Casting Off the Garment of Humility

A response to ‘The Report of the Covenant Design Group’¹

T. W. Bartel

Summary

Amidst rising tensions in the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexuality, the Windsor Report strongly advised its member churches to adopt a worldwide Anglican Covenant in order to restore the bonds of trust and affection within the Communion. The Report also presented a detailed draft covenant for discussion. That covenant proposed a sweeping transfer of authority from individual provinces to the four central structures of the Communion, the ‘Instruments of Unity’, two of which are composed wholly of primates and three exclusively of bishops.

Despite these ominous first steps on the way to an Anglican Covenant, subsequent documents and public statements from the Instruments of Unity gave reason to hope that the Covenant process would be an inclusive exercise resulting in an inclusive agreement. These hopes were shattered, however, by the Report of the Covenant Design Group (CDG) and by the communiqué of the Primates’ Meeting at Dar es Salaam. The draft Covenant of the CDG report gives the Instruments of Unity veto power over change within the provinces on ‘essential matters of common concern’, as well as exclusive authority to declare a member church in breach of the Covenant and therefore no longer in covenant relationship with other churches. Furthermore, instead of envisaging an unhurried, comprehensive process of consultation in provincial synods, the CDG report urges the immediate acceptance of this Anglican curia across the Communion, offering a patently question-begging argument for doing so. The primates’ communiqué from Dar es Salaam exceeded the presumptuousness even of the CDG, not only crediting the primates with the authority to issue ultimatums to member churches and impose sanctions for non-compliance, but also demanding that a member church violate its own canons and constitution. Far from restoring trust throughout the Communion, the Covenant process has thoroughly undermined it.

It might be replied that, while of course the process of agreeing a Covenant must be a collaborative dialogue with neither content nor purpose of the Covenant fixed at the outset, the only way forward is a more centralised Anglican Communion, with a central tribunal for vetting change in the Communion on controversial matters. But such a tribunal would only be reasonable if it could be more reliable at ‘tracking the truth’ than the traditional polity of the Anglican Communion—and that is not the case. Moreover, at present and in the foreseeable future, no international Anglican tribunal could begin to approach the standard of reliability required, for it would be unduly vulnerable to pressure from hardliners on the issue of homosexuality. Hence the CDG draft Covenant’s proposals for concentrating power in the Instruments of Unity violate the Covenant’s own commitment to the open, communal pursuit of truth.

One of the chief responsibilities of Christian communion is intellectual humility. That virtue is not just a means to fulfilling the Church’s mission in the world: it is an essential constituent of the ideal of human character displayed to perfection in Jesus Christ, an ideal that the Church herself must embody if she is to convince the world to imitate Christ’s example. This means that the traditional Anglican respect for diversity in doctrines, interpretations and ways of life, far from being an obstacle to the mission of the Anglican Communion, is absolutely central to it; and the polity that the Communion ought to have is the one it has had from the beginning—entrusting decisions on the reception of innovations in faith and practice to the synodical processes of the individual provinces.

I. The Windsor Report: the seminal Covenant document

Since the closing years of the 1990s, several churches of the Anglican Communion have declared in word and deed that homosexual unions can be fully compatible with Christian morality. These declarations have provoked vehement reactions, by no means limited to vehement objections. Archbishops elsewhere in the Communion have not only entered those churches and exercised episcopal ministry without the consent of the diocesan bishop, but have also demanded the expulsion of these churches from the Communion unless they agree to a moratorium on such behaviour, and have threatened schism if such a moratorium is not imposed.

Shortly after the consent of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA (now The Episcopal Church, or TEC) in August 2003 to the election of Canon Gene Robinson, a partnered homosexual, as Bishop of New Hampshire, the Archbishop of Canterbury, concerned about the deepening crisis within the Anglican Communion, appointed the Lambeth Commission ‘to seek a way forward’ which would encourage greater unity within the Communion.² The fruit of their deliberations, the Windsor Report, published in October 2004, censured both churches who act as if same-sex unions are acceptable, and bishops who intervene in other dioceses, for paying insufficient heed to the interests of the wider Communion.³ It strongly recommended, in order to restore trust throughout the Communion, that the member churches should adopt a common Anglican Covenant ‘which would make explicit and forceful the loyalty and bonds of affection which govern the relationships between the churches’,⁴ and it offered a detailed draft of such a covenant for consideration.⁵

Many Anglicans who studied that covenant, however—including some who endorsed the Windsor Report’s judgement on the consecration of Canon Robinson and similar measures—soon expressed grave reservations about the centralisation of authority it advocated. While Anglicanism has four international bodies which Windsor terms ‘the Instruments of Unity’—the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting, and the Anglican Consultative Council—those bodies have never exercised any legislative, executive or judicial authority over any of the churches in the Communion. But, though the Windsor covenant grants its signatory churches the right to make decisions on affairs ‘which may also touch the Anglican Communion of which it forms part’,⁶ they may only take action on ‘essential matters of common concern’ to the Communion after gaining approval from the Instruments of Unity.⁷ Moreover, those Instruments are given sole authority to designate an issue an ‘essential matter of common concern’.⁸ And, while this covenant specifies no penalties for breaching any of its obligations, the main text of the Windsor Report, in advance of any agreement on a covenant, not only insists that all member churches cease and desist from consecrating gay or lesbian bishops and authorising blessings for same-sex unions, but suggests that churches who act otherwise should be excluded from representative Anglican bodies and meetings (such as Lambeth and the Primates’ Meeting), or even removed from the Communion.⁹ It seemed little more than a crumb of comfort that the Windsor draft covenant forbade intervention in the internal affairs of another member church without its consent,¹⁰ especially as the Instruments of Unity almost instantly treated Windsor’s judgements, exhortations, and sanctions against member churches who accept same-sex unions as if they had binding force throughout the Communion.¹¹

II. Signs of hope for an inclusive Covenant

Despite these ominous first steps on the road to an Anglican Covenant, however, even wary campaigners for an inclusive Communion saw reason to hope that the Covenant process would be an unhurried, worldwide, comprehensive and truly consultative exercise resulting in a document that would firmly uphold the traditional Anglican principles of provincial autonomy, respect for diversity, and participation of the laity in the key decisions of the Church.¹²

Windsor itself had explicitly stated that the process of adopting a covenant would need to be ‘a long-term process, in an educative context’.¹³ The communiqué of the first Primates’ Meeting after Windsor, at Dromantine in February 2005, concurred, since it noted that there were serious questions to be answered about the content of a covenant;¹⁴ and the Primates expressed caution about any development toward an international Anglican jurisdiction that would override proper provincial autonomy.¹⁵ The consultation paper on Windsor’s covenant proposal issued in March 2006 by the Joint Standing Committee of the Primates and the Anglican Consultative Council, ‘Towards an Anglican Covenant’, affirmed that the covenant process ought to be a transparent, collaborative dialogue with equal participation for all.¹⁶ It refrained from committing itself to any particular form of covenant, observing, among other things, that the idea of any province ceding authority to one or more of the Instruments of Unity ‘has been a sticking point since at least the first Lambeth Conference in 1867’.¹⁷ It did recommend the establishment of a small covenant drafting group to draw up the first version; but it specified that this group should reflect the diversity of the Communion, and that their draft covenant should be regarded as provisional.¹⁸ It was certain that the subsequent consideration of that covenant by the provinces would be a lengthy process.¹⁹ And it warmly commended the embracing of a wide range of Christian emphases as ‘part of the genius of Anglicanism’.²⁰ When the consultation paper’s proposal for a covenant drafting group was accepted, with the appointment by the Archbishop of Canterbury of the Covenant Design Group (CDG) in January 2007, its membership included at least three senior Anglicans with a good deal of sympathy for an inclusive Covenant. Finally, public remarks by members of the Group or Lambeth officials closely connected to it, right up to the publication of the CDG report, were equally encouraging.²¹

III. Hopes dashed: the CDG report and the Dar es Salaam communiqué

These hopes were utterly dashed, however, by the Report of the Covenant Design Group and by another document issued the same day (19 February 2007): the communiqué of the Primates’ Meeting at Dar es Salaam.

Although the CDG report goes to great lengths to assure us that what it is proposing is fully in keeping with Anglican tradition,²² its draft Covenant indisputably demands the surrender of provincial autonomy to the Instruments of Unity, who are given the full and exclusive authority to rule that a member church is not fulfilling ‘the substance of the Covenant’ and has thereby forfeited its covenant relationship with fellow-churches, requiring ‘a process of restoration and renewal’ to re-establish that relationship.²³ There is little representation of the laity, or even the non-episcopal clergy, on the four Instruments of Unity: two are composed wholly of primates and three exclusively of bishops. And in so far as the composition of the Instruments of Unity is likely to change in the foreseeable future, it will grant even more representation to the primates. For it is well within the realm of possibility that the primates will be added as ex officio members to the fourth of those Instruments, the Anglican Consultative Council.²⁴

In addition to giving veto power over change within the provinces to the Instruments of Unity, the CDG report urges the Communion to commit itself immediately to ‘the fundamental shape’ of the draft Covenant, with consultation in the provinces limited to ‘fine-tuning’, on the grounds that this is the only way to assuage those in the Communion who doubt the faithfulness of Anglican churches to the Gospel and to ‘patterns of obedience to Christ’.²⁵ Of course, those who have aired such doubts are predominantly those who have condemned any action in favour of same-sex relationships, and who have pressed for an international Anglican curia with the power to prevent member churches anywhere in the Communion from taking such action. So the Covenant Design Group offers a patently question-begging argument for delivering an Anglican curia to the provinces as a fait accompli, wholly exempt from reasoned discussion. Those who are sceptical that such a polity is an authentic expression of Anglicanism, that it would reflect the commitment of the Communion to the Gospel, that it would restore trust within the Communion, are obviously mistaken, and their voices should be ignored. The presumption of this argument is staggering.

But the presumption of the Covenant Design Group was exceeded by the primates in their communiqué from Dar es Salaam. While the CDG report attempts to foreclose on local discussion of the basic shape of the Covenant, it does at least prominently declare on its title page that its draft Covenant ‘is not offered for approval or authorisation but released for wider consultation and debate’, and there is no indication in the draft Covenant that the primates have the power to act unilaterally on contentious Communion matters. But the communiqué demands that in order for The Episcopal Church to remain a full member of the Communion, its House of Bishops must submit the province to a Pastoral Scheme for the oversight of TEC members who do not accept the authority of their diocesan bishop—a scheme directed by the primates. And, contrary to Windsor’s categorical disapproval of violations of diocesan boundaries—in accordance not only with Lambeth Conference resolutions, but ancient ecumenical church councils²⁶—the primates insist on submission to this Scheme before they undertake to end all such violations.²⁷ The communiqué also demands that for TEC to remain a full member of the Communion, the House of Bishops must, by 30 September this year, impose a moratorium on the authorisation of rites of blessing for same-sex unions and the consecration to the episcopate of those living in such unions, until ‘some new consensus on these matters emerges across the Communion’.²⁸ Not only do these ultimatums presume the authority to issue demands to, and threaten sanctions against, member churches, they also expect the House of Bishops to violate the canons and constitution of its own church by acting on behalf of TEC without the consent of the General Convention or Executive Committee.²⁹

In brief, it is painfully evident that, far from restoring trust throughout the Communion, the Covenant process has totally undermined it. Anglicans can have no grounds for confidence in a hierarchy that promises a deliberate, transparent, accountable and egalitarian process and then delivers a process that is none of these. Nor can Anglicans have any confidence in the hierarchy when fewer than forty of its members arrogate to themselves far-reaching powers in defiance of centuries of Anglican precedent, and run roughshod over the basic governing institutions of a member church.

IV. An Anglican tribunal: the only way forward?

All this might be conceded, however, without thereby conceding that the draft Covenant is fundamentally flawed. Granted, the Covenant process was short-circuited by the CDG and the primates acted with monstrous presumption in Dar es Salaam. Granted, the process of agreeing a Covenant must be a collaborative dialogue, with none of the details of the Covenant’s purpose or content fixed at the outset. None the less, it might be argued, a more centralised Anglican Communion, along the lines proposed in the draft Covenant, is ultimately the only way forward for the Communion. Worldwide Anglicanism cannot renew the bonds of trust, loyalty and affection among its members, and fulfil its saving mission to the world, without such a Covenant. Perhaps it is even the case that, notwithstanding the attempted assurances of the CDG report, their draft Covenant is indeed a radical departure from Anglican polity as we have always known it. But it need not be a radical departure from authentic Anglican values.

Let us turn, then, to the draft Covenant’s proposals for the restructuring of the Communion. And let us interpret those proposals as generously as the text permits. Suppose that instead of establishing a ‘papacy of the primates’, the draft Covenant spreads the power of approving innovations, and administering sanctions, across all four Instruments of Unity, granting a major role to the lay representatives of the Anglican Consultative Council. Suppose, too, that this international Anglican tribunal officially adopts plausible criteria for judging the acceptability of proposed innovations—such as agreement with scripture, tradition and reason.³⁰ Finally, suppose that only a bare majority in favour of the change is required for approval.³¹ This sort of tribunal, it could fairly be said, would differ in a number of significant respects from the teaching magisterium as understood by the modern Roman Catholic church. It would not regard any single member of the tribunal as its head; its membership would not be restricted to the episcopal clergy, or even the clergy; it would not regard itself as infallible in any matter which came under its scrutiny.

But, despite those differences, the tribunal would closely resemble the magisterium in at least two key respects. First, it would have the authority to issue judgements that a doctrine or practice is unacceptable throughout the Communion, regardless of local circumstances. Secondly, it would have the power to discipline those who contravene these judgements—and we have every reason to expect that the disciplinary powers of an Anglican tribunal under anything remotely like the draft Covenant would be considerable, to the point of suspending or expelling the offending member church from the Covenant fellowship unless major public expressions of repentance and acts of self-restraint are forthcoming.

Now it can only be reasonable to grant these powers to an ecclesiological tribunal if it would be more likely than the present Anglican Communion to ‘track the truth’—which means not only preserving the Communion from falling into error by abandoning traditional doctrines that are true, but also from persisting in error by clinging to traditional doctrines that are false. Of course, that is precisely what the Roman Catholic church teaches about its own magisterium. As their Catechism boldly states, the magisterium ‘teaches only what has been handed on to it. At the divine command and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it listens to this devotedly, guards it with dedication and expounds it faithfully. All that it proposes for belief as being divinely revealed is drawn from this single deposit of faith’.³² Even in its ordinary teaching, when it does not attempt to arrive at an infallible definition or pronounce definitively on a question, the magisterium receives ‘Divine assistance’ sufficient to oblige the faithful to submit to this teaching with ‘religious submission of mind’.³³

But from the Anglican point of view, the history of the Roman Catholic magisterium cannot inspire much confidence in the ability of a worldwide ecclesiastical tribunal to track the truth. There is a long list of doctrines that Anglicans came uncontroversially to regard as false, or as matters indifferent, well before the magisterium did so: for instance, that human slavery is divinely ordained; that freedom of religious conscience and worship is ruinous folly; that the human species was created de novo; that all of the traditional attributions of authorship to biblical books are correct; and that at the Last Judgement unrepentant sinners are consigned to everlasting punishment.³⁴ There is also a long list of doctrines that Anglicans regard as false, or matters indifferent, which the magisterium teaches as true: for example, priestly celibacy; the immaculate conception and assumption of Mary; and the immorality of artificial contraception, remarriage after divorce, and polygamy.³⁵

It might be replied that the majority consensus across the Communion is more likely to be right than the opinion of an individual church, and that, given appropriate safeguards, an Anglican tribunal, unlike the magisterium, would represent the will of the majority in the Communion.³⁶ But even if that could be reliably guaranteed, majority consensus is no more accurate as an indicator of theological acceptability than the consensus of a college of bishops. Time and again it has prevailed not because it tracks the truth, but because of other, far less flattering factors, one of them recognised frequently in the Bible, and fully acknowledged in the central Christian doctrine of original sin: it buttresses a status quo that the majority (or just the elite) find congenial to their own interests, however injurious they may be to the welfare of the wider Church.³⁷

Finally—and the importance of this can scarcely be exaggerated—it would be wholly naive, given the current and foreseeable situation in the Communion, to imagine that any international Anglican tribunal would begin to approach the standard of reliability required. Quite the contrary. Recent events have made it all too clear that there is an organised, worldwide bloc of Anglicans, including a number of bishops and primates, who stridently insist that the immorality of homosexual activity is a non-negotiable article of the faith, drawn from the single depositum fidei, for ever irrefutable, and that those believe otherwise are at the very least guilty of surrendering to, if not actively fomenting, the rankest sort of heresy.³⁸ It is also well known that this bloc is firmly determined to resist any further developments along these lines, and have threatened to split the Communion if such changes go ahead, anywhere in the Communion, at any time.³⁹ And it is a familar fact that they exert a great deal of leverage on the Communion whenever the issue of homosexuality arises, especially in the drafting of recent pronouncements of the Anglican hierarchy on the issue—for instance, in the adoption of the 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1.10, declaring that homosexual practice is incompatible with scripture, and in the numerous statements by the primates since then that this resolution represents ‘the standard of Anglican teaching’ on the matter, so that member churches who reject it, in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘pose a substantial problem for the sacramental unity of the Communion’.⁴⁰

It should be evident, therefore, that this bloc would exert enormous pressure on any tribunal for vetting policy and practice on homosexuality across the Communion. Indeed, the very establishment of such a tribunal, complete with powers to suspend or revoke membership in the Communion, would firmly institutionalise the influence of hardline thinking on homosexuality. In all likelihood, the tribunal would enforce a moratorium on change for years, perhaps decades (assuming that the Anglican Communion held together that long), regardless of the evidence that might accumulate in its favour. And if an Anglican curia could be subject to hardliners on this issue, why not on others?⁴¹

The draft Covenant thoughtfully reminds us that in order to be faithful to God, the members of the Anglican Communion must ‘pursue a common pilgrimage with other members of the Communion to discern truth’, and must ‘spend time with openness and patience in matters of theological debate and discernment to listen and to study with one another in order to comprehend the will of God’.⁴² But in the present climate, one can scarcely imagine anything more inimical to the open, patient, communal pursuit of truth than the Covenant's proposals for concentrating authority in the Instruments of Unity.⁴³

V. Casting off the garment of humility

‘The union that binds the members of Christ together is not the union of proud confidence in the power of an organisation. The church is united by the humility as well as by the charity of her members. Hers is the union that comes from the consciousness of individual fallibility and poverty, from the humility that recognises its own limitations and accepts them, the meekness that cannot take it upon itself to condemn, but can only forgive because it is conscious that it has itself been forgiven by Christ.’

Thomas Merton

No sensible Christian will object to the Introduction to the CDG draft Covenant when it states that the gift of communion, to which God has called us in Jesus Christ, imposes on every one of us ‘responsibilities for our common life before God’.⁴⁴ And one of the cardinal responsibilities of genuine Christian communion—or for that matter, of any defensible notion of communion, religious or secular—is intellectual humility. A church that truly cares about intellectual humility will do everything it can to promote the fair evaluation of theological opinions, discouraging its members, especially its senior members, from unjustly disparaging the views of those with whom they disagree, and from exaggerating the merits of their own. It will do everything it can to stay abreast of developments in research and scholarship that touch on questions of doctrine, practice and ethics—that is, developments in every field of research and scholarship. And it will do everything it can to create and sustain a community in which everyone’s voice is heard with the utmost charity—especially the voices of those it is all too tempting to silence.⁴⁵

Moreover, intellectual humility is not merely a means to the fulfilment of the Church’s mission to the world. The Church is called upon to embody, as well as to proclaim, an ideal of human character displayed to perfection in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. Humility, like joyfulness, kindness, gentleness and self-control, is a fruit of the Spirit, and therefore an essential constituent of that ideal of character, that ‘mind of Christ’ who ‘humbled himself’, a mind which must also be that of the Church if it is to have any hope of growing to the full stature of Christ, of showing the world that Christ is truly present within her, and convincing the world to imitate his example.

Of course, if scripture and tradition contained unambiguous answers to all our major doctrinal and moral questions, and if a highly centralised teaching authority had always faithfully expounded these answers, then that sort of authority is what the Anglican Communion had better adopt. But centuries of bitter experience have surely taught us otherwise. The traditional Anglican embracing of a diversity of doctrines, interpretations and ways of life is absolutely central to the mission of the Anglican Communion, not peripheral to it (let alone an impediment), and the polity the Communion ought to have is the one it has had since its inception—trusting individual provinces to judge for themselves, via their own synodical processes, whether something new in faith or practice is consonant with scripture, tradition and reason. The Anglican witness to unity in diversity, of which the Communion has been a sterling example, has never been so necessary, what with the world being torn apart by factionalisms, fundamentalisms, and the marginalisation of most of its population.

‘Indeed, all of you should wrap yourselves in the garment of humility towards each other,’ writes the author of 1 Peter.⁴⁶ Why are so many in the Anglican Communion so eager to cast off the garment of humility? It is needed for the wedding banquet of the kingdom of heaven.