THE TAIL IS WAGGING THE DOG
A Response to the Pastoral Letter
Of
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori
The Rev. Dr. Philip Turner
In the brief time since first it appeared, the recent pastoral letter to the Episcopal Church by its Presiding Bishop has brought forth a voluminous and heated response. If, however, this letter is to be assessed adequately, it is not enough to celebrate its boldness or decry its inaccuracies and half-truths. Before assessing the moral and spiritual worth of the letter or picking apart its various claims, it is necessary to ask just what purpose this letter is meant to serve. Once an examination of this sort is complete, it will become clear that the argument put forward by the Presiding Bishop is a stark example of the tail wagging the dog.
Clearly the Presiding Bishop’s Pastoral was written in response to the Pentecost letter of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In that letter the Archbishop made it clear that the recent actions of TEC raise questions about the suitability of members of our church to represent the Anglican Communion in conversations with the Communion’s ecumenical partners. He also indicated that he, as Archbishop of Canterbury, has authority to determine the status of the Presiding Bishop in respect to the meeting of the Primates. He said as well that he intends to consult with the Primates about the most prudent course for the exercise this authority.
Among many other things, the Pentecost Letter of the Archbishop presents the distinct possibility that TEC’s Presiding Bishop will be placed within what has been called a “second track” within the Communion. If she is in fact located on the “second track” so also in some way may be TEC, the church she represents. The Pastoral of the Presiding Bishop must be understood in large measure as a response to this possibility. Confronted with location within a “second track” of Anglicanism, the Presiding Bishop has thought it necessary to give an account of TEC’s actions both to the members of TEC and the various Provinces of the Anglican Communion; and in so doing block the course of action the Archbishop seems to be taking.
The account she offers of TEC’s action and the response of the Archbishop is intended (1) to defend the course TEC has chosen to follow, (2) to call into question both the probity of the Archbishop and his authority to respond as he has, and (3) set forth a normative account of what it means to be a Communion—an account that runs counter to the one contained in the Covenant each of the Provinces have been requested to consider for adoption.
(1) The letter is meant first as a defense of TEC’s actions. It is from start to finish a defense of an action already taken rather than a request for the Communion and its ecumenical partners in their collective wisdom to help TEC test the spirits. Given the fact that TEC’s action represents a remarkable novelty in the history of Christian belief and practice, one would have thought that some testing of the Spirit not just by TEC but also by the Communion as a whole is in order. In the face of a novelty of this magnitude the burden of proof surely lies with TEC. After all, all four of the Instruments of Unity have urged that actions like those of TEC not be taken. In the face of such widespread opposition, it is a mystery why the Presiding Bishop fails to see that this is so.
Nevertheless, she does not, and so strongly suggests that it is up to the Communion to catch up with TEC rather than the reverse. When it comes to TEC’s actions, it seems that she believes it is proper for the tail to wag the dog. Thus, she starts with a fait accompli, and then marshals a bevy of arguments to show (1) that TEC has done the right thing and that (2) that the Archbishop is just plain wrong in requesting that TEC’s representatives step down from bodies that represent the Communion in ecumenical settings.
The foundation of her defense is that TEC has taken the action it has in response to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. She notes that parts of the Anglican Communion and some of TEC’s Christian partners believe the same thing, but admits that many (she should have said most) Anglicans do not. It is at this point that her argument takes a curious direction. She seems to believe that in some mysterious way the Spirit is leading both TEC and her opponents.
This claim is certainly incoherent. It’s hard to see how the Holy Spirit can favor TEC’s action yet be opposed to it. That said, the burden of her letter is that TEC has understood the promptings of the Spirit correctly. Thus, she makes much of the Spirit teaching new things and promoting diversity. In doing so she relies heavily on John’s saying about the Spirit teaching new things and Acts depiction of each hearing the Gospel in their own language. The Johannine citation is intended to justify TEC’s introduction of theological and ethical novelty, and the citation from Acts is meant to justify contextualization of the Gospel in ways suitable to various languages and cultures. She seems to be saying both that TEC’s action is a new thing taught by the Spirit and that it is suited to America’s particular cultural and “missional” situation.
My colleague Christopher Seitz, in his article “God the Holy Spirit and being led into all truth,” has shown that both these claims misrepresent the plain meaning of the texts upon which she relies. (http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/category/article/) What he says is convincing in itself and there is no need to rehearse his exegesis here. The point is that the Presiding Bishop begins with the tendentious claim that TEC’s action accords with Scripture and represents a new work of the Holy Spirit. Here is the tail (TEC’s action) that she then uses in an attempt to wag the dog (the weight of Communion teaching, procedure, and opinion).
(2) What I mean is this. To sustain her position she launches an attack on the Archbishop’s response. She seeks to show not only that the Archbishop is acting to quench the Spirit, but also that he has taken a morally dubious course that violates longstanding Anglican tradition. A hallmark of Anglicanism, she says, is a form of “diversity in community” that manifests “willingness to live in tension.” This tolerance of diversity “recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree.”
I have already noted that her view of the Spirit’s leading seems incoherent. I will leave it to the historians among us to assess her claims about the tolerant character of the Elizabethan Settlement, but it has never seemed to me that the Act of Uniformity was meant to put up a big tent, or that the treatment of Anabaptists (they were burned) showed great openness to contrary views of the Christian’s relation to the state. The fact of the matter is that “Anglican inclusiveness” serves more as a charter myth for legitimizing contested issues than a solid historical precedent for innovation. Anglican history, though not overly confessional when it comes to doctrine, manifests extraordinary caution when it comes to changing practice. If anything, caution in respect to changing practice is a “hallmark of Anglicanism.”
The real issue, however, is not the claim about “diversity in community” or “willingness to live in tension.” The real issue is what Anglican’s are to do when the action of one Province, diocese, or person within the Communion takes an official action that others do not “recognize” as consonant with Christian belief and practice. The issue of “recognition” stands in the background of the first Lambeth Conference. There, the question of recognition centered on Bishop Colenso’s interpretation of Holy Scripture. Latterly, the question of recognition surfaced with the consecration by TEC of a partnered gay man. Now it has surfaced once more with the consecration of the Suffragan Bishop of Los Angeles.
The Anglican Covenant is the latest attempt on the part of the Communion to address this issue. The Pastoral Letter of the Presiding Bishop, however, simply assumes that the diversity of Anglicanism renders the question of “recognition” moot. Each Province should have authority to determine the Christian adequacy of its actions on its own. Each Province should be free to determine the way in which Christian belief and practice are to be rendered within its particular cultural context.
Once more, the tail wags the dog! Most Anglicans elsewhere may not “recognize” what TEC has done as “Christianly apt.” But TEC is best suited to be judge in its own case and other Provinces, no matter what their convictions might be, should simply be accepting of this fact. Having arrived at this point, however, the TEC tail wags the Communion dog in yet another way. Given the unfettered autonomy of the Provinces the Presiding Bishop assumes, she sees the letter of the Archbishop as a “troubling push toward centralized authority.” It seems that in yet another way Anglican tradition has been violated. So she notes, “Anglicanism as a body began in the repudiation of the control of the Bishop of Rome.”
The statements of the Archbishop that “push toward centralized authority” put the Presiding Bishop in mind of the Anglican Covenant. She sees this proposal also as an “instrument of control” (and so contrary to the Anglican tradition of diversity). Thus, while the Archbishop in all his communications has spoken of “recognition” and “consequences” she speaks of an “instrument of control” that imposes “sanctions.” Clearly, she seeks to depict the Archbishop and the Covenant as harbingers of a centralized Anglican authority like the Vatican. Given these views, one cannot imagine those within TEC who share the Presiding Bishop’s views giving support to the proposed Covenant.
Be that as it may, I can only say in response that either she has failed to understand the Covenant proposal or she is simply distorting its plain meaning. The dreaded Section Four she mentions does no more than lay out a procedure for recognition or non-recognition of contested action. In this procedure there is no central authority to be found. If anything, the process is so diffuse one wonders how any common judgment can be arrived at. A Standing Committee receives questions about recognition, assesses them and possible consequences, passes recommendations on the Primates and the ACC and these recommendations are in turn assessed by each of the Provinces. This doesn’t look much like the Vatican to me.
So the claim is that the Archbishop’s letter lies outside the circle of Anglican tradition. I wish she had stopped here, but she didn’t. She goes on to question the moral probity of the Archbishop’s request. In his attempt to limit the TEC’s autonomy, she detects a colonial attitude that “attempts to impose a single understanding across widely varying contexts and cultures.” The Archbishop’s letter thus gives expression to “the same kind of colonial excess practiced by many of our colonial forbears.” So now TEC is the victim of “colonial excess” by the same people from whom we broke through a revolution. All one can say is that this is a curious charge, given the fact that the most common criticism of the Archbishop is that he has been loath to use the authority of his office to rein in TEC’s idiosyncratic actions and in his letter he proposed only the most modest consequences.
(3) Nevertheless, modest though the proposed consequences may be, they have prompted another wag of the dog’s tail. This time, in order to place TEC’s action beyond the reach of communion reaction, she in fact proposes an account of communion that legitimates TEC’s claim to autonomy rather than the view of mutual subjection within the body of Christ that stands at the foundation of the Covenant. She wants no checks on the actions of the various Provinces of the Communion. By implication, mutually recognized faith and practice do not play a central role in the Communion of Anglicans. Communion then, as her final paragraph makes plain, consists of listening one to another, continuing conversation, joint efforts in theological education, and less formal and more local partnerships in mission and ministry. As best I can determine, her view of communion does not flow from mutually recognized belief and practice but from bilateral, even multilateral assistance in mission and ministry.
I have argued elsewhere, that in comparison with that proposed in the Covenant, her view of communion is “thin” rather than “thick.” It does not ask the Provinces to have mutually recognizable forms of belief and practice—only that they keep open lines of communication and provide one another mutual assistance. And it appears that this view of communion stems from an attempt to justify a contested action already taken. The tail wags the dog!
I am prepared to say also that this view of communion amounts to an attempt to export American denominationalism and in so doing remake the Communion in TEC’s image. Americans are prone to this sort of thing. The Presiding Bishop’s proposal remakes the world in America’s image and so reduces the various Provinces of the Communion to denominated national expressions that share the same historical origins but need not see in one another forms of belief and practice they recognize. Each is free to cooperate or not as they may see fit.
I could spend far more time and space expositing the two views of communion the letters of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Presiding Bishop exemplify. That discussion, however, points to the theological and practical work that lies ahead for the Communion in the coming season. All I can do here is indicate the sort of challenges that lie before us. Those challenges, so it seems to me, press hard upon us even now. As I write, the Presiding Bishop has undertaken an extensive and intensive travel schedule to Canada, England, and Scotland. She appears to be in the midst of a diplomatic campaign to gain support for TEC’s actions and for her view of communion life. So she seeks to cast doubt on the wisdom and probity of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the chief symbol and instrument of Anglican unity and identity. She seeks also the call into question the proposed Covenant. She also promotes a thin account of communion that runs counter to the proposed Covenant. The Covenant now before the Communion sees communion as more than a means for promoting cooperation and mutual support. The Covenant supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury is a means of maintaining commonly recognized forms of belief and life and so also a coherent and common view of the mission to which the Provinces of the Communion are called.
