The Organizational Basis of the Anglican Communion: A Theological Consideration
By Rev Dr Ephraim Radner, ACI
The proposed covenanting of Anglican churches that is embodied in the Covenant “process” now before the Anglican Communion has brought to the fore an important question: what is the appropriate “church” body to adopt the Covenant? Is it a province or a diocese? The question has already stirred acrimony in debate, because it is seen to touch at least two current sore spots in the Communion’s life: that is, the status of churches who a.) have left TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada, gone “under” the temporary jurisdiction of non-North American provinces, and are now forming a “new” North American province (ACNA), and b.) those dioceses within TEC whose bishops would like, if necessary, to covenant directly with other Anglican churches around the world, independently of their province’s decision on the matter. The issue of ecclesial status within the Communion raised by these cases is potentially fraught with legal and property implications, and therefore the theological issues behind it have been only partially examined in their own right. Yet the theological aspects are wide-reaching, touching not only on local and Communion ecclesial ordering, but on the character and shape of ecumenical vocation.
It was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who personally pointed to the theological matter. In a letter of October 14, 2007 to Bishop John Howe of Central Florida, designed to be made public, the Archbishop made a more political point regarding the need for congregations to remain bound to their diocese. But he upheld this advice with an ecclesiological claim: “The organ of union with the wider Church is the Bishop and the Diocese rather than the Provincial structure as such…[there is a …] need to regard the Bishop and the Diocese as the primary locus of ecclesial identity rather than the abstract reality of the ‘national church’.” Here the Archbishop makes several important assertions: first, ecclesial unity is given directly through a bishop and diocese, not a province; second, by consequence, provincial “structures” are not organs of unity “as such”; thirdly, “national churches” are somehow equivalent in this regard to “provinces”; and fourthly, the “abstraction” of a national church may even therefore apply, in its lack of ecclesiological concreteness, to provinces.
What are we to make of these assertions, not so much in the context of current Anglican debate, but “in themselves”, as it were, as theological claims? What follows is an attempt to lay out these theological issues in just such a way as to avoid, for the present, the political issues of the moment. It is not possible, however, to do this without at least noting some of the historical realities that have shaped the theological vision involved.
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