“Liturgy exists not to educate, but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where one is freed to learn things which cannot be taught.” – Aidan Kavanagh

During this sad time of division in the church, fundamental matters of ecclesiology come to the fore again with a new urgency.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams recently re-articulated one such fundamental matter: that the basic organ of the church which binds the catholic church together is the diocese, centered on the bishop, and not the province (or the congregation, for that matter). See here.

This catholic and patristic perspective is definitely shared by and elaborated on by the Windsor Report and the proposed covenant, as well as the theology (ie, the communion ecclesiology of John Zizioulas and others) and texts (ie, The Virginia Report as well as The Church of the Triune God: The Cypress Agreed Statement of the International Commission for Anglican – Orthodox Theological Dialogue) upon which they rest.

Read here about how the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has virtually destroyed the Christian community in Iraq.

Catherine Pickstock gives the word “liturgy” a wide resonance. But she also devotes many pages of her book AW to analyzing a specific liturgy: the celebration of the Christian Eucharist, in which the elements of bread and wine are said to become the body and blood of Christ. Drawing particularly on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, she asks how Christ is made present in the Mass.

I found that the understanding of presence that you get in Aquinas’ understanding of the Eucharist is not the kind of fetishized presence of modernity. It is not one that is somehow “enthronable” or “stockpileable.” It is a presence which is mysterious, and one which seems to bring the meanings of words together. One thing that stuck Aquinas about the Eucharist is that although it is perhaps the highest instance of God’s action through human action on earth, nevertheless it seems to use the most ordinary objects, it seems to use the most banal objects: bread and wine, grape and grain. Nothing could be more local and more summoning or ordinary labor – transport, commerce – all the things which ordinarily seem to take us away from “high piety” – and one of the things that A says about the choice of elements is precisely their ordinariness and their association with human conviviality – eating and drinking and the good smell of the bread and wine. Plus it was significant for him that bread and wine involve human trade and travel and commerce and so forth, and so the lowest and most basic elements of human survival and human operation are brought into the moment of heightened realization of divine presence. And so for all these different reasons you can see the ways in which we are being reminded in the Eucharist that there really isn’t an area of human operation which isn’t somehow preincluded in God’s gift. And we’re are reminded also that liturgy is something which all of human action and human operation leads toward and presupposes. If, even, in the manufacturing of bread we are being led toward the Eucharistic celebration, it helps us to reposition our understanding of all human labor as praise of the divine. And again this brings us back to the idea that liturgy isn’t something that we should think about only on Sundays or high feast days but its something that all our human labors might become, that human labor itself might be liturgy. And so there isn’t necessarily a separation between life and liturgy. Even washing up could be offered up as a sort of divine praise. All human actions could be.

And so, equally, if we think of the tree which I referred to earlier as fulfilling its “tree-ness” by worshipping God – and this is the way in which Aquinas saw the world around us, where everything is worshipping God in its own way – and so when the tree fulfills its telos as a tree, that moment of fulfillment is the tree’s worshipping God, or copying God in its own manner. And so a Eucharistic sensibility is one in which one sees everything as participating in praise of the divine.” — Catherine Pickstock in an interview which one can listen to here.

Liturgy, as Catheine Pickstock explains it, signifies an underlying attitude and not just a specific order of celebration. It is, as she says, “a way of being on the way.” A way of receiving, and releasing, what is only ever present in passing.

Liturgy isn’t just going to church on a Sunday. When I was analyzing what a liturgical worldview might be like, I tried to conceive it as a way of life, rather than as a text or as something we did every now and then. And this is something I found in Plato again, when he is looking at the life of the philosopher and the philosopher’s desire to recollect the highest principles of the good and to communicate them to his pupils. He was trying to show that philosophy isn’t a decadent pursuit which occurs on the ancient Greek version of a high table at a college, but rather is a way of life, where everything must be orientated toward a vision of the good, and if one can Christianize that vision…. Well, in a way that is what I’ve been doing in my analysis of liturgy: trying to show how a way of life might help us to unsettle all the dichotomies and pernicious categories that I analyzed in secular modernity.” — Catherine Pickstock, in an interview one can listen to here.

John Milbank sees the church as an encompassing an ultimately cosmic community. And this view is complemented by the emphasis in Catherine Pickstock’s work on liturgy. Liturgy, in its most basic meaning, refers to the order of words and actions that is prescribed for public worship. but in her book After Writing, CP has given the term a much wider meaning. She argues that he muddles and uncertainties in which modern philosophy has ended up can only be overcome by recognizing that language only finally fulfills itself in praise and celebration. That is, in liturgy. And so she she subtitled her book “On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy.”

In my subtitle I was trying to hint at the ultimate argument of my book which is that the spatialization of modernity as I have described it can only be shattered or in some way challenged by a liturgical worldview where one is no longer trying to enthrone one’s own constructs but is now trying to reposition one’s self in that broader context which sees  the whole of reality as arriving from a divine creative source, and that we can only undo these dichotomies by some kind of liturgical enactment. One of the things I did in my book when I was analyzing secular reason is to show that the human self is by definition a divided self when it is trying to enthrone its own constructs. It starts to lead an almost duplicitous life. But a liturgical self is one which acknowledges fully its own dependence on a divine transcendent reality and is so committed to that reality that it can’t admit any divisions or internal contradictions. There is something completely simple about liturgical language. It simply says “I am nothing, and I worship you and I depend on you.” And along with this liturgical worldview comes the recognition that everything around us is in the mode of gift and is a gift from God. And so not only does it affect our relationship with our self and with God, but also our relationship to the world around us, and how we receive it.” — Catherine Pickstock in an interview which one can listen to here.

Catherine Pickstock gives liturgy a much broader sense. She argues that the muddles and uncertainties in which modern philosophy has ended up can only be overcome by recognizing that language only fulfills itself in praise and celebration, that is, in liturgy.

The spatialization of modernity can only really be shattered or in some way challenged by a liturgical world view in which one is no longer trying to enthrone its own constructs but to reposition ones self in that broader context which sees the whole of reality as arriving from a divine creative source. We can only really undo all of these dichotomies by some kind of liturgical enactment. One of the things I did in my book when I was analyzing secular reason is to show how the human self, by its self, is a divided self, and when it is trying to enthrone its own constructs it starts to lead an almost duplicitous existence, but the liturgical self is one which acknowledges freely its complete dependence upon another being, a divine, transcendent reality, and is so committed to that reality that it can’t admit to any kind of internal divisions or contradictions. There is something completely simple about liturgical language. It simply says, “I am nothing, and I depend upon you and I worship you, and along with that liturgical worldview comes the realization that everything around us is in the mode of gift and arrives as a gift from God. And so not only does it affect our relationship with ourself and to God himself, but also to our relationship with the world around us, and how we receive it.” — Catherine Pickstock, in an interview which one can listen to here.

“I’m very much in a tradition of Anglican thinkers going back to John Neville Figgis who have insisted that the church is the purpose of salvation, it’s not just the collection of believers or the saved. The church is the realization of salvation, because the church is the realization of reconciliation, ultimately b/t everybody. Ultimately the church is, as the Eastern Orthodox stress, bigger than the cosmos, because it’s the cosmos linked to God and returned to God. So church for me is a very big reality. It’s the site of the true human sociality. So, again, very much in the tradition of Anglican socialism I tend to see the church itself as the political vehicle. You don’t need a political party, b/c the church has a social purpose that goes beyond the political understood in the normal sense, because it’s not just about equal sharing and punishing wrongdoers. It’s about forgiveness and reconciliation and restoring and giving superabundantly to each other. So it involves some kind of social purpose that can’t be fully realized in this world but can to some extant and goes beyond the social purpose and the political purpose of the state, so much so that even ideally state functions should be minimalized in relation to ecclesiastical functions. The more we had real church in our economic practices, in our social practices … the less you would need these state functions. Liturgy also is crucial here: the sense that worshipping God is the true social purpose and that everything, all our economic activities are ultimately oriented to making the true worship of God in the kind of ritual patterns of the daily life that come to a head in what happens in a church. Without a sense of what binds us together you don’t have a real society.” — John Milbank, in an invterview which you can listen to here.

“The Church is at once very very spiritual and very very concrete. The Church continues that sense of the Incarnation, and I mean that quite literally, that the church is a communion of souls, it extends to another world, but it also is the material practices, it’s also physical churches, it’s also sacred sites, it’s also the continual sacralization of space, its also parish boundaries. I mean, I believe in all this fantastic stuff. I’m really bitterly opposed to this kind of disenchantment in the modern churches, including I think among most modern evangelicals. I mean recently in the Notthingham diocese they wanted to do a show about angels, and so the clergy – and this is a very evangelical diocese – sent around a circular saying, “Is there anyone around who still believes in angels enough to talk about this?” Now, in my view this is scandalous. They shouldn’t even be ordained if they can’t give a cogent account of the angelic and its place in the divine economy. I want everything put back again, in one sense. I believe in the lot. Pilgrimages, you know, everything. The importance of sacred sites, the traditions about the unseen, even about there being other creatures hidden within the dimensions of this world. These are things which I think we should take seriously that exist in many dif traditions. And I think that one of the problems we have is that we have the wrong idea about monotheism, you know, that of course there are gods and angels and spirits, and what have you, in incredible plurality. The point about the divine unity is that it’s beyond all that. Monotheism is not denying the gods. The most radical monotheists have always seen that. There are many spiritual powers, and there may be some place between the good and the bad among them like the early Irish theologians acknowledged. Who knows? The point is that he supreme God is one who transcends any of that kind of thing, so for me, the church is supremely concrete and supremely spiritual and I think that there is a sense in which, in a fallen world corporeality can lead us into despair, it’s a site of decay. And we can only not despair if corporeality is restored. So with the Incarnation and without the resurrection, we are not really going fully to value embodiment as glorious.” — John Milbank, in an interview which can be listened to here.

Please be in prayer for this week’s global gathering of bishops at the Lambeth Conference, and that you might do so in an informed way, see this article by Ephraim Radner.

“I have never found certitude easy. Beliefs grow slowly in my mind, changing shape as they gain a fresh insight, or shed what seems to be an error. It is not a process that leads naturally to a conclusion. This can be an advantage in the ordinary intercourse of life. One is better able to understand other people if one’s ideas have not yet hardened, and can be stretched without loss of integrity to accommodate theirs.

The difficulty is to know when the limits of understanding are reached. There always seems to be one more step that can be taken without danger in fellowship. Harmony is a great good, but there are others greater, for those whose sake it must be, in the last resort, renounced. I could, I hope, find the courage to die for them; but my mind still gropes in vain. It is an agonizing task to define the principles for which a man must condemn his living body to the flame.” — Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, en route to being burned at the stake.

Another thought about Westminster Seminary (my alma mater) whose publication “Westminster Today” arrived in the mail recently, which I just read.

What wonderful, rich theology, for example in the article by Vern Poythress on the relationship between biblical and systematic theology, a topic which is perpetually addressed at the seminary with near exhaustive detail.

Indeed, one can read tens of thousands of pages about this relationship, and hear scores of hours about it in lectures.

However, eight years after Westminster, I find myself asking with even more conviction than I did eight years ago, “What about liturgical theology?” What about the ancient maxim, lex orandi lex credendi, which can be rendered as “Our worship determines our theology”?

On the other hand, I don’t really expect Westminster to embrace this idea. It simply isn’t a Reformed conviction, and Reformed theology “is what it is.”

But it is very clear to me that, whatever the deep riches present at Westminster and in the grand tradition it represents — and there are many — it does not believe that theology begins in worship and is rooted there.

Perhaps if it did there would be a chapel on campus in which the sacraments are celebrated.

In the past I have written about Lauren Winner’s Real Sex, and I want to do so again, as part of a larger conversation.

Bouquet and I have a pair of good friends who are in their early-to-mid twenties and who are in a dating relationship which is getting “pretty serious.”

They recently approached Bouquet wanting to discuss the issue of sexuality, in particular asking the question, “Based on Christianity, is it really the case that ’sex outside of marriage’ is wrong?’”

Great question, and one that I am always asking myself, and so I want to blog about it.

I want to start with a line from CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity, specifically from Book III entitled “Christian Behavior,” and chapter 5 of that book called “Sexual Morality:” “[t]he … Christian rule is “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or abstinence.”

First off, notice that Lewis is saying that marriage and not “a wedding ceremony” is a prerequisite for sex, on the Christian view. This is an important point because nowhere in the Bible is there a clear precedent for, or a clear teaching on, a wedding ceremony. Instead, what there is clear teaching on in Scripture is something called “one flesh union.” This is what is portrayed in Genesis (Gen 2:24) and in the sexual theology of St. Paul which always has the creation narrative(s) — or as Lauren Winner puts it in her book, the original order of God’s good creation which we see in the creation stories — in view (see I Cor 6:16 for Paul’s direct quotation of Gen 2:24).

In other words, even if the the Bible does not seem to have a lot to say explicitly about wedding ceremonies, it does clearly teach that sex goes with marriage. And so the question becomes, “What is marriage?” And the answer to that question is seen as elsewhere in the two verses cited above: marriage is one flesh union.

Now what is interesting about that is the word “flesh.” For, as Winner alludes to in her book, both the Greek and the Hebrew words (sarx and bassar, respectively) for “flesh” point in two directions are the same time. The word can mean “body,” and / or it can mean something like “the holistic life of the self” or the “one’s own life in its totality.” For the former meaning see I Cor 15:39 or II Cor 7:5, and for the latter see, again, I Cor 6:16. (There is a third meaning of the word which is less important for our purposes, though it is related to this second meaning: it can refer simply to the human person or to humanity as a whole, as in Jn 17:2 and Acts 2:17, and a fourth meaning can be “the sin nature” as we see in Gal 5.)

So when the Bible portrays the man Adam and the woman as “one flesh” it is referring both to both meanings. To quote Lauren Winner:

“One-fleshness … captures an all-encompassing over-arching oneness — when they marry, husband and wife enter an institution that points them toward familial, domestic, emotional, and spiritual [one might also add: financial, psychological, and social] unity. But the one flesh of which Adam speaks [in his "love poem" in Gen 1:23] is also overtly sexual, suggesting sexual intercourse, the only physical state other than pregnancy when it is hard to tell where one person’s body stops and the other’s starts.”

What is marriage? It is a relationship of holistic unity with another person, and this includes at its center the bodily unity of sex. Because this holistic unity involves so much, because there is so much at stake — physical health, emotional health, economic health, social health, psychological health — it requires commitment.

The kind of lasting commitment one finds in biblical portrayals and descriptions of covenants. And it is here, in the need for commitment, where the actual marriage ceremony becomes a serious matter, and one which wise people will consider very seriously.

To summarize, does the Bible teach that one must get married before having sex? I am not sure if it does or not, but I know that it does teach that one must be married before having sex (although it requires this not as some abstract law, but rather as a way to protect the health or shalom of the person), and a wise person will recognize that the best way to start being married is actually to get married.

Conclusion: Hope for Mutual Subjection in Christ around our Deepest Divisions

I repeat the question with which I opened this essay: How can one discern if homosexual practice on the part of a Christian disciple or believer can be faithful to God apart from deep, empathetic, listening-and-responding communion and relational interaction with fellow members of the body of Christ, including with those who are homosexual? This question, which, in analogy to the 16th century Protestant Reformation, might be thought of as the material cause or issue of the current Anglican crisis, is potentially more explosive and divisive than the issues in the recent past concerning women above.

Is the ontological nature of Episcopal Church personal, or individualistic? Which answer better provides a healing alternative to the violent practice of nation-state politics currently destroying our world? Which answer better explains why and how the church should exercise the ministry of bishops? Which answer makes more sense of what we are doing in the Eucharist?

The Windsor process, including its report and its proposed covenant(s), is of course not perfect. However, rooted in the koinonia of the personal and communal God whose image or icon humanity and the church are, it provides not just the practical time and space and procedure for a deep and listening participation in each others’ lives, but it grounds such a life in ultimate ontological reality (mediated through scripture and ancient tradition) as well. And it does this, in concert with other texts discussed in this paper, in a way which has implications which are potentially healing to both the human family of nations and the universal Church of the Triune God. In so doing it shows that preserving and deepening the unity of the church demands that we name and live into our true personhood in listening, mutually submissive covenant with each other.

Works Cited

The Anglican Consultative Council. The Church of the Triune God: The Cypress Agreed Statement of the International Commission for Anglican – Orthodox Theological Dialogue (London: the Anglican Communion Office, 2006).

The Anglican Consultative Council. Report of the Second Meeting of the Covenant Design Group (London: the Anglican Communion Office, 2008).

The Anglican Consultative Council. The Virginia Report: The Report of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (London: the Anglican Communion Office, 1997).

The Anglican Consultative Council. The Windsor Report (London: the Anglican Communion Office, 2004).

Cavanaugh, William. Theopolitical Imagination (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002).

Chauvet. Louis-Marie. The Sacraments (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1997).

Hays, Richard. The Moral Vision of the New Testament. (New York: Harper Collins, 1996).

MacIntyre, Alisdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame P., 2007).

MacIntyre, Alisdair. A Short History of Ethics (New York: MacMillan, 1966).

Marion, Jean-Luc. God Without Being (Chicago, U. Chicago P., 1991).

Pickstock, Catherine. After Writing: on the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

Radner, Ephraim. Hope Among the Fragments. (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004).

Radner, Ephraim. “A Presentation to the House of Bishops on the Proposed Anglican Covenant” (online at www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_83881_ENG_HTM.htm).

Turner, Philip. “A Comment on the St. Andrew’s Draft of the Anglican Covenant” (online at http://covenant-communion.com/?p=708).

Yannaras, Christos. On the Absence and Unknowability of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2007).

Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and Communion (Crestwood: SVS Press, 1985).

II. Three Sub-plots in this Emerging Narrative

Sub-plot #1: the Nature of Personhood. First, let us consider the nature of this theology of personal communion that undergirds the Windsor process as well as the iterations of the proposed covenant. In book Being as Communion John Zizioulas has offered a massively influential argument which undermines some of the most deeply held assumptions that we have (especially in the West) about the nature of ultimate reality, or about ontology, that which is ultimately real, real in the case of God (of one believes in God) and real in the case of the world (or what theology thinks of as creation). We in the West tend to assume (and, interestingly for the purposes of mission, this assumption holds both in the Christian community as well as in the larger secular culture) that what God really is, and what the world really is, more than anything else, is being. And our understanding of being, in turn, is pervasively suffused by the thought of a thinker who lived 2500 years ago and whose name was Aristotle, who defined being as substance. What is relevant for our discussion is that substance is something which is fixed, static, or (to use one of Catherine Pickstock’s words and ideas) “stockpileable.”

The Zizioulian turn is to show how, implicit in the theology proper of the church fathers, is a rejection this fixed, static nature of being (including the being of God) in favor of something more dynamic, more fluid, more free, more relational. This “something” for Zizioulias is communion or koinonia, a primary Leitmotif not just in the thought of the church fathers, but in the New Testament documents themselves.

Why identify communion, however, as that which best describes ultimate ontology? Zizioulas’ answer is that it is because God is a person who freely begets the Son and who freely brings about the Holy Spirit, and who thus enjoys a personal relationship with the Spirit and the Son. In short, God is a loving community of persons, and what “connects” these three persons is not static, undifferentiated being-as-substance, but rather free love, in which each person participates in the others, mutually indwelling (with) them in (voluntary, loving) interdependence.

Communion becomes an ontological concept in patristic thought. Nothing in existence is conceivable in itself, as an individual, such as the tode ti of Aristotle, since even God exists thanks to an event of communion. In this manner the ancient world heard for the first time that it is communion which makes things “be:” nothing exists without it, not even God.”

So what we see in the patristic understanding of the life of the Holy Trinity might be thought of as “personhood kata holos,” or “personhood according to the whole,” or perhaps “catholic personhood.” Each person of the trinity reaches into the others. In the life of God, there is so such thing as a solitary individual, not to mention the thought, even, of unilateral action. Everything touches all, and everything is “decided” by all. The whole truth or reality is “known” by the whole community. This communion is what we mean by “personhood kata holos,” and this communion is what we find in the very life of the Triune God. (Note, importantly, how this theology of personhood is providing rigorous theological grounding for the concept of communion we have seen articulated in The Virginia Report.)

What Zizioulas goes on to show, and what the Windsor Report and other major Anglican documents we are looking at in this paper develop, is that if this personal communion characterizes God, then it also characterizes his church.

One such official Anglican document is The Cypress Statement. Building on the contrast we saw earlier in our discussion of The Virginia Report between communion and competitive individualism, this text states that

… the person exists not in possession of its own nature in opposition to others, but in giving itself wholly into the life of others. Thus the person is not part of some whole, but the place where the wholeness of nature is real and concrete.”

This explicit articulation of the “personhood kata holos,” or “catholic personhood” finds its analogue in the church: “St. John makes it clear that the fellowship or communion (koinonia) of life in the Church reflects the communion that is the divine life itself.” To bring human beings into this living relationship between the divine persons is “the ultimate purpose of the church…. This is what the Greek fathers and the Orthodox tradition have called theosis.” This analogy is made more explicit:

The Church is both a local and a universal reality. As the one God is a communion of three persons, so the universal church is one communion in Christ of many churches. She is not a federation of many parts. The relationship between the local church and the universal Church is determined by the revelation of the life of the Holy Trinity.”

I cannot avoid calling attention to paragraph 26 in the statement, which analogizes from the personal causality of the Father in the Trinity to the necessarily personal arche in the church: “all forms of primacy in the Church … being personal … cannot but be relational.” For those such as bishops and primates and archbishops who exercise authority, this is an important reminder. In this in many other ways, the theology of personhood kata holos pervades the entire text of The Church of the Triune God.

Sub-plot #2: the Decline of the Modern Nation-state. In our late modern age, characterized by what Alistair MacIntryre calls “emotivism,” humanity seems less able than ever to inhabit a peaceful politeuma or commonwealth.

It is, by now at any rate, clear that following the age of Luther and Machiavelli, we should expect the rise of a kind of moral-cum-political theory in which the individual is the ultimate social unit, power the ultimate concern, God an increasingly irrelevant but still unexpungeable being, and a prepolitical, presocial timeless human nature the background of changing social forms. The expectation is fully gratified by Hobbes.”

It is no coincidence that, as MacIntyre points out, the rise of the modern-nation state requires that the ultimate social unit, in direct opposition to the social thought of the Fathers, be that of the solitary individual. This is the case because, in order for the state to be thought of (and worshipped?) as savior, all mediating groups which bind people together must, in principle, be disbanded, leaving the isolated individual in the position of a direct one-to-one relationship with the state. This is why, modern political thought presupposes the primacy of the individual, (and the concomitant privatization of the church) as for example in Rouseau’s social contract which is a vehicle to overcome violence between individuals.

Regardless of one’s view as to the extent to which the “founding fathers” of the US Constitution are complicit in this strategy to privatize the church and to individualize persons into discrete units, it seems impossible to deny that, 200 years after the founders, we live in a nation-state (the USA) in which religion / church is indeed privatized and hence power is relegated to the state. And the state, currently involved in a violent, grand effort to extend its modern project into the Middle East, takes full advantage of this situation. And we feel it in our bones: is it any wonder, to invoke a bit of anecdotal evidence, that so few people seriously sing the national anthem at sporting events? American patriotism is on hard times, and rightly so.

And that is why this writer cannot help but view our ecclesial opportunity in the Anglican Communion to bind ourselves together in covenant recognition of our true mutually indwelling personhood as a kairos moment not just for the church but for the world, and especially for the West, racked as it is by nation-state power politics and sophistic, manipulative rhetoric.

Sub-plot #3: Ecclesiology. How does this fecund idea of personhood kata holos inform our understanding of the embodied church? First let us consider the ministry of episkope. The apparent presence of divergent understandings of the episcopate between, for example, African provinces and North American provinces makes this question particularly weighty.
My point is that this communion ecclesiology informs the nature of the episcopate, especially since the bishop is seen as an icon of the whole church of God. It does seem to me that “both sides” have something to learn from the theological reality of communion. I quote The Virginia Report:

A ministry of oversight (episkope) of interdependence, accountability and discernment is essential at all levels of the Church’s mission and ministry, and for the sake of the Church’s wellbeing, must be exercised at every level in a way that is personal, collegial and communal. A bishop’s authority is never isolated from the community; both the community of the Church and the community and unity of all humankind.”

And again:

The episcopal ministry is no authoritarian ministry above and separate from the community, but is a ministry, based in the grace of God, always exercised in relation to the community and always subject to the word of God.”

The first quotation above stands as a warning to those in the North America who conceive of the bishop along the same lines as an elected official in the “democratic republic” of the USA. The term “representative” is often used, as if the “job” of the bishop were to simply “vote” in accordance with the will of the majority of his or her constituents. Such conception, however, cannot be sustained in light of our understanding of communion as personhood kata holos. A renewed understanding of episkopos in this light will greatly aid those in North America to see the bishop as one in whose person we all have a stake and a vital connection, and vice-versa.

The second quotation above, however, issues an admonishment to any Christian, including Anglicans in Africa, who conceives of the arche of the bishop, the ministry of oversight, in a top-down fashion. What personhood kata holos shows us is that the bishop’s relationship to his people can be no more hierarchical than the Father’ relationship to the Son. Mutuality and interdependence must be seen as real, and practiced as such.

Second, let us consider the nature of the Eucharist. One could easily mine the official Anglican Communion documents referred to in this paper and, just as we have done above in the case of the bishop, draw out many implications of communion theology to the Eucharist. However, I would like to think more ecumenically than that in this treatment of the Eucharist.
The Eucharistic theology of Catholic theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet is one contemporary instance of several which see the Eucharist as constitutive of human deification, albeit in ways which prefigure ultimate deification (e.g., Thomas’ beatific vision), thus radically calling into question what can be thought of as “traditional ontology,” which, again, after Aristotle, can be thought of as “being-as-substance.” Chauvet argues sociologically that the Eucharist can be viewed as an example of symbolic gift exchange, in which a “circuit” of community members share in gift exchange which is not simply bilateral, and in which gift givers actually give themselves to their fellow circuit members. In this community of (self) gifting, the upshot is that a superabundant economy of peace is created and sustained which truly binds people together in the fullness of human communion. In other words, Chauvet, in a very post-Heideggarian move, sees ontology as symbol, or even symbolic gift exchange. When the Body of Christ performs this action in Eucharistic synaxis, deification occurs, and the members of the Body participate not just in one another but in the very life of the Triune God.

Chauvet’s approach to the Eucharist presupposes not only post-Heideggarian metaphysics, however. It also relies on the “scansion shift” of the three-fold body of Christ documented among others by Henri de Lubac. No other development in the history of modern theology opens the door to ecumenical relations more than this recovery of the patristic understanding of the three-fold body, for it gets behind the high medieval doctrine of transubstantiation in a way that even Rome must be open to. To assert that the ancient corpus verum, the members of Christ gathered around the bread and the wine, is what is transubstantiated is precisely what The Cypress Statement affirms when it speaks of deification in the context of the Eucharist.

Such a reinterpretation of transubstantiation resonates deeply with this theology of personhood kata holos, for it sees that which is ultimately real as dynamic, free, and (above all) relational between persons. In addition to critiquing radical individualism as seen in the competition between church entities such as Anglican provinces, it also reveals the inherent individualism behind the medieval Eucharistic theologies in the wake of the three-fold body scansion shift.