Truthful Language and Orderly Separation

The Anglican Communion Institute published this stunning paper by Ephraim Radner yesterday:

The Anglican Communion is currently pursuing a number of activities in response to the acrimonious struggle over sexual teaching and discipline within our churches. These activities have been encouraged by the Communion’s leadership, including at the recent Lambeth Conference. I have, to various degrees, been a supporter of these activities, not least because I have trusted those who have promoted these means towards ecclesial healing. I am increasingly skeptical, however, that the way these activities have been framed – descriptively and practically – represents the true nature of our disputes.

Categories like “moratoria” and “reception” and “listening”, for instance, are now prominent elements in our strategic ecclesial discussions. Unfortunately, they no longer appear to be useful categories, in large part because they do not accurately reflect the actual relationship of expectation and possibility that the disputing parties hold, one to another and with respect to their own commitments. When one party says, while responding to the request for a “moratorium” on specific actions, “yes we will consider it; but there is no going back on our underlying commitments”; and another party says at the same time, “yes we will consider it; but only on the condition that you others give up your practical commitments”, then the very category of “moratorium” functions in very different ways in each case. Similarly, when “reception” is a “process” that seeks to discern the Christian authenticity of an innovative practice, but also does so by the very means of rooting that practice within the life of the church in different areas, the notion that discernment has a possibly restraining role to play seems practically undercut. Or when “listening” presumes an ecclesial practice even as it refuses to evaluate that practice, one is not so much listening as receiving justification ex post facto.

Indeed, the practical logic of the situation we are now in as a Communion has exposed the inadequacy of these categories, and has raised questions about the very nature of “council”, consensus, and decision-making. With this, our churches have been challenged to reconsider from the ground up whether or not we are capable of maintaining the integrity of our common life at all…

The Bishop of Winchester, the Rt. Rev. Michael Scott-Joynt, recently aroused comment when he suggested that, post-Lambeth Conference, the means for an “orderly separation” betweem Anglican churches who stand opposed to the practice of gay inclusion who do not, be devised and pursued: “I continue to see a negotiated ‘orderly separation’ as the best and most fruitful way forward for the Anglican Communion. The experience of this Lambeth Conference […] has again convinced me that the Anglican Communion cannot hold in tension convictions and practices that are incompatible, and so not patent of ‘reconciliation’, without continuing seriously to damage the life and witness of Anglican Churches”. It was this reference to “orderly separation” that struck many as significant, coming as it did, not from the bigoted reactionary that some have wrongly made him out to be, but from a bishop who has steadfastly stood for and offered witness on behalf of the imperative and blessings of ecclesial Communion among Anglicans. His admission that such an “orderly separation” may be necessary at this time is significant because, in fact, he has worked hard for unity and believes in it. It is this kind of admission that should spur us to hard thinking.

Indeed, I do not want such a separation. I pray against its demand. It is not something that I think our Lord confronts, in his own heart, with anything but sorrow. But I agree that the sheer practical dynamics of the situation we are now in may well uphold Bp. Scott-Joynt’s views. It is not so much that the Lord will weep, but that even now He is weeping…

But what shall we say of “orderly separation”? Such a separation of parties – leaving aside its shape — may be necessary, if the integrity of language, practice, formation and witness is to be maintained, even with clarity of concepts and categories restored. That separation is not to be prayed for as an end in itself; but the means needs to be soberly formulated and allowed to be used so that the firm embrace of asymmetrical logics can find its resolution in coherent lives that no longer threaten common dissolution. In fact, it could be argued that any church needs to have as part of its ecclesial polity some means within it either to resolve such asymmetrical logics or to disentangle them from its common life.

It may be that separation is not to be desired; it may be that it is not inevitable, in the sense that nothing determines its integral imposition upon the Communion, except finally individual and collective desire. But it now looks as if separation is simply necessary, not historically so much as logically and morally. A more adequate vocabulary that takes the place of “moratoria,” “reception”, “listening”, and so on makes this logical necessity plain by showing the conditions of coherence. And the survival of catholic Christianity makes plain the moral necessity of such orderly separation by demonstrating the demands of one logic over the other. It is separation that preserves Anglicanism as a Catholic form of Christianity.

Some have suggested that the Covenant and the process leading to its adoption would, of itself, if not deliberately at least as a matter of course, provide the “orderliness” by which a separation, if needed, could indeed unfold. If it is to be the Covenant and its process, this indicates that we must not fear the kind of clarity and accessible steps of implementation that would allow for such differentiation if that is indeed the end towards which the present logics turn out to be moving. This is a key realization: for if such fears drive the Covenant process, the destructive dynamics of the present situation will surely prevail. A Covenant that makes clear that diversity has its limits and attaches consequences for violation of those limits preserves Communion while holding open the possibility of reconciliation.

And if the Covenant is not to allow this, for deliberate reasons as to its purpose and shape, then some other means must be devised if the end is finally proved to be desirable. I believe that this challenge must now be accepted, even among those who have spoken clearly against any Covenant that has the capacity to disentangle our current cross-purposes: if not this, then what? If one leaves things as they are, in some belief that “this is how it must be” one has succumbed to a dumb fatalism. If one insists only on ad hoc adjustments or deals struck between dispersed individual congregations and bishops, this will end in the dissolution of communion as Catholic integrality. The alternatives of doing nothing or of positively encouraging the current of spontaneous disintegration and dissolution continue to move in the same direction: profound Christian incoherence. And in Scriptural language this is described in terms of “double-mindedness”, as James puts it, or finally, of the duplicity that comes from the failure to say “yes, yes” and “no, no”. It is a failure, as Jesus says, that “comes from the evil one” (Matthew 5:37).

I call the paper “stunning” because, as a member of the Covenant Design Committee, Dr Radner has been consistently in favor of maintaining the unity and integrity of the Anglican Communion. It seems that he is one of a growing number of moderate conservatives who are beginning to recognize that, in the current state of affairs, this may no longer be possible. You can find his whole paper here.