Benjamin Guyer - 20 July 2009 02:35 PM

I think part of the problem here, Tony, is the confusion between “province” and “church”.  The organization of the Anglican Communion is fundamentally episcopal and diocesan, not provincial.  Ergo, although parts of the Episcopal Church may fail on certain matters of life and doctrine, this does not mean that every diocese so fails.  I encourage reading Ephraim Radner’s The Organizational Basis of the Anglican Communion.  To paint every lay person, every deacon, priest, and bishop with one and the same brush smacks of the same excessive provincialism that infects a significant portion of the liberal left in the Episcopal Church.

I think that saying that the “organization of the Anglican Communion is fundamentally episcopal and diocesan, not provincial” is misleading. It is true that dioceses are the essential builiding blocks of the member churches of the Communion, but that is only part of the story. Those dioceses are recognized as Anglican only through their belonging to one of the national or regional churches of the Communion. In the more recent strictures of the Communion, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meetings, representation is from the member churches and not directly from dioceses. While the polities of the member churches are far from uniform, it is, as far as I can tell, at the level of the member church that there is autonomy and not at the level of the dioceses.

One other point: I have, as may be evident from the previous paragraph, not refer to “provinces” of the Anglican Communion. The term is misleading, suggesting that like the Roman Church, the Anglican Communion is a church with seperate divisions around a central structure of authority. While that seems to be what some desire, it is not true of the Communion now and would be a departure from the norm of national or regional churches in communion with Canterbury and one another. “Province” is also a colonial term which has little value in describing a post-colonial Anglican Communion.

While I cannot know the motives of people like Dr. Radner - I can’t even understand much of what he has written - I wonder if some of the interest in asserting the autonomy of dioceses has to do with property disputes.

Charlie Clauss - 20 July 2009 11:05 AM

But Charlie, what if heretics won’t leave? And if there is either nobody with the authority to expel them, or those with the authority don’t use it? Is one obliged to stay in a heretical body whose teachings one does not believe? Is this Kobayashi Maru, the no-win scenario, where no matter what one does, it’s wrong?

As a ST fan, I really like the ref to Kobayashi Maru!

The major problem I face is the fact we don’t live in the 4th century! During the Arian crisis, Athanasius did not leave the Church, but fought to reform it. He died (373) before he witnessed the re-establishment (381) of the orthodox position.

But we live post-Reformation, where the standard way of dealing with heresy in a church is to leave. It is argued that Luther had no intention of starting a new church, that he wanted to reform the Catholic church. But the situation of the time made that impossible. Maybe it is impossible for us as well.

Plus we have lived with the strain of thought I call “pure church” ever since the Reformation (although Augustine wrestled with it). Most of the arguments I have seen against staying in TEC have a pure church look and feel. The “come out from among them” camp. The arguments goes that you should only be in a church that is pure in doctrine and practice. It is obvious that this idea only has traction in a post-Reformation world.

Maybe the sharpest edge of your comment is that there is no authority to expel. Like in Athanasius’ time, it is the heretical that has the power, and they can expel us (Athanasius lost his diocese, and part of his fight was to get it back).

Bottom line: I know what would be the easy thing to do: to leave. It is hard to stay. As I have said, my parish has been torn apart by this fight. Why not just go to the AMIA church in town where there are no problems (!)? Or start the process of joining the RCC? But I am committed to my parish, and when commitment is easy, there is no problem. It is when being committed is hard that it then reveals character. If we as a parish decide to leave TEC, then I’ll go. But until that is the clear discernment of the parish, I stay.

I guess what I wrote might have sounded as if I was advocating that you leave TEC, but that’s not really the question I am trying to ask. What I want to know is, “am I obligated to stay”? I wrote to Shawn on another thread, about doing what is right, just because it is right, and I wonder now if staying in TEC, despite its problems, is one of those “right things to do” which I ought to do even if I don’t want to, even if it appears to be of benefit neither to me nor to anyone else, simply and solely because it IS right. A conviction that, in spite of everything, leaving TEC would be wrong, is about the only thing that would induce me to remain past the expected addition of SSB/SSM to the prayer book. But I am still so ignorant of how to think about all this that I just don’t know what to do.

I will say that my argument for leaving would not be that the “pure” church could be found elsewhere, but that, if TEC begins calling SSB/SSM “blessed” it would be living a lie for me to stay. I don’t think I can find a “pure” church but I would hope to find one in which I would not be a disbeliever in the pews, a revisionist undermining it from within. I’ve seen in TEC what damage that causes and would never want to bring such damage and pain on some other Christian entity. I just want to be able to be honest when I describe myself by their name, something I only expect to be able to do in TEC for another few years at most.

Karen

Karen, I just posted a new thread with a link to my rector’s sermon from July 12. You may not agree with him, but he directly answers the questions you are asking (“I wonder now if staying in TEC, despite its problems, is one of those “right things to do” which I ought to do even if I don’t want to, even if it appears to be of benefit neither to me nor to anyone else, simply and solely because it IS right.”) I highly recommend it; it was very inspirational for me when I listened to it in my hotel room in Anaheim last week.

Benjamin Guyer - 20 July 2009 02:35 PM

I think part of the problem here, Tony, is the confusion between “province” and “church”.  The organization of the Anglican Communion is fundamentally episcopal and diocesan, not provincial.  Ergo, although parts of the Episcopal Church may fail on certain matters of life and doctrine, this does not mean that every diocese so fails.  I encourage reading Ephraim Radner’s The Organizational Basis of the Anglican Communion.  To paint every lay person, every deacon, priest, and bishop with one and the same brush smacks of the same excessive provincialism that infects a significant portion of the liberal left in the Episcopal Church.

Do you consider the actions of GC just past irrelevant to a “stay or go” decision, because they are not at the diocesan level? If TEC changes its national canons (or the prayer book) to add SSB/SSM in all dioceses, is this a null action, because it is not at the diocesan level? Is there any action at the national level which, in your opinion, would cause TEC, as such, to cease to be part of the Church? I don’t understand where you are coming from.

Karen

P.S. I am reading Tract 8 but have only gotten to part 3 so far.

Daniel Weir - 21 July 2009 08:47 AM

While I cannot know the motives of people like Dr. Radner - I can’t even understand much of what he has written - I wonder if some of the interest in asserting the autonomy of dioceses has to do with property disputes.

Some degree of autonomy has to be asserted simply for the Anglican churches to justify their separation fro the CHruch of Rome.

Charles Wingate - 21 July 2009 12:35 PM

Daniel Weir - 21 July 2009 08:47 AM

While I cannot know the motives of people like Dr. Radner - I can’t even understand much of what he has written - I wonder if some of the interest in asserting the autonomy of dioceses has to do with property disputes.

Some degree of autonomy has to be asserted simply for the Anglican churches to justify their separation fro the CHruch of Rome.

Quite right, but that autonomy was asserted first by the Church of England, the first national church in what would become the Anglican Communion. The assertion was not made by individual dioceses, but by the Church of England. The history of the development of the Communion follows much the same path as newly formed national churches became autonomous, separate from the Church of England or, in a few other cases, from ECUSA.

Daniel Weir,

  I like the reference to the Benedictines. I’m an oblate myself. However, it is obedience to the Word of God that grounds stability and conversion of manners.

Pax,
Edward

Edward Craig - 21 July 2009 05:10 PM

Daniel Weir,

  I like the reference to the Benedictines. I’m an oblate myself. However, it is obedience to the Word of God that grounds stability and conversion of manners.

Pax,
Edward

If you mean by “the Word of God” the Incarnate Word Jesus, I have no disagreement. If you mean the Holy Scriptures, then we need to have a longer discussion of how the Church interprets Scripture in order to discern God’s will.

Daniel Weir - 21 July 2009 01:09 PM

Quite right, but that autonomy was asserted first by the Church of England, the first national church in what would become the Anglican Communion.

That does not ameliorate the problem. Separation and constitution into a denomination is not sufficiently different from separation and constitution in a single step. Also, I really don’t think you should be speculating on the self-serving motives of departing dioceses, when such speculations seem to me to be self-serving in exactly the same way. I have long ago grown tired of the niggling over the finer points of the church constitution and polity, because it seems to me that this embodies a certain hypocrisy about privilege. Between the two, the large body of somewhat cautious liberals and smaller body of ardent progressives have maintained control, more or less, over the denomination for several decades (noting, for instance, that according to Louie Crew’s tallies Bishop Dennis had an unblemished record on LGBTQ votes). They might not always have advanced on every battle, but they have never been forced to retreat. So of course it’s their advantage to to be sticklers about the Rules and about fealty to the church hierarchy, since they wrote the rules as they stand, and they are the hierarchy as it stands.

Charles Wingate - 22 July 2009 05:33 PM

Daniel Weir - 21 July 2009 01:09 PM

Quite right, but that autonomy was asserted first by the Church of England, the first national church in what would become the Anglican Communion.

That does not ameliorate the problem. Separation and constitution into a denomination is not sufficiently different from separation and constitution in a single step. Also, I really don’t think you should be speculating on the self-serving motives of departing dioceses, when such speculations seem to me to be self-serving in exactly the same way. I have long ago grown tired of the niggling over the finer points of the church constitution and polity, because it seems to me that this embodies a certain hypocrisy about privilege. Between the two, the large body of somewhat cautious liberals and smaller body of ardent progressives have maintained control, more or less, over the denomination for several decades (noting, for instance, that according to Louie Crew’s tallies Bishop Dennis had an unblemished record on LGBTQ votes). They might not always have advanced on every battle, but they have never been forced to retreat. So of course it’s their advantage to to be sticklers about the Rules and about fealty to the church hierarchy, since they wrote the rules as they stand, and they are the hierarchy as it stands.

I quite agree that one can view partisans on all sides as choosing a particular interpretation of history or theology in a self-serving manner. So, I apologize for suggesting that the proponents of diocesan autonomy are such because of property concerns.

However, I must challenge your assertion that we who defend TEC’s autonomy wrote the rules. The rules are, in most cases, decades or more old and, while I am in some sense a descendant of those who did write the rules, so are the proponents of diocesan autonomy. The essential point that I have made in this thread is that the polities of the churches of the Communion locate autonomy at the level of the national or regional church and not at the level of the diocese. The unqualified accession by a new TEC diocese to TEC’s Constitution and Canons is one example of the location of autonomy on the national level. In other churches of the communion there is even more power vested at the national level. e.g., in the Church of England’s system for the appointing of bishops. If it were to be established that the locus of autonomy in the Communion is the diocese, then the C of E would be in for even greater changes than would happen here in TEC.

Daniel, these controversies are decades old. Integrity itself is thirty-five years old; Louie Crew tracks bishop votes back to 1979, in which year there was a GC vote to refrain from ordaining homosexuals and a signed dissent to that outcome. I suspect the Dennis canon may have been more directed at those objecting to ordaining women, but in the scheme of things that is but the substitution of one point of dispute for another.

It also seems to me that you are gathering under the banner of “autonomy”—or rather “governance”—a number of issues whose differences do in fact obtain here. I would begin with the issue that in practice the official church has tolerated disobedience on these points all through these decades. This would tend to imply that on that level at least there is a great deal of autonomy, certainly for bishops; they don’t really have to obey these prohibitions. From there we move on to the big begged question. I think in general we would all hold that participation/membership/etc. in the organization would imply adherence to its governance, in spite of the routine disobedience we see today. That doesn’t answer the question of membership. The polity of the USA, of course, has been settled, by war, to imply that there is no autonomy of membership on the state level. For other organizations of which polity is an expedient, not the be-all and end-all, it is the case that members are free to go, if not to come. And this church? Well, that brings us back to its formation as a separate communion. The whole question of what “can” be done gets, literally, very legalistic. Surely nothing prevents the ACNA bishops from representing themselves (and therefor acting) as a church; it’s all a question of which rules one decides to accept at the moment. Surely the bishops in England thought the same way, that mere Roman canon law ceased to matter as soon as they had separated themselves from Rome.

Charles Wingate - 22 July 2009 09:39 PM

Daniel, these controversies are decades old. Integrity itself is thirty-five years old; Louie Crew tracks bishop votes back to 1979, in which year there was a GC vote to refrain from ordaining homosexuals and a signed dissent to that outcome. I suspect the Dennis canon may have been more directed at those objecting to ordaining women, but in the scheme of things that is but the substitution of one point of dispute for another.

It also seems to me that you are gathering under the banner of “autonomy”—or rather “governance”—a number of issues whose differences do in fact obtain here. I would begin with the issue that in practice the official church has tolerated disobedience on these points all through these decades. This would tend to imply that on that level at least there is a great deal of autonomy, certainly for bishops; they don’t really have to obey these prohibitions. From there we move on to the big begged question. I think in general we would all hold that participation/membership/etc. in the organization would imply adherence to its governance, in spite of the routine disobedience we see today. That doesn’t answer the question of membership. The polity of the USA, of course, has been settled, by war, to imply that there is no autonomy of membership on the state level. For other organizations of which polity is an expedient, not the be-all and end-all, it is the case that members are free to go, if not to come. And this church? Well, that brings us back to its formation as a separate communion. The whole question of what “can” be done gets, literally, very legalistic. Surely nothing prevents the ACNA bishops from representing themselves (and therefor acting) as a church; it’s all a question of which rules one decides to accept at the moment. Surely the bishops in England thought the same way, that mere Roman canon law ceased to matter as soon as they had separated themselves from Rome.

Charles,

I agree that there has been an often surprising degree of toleration of disobedience to the canons by people in both the liberal and consrvative wings of TEC. What often holds Bishops in check are the Standing Committees, but there are dioceses where the Standing Committee will support the Bishop in violating the canons.

Clearly the dioceses of TEC have a fair amount of autonomy, certainly more than dioceses in the Church of England, but there are limits to that autonomy, just as there are limits to the autonomy of member Churches of the Communion. What the limits are for both are in dispute, although there is probably some wide area of agreement. For example, a member church of the Communion would not be free to abandon the historic episcopate and become in its polity presbyterian. Nor would it be free to adandon the Creeds, the dominical sacraments, or the Bible. Beyond these points of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral we would begin to see disagreements. which may or may not be a good thing. As to the autonomy of dioceses, there is the limit placed on it by TEC’s Constitution and Canons, which, although at times violated, are generally obeyed, esp. in matters, like the election of Bishops, where there are requirements for confirmation of a diocesan action by others. It has been my contention that the departure of a diocese from TEC would only be possible with the consent of the GC, which, after all, has to act to admit dioceses and with which dioceses are “in union.” I understand that there are faithful and intelligent folks who disagree with me about this.

About the polity of ACNA, as far as I understand it, I have no opinion, except that ACNA is free, as TEC has always been free, to adopt a polity of its own choosing.

Dear Benjamin,

Perhaps I should take time to read about proper hermenuetical approaches. I agree the danger of assumed objectivity is the pretend interpretation of text within a historical vacuum. Hence, the need for secondary and tertiary standards? How we interpret Scripture is thrown into real tailspins when we dump more and more of our standards—articles, prayer book, creeds, councils, definitive Summas, etc.. Indeed, none are sufficient in-and-of themselves, but when each acts as a lens upon the other, you have a decent constellation and magnification of texts to filter out innovations. What I believe TEC (and others) suffer from is an excessive delegitmization/critique of constitutional documents. Often these critiques are driven by modernist/radical agenda rather than a reverence for organic past or ideal of continuity/catholicity in doctrine and morals?