How to Quench the Spirit

by Marilyn Adams

The Windsor Report proposes a new polity for the Anglican Communion, one that translates the poetry of mutual affection and nostalgia for Canterbury into institutional structures that move in the direction of international canon law. What was formerly a loose federation of legally independent churches would now be bound together by a Covenant which would be given legal status by each of the member churches passing a canon to observe it. Just as the UN uses the doctrine of human rights to critique the legal practices of member states, so the Covenant would hold member churches to "essentials," while allowing them autonomy over matters of indifference.

The Covenant would oblige members to submit innovations in theology or ethics to "Instruments of Unity" (the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates' Meeting). It also implies that the selection of bishops would be subject to the approval of these Communion-wide authorities. Compliance would be enforced on pain of excommunication from the Anglican Communion.

So far from a way forward, this proposal is pernicious: it brings us too close for Anglican comfort to the coercive and authoritarian structures of Rome.

The Windsor report locates authority to discriminate the essential from the indifferent in the instruments of Unity. Its criterion for what violates essentials is what disrupts the union and compromises the common good of the Anglican Communion. What counts as essential thereby becomes a function of what the international bodies can or cannot tolerate.

Once essentials are expanded beyond theological doctrines (such as are mentioned in the creeds) to ethics and mores, the problem of how Christ relates to cultures looms large. The Bible bears witness that difficulty in discriminating the Spirit of God from the "spirit of this present age" applies to entrenched social patterns as much as to innovations.

Jesus' inaugural sermon and his Synoptic Gospel ministry suggest that "release for the captive" may well involve the undoing of long-standing taboos. The Gospels, human history and the newspapers all bear witness: when taboos begin to unravel, the process regularly arouses heated resistance. Because we have individually and collectively defined ourselves in terms of these challenged ways of life, their maintenance can seem like a matter of life and death.

The structures proposed in the Windsor report invite those who want to stop the process of change before it reshapes the Church to appeal for allies from other cultures where the taboos are still firmly in place. It contains no comparable provision for individual and Communion-wide self examination, no provision for systematically exhorting member Churches to uproot taboos that oppress.

In the best of circumstances, even among those of similar backgrounds, fresh consensus on issues of race, gender, and sex is the work of decades. The Windsor report's built-in demand that member Churches wait -- on pain of exclusion from the consultative councils of the Communion -- for multicultural consensus would have the consequence of quenching the Spirit.

The authoritative tone of the Windsor report is further sounded in its demand that both sides compromise their integrity for the sake of unity and the common good. It is one thing to express regret that others were hurt; this is a ready response of human benevolence and Christian love. It is another to acknowledge responsibility for hurting someone by my actions, and to submit to a "cease and desist" order on further actions of this kind.

The latter seems to agree that I have done something wrong, and that the thought-process that led me to it was in error. But ECUSA does not believe that it has wronged the Anglican Communion by consecrating Bishop Gene Robinson. The Diocese of New Westminster does not agree that it has violated an obligation by authorizing rites for blessing same-sex partnerships. And bishops acted in conscience when they entered into other dioceses to provide pastoral care. The Windsor report calls for a suppression of honest discernment, contrary to the mystery of the gospel that calls us to discern for all we're worth, and to live up to the light that is in us.

Current disagreements should remind us how all merely human discernment -- not only individual, but collective -- is fallible. Where positions are diametrically opposed, both parties can't be right. Worldwide cultural flux should combine with vigorous multiculturalism within Anglicanism to warn us against demanding too much agreement from one another. Instead, we should stick with the loose federation that has enabled us to work together to meet the world crises of war, hunger, poverty, disease, and dislocation in the past.

[COVENANT, Number 20, April 2005]

Canon Marilyn Adams is Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford.