Wednesday, November 14, 2007

The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion: An Appraisal at a Time of Waiting

http://anglicancommunioninstitute.com/content/view/120/1/

[Anglican Communion Institute] 14 Nov 2007--In his lectures delivered at Wycliffe College last month, Ephraim Radner has given an historical account of conciliarism and has described how Anglicanism developed over time a set of Instruments intending to maintain unity of faith in the light of missionary expansion and the emergence of nations in the New World (among other things). This did not happen from ‘the top down' or by an anticipatory prophetic template. The relationship between the Instruments, and their relative weighting, interplay, etc, is due to a slow process of interrelationship and maturation, and flows from the fact that mission and growth is in God's hands: this requires constant prayer and reflection in the area of accountability and mutual forbearance, provision for which cannot be given beforehand by ecclesial fiat or one-size-fits-all polity design. This also prevents one from simply historisicing the Instruments, on the one hand (the first is more important than the last), or seeing them as matters of preference or choice-competitors for our politicking-on the other. Or, it should do. If this historical, or providential reality, is grasped, then it is less surprising, if not still disturbing, that the Communion is in a difficult time. This is all to do with the fact that Anglican Christianity has been a successful missionary movement, spanning the globe whilst maintaining-it has been hoped-an Anglican catholic face. What is required is that we understand how to preserve and steward what God has provided. But this must be done in accordance with certain basic assumptions about the character of Christian life provided by the Scriptures, and not in the name of institutional survival or peace-keeping only - two sure-fire ways to get in the way of God's purposes in the church, even in, or especially in, times of stress and strain. Ironically, these ‘peace-keeping' instincts are now shared on both ends of the theological spectrum: autonomy arguments on the part of national churches seeking to accommodate a new understanding of sexual ethics, on the one side; and on the other, efforts of individual dioceses and parishes, linked to individual Primates, to carve out zones of confessional purity and integrity - the zeal for which is in proportion to perceptions of how dire the situation is, or the knock-on effect of how pressured their existence appears to be, given efforts to move out of TEC and form new structures.

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