The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



The Rt. Rev. John C. Bauerschmidt: Book Review

The Fate of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006), xiii + 306 pp.
Ephraim Radner & Philip Turner, authors.

The conviction that ecclesiology is the proper lens to view the controversy over human sexuality now existing within the Anglican Communion is a persuasive one. This collection of essays by Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner, Episcopal priests and theologians who place the understanding of the church as “communion” at the heart of the matter, begins with the assumption that the church is usefully understood as a communion or koinonia, a fellowship rooted in and living out the relationship between the persons of the Triune God. They offer a sustained rationale of why we ought to see the furthering of communion as the way forward in this controversy; in fact, the dispute is a providentially provided opportunity to the church to step up to the mark and find anew its “vocation to live in communion” (p.295). Communion requires patience, mutual forbearance, and sacrifice, and part of the “agony of Anglicanism” about which our authors write so passionately is the re-discovery of this truth.

“Communion ecclesiology” has come to play an important role in the ecumenical dialogue between Christian churches, divided now not only by historic issues but also by their own ecclesial self-understanding. It has proved attractive to Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant theologians as divided Christians have sought to recover the unity of the church. Communion ecclesiology has provided a base as well as Anglicans have considered their own common life in the midst of disagreement, in the Eames Commission Report of 1989/1990, the Virginia Report of 1997, and most recently in the Windsor Report of 2004. The same communion tools used to foster unity between divided Christians are now employed to safeguard the fellowship that already exists between the churches of the Anglican Communion, perilously threatened by fracture and schism.

The controversy about human sexuality has been a revealing one for ecclesiology. As the place of gay and lesbian persons has been reassessed in the churches of the First World, fissures of disagreement have opened up not only within those churches but also between the churches that constitute the Anglican Communion. As a communion of churches, a common life is espoused by the members, but the presence of serious disagreement raises questions about that life. Churches may insist that actions taken (like the consecration of a bishop living in a partnered same-sex relationship) constitute no breach of fellowship; but if those actions are seen as such a breach by other churches then there must be a common resolution for fellowship to continue.

The dispute tests the very meaning of “communion” itself. How do the churches of the Anglican Communion take common counsel together and then live within its constraints? Can there really be a Communion with no commonly agreed commonality? As the Communion has developed in the wake of the British colonial experience, beginning with the formation of the Episcopal Church itself, there has been an impetus toward the articulation of “mutual responsibility and interdependence” between the members, even as churches in newly independent states asserted their distinct identities. The provinces are autonomous only in relation to others, not in some absolute sense. “Instruments of unity” have developed over time and been recognized as means by which the interdependence and coherence of the Communion are expressed: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates’ Meeting. It is through these that resolution of disputed issues is sought, as the Communion seeks to be something more than an association of independent churches with a common history and sentimental ties, or perhaps even (as seems to be increasingly the danger) churches with competing agendas in conflict with one another.

No one should mistake this book as nothing more than a livre de circonstance. It is a sustained work of theology with insights that go beyond the presenting issue. In a section sketching the social context in which this crisis takes place, Ephraim Radner invites us to see it as an instance of American exceptionalism. The “children of Cain”, influenced by their seemingly endless frontier, choose a liminal and progressive “primordialism” (p. 33) that seeks to overcome the Fall, rather than the settled Catholic emphases on a church with historical continuity and universal reach. It is a characteristic American temptation, and the figure of Cain appears and reappears in the American cultural imagination. In a section on the American “evasion of communion” (p. 220), Radner fills out further this cultural picture by reminding us that “consent” (Phil. 2:5, “being of one mind”) is best seen as the defining characteristic of communion, a “common and mutual subjection that represents God’s life”, rather than the often appealed to “conversation” (p. 234).

Radner later identifies continuity and community as marks of “communion character” (p. 77) as he defines a Christian conservatism that bears little relationship to what most people think of when they hear those two words together. This chapter on “Apprehending the Truth”, with its appeal to a political typology of “liberal” and “conservative” (so often eschewed by others) as the best way of understanding the Anglican confrontation, was dense and intriguing. Since both “liberalism” and “conservatism” are rooted in the conceits of the Enlightenment, more work needs to be done here if “conservatism” is to be used instead of “orthodoxy”, given Radner’s identification of the cataleptic (not yet fully present) nature of orthodoxy.

The use of the “children of Cain” points “to the figural contrast between the progeny of the ‘old Adam’ and the ‘new Adam’ of the Body of Christ’” (p.32). Radner’s contributions are marked again and again by this figural reading of Scripture, and a resolute intention to plot the history of the church even to our own day within the Scriptural story as a whole. The commitment to the figural reading of Scripture is also manifested in his understanding of the distinctive Anglican tradition, a disciplined reading of Scripture in community (a point made by both Radner and Turner). Radner reminds us that this “Scripture-in-communion” (p. 106) practice is the most clear witness to communion ecclesiology within pre-Tractarian Anglicanism, prior to the emergence of the Episcopal Church, which defined itself in large part by the constraints it embraced in regard to keeping fellowship with the Church of England.

Philip Turner, among a number of other clear and lucid essays, reminds us in “Episcopal Authority” of the relationship between authority and community. After investigating the gap between formulary and practice in the exercise of modern Episcopal authority, Turner reminds that authority is a way of investing power (Weber’s “the ability to achieve purpose”) “with moral and religious accountability”; a way of linking ruler and subject “in a common bond of fundamental belief and in a common form of life” (p. 140). With common beliefs and a common way of life, a proper emphasis can be placed on the discernment of the virtues within persons who can live out these beliefs and augment them. It is with these virtues that true authority lies. All of which is eroded by the embraced pluralism of modern political and ecclesial life.

Still, Turner reminds us of Alisdair McIntyre’s insight into the pluralism of tradition, and the key role played by authority in those circumstances, “maintaining and augmenting the common traditions of the church in the midst of a struggle over their meaning and implications” (p. 143). With pluralism a given, the key role of authority within the church becomes even more necessary in order to bring coherence and maintain communion. Bishops, if they are to do anything, must first “further a common set of beliefs and practices” (p. 155) in the interests of communion, and it is the abandonment of this principle in the holders of the episcopate that has led to the present impasse.

Both Radner and Turner are clear that the communion emphasis they present, and which they believe represents most clearly the Anglican past and the Anglican future, is in clear distinction to other emphases. This collection is the most sustained attempt I know to articulate what has been called a “communion conservative” position on the matter at hand. The left begins, not with communion, but with the prophetic call to justice. The right begins with neither communion or advocacy, but with the church as guardian of truth. Turner contrasts these perspectives with those of the authors of the Windsor Report: “…though they care mightily about truth and justice…they see unity, communion, and holiness of life as providing something like a circle of grace… unity, communion, and holiness of life are constitutive of the calling of the church. Truth and justice (along with love) are the fruits that arise within this circle of grace…” (p. 202-3).

The authors of these essays do not dispute that the Anglican Communion itself may not survive, yet they believe the call to communion is a gift that Anglicanism witnesses to even in its agony. Again and again they call us to see time as a gift that God gives us for the working out of his will. Patience involves suffering. But in this present controversy, we can see by faith the figure of Jesus’ own death and resurrection.

- The Rt. Rev’d John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee






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