Tighter Anglican Bonds Urged By Archbishop
Episcopal News Service. December 5, 1985 [85247]
LONDON (DPS, Dec. 5) -- World Anglicanism might need "more effective links" among its member Churches, suggested Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie in his presidential address to the general synod of the Church of England in late November. Much of his address was taken up with expounding an Anglican understanding of Christian community/comnunion (koinonia) and of authority. The fact that koinonia is a key concept in the report of the Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission, now being evaluated by the two traditions, gave what he said an added ecumenical significance.
Besides being the primate of the Church of England, Runcie is a focus of unity for world Anglicanism. Remarking that Anglican councils had properly been called "bonds of affection," he said: "Had Anglicans possessed a stronger sense of communion expressed in a more structured affection just a few years ago, it is arguable that we might have handled the question of the ordination of women in a more satisfactory way."
Pointing out that the Anglican Communion was "no longer a Church of the white middle classes from the security and prosperity of the western world," he said: "As Anglicans, our identity is defined by communion rather than adherence to a confessional formula or subjection to an all-pervading legal system." The purpose of authority in the Church was to promote and maintain the Church's communion of life, he said, and the Anglican principle of "dispersed authority" was an authority which built up the Church's fellowship with God and one another, he added.
"When Anglicans speak of 'dispersed authority,' they mean that there are many sources of authority, each of which has a claim to be heard," said Runcie. "We have always given a unique place to the authority of holy scripture... But the texts have to be expounded and interpreted. We must listen to the traditional elucidations, but also to those who bring to bear an honest, probing and responsible scholarship. We must respect the witness of tradition, ... but we have to see it as dynamic... And we must take account of human reason, not as a slavish following of contemporary intellectual fashions, rather as a principle of criticism of faith and action to establish moral priorities."
A communion of local churches does not possess a visible and instant magisterium," Runcie remarked. Nor should they be complacent about the way authority and communion had been worked out in practice within the Anglican family, he suggested, and "if communion... is to be maintained, we may need more effective links between the Churches." He stressed, however, that his role is "fraternal, not papal," to "gather the Churches, not to rule them."
The synod itself gave provisional approval to a measure which would give a bishop discretion to ordain to the priesthood a man who had remarried after divorce or who was married to a divorcee -- something at present forbidden. Under present legislation, said Thomas Coningsby, vicar general of the province of York, the emphasis is on remarriage, not divorce, as the bar to ordination. This means, for example, that there is nothing to stop a divorced man being ordained, if he was otherwise suitable, and then getting married. But if a serving clergyman got divorced and remarried, this in itself does not lead to any action being taken against him.