Upon Receipt of the Windsor Report, 24 October 2004
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20041028074512/http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.org/
“As a friend of mine said, I’m an Episcopalian, not an Anglican.”
In this brief comment from one of the many, newly proliferating blogs, we glimpse something of what is at stake, in this moment God has prepared in his Providence, for American Episcopalians and their Anglican counterparts throughout the world.
Evangelical churches in the United States believe they are mysteriously, invisibly united with all those who confess Jesus Christ as Lord -- no matter what their historical or ecclesial heritage. This is what, in part, it means to live in a New World and look to Jesus Christ as Lord. Liberal Protestants used to work at this coal face too, but have long since not bothered.
We now have an Old World version of this same New World ecclesiology. That is, US Anglicans who wish to cut themselves off from their, mysterious but visible, union with other Anglican Christians throughout the world.
The burden was never on the former evangelical or liberal protestant groupings, which might well have shied away from a confession like, “I believe in One Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church.” Contested though that claim might be for Anglican Christians, it still had a foundation in a worldwide Communion and ongoing dialogues, until recently strained but not broken, with other such Communions of visibly catholic Christians.
So the real question is: will American ‘episcopalians’ now become that full-stop, and not something called Anglican? Is the New World going to claim still another New Spirit of separation, a ‘Spirit’ with which Anglicans in particular wrestled from their inception, opting to side with Old World Communion instincts, whether initially in Scotland or later in the Church of England.
So, then, the question raised by the Windsor Report is: will a new denomination of ‘episcopalians’ become a new ‘New World’ expression of local religious conviction, calling itself Christian and seeking to give content and mission to that claim, and so joining others in the New World supermarket of religions?
Whatever its failings, the recently released and long-awaited Windsor Report does not promote such a vision of Anglican Christian witness and mission. Yet almost immediately, the Presiding Bishop of the American branch of Anglican Christianity has said, ‘I am an Episcopalian,’ and we of the episcopal denomination, to borrow a phrase, ‘hold certain truths to be self-evident.’ ‘Self-evident’ is the same conceit once adopted by New World humanists convinced of a category ‘self-evidence,’ whatever that empiricism might have hopefully meant then, and might now mean, in our rights and self-interest fog bank of freedom and individual rights.
Seabury sought to connect American Anglicanism to its Communion roots, as did the colonially inclined William White.
The new breed of American episcopal Bishops, led by their Presiding Bishop, has played the ultimate New World trump card, by saying: we are boldly going where ‘humankind’ has not gone, or cannot know yet about. This claim may seem to have the hands of ‘self-evidence’ but it surely has the voice of ‘new like never ever before.’
This claim outstrips the desires of the New World-ers of the 17th and 18th centuries, but to atone for its tardiness, it brings an offering yet more New World than anyone then could have imagined, that is, an episcopally denominated expression of Christianity nowhere in evidence in history or in ecumenical manifestation. And so, the newest of the New World religions after all, even in a late harvest and New World Epiphany.
C Seitz, President, Anglican Communion Institute
