Eames Commission Members Sharpen Issues for House
Episcopal News Service. October 4, 1989 [89163]
Steve Weston, Diocese of Dallas
PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 25 -- On the first day of its meeting, the House of Bishops took up one of the thorniest issues it has faced in years -- women in the episcopate.
The discussions centered on the response to the Archbishop of Canterbury's Commission on Communion and Women in the Episcopate, commonly known as the Eames Commission. Two members of the commission, Bishop Mark Dyer of Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) and Dr. Mary Tanner, theological secretary of the Board of Mission and Unity of the Church of England, gave major presentations dealing with the commission's understanding of the report's underlying theological concepts -- koinonia, reception, and provisionality.
A third presentation was made by Bishop William Wantland of Eau Claire, who shared the concerns of the Episcopal Synod of America (ESA), founded in Fort Worth last June. (See separate story.)
After the presentations, small groups discussed the pastoral implications of the report for the Episcopal Church; this provided grist for the pastoral letter, which will be the bishops' counsel to the church on the issue.
The Eames Commission report, which was affirmed by the 27 Primates of the Anglican Communion in Cyprus last May, defines how individual provinces of the Communion, including the Episcopal Church, can live together while disagreeing.
The meeting of the House of Bishops September 23 to 28 in Philadelphia is considered a watershed because it is the first time this body will officially respond to the report.
The objective of the Eames Commission, said Bishop Dyer, was not to render a judgment on the question of the ordination of women tothe priesthood and episcopacy, but "to discover how Anglicans can live together in the highest possible degree of communion with differences of principle and practice on the ordination of women to the episcopate."
Dyer said that koinonia, the sense of Christian community at one in Christ, is pervasive throughout the Eames Commission report because "union with God and one another and the world is a basic theological principle of Scripture and life. It is the reality of the historical signs of the time in which we live." He continued, "The world is seeking a deeper sense of koinonia, a deeper level of friendship."
The overriding theological premise in the Eames Commission report concerns the temptation in the Garden of Gethsemane to abandon humanity.
There, said Dyer, "Jesus prayed for release from koinonia, for release from all of these sinners for whom he would have to die." In his humanity, Dyer said, "he prayed for the break in koinonia, didn't he?" The death of Christ showed the depth of communion God seeks and offers to humankind. "That's why schism is heresy," Dyer said.
One of the most promising aspects of the report, "but one that will be very difficult," Dyer continued, was the encouragement on the part of provinces in the Anglican Communion to welcome visits of women priests and bishops from around the world, especially when provinces have decided against ordaining or consecrating women or are still considering the matter.
Dyer said, "We pray to God for a fundamental concern for unity. We pray to God for a dedication to God's mission to make us one, to make us holy, so we might be in communion with God, with one another, and all of God's creation." Sin, he said, was the obstacle to truth, and "our lack of will to maintain the highest degree of communion with one another during disagreement and conflict is sin's enforcer." He suggested that truth is not served by "removing ourselves or excluding others from the table."
Dyer outlined many aspects of the Eames Commission report, including seven elements of unity and mission, key understandings in the exercise of episcopal ministry outlined in the Lambeth Conference report, 1988, and the role of the bishop as symbol and agent of unity and continuity in the church.
Dr. Tanner's remarks, immediately following Bishop Dyer's presentation, defined the themes of reception and provisionality embodied in the Eames Commission report. "The theme of reception is not an idiosyncratic move on the part of Anglicans to get themselves out of a tight corner" with regard to the ordination of women, she said. "In the New Testament, in the case of admission of the Gentiles to the church and the matter of circumcision, Paul's actions in one part of the expanding church were in advance of the decisions of the whole church."
Tanner said that before such events were accepted, they were agreed upon by the apostles, elders, and the whole Christian community. The validity of apostolic action was confirmed by the entire church. Likewise, said Tanner, decrees of the early church councils, including Nicaea, "though definitive, were not absolute." The intervention of several centuries enabled a majority of Christians to accept the now historic creeds and conciliar doctrines.
"Touching on our own Anglican identity and unity," she said, "we often forget that it took some decades for episcopacy itself to be received fully and unquestionably as fundamental to the Church of England." She stated that the process of reception employed by the Eames Commission came directly from the "primitive life of the church as a way of the body of Christ discerning and being kept in the faith of its Lord."
Critical to the process of reception is the role of the faith community, Tanner said. Its members must test the insight and teaching of ordained ministers. "Through this continuing process of discernment and response, in which faith is expressed and the Gospel impartially applied, the Holy Spirit, not us, declares the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the faithful can live by it."
Maintaining the faith is a corporate and universal responsibility, and not the prerogative of one group or province alone, said Tanner. Thus the process of reception, as in the case of the ordination of women as priests and bishops, could be a lengthy and spirited one. Not to participate would give rise to the impression that church councils are infallible. Lost at the same time is the English Reformation insight of the "role and place of the whole people of God."
"Ours is a single community of discernment, interpretation, and reception," Tanner said. "Unless we strive to maintain this, we become congregationalist provinces, at best a loose federation, and give up on the vision of Anglican unity."
There is a necessary openness about the question of ordination, Tanner said. "If it is of God, it will, by the power of the Spirit, flourish. If not, it withers." In the case of ordination of women, what is being tested by the process of reception is "not simply a doctrine to be discerned," but one embodied in ordained persons. There is a "facticity," she said, about what is being put to the openness of reception. Provisionality, in the sense used by the Eames Commission, does not refer to the "validity, fruitfulness, or truthfulness of women episcopally ordained."
No negative judgment is being passed, Tanner said, upon the ministry of ordained women as such. Provisionality, instead, addresses the development of women's ordination within the ordering of the church's universal ministry. "It is important that this is spoken with clarity and with gentleness so that it is not misheard or misinterpreted," she continued.
Tanner acknowledged the tension raised by the issue. Those in favor of the ordination of women, she said, "need to recognize that the matter is not settled beyond doubt. Advocacy cannot be left behind. Sensitive advocacy both within a province and between provinces has to continue. Those in favor have to proclaim why it is 'Good News.'" The value of the debate, she said, "is that it compels persons to examine what we believe about the church, about ourselves as men and women, about what we understand of the nature and being of God."
For those who remain opposed, "there are jealousies and vulnerabilities of the other side to be respected if there is to be a process of reception." Tanner said that if the dissenting voice in the matter is to effectively remain within the Anglican Communion, it must be expressed -- as the Eames Commission suggests -- within the "confines of the one synodical structure, and not over against it." Once new structures are created, she said, and become the center of entrenched separation, "breaches are hard to heal, and open reception within a single communion of life and witness is hindered."
Tanner suggested that to live faithfully with the process of reception, the church is about the business of witnessing in the power of the Holy Spirit "to the unique and costly way of the Christian gospel of reconciliation and love." What could be more effective for evangelization and mission, she asked.
The Eames Commission continues its work. Its next meeting is in London in October. Two new members have been added: the Rev. Dr. Julia Gatta, of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Archbishop Amos Waiaru of Melanesia.