The Windsor Report: Two Observations on Its Ecumenical Content

This essay comments on ways in which two important international ecumenical dialogues of Anglican Communion are treated in Windsor Report: misleadingly in case of Roman Catholic Church, and hardly at all in case of Orthodox. authority of Scripture and that of are contrasted within Report in a way that plays off one against other, rather than illustrating considerable range of agreement that ecumenical dialogue has produced. Also, no mention is made of tolerable organizational diversity that allows various Orthodox churches to coexist without any one centralized authority, an ecclesiological option that might be favored as an alternative structural model by some Anglicans in current situation. In Tradition and Innovation in Anglicanism, a paper I wrote for first Fellows Forum sponsored by Episcopal Church Foundation, I concluded with question, Who decides whether some proposed development is really an innovation that so contradicts tradition that it cannot be tolerated? In Anglican Communion we have been asking these sorts of questions in recent years with increasing frequency and urgency, especially since last Lambeth Conference but even before. In spite of such evolving developments as Anglican Consultative Council and Meetings of Primates, there are still no effective means for mutual consultation that go so far as to produce common and agreed decision making that can facilitate reception, or rejection, of proposed innovations that may be good or may not be. My view, my conclusion, is that we need a way to do this. Then I summarized way in which Virginia Report, prepared for 1998 Lambeth Conference, put question to us: Can we go on as a world Communion, with morally authoritative, but not juridically binding, decision-making structures at international level? These questions have been pressed to top of Anglican agenda by events of more recent years, and Windsor Report, at long last, does present a tentative and imperfect indication of direction that Anglican Communion may wish to move in such matters. present essay will not attempt to chronicle or interpret vast and generally negative response that consecration of Bishop Robinson has received at official level from a significant number of Episcopal Church's ecumenical partners.2 Rather, this essay will focus upon two particular observations about Report in relation to ecumenical frontiers with Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox churches. It is my conviction that Report does less than full justice to classical Anglican hopes for ecumenism in both of these directions. Roman Catholic Church first frontier comes to fore when one asks what Windsor Report says about Roman Catholic Church, especially as regards authority. Already in 1997 Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commissions Virginia Report had posed to Anglicans question: Is not universal authority a necessary corollary of universal communion? (chap. 5, para. 20). ARCIC Final Report (1981) and subsequently Gift of (1999) have raised a similar question. All of these have pointed, within limits, in direction of a closer relationship to Roman see. And yet one now reads in Windsor Report paragraph entitled Authority (para. 42), firm statement that The Anglican Communion does not have a Pope (which is certainly true) but also claim that The Anglican Communion has always declared that its supreme authority is scripture. This contrast-as though for us authority is Bible and for them authority is Pope-is further reinforced in paragraph 70 where it is stated that in Roman Catholic Church the Pontiff, with support of Curia, enjoys 'supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power,' which he can always freely exercise, whereas, Anglican way, theological, symbolic and practical, is diffused among different aspects of life of Communion precisely in such a way as to give supreme authority, in sense outlined above, to scripture as locus and means of God's word, energising Church for its mission and sustaining it in its unity. …