Authority Versus Autonomy an Old Debate for Anglicans
Episcopal News Service. February 23, 2001 [2001-47]
Jan Nunley
(ENS) Archbishops Maurice Sinclair and Drexel Gomez say that their proposals in the book To Mend the Net are a response to recent actions of the Lambeth Conference of the world's Anglican bishops regarding the authority of the primates and the autonomy of provinces within the Anglican Communion.
But questions of the role and authority of the so-called "instruments of unity" within the Anglican Communion--the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Conferences, the Anglican Communion Council and the Primates' Meeting--to discipline member provinces and bishops are as old as the Lambeth Conferences themselves. And the last two of those "instruments" emerged directly from Lambeth resolutions.
Asserting autonomy, searching for unity
While bishops at Lambeth gatherings regularly called for some means of maintaining unity, they also repeatedly asserted the independent authority of each Anglican province to govern itself--and of each diocesan bishop to administer a diocese without interference from another bishop or primate of the Communion.
The first Lambeth Conference was convened in 1867 to address the deposition of South African suffragan bishop John William Colenso of Natal, by Archbishop Robert Gray of Cape Town for alleged heresy. Colenso appealed to the British government on the grounds that Gray lacked the authority to depose him, and the Privy Council upheld Colenso.
At Lambeth a committee was appointed to "consider the constitution of a voluntary spiritual tribunal, to which questions of doctrine may be carried by appeal from the tribunals for the exercise of discipline in each province of the colonial Church" (1867 Resolution 9), but the voluntary tribunal never came about.
The 1878 Lambeth Conference's first "recommendation" (there were no formal resolutions) affirmed "certain principles of church order," including the idea that "the duly certified action" of each province "should be respected by all the other Churches, and by their individual members." The conference also recommended that "no bishop or other clergyman of any other Church should exercise his functions [within another diocese] without the consent of the bishop thereof."
The 1897 Lambeth Conference was the first to ask specifically for a consultative body to be formed "either for information or for advice by the Archbishop of Canterbury (1897 Resolution 5)--a kind of proto-Primates' Meeting. By the time of the 1920 Lambeth meeting, the bishops felt it necessary to pass a resolution (1920 Resolution 44) declaring that the Consultative Body, composed of 18 bishops, "is a purely advisory body. It is of the nature of a continuation committee of the whole Conference and neither possesses nor claims any executive or administrative power... it offers advice only when advice is asked for."
Resolution 49 of the 1930 Lambeth Conference defined the Anglican Communion as a "fellowship" of particular or national churches in communion with the See of Canterbury sharing "the Catholic and Apostolic faith and order" set forth in the Book of Common Prayer. "[T]hey are bound together not by a central legislative and executive authority, but by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops in conference," the resolution concluded.
The next resolution (Resolution 50) reaffirmed the 1920 conference's statement that the Consultative Body of 18 bishops was advisory and not legislative in character. The duties of the Consultative Body were strictly limited to carrying on the work of the preceding Lambeth meeting, assisting in preparing for the next gathering and dealing with matters referred to it by the archbishop of Canterbury or any group of Anglican bishops, "subject to any limitations...which may be imposed by the regulations of local and regional Churches."
Signs of a shift
The 1948 meeting authorized the appointment of a network of provincial secretaries and called for a communion-wide Anglican Congress, which was held in 1954 in Minneapolis. A curious final clause in a 1948 resolution on church unity, perhaps a hint of things to come, asked that "a part of our Communion contemplating a step which would involve its withdrawal from the Anglican family of Churches should consult the Lambeth Conference or the provinces and member Churches of this family of Churches before final commitment to such a course."
Not until 1968, however, did Lambeth approve a proposal for an Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), to include priests, deacons and laity as well as bishops in its mission "to serve as needed as an instrument of common action" for the Communion at its meetings every two years. Its functions included sharing information and advice, but also called for policy development--a first for Anglicans.
A regularly scheduled Primates' Meeting emerged 10 years later, at the request of then-Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan, who envisioned the gatherings for "leisurely thought, prayer and deep consultation," but not legislation. He also called for the primates to be in "the very closest and most intimate contact with the ACC." The minutes of the first Primates' Meeting declare that the gathering "was not desired as a higher synod... Rather it was a clearing house for ideas and experience through free expression, the fruits of which the Primates might convey to their Churches."
By the 1978 Lambeth meeting, controversy over the ordination of women in the United States was roiling the Communion. For the first time, the tone of the conference on the issue of provincial autonomy shifts. The conference "advises member Churches not to take action regarding issues which are of concern to the whole Anglican Communion without consultation with a Lambeth Conference or with the episcopate through the Primates Committee, and requests the Primates to initiate a study of the nature of authority within the Anglican Communion" (1978 Resolution 11). Resolution 25 established the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Consultation, whose most recent work includes the Virginia Report to Lambeth 1998 on how the Communion makes authoritative decisions.
Most recent Lambeth actions
The 1998 Lambeth resolution III.6, entitled "Instruments of the Anglican Communion," reaffirmed resolution 18.2(a) of Lambeth 1988, which called for a "developing collegial role for the Primates' Meeting...to exercise an enhanced responsibility in offering guidance on doctrinal, moral and pastoral matters." The 1998 version included "intervention in cases of exceptional emergency which are incapable of internal resolution within provinces, and giving of guidelines on the limits of Anglican diversity" within the scope of that enhanced responsibility.
"While not interfering with the juridical authority of the provinces," the resolution adds, "the exercise of these responsibilities by the Primates' Meeting should carry moral authority calling for ready acceptance throughout the Communion, and to this end it is further recommended that the Primates should meet more frequently than the ACC."
Resolution IV.13, "Unity within Provinces of the Anglican Communion," invites the Archbishop of Canterbury to appoint a commission to make recommendations "as to the exceptional circumstances and conditions under which, and the means by which, it would be appropriate for him to exercise an extra-ordinary ministry of episcope (pastoral oversight), support and reconciliation with regard to the internal affairs of a Province other than his own for the sake of maintaining communion within the said Province and between the said Province and the rest of the Anglican Communion."
But Lambeth resolution III.3 also affirms the principle of "subsidiarity," which provides that "a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level," provided that these tasks can be adequately performed at such levels.
And Resolution V.13 reaffirms and requests the primates to encourage bishops of their provinces to consider the implications of Resolution 72 of the Lambeth Conference 1988, which "affirms that it is deemed inappropriate behaviour for any bishop or priest of this Communion to exercise episcopal or pastoral ministry within another diocese without first obtaining the permission and invitation of the ecclesial authority thereof."
That would seem to preclude the option of a parallel jurisdiction for Anglicans who dissent from the majority in their diocese or province, an arrangement deplored by the Lambeth Conference as far back as 1968 (Resolution 63).
SOURCES:
Archive of Resolutions from Lambeth Conferences of Anglican Bishops
The Lambeth Conference 1998
The Virginia Report: The Report of the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, 1997