| THE SYNOD debated an agreed statement, Church as Communion, from the Second Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC II), 19 years after it was originally issued, with the help of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who had been the ARCIC co-chairman at the time. He addressed the Synod on the subject of communion — koinonia.
The Archbishop of Canterbury welcomed the Cardinal as a friend and colleague who had for many years been working at the issue of communion on the basis of a recognition of mutual authenticity.
Dr Williams spoke of the need of communion to be intensified and deepened. The Churches needed to find out how they could express their responsibility to and for each other. Communion was flexible, “sometimes almost too flexible”: “Even in the New Testament it is not exactly yes or no.” He wondered what was the communion that existed between Barnabas and Paul at Antioch.
“It is not just us, not just this generation that has problems with communion.” Why was this, he asked. It was because in some sense communion was always growing deeper as it entered more intensely into the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; so there would always be more to be discovered in communion. The content of this intensification was not necessarily in an advance from invisible to visible communion, but in “the common pilgrimage of Christ’s people into the depths of the divine life”.
Another aspect of communion, significant in the New Testament, was communion as sharing one another’s burdens.This was never complete. There was always a seeking to enter more deeply into identity with one another. To say that communion was not a simple yes-or-no matter was not, therefore, “to shrug one’s shoulders” and be satisfied with the current situation: it was a journey that offered further sharings.
Third, how did they pursue this intensification? They asked, what could they recognise in each other as a sign of the Body of Christ? This was a question that was asked internally within the Anglican Communion as it sought to resolve its own issues, and externally with other Churches.
Christianity must not be marginalised in the public life of Britain, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, told the Synod in his preliminary address before the debate. England was terra oecumenica, and the two Churches were increasingly aware that they had to face together the challenges of a very secular society, he said: “It is up to us here to set the tone and the style and the impetus that can carry our ecumenical journey forward.”
The term “communion” or koinonia was a key concept in ARCIC’s work: “the term most aptly expressing the mystery underlying New Testament images of the Church”. All Christian traditions believed that the Church was at the same time both “a communion of believers with Christ in the Holy Spirit, and a communion of believers with one another”. This was “a rich and wonderful concept”.
The First Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission had described Anglicans and Roman Catholics as “already in a real, though as yet imperfect, communion”. It now seemed clear that the Commission’s work touched not only on what the two Churches needed to resolve together, but also on some of the issues that the Anglican Communion had been grappling with. Visible communion required all the constitutive elements of ecclesial communion to be present and mutually recognisable in each of them. The list incuded “the one celebration of the eucharist as its pre-eminent expression and focus”; “the placing of the interests of others above the interests of self”; and “acceptance of the same moral values”. Bishops had the responsibility of maintaining and expressing the unity of the Churches.
ARCIC’s recent document The Gift of Authority had emphasised mutual interdependence. “It is stating something crucial, namely that the Anglican Church as such is not self-sufficient: it depends on its real, though imperfect, communion with other Churches,” the Cardinal said.
Did the two Churches agree in their understanding of Church as communion, he asked? How did that influence decisions that might be taken before the ultimate goal was reached? Such questions had been at issue in the Anglican Communion’s internal debates.
The nature and necessity of the bonds of communion also affected the way the relationship between the two Churches was going to develop. He urged: “If we are to make progress through dialogue, we must be able to enter into solemn and binding agreements with one another.”
He was speaking frankly, he said, when he told the Synod that the Anglican Communion’s struggle with issues of unity affected all. “Division within any Church or ecclesial community impoverishes the communion of the whole Church. We Roman Catholics cannot be indifferent to what is happening to our friends in the Anglican Communion, and, in particular, in the Church of England.” He insisted: “Unity is a prerequisite to truth, and you should not settle for less — even if it takes time.”
The goal remained visible and sacramental communion: something more than rediscovering shared history and more than the existing parallel structures of church life. He described the present ecumenical landscape as a kind of “receptive ecumenism”, a transitional period in which there must be a deepening communion between the two Churches. A focus on spiritual ecumenism over doctrinal convergence was needed.
The report Church as Communion challenged the Anglican Church to “deepen its structures of authority and attain an essential unity for the living and preaching of the gospel; it challenges the Roman Catholic Church, too, to reflect much further than we have thus far on the place of diversity in the Church’s life, and how authority should be exercised at different levels in the Church. We both have much to learn.”
Introducing the debate on the take-note motion, the Bishop of Guildford, the Rt Revd Christopher Hill, said that Church as Communion was not a hugely controversial ARCIC agreement as, for example, texts on authority or Mary’s place in God’s plan were. But, even though it was completed 19 years ago, and would probably in some parts have been differently expressed today, it was still “an important text, which perhaps the Synod should have examined some time ago”.
The word koinonia was central to it, although it appeared only once in its Greek form; otherwise it was translated variously as “unity, life together, sharing, partaking, to have part in, to have something in common, and to act together”. It could equally mean fellowship or community, which was why the title said Church “as” communion. Sometimes critics of koinonia ecclesiology feared that it described an idealised Platonic idea of the Church, “whereas we all know only too well the Church is messy, sinful, human, and flawed”. The ARCIC text recognised the constant need for repentance and reconciliation. Paradoxically, he said, it was “in our weakness and suffering that the Church becomes the sign of God’s grace”.
As for the actual communion as Anglicans and Roman Catholics, “we could all write the final sections laying blame this way or that as to why we are not yet in communion. Today that section would be rewritten. But please notice something hugely important: we are not out of communion.
“Full communion has never existed in the whole history of the Christian Church — least of all in the New Testament. (Read the Corinthian correspondence or Galatians.) Full communion is about the coming together of all peoples and the fullness of creation in Christ. But ecclesial or canonical communion between us was broken in the 16th century and has not yet been restored. The break is not, however, absolute. A real if imperfect communion still exists between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, and we should celebrate it while also striving towards further communion.”
The Bishop of Chester, Dr Peter Forster, said that very many different kinds of communion had been referred to, and the Archbishop of Canterbury had introduced new ones; visible and invisible communion, and intense and less intense communion. But he said that such talk of different kinds and levels of communion was to accept something less than what God had called us into.
Because the idea of impaired communion had been used within the Anglican Communion, it had the result that full communion was an idea increasingly transferred into some ideal found only in the Godhead. He said that even in the House of Bishops he had heard that impaired communion had begun at the Last Supper, “presumably a reference to Judas”. The Archbishop had in his address traced impaired communion back to Antioch, and to the “blazing row” between Paul and Barnabas. But to describe these events as “broken communion” was to “read back” into the Gospel what was not there at the time. “The notion that communion requires sacramental expression should only be given up with the greatest reluctance.”
History had indeed got in the way of visible communion, as it had with Anglicans and Methodists, and “it is history that is keeping us apart.” But full communion must be part of the journey, and the longer impaired communion remained, the harder it would be to achieve. It was “a great scandal” that Primates of the Anglican Communion at the recent meeting had not been able to share the eucharist together.
The Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Revd Stephen Platten, said that he had been the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Secretary for Ecumenical Affairs at the time of the publication of the report Church as Communion, but that it had, in news terms, suffered the “indignity” of being overshadowed by the first Gulf War, which had effectively smothered it.
It was, however, one of the earliest bilateral documents, and had set the parameters for much ecumenical theology. It had consolidated much of the ecumenical thinking of ARCIC I, and also responded to Vatican II and the remarkable ecumenical developments of the 20th century.
The years since its publication had not been easy ones in Anglican-Roman Catholic relations, but the commitment to dialogue had grown more determined. One aspect of that was the call from the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM) for “joint witness, practical action, and common statements on social issues”. Wakefield and other dioceses were shortly to discuss the implications of that report, and intended their discussions to have practical results.
Mgr Andrew Faley (Roman Catholic Church) said that the “formality of friendships” was more than 40 years old. The depth of the relationship between the Anglicans and Roman Catholics meant that the dialogue was one of the richest in which the Roman Catholics were engaged. It was rooted in practicalities. It was not just about the theory of Church, but of its practical working out locally.
He spoke of the richness, too, of the dialogue between the Methodists and the Roman Catholic Church. That dialogue was “a little bit more logical” than the dialogue with the Anglicans. It was more thorough in its approach to theological debate, and it made clearer the practical implications of what had been said. The Anglican-RC dialogue could learn from the Methodist-RC dialogue.
Third, he spoke of the importance of friendship, which needed nurturing, could not be taken for granted, and could emphasise the similarities between them, through shared prayer and through an understanding of what the gospel pointed to behind the divisions, which was the unity that they all sought.
Fr Thomas Seville CR (Religious Communities) said that the report had worn well over the years, but it had not addressed mission as comprehensively as a modern report would in the face of the rapid process of decline of Christianity in both public and personal life. He hoped that the Churches would now more seriously consider the importance of doing mission together. One example of this was the importance of Anglican retreat houses’ being shared ecumenically, as “the luxury” of their being solely Anglican was no longer affordable.
Canon Professor Marilyn McCord Adams (University of Oxford) asked whether the Church of England had lost its nerve, because two Synod meetings had now both begun with the consideration of “an alien polity” — last year, with the Orthodox Church, which, while emphasising the worldwide episcopate, had left out the national Church as a unit of discernment.
The report under consideration “soft-pedalled the harder elements of Roman Catholic piety”. Perhaps the facts that the Anglican Church still did not recognise the primacy of Rome, and that provinces had dared to ordain women, had been soft- peddalled because of the duty to strive for visible unity. But, she said, this suggested complacency. “The alternative to complacency is vigorous differentiation,” she said. The body developed from a lump of undifferentiated cells into something more interesting because of differentiation, and so it might be with the Churches. “Perhaps 500 years of division has been turned by God into a good thing.”
From the division of the Churches had grown “a deeper appreciation of scripture, not of tradition or the magisterium, but of the Bible”. It had also led to a deeper appreciation of subsidiarity, to the importance of decisions’ being taken locally, “where the gospel hits the road”.
The Revd Mark Thomas (Lichfield) said that, in Shrewsbury, three churches ran a faith centre in the centre of the town, and, at a local level, people felt “a real hunger for visible unity”. He felt a disjunction between the Synod debate “and the hunger in our hearts”.
The Revd Douglas Galbraith (Church of Scotland) found much that was helpful in the report, such as the challenges of episcopacy, the emphasis of the preaching of the word in sustaining communion, and the need for the healing of memories. “Churches in Communion is far more than two neighbours talking to each other.”
The Revd Ruth Yeoman (Bradford) told of her two years working in a L’Arche community with people with learning difficulties. Having been a member of the Church from childhood, she found it very painful at eucharistic services when she could not receive the sacrament.
The Revd Jonathan Baker (Oxford) welcomed the report’s invitation to reflect on “our own life as Anglicans”. Christian disunity obscured God’s invitation to communion. Sacramental relationships were deeply wounded. The report contained an enormous amount of helpful material on the apostolic faith and community.
The Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, suggested that debating the report did not indicate a loss of confidence, but “a characteristic Anglican confidence in going forward together as best we can”. He had been the fraternal Anglican delegate to the Synod of Bishops in Rome in October, when one bishop had suggested that two signs of unity were baptism and the Bible. If the Bible was to be a sign of unity, the two Churches must study it together. “Let’s make it a priority in our ecumenical work. We have no idea where it might take us,” he said.
He went on to define “receptive ecumenism” as asking, from the Roman Catholic point of view, what gifts God had given to other Churches “and which we must receive from them”. Koinonia was in the bloodstream, he declared, but mission was missing from the report. The apostle Peter had broken communion by sitting separately from the uncircumcised. “All those who believe in Jesus Christ belong at the same table, no matter what their background has been.”
The Synod took note of the report.
Finance, asylum-seekers, evangelism — ten more pages of Synod next week
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