Anglican Polity as Social Witness

During the meeting of the Anglican Primates in England recently, I have seen friends who are priests on both sides of the American Anglican/Episcopal divide flippantly dismiss the Anglican Communion as unnecessary to their ministry. I saw several articles go by about what was potentially at stake, most of the authors treating the subject from the angle of contemporary political struggle and intrigue.

What I have not seen anywhere yet are the biblical and theological underpinnings that are the foundation for Anglican polity and its processes, which we Americans—who all believe ourselves to be right—admittedly find excruciatingly slow. Americans who are conservative theologically just want the Archbishop of Canterbury to speak plainly and definitively on the subject. Americans who are theologically liberal are quick to point out that nothing is binding on them or can challenge their autonomy if he does.

Many observers within and without the Anglican Church of North America have come so late to the conversation, not understanding the history of the emergence of the Anglican Communion in the wake of British Imperialism and the missionary societies that followed it, that the decision-making processes of Anglicanism in general are something of an enigma. The application of biblical principles in an Anglican way of Christian discipleship to the particular presenting issue of human sexuality seems all the more convoluted to the outsider.

I’ll leave the present issue mostly to the side in this discussion, attempting to approach Anglican sources of authority to which we appeal in matters of polity, and why the biblical underpinnings of Anglican polity continue to matter to the vitality of our Gospel witness.

Jesus clearly believed that the truth of his identity as the Son of the Father would be revealed to the world in how we, as the Body of Christ, love one another by His Spirit within us, proclaiming the truth of this epiphany: that He is the only begotten Son of the Father. This is a proclamation we do not merely proclaim with words, but with our very lives. On the one hand, some Christians seem to suggest that truth trumps love, and implicit in the ethos of the doctrinal purity camp is an often willful abdication of our responsibility to love one another as Jesus has loved us. This is justified, according to this operating style, just as long as we intellectually assent to right doctrine.

On the other hand, there is another lobby that believes unity at all cost to be more important than any of the content of the Christian Gospel. This lobby claims what we all believe about the particularities of the Christian faith not to matter, it’s all adiaphora, and sometimes they even include major tenets of the Christian faith as though they are a matter of secondary importance to unity. After all, why can’t we all just get along?

However, the gleeful and flippant departure—from either unity or truth in such turbulent times as ours—is… wait for it… not Anglican. In addition, when we do this in full public view, it hampers our witness to those outside the faith severely. It should go without saying that as those who walk in the Anglican way of Christian discipleship, we must not let go of our hold on the truth, even as we attempt to sustain our unity. It should also go without saying that we must not ever give up the quest for greater unity in Christendom, and in our particular portion of it, even as we hold fast to the truth.

The mission of the Church is, as some have put it, to carry out the Great Commission—making disciples of people of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and to do this in the spirit of the Great Commandment—you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The Scriptures teach that those outside the faith will know we are Christians not only by our love, but also that they will be transformed by God’s love only if we have the guts to get about the business of proclaiming His truth, the κήρυγμα, the kerygma, or the Apostles’ teaching. Truth and unity are inextricably linked.

While the word synod elicits a nearly spontaneous involuntary groan among Anglicans in the Church of England, the etymology of the word is interesting and helpful—at least to me—and it comes from two Greek words, συνάγω (to come together) and ὁδὸς (road or way). At the local parish, regional diocesan, national provincial, and international Communion levels, the Anglican way of Christian discipleship is a “together way,” and it is a very important middle way between Roman hierarchical and Protestant decentralized forms of polity in the West.

A road suggests boundaries, and interdependent Christians, members incorporate of the mystical Body of the Son, are bounded by the edges of decided orthodoxy, where biblical orthodoxy functions like the buoys organizing a main channel in a river to allow for safe passage, to avoid being marooned on the rocks of heresy if we tack too hard in any direction. A road also suggests an origination point and a destination, and as Christians, we are bound both by our point of origin as creatures of our Creator, given to the stewardship of our image-bearing of God as our original biblical responsibility, and we are bound to proceed together in our faith toward the eschatological reality of God’s Kingdom, eternally established in earth as it is in heaven. We are a foretaste of that Kingdom, especially in the way that we relate, even as the Trinity relates, in mutual self-denying and self-offering as gift.

In Christian discipleship, therefore, we have a source, a path with boundaries, and a destination. We neither have the luxury of saying to other Christian believers on the road, “we have no need of you,” nor do we have the luxury of saying that the biblical theology of, say, human sexuality, or that accountability to God and to one another for holiness, doesn’t matter and can be chucked unilaterally. As disputes arise over whatever presenting issue, it is our bounden duty to consult the Scriptures and the tradition of Scriptural interpretation together, and if the matter is settled by either the Scriptures, which have primacy, or previous generations of Christians—with an special deference to the Apostles and the Councils of the undivided ancient Church—then the matter is settled.

If we have an issue, say, with the divinity of Christ, or His dual nature, we do not use the word “Christian” to describe any challenge to this doctrine, we use the word heresy. If, in a controversial matter that has never been settled by previous generations of Christians, we must settle a dispute in a process of coming together with other Christians in whom the Spirit dwells to reason with one another over the Scriptures and their interpretation, and in the Anglican way of Christian discipleship, there are mutually agreed upon instruments of unity and basics of doctrine that are our sources of authority for settling those disputes.

Richard Hooker’s codification of Thomas Cranmer’s biblical method of settling theological, doctrinal, and ecclesiastical disputes through consultation of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, include a very clear structure of primacy, not as a “three-legged stool” of mutually interpreting sources of authority on equal footing. Scripture has primacy. Tradition is not simply something liturgical we’ve done two years in a row in our favorite parish. Tradition is the distillation of biblical principles and the application of the same to previous historical contexts, by previous generations of Christians who were up against varied and difficult persecutions and cultural contexts, establishing precedents that are more often than not now settled matters of theology and doctrine.

Finally, reason is not defined as whatever seems reasonable based on the anecdotal experiences of an individual, or even a large group of individuals, even perhaps constituting a significant minority in the Church. Rather, reason as a source of authority in settling disputes in Anglican polity is to face whatever is dividing us, together. An example might be a moral or ethical issue we’ve never confronted before, something like genetic engineering, and as the gathered people of God, led by His Spirit, we reason together about how we must be obedient in applying established biblical principles to the new context we face in the present. Then we speak with one voice as the Church, through the instruments of unity. How we come together, what we have agreed to believe, much of which is settled already, what common ministries and mission we agree to co-labor on together, and what direction—and toward what destination we choose to walk together—these are not secondary matters as Anglican Christians.

It is fundamental to our Gospel witness—at the local parish, regional diocesan, national provincial, and international Communion levels. In our episcopal system of biblical polity, we are episcopally led and synodically governed. Our bishops take vows before God and witnesses to guard the content of the Apostles’ teaching—referred to in their consecration vows as “the faith once delivered,” and to guard the unity of the Church; having taken vows, they do not have the luxury to dismiss as secondary either unity or the truth.

Bishops are interdependent, representing the unity of the whole Church from their cathedra, or chair, over which they have been given ecclesiastical authority by God, affirmed by the Spirit in the Church. They are not autonomous, by any stretch, simply because they sit in the top regional chair of ecclesial hierarchy—rather, they are bound by vows to God and to His Church to hold others accountable and to be themselves submitted to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Church, as we have received the same from previous generations of faithful Christians. In fact, it was an operating principle in the ancient Church that a bishop who had walked away from being a guardian of the content of the Apostles’ teaching—and therefore the unity of the faith—had vacated his spiritual See, even if he continued to physically sit in the chair of his episcopal office.

At its best, the Anglican way of settling disputes is to maintain the poles of polemical debate—when opponents are within the boundaries of established orthodoxy—in tension like the pedals of a bicycle, propelling the Church—the vehicle of Gospel ministry, mission, and witness—into the world that God so loves. This is only when the poles are within the buoys of the main channel of orthodoxy; within those buoys, the disagreements may be sharp, even as we are called to be charitable, but it is a discussion within the family about the edges of the boundaries of the road we travel together. As soon as one of the points of polarity goes beyond the buoys of the main channel of orthodoxy, it is a controversy of a different sort, in which the Christians are engaging in apologetics to someone who holds a view that is inconsistent with the canon of the Christian Scriptures, or their traditional interpretation—their historic distillation by the Divines and application by the Church in a context—or their reasonable application in the varied contemporary contexts of the worldwide Church catholic. (In this use of the word “catholic,” we simply mean “universal.”)

The Elizabethan compromise between medieval Roman Catholicism and Radical Protestantism, first set this Anglican ethos of settling disputes by synod in motion—although it was not invented in the 16^th Century, but was rather a reassertion and continuation of ancient practice and tradition—and the tension between centralized ecclesial power and decentralized ecclesial accountability later contributed even to the principles at work in the formation of American government in the wake of independence from England.

Even a cursory understanding of English ecclesiastical history since the Reformation exposes that the pendulum has swung to tragic extremes, swinging back too far or too fast in the other direction, sometimes red with the blood of political opponents. Thankfully, in our day, no one is about to be banished to a tower or dungeon, or lose their head… at least, not in the West.

There are very real portions of the Anglican Communion, however—the most populous portions in fact—where our Christian brothers and sisters face persecution from Islamic religious fanaticism because of the conversations we have in the West as though they were in the vacuum of an ivory tower.  There have been many crises in the history of the Church of England and later, in the Anglican Communion, and our current crisis, and its particularities, has exposed fault-lines in the nexus between our pedals that already existed.

However, one side of this particular argument has repeatedly demonstrated its willful disregard for the boundaries of settled biblical orthodoxy for over a decade, not just on the subject of the settled theology of human sexual morality, but even more concerning are recent democratic votes on central tenets of the Christian faith which should not even be taking place. In our reaction to their unilateral choice to walk apart—not just from the rest of the Communion, but from Christendom itself—we must ourselves not lose for a moment the principles of biblical unity in truth, which are not a matter of secondary importance. If we are not careful, the very essence of our Gospel witness as a middle way between Roman over-centralized and Protestant over-decentralized polities could be lost.

Anglican Chaplain Chris Cairns serves in the U.S. Army at Fort Riley, Kansas.