — do indeed create many obstacles, sometimes serious ones, to full ecclesiastical communion. The ecumenical movement is striving to overcome these obstacles. But even in spite of them it remains true that all who have been justified by faith in Baptism are members of Christ’s body, and have a right to be called Christian, and so are correctly accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church (Unitatis redintegratio 3).
The visual metaphor that is helpful is a rubber band: the tighter it is pulled, the longer is reaches and the thinner the band appears.
The decrees of communion have practical implications. For example, from the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, while the various Eastern churches are not in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, they are nonetheless treated as a full and proper church with unambiguously valid sacraments and ordinations and they are welcome to receive the Eucharist in a Catholic Church (regardless of whether that is reciprocated).
While baptism “establishes a sacramental bond of unity which links all who have been reborn by it,” the Decree on Ecumenism also claims that “of itself Baptism is only a beginning, an inauguration wholly directed toward the fullness of life in Christ. Baptism, therefore, envisages a complete profession of faith, complete incorporation in the system of salvation such as Christ willed it to be, and finally complete ingrafting in eucharistic communion” (Unitatis redintegratio 22.2).
Thus, the Roman Catholic Church teaches and acts toward the separated ecclesial communities in the West — including Anglicans — with a practical outworking of this claim. Since there is not a sufficient sharing of faith about the nature of the church, the place of sacred tradition, and beliefs about the sacraments, there is a degree of communion that does not rise to the level of eucharistic communion and thus eucharistic sharing. This is a simplistic summary of the ecclesiological claim.
Degrees of Communion in the Anglican Tradition
While I have used Roman Catholic sources thus far to engage with the reality of two different teachings on a matter within the same church, such a tension is not foreign to the Anglican tradition. The teachings were explicitly mooted in The Windsor Report (2004) and the proposed Anglican Covenant (2009), but neither text “invented” this for Anglicanism. Both texts assume that there is much more than simply a common baptism that enables full eucharistic communion. Despite all the charges from detractors about authoritarian overreach in Section 4 of the Covenant, which suggests possible “relational consequences” such as “provisional limitation of participation in, or suspension from, that Instrument [of Communion],” this is not a radical idea.
There are many actions that a Province could take which most would agree would raise the question about whether said Province could remain a part of the Anglican Communion: for example, formally approving lay presidency at the Eucharist; making episcopal ordinations optional and adopting presbyterial ordinations; rejecting the use of wine at Communion and adopting only grape juice; formally affirming polygamy, including for the clergy. The list could go on.
In other words, Anglicans already function with a working version of this approach to ecclesiology and communion: there is some degree of variability that is permissible, but it has limits. To cross those limits would result in certain relational consequences: the inability to have an interchangeability of clergy, questions about whether Eucharistic sharing is possible, etc. In fact, basically all churches have a version of the limits of diversity.
The key question is obvious: What are these limits of theological diversity? If this question seems like one from 20 years ago, it is only a reminder that it remains as prescient a question now as it was then (even if we pretend otherwise).
The Church of England and the Anglican tradition that developed from it contain a number of salient examples of such diversity. Within a few generations of the death of Thomas Cranmer, there were figures at the center of the Church of England, such as Lancelot Andrewes, who not only taught a theology of the Eucharist that was clearly contrary to what Cranmer intended the 1552 Book of Common Prayer to express, but argued that the prayer book could be interpreted in this Catholic direction.
One feature of these differences in eucharistic theology is even clearer in the theological and liturgical developments that occurred during the non-juror schism in Scotland and England, after the ascension of William and Mary. Some argued that William and Mary were not the rightful sovereigns, and concluded that they were free from the vows of submission to the crown in matters ecclesiological. It was in this same period that some ancient liturgical rites began to become available, particularly Apostolic Constitutions (sometimes referred to as the Clementine rite).
To oversimplify, some of these figures looked at these older rites and concluded that the current English and Scottish prayer books were insufficiently recognizable to the ancient church because they lacked any offering of the gifts of bread and wine or a clear enough expression that the bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ. Hence, the Scottish church ended up authorizing a eucharistic prayer that stands in the linguistic genealogy of the 1549 English Prayer Book, but includes features that no English prayer book ever had: a material offering of sacrifice (“Wherefore, O Lord, and heavenly Father, according to the institution of thy dearly beloved Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, we thy humble servants do celebrate and make here before thy divine majesty, with these thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto Thee, the memorial thy Son hath commanded us to make”) and an explicit request for the transformation of the gifts of bread and wine (“And we most humbly beseech thee, O merciful Father, to hear us, and of thy almighty goodness vouchsafe to bless and sanctify, with thy word and Holy Spirit, these thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine, that they may become the body and blood of thy most dearly beloved Son”).
These differences — whether the material offering of bread and wine is constitutive of the Eucharistic action and whether the eucharistic prayer expresses that one feature of such prayers is a request that God make the gifts of bread and wine the body and blood of Jesus — were clearly church-dividing at the time of the Reformation in the 16th century. For the Catholic Church and for various Orthodox churches, a rejection of these two items would be an impediment to full eucharistic communion.
And yet these differences have not been an impediment to full eucharistic communion between the Church of England and either the Scottish Episcopal Church or the Episcopal Church in this country. It is true that many members of the Church of England believe the eucharistic theology expressed in the Scottish-American tradition, but it is also clear that the 1662 Book of Common Prayer does not teach such a theology.
I mentioned before that the ACNA has allowed for two teachings on the ordination of women. This difference, it is important to note, is one that has clear precedent in the Anglican Communion. It was this very question that began the sequence of documents about ecclesiology and communion in the face of theological disagreements, starting with the Eames Commission, which produced The Virginia Report in 1997. This oft-quoted sentence gets to the heart of the central question: “How Anglicans might live together in the highest degree of communion possible while different views and practices concerning the ordination of women continued to be held within the Communion.”
In this respect, the ACNA has followed the approach of the Anglican Communion during the last 40-odd years to such matters, while those provinces like the Episcopal Church that have approved same-sex marriage have failed to follow the calls of the Communion on this issue to “wait for one another.” The most recent developments in the Church of England in the Living in Love and Faith process have further exacerbated this question because of the peculiar historical role that church has played in the development and life of what is now the Anglican Communion.
In the final part of this essay, I will suggest how Augustine might be able to resource the church going forward in light of this uneasy state of affairs.
