Design group to give draft covenant to Primates
Episcopal News Service. January 26, 2007 [012607-01]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
The Anglican Communion's Covenant Design Group's report to the February meeting of the Communion's Primates will include a draft covenant, according to one of the two Episcopal Church members of the group.
Both the Rev. Dr. Katherine Grieb, associate professor of New Testament at Virginia Theological Seminary, and the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner, rector of Church of the Ascension in Pueblo, Colorado, adhered to the group's agreement to keep the details of its report confidential. Grieb said the report contains a draft of a proposed covenant.
However, both spoke to the Episcopal News Service about the covenant-design process and discussed their thoughts about the idea of a covenant for the Communion, which originated in the Windsor Report (paragraphs 113-120). The Archbishop of Canterbury appointed the group at the request of the Joint Standing Committee of the Primates' Meeting and of the Anglican Consultative Council.
"The covenant process is moving at a great speed," Grieb said. "It's a good time for all of us to become clear about what the covenant is."
Of the report, Radner, who is a "collegial theologian" of an organization called the Anglican Communion Institute, said: "I think it will surprise people positively for the balance, for effectiveness of discussions and what we were able to produce. It's going to respond to a wide variety of concerns that have been expressed."
Radner said the group's discussions during its mid-January meeting in Nassau, Bahamas, and its resulting report took into account the anxieties some people have about a covenant and what this particular design group might produce. He included in those anxieties concerns that a covenant might create a curial system such as that which assists in governing the Roman Catholic Church, possible attempts to "railroad" one point of view through the process, and a covenant "being set up on the basis of trying exclude people from the start."
"I think all of those anxieties -- at least in my view -- are ill-founded," Radner said. "They're understandable in the context in which they were articulated but on the basis of the actual group's work, I think they will be shown to have been ill-founded."
Grieb said the fact that the group's members from Ireland, South Africa and Ceylon could not be at the meeting was "unfortunate [because] it meant that the representation was unbalanced."
"Ceylon has just ordained women. South Africa has been through the whole apartheid experience and Ireland has struggled with religious conflict," Grieb said. "We could have used their experienced voices."
"There weren't very many of us to speak for the use of the covenant as binding the whole Communion together with different points of view represented in it," she said.
"The most-well-represented view was that the purpose of the covenant is preventative. According to that view, a covenant would prevent any significant change from happening in Church's doctrine and practice," she said. "Proponents of this view are eager to have a covenant in place as quickly as possible so that there will be procedures available to prevent any unwelcome innovations from their point of view."
"For some in our group, the voice that matters is the voice of the Primates," Grieb said. "The Anglican Communion, as important as the Primates are, is much bigger than the Primates. We need to hear the voices of women, of laity and of clergy. They are the Anglican Communion on the ground."
Radner said "everything depends on [the primates' response]."
There is no process in the Anglican Communion for considering or adopting something like a covenant. Radner noted that so far the process has come from "those for whom we have been asked to do some work."
"If the response is positive, then I think one can assume there will be other work that is going to be done, but that doesn't depend on us," he said of the design group.
"The result of our work will be continued discussion within the Anglican Communion," Radner said.
The goal and details of a covenant -- and even the need for one -- will be part of future work, the two design group members said.
"There was common sense that the Communion's life has been an enormous gift and any way that that could be strengthened through the covenant was something that we were all prepared to put our hearts and minds together to try to accomplish." Radner said of the group's Nassau discussions.
Grieb said that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, is leading Anglicans in a covenant process designed to preserve the Anglican Communion.
"It is important for the entire Anglican Communion to go forward as a group and not to split into two different versions of Anglican Communion," she said. "It's worth working for; it's crucial theologically to be one body for our witness and our mission. If the covenant is the best way of holding the Communion together, then a lot of us are interested in covenant for that purpose."
Radner said his idea of a covenant is that "it's more than about attitudes that are shared; it's about actually making promises about all of that, and promises that, because they are made before God and in the Body of Christ, are by definition accountable at least to God and to the Body, whatever that means."
He said that there might be disagreement about how such promises would be made and kept "but if one feels that the Church is not a place where promises are to be made, kept and held accountable about, then obviously the idea of a covenant is not going to be a happy idea."
"I think that's a line of difference in terms of perspective," he said.
Radner said he hasn't heard anyone say that the churches of the Anglican Communion shouldn't make promises to one another. "On the other hand, I've heard views that would say that one must not seek a way to constrain the commitments of individual churches -- again, whatever that might mean, but I think a promise is a constraint. It's a self-constraint," he said. "You make a promise because you yourself are willing to bind yourself to your own word."
Grieb called for the active participation of as many people as possible in the continuing covenant conversation.
"This coming time will require action around the Communion if we want to continue in the Anglican tradition of comprehensiveness, generous orthodoxy, listening to minorities and welcoming the stranger -- the person with another point of view," she said. "Not everyone in the Anglican Communion views that sort of tradition as distinctively Anglican. The question of what is distinctively Anglican is in danger of being reduced to a set of doctrinal commitments that we can all sign on to. That would be unfortunate."
Grieb said that Anglicanism has a "long tradition not of closing our eyes to conflict, but, of creating spaces where different points of view can be argued intelligently, coherently and with attention to biblical interpretation in ways that we can move forward without everyone agreeing but with an understanding that we don't see it the same way and yet we cared deeply about our union."
She rooted that tradition in the early Church, noting the struggles of the Church in Antioch and Corinth to remain together despite ecclesial differences, as described in Paul's letters to the Galatians, Corinthians and Romans.
"We will continue to disagree. There never was a golden age where everybody in the Church agreed on everything. We've always [been] working it out; we've always been trying to figure out how to live together around the same table with different points of view," she said. "We will continue to do that unless we abandon the project of communion and seek to live in a church where everybody looks like us and sounds like us and agrees with us. That would be not only boring; it would be deadly and, more to the point, it would happen at the cost of the gospel of God which calls us to welcome the brother or sister for whom Christ died. "
For Grieb the issue comes down, in part, to recognizing that there are two traditional approaches to biblical interpretation that are continually in "tension and conversation."
One tradition she described as that "understands faithfulness to the text as being a non-complicated reproduction of what was said in the past without embroidery, without modification, taking those great, ancient -- some might even say eternal truths -- and applying them in out life today, no matter how difficult that is. It intends to preserve ‘the faith once delivered to the saints.'"
The other tradition "understands the Bible in closer continuity with Judaism that sees the Torah as a living, breathing word, like a tree that has new leaves."
"The Bible itself has participated in the dynamic process of re-hearing the Word of God in each generation," Grieb said. "This view sees the biblical text itself as a growing thing -- a growing text. It assumes that God actually plants new insights in the text, new questions in our hearts, new interactions between reader and text."
The on-going conversation about an Anglican covenant, Grieb said, recognizes that these two traditions live side-by-side in our congregations.
"What we need right now are for biblical interpreters and theologians and all the people living in our churches hearing the Word every Sunday, living it out in their lives all the days of the week, to reflect on these traditions of biblical interpretation," she said. "As we reflect also on our present context, we can recommit ourselves to welcome those who share another understanding of Scripture and therefore another interpretation of doctrine or ethics than we do."
"It is the time for the Anglican Communion at every level to renew its commitment to conversation about the Anglican Communion and about the history of biblical interpretation in Anglicanism," she said. "We're up to that; we can do this."
According to Bonnie Anderson, vice president of the Episcopal Church's Executive Council, its Standing Committee on International Concerns plans to invite Radner and Grieb to attend the Executive Council meeting in Portland, Oregon, March 2-4. The 75th General Convention's Resolution A166 called for the International Concerns and the Episcopal Church members of the Anglican Consultative Council to follow the covenant development processes and report regularly to the Council and the 76th General Convention in 2009.
"It is important that Executive Council is in communication with those appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury from The Episcopal Church as this process develops," said Anderson. "An understanding of the culture and polity of all the provinces will be necessary to design a covenant that can be considered and potentially embraced by all."