Glastonbury and The Gift of Authority

I originally posted this essay to the OrthodoxAnglican e-mail list. In the pre-blog era, this was where conservative Anglicans of various stripes, as well as their sympathizers in other communions, shared news and debated the issues of the day.

Thanks to Fr. Wilson for posting Fr. Houlding's Glastonbury sermon. It addresses a subject that has been on my mind for the past couple weeks, following my readings of two other pieces on the same topic. The first is, of course, the ARCIC document, The Gift of Authority, to which Fr. Houlding refers in his homily. The second was recently introduced on this list by Richard M.: "the famous text of Dom Lambert Beaduin's The Church of England United Not Absorbed, . . . a seminal document in Anglican-Roman Catholic relations, written in 1925."

Both of these documents, like Fr. Houlding, take the desirability – even the necessity – of union with Rome as a given. For those in the Ritualist/Romanist wing of Anglo-Catholicism, perhaps this seems so obvious that it needs no elaboration, explanation, or defense. But for most Anglicans – including most Anglo-Catholics, I daresay – it is not so obvious.

Without endorsing every twist and turn of Anglican history, most of us think that the separation of the Church of England from Rome was not an entirely bad thing. For nearly five centuries, the West had been drifting further and further from the teaching and practice of the Undivided Church. Those who inaugurated the C. of E. might not have articulated their rationale in a clear, unanimous, or consistent way, but their failure has been remedied by the best Anglican theologians from Hooker on. We have failed miserably to live up to this vision of Anglicanism as a restoration of the ancient, Undivided Church in England. There have always been differences on exactly what this vision entailed. And there have always been those who rejected this vision in favor of another, whether Protestant or (Roman) Catholic or Modern. But I think this vision is still the right one – the only one under which the existence of Anglicanism makes any sense, and therefore the only authentic one.

A Gift?

The Gift of Authority, the most recent product of ARCIC, embodies the usual flaw of post-Schism Western theology: It begins with a deficient understanding of Tradition, and then tries to fill the resulting vacuum with Authority. Clerical authority, to be more precise. And, ultimately, Papal authority.

Fr. Houlding says, "That universal stability, I believe, is only to be found ultimately in union with the See of Peter."

We often hear traditionalists of all stripes lamenting the "crisis of authority," which they blame for the instability of our church. I don't get it. When has authority ever been a source of stability? Authority is, rather, a force for innovation. Didn't Vatican I teach us that?

If you want to see what happens to a church without clerical authority, look at the Old Believers. Now that is stability.

Anglicans as Uniates?

Dom Lambert Beaduin's United Not Absorbed proposes that the Church of England should be restored to union with Rome on a basis similar to that of the Melkites – i.e., with internal autonomy under its Patriarch/Primate, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who receives his authority, in the form of the pallium, from the Pope. He lays out thoroughly the historical basis for such a relationship between Rome and Canterbury. He seems to pre-suppose a Church of England that is equivalent to the Melkites before their schism with Constantinople – an ancient, autocephalous church with its own rite, canons, traditions, and hierarchy. Apart from his acceptance of the necessity of reunion with Rome, his vision of the C. of E. is actually quite similar to mine.

Interestingly, the Melkites have recently expressed regrets about their acceptance of Papal supremacy ca. three centuries ago.

The Undivided Church

Some, doubtless, will recall my Eastern Orthodox sympathies, and will wonder whether I am not just slamming the idea of submission to Rome because I am holding out for submission to Constantinople, instead. But I do not think we should feel obligated to take the Byzantine tradition as normative, any more than we should have to take the Roman tradition as normative. If we would simply live up to what our own Anglican tradition tells us we are supposed to be – a restoration of the ancient undivided Church in England – we would not need to look to other churches for our norms at all. This was the central message of a recent address by the Most Rev'd Dr. Keith Rayner, Primate of Australia, "The Future of Catholic Anglicanism." Naturally, we should feel free to borrow from those traditions, and from others – but within the norms established by our own tradition. We should not try to imitate another church, whether that of Rome or that of Constantinople (or that of Geneva). We should simply be strive to live up to the vision our own best theologians have set for us over the centuries.

If I look to Orthodoxy as a model, it is only because I think that by being good Anglicans we would inevitably come to look like an Orthodox church – an autocephalous national church with a liturgically centered life rooted in a tradition defined by the Fathers and the Ecumenical Councils.

Borg and Wright

Last night I attended a lecture/debate at National Cathedral featuring Prof. Marcus J. Borg of the Jesus Seminar and the Rev. N.T. (Tom) Wright, Dean of Lichfield Cathedral. It was billed as "An Evening of Detente in the Jesus Wars." While the two men differ strongly on critical points regarding who Jesus was, they are longtime friends who studied at the same school under the same adviser, and they have written a new book together, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (which was for sale on site). The center section of the nave of the cathedral was nearly full.

Wright won the coin toss and opted to speak first. He tried to downplay the extent of his differences with Borg, saying it is not entirely correct to depict himself as a "traditionalist" and Borg as a "revisionist." In some ways they are both traditionalists (they are practicing Christians), while in others they are both revisionists (they are academic historians whose goal is to understand Jesus in the context of 1st century Judaism). This allowed them both to focus on the points where they actually disagree.

Wright understands Jesus in terms of contemporary Jewish apocalypticism. Many sects of that era expected God's direct intervention in history. For Wright, Jesus was not just a teacher of wisdom, but a prophet warning his hearers to prepare to meet God. He believes that Jesus consciously identified himself with the rampant messianic hopes of his era, while interpreting the role of messiah somewhat differently than popular expectation. And he believes in a literal resurrection of the body of Jesus. He does not believe in a simple "resuscitation of the corpse" (who does?); rather, he describes the resurrection as a transformation of Jesus' body into "a different mode of physicality."

Borg interprets Jesus as a Jewish mystic. By "mystic," he means a person with direct experience of God. He would also include the Buddha and a few others in this category on a basis equal to that of Jesus. He believes that Jesus was a healer, but he does not believe in other miracles, such as the feeding of the 5,000 or walking on water. He does not believe Jesus thought of himself as messiah or son of God, but believes, rather, that these identifications were made by the early Church after Jesus' death. And he understands the resurrection as a purely spiritual phenomenon, involving the union of Jesus' spirit with that of God, and the Church's real sense of Jesus' ongoing presence in the Christian community.

Each man spoke for about 20 minutes, and then they went back and forth, critiquing each other's ideas and responding to these critiques. Finally, people from the audience lined up to ask question, some more interesting than others. One complimented them for their criticism of the Enlightenment, and then asked if there was some other era in the Church's history when the Church, in its understanding of Jesus, "got it right." However, neither speaker claimed the objectivity to judge our own century, and both men's expertise is so focused on the 1st century that they did not feel qualified to pose as experts on the intervening 18 centuries. A couple of questions addressed to Borg challenged his unorthodox beliefs on the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, but he made a plausible case for his being a traditional Christian while holding to untraditional understandings of these doctrines. And Wright, while expressing belief in the Virgin Conception, said he could not consider this belief essential to understanding the doctrine of the Incarnation, since Matthew did not draw theological inferences from the fact of the Virgin Conception, and Luke barely did so.

The event ended about an hour and a half after it began. The authors were available afterwards to sign copies of their books, which were for sale at the cathedral.

Ordination of Women

In 1997 I participated in the Canon 1024 Discussion List. Canon 1024 is the Roman Catholic canon that restricts the Sacrament of Ordination to males. The list was run by a Roman Catholic who wanted the Church to overturn this canon and start ordaining women. I tried to maintain a neutral stance, but, since most of the participants were unabashedly – and uncritically – in favor of ordaining women, I was usually forced to argue the opposite side. This first excerpt from an early message lays out the basis of my participation in the list.

The subtitle of this meeting is "Ordination of Women in the Liturgical Churches." My concern is not so much with OW, per se, as with the impact of OW on the LCs. If women are to be ordained to the priesthood, I would like to see a theological basis for it that does not undermine or compromise the liturgical, sacramental, and iconic nature of the Church. Too often, I fear, such theological concerns have been downplayed, ignored, or subordinated to other claims (e.g., "justice"). And I suspect that some proponents of OW hope to use it as a Trojan Horse to undermine other aspects of the Church's Tradition they oppose. I would like to be persuaded that the ordination of women to the priesthood is to be carried out in conformity with the Tradition of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, not in opposition to it. So far, I find arguments on both sides ultimately unpersuasive.


In my final contribution to the list, I began by addressing a proposal from the list adminstrator to discuss the issue in terms of a specific icon.

We are trying to focus on some specific texts to facilitate the discussion. Why don't we also select one specific icon to focus our consideration of the "icon of Christ" argument against the ordination of women. I propose Andrei Rublev's Trinity. I think it is a very priestly-eucharistic icon, and the contemplation of this icon has convinced me that the "icon of Christ" argument is not very convincing.

Luis,

For purposes of this discussion, I think the only image of Christ that really matters is that of the High Priest. There actually is a High Priest icon, which shows Christ (with a beard!) enthroned and crowned, looking like a king or a bishop. This image harks back to the Epistle to the Hebrews, whose central purpose is to draw out this High Priestly image and its implications. Verse 4:16, which refers to "the throne of grace," introduces chs. 5-7, which compare Christ to Melchizedek, who was both king and priest. I would guess these chapters are the major inspiration for High Priest icon.

But the images of the next section, chs. 8-10, are more applicable to my argument. Ch. 9 recreates the image of the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle and recalls the High Priest's role of offering the annual sprinkling of blood on the day of atonement. Ch. 10 invokes the priests' daily offerings of animal sacrifices. Christ fulfills and supersedes the High Priestly role by offering his own blood for the atonement of all Mankind. He intercedes for us before God, offering himself, the perfect Paschal Lamb, as a sacrifice. He is both priest and victim.

The defining role of priesthood in any traditional culture, whether Jewish or pagan, is to offer sacrifice to God on behalf of the people. The Christian counterpart of animal sacrifice is the sacrifice of the Mass, and the Christian priesthood succeeds the former priesthood in offering this new type of sacrifice.

My intermediate conclusions: 1) The defining role of a Christian priest – the thing that sets a priest apart from his brothers and sisters – is celebrating the Eucharist. 2) The Eucharist is a sacrifice. I would further assert that these two points are defining elements of Catholic sacramental theology. Any sacramental theology lacking these elements cannot reasonably be described as Catholic.

The Roman Catholic Church has always been very insistent on the sacrificial nature of the Mass. This is why Pope Leo felt compelled to dismiss the validity of Anglican orders. In the process of reforming the Anglican ordinal, Abp. Cranmer had removed some of the language that referred explicitly to the ordinand's new role as a sacrificing priest. In accordance with lex orandi, lex credendi, Leo feared that recognizing Anglican orders might be seen as implicitly accepting a theology of holy orders that downplayed the sacrificial role of the priest, thereby denying the sacrificial nature of the Mass and undermining Catholic Eucharistic theology. The sacrificial nature of the Mass is so essential to Catholicism that Leo felt obligated to protect it (though we Anglicans might argue that he misunderstood us or went too far). (Note: In recent years, Rome and Canterbury have reached express agreement on the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist.)

As I see it, precisely the same thing is at stake in the issue of ordination of women: the sacrificial role of the priest, which has been understood as an iconically masculine role in all times, places, and cultures. (If postmodern Westerners cannot understand why performing such sacrifices is iconically masculine, this is a reason not to alter traditional practice. We should not presume that our ignorance trumps the understanding of our ancestors and the rest of humanity.) (If anyone wants to assert that there is nothing iconically masculine about priesthood or performing sacrifices, then I must ask: What do you think is iconically masculine? If you cannot offer an answer, then you are implicitly accepting the unisex – i.e., sexually iconoclastic – model offered by the current secular society.)

Protestants, who do not have a sacrificial understanding of the Eucharist, do not face this sacramental/iconic problem in ordaining women as functional ministers. But Catholics must address it if they want to ordain women priests without undermining their sacramental theology.

Can a Catholic church ordain women without implicitly accepting a Protestant theology of ordination – one that denies the sacrificial role of the priesthood? Can a Catholic church ordain women without implicitly accepting a Protestant theology of the Eucharist – one that denies its sacrificial nature? If we really want to see women as Catholic priests, these theological hurdles must be surmounted decisively. Otherwise, we risk undermining all of Catholic sacramental theology and reducing the Catholic sacramental priesthood to a Protestant functional ministry.

Is it possible for a woman to serve as a priest without implicitly contradicting the nature of the priest as one who performs sacrificial rites on behalf of the people? I do not know. I think there are far too many unanswered questions in the areas of 1) theology of priestly orders and 2) theology of sex/gender. These questions are, at base, iconic questions; that is, they are questions of what symbolic realities are embodied by priesthood and male/female.

There are also deeper, more basic, questions of iconic theology here: Is religious iconography mutable? Is all iconography a product solely of its immediate culture, or is some of it rooted deeply in human nature and the created order? If you change a religion's iconography, do you still have the same religion? If so, how fast and to what extent can a religion absorb iconographic changes?

The people with the greatest interest in honest investigation of these questions should be those women who believe they have a calling to be sacramental priests. Any woman who wants to be a functional minister can already do so in any number of denominations. But a woman who wants to be a sacramental priest has an obvious interest in ensuring that her own ordination will not serve to undermine the very role to which she aspires.

P.S. With this opus, I think I have completed my chief work in this forum. I have expressed what we have come to call "the iconic argument" in the fullest form I am able at this time, and I have tied it to other issues such as Anglican orders, lex orandi, lex credendi, and functional ministry in a way that, I hope, sheds light on all of them. I have ended with lots of open questions – questions that, I hope, will be addressed over the next couple of centuries as Catholic theologians grapple with this issue, trying to fill in the blanks in order to turn Ordinatio Sacerdotalis from a possibly infallible assertion into an actual theology.