Bishop of Tennessee on Ecclesiology

A good GTS man by the way:

The Rt. Rev. John C. Bauerschmidt: Remarks at Wycliffe College, Toronto

Agreeing Together: Reflections on Ecclesiology and Theological Method

“What are parties given for in London but that enemies may meet?” says the Duchess in Henry James’ novel The Awkward Age. “How can hatreds comfortably flourish without the nourishment of such regular ‘seeing’… as friendship alone supplies?” The aptness of such an observation, of course, depends on one’s perspective on the upcoming Lambeth Conference of Bishops. What kind of party will it be? Will it be the mere meeting of enemies? Or perhaps simply a “non-meeting”? For those of you who know the novel, it may seem that it is the awkward age of the Anglican Communion itself, no longer a child yet not quite grown, and perhaps even prey to unscrupulous persons. In a number of ways there is a sort of Jamesian quality to Communion life right now, with the necessity of a tortured parsing of dialogue in report, resolution, and communiqué. We might make the exception that the theme of sexual tension is in Communion affairs no longer subtly presented (as it was by James), but rather foisted upon us in a post-Freudian and political way in our own day.

Forgive the literary parallels. I have no solution to the dilemma of how we can gather, not as enemies, at Lambeth, though I do want to reflect on another parallel, in ecclesiology and theological method that may be helpful to Anglicans as we think about the way forward. That parallel is the necessity of agreeing together, both for the Church to embody the fullness of the life God has given it, and for Christian theology to have both authenticity and coherence. Those who must agree together in the Church are the diverse centers of authority; while in Christian theology a number of sources (“authorities” of another sort) cohere and speak together in order for truth to command assent.

So let’s start with ecclesiology, in particular with the influential Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage. For Cyprian, the agreement that was crucial was the agreement of the Church’s bishops. The episcopate is one, and though spread throughout the world, is a harmonious multitude. The one Church and the one episcopate reflect the One God. though the necessity for agreeing together points to an underlying multiplicity, and is not an argument for an ecclesial monism. The concurrence of the episcopate in agreeing together was in Cyprian’s time an important theological datum, a sign of the Church’s unity and integrity in the midst of multiplicity and diversity. Diversity: in respect to penitential discipline, and then in Cyprian’s own time in respect to discipline regarding those who had lapsed during the persecution of the Church. The communion of the bishops with each other, in the midst of diverse practice, reflected the unity of the Church. “The authority of the bishops forms a unity, of which each holds his part in its totality. And the Church forms a unity, however far she spreads and multiplies by the progeny of her fecundity.”

But it is when we come to the issue of schism and baptismal discipline in the Christian community that we see Cyprian as most willing to stretch the concord of the episcopate. The custom of Cyprian’s North African Church was to re-baptize those who had been baptized in schismatic communities; not the practice of the Roman Church, nor the practice which eventually prevailed in the West. Cyprian and Pope Stephen engaged in long range theological argument over this difference in baptismal discipline, and Stephen seems to have been willing to sever communion with churches that followed the North African practice. Cyprian, by contrast, was willing to tolerate divergent practice in this case as well. Again, as in the case of the other issues, each bishop was to follow his own custom while unity was kept. “Charity of spirit, the honor of our college, the bond of faith, and priestly concord, are maintained by us with patience and gentleness”.

Yet there were limits to diversity in Cyprian’s scheme. When it came to clergy who had lapsed in the persecution, or who had become schismatic, a harsher line was taken. They were not to be restored to office, even if repentant. The more rigorous discipline functions as a reminder of the role played by the episcopate in Cyprian’s theology. As long as the episcopate was uncompromised, diversity in regard to some things could be tolerated.

Cyprian’s Episcopal theology and ecclesiology were tremendously influential among upholders of the episcopally-ordered Church of England in the seventeenth century, and then again in the wake of the Oxford Movement among Catholic-minded Anglicans in the nineteenth century. It is a fact to conjure with that the echoes of this ecclesiology continue to resound in the Windsor Report, with its specific call for agreement among Churches about those who hold the episcopacy, in order that the Communion can continue to walk together. The tradition of North African Christianity has been a rich mine for Catholicism in the West, and a rich mine for Anglicanism in particular. The themes developed by Cyprian continue to shape the argument. Diversity, yes; but also the necessity of agreement together.

Let’s cycle forward a bit now, ruthlessly skipping the rise of the medieval papacy, the Conciliar movement, and the Reformation, not to mention the beginnings of a global Christianity and the development of the Anglican Communion itself, and come to the way in which agreement together works itself out in our Anglican context. The 1948 Lambeth Conference addressed one of its reports to the subject of the Communion itself. The Report cited the 1930 Conference, which had contrasted two types of ecclesiastical organization, “that of centralized government and that of regional autonomy”. Casting its eyes nervously over its shoulder at Rome, the 1948 Conference Report repudiated centralized government, congratulating previous Conferences on decisions not to establish either a formal primacy for Canterbury, or an Appellate Tribunal, or to give the Conference itself legislative powers. One wonders what the fathers of Lambeth 1948 would have made of our situation today. It’s a sobering meditation on how times have changed, and of how a gentlemanly smugness concerning a time-conditioned understanding of our own tradition as evidenced at Lambeth 1948 has been first exposed and then transformed by ecumenical dialogue and the changed circumstances of a global Christianity.

Yet, even here, in spite of smugness about the best of all possible churches, “the positive nature of the authority which binds the Anglican Communion together is therefore seen to be moral and spiritual, resting on the truth of the Gospel, and on a charity which is patient and willing to defer to the common mind”. “The common mind”: once again, agreement together.

Authority, as it has come down to the Anglican Communion from the undivided Church of the first centuries, is single in that it comes from one Divine source, but is “distributed among Scripture, Tradition, Creeds, the Ministry of the Word and Sacraments, the witness of saints, and the consensus fidelium, which is the continuing experience of the Holy Spirit through His faithful people in the Church”. Lambeth incautiously speaks of different kinds of authority together in the same breath, but the principle of diversity is the same. Again, the need for multiple elements to agree together for authorities to cohere and speak as one in order for truth to command assent.

“It is thus a dispersed rather than a centralized authority having many elements which combine, interact with, and check each other; these elements together contributing by a process of mutual support, mutual checking, and redressing of errors and exaggerations to the many sided fullness of the authority which Christ has committed to His Church. When this authority of Christ is to be found mediated not in one mode but in several we recognize in this multiplicity God’s loving provision against the temptations to tyranny and the dangers of unchecked power”.

When Lambeth 1948 sought the place where this dispersed authority distributed in diverse places finds its focus, it pointed to the episcopate, “by virtue of… divine commission, and in synodical association with… clergy and laity”, and to the Book of Common Prayer. So again, we come back to agreement together: something different from centralized authority or universal jurisdiction, yet still substantial, and morally and spiritually authoritative.

I think it not too far a leap, at this point in the life of the Communion, to see the Instruments of Unity within the Anglican Communion as the means by which authority, multiple and dispersed, finds focus so that there can be agreement together. The agreement expresses a common mind, and a commitment to a life together that is substantial, even if not agreeing in every detail. Charity requires patience, and of course patience involves suffering. To walk away from agreement together as our means and end to the living of the Christian life in community is to attempt the re-founding of our doctrine of the Church on something else (indeed, what?); to walk away from the possibility of “mutual support” “mutual checking”, and the “redressing of errors and exaggerations” within the Communion. It is to take the ecclesiology of Cyprian, a committed builder of bridges between Churches, and to turn it into the ecclesiology of the Donatists, who defined their Church by separation. The ecclesiology of the Donatists, in some aspects his legitimate heir, represents in fact the metastasis of Cyprian’s ecclesiology.

Now I want to say something in parallel about theological method, already adumbrated in the 1948 Lambeth Report. In the same way that the Church seeks agreement in the midst of multiplicity, so too do the sources of Christian theological authority seek to come together and offer a coherent witness. They may be distributed in diverse places, according to the Lambeth Report, but they too agree. The Church has a regula, a rule of faith, which is akin to saying that the Holy Scripture needs to be reasonably interpreted in light of the Church’s tradition of understanding the Scripture. The Scripture has its own hermeneutical tool, a way of being interpreted, and it is rooted in the Scripture itself. As Lancelot Andrews put it “one canon...two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period...determine the boundary of our faith.”

Here I want to offer, perhaps improbably, an argument for theological diversity (of a sort). For all our talk of pluralism, there seems a much greater danger of monism in theological method than there is of anything else. Anglicanism has tended to take a historical approach to theology, and history is messy and diverse. The regula is revealed in history; creedal orthodoxy takes time to blossom. The Anglican Divines of the 17th century followed Andrews in valorizing the first centuries of the Church’s life, but by doing so they embraced a multiplicity of perspectives and issues that were stitched together into a coherent witness by the regula.

Yves Congar puts it this way:

Nevertheless, the Church of the Fathers is possessed of something quite special and privileged, and we must recognize this, not just in virtue of some romantic taste for the primitive, but because of what that period represents, historically, in the Church's life. It represents, to be precise, the moment when the deposit of apostolic faith was given an exact form with a view to excluding certain interpretations rejected as heretical...This was the historical role of the Fathers, and that of the great dogmatic councils too. Among these latter, the first four have a kind of preeminence, for, like the Fathers with which they are contemporary, they had to determine the fundamentals of belief, the trinitarian and christological dogmas; they had to forge, for future generations, the elements of a whole Christian language.

Diverse sources sprung from Scripture within community and the lived life of the Church had coherence through the regula fidei.

But what we have in our own day is a tremendous diminishment of theological method, as more complex considerations are swept away by appeals to “justice”, or “inclusion”, or even “scriptural truth” as the only interpretative tool for the Christian tradition. This is less like the uncovering of agreement within multiplicity, the teasing out of connection and underlying unity, and more like the paving over of difference by a theological monism that ignores whole parts of our theological tradition. It is like trotting out “incarnation” and expecting it to trump “atonement”, to speak the word “fall” and expect it to eclipse “creation”, or vice versa.

Don’t misunderstand me: justice (once we’ve defined what we mean by it) is important; and inclusion, if we can define it by proclamation of the truth and welcome into the community, is a graceful thing. But I think that you know what I mean when we find that our mission is defined in such a one-dimensional way, and our community re-defined on a basis which dissolves its very coherence.

Then again, I’m not arguing against Scriptural truth, but only against a sort of “scripturalism” that uses the Bible as a weapon. I think Richard Hooker understood this when he refused to let the Church’s order and traditional common life be re-fashioned by the Puritan demands of “nothing but the Bible”, a demand which finally led to schism within English Christianity and became the theoretical justification for that separation. Hooker upheld a Scripturally-based reformed Catholicism, but he knew the trap of theological monism that was concealed by the Puritan agenda.

Christianity is simply too broad and too deep for this sort of reduction. The necessity of agreeing, through a “regular” reading of Scripture (that is, both sustained over time and also in accord with the rule of faith), reminds us that theological issues are not resolved by appeals to slogans, even ones with substantial credentials, worthy of our attention. Slogans tend to be repeated endlessly, whereas agreement comes through attention to the Scripture and shared discernment and prayer. Our theological method needs to recognize the diverse sources and issues that come before us, and seek agreement in the midst of them. We will have to pray together and hold together in order to do this. There will be no possibility of agreement otherwise.

So, will we be able to gather, as something more than enemies? Agreement together is crucial to both our understanding of the Church, and also to our articulation of the Faith. I think we will need to work out what it means to agree together for our gathering to have any meaning. Agreeing together does not, and should not, involve ecclesiological or theological monism, but it does mean that we will have to agree on substantial things; enough, at least, to show up for the party. I believe that the Windsor Report points the way forward: not to the resolution of everything that divides us at this present moment, but perhaps to that substantial agreement together that will allow us to gather and to seek a common mind.