Mark Dyer, The Virginia Report, and the Promise of The Windsor Report
by Professor Christopher Seitz and The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner (Nov 18, 2004)
Bp. Mark Dyer was the only ECUSA representative on the Lambeth Commission, the body that issued the "Windsor Report". Bp. Dyer has recently made statements that are deeply puzzling and even disturbing. These statements stand in contrast both to the Report's straightforward text and to the interpretations publicly given to it by other Commission members. Given Bp. Dyer's role as its public interpreter in ECUSA, this raises serious questions as to the informed weight the ECUSA House of Bishops will give the Report.
At this point we would draw attention primarily to the general meaning Bp. Dyer attaches to the Report's message. According to the bishop, the situation addressed by the Report and its recommendations is one of discourtesy, and the struggles that have ensued within ECUSA and the Communion come down to this: "It's a question of bad manners in terms of what it means to be an Anglican."
This statement is of course deeply undercut by the very shape of the Report's theological premises, which the bishop knows so well: the character of God's own life as Trinity, the mission of God within the world, the Church's life as a reflection and instrument of that mission, its demanded life in unity and radical holiness, its subjection, especially through its bishops, to Scripture's dynamic call and shaping in the life of the Church as a whole, and the ordering of common life in a way that both sustains and submits to these creative divine realities. The final paragraph of the Report lays out what is at stake in maintaining the life of the Anglican Communion - not "manners" at all, but our turning towards or "away from the Cross" of Christ Jesus Himself.
It is hard to know why Bp. Dyer would make the statement that he did. But however the bishop intended the explanatory reach of his statement, it is consistent with the kind of approach he has publicly taken with respect to the Report. He has expended enormous attention, for instance, to the matter of boundary-crossing by extra-jursidictional bishops, and to the Report's recommendation that that this practice cease. He cites at length judgments that "schism is worse than heresy" - not "bad manners" in this case, it appears - and erroneously attributes these intentions to bishops and clergy who to this day have remained faithful to the Episcopal Church and to the Anglican Communion. He says very little, on the other hand, about the offenses of ECUSA leadership that have "breached the bonds of Communion" and that have been carefully catalogued by the Report itself.
The special pleading in this regard is egregious. In a recent talk on the Report given at Virginia Seminary, Bp. Dyer asserts unbalanced moral comparisons among Communion members and their actions where they do not exist in the Report; he attributes openness to the Report's attitudes towards doctrine and morals where it is never offered; he underplays the church-dividing character of the issue of sexuality where in fact the Report accepts this matter's central role in the communion's consensual teaching; he interprets the Report's recommendations in a theologically minimalist way that is contradicted by the Report's entire approach to its conclusions and their implications; he truncates the actual scope of the recommendations in his attempt to provide U.S. bishops a basis for evading the Report's demand for a change in their behavior. And in doing all of this, he not only trivializes and demeans the stated concerns and consensual convictions of the majority of Anglican Primates whose disquiet over ECUSA's "tearing the fabric of the Communion" elicted the Report in the first place, but he distorts and marginalizes the witness in the Church's history of all those persons, lay and ordained, who have struggled mightily in a faithful opposition to false teaching and ecclesial misdirection, including those who, during the Arian struggle to which the bishop is fond of appealing, were forced at great sacrifice to disengage themselves in various ways from ecclesial structures in error.
At the root of this highly misleading presentation of the Windsor Report is a view of the church that is bound to paralyze efforts at recognizing the profound demands of communion -life and that logically do in fact lead to the relegating of extraordinarily vital matters of Christian life to the category of "manners". It is summarized in Bp. Dyer's claim that "the unity that we share is a divine gift over which we have no power to dissolve. Because God has given it". This, he argues, is bound to the Pauline teaching that "even though [Christians were] behaving badly, they could not destroy the gift of God's grace that had been given to them". If in fact baptism creates an indissoluble unity among Christians, solely determined in its integrity by the once established fiat of God, then of course, as Bp. Dyer argues, sins against divine truth and unity are reduced to impotent gestures of ill-breeding.
The Report itself makes explicit (if only general) use of what is called "communion ecclesiology", and it locates some of its principles in The Virginia Report on the nature of the Anglican Communion that was commissioned by the 1988 Lambeth Conference. Bishop Dyer was himself involved in the drafting of this last document, and from the perspective of the current crisis in the Anglican Communion, it now appears that concerns early expressed over The Virginia Report's confused and 'hyper-extended' ecclesiology wrongly attributed by Dyer to John Zizioulas (Being in Communion), were well founded. The positive potential of The Windsor Report is fortunately not subverted by this use - but only so long as pressure remains in place to reject the ongoing, revisionist spin of its substantive claims. For unlike the earlier Virginia Report, The Windsor Report acknowledges that discipline is going to be necessary for the Communion to survive, when there is manifest unwillingness to abide by Communion-wide resolutions and teaching.
What of this species of 'trinitarian' or 'koinonia' ecclesiology found in The Virginia Report to which Bp. Dyer seems so bound?
We commend a chapter in the recent book Figured Out (Professor Christopher Seitz, Westminster, 2001), which traces the rough transition from Lambeth 1988 to The Virginia Report, and describes the confusion introduced in the latter by its drafters especially in the areas of Scripture, Trinity, and ecclesiology. By contrast, the earlier Lambeth 1988 account retains a productive view of the authority of Scripture, and hence of the Church and the Triune God.
One can quickly turn to any of the responses to the present interest in trinitarian, koinonia, 'participation' or Cappadocian theologies (including responses from Zizioulas himself) to see that one cannot simply posit a plurality in unity in the Godhead- a fearful prospect from the point of the Christian doctrine of God which then seeks to comprehend the Church, by direct analogy.
A quote from Colin Gunton is a useful here, and directly illumines both the challenge at the heart of the Anglican Communion as well as the gravity of mis-describing the nature of the Church in the way that Dyer as done:
"It should scarcely require repetition that communion depends upon atonement: upon the reconciliation of relations lost at the Fall. That is one reason why both christology and pneumatology are essential to an understanding of communion. Where community is breached, it cannot be restored without the healing or extirpation of that which occasioned the breach. That is why Christ dies under the law, on the altar and in conflict with the demons. Communion, the will of the creator for his people, is the shape of their being in relation, but of a being that apart from redemption is destined for the relationlessness that is death" (The One, The Three, and The Many: The 1992 Bampton Lectures).
In its platonising instincts, The Virginia Report threatens to absorb the Church into Christ's own Ascension, and the baptised Christian into a sinless Christ at the right hand of the Father. Bishop Dyer seems to have embraced this danger, to the detriment of the right reading of the Windsor Report itself and to the obscuring of the way forward for ECUSA and the Communion as a whole. We know from countless chapters in church history that baptised Christians have thrown themselves, by their actions, into serious places of sin, in need of repentance and penitence, by reason of manifest departures from Christian teaching and living.
To blur this, in the face of present conflict with false teaching, is to re-write and distort church history, trinitarian theology (East and West), and ascetic theology of the most basic sort. It is also to ignore a vast swath of New Testament witness that places the character of our common life as the Church under warning, neither presuming upon God's grace nor despairing of His promises, but taking responsibility in hope with soberness of judgment as to our vocation (e.g. Mk. 9:42-50; 12:1-11; 1 Cor. 10:12; Jude 5; Hebrews 6:4-8; Revelation cc. 2-3).
Mark Dyer can claim theological positions he believes are grounded in John Zizioulas, Rowan Williams, the Cappadocian Fathers, and a recent interest in 'communion eccelesiology' -- but this claiming requires a grounding that goes beyond rhetorical ingenuity on behalf of a church his own Report has seriously castigated and passionately called into a new place of repentance.
In the season following The Virginia Report we have seen the Anglican Communion fracture and threaten to collapse, due to the failure to discipline errant, unilateral members of the Body. Lofty statements about unity, such as we find inThe Virginia Report, have only led to confusion and fragmentation. On this front, The Windsor Report is a sober and useful replacement, and we can all pray that it has put members of the Communion Family on notice about the obligations of our life in Christ. Let there be no further temporizing or false offers of regret, which focus not on actions but on the reactions to them. It is time now for ECUSA Bishops to declare their compliance to The Windsor Report. Such declarations and statements of sincere regret accompanied by actions consistent with Communion teaching will assist the Primates in their deliberations in February.
Professor Christopher Seitz
University of St Andrews
The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner
Pueblo, Colorado
