Andrew Linzey and Richard Kirker, editors, Gays and the Future of the Anglican Communion: Responses to the Windsor Report, O Books, 2005

A review by John Gessell

The twenty-four essays which make up this book reveal the hypocrisy and the astonishingly uninformed hostility which mark the Windsor Report. In addition to a few general comments, I have selected four for more particular comment to afford a taste of the tenor of this important book.

These essays by an extraordinary gathering of Anglican theologians from around the world add up to a crushing analysis of the Windsor Report. They constitute an angry challenge and an unremitting declaration of the basic wrongness of the Report.

It is a severe rebuke to the Windsor Commission, which seeks unity above justice, for its failure to consult the Church theologians outside the members of the Commission and for departing from the received understandings of the polity of central Anglicanism. Its recommendations would transform the Anglican Communion from a collection of autonomous provinces to an authoritarian church able to command obedience to a centralized hierarchy of primates. This is all very troubling to read since Windsor seems to set aside the historic freedom and liberty of the local provinces of the Anglican Communion in favor of a rigid magisterium which must be obeyed in order to resolve the current disputes about authority and sexuality. This is seen as the price of maintaining unity.

But it is not all straightforward. Andrew Linzey of Oxford University in his introduction to the collection sees Windsor’s recommendations as influenced by homophobia as a mask for widespread homophobic sentiments. Among such considerations, he lists the vehemence of antigay language (p xxvii), and the absence of dialogue with gay Anglicans despite the Lambeth l998 call for "deep and dispassionate study of homosexuality" (p xxix).

Further, William Countryman of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific views Windsor, all told, as a "palace coup," a shifting of power to the Primates (pp 1 ff). He discusses this under two rubrics: the issue of polity and the role of scripture.

Windsor, he writes, proposes a revision of the polity of the Anglican Church. "Nothing is more astonishing… than the sudden prominence of a group that did not even exist a few decades ago and has no real grounding in our ecclesiology: the Primates meeting. …Windsor, however, elevates them to one 'Instrument of Unity' among four. And the Primates themselves have now gone on to turn themselves into the principle such instrument by presuming to give direction to another of the instruments, the Anglican Consultative Council." This, Countryman says, would be an authoritative voice to which all must give obedience (p 5), thus overruling the autonomy of provinces and local bishops.

As for scripture, Countryman notes that Windsor "speaks glowingly of bishops as teachers of scripture" (p 12) and gives "Primates a central role in mediating scriptural authority to the communion as a whole" (p 13). This has led some Primates as chief teachers of scripture to assume the authority of the voice of God (p 14).

Marilyn McCord Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, calls Windsor inept (p 74) as it offers a "pernicious polity" and promotes "ethical norms to creedal status," a form of idolatry as human traditions are raised to the level of mandatory belief along with the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. She lays down the gauntlet. The cost of receiving Windsor is too high, she insists in an angry challenge. We may have to allow those who disagree to go their own way. "So far from repenting the consecration of Gene Robinson or approving rites for the blessings of same-gendered unions, we should call upon the Anglican Communion to apologize for the harm caused by the passage of 1998 Lambeth antigay Resolution 1.10.

Rowan Greer, emeritus professor at Yale Divinity School, shows (p 105) that "even in early Anglicanism it is impossible to find any one clear understanding of biblical authority." Further, scripture "is not primarily an arbiter of religious controversy" (p 109). And further, he states, "I am convinced that the repudiation of infallibility is characteristic of Anglicanism" (p 109). Windsor, he argues, would undermine "the consensual aspect of Anglicanism, and mark a radical departure from a tradition that has usually prized freedom sufficiently to be content with ambiguity and controversy" (p 115). Here, Greer affirms Adams in a carefully detailed argument showing how Windsor would overturn Anglican polity. This reviewer believes that these two essays lie at the heart of this collection.

In his own essay, Andrew Linzey lays out eight aspects of Windsor "which concern not just the [unfair] treatment of homosexuals but also the future of the Anglican Communion" (pp 174-187). The report, Linzey writes, does not address the gay issue specifically because it was not part of its mandate, "but the issue permeates its discussion, and should be addressed directly." If the position is that practicing gay behaviour is inherently wrong and contrary to scripture, then all gays and their supporters will have to leave the church. This one issue [will become] the cornerstone of contemporary Anglican orthodoxy" (p 186). This does not appear to be a good future. The exclusion of gays, the repudiation of diversity, could irreparably harm the church.

As Marilyn Adams says, the price is too high in accepting the chaos and conflict which third- world Anglican cultures seek to export to the Anglican provinces in the West. Gays and the Future of the Anglican Communion should be read with care by those who are concerned for both.

[COVENANT, Number 22, January 2006]

The Revd Dr John Maurice Gessell is professor emeritus of ethics, School of Theology, University of the South, Sewanee, and consultant to the editor of Covenant, among other things.