What’s up Down Under?
By Dale Rye, Covenant
The recent decision of the Diocesan Synod of Sydney, in the Anglican Church of Australia, to allow the administration of Holy Communion—i.e., the celebration of the Eucharist—by deacons and eventually laity seems outlandish to many overseas Anglicans. It makes considerably more sense within the context of Australian Anglicanism, which has a very different history than The Episcopal Church (TEC) and its various offshoots (I will get to that later). Australian Anglicanism is exceptionally diverse as a result of that history, and its diversity has led the Anglican Church of Australia to adopt a unique pattern of organization.
Just as some Episcopalians are frustrated when other Anglicans cannot understand TEC’s particular form of synodical governance, so I expect Australians feel when outsiders try to apply their own context to matters Down Under. I write the following as an American outsider, but one who has long been fascinated enough by the local variations on the common Anglican theme to make a study of them. (I hope that any Australians who read this will take the trouble to correct my inevitable mistakes by commenting below.)
There is another unobvious but critical context for the Sydney decision. Decentralization and diversity have had particular influence on the Australian debate over the ordination of women to the presbyterate and episcopate. In 1968, the Lambeth Conference stated that there were no conclusive arguments for or against women’s ordination; actual ordinations to the priesthood followed in Hong Kong during 1971. Since that time, every Anglican province has been forced to consider the possible ordination of women. The history and structure of the Anglican Church of Australia led the debate there to take a unique form. More so than in most provinces, Australians have considered underlying theological issues about the essential nature of ministry, ordained and otherwise.
There are some Australian dioceses, like Ballarat and The Murray, that are as traditionally Anglo-Catholic as any Anglican jurisdictions anywhere in the world. These dioceses have exercised their right under the Australian church constitution not to follow the majority by ordaining women. They oppose this on the familiar grounds that Jesus chose only men as his apostles and that only a male priest can represent Jesus at the altar.
Other dioceses, like Sydney, Armidale, and North-West Australia, are more Protestant than any others in the world. These dioceses find the Catholic argument completely repugnant, as it assumes that “ministers” are “priests,” that the “table” is an “altar,” and that what happens there is in some sense a sacrifice. They deny any real presence on Calvinistic receptionist grounds. It is still a canonical violation in those dioceses for anyone to wear a chausible or other Eucharistic vestments, and many ministers conduct their “meetings” (not “services”) wearing street clothes. You will almost never see the Archbishop of Sydney or most of his fellow ministers in a clerical collar because of its implications.
Their opposition to the ordination of women is based on the Scriptural injunction, “I allow no woman to teach or have authority over a man” (I Tim. 2:12). That argument has a broader appeal in Australia than the Catholic objection. Even in some of the more moderate dioceses that do allow women priests, they generally serve as chaplains and curates, seldom or never as a rector. The first two dioceses to consecrate women bishops originally defined their role to avoid direct supervision of parishes.
There is an obvious benefit to Sydney from lay presidency. Much of the pressure for ordaining women as presbyters comes from those who feel that the pastoral care of the church would be enhanced thereby. There are women (and even men) who say they could more easily feel God’s presence though the ministry of a woman confessor or celebrant than through a man. That matters, if the reception of the Body of Christ is indeed dependent on the faith of the recipient. I saw the same discussion in TEC during the early 1970s; hardly anybody claimed that women had a right to be ordained, but everybody agreed that they had the right to effective pastoral care. By allowing women deacons (and eventually laity) to administer Communion, Sydney can respond to this desire without compromising its position on giving women authority as elders over men.
Since Sydney (along with the other Protestant dioceses) sees the ministry of presbyters largely in terms of teaching and preaching, it is hardly surprising that they have entirely declined to ordain women to that order. Since the episcopate is a ministry of oversight, the Protestants are even less likely to select a woman bishop. The diaconate is another question; as a servant ministry, it seems consistent with the subordinate (not inferior) role of women under the headship of men. For many Catholics, of course, the diaconate is the first level of the Sacrament of Orders, from which woman are barred by nature.
That illustrates another deep division between Australian conservatives: their attitude towards tradition. The Catholic dioceses might not go so far as to place tradition alongside scripture as a parallel source of doctrine, but they certainly regard the ordinary magisterium of the Church as expressed in its traditional teaching as a trustworthy interpreter of scripture. For the Protestant dioceses, tradition has no authority at all. Either it agrees with the Bible and is superfluous, or it disagrees and is superstitious nonsense. If the church has never ordained women (or blessed homosexual relationships), that has no additional weight beyond what scripture teaches on the subject. An unfounded tradition is no more than an ancient error.
In Sydney, that is just as true of their own Calvinist tradition as it is of Catholic tradition. For the Reformers, pulpit and table were inseparable. They defined the Church as the place where the Word is rightly preached and sacraments rightly administered. Teaching, preaching, and administration of the Gospel ordinances were all committed exclusively to the elders set apart by prayer and the laying on of hands. Thus, the threefold ministry of deacons, presbyters, and bishops is enshrined in the successive Anglican Books of Common Prayer (which no longer have compulsory force in Sydney since the 2003 Diocesan Synod repealed the Act of Uniformity 1662). In the Calvinist tradition, laity could not even perform emergency baptisms. The Protestant leadership in Australia have come to a different conclusion that has led them unashamedly to reject the united Catholic and Reformed tradition and to separate the sacramental and preaching ministries.
As their Puritan forebears put it, every ploughman in his field with an open Bible has the same access to God’s commandments as the highest bishop or theologian. Of course, modern Australian Protestants are no less likely than the Puritans to regard any reading of scripture that differs from their own as profoundly mistaken, but the point remains that it is the Bible text and not church teaching that matters. If my private reading of Scripture differs from the Fathers’, so much the worse for them.
How did Sydney come to the point of rejecting principles that are taken for granted everywhere else in the Catholic, Reformed, and Anglican worlds? To answer, we must drop back for a look at the Anglican Church of Australia, its history, and its structure. One of the complicating factors in the current Anglican crisis has been the fact that most of us assume that all Anglican churches operate pretty much alike worldwide. Australia (like the Church of England, TEC, and the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia) provides a major refutation of that assumption. Australia, in particular, may illustrate one possible future for an Anglican Communion that must cope with the consequences of an almost inconceivable revolution in communications.
The differences between provinces didn’t matter much when hardly anybody knew what anyone else was doing until long after the fact. The internet, in particular, has shrunk the Anglican world so that it is possible for someone across the world to know what is going on in a diocese before most of its members find out. What had been a number of separate communities tied together only by loose bonds of affection is now a single global village. In part, our present difficulties involve working out what that means for our common life, witness, and ministry. One possible model is the way that Australians coped when modern communications and transportation brought together far-flung dioceses holding incompatible theological positions.
Australia is defined by a geographic dichotomy. On the one hand, most of the continent-sized country consists of vast stretches of open land thinly populated with ranches, farms, and a few small towns. The iconic Australian is a fiercely independent jolly swagman waltzing Matilda through the bush. On the other hand, 62% of the population is concentrated in a handful of very large cities—Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth—that utterly dominate their hinterlands. Beyond the suburbs, there are a few dozen smaller cities like Canberra, Hobart, Newcastle, and Darwin. Less than 10% of Australians live outside an urban setting.
The hinterlands of the five metropolitan areas (like Tasmania) were settled as independent colonies—New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia—that had far closer social, political, and economic ties to Britain than they did to one another. Australia as a political entity dates only to the 20th century; the national identity was forged in the generation that fought and fell together at Gallipoli. “Advance, Australia Fair” only displaced “God Save the Queen” as the national anthem in 1984.
The history of the Anglican Church of Australia paralleled the history of the country. The Church of England arrived in Sydney with the First Fleet in 1787. By grace or a happy coincidence, it was financed by the grant of glebe lands (farms to be tended or rented for the support of the clergy) located right where downtown sits today. Sydney is now probably the richest Anglican diocese in the world as a consequence. The first bishop, consecrated in 1836, was notionally responsible for the entire continent. In practice, however, the vast distances and difficulties in communications required the creation of 24 additional dioceses over the next 80 years.
Like the separate colonies, these dioceses of the Church of England in Australia all had closer ties to the Mother Church than they did to one another. (Remember, incidentally, that the United Church of England and Ireland was the home church from 1801 to 1871, and that Ireland was always more Protestant than England.) Almost all of the Australian bishops came out from the UK, as did many of the clergy. Due to their isolation, the dioceses evolved in very different ways, and tended to become more uniform and extreme in churchmanship than dioceses elsewhere. Sydney, Armidale, and North-West Australia are the most intensely Protestant dioceses in the entire Anglican Communion. At the other end of the spectrum, if Catholicism were defined by the Councils of Trent and Vatican I, the Anglican Dioceses of Ballerat and The Murray would arguably be more Catholic than the Pope. Other dioceses, like Perth, fall more within the moderate to liberal range, while some like Melbourne are highly diverse.
Australian Anglicanism was further shaped by fallout from the dispute over Bishop Colenso of Natal. The 1865 ruling of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was widely seen as marking the independence of the colonial dioceses from any effective outside supervision. The Australian bishops took full advantage of this authorization to act independently. Until Australia became a unified dominion and for six decades thereafter, the “national church,” insofar as there was one, was basically a voluntary association. All of the real work of cooperation in mission and ministry was accomplished through bilateral agreements. The dioceses of the Church of England in Australia were quite reluctant to give up their autonomy, and did not consent to the creation of the Anglican Church of Australia until 1962.
The Constitution of the Church is unique among Anglican polities in the lack of any strong central authority. Power still lies in the network of diocese-to-diocese relationships, not in any connection with a common center. Certain critical decisions of the national General Synod must be ratified at the regional level by a majority of all the dioceses, including unanimous consent by all five of the metropolitan sees. Even then, it is possible for a diocese to opt out of the application of a national canon in many cases. Sydney, for example, does not allow the use of A Prayer Book for Australia, in general use elsewhere since 1995.
This constitutional situation has obvious implications for the adoption and enforcement of any proposed Anglican Covenant in Australia. It is hard to imagine that many dioceses would be willing to give foreign Instruments of Communion more power than they have given their own national authorities. For the Protestants in particular, their private reading of the Word of God trumps corporate discernment, canons, traditions, and everything else.
That attitude is reflected in Sydney’s response to the Robinson consecration, the Windsor Report, and the Covenant process. They do not see it as a special problem that TEC violated the bonds of affection within the Anglican Communion by disregarding its consensus regarding homosexuality. The existence of a consensus on the question did not add one whit to the authority of scripture. The pages of Holy Writ lie open to anyone who can read them, and every Christian is bound to follow the dictates of what he reads there. No ecclesiastical loyalty, no bonds of affection, and no covenant can alter the conscientious duty of every individual to follow God’s will as revealed to his private judgment. Sydney and its allies consistently follow the sola scriptura principle in this as in all other matters. They oppose TEC because they see it as substantively wrong, not because it disregarded the corporate discernment of the Communion.
They therefore do not see it as a problem if they themselves violate the bonds of affection by disregarding the overwhelming Communion consensus on lay presidency. The corporate discernment on this matter is either consistent or inconsistent with scripture, and thus either superfluous or worthless. Because they do not see the administration of Holy Communion (or anything else) as a sacerdotal ministry and do not set presbyters apart from the priesthood of all believers, they do not feel it is necessary for a presbyter to celebrate. The “validity” of a celebration is pretty much a meaningless concept, since communicants receive the Body of Christ through their own individual faith quite apart from any objectively real presence.
Does Sydney expect there to be consequences from this? Of course. However, their view of the Anglican Communion is shaped by their experience of the Church of Australia as a loose association of largely autonomous dioceses holding incompatible theological views. If Protestant Sydney disagrees with something Catholic Ballarat or Liberal Perth does, it is free to withhold working with them in areas that might seem to compromise its integrity. That does not foreclose cooperation in other areas where both parties share common goals.
The same is true of Sydney’s relations with the Diocese of New Hampshire; it is free to regard itself in such an impaired state of communion that cooperation is effectively impossible. It is also free to enter into cooperation with other Anglicans in New Hampshire when profitable work for the Gospel is possible. Just so, Sydney works with both the official Anglican Church of Southern Africa and the Church of England in South Africa (a body that formed about the same time and for much the same reasons as the American Reformed Episcopal Church). Sydney recognizes that allowing lay presidency will impair its relations with many other Anglicans, but it does not regard that as sufficient reason to stop it from doing what it thinks to be right.
I am not advocating Sydney’s vision of Anglicanism as a loosely-knit family of very diverse siblings tied together by a network of bilateral cooperation agreements, rather than by links to a common center (whether the See of Canterbury or the Primates’ Meeting). However, I am pointing out that their vision exists as an alternative to the view expressed in the Windsor Report and recent acts by the Anglican Instruments of Communion. It already finds a concrete embodiment in the structure of the Anglican Church of Australia, just as the American vision of a church run on democratic principles finds its embodiment in TEC.
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