In his Christian Meditation, James Finley outlines the four stages of contemplative prayer: spiritual reading (or lectio divina), discursive meditation, prayer, and contemplation.

Spiritual reading, itself an act of faith, is a prayerful reading of Scripture or some other spiritual text which inspires us or guides us in our search for God.

This, then, leads to discursive meditation, in which we are prayerfully thinking about the things of God and filling our imagination with images that inspire and guide us in our spiritual journey.

Spiritual reading and discursive meditation awaken our desire for God, which we express in prayer. Here we tell God that we long to be one with him.

In contemplation our heart receives the gift of divine awareness. Finley writes:

In this mystical realization of oneness with God we are liberated from our tendencies to derive our security and identity from anything less than God. In specifically Christian terms, we enter the mind of Christ, who realized oneness with God to be the reality of himself and of everyone and everything around him.”

In light of controversies swirling around Westminster Seminary and Pete Enn’s view of Scripture, I thought I would post this article by Alan Gregory (Professor of Historical Theology at ETSS) on Samuel Coleridge’s theological (note: not historical or critical) critique of the dominant understanding of Scripture in England in his day, that of “plenary inspiration:”

Spirit to Spirit: Coleridge on the Bible

1. Introduction

Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit is a
“prophetic” work. “Prophetic” in the sense that Coleridge
offers a theological account of contemporary shifts and
tendencies to which others were blind or indifferent.
Almost alone among his contemporaries, Coleridge knew the
German historical and critical work on the Bible. What’s
more he grasped its significance, he saw that it did and it
would have far-reaching implications for understanding
Scripture and its authority. In the year he completed the
Confessions (1825) Coleridge had read Schleiermacher’s
Critical Essay on the Gospel of St. Luke. His attitude was
far from uncritical but he appreciated that the direction
German theology was taking might offer a path beyond the
sterility of “Bibliolatry,” as he terms it.

On the other hand, Coleridge recognized that things were
changing in England, too. More subtly but still
significantly. For several decades, the doctrine of
“plenary inspiration,” the doctrine that Coleridge
describes as dictation by “an Infallible Intelligence,”
would remain largely uncontroversial. It was stoutly
defended by Van Mildert, the Bishop of Durham in 1814 and
the defense largely held until the 1860’s. Under the
surface, however, Coleridge had detected change. Change in
two important respects: firstly, there was, he thought, a
tension between what leading clerics said about Scripture
from the pulpit and the explanations some of them gave when
out of it. Coleridge has pinpointed a problem of
hermeneutic integrity in a particularly modern form. Clergy
have come to participate in what sociologists refer to as
an “expert culture,” an expert culture formed by modern
notions of science and intellectual responsibility. The
hermeneutic problem is, partly, that of all expert cultures
which involves a - sometimes seductive - “knowledge” gap
between the expert and his or her constituency. For the
clergy, that problem is sharpened as their expertise
concerns the Bible, which is the primary source of
narratives, images, symbols, exemplars, codes, and
doctrines in which people find their lives before God.
Here, therefore, the “gap” between “expert” and
constituency, threatens the integrity of the common life
and the practice of faith. The second change Coleridge
recognized was a dangerous instability in a situation in
which people, in order to maintain a particular doctrine of
biblical authority, engage in desperate mental gymnastics
that they would consider insane if applied to any book
other than the Bible.

Coleridge recognized that certain ways of defending
Christian faith had had their day and, what’s more, that
eventually, if they hadn’t already, they would become a
liability. Also - and this is vital - Coleridge argued that
the dominant doctrine of Biblical authority, together with
the assumptions behind it, were theologically unsound. That
they were corrupting of faith. If Coleridge had just
written a critique of “plenary inspiration” from a
historical-critical perspective, this would have long been
out-dated. However, he wrote a theological critique, the
positive proposals of which transcend the survival of any
“doctrine of an Infallible Intelligence.”

2. The Doctrine of an Infallible Intelligence

What view of Scripture does Coleridge attack? It might seem
as if Coleridge was setting up a “straw man” in these
lectures: did anyone really hold the views of Scripture he
attacks? Well, as for the C19th, accounts of the Bible very
much in terms of what Coleridge calls the “doctrine of an
infallible intelligence” continued not only to be held but
fiercely defended from Anglican pulpits throughout the
century. In 1861, for instance, the Vicar of St. Mary the
Virgin, Oxford – the University Church – preached a series
of sermons denouncing the, relatively conservative,
advocacy of “higher criticism” found in the liberal volume
of essays, Essays and Reviews. As one commentator put it,
he smote the “seven champions” of heresy “with the jawbone
of an ass.” Here is an extract:

The Bible is none other than “the voice of Him
that sitteth upon the Throne” Every book of it -
every chapter of it - every verse of it - every
syllable of it - (where are we to stop?) every
letter of it - is the direct utterance of the
most High! The Bible is none other than the Word
of God - not some part of it more, some part of
it less, but all alike, the utterance of Him who
sitteth upon the Throne – absolute – faultless –
unerring - supreme.

If mainstream defenses of this view are harder to find
today, it would, nevertheless, be rash to deny that we
still find attitudes to Scripture and practices of reading
it that imply, even where they don’t state, something like
the “doctrine of an infallible intelligence.” This is one
point at which Coleridge is perhaps most useful to us,
alerting us to a relationship to the Bible that is fraught
with the same spiritual and theological dangers even if it
avoids the theory.

How, then, does Coleridge describe the “doctrine of an
infallible intelligence”?

The doctrine in question requires me to believe,
that not only what finds me, but that all that
exists in the sacred volume, and which I am bound
to find therein, was-not alone inspired by, that
is, composed by men under the actuating influence
of the Holy Spirit, but likewise-dictated by an
Infallible Intelligence; - that the writers, each
and all, were divinely informed as well as
inspired. Now here all evasion, all excuse, is
cut off. An Infallible Intelligence extends to
all things, physical no less than spiritual. It
may convey the truth in any one of the three
possible languages,-that of Sense, as objects
appear to the beholder on this earth; or that of
Science, which supposes the beholder placed in
the centre; - or that of Philosophy, which
resolves both into a supersensual reality. But
whichever be chosen-and it is obvious that the
incompatibility exists only between the first and
second, both of them being indifferent and of
equal value to the third - it must be employed
consistently.

In this view, Scripture is infallible in every respect and
from whatever angle of approach - historical, scientific,
philosophical. “And… whichever of these three languages
(of sense, science, or philosophy) be chosen it must be
translatable into Truth.” That is, it must be fully
consistent with any and every other statement within the
body of Scripture and with any and every other element in
our knowledge of the world. Thus, in the case of the story
of Noah’s Flood, for instance, if we say that it possesses
theological rather than historical truth we are, in effect,
limiting the kind of truth this story may be said to
possess. It is precisely this limitation that, Coleridge
argues, the theory of “divine dictation” does not allow.
Why? Because it involves the claim that everything is
directly the speech of God. The finite, historical media -
the human writers and singers and speakers - contribute
nothing of their own finitude. Their language no longer
bears their passions, their limitations of perspective,
their particularities of their experience, their
historicity, it is entirely transparent to the divine
speech.

Coleridge spots an essential shift here. Scripture itself
has become an “object of faith” - an object of faith rather
than a source, awakener, sustainer, restorer, and companion
of faith. In Coleridge’s view, classical convictions of
Biblical authority did not involve fore-grounding beliefs
about the Bible but rather believing with and through the
Scriptures. In the position Coleridge attacks, the Bible
becomes the focus of attention rather than the subsidiary
means of attention – what we see rather than that through
which we see.

This leads to another crucial point. An “objectified”
Scripture is the creation of a falsely objectified faith.
This takes us back to the understanding of our knowledge of
God that William Law also attacked. The Deists voiced an
extreme version of a more generally held conviction that
one might grasp religious truth through the exercise of a
reason that was common to all and, therefore, free from the
disputes and controversies that had so sorely disturbed the
Church. There were, some suggested, religious truths that
were “natural” in that there were rationally convicting,
perspicuous to anyone who wasn’t mad or wicked. Such truths
were graspable, to use Coleridge’s language, “like the
objects of sense, common to all alike.” By the end of the
18th century, though, this view, though it continued to be
held and popular, most famously by William Paley, had come
under severe criticism. Both Hume and Kant had showed that
you couldn’t get away that easily from the knowing subject,
from the perspective, the point of view, the cognitive
structure of the one who is doing the knowing. Hume pointed
out, for instance, that we bring to the argument from
design the characteristics of the Christian account of God
which the argument on its own cannot sustain. More
radically still, Kant argues that our particular way of
knowing – ordering sense experience through the a priori
structuring activity of our minds – bankrupts all claims to
know any reality that is not “sensible.” We cannot escape
the structure of our knowing – we can know only things as
they appear to us, only in terms of our structure of
knowing. We, therefore, are always implicated in what we
know. There is no epistemological escape from the subject,
from ourselves as and in our knowing. Coleridge takes this
critique a stage further and in a different direction.

Coleridge, then, faces us with a choice. On the one hand,
we have a doctrine of biblical authority in which that
authority is “objectified.” In other words, the claim is
the bible is verbally inerrant and evidence can be provided
for that, at least negative evidence, that should be
accepted by all right thinking individuals irrespective of
their belief. On the other hand, we might acknowledge that
the authority of the Bible is not the sort of authority
that can be objectively demonstrated. Rather it’s an
authority that asserts itself in the process of our
committed engagement. Not only can you not escape
subjectivity but, as far as religion is concerned, you
shouldn’t want to. Subjectivity is essential to religion,
to faith. Put differently, Coleridge recognizes that
engagement is inescapable. It is the way to truth.

As far as the Bible is concerned, shoring up the doctrine
of divine dictation requires all kinds of odd maneuvers in
order to show that inconsistencies aren’t really
inconsistencies, that errors of fact are not, in fact,
wrong, and that morally offensive passages are entirely
agreeable, after all. The most familiar examples of this
kind of thing involve internal contradictions of fact and
external contradictions with, say archeological and
historical science. The doctrine of “infallible
intelligence” requires us to explain away every tension and
scurry to resolve or attack every claim of “secular”
science that seems to threaten a biblical statement. What
is going on when we do that? You’re trying to secure an
objective certainty. The authority of Scripture depends on
its infallibility being objectively demonstrated or
preserved against erosion, secured, on the one hand,
against the subjectivity of its human authors - here
reduced to passive instruments - and, on the other hand,
against the doubts and questions of its contemporary
readers. This mistaken attempt at security, however,
produces only uncertainty and restless alarm. It also has
to some dark moral consequences, suggested in his anecdote
about the morality of Jael. As a contemporary example,
consider the way in which, even in the late-C20th, the
doctrine of verbal inerrancy has reinforced and justified
anti-Semitism.

What sort of authority does Scripture possess, then? The
kind of authority that comes about through engagement,
recognized in and through a relationship. It establishes
itself Spirit to Spirit, in the experience of recognition,
an experience that changes and grows with time.

[In Scripture] I have met everywhere more or less
copious sources of truth, and power, and
purifying impulses; - that I have found words for
my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances
for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame
and my feebleness… . In short, whatever finds me,
bears witness for itself that it has proceeded
from a Holy Spirit, even from the same Spirit,
which remaining in itself, yet regenerateth all
other powers, and in all ages entering into holy
souls maketh them friends of God, and prophets.

This kind of authority is not neurotically dependent upon
freedom from any and all error, inconsistency, or lapse.
Scripture is the medium of a relationship in which truth
may be received, known, and lived. What Coleridge has done
is to re-appropriate a patristic and Reformation idea,
namely, that the Bible is “self-authenticating,” it’s
authority “self-demonstrating.” This is, in fact, an ancient
view. Coleridge’s account is distinctively modern, however,
in its psychological and historical thrust: this self-
demonstration takes place over time, as a process of trial.

There are likewise sacred Writings, which, taken
in connection with the institution and perpetuity
of a visible Church, all believers revere as the
most precious boon of God, next to Christianity
itself, and attribute both their communication
and preservation to an especial Providence. In
them you will find all the revealed truths, which
have been set forth and offered to you, clearly
and circumstantially recorded; and, in addition
to these, examples of obedience and disobedience
both in states and individuals, the lives and
actions of men eminent under each dispensation,
their sentiments, maxims, hymns, and prayers,
their affections, emotions, and conflicts;-in all
which you will recognize the influence of the
Holy Spirit, with a conviction increasing with
the growth of your own faith and spiritual
experience.

An important question, though, arises. Doesn’t
Coleridge’s strategy leave us with a merely subjective
assertion of the Bible’s authority: an emotionally
based conviction that cannot sustain itself publicly,
in any kind of argument?

Coleridge’s restoration of subjectivity against an
objectification of Scripture is a distinctively post-
Kantian one. He’s critically aware of the dangers of a
failure to recognize the subject both within and without
the text of Scripture, both, that is, the subjectivity of
the authors and that of the readers. Coleridge, of course,
pulls his radical punches in that he reserves - whether for
reasons of strategy or personal conservatism - the category
of direct “dictation.” The burden of his argument, however,
falls on the affirmation of the finite as the inevitable
medium for the knowledge of God. We do not know “things in
themselves” but things in the mode of human knowing.
Coleridge asks:

“How can I comprehend this? How is it to be proved?
To the first question, I should answer:
Christianity is not a Theory, or a Speculation; but
a Life. Not a Philosophy of Life, but a Life and a
living Process. To the second: TRY IT.”

3. The “Coinherence” of Subjective and Objective

It’s important to note, though, that Coleridge is not
saying “it’s true because you believe it,” or “by believing
it, you make it true.” Nor is he intending to “privatize”
Christianity: access only through the doors of an
experience vouchsafed to the few. Rather, the point is the
post-Kantian and Romantic one: subjectivity is the
inescapable medium of objective truth. Coleridge explains
it like this:

I comprise and conclude the sum of my conviction
in this one sentence. Revealed Religion (and I
know of no religion not revealed) is in its
highest contemplation the unity, that is, the
identity or coinherence, of Subjective and
Objective. It is in itself, and irrelatively, at
once inward Life and Truth, and outward Fact and
Luminary. But as all Power manifests itself in
the harmony of correspondent Opposites, each
supposing and supporting the other,- so has
Religion its objective, or historic and
ecclesiastical pole, and its subjective, or
spiritual and individual pole. In the miracles,
and miraculous parts of religion - both in the
first communication of divine truths, and in the
promulgation of the truths thus communicated - we
have the union of the two, that is, the
subjective and supernatural displayed
objectively, outwardly and phenomenally as
subjective and supernatural.

An example may clarify the last – and important – sentence.
The Risen Jesus appeared only to the disciples, only,
therefore, to those who, however broken in spirit, guilty,
disappointed, or bewildered, still stood within a structure
of concern, of interest: “we had hoped that he was the one
to redeem Israel.” Jesus did not appear to Caiphas, Pilate,
or to any passing and indifferent stranger. Does that mean
that the resurrection was “merely subjective,” just “in the
heads” of the disciples. Coleridge’s answer is no. This
risen life is God given: it is not a possibility of which
the world is capable. Only possibilities within the world
can be proved or demonstrated and resurrection simply isn’t
a this-worldly discovery. In Coleridge’s terms, it is
“supernatural.” Here, then, in the resurrection
appearances, it is disclosed objectively, that is, as an
outward truth – as “real.” The theme of doubt that also
appears in the resurrection narratives serves to reinforce
this “outwardness” – the resurrection appearances are
something unexpected, “out of the way,” and therefore
capable of provoking doubt as well as faith. Furthermore,
the mystery of resurrection is offered to the freedom of
trust, it does not overwhelm, coerce. The resurrection,
then, is given as an outward truth, not as created by the
disciples’ mental state. Yet, still, only the disciples
perceive it, it is “available,” as it were, only in and
through that movement of trust which Christ summons and to
which he addresses himself. Why? Because the deepest truth
of things is only available to the engaged, to those who
participate, give themselves in trust and hope. Even, if
that giving is tentative, fearful, and accompanied with
doubt. Thus, in Coleridge’s terms, the resurrection
appearances disclose the objectivity of resurrection as an
outwardness that can only be grasped inwardly: an
objectivity that requires subjectivity. The “identity or
coinherence of Subjective and Objective.”

Immediately after this passage, Coleridge returns to the
character of Scripture: “in the scriptures…and in the
Mind of the believing and regenerate Reader and Meditator,
there is proved the reciprocity, or reciprocation of the
Spirit as Subjective and Objective.” We are, in all this,
and Coleridge points it out, close to an ancient Christian
doctrine: that of the Holy Spirit as inspirer of author and
interpreter.

4. A Novelistic Approach to Scripture

It remains to note one distinctive element of Coleridge’s
proposals for reading Scripture. Scripture is the witness
to God’s truth given through a complex history of flesh and
blood. The Bible was fashioned within and bears innumerable
marks of cultural change; of the formation, adaptation; and
decay of institutions; of intellectual developments; of
violent breaks of historical continuity; of disagreement,
conflict, and ideological rivalry; of renewal and revision.
This is Scripture’s “historicity” and it’s this that the
“doctrine of Infallible Intelligence” obscures. Here is
Coleridge’s example:

Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord; curse
ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof - sang
Deborah. Was it that she called to mind any
personal wrongs - rapine or insult - that she or
the house of Lapidoth had received from Jabin or
Sisera? No; she had dwelt under he palm tree in
the depth of the mountain. But she was a mother
in Israel; and with a mother’s heart, and with
the vehemency of a mother’s and a patriot’s love,
she had shot the light of love from her eyes, and
poured the blessings of love from her lips, on
the people that had jeoparded their lives unto
the death against the oppressors; and the
bitterness, awakened and borne aloft by the same
love, she precipitated in curses on the selfish
and coward recreants who came not to the help of
the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the
mighty. As long as I have the image of Deborah
before my eyes, and while I throw myself back
into the age, country, circumstances, of this
Hebrew Bouduca in the not yet tamed chaos of the
spiritual creation; - as long as I contemplate
the impassioned, high-souled, heroic woman in all
the prominence and individuality of her will and
character, - I feel as if I were among the first
ferments of the great affections - the proplastic
waves of the microcosmic chaos, swelling up
against - and yet towards - the outspread wings
of the Dove that lies brooding on the troubled
waters.

There is something very interesting about this approach. It
is “novelistic.” We read and understand Deborah like we
would read and understand a character in a novel. It is no
coincidence - despite Coleridge’s own reservations about
novels - that this is the period in which the novel
develops and becomes the dominant literary form - even
poetry becomes “novelized” in the C19th, as does painting.

The Bible is unique, Coleridge tells us, but it’s not
unique because it’s infallible: it’s unique in its power to
“find” us. Coleridge asks us, therefore, to “read its
contents with only the same piety which you freely accord
on other occasions to the writings of men, considered the
best and wisest of their several ages!” This is an
important critical principle. It was to become a slogan
when historical-criticism began to make serious inroads
into the English clergy’s approach to Scripture. The idea
is, for instance, found in Benjamin Jowett’s contribution
to Essays and Reviews, the collection that so upset the
vicar of St. Mary the Virgin. However, there is a problem.
Historical criticism invites a far more reductive approach
to the biblical text than Coleridge would have
countenanced. When biblical interpretation is dominated by
historical-criticism, meaning is identified with the
results of an historian’s reconstruction of the author’s
intentions and the author’s historical context. This is
another form of false and reductive objectification.

Here, Coleridge’s doctrine of “the coinherence of
subjectivity and objectivity,” of the Spirit in authors and
readers points a way beyond reductionism. For him, meaning
is not univocal or static but arises out of the relation
the reader has with the text: the dynamism of the reader
and the reader’s context, on the one hand, with the text on
the other, a dynamism mediated in the Spirit.

As a part of my journey of seeking Anglican orders in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas, I am participating in the CPE program at Christus Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio.

I was hoping, before the summer started, that CPE might be an opportunity for me to develop deeper self-awareness (of my attitudes, values, and assumptions that could “get in the way” of ministry), and this has proven to be the case so far.

What has been a wonderfully gracious surprise, however, is that this process of self-awareness has been linked to my ongoing journey (about three years old now) into the life of contemplative prayer. As Thomas Keating has pointed out, gaining awareness into deeper meditative states of the heart can help to heal wounds to the unconscious self, and meet the deep longing of the Christian mystic: to experience immediacy with God, whose unbounded love alone is sufficient to satisfy the human heart, having as it does eternity set in it.

I was radically encouraged by this quotation from James Finley in Christian Meditation:

The very fact that you sincerely  desire to practice meditation means you are being blessed in a most extraordinary way. You are being led into the waters of meditative awareness, in which hermits, monks, and nuns living in monastaries, and countless devout women and men living in the world have found a deep and abiding experience of oneness with God. In order to join all these kindred spirits, you must courageously step into the stream of meditative experience that they entered, and in which their lives were transformed. You must entrust yourself to God, who is the river’s origin, its steady, strong current, and the ocean of fulfillment to which it leads.

In this teaching on Romans, NT Wright argues that, in chapters 5 - 8, Paul is basically retelling the exodus story, now recapitulated and fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Chapter 5 is about redemption (see also 3:24), which is what happened when God went into the slave market called Egypt and rescued Israel to be his first born son.

Then in chapter 6 there is a passing through the water – baptism – into new freedom. Here we find liberation to be God’s people among the nations.

Then, in the exodus story, what happens next? The giving of the law. This is chapter 7, where we are brought to Sinai. The new law of Christ and the Spirit do what the Torah could not do: bring about the obedience of faith.

Then what? A long wilderness wondering to get to the promised land. This Rom 8:12ff, in which God’s people are led to their inheritance (ie, the renewed creation) by the Spirit, as children of God, and not falling back into fear like slaves (8:14,15).

And all of this, just as in the Exodus story, is because of the covenant love of God, a loving covenant which then renews the entire creation.

At the end of chapter 4, Paul says that the faith which reckons us as righteous (is this “reckoning as righteous” what Paul means by “justification?” I think Luther would say “yes” but Wright would say “no”) is belief that God raised Jesus from the dead.

“From the dead.” I have never before noticed that Paul is drawing a parallel between the faith which reckoned Abraham righteous was also belief in God’s power over death. Rom 4:19 says that Abraham “unwaveringly” in faith considered his own body which was “as good as dead” as well as “the deadness of Sarah’s womb.” (It is interestingly that Abraham did not “deny death” but rather looked it in the face. God’s power in Abraham’s life did not bypass death but passed through it.)

Trust specifically in God’s victory over death, then, is apparently central to justifying faith.

It is kind of strange that only now am I noticing this (since I preached on Rom 1:16-17 this last Sunday), but I now see something about the word “righteousness” or in Greek dikaiosune (which Paul uses for the first time in 1:17) which I had not seen before.

NTW makes the point that this word for Paul has two aspects in view: justice (defending the oppressed and addressing injustice in the world) and covenant faithfulness (God following through and actually doing what what he promised to Abraham and his family). It is through the latter, however, that God will do the former, thereby fixing the “Adam problem” and “setting the world to rights.”

What I never noticed, however, is that Paul has precisely these two aspects of God’s righteousness in view in the structure of the first major section of the letter (chapters 1 - 4).

After his introductory material (1:1 - 1:17) Paul turns to elaborate on God’s justice, how he absolutely shows no favoritism: every ethnos — including the Jews — are on equal footing before God. This massive critique includes a scathing hermeneutic of suspicion against the Jewish religious authoritative types specifically in 2:17 - 2:29, a critique which shocks me in its vitriolic intensity. (No wonder followers of Christ are always getting into trouble with “the powers that be!” Where did Paul get this kind of boldness?)

Then, however, in chapter 4, Paul goes on to discuss Abraham and God’s promises to him. The point here (among others) is that God in Christ (and in the church?) has done what he promised to do for and with Abraham and his family. And what did God promise? According to chapter 4, he promised to make Abraham the father of many nations (4:17, note that Paul does not say “the father of a great nation,” which would refer to ethnic Israel) which would then inherit not simply now the promised land but in fact “the world” (4:13).

Yesterday, in my final sermon at Christ the King Presbyterian Church here in Austin, I preached on Rom 1:16-17 (the lectionary’s epistle lesson for the day).

Paul in those passages says that the Gospel is “the power of God for salvation….” All day yesterday and this morning I have been asking, “OK, now, just what does Paul mean by ’salvation’ again?”

I find NT Wright’s answer to this question, laid out in his Romans commentary, quite compelling. Wright suggests that what Paul has in mind, especially evident in chapters 5 -8, includes:

- “new exodus” (ie, Israel’s liberation from bondage / captivity),

- sonship or adoption,

- inheritance (the land now including the whole world),

- the glory of God which means his presence in the form of the Holy Spirit, and bodily resurrection.

These are weighty matters, and hopefully I can come back to each one of them soon.

“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.

Bruce McCormack, professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, has commented on the text which (one subgroup of) the faculty of Westminster wrote to justify its opposition to the Christological analogy Pete Enns relies upon in his book Inspiration and Incarnation.

McCormack succinctly does a geneaology of Reformed christology, culminating in John Owen and visible in the Westminster Standards, tracing it back to Chalcedon. The upshot is that the Reformed tradition, in opposition to some patristic readings as well as most Orthodox readings, locates the personhood of Christ in the hypostatic union, and not simply as derivative from the pre-existing Logos. Interestingly, the main motivation for this on the part of the Reformed tradition was to preserve the real humanity of Christ in all its fullness, resisting the idea that Christ’s humanity is just an instrument of the Logos.

Here as elsewhere, the Reformed theological tradition rocks. What is sad, though, is that WTS, as a part of its condemnation of Pete’s book, is departing from this.

What is even sadder is that they probably did not even realize what it was doing, so low is its interest level in the patristic thought and the ancient context of Chalcedon. McCormack reminds us that doing theology is impossible apart from doing history.

Hmmmm … isn’t that also what Pete is saying (among other things) in his book?

Bad things happen when we (ie, evangelicals or conservative Reformed types) let our doctrine of Scripture drive the rest of our theology, which seems to me to be what is going on at WTS. The need nostalgically to defend (a relatively recent conception of) the Bible drives all else.

For the text of the McCormack piece, go here.

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.

I. Summary of the Windsor Report (and Underlying Documents) and the Covenant

First, however, it would be helpful to summarize and interpret the Windsor Report (containing four sections: A - D) itself as well as the proposed covenant. The Windsor Report makes it abundantly clear that it is not dealing primarily with issues of human sexuality or sexual ethics. Rather, it is dealing with the nature of communion, as clarified by a certain crisis (note that crisis or controversy is the primary way in which theology gets clarified in the history of the church) which has in turn been precipitated by unilateral actions concerning human sexuality on the part of certain ecclesial entities.

Therefore, when one turns to “Section A: The Purposes and Benefits of Communion” one can appreciate why the authors, after summarizing the rich biblical foundation for communion (the proleptic embodiment of the coming Kingdom of God in redemptive history) and the practical consequences of healthy communion (common pattern of liturgical life; mutual independence and responsibility in the body of Christ; solidarity in social issues of justice such genocide and racial enslavement), chose to spill so much ink in writing about the nature of communion, including how recent controversies in the global Anglican family of churches (the ordination of women to the presbyterate; the consecration of women to the episcopate) have impacted that communion. The upshot of this is that, in contrast to the groundswell of collective will regarding the above mentioned issues related to women – in which action was “taken in cooperation with the Instruments of Unity” – the actions recently taken by the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster (to authorize a public rite of blessing for same sex unions) and by the General Convention of the Episcopal Church (“to consent to … the consecration of … the person elected as Bishop of New Hampshire, a divorced man openly acknowledged to be living in a sexually active and committed same sex relationship” ) were undertaken unilaterally, with apparent disregard for the Primates’ advance warning that such an action (in the case of the consent to the consecration of Gene Robinson) “might ‘tear the fabric of our communion at the deepest level.’” The primates, as the Report points out, had repeatedly reaffirmed Lambeth 1998 1.10, which rejects “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture” and states that it “cannot advise the legitimizing or blessing of same sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same gender unions.”

It is because of this unilateral action, the report argues, that the Anglican Communion now finds itself in a condition of critical illness. And as so often happens in the case of illness in the human body, some attempts to bring healing have actually exacerbated the symptoms, especially the move on the part of some African bishops and primates to send “flying bishops” to North America to perform canonical Episcopal actions, including the consecration of additional bishops. Such transgression of Episcopal boundaries, the report points out, are a clear violation not only of resolutions from Lambeth 1988 and 1998, but also of “some of the longest-standing regulations of the early undivided church (Canon 8 of Nicea).”

Even if, however, the actions taken by New Westminster and The Episcopal Church have displayed symptoms of critical illness in the Anglican Communion, the report does stress that there have been and remain “deeper symptoms” of illness as well. The report identifies six “key strands in the story” which have lead to the current impasse: theological development, ecclesiastical procedures, adiaphora, subsidiarity, trust, and authority. In every case except for the last two, the report specifically states that the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of New Westminster have fallen short of their responsibility to the larger communion.

Section B of the report (“Fundamental Principles”) is a description of both the nature of the communion we share as well as the actual, concrete bonds, or one might say, cords, that bind us as Anglicans together.

Before turning to the concrete bonds which tie us in unity, however, consider the nature of the communion which the report suggests, which can be seen in three key ideas put forward in the report: “mutual interdependence,” “putting the needs of the global fellowship before [one’s] own,” and “corporate, ecclesial personhood, [existing] in and for [the] fellow churches.”

What is the origin of these ideas? We have already seen that in the first paragraphs of the report in Section A this idea of communion is rooted in the redemptive work of the Triune God as described in the New Testament in such places as Ephesians. However, it is the Virginia Report, which is referred to thirteen times in the main body of the Windsor Report, which provides the underlying communion theology for the latter.
It seems to me that the authors of The Virginia Report do three things which are hugely significant for the purposes of this discussion: they ground communion; they contrast communion, and they eschatologize communion.

First, they ground communion in the life of the Trinity:

The Commission has centered its study on the understanding of the Trinitarian faith. It believes that the unity of the Anglican Communion derives from the unity given in the triune God, whose inner personal and relational nature is communion. This is our center. This mystery of God’s life calls us to communion in visible form.”

Second, they contrast communion with “the competitive individualism” (which they also rightly point out is “no longer accepted without question” even in the secular world) in the “political, scientific, economic, and psychological spheres.” So whatever communion is for the Anglican Communion, it is not something that occurs between competitive individuals. As we will see later in John Zizioulas’ theology of personhood, communion is in fact antithetical to our normal conception of the solitary individual as such, since the persons of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit so indwell and mutually penetrate one another that they cannot be thought of as individuals at all. Instead, patristic theology sees communion as rooted in the ontology of person, which is something quite different than that of the individual. All “injustice, racism, separation and denial of freedom” as well as individual and corporate alienation – all of which are rooted in the competition of the individual – are radically challenged and ultimately overcome by the communion we have with each other in Christ, his body and blood, his “passion, death, and resurrection.”

Third, they eschatologize communion. The communion of the Trinity is the telos of mankind as imaged in the church. Paradoxically it is present now and still-to-be realized in God’s future. The report in this context quotes Maximus the Confessor: “The things of the past are shadow; those of the present icon; the truth is to be found in the things of the future.” Two implications flow from this: first, that the church is called to embody the purpose of God’s future in today’s world ; second, that communion is something that we can only partially realize in the present, though it is the future goal to which we wholly devote ourselves.

In its articulation of the actual ties that bind us together, the two concrete cords discussed in The Windsor Report are Scripture (together with its interpretation, by the church of course) and the episcopate. Why does the Windsor Report exert so much energy in discussing the role of Scripture?

The answer to this question has to do with that final “key strand in the story,” mentioned above, which has attenuated the unity of the Anglican communion: authority. And it is not too speculative to suggest that the implicit contrast, or foil, in view in this discussion of authority is the Roman papal see. For, in Anglicanism (as has been made clear in diverse ways in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries ), authority resides in Scripture.

Here, however, another implicit contrast comes into play: the Protestant, or we might say “Reformed” or “evangelical” understanding of how Scripture is authoritative in the Christian Church. This conception tends statically to spatialize Scripture into a “quasi-legal” rule book of propositions to be appealed to in the case of controversy.

The report’s (and purportedly, the Anglican Communion’s) understanding of how authority works is neither papal nor protestant in the way just described. Rather, Scripture plays a vital role in the authority of God in Jesus Christ in the mission and life of the church as it seeks to bring about the inbreaking Kingdom of God in and for the world. This, the report claims, is how the earliest Christians thought of it, and this makes sense when it is remembered that, while the earliest Christians did not have the New Testament canon as we think of it, they did nevertheless gather in Eucharistic synaxis to be formed by the word of God (as the preaching of the Gospel) into the body of Christ for the sake of the world. To put it another way, it seems helpful to imagine (with a historically informed imagination, of course) how the earliest Christian communities made decisions in the era prior to the canonization of what we call the New Testament . Our use of Scripture must be consistent with theirs.

The point of this rendition of how Scripture is authoritative, however, is to locate authority not just “in the Scriptures” (as if texts can be without interpretation in any meaningful sense) but rather in the (whole) church’s interpretation of the Scriptures. Consistent with The Virginia Report’s articulation of communion above, the interpretation of the entire Church resides in each local (including provincial) church.

The second concrete cord that binds the Anglican communion together is the episcopate. After rehearsing the history the emergence of the shared historic episcopate in the Anglican Communion (reaching its settling point in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral), the report states that “… a bishop is more than simply the local chief pastor. Bishops represent the universal to the local to the universal and vice-versa.” Again, note how this understanding resonates with The Virginia Report’s concept of communion summarized above.

Because of this unique nature of the bishop, who, building on what we just said, embodies the catholicity of the Church in his person, “successive Lambeth conferences have urged the primates to shoulder the burden of enhanced responsibility for the unity of the Communion….” Interestingly, this move is grounded by the report not just in Ignatius, Irenaeus, and Cyprian as well as in “the great sees of Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, Rome, and Jerusalem,” but also in St. Paul, who wrote “with authority to various churches … he had not himself founded.”

An additional bond discussed in the report (in addition to Scripture and the Episcopate) which binds the Anglican Communion together is the way the Communion has answered the question, “How can we, being a diverse community, practice reception, or the making and receiving of innovations within the tradition?” The answer has been for the church to perform the following steps mediated through the Instruments of Communion:
• theological debate and discussion
• formal action
• increased consultation to see whether the formal action settles down and makes itself at home.

It is each autocephalous church which performs this process, in relative “autonomy” to each other province (ie, autocephalous church) but within a wider obligation to others, and in subordination to the whole. (Autocephalous churches can make their own independent decisions only at their own level, and so we can see how autocephaly is linked to subsidiarity.) This “wider obligation” and “subordination to the whole” takes effect particularly in potentially divisive matters about which the whole Communion has yet to make up its mind. Even “internal decisions [must be] fully compatible with the interests, standards, unity and good order or the wider community of which the [autocephalous] body forms a part.” This is particularly true in the church’s necessary task of inculturating the Gospel into different societies in mission.

The underlying principle of this entire articulation of the process of reception is stated in the ancient dictum, “What touches all must be decided by all,” an idea which, again, presupposes the idea of communion articulated in The Virginia Report (see above).

Section C of the Windsor Report (“Our Future Life Together”) makes specific recommendations for the Communion about how to mend the strained communion / relationships which have ensued due to the unilateral actions named above. For the purposes of this paper I will include only one such recommendation: that of a “communion law’ which would be inserted into each local ecclesial entity’s body of canon law. This action would “enable and implement the covenant proposal below, strengthening the bonds of unity and articulating what has to-date been assumed.” Such an communion law is needed, the report argues, because “informal agreement or unenforceable guidance is not enough.”

This is strong and important language to say the least. What is being proposed here is that each province in the Communion adopt and incorporate into its official documents (constitutions, canons, prayer books) a “law” which will commit it to submit to a covenant to be adopted by the Instruments of Communion.

Before summarizing and interpreting the (as of the current date) final version of the covenant, we note that The Windsor Report envisions that the covenant would “deal with:” acknowledgement of common Anglican identity; the relationships of communion; the commitments of communion; the excercize of “autonomy” in communion; the management of communion affairs.

The St. Andrews Draft of the proposed covenant is divided into three parts: faith, mission, and (maintenance of) communion. Each part contains both affirmations and commitments.

The scope of this paper does not lend itself to listing every faith-affirmation and every commitment adumbrated in the covenant. Instead, I would like to work with Phil Turner’s three “stances” which he has outlined in his paper “A Comment on the St. Andrews’ Draft of the Anglican Covenant:” the confessionalist stance, the pluralist stance, and the conciliar stance. Using these categories, I will “get down to brass tacks” and identify notable items in the covenant which bear on the current crisis or impasse.

The affirmations under the “Faith” section (Section One) include nothing which all stances could not agree on, all of the listed affirmations being traditional beliefs in the Anglican tradition that are commonly listed in historic Anglican documents and formularies (including common belief in the communion of the church, the worship of the triune God, reliance upon the Holy Spirit, the unique revelation of the faith in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as containing all things necessary for salvation, the catholic creeds as that which set forth this faith, the significant witness of the historic formularies of the Church of England, the two sacraments of baptism and the Supper of the Lord, the historic episcopate, shared patterns of common worship and liturgy, and participation in the apostolic mission of God).

In the “Commitments” section of “Faith,” there is nothing that could not be affirmed by all three stances, except for possibly section 1.2.3 which binds each church to act “in accordance with existing canonical disciplines….” Specifically it seems to me that this provision would prevent pluralists from practicing open communion, or adopting a non-Trinitarian liturgy, since both of these are already stipulated in existing canons.

In the declarations of Section Two (dealing with mission) my only note is to acknowledge Phil Turner’s observation that language of “reconciling mission” (2.2.1) demands content about how “reconciliation is fundamental to God’s relation to the world.” While I appreciate this point, it does seem to me that the covenant does this very thing when, in the second paragraph of the preliminary remarks, it links itself to the Windsor Report, which speaks of God’s reconciling ministry in such places as paragraph 55: “God’s sovereign, saving, redeeming and reconciling rule over all creation.”

Among the affirmations of Section Three on (Maintenance of Communion), it seems to me that the affirmation of most importance for the purposes of this paper is that of the central role of bishops as “visible signs of unity, representing the universal Church to the local, and the local Church to the universal,” language which, as we have seen above features prominently in the Windsor Report. Why is this statement so important?

First, it implies that it would be contradictory for the bishops, say, of a particular province, not to participate in council with the bishops of the larger church. That is, for a bishop to be a bishop, he must be meeting with bishops from the larger church in an official Episcopal capacity. If this is not happening, then he is not “representing the local to the universal,” and thus he is not (fully) a bishop in the church. Second, the language here of “universal church” clearly implies ecumenical concerns. In other words, separated bishops would damage and rupture not just the Anglican Communion, but the catholic church in its full ecumenical sense.

As for Section Three’s common commitments (by its own admission, the Draft’s “most contentious” section ) on the maintenance of communion, my thoughts are as follows. First, what is said about the “constitutional autonomy of all the Churches of the Anglican Communion” presupposes all that the Windsor Report stated about subsidiarity (see this discussion above). Second, it is important to note (in light of those who complain about too much power being given to bishops and especially to primates) that the St. Andrews Draft modifies the previous draft (Nassau) to widen the circle of coordination beyond the Primates to all Instruments of Communion (including the Anglican Consultative Council). Third, the “procedural elements” outlined in 3.2.5 are implemented when “actions … either proposed or enacted … which … are … deemed to threaten the unity of the Communion” are identified and proceeded against by any appropriate ecclesial entity.

Fourth, a word about the “teeth” of the covenant. The document assumes that when an ecclesial entity (ie, a province) is understood to have “relinquished the force and meaning of the purposes of the covenant,” that this is tantamount to a suspension of communion. I do think it would be helpful, following the suggestion of Philip Turner, to include language something like “suspension of participation in the councils of communion,” or perhaps “… participation in the Instruments of Communion.” Nevertheless, what this covenant does succeed in doing, and this is what really matters, is to provide a way “of common belief and practice … sustained by the practice of mutual subjection expressed by forbearance and restraint over time within a conciliar polity.” This procedure, it seems to me, does flow validly from the theology of personal communion which undergirds the entire Windsor process.

In four parts, I am going to post the paper I wrote for Philip Turner, in an independent study course at ETSS called “Authority and Communion in Global Anglicanism.” Here is the introduction:

This life is revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us – we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you may have communion with us; and truly our communion is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” (I John 1:2-3)

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? The answer of this paper is simply that one cannot. This is what the theology of embodied, personal communion which underlies the Windsor process, including the proposed covenant, articulates, and this is a major reason why this process, including its covenant, should be supported.

This paper is an argument that the proposed covenant is an attempt more fully to embody personal communion in the global Anglican family of churches, and that, in the main, to reject this (or some similar) attempt is implicitly to opt in favor of (an inherently violent) competition between individuals.

After developing and showing some ecclesial implications of the concept of person in contrast to that of the individual, I will proceed to demonstrate the importance of this global Anglican moment in light of the global situation confronting the human race. Finally, I will end with two ecclesiological examples of embodied personal communion: the Eucharist and the Episcopate.

My argument is not simply that to reject the proposed covenant is to reject this theology of embodied personal communion; however it is not far from that, either. I grant that it is theoretically possible to be in full agreement with every aspect and every implication of the communion theology articulated in this paper (rooted in the Windsor Report, The Virginia Report, and The Cypress Statement) and still oppose this covenant. However I do think that many people who resist this development are failing to see what the real issues are, in at least three areas: the nature of personhood, the demise of the modern nation-state, and the nature of the church (as exemplified in the Eucharist and the Episcopate). These three “subplots” undergird this debate, and clarifying these issues as well as showing how they relate to the Windsor process and the proposed covenant should go a long way to at least clarifying the debate.