Pro Communione: Theological Essays on the Anglican Covenant

Introduction

A Covenantal Horizon

¹

Benjamin M. Guyer

Come now, and let us reason together.

Isa 1:18 (AV)

The Anglican Communion is currently struggling, both loudly and painfully, with a wide variety of matters. There are disputes over human sexuality and the place of women in holy orders; there are disputes over the unity of the Communion and the reliability of its authority structures. These and other debates converge—and sometimes collide—at a single point: the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant, which offers a procedural framework for working through these issues and any others that will arise in the future. The Anglican Covenant offers historical and theological rationales for why the Anglican Communion should pursue—rather than flee from—Christian interdependence. The present introduction seeks to perform four distinct tasks. I first offer a historical outline of the use and development of ecclesial covenants in the Anglican tradition. I then mark the ways that the proposed Anglican Covenant draws upon this same history. In the third section, I consider several criticisms of the Covenant, raising formal questions about the perspicuity, and thus the viability, of such critiques. I conclude with some brief comments on the shared aspirations and thematic harmonies of the essays that comprise this volume. In the pages and chapters that follow, it is our goal to touch both hearts and minds.

Anglicans and Covenants

Ecumenical Covenants

The Anglican use of ecclesial covenants may be traced to 1948, with the First Assembly of the World Council of Churches. Because of these origins, the Anglican Communion Covenant reflects concerns for global unity and peace that developed in the aftermath of the First World War, culminating in the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the World Council of Churches in 1948. During this quarter century, covenant became and remained a key theme in those secular and religious discourses concerned with attaining political concord. We see this as early as 1920, when the Covenant of the League of Nations was enacted. Its stated aim was to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security.² The creation of the League the previous year had been a matter of widespread interest and support by secular and religious leaders, and consequently provided a sharp impetus for the development of Christian ecumenism. In January 1920, in an encyclical addressed Unto the Churches of Christ everywhere, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople followed the lead provided by the League of Nations and urged the founding of an international body of churches that might call itself the League of Churches.³ This encyclical became the first, albeit unintentional, step toward creating the World Council of Churches, although it must be underscored that the Orthodox were concerned not only with politics but with evangelical witness. The penultimate paragraph of the Encyclical reads, Finally, it is the duty of the churches which bear the sacred name of Christ not to forget or neglect any longer his new and great commandment of love. Nor should they continue to fall piteously behind the political authorities, who, truly applying the spirit of the Gospel and the teaching of Christ, have under happy auspices already set up the so-called League of Nations in order to defend justice and cultivate charity and agreement between the nations.⁴ The creation of a League of Churches first demanded an admonished and repentant Christendom.

Concerns for international stability, both within and beyond the Church, were also discussed in earnest at the 1920 Lambeth Conference, which began several months later on 2 July.⁵ The bishops supported the founding of the League of Nations in Resolutions 3–6. Resolution 3 reflected both ecumenical and political concerns in its conclusion, which stated that the bishops were of the opinion that steps should immediately be taken, whether by co-operation or concurrent action, whereby the whole Church of Christ may be enabled with one voice to urge the principles of the League of Nations upon the peoples of the world. At the same time, the bishops received a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and devoted the single largest bloc of their resolutions to what they termed The Reunion of Christendom.⁶ The most important of these was Resolution 9, the lengthy Appeal to all Christian People. Its text still rings with notes of urgency; the bishops recognized the responsibility which rests upon us at this time, and wrote of the need to associate ourselves in penitence and prayer with all those who deplore the divisions of Christian people. Only a truly united Church, they argued, could give a common service to the world. Like the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Lambeth Fathers believed that the wellbeing of the world was secured through Christian penitence, the necessary precursor of Christian unity.

In the ensuing decade, Anglican support grew for the League of Nations and the burgeoning ecumenical movement. Like its predecessor, the Lambeth Conference of 1930 supported both. With a bloc of seventeen resolutions, ecumenism was clearly the more important of the two, although three resolutions endorsed the League of Nations and its work.⁷ By this point in time, however, a number of Anglicans were also personally involved in the ecumenical movement and were directly contributing to the formation of the World Council of Churches (WCC). Most well known today is perhaps William Temple, who participated in the Faith and Order conferences of 1927 and 1935, the Committee of Thirty-Five, which drew up plans for the WCC in 1936, and the Committee of Fourteen, which drafted the WCC constitution in 1938 and which Temple also chaired.⁸ Following Adrian Hastings, Stephen Spencer speculates that had Temple lived, he would have been the WCC’s first president.⁹ If so, he would not have been the only high-ranking Anglican in the WCC; other ecumenically-devoted Anglicans also involved themselves in pre-WCC ecumenical bodies, laying the foundation for ecumenism as it now stands. The founder of Faith and Order was Charles Henry Brent, bishop of Western New York in the American Episcopal Church, and bishops George Bell and Charles Gore were among those who participated in both the Faith and Order and the Life and Work conferences.

¹⁰

The Second World War profoundly disrupted the momentum of the previous decade on both ecumenical and political fronts, but covenant remained an important concept in both spheres. Despite the failure of the League of Nations to prevent the outbreak of another world war, the United Nations was founded in 1945 and soon began drafting its Covenant on Human Rights. This became the basis for the two covenants contained in the International Bill of Human Rights: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.¹¹ When the World Council of Churches held its First Assembly in 1948, it too used the language of covenant to express its intentions. In the Message released at the conclusion of the Assembly, the WCC stated: Here at Amsterdam we have committed ourselves afresh to Him, and have covenanted with one another in constituting the World Council of Churches. We intend to stay together. We call upon Christian congregations everywhere to endorse and fulfill this covenant in their relations one with another. In thankfulness to God we commit the future to Him.¹² The 1948 Lambeth Conference, the first Lambeth Conference since before the start of World War II, endorsed the United Nations Covenant on Human Rights in Resolution 8 and embraced the WCC in Resolution 76. The final lines of the latter resolution read, The Conference hopes that the results of the Assembly at Amsterdam may be made widely known throughout the Anglican Communion, and that an active interest in the World Council of Churches may be encouraged in all dioceses and parishes. Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher intended for the first post-war Lambeth Conference to revive the whole idea of the Lambeth Conference as the great family gathering of the Anglican Communion.¹³ These resolutions, which reveal the strong thematic continuity between earlier Lambeth Conferences and that of 1948, indicate that the Archbishop attained his goal. With the WCC at the center of Anglican, Orthodox, and Protestant ecumenical endeavors,¹⁴ 1948 marked the definitive entry of covenant into both Anglican and ecumenical discourse, just as its presence in international politics had already been secured by the United Nations Covenant on Human Rights.

A British Covenant

The hope that fired the World Council of Churches quickly burned itself into the Anglican imagination. A number of Anglican leaders attended the 1948 Assembly, including Archbishop Fisher, bishop Stephen Neill, future Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, and Oliver S. Tomkins, then Assistant General Secretary of the WCC but future Bishop of Bristol.¹⁵ Tomkins provides the direct link between the covenanting of the WCC and that which was later taken up into Anglican ecumenical ecclesiology. In Regional and Confessional Loyalties in the Universal Church, his speech to the 1948 Assembly, Tomkins identified the problematic which ecumenical covenanting was intended to address by outlining various forms of ecclesiastical affiliation. He surmised that Scripture only recognizes the mystical body of Christ and its local manifestation. Thus any other definition of the Church—whether regional, national, denominational, or international—has only a temporal legitimacy because it has been produced by the division of Christendom.¹⁶ Tomkins began his speech with a discussion of regional and national churches, arguing against both nationalism and the reduction of any church to national—and thus secular—borders. This allowed him, in turn, to propose that churches which define themselves either regionally or nationally are far more likely to reproduce within themselves those patterns of sin that are most prevalent in the surrounding culture.¹⁷ Such churches have a place within the scheme of salvation because human beings are defined by regional and national identities. But if any church is content with such a limited identity, it stands in the way of Christian unity.¹⁸ Tomkins was evidently less concerned with international confessions and particular denominations; he spent the bulk of his address speaking to the problem posed by regional and national churches. The problem which he and the World Council of Churches faced was that of uniting diverse churches, so frequently and complacently defined by the boundaries of the secular nation-state, into an ecumenical whole. With the covenanting that concluded the 1948 Assembly, Tomkins was given his answer.

In his key 1952 article Implications of the Ecumenical Movement, Tomkins proposed that the covenanting of the WCC carried five implications for all churches. The first and second implications are most important for our present concerns.¹⁹ First, Tomkins perceived that "this covenant relationship brings us to the end of . . . mere comparative ecclesiology.²⁰ Like many others, Tomkins recognized that by mid-century, the ecumenical movement had produced points of confessional convergence which rendered null and void any lingering belief that ecclesial division was exclusively theological. However, amidst this convergence was a lingering danger; in comparing belief systems, he continued, we are tempted by the same process to justify them.²¹ Discussing confessional differences should serve only as a first step toward greater unity, and never as an excuse for eliding commitment to Christian unity. The second implication followed immediately upon this: the essence of our covenant with each other is to deny that our denominations are enough.²² Here Tomkins pushed for international confessions," which he discussed only briefly in 1948, to engage themselves in the pursuit of greater unity. Those familiar with the work of Michael Ramsey will recognize a similar theme—and it is not surprising, given Ramsey’s presence at the 1948 Assembly and his own deep, ecumenical commitments. Like Tomkins, Ramsey envisioned the progressive dissolution of denominational identities as churches traveled the road to ecumenical wholeness.²³ But each also believed that churches could not simply escape the realities of denominational division here and now.²⁴ As with his 1948 speech, Tomkins recognized the facts of historical existence and confessional commitment, even as he proclaimed the limitation of any commitment that shirked the interdependent, twofold need for Christian unity and Christian witness.

In Britain, these aspirations came to fuller fruition twelve years later at the 1964 British Conference on Faith and Order. Christians from many denominations participated, although the Roman Catholic Church only sent observers. As bishop of Bristol, Tomkins chaired the Conference and led it in adopting the covenantal model of 1948 as the guiding pattern for British ecumenism. The Conference resolved: United in our urgent desire for One Church Renewed for Mission, this Conference invites the member churches of the British Council of Churches, in appropriate groupings such as nations, to covenant together to work and pray for the inauguration of union by a date agreed amongst them.²⁵ Of 474 voting conference members, 329 of whom were official church delegates, only 5 voted against the resolution and merely 12 abstained. Inspired by this, the Conference continued in its next resolution: We dare to hope that this date should not be later than Easter Day, 1980. We believe that we should offer obedience to God in a commitment as decisive as this.²⁶ This dare to hope formed the immediate background of two Anglican developments later in the decade. The first was Resolution 47 of the 1968 Lambeth Conference, which encouraged covenanting proposals at the provincial level insofar as they included agreement on apostolic faith and order and took place under the general direction of the bishop. Second was the development of Local Ecumenical Projects (LEPs).²⁷ In less than three years, 170 LEPs had been initiated as a direct response to the 1964 Conference²⁸ and by 1998 there were 837 LEPs across Britain.²⁹ Notably, one form of LEP today is the Covenant Partnership, which is entered into through a Declaration of Intent and maintained by a Constitution.³⁰ In 1964, the era of covenanting had dawned.

The late-1960s and 1970s saw the rapid development of grassroots covenanting. At a national level, however, similar developments ensued throughout Britain. In Wales, five churches, including the Church in Wales, covenanted together in 1975. In 1978, the British Council of Churches established the Churches’ Council for Covenanting, which produced the 1980 report Towards Visible Unity: Proposals for a Covenant. This was intended to fulfill the resolutions from 1964. The bulk of the report was a series of liturgies, ranging from those for the ordination of bishops, presbyters, and deacons and other ministers, to those for the celebration of the Eucharist and confirmation. The most important liturgy was entitled The making of the Covenant, and it culminated with a vow of common decision making.³¹ The report contained an entire chapter devoted to this topic, elucidating that, If the Covenant is to be an effective instrument of common action for mission and a means of growth into greater unity, commitment to common decision making will be crucial.³² In the liturgy, the presiding minister was to declare: Within this Covenant, we bind ourselves to develop methods of decision making in common, to act together for witness and service, to aid one another in Christian growth, and to honour the authority of shared decisions. When the people were then asked, Do you so bind yourselves? they were to respond: By God’s grace, we do.³³ The Churches’ Council for Covenanting elaborated: This enterprise, like the Covenant itself, must depend on a growth of trust between the Churches as they move towards each other.³⁴ This was indeed a dare to hope, and to many it appeared attainable.

Despite broad support across Britain, the Church of England did not accede to the British Covenant. Signs pointing to the possibility of such an outcome had already appeared on the horizon but they had been ignored. Towards Visible Unity included a Memorandum of Dissent composed by three of the Council’s Anglican members. Their fundamental point of contention concerned episcopacy; although ordinations to the episcopate were part of the British Covenant, Towards Visible Unity read: It is recognized that as Churches are accepting one another in this Covenant, so they are accepting one another’s ministers, including those persons carrying out functions analogous to those of bishops.³⁵ Against this, the Memorandum called for the total and invariable adoption of episcopal ordination, which it claimed had been the original intent of the Council. The much weaker understanding of the episcopate which emerged in the final text of the report missed a fundamental principle of Catholic order and erected a further barrier to our closer associations with other parts of the Church Catholic.³⁶ This point is important, given that the Roman Catholic Church had refused membership in the British Council of Churches. Robert Runcie, then only recently elevated to the See of Canterbury, emerged as a strong critic of the Covenant’s ecumenical viability for these same reasons, although he voted for its ratification in the end.³⁷ The Covenant nonetheless failed in General Synod by a slight majority. Adrian Hastings later described the results of this upset as numbed uncertainty and a sort of ecumenical despair.³⁸ Only in 1982, with the World Council of Churches report Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry and the first report by the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, did ecumenism again appear viable in Britain—but even here a change had taken place. Borrowing again from Hastings, these reports together provided the ground for a new kind of ecumenical doctrinal orthodoxy in the Church of England, which involved ecumenical commitment to both the British Council of Churches and those outside of it, above all Roman Catholics.³⁹ It was no longer clear that covenanting had a