Why a Covenant, and Why Its Conciliar Form: a Response to Critics

Agreeing in the truth of God’s holy Word is also a part of Jesus’ own prayer to the Father in John 17’s famous petition regarding unity: when Jesus asks the Father to "sanctify" his disciples in the "word that is truth" (17:17), he is asking the Father to maintain them in a divine "gift" (v. 14) – God’s word — that will make them "one" in his own "glory" (v. 22). And so Paul also pleads with the Philippians that they have the "same mind" – literally, "think the same thing" – and be of a common spirit and think "one thing" (Phil2:2). It is a phraseology he repeats elsewhere in the letter – with respect to Eudoia and Synteche (4:2) and the Romans (Rom 15:5). And of course among the Corinthians – cf. 2 Cor. 13:11; 1 Cor. 1:10 – he calls them to "agreement", by being in the "same mind" (noi) and "judgment" (gnome). And this represents the very character of the Body of Christ in its fullness, as seen with different images in Acts 1:14; 2: 46 (homothumadon) and 1 Pet. 3:13 (homophronein). Coming to one accord – this is a prayer and it is the work of God. Thus, it is the work of the Church. Any church and the whole Church. I cannot see how it could be otherwise.

I will say, however, that at the March meeting of the American House of Bishops, this necessary work of "agreement" and "accord" was questioned by several bishops. "Why should Christians think the same things?" several asked with respect to the Covenant. Yes, we need some fundamentals. But even these are not helpfully articulated. The argument is that "unity is in Christ", it is a gift, it isn’t ours, and therefore if we are baptized in Christ, that is all the unity that counts. Anything more we press for goes beyond our brief, as it were. In fact, it undercuts baptismal unity whose reality is actually highlighted when it stands above diverse and even conflicting variations of Christian belief and witness within the world. Look! No matter how different we are, Christ holds us together!

I pointed to Philippians 2:2 as an example of at the least the calling to agreement. But the answer I got from Katherine Grieb was that this was a specific, not a general accord: be of "one mind" when it comes to the humility of Jesus who "though he was in the form of God", etc.. Common-mindedness is not something Christians need to strive for as an essential element of their life as Christians in general. With respect, for instance, to the Word and its truth. But then, what are we praying about?

Indeed, as the few citations just offered demonstrate, the prayer is Jesus’ and it drives Paul and the Christian Church to an encompassing vocation of "accord", not to a set of specific areas of helpful agreement from time to time. "Accord" is of the nature of the Church, whatever also may be the failures of the Church in embodying it. Indeed, if the "oneness of mind" that Paul refers to in Phil. 2 is specifically aimed at the humility of Christ, just this aim points out the breadth of the "mind" in question: for this humility is precisely what draws all creation together in a common confession by "every tongue" that "Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:11). Being of "one accord" in the "mind" that is "ours in Christ Jesus" is therefore being joined to the very movement and act of God in Christ; it is to be a part of something God is in fact doing – bringing all things together in unity in the Son (Eph. 1:10; Col 1:20; 1 Cor. 15:28). If we pray that "we may agree in the truth of thy holy Word, and live in unity, and godly love", it is because God’s promise is that we do, or at least that His Church does, and that this promise is being made good in the life of His Son.

When Jesus teaches that a "when two or three" "agree" in a petition, such a prayer will be answered (Mt. 18:19), he speaks of a prayer uttered, literally, in "symphony". This is the voice that the Son shares with the Father – I say nothing of my own accord (Jn. 14:10. 24) – and thus later, it is applied to the truth of the Scriptures as they direct the Church – the "symphony" of the prophets is their "agreement" with the perceived work of the Holy Spirit (Acts 15:15). To pray "in accord" is to be joined to the work and life of Jesus Christ. Agreeing in the truth of God’s holy word, then, really is an essential aspect of the Church’s life and – in the world as it is – her vocation; it is such because this agreement is who God is as Father and Son and Holy Spirit and how God acts in the created world. God gives His Word as a gift, and is One with this Word, and the Word’s life is Spirit and Truth. And because it is a promise and act of God, the Church has no choice, in her love of God, but to seek to "think one thing".

On a simple level, this is the only reason for a Covenant among Anglican churches today: that we might come to oneness of mind and heart, agreeing in the truth of God’s holy Word, for that is what we must do because we are Christians and followers of Jesus. The Covenant – any covenant between churches to live together as Christian churches – constitutes a promise to act in certain ways so that such oneness of mind and heart, such agreement in the Word, is furthered. The promises, however, derive from God’s own promise that this is what He does, and this is how the very words of the Son’s prayers take their shape in the life of the Church.

I submit that there can be no valid objection to a covenant understood in this broad way, unless we wish to object to the promises of God Himself. And the only objections that might rightly be lodged against a covenant articulated in particular forms, is that such forms do not in fact further "agreement" and "one-mindedness", not in general, but in terms of the "truth of God’s holy Word" as well as in other quite specific elements of witness and life. For there can be no doubt that such "one-mindedness" in the truth of God’s holy Word, among other things, does not now exist among our churches. How, then, shall we fulfill our vows to the Most High in this regard?

In the past, as many have pointed out, no such articulated covenants seemed necessary for Anglicans. We might ask why and what has changed. In general, one-mindedness where it existed derived from structures of dependence that bound various parts of the developing Anglican Communion together in socially necessary (if not always just) ways: structures that determined political and disciplinary dependence, cultural dependence, economic dependence, and dependence upon a limited pool of leadership and bishops. Such one-mindedness as existed was often given through the uni-directional character of ecclesial authority within missionary districts. At the same time, the lack of one-mindedness and accord was often masked by geographical and communicative isolation: one simply didn’t know the minds of God’s scattered children in the world. Sometimes, finally, this lack of communication was deliberately upheld so as to avoid conflict among the differently-minded, as within missionary districts governed by alternative and sometimes theologically diverging groups. Obviously, all this has changed.

And the vocation to one-mindedness, whatever its partial, imperfect, or even contradicted pursuit in the past, is now thrust upon Anglicans (though less upon other Christians together because of our ongoing social isolations) in a self-evident way. To those who question a covenant, one must ask if we can be faithful to this calling without one?

And it is absolutely crucial to understand the proposal for a covenant as an attempt to be faithful to the calling itself, and the shape of the currently proposed covenant as means to fulfill such faithfulness. Here we need to return to Paul’s own discussion of one-mindedness to see what is at stake.

For Paul, such "agreement" in ‘thinking" is a part of a life "in Christ" and "in" Christ’s "mind" that is bound to certain forms of life lived out one with another: having the "same love", "doing nothing from selfishness or conceit", "in humility counting others better than yourselves", "looking not only to [one’s] own interests, but to the interests of others" (Phil. 2:2-4). This is a consistent network of postures. So, in Romans 15, when he speaks of the call to "one-mindedness", he links this with "contributing to the needs of the saints" and being "hospitable", "blessing" one’s "persecutors", "rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep", not being "haughty" or "conceited" and so on (Rom. 15:13-16). Agreement is bound to a way of living with one another that is rooted in the heart or form of Christ Jesus, and that grows out of a certain bondedness whereby deference is made to others. Hence, one-mindedness is not simply or perhaps foundationally propositional (although it doesn’t exclude propositions).

What is this way of living? Is it not the "coming together" (Acts 15:6), that is, the "gathering" together of the church in order to "keep silence" (Act. 15:12) and "listen" (12, 13) to one another? Is it not the study of Scripture and the discernment of its "agreement" (15) with the minds of the church’s leaders? Is it not through this that there emerges the "accord" of the Church herself (15:25) over what is "necessary" to her life (28)? These phrases, taken from the so-called "council" at Jerusalem in Acts 15, are also clearly bound up with the earlier descriptions of the Apostles’ own life in Jerusalem in the first chapters of Acts – a life of common prayer, possessions, teaching, and "accord" (homothumadon).

The proposed Covenant is a "conciliar" covenant in this regard: it lays out certain promises of commonly committed teaching and mission as the basis for one-heartedness; but it also lays them out in terms of an ecclesial posture of seeking agreement in the truth of God’s holy word through the form of life that leads to one-mindedness: gathering, listening, hearing the "symphony" or "agreement" of the Scriptures with and within the life of the Church, and finding an "accord" by which the church teaches what is "necessary", in the sense of unavoidable and inevitable. Section 6 of the proposal offers a way of doing this through the interlocking councils of the Communion that come to a functional agreement and decision (in this case, through the instrument of the Primates). The ordering of this interlocking scheme could be changed around without altering its significance. The point is, that the shape of this ordering is geared towards one-mindedness through the postures of counsel that themselves follow the "mind" and "form" of Jesus’ humility of service. So Paul himself describes the gift of this posture and counsel as a movement that draws the church through time into one-mindedeness; it is not a final point that is reached – so we have said that "councils may err" in our Articles — but it is an approach to the "prize" that is absolutely necessary to pursue if we are to be the followers of Christ: "let those of us who are mature be thus-minded – "think this thing", this one thing; and if in anything you are otherwise minded – if you "think" differently –- God will reveal that also to you" (Phil. 3:15), that is, you will come along with those who are one-minded, for God’s promise will be fulfilled. "Only let us hold true to what we have attained" (16); let us not stop moving forward into the one mind that our counsel has led us towards.

The Covenant is a promise to seek agreement; it also provides the means to do so through the councils of a church that function in the posture of our Lord’s own agreement with the Father.

II.  Why a covenant and why its conciliar form:  a response to conservative critics regarding confessionalism

Now we might say that the call to one-mindedness is a call to a single mind today; that it is an injunction to agreement at this time, in the face of judgment. "Can two walk together if they do not agree?" or "recognize each other" (Amos 3:3)? This has been a common objection to any kind of covenant other than a propositional confession, that, in its very agreement, marks at once the "one-mindedness" that is Christ’s calling to the Church. No "one-mindedness" without spelling out exactly what that mind is.

One must wonder, however, whether the way of life that pursues one-mindedness does not paradoxically mean that in some cases we must eschew the demand for a propositional confession as an essential element of what we are about. Not that the pursuit precludes the prize, but that the prize is given only in the pursuit. The New Testament word for "confession" – homologia, one- or same-speaking – is related, after all, to "one-mindedness" and "one-heartedness". They cannot be pried apart from their historical knitting together. And when they are, when confession and one-mindedness are not necessarily intermingling, we are perhaps talking about diverse (though not necessarily negative) goals altogether.

For instance, take one of the most recent and highly successful, in its own way, confessional covenants, the Lausanne Covenant of 1974. Here we see a relatively highly developed confessional statement, agreed upon between a large variety of churches, denominations, and parachurch missionary organizations and individuals – over 2,300 delegates to the First International Conference on World Evangelization — designed to provide a foundation for cooperative evangelistic work. The Covenant contains quite substantive agreed statements on such topics the "Purpose of God", the "Authority and Power of the Bible", the "Uniqueness and Universality of Christ", the nature of evangelism, the responsibilities of Christian evangelists, current world situation, the "power of the Holy Spirit", and the "return of Christ". One might wonder how it is possible for divergent churches and groups to agree on such things, but not the churches of a single Christian tradition like Anglicanism?

But we must remember what Lausanne was after: cooperative work. It was not after the nurturing and support of an identity and ecclesial self, a single Body, of "one-mindedness" in the sense of what we call "communion", or the New Testament sense of coming together, of living together, of stripping oneself before the other, as in Acts 2 or 4’s description of the apostolic communion, let alone Ephesians 5’s description of mutual subjection in the form of husband and wife, Christ and Church. Had the Lausanne Covenant been about this, could its "confession" have been sufficient or even directly to the point? That is, would the groups and individuals represented at Lausanne have ever submitted themselves to one another in the discernment of an "agreed truth of God’s holy Word" in the way that Paul speaks? Or was this statement, in fact, not a discernment at all, but a description of common principles actually existing that provided a sufficient basis for cooperative ventures, including the most important one of evangelization? The confession of Lausanne was not about the search for one-mindedness, but about the practical conditions for achieving a task among those already convicted about that task.

Now nothing, of course, precludes confessional agreement from Anglicanism a priori. The unified or linked confession of a prior conviction is not contradicted in Anglicanism by logical definition. It is not clear, however, that confessional agreement in fact is sufficient or even always directly relevant to one-mindedness in a New Testament sense. Furthermore, such confessionalism is not actually something that has informed Anglicanism in the past. It is not logically contradicted; only historically so. This is obviously a disputed question, but I believe that Anglicanism’s historical experience with the category of "confession" bears this out.

The Articles of Religion, for instance, were not originally used in a catechetical or formational fashion until over a century after their composition. That is a rather significant fact. And although called a "confession" by early 17^th-century theologians, these same theologians – and I have in mind both Protestant and Catholic writers like Thomas Rogers and Christopher Davenport, not to mention William Chillingworth – were unable to apply the Articles to a clear definitional standard for Anglicanism without interpreting them through extraneous lenses (either of Continental Reformed confessions or of specific Catholic writers). That is, on "their own" the Articles were not sufficiently robust as to clarify confusions. Hooker made no use of the Articles at all in his writing about controversial topics, like Justification, and their actual function as time went on tended to be one of a container of tolerated divergences of conscience.

Archbishop William Wake, in his attempts at furthering reunion with Gallican Catholics in France in the early 18^th century, saw the Articles as irrelevant to the exposition of "fundamentals" except insofar as they demonstrated Anglican adherence to the ancient Creeds. (This was not insignificant, however, since it was on this basis that the English bishops forced the newly forming Episcopal Church in America to withdraw their excision from the Apostles’ Creed of the Descent into Hell – but it was not on the basis of the Articles that they did so.) By 1772, motions to Parliament were already being made to abolish clerical tests, like subscription to the Articles, because it was clear that they had done little to prevent the adherence of Arians and Socinians, who had infiltrated the English clergy. One could argue whether it was the Articles themselves that were porous or the authorities applying them to ordinands. But the result was the same. The American church, as we know, originally let the Articles drop altogether, although they were reinstated in the early 19^th century, only to be dropped again 30 years ago as a normative test for clergy and for the church as a whole. As limits to doctrinal diversity the Articles gave the lie to an Anglican dogmatic identity, and Newman’s famous attempt – no different than Davenport’s 200 years earlier – showed that all things were possible within the current of subtle explanation. Lambeth 1888 (Res. 19) already stated that acceptance of the Articles "in their entirety" was not necessary for churches of the Communion, and in 1968 (res. 43) the Lambeth Conference recommended member churches dropping the Articles altogether as a test for Anglican identity.

This historical experience of confessional incapacity, however, may indicate a weakness, one that should be overcome. But it may also indicate a peculiar mission – the seeking of one-mindedness in a double- and triple-minded Church and for the sake of larger Church’s healing, strengthening and faith. For the situation in which Anglicans have long struggled with respect to "accord" is one that now touches wide swathes of the contemporary church, and not only in the West: contested interpretation of the Scriptures and the breakdown of any viable and powerful consensus fidelium, the fundamental agreement of the Church’s "faithful". There are and have been sociological realities of Anglican identity – that is, there has been such an ecclesial existent as "Anglican church" and "churches", and these can be defined, and this identity has had a certain consistency over time (and Martin Davie’s arguments that this is the case, and that this is not to be dismissed are accurate). But these identity markers are neither reducible to a confession, nor do they say anything about God’s will and purpose for the Anglican church itself. Instead, we can observe the emergence of the Communion in tandem with the disintegration of some of these markers, the tension between which has exposed a vocation: the seeking of one-mindedness for the sake of others. It is the rise of the Communion that has made clear our vocation to one-mindedness – not the other way around.

The articulation and offering of the Quadrilateral derives from a recognition of this mission, as do, for instance, the pointed resolutions on unity that came out of the 1920 and 1930 Lambeth Conferences. The language of both the 1920 Appeal and 1930 Resolution 49 (as well as the resolutions on the South Indian Church) all pointed to the provisionality of Anglican ecclesial and even doctrinal distinctives in major regards, and , exposed the Communion now as a body with a special orientation in the service of the larger Church. What service? Given the affront to the Gospel’s receipt perpetrated by Christian division, this service seems to lie in the retrieval of a "consensus-and-community-building hermeneutic" with respect to the Scriptures themselves, as George Lindbeck has put it; or in the language of Paul and the Prayer Book, one-mindedness in the agreement of the truth of God’s holy Word. And this mission in fact stands in sharp contrast to the self-understanding of Roman Catholicism (and hence evades the criticism of still-unresolved factions given by someone like Aidan Nichols); the mission also stands over and against the notion of an invisible church, stitched together through time by an already faithful and confessing remnant.

It is this mission that any Covenant must seek to further. And although there may be a logical weight to the hope that our current divisions might be resolved through the imposition of a defined body of doctrine and witness, Anglicanism itself does not seem capable of receiving such a remedy. Instead, the Communion seeks to heed a calling, the exhortation to become of one mind, and not for itself alone, but for the sake of a fractured Christian Body that extends from within Anglicanism and reaches the breadth of the world’s Christian churches. A covenant, after all, is given in the midst of history, even such a one as this. And in this light, a Covenant whose confessional substance could act as a "magisterial" criterion to the witness and actions of the Communion’s members historically puts the cart before the horse. God makes His promises for the salvation of a fallen world; and the Church covenants in the midst of Body still immature. If "magisterium" has a meaning in Anglicanism, it can only be in the terms Augustine laid out in his wonderful dialogue "On the Teacher" (De magistro), where the human pedagogue is not the one who imparts the truth, but is rather the one who points us to the only true teacher, who is Christ – in this case, given in the Word of the Scriptures themselves; and so allows them to teach us, His church. The magisterium of the church – articulated in the promises of a covenant — must mean, then, not the outline of a teaching, but the framework for being taught, for learning. That, already, is what we have seen with respect to the search for one-mindedness. For is not the search for one-mindedness tied to what Calvin called docilitas, or "teachableness", the gift granted him, according to his account in his preface to the Psalms commentary, in his own conversion? "Teachableness" "involves the humble willingness to be taught by the Holy Spirit in sacred Scripture, as Scripture directs us to the fountain of every good thing the Father sets forth for us in Christ. The source and norm of doctrine is therefore the genuine meaning of Scripture" and nothing else (Randall Zachman, Theology Today, Jan. 2002). Only a church that brings its people to the Scriptures, and allows them to form us, through the Teacher who is Christ the Word speaking them to us, can gather its people into the oneness of mind that is our goal in the form of Christ. For who is it who shall "confess" – speak as "one" – "Jesus Christ as Lord" before and with all creation, except those who are one-minded in their humble listening to the Word (cf. Phil. 2:11)?

St. Paul, in relation to just such a divine grace, ties the "richly indwelling Word" (Col 3:16) to the relational virtues of peace, harmony, forgiveness, and love. But also, because what is involved here is a coming to one mind, a learning, what is required is a discipline within the church, where "admonishment", of the kind he himself was willing to offer, is a necessary and essential aspect of the Scripture’s power to bring minds together. "Discipline", after all, is a word cognate with "disciple", the "student" who learns through following and standing ever near. The "teacher" points to the Scriptures and holds the student – the disciple – close to its formative demands. And "discipline" represents that framework of order through which this teaching or Scriptural indication is permanently applied.

If the councils of the church in the Communion exercise a magisterium, it is in just this way. And it is a way that, arguably, the Communion is currently engaging.

The goal of any Covenant for the Communion, then, would further the one-mindedness of Anglican churches through the discipline of Scriptural listening. Does the conciliar model of the current proposal do this? It would appear, at least, that this is exactly what is happening in the present – we are, through the interplay and adjudication of our councils, being taken close to the Scriptures and made to hear them, often in contested ways to be sure, but ultimately in "symphonic" or agreed upon ways, even if not all are convinced at once. And thus it would seem that the proposal itself is in general congruent with the goal. If anything, the Proposed Covenant could be strengthened through a greater Scriptural focus that linked conciliar discernment with Scriptural conformity and "non-repugnance", to use the Articles’ own phraseology. This is a point that underlines the fact that Anglican identity need not be sacrificed by stepping to the side of full-fledged confessionalism. Rather, as John Webster has noted, confessions "bind only as [they] present the Gospel’s claim" (Nicene Christianity, p. 131). Agreeing in the truth of God’s holy Word is the act that receives that claim as God’s, and hence makes confession – the "one-speaking" (1 Tim. 6:12f.) that comes from "one-mindedness" — possible. To this act, the Communion is now called to give itself.