A Polity of Persuasion: Gift and Grief of Anglicanism

By Jeffrey W. Driver and Bruce N. Kaye

At an international level, Anglicanism has almost no mandating or juridical power. Stresses and threats of division over issues such as human sexuality have resulted in moves to enhance the Communion's central structures and instruments. However, it is becoming clear that there is little likelihood of substantial change in this direction succeeding, at least in the medium term. The challenge for Anglicanism is to make a "polity of persuasion" work more effectively. This volume seeks to identify some trends and shifts of emphasis in Anglican ecclesiology to serve that end.

Jeffrey Driver argues that there is more at stake in such an exercise than Anglican unity. In an ever-shrinking, pluralist, and conflicted world, where oneness is often forced by dominance, the People of God are called to model something different. The injunction of Jesus, "it is not so among you," challenged his followers to use power and live in community in a way that contrasted with what occurred "among the Gentiles" (Mark 10:41-45).
This is why the sometimes tedious debates about authority and structure in the Anglican Communion could actually matter--because they might have something to say about being human in community, about sharing power and coexisting, about living interdependently on a tiny and increasingly stressed planet. The Anglican experiment in dispersed authority, for all its grief, could be a powerful gift.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Apr 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630871703

Jeffrey W. Driver

Jeffrey W. Driver was the Anglican Archbishop of Adelaide, Australia, for eleven years, and before that, the Bishop of Gippsland. In retirement, he is a research scholar with the University of Divinity in Melbourne and acting Principal of Newton College in Papua New Guinea.

Book preview

Foreword

For some time Jeffrey Driver has been thinking and reading about the nature of the Anglican tradition of faith and how to interpret the current condition of the Anglican Communion. Now we have his considered treatment of some of the most important issues facing Anglicans. This is a book to be read and pondered. In an increasingly well-populated field, it offers some realistic and helpful ways of understanding what is going on in Anglicanism worldwide that are creative and practical. The book is based on wide research and practical wisdom.

In a dispersed communion, what kind of authority is appropriate to the history of Anglican faith and practice and what are the consequences of a notion of dispersed authority in such a community? Driver locates this diversity, not only in terms of contemporary church life, but also in terms of diversity over time. The Anglican way is a way of expressing faith in historical contextuality. This is especially true of Anglican ecclesiology. This very helpful approach enables him to confront current issues with both a confidence about faithfulness to the gospel over time and with a robust candor about the present. He names the postcolonial currents and the hegemonic power of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the USA. He draws attention to the family resemblances between the Grindrod, Eames, Virginia, and Windsor reports and the various Anglican covenant drafts. He offers a historical-contextual interpretation of these reports.

This book is not just analysis; it also offers ways of thinking about the future. He rightly nails the Windsor approach as centralizing in its tendency and entailing a somewhat mountaintop notion of reception. But he takes this point and offers a way of thinking about reception that incorporates a contribution from what might be called the top down with a conciliarist-inspired notion of a bottom-up approach to reception in the life of the church. At work here is a sense of the whole church being responsible for the whole church. The last chapter comes to grips with the role of various doctrines of the Trinity in these ecclesiological debates and the Trinitarian idealizing that is found in some recent arguments. He seeks to reframe this aspect of the argument in a way that takes better account of human frailty and brokenness, the critical issue of imitation as a way of speaking about the function of the doctrine of the Trinity for Christian behavior and the challenge of endemic conflict in the church.

Driver is archbishop of Adelaide and metropolitan of the province of South Australia and was previously bishop of Gippsland in Victoria. He has plenty of involvement in the Australian church and this enables him to write with considerable experience and knowledge about the particular kind of federalism that is built into the constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia. He shows that that constitution and the church community that inhabits this constitution contain many of the institutional and political issues that on a wider canvas are present in the Anglican Communion. He gives a succinct analysis of the Australian situation and illustrates the usefulness of the Australian example for the wider communion with a discussion of the arguments over the ordination of women. His point is not that the Australian church has the answers but rather that the Australian example has sufficient parallels with the Communion issues that it is worth seeing how the Australians have struggled with the questions.

In a very valuable chapter he sets out a case for what he calls a polity of persuasion. Just as with the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission’s (IATDC) Kuala Lumpur Report, he recognizes that conflict is endemic in the church and that much of church life is to be taken up with creatively dealing with that conflict. Indeed one might reasonably say that the vitality of a church is directly proportional to its capacity to provide for conflict and diversity in creative ways. In this book Driver joins conflict resolution principles with aspects of conciliarity to argue that good conciliarity arrangements provide a bounded space for the creative expression of conflict within relational engagement. This kind of conciliarity, he says, is critical to the ongoing life of the Communion, especially as it must confront issues of diversity, change, and conflict.

This is a timely book full of good ideas and presenting an important argument of great relevance and value to any who are interested in the character of Anglican Christianity or more generally in the nature of ecclesial life in a pluralist world.

Bruce N. Kaye

Former General Secretary, Anglican Church of Australia

Founding Editor, Journal of Anglican Studies

Acknowledgments

At the 2008 Lambeth Conference I was deeply moved during the Gospel Procession in the opening service. Under the lofty arches of the great Canterbury Cathedral, Anglicans from Melanesia processed the gospel book in a wooden canoe. They were wearing traditional dress and the music of Melanesia filled the cathedral. There was a personal moment; my brother had served as a missionary in the Melanesian church through the 1960s and 1970s. However, there was much more for me in the moment than this family connection.

It struck me that this liturgical moment somehow captured the worldwide dance of Anglicanism, which can invest in and celebrate the local in a way that just a few churches can, while at the same time belonging together in an ancient tradition and contemporary global family. It is a wonderful dance, that so values the local that it will not let the whole coerce it; that so values the whole that no one part can dominate. At its best it is a wonderful, slightly messy human dance. At its worse, it can lead to paralysis.

Over recent decades the possibility of paralysis has seemed to loom; with the Anglican experiment of diffuse authority operating through a family of autonomous churches looking like it could not maintain enough cohesion to hold together. This study comes out of my own reflections over the past decade or so in which, as a bishop, I have tried to understand more deeply the distinctive mission of the church in which Christ has called me to serve. It also comes from a deep instinct that there is something more at stake in the Anglican experiment than ecclesiastical arrangements; that the strange dance of Anglicanism has something to offer that much larger dance of being human in community on a frail and increasingly crowded planet.

In writing this small volume, I have valued greatly the encouragement, guidance and gentle critique of a number of conversation partners. These include Stephen Pickard and Graeme Garrett, who supervised my initial research, Keith Rayner, a former Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, and Bruce Kaye, a former General Secretary. I have had the privilege of being a member of bodies that have had a share in constructing the Australian response to The Windsor Report and the various Covenant proposals that followed. These include the Standing Committee of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia and the Windsor Report Working Group of that body. I acknowledge that membership of these groups has provided me with access to material and conversations that have enriched my thinking. I am grateful for initial proof-reading by Stuart Langshaw and Fiona White and the support of my own Diocese, the Diocese of Adelaide.

In a life already busy, endeavors such as writing a book take time most from those closest to us. I am deeply grateful, therefore, to my wife Lindy who has made her own contribution to this book through the patience she has exercised and the support she has shown.

To Wipf and Stock Publishers, I express my thanks for the opportunity to publish and the patience and guidance that helped turn opportunity into pages in print.

1

Dispersed Authority—Dispersed Communion?

The cultural hegemony of the Anglo-American alliance of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church has begun to crack in Anglicanism, and anthems by Titcomb and Tallis sung by boy choirs in Oxford or in New York City can no longer hold us together.

—Ian Douglas (2005)

¹

The controversial bishop of Durham for a time, David Jenkins, wrote a slim volume called Anglicanism, Accident, and Providence. In it he suggested—perhaps rather tongue in cheek—that the Anglican Communion began with the archbishop of Canterbury ducking a problem. In 1780 the Church of England settlers in Connecticut wanted a bishop so they chose to send one of their number to the archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop did not know what to do. A bishop could only be consecrated according to the rites and rules of the Church of England, with a Royal Licence, and on swearing an oath of allegiance to the Crown. This was clearly a problem for the consecration of a bishop to serve in a country that had been fighting a war of independence against England.

So for the time being, the Archbishop ducked the problem and Mr Seabury was passed on to the surviving Scottish Episcopalian Bishops, by whom he was duly consecrated (fortunately there were four of them and three were available so it was all canonical). This was in

1874

. So the first—what? Church of England? Anglican?—bishop outside the United Kingdom returned to the United States via Scotland.²

Jenkins’ proposition is that the Anglican Communion clearly happened accidentally.³ Its shape and form were largely the product of circumstance. This is not an uncommon critique of Anglicanism, or indeed of the Church of England, which has suffered often enough the polemical suggestion that it was brought about and shaped by a monarch’s multiple divorces. Regardless of the superficiality of such statements, it is hard to deny that it is a characteristic of the Anglican tradition that it has been shaped, and allowed itself to be shaped, in response to historical circumstance.

The extent to which this is some form of deficiency is open to question. Perhaps what can more appropriately be said is that a characteristic emphasis of Anglicanism is an openness to being shaped by engagement between the historical context and scholarly reflection on the received tradition. To suggest that Anglican ecclesiology is simply the product of historical circumstance is to miss the point and deny a deeper coherence. Likewise, to suggest that Anglican ecclesiology is above all marked by an emphasis on scholarly reason is to ignore a critical dynamic.

Paul Avis critically considers the notion that what most clearly marks the Anglican position is its emphasis on the appeal to reason and sound learning. Avis examines the thesis of Mandell Creighton that the contribution of Christian humanism was more openly received in England so that what particularly marked the Church of England was this disinterested pursuit of truth.⁴ It gave sanctuary to ‘the devout scholar . . . who reverenced liberty, who believed in progressive enlightenment, who longed for an intelligent order of things.’⁵

Avis goes on to suggest that this rosy picture of a church devoted to the calm pursuit of truth clearly needed to be heavily qualified by the realities of history. He quotes Hensley Henson: Something very different from a zeal for sound learning covered England with ruined monasteries, raised no less than three revolts, and added to our national history a long list of judicial murders.⁶

The Anglican Way: Expressing Faith in Historical Contextuality

Henson was not dismissing the scholarly emphasis in Anglicanism. Rather he was suggesting that there was quite a lot more to be said. Anglicanism has been marked not just by a scholarly emphasis, but by a scholarly capacity to reflect on its tradition in light of historical circumstance.⁷ Anglican theology, and particularly its ecclesiology, has been characterized by what we might term historical contextuality. There has been an embrace of sound scholarly reason to reinterpret tradition in the light of historical and missional context.

Perhaps Anglicanism’s greatest exponent of this approach was Richard Hooker whose enduring contribution to Anglican thought was forged out of the conflict with both Puritan and Roman Catholic critics of the Elizabethan settlement, itself reflecting a political need for stability and national unity after a time of upheaval and in the face of international threat.

Rowan Williams suggests that Hooker is the first major European theologian to assume that history, corporate and individual, matters for theology.⁸ Hooker gives real intellectual weight to what Williams calls the accumulation of historical precedent, while continuing to be guided by principles of faith that are received and not invented.

An application of this methodology in Hooker may be found in his defence of the sacred regiment of bishops, which he bases not on theological necessity, but upon theological desirability and the reality of history; the continuity of a thousand five hundred years and upward.⁹ For Hooker there must be a presumptive leaning towards existing patterns of church order based on the incarnational pattern of God’s invisible presence and involvement in the complex web of human history and communal life. For Hooker, spiritual truth is not reached by a detached or non-historical reason; it is received then forged and sharpened by the tools of reason on the anvil of history.¹⁰

This Anglican tendency towards doing theology in historical particularity has caused difficulties at times in ecumenical dialogue, with partners who feel they are trying to engage a moving target. Cardinal Ratzinger, for instance, responded to the Final Report of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission with a demand for a clearer Anglican theological profile with which to engage.¹¹ For those looking within Anglicanism for an overarching metaphysic that gives coherence to the many and various elements, such a system may seem illusive.

This is not to say that Anglicanism is without specific theological character. In 1978 Stephen Sykes wrote a very significant slim volume called The Integrity of Anglicanism. In it he challenged the common assertion that there was no such thing as an Anglican theology. For Sykes the fact that Anglicanism is without a confessional statement or system of dogma but instead looks to the catholic theology of the early and undivided church does not mean it is without its own particular character or contribution. After all, he points out, Anglicans are not the only Christians to claim that their theology is catholic, and there are quite significant theological differences between some of the various ecclesial communities that would make this claim.

The designations Roman, Greek and Protestant are verbal conventions used for identifying the differing features of various accounts of Christian faith, not alternatives to the term catholic. And why should we not, in the same sense, speak of catholic theology as both catholic and distinctively Anglican? Why should Anglicans be shy of actually having something identifiable in their approach to the truth of the Christian faith? Once it becomes obvious that that there is no one Anglican systematic theology, any more than there is one Lutheran or Calvinist, one Greek Orthodox, or even one Roman Catholic, then nothing is lost if non-Anglicans discover that Anglicans do, as a matter of fact, bring a rather distinctive approach or group of approaches to the questions of theological discussion.¹²

For Sykes it was entirely appropriate to speak of both an Anglican theological standpoint and an Anglican theological method. Bruce Kaye makes a slightly different but similar point when he describes Anglicanism as a discrete tradition in the broader tradition of Christianity.¹³

Amongst what Sykes calls the distinctive approaches, or groups of approaches that characterize Anglican theology, we have identified as particularly prominent a pattern of thoughtful engagement between the received tradition and historical particularity, within a community that knows itself to be incomplete and with the last word about it yet to be spoken.

Recognition of this theological-historical motif within Anglicanism provides a helpful framework to approach the ecclesiological development of recent decades, because much of it has emerged in response to historic crises within the Communion, firstly about the ordination of women and more recently about issues of same-sex relationships.

To some extent these Communion crises themselves need to be understood against the broader historical background of the transition in the Anglican world from colonialism to postcolonialism and from modernity to postmodernity. Kwok Pui-lan makes the point that the 1998 Lambeth Conference was marked by cultural contestation as leaders from Africa, Asia, and Latin America took the opportunity to talk back to the West.¹⁴ Ian Douglas makes a similar point:

Lambeth

1998

signaled a turning point for Anglicanism. In debates over international debt and/or sexuality, it became abundantly clear to all that the churches in the southern hemisphere, or the Two Thirds World, would not stand idly by while their sisters and brothers in the United States, England and other Western Countries continued to set the agenda. Whether aided or not by some in the West who stood to gain ground in the sexuality debates by siding with bishops in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific, Lambeth

1998

pointed out that a profound power shift has occurred in Anglicanism. For the first time ever, the Anglican Communion has had to face head-on the radical multicultural reality of a global Christian community.¹⁵

In recognizing these power shifts we are not suggesting, however, that the forces of global colonization are spent and are therefore less likely to be a factor within Anglicanism into the future. As Douglas and Pui-lan point out, while the old forms of colonialism through political domination and military control might shape the world map less today than a century ago, they have been superseded by an economic colonialism in the global market dictated not by individual nation states, but by multinational corporations and international financial institutions.¹⁶ What is being acknowledged is an ongoing global context that extends beyond the presenting crises confronting the Communion, but which must be taken into account in any reflection on recent tensions within worldwide Anglicanism.

Seeing Through the Lens of Reports in Crisis

So the primary methodology for this brief study is one of theological-historical inquiry. It will focus on a number of key Anglican Communion reports, debates and documents since the 1978 Lambeth Conference and seek to trace a hermeneutical circle, developing an interrogative dialogue between key Communion texts and their historical and contemporary context in order to identify and advance elements of an emerging ecclesiology for communion and conflict within Anglican polity.¹⁷

Many of the recent Anglican Communion reports have considered the working of Communion structures. Kaye and Harvey make the point that one of the ways that the working ecclesiology of a community of faith can be discerned is through what they call its habits of life—its governance mechanisms, its institutional arrangements.¹⁸ So in considering a number of key Anglican Communion reports, documents and debates, this study will also give consideration to the related theme of structure and governance.

While many reports are produced within the Anglican Communion, particularly leading to Lambeth conferences, The Grindrod Report (1987), The Eames Reports (1989–94), The Virginia Report (1997), and The Windsor Report (2004) have similar origins in that they were specifically commissioned in the light of perceived strains on Anglican bonds of affection.¹⁹ They are part of a response by the Anglican Communion to almost four decades of unparalleled strain on the relationships that hold it together. The reports are also linked by key themes that are carried forward with a continuity of approach from one report to another. The later reports include numerous references to the earlier, so there is a continuity that enables them to be considered in relationship.

Other Anglican Communion reports produced around the same time do not share the same level of family resemblance—continuity of themes and similarity of approach. The 1986 Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (IATDC) report, For the Sake of the Kingdom, examines the place of the Anglican Communion in a pluralist world. However, this report has a different set

Reviews for A Polity of Persuasion

[tedwitham · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was born an Anglican. My first memories are of Saint Mary’s in Tambellup, now sadly de-consecrated, with its emphasis on Percy Dearmer – necessarily stripped down to suit the bush environment. I thought, of course, that this simple Anglo-Catholicism was the norm. That’s what all Anglicans were like.At boarding school, I soon realised that the robed choir and six-altar-servers-on-Sunday at Christ Church, Claremont was the norm. Only on the very eve of leaving Perth to study theology in Melbourne I discovered that there were different types of Anglicans, and they were called ‘evangelicals’. In outlining the differences for me the late Canon Brian Albany expressed great sorrow because he knew he was ending my innocence!Four decades on, my understanding of the Anglican Communion is a little more nuanced than in 1972. I know that there are shades of grey; and I also know that there are grave differences between Anglicans. It is no longer a matter of simply accepting that we have cousins in Sydney or wherever who though a bit different to us are still family. The divergent opinions thrown up first by the ordination of women and then by homosexuality in the short term are irreconcilable.Jeffrey Driver, Archbishop of Adelaide, sets out in A Polity of Persuasion to ask whether the attempts of the Anglican Communion to heal these rifts have been appropriate and whether they are likely to bring success. He gives helpful summaries highlighting the principles and theology of each of the reports commissioned by the Communion and leading up to the Anglican Covenant. He uses the 18-year (or more) process to the ordination of women in the Australian Church as a case study illustrating how big changes need a great deal of time; a preparedness to let go of our agendas and expect new outcomes; effort to be made both through the legal processes; but also, and much more importantly, through informal ongoing contacts where trusting relationships can be built and partners can be persuaded of the rightness of a change. Driver calls this cluster of elements ‘a polity of persuasion’, and his terminology has been taken up more broadly than in our national Church. He insists that differences must be addressed. He notes that the Vatican did not accept the first report from ARCIC (Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission) because ARCIC’s aim of finding common ground meant that Rome couldn’t see where Anglican belief was clearly articulated. Archbishop Jeffrey has been a bishop since 2001 involved in the work on the Anglican Covenant. He proposed the enabling legislation in 2004 for the ordination of women to the episcopate. I was not surprised to learn of his background in journalism from the way he demystifies complex debates and principles. His snapshot story of the ordination of Seabury to be the first bishop in the American church illustrates not only the flexibility of Anglican polity, but also Driver’s gift for narrative and humour. A Polity of Persuasion clearly draws on Driver’s Ph.D. thesis, but it is not dry academia. He outlines the history of our differences over the past generation with clarity, always keeping an eye on the principles and personalities involved. He gives good reasons for the church to be patient and to wait on the Holy Spirit. He calls on Anglicans to treat one another non-violently and respectfully. This book will encourage those who are directly engaged in the work of the Anglican Covenant and in General Synod, and will inform those who stand on the sidelines of this institutional work but still love the Anglican Church and want it to continue to prosper. Reading it burrows out of you any idea that your Anglicanism is the norm and allows time for the Holy Spirit to lead all of us to the new place. Forthcoming in The Anglican Messenger (Perth) September 2014