The structure of the Anglican Communion is incoherent and lacks “theological seriousness,” the Archbishop of Canterbury said in a paper presented to the Fellowship of St Alban and St. Sergius at their annual meeting in New York.The Rev Jonathan Goodall, Dr Rowan William’s ecumenical advisor, read the address entitled “Rome, Constantinople, Canterbury: Mother Churches?” prepared by Dr Williams to the meeting of Anglican and Orthodox scholars and churchmen on June 5 at St Vladimir’s Seminary in New York.
Addressing the theme of primacy within the church, Dr Williams offered his views on the “many-layered issue” of the relationship between the local and denominational church and the charism of the episcopacy. While not directly addressing the divisions within the Anglican Communion, his remarks illustrate the reasons for his actions in relation to the Bishop of New Hampshire and the American bishops under African jurisdiction.
In its essence, “the life of the local congregation is founded on something received, not discovered or invented” he said, for local churches come into being as “part of a continuous stream of life being shared” in Christ. The local church can therefore not lay claim of being “complete and self-sufficient,” in itself, but must be in relation with a wider body. “A local church is indeed at one level a community to which is given all the gifts necessary for being Christ's Body in this particular place; but among those gifts is the gift of having received the Gospel from others and being still called to receive it,” he said.
Following upon Tertullian’s dictum that ‘one Christian is no Christian,’ Dr Williams argued that we should say that “one bishop is no bishop” and “one local church alone is no church.”
A bishop does not represent the local church as if where were acting as “politician for his constituency. The bishop is above all the person who sustains and nourishes within the local church an awareness of its dependency on the apostolic mission, on the gift from beyond its boundaries.” This understanding of the nature of primacy or Episcopal leadership “is why it is problematic if a local church so interprets the gift it has received that it cannot fully share it beyond its own cultural home territory – an issue for both 'left' and 'right' in our churches,” Dr Williams said.
This is why the “local assembly and its chief pastor” must not act in such a way so as to “lose its recognisability or receivability to other communities – across the globe and throughout history,” he said.
The Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican understandings of primacy were incomplete. The Vatican was “still labouring to discover how to disentangle the missionary apostolic charism of the See of Peter from juridical anomalies and bureaucratic distortion.”
Orthodox have often 'frozen' the concept of primacy in an antiquarian defence of the 'pentarchy' as the structure of the church, thus allowing non-theological power struggles rooted in nationalism and ethnocentrism to flourish with damaging effect,” he said.
Anglicans, Dr Williams observed, had “failed to think through primacy with any theological seriousness.” This had given us a “not very coherent or effective international structure that lacks canonical seriousness and produces insupportable pluralism in more than one area of the church's practice.”
The archbishop urged all to “rethink the meaning of primacy in relation to mission and in relation to what episcopal fellowship really means.”
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