Holmes believed the reticence of what he called the Anglican sensibility to be compatible with there being--and our pursuit of--truth about how God is, truth not merely relative to or located within the space of a particular way of seeing God, but absolute truth. We should not be surprised to find ourselves faced with the question Holmes raises at the beginning of his second chapter: Is this experience true? That is, from within our way of experiencing God, it may seem clear that some theological proposition Q holds, for instance that an actively gay priest may be elected bishop; we should ask whether Q is true, or merely what seems true given the limited perspective of the relevant way of seeing God.
To figure out whether Q is true Holmes requires us to appeal to an authority. One might take a
single member of the church, like the Pope speaking ex cathedra on matters of the faith or morals, to be an infallible authority guided by the power of the Holy Spirit, or one might take any individual to be authoritative who reads Scripture and is inspired by the Holy Spirit, but Holmes would have us reject such sources of authority. He takes "the Puritans" to be his
principal target--people stressing the sufficiency of the individual, inspired reader of Scripture. On that view, Holmes thinks, Scripture can be read without regard for the tradition of its interpretation, and it yields a certainty beyond science-bound human reason.
Instead, Holmes holds out an ideal strategy of reasonable interpretation. Human reason, illuminated by grace, is capable of discerning truth inasmuch as the Creator is himself rational, and our reason is "seeded" by divine reason--our rationalilty "participates" in divine rationality. We should see nature and the supernatural not as really distinct, disjoint realms, but rather as complementary and "continuous" so that the "sincere pursuit of truth opens God's mind" to our understanding, whether in theology, math, biology, or any other field of inquiry. Holmes notes "heresy trials are alien to us" in that we may trust natural theology has a sufficient foundation for our confidence that the truth can come out with sincere inquiry.
I suppose his idea is basically Thomist in spirit: divine reason operates like a Platonic Form, serving as an exemplar modelling genuine rationality for us to imitate and reflect in partial, fragile ways which may be, via grace, enough like the model that truth may be accessible to us, though Holmes is careful to say saving knowledge requires revelation if we are to possess it. Anyhow, the likeness is one not of univocity but analogy. Being a scotist I'd contend for univocity instead, but nothing depends on the univocity/analogy distinction at this level of generality.
Reasonable interpretation cannot be carried out by the individual alone; it requires, Holmes claims, "collaboration." As we consult the text and see what others--and "others" here must be rather broadly conceived so as to include not just theologians & scholars in academia, but unschooled lay believers, secular scientists, et al--have said, we immerse ourselves in an interpreting community. For Holmes, human reason is social by nature, to the point where private interpretation would fall short of normative rationality, as he puts it: reflecting one's opinion as if with divine authority. Holmes locates the "origin of schism" here.
God's self-revelation is self-disclosure between "lovers"--apparently Holmes would grant the Song of Solomon high status as disclosing the type of relationship with us, suffused with eros, at which God aims. This revelation in Scriptural canon "confronts" the church with an essential norm--not only in terms of what is in it, but also in terms of what is not contrary to it. In short, his idea seems to be that while we may be obliged with regard to what may be shown from Scripture, we are not obliged with regard to what is not contrary to what may be shown from Scripture. If playing cards is not contrary to Scripture, one is not obliged qua Christian to forsake it.
Interestingly, Holmes holds that confrontation continues between God and the church after the formation of the canon in our own day as the concrete, historical church reflects on God disclosing himself in the context of its canon and tradition. How should the church reflect? In councils--but not because in them we shall find a happy infallibility. Holmes claims conciliar authority comes with the consent of its members to the council's findings: the findings must be received by those the council represents. But even received findings of a church council cannot properly claim infallibility though, and it is likely, Holmes notes, councils will be frustratingly vague. This vagueness is necessary, however. The alternative is "tyranny" as, given the fallibility of councils, only conciliar vagueness is consistent with our liberty as Anglicans.
Holmes: What is Anglicanism?
Written in marginally calmer times, Holmes' monograph (in print from Morehouse, used copies starting at $.01) was one volume in an international effort among Anglicans to articulate an Anglican theology, touching on Scripture, spirituality, morality and other topics. While Holmes' interpretation of Anglicanism did not represent the views of the contributors in general, and so of course he does not speak as a one-man magisterium, neither is it simply foreign to their understanding of Anglicanism. In other words, his view can claim, it seems to me, status consistent with the broader self-understanding of Anglicanism evident in the series as a whole.
Preface & Chapter One
Holmes comes right out and says to be Anglican is to
(i) use an official BCP,
and (ii) be in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
A minimal account prima facie, but he seems to think--rightly in my view--(i) and (ii) are not compatible with just any Christian practice. That is, a certain content goes with (i) and (ii) obtaining, such that without that content one either would not be worshipping according to an official BCP or one would not be in communion with the Archbishop.
It follows from (i) that belonging to a provincial church is essential to being Anglican, insofar as a diocese cannot decide on its own what will count as an official BCP. That is, Holmes would end up disagreeing with Rowan Williams, who said recently that the diocese alone was sufficient unto itself as the basic unit of the church. Insofar as dioceses have contracted into relationships wherein they cannot unilaterally determine theor own BCPs, and worshipping according to an official BCP is essential to being Anglican, it seems on this account their being Anglican tethers them to the larger province. From (ii) it follows that an Episocopal Church out of communion with the Archbishop would not be Anglican--and so it seems, given the importance Holmes puts on being Anglican, that he would put great store in maintaining the province's ties with Canterbury. Whether that effort to remain in communion with Canterbury makes sense seems to depend on (a) whether there is a close connection between (ii) and the content which purportedly goes with (ii)'s obtaining, and (b) whether that content is indeed significant. In my view, for what it's worth: to (b), I think the content Holmes describes is significant enough to defend, and to (a), I'm not sure the content can only--or even best--be defended in communion with Canterbury.
Well, being Anglican to Holmes is characterized by catholicity--as we should well hope--and "freedom of a sort unsurpassed," a freedom we have to "disagree openly" rooted in "the many-formedness of human knowing." That latter bit about freedom seems to give Anglicanism its distinctive essential content in Holmes' view. Sure, you could come up with other distinctive features of Anglicanism, but that one is essential, and should stand with catholicity to mark us out as having a distinctive if "provincial" "way of looking at Christian experience."
That freedom has an outer bound: what Holmes calls reasonableness; one's position should not contradict a reflective, balanced examination of experience carried out by one believing oneself in love with God. Presumably, though I may be wrong, those believing themselves in love with God by that standard would include not just other Anglicans but also Christians of other denominations, Jews, Islamic believers, Hindus, and other monotheists far and wide.
Holmes seems to be thinking that of course they will disagree with each other, ending up holding positions at variance, but they will nevertheless be able to recognize certain positions of those with whom they disagree are reasonable, or rational, insofar as they do not contradict one's own position. Why? Reconstructing Holmes' view, it seems he means that one recognizes one's own position is formed by one's religion, what he calls in Chapter One a way of making sense of the experience of God. More: even if not formed from within some religious way of seeing, one's view of God is nevertheless formed from within some other nonreligious way of seeing; unformed ways of seeing get ruled out tout court. In effect, then, whereas an Episcopalian would say
(1) God is a Trinity,
and a Hindu would say
(2) God is not a Trinity,
these two should, Holmes implies, recognize each other's assertions as reasonable, inasmuch as each is shaped by a way of making sense of the experience of God. That is, though prima facie (1) and (2) contradict, in reality they do not. If their deep structure, say, was apparent, we could read them as saying
(1)' According to the Anglican way of making sense of the experience of God, God is a Trinity,
and
(2)' According to the Hindu way of experiencing God, God is not a Trinity.
(1)' and (2)' no longer contradict; inasmuch as neither takes the other as in contradiction with the faith, each can view the other's take on what faith requires as reasonable.
One problem with this emphasis on being reasonable, as Holmes recognizes, is that such a kind of translation scheme as he has in the background seems to invite relativism--even religious pluralism a la John Hick. But Holmes thinks he can have his translation scheme without relativism or pluralism.
At the end of Chapter One he notes comprehension does not imply tolerating "palatable" relativism. That is, there is a Truth (big "t", absolute) to how God is, and so we should say there are better and worse ways of experiencing God, and some ways of experiencing God may get the Truth right in part. There is no way for us of stepping outside ways experience is shaped--religious or otherwise--to get direct access to God--Holmes notes quite rightly one never experiences anything raw; experience is always already shaped. Our commitment to the rightness of the way of experiencing God disclosed to us in Jesus cannot be guaranteed by any such direct access to Truth; it can only be rooted in faith.
In particular, the revelation of Jesus in Scripture is not a means for us of getting direct access to God. Inasmuch as God is transcendent and other by nature, we cannot express what he is literally in any discourse, even religious, even scriptural; we shall have to have recourse to metaphor, approaching God in truth through the ordinary. Yet Holmes holds God can be known through metaphor; revelation is God disclosing divinity through metaphor, making certain metaphors normative for a religious community--and in an Anglican Christian saying this, one already makes a movement of faith identifying Scripture as the source of the metaphors God has chosen for self-disclosure.
Alas, the content of metaphor cannot be captured and reduced to the content of propositions. We shall be unable to give final, propositional expression to the content of faith disclosed in Scripture; it follows our understanding of God can only ever be "penultimate" and not ultimate. We can only accurately apprehend God with a certain degree of ineliminable ambiguity. For example, Holmes claims following Julian that God discloses himself as mother in Scripture, but that metaphor does not imply the proposition God is female or even God gives birth.
There is another problem, one which Holmes recognizes but does not dwell on: while religious ways of seeing are not the types of things that might contradict each other, religious ways of seeing still might be mutually exclusive. That exclusivity could create conflict; e.g. from within one's way of seeing, other ways of seeing should be declared unreasonable and not be tolerated. It is no surprise, then, that Anglican reasonableness is a fragile thing--after all, the Elizabethan Settlement did not succeed in peaceably holding Christians at variance with one another togteher. But that fragility does not make reasonableness unworthy of defense.
Cognitively speaking, God's ineffability is like "darkness"--a darkness that Holmes notes can protect us. Anglicanism's freedom to disagree is rooted in a self-conscious awareness of the darkness in which God is shrouded, of the limits of our religious discourse and cognitive capacities. That self-conscious awareness takes the shape of a distinctive sensibility with us, according to which we have, or perhaps should have, the courage to live with the fact of our ignorance rather than hiding it via spurious speculation and made-up authority. Holmes may be thinking that once we can admit to the darkness of God and our ignorance, we can be kept from suppressing or persecuting those at variance with us by the recognition that we may be wrong about the points of contention. The moderation that goes with this Anglican sensibility, Holmes may contend, is worth defending, and especially worth catholic Christians defending.
This Anglican sensibility, for Holmes, implies the freedom that gives Anglicanism its distinctive content, a content Holmes recommends as of great value. In effect, to recommend Anglicanism is to recommend taking catholicity with this distinctive sensibility.
Preface & Chapter One
Holmes comes right out and says to be Anglican is to
(i) use an official BCP,
and (ii) be in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
A minimal account prima facie, but he seems to think--rightly in my view--(i) and (ii) are not compatible with just any Christian practice. That is, a certain content goes with (i) and (ii) obtaining, such that without that content one either would not be worshipping according to an official BCP or one would not be in communion with the Archbishop.
It follows from (i) that belonging to a provincial church is essential to being Anglican, insofar as a diocese cannot decide on its own what will count as an official BCP. That is, Holmes would end up disagreeing with Rowan Williams, who said recently that the diocese alone was sufficient unto itself as the basic unit of the church. Insofar as dioceses have contracted into relationships wherein they cannot unilaterally determine theor own BCPs, and worshipping according to an official BCP is essential to being Anglican, it seems on this account their being Anglican tethers them to the larger province. From (ii) it follows that an Episocopal Church out of communion with the Archbishop would not be Anglican--and so it seems, given the importance Holmes puts on being Anglican, that he would put great store in maintaining the province's ties with Canterbury. Whether that effort to remain in communion with Canterbury makes sense seems to depend on (a) whether there is a close connection between (ii) and the content which purportedly goes with (ii)'s obtaining, and (b) whether that content is indeed significant. In my view, for what it's worth: to (b), I think the content Holmes describes is significant enough to defend, and to (a), I'm not sure the content can only--or even best--be defended in communion with Canterbury.
Well, being Anglican to Holmes is characterized by catholicity--as we should well hope--and "freedom of a sort unsurpassed," a freedom we have to "disagree openly" rooted in "the many-formedness of human knowing." That latter bit about freedom seems to give Anglicanism its distinctive essential content in Holmes' view. Sure, you could come up with other distinctive features of Anglicanism, but that one is essential, and should stand with catholicity to mark us out as having a distinctive if "provincial" "way of looking at Christian experience."
That freedom has an outer bound: what Holmes calls reasonableness; one's position should not contradict a reflective, balanced examination of experience carried out by one believing oneself in love with God. Presumably, though I may be wrong, those believing themselves in love with God by that standard would include not just other Anglicans but also Christians of other denominations, Jews, Islamic believers, Hindus, and other monotheists far and wide.
Holmes seems to be thinking that of course they will disagree with each other, ending up holding positions at variance, but they will nevertheless be able to recognize certain positions of those with whom they disagree are reasonable, or rational, insofar as they do not contradict one's own position. Why? Reconstructing Holmes' view, it seems he means that one recognizes one's own position is formed by one's religion, what he calls in Chapter One a way of making sense of the experience of God. More: even if not formed from within some religious way of seeing, one's view of God is nevertheless formed from within some other nonreligious way of seeing; unformed ways of seeing get ruled out tout court. In effect, then, whereas an Episcopalian would say
(1) God is a Trinity,
and a Hindu would say
(2) God is not a Trinity,
these two should, Holmes implies, recognize each other's assertions as reasonable, inasmuch as each is shaped by a way of making sense of the experience of God. That is, though prima facie (1) and (2) contradict, in reality they do not. If their deep structure, say, was apparent, we could read them as saying
(1)' According to the Anglican way of making sense of the experience of God, God is a Trinity,
and
(2)' According to the Hindu way of experiencing God, God is not a Trinity.
(1)' and (2)' no longer contradict; inasmuch as neither takes the other as in contradiction with the faith, each can view the other's take on what faith requires as reasonable.
One problem with this emphasis on being reasonable, as Holmes recognizes, is that such a kind of translation scheme as he has in the background seems to invite relativism--even religious pluralism a la John Hick. But Holmes thinks he can have his translation scheme without relativism or pluralism.
At the end of Chapter One he notes comprehension does not imply tolerating "palatable" relativism. That is, there is a Truth (big "t", absolute) to how God is, and so we should say there are better and worse ways of experiencing God, and some ways of experiencing God may get the Truth right in part. There is no way for us of stepping outside ways experience is shaped--religious or otherwise--to get direct access to God--Holmes notes quite rightly one never experiences anything raw; experience is always already shaped. Our commitment to the rightness of the way of experiencing God disclosed to us in Jesus cannot be guaranteed by any such direct access to Truth; it can only be rooted in faith.
In particular, the revelation of Jesus in Scripture is not a means for us of getting direct access to God. Inasmuch as God is transcendent and other by nature, we cannot express what he is literally in any discourse, even religious, even scriptural; we shall have to have recourse to metaphor, approaching God in truth through the ordinary. Yet Holmes holds God can be known through metaphor; revelation is God disclosing divinity through metaphor, making certain metaphors normative for a religious community--and in an Anglican Christian saying this, one already makes a movement of faith identifying Scripture as the source of the metaphors God has chosen for self-disclosure.
Alas, the content of metaphor cannot be captured and reduced to the content of propositions. We shall be unable to give final, propositional expression to the content of faith disclosed in Scripture; it follows our understanding of God can only ever be "penultimate" and not ultimate. We can only accurately apprehend God with a certain degree of ineliminable ambiguity. For example, Holmes claims following Julian that God discloses himself as mother in Scripture, but that metaphor does not imply the proposition God is female or even God gives birth.
There is another problem, one which Holmes recognizes but does not dwell on: while religious ways of seeing are not the types of things that might contradict each other, religious ways of seeing still might be mutually exclusive. That exclusivity could create conflict; e.g. from within one's way of seeing, other ways of seeing should be declared unreasonable and not be tolerated. It is no surprise, then, that Anglican reasonableness is a fragile thing--after all, the Elizabethan Settlement did not succeed in peaceably holding Christians at variance with one another togteher. But that fragility does not make reasonableness unworthy of defense.
Cognitively speaking, God's ineffability is like "darkness"--a darkness that Holmes notes can protect us. Anglicanism's freedom to disagree is rooted in a self-conscious awareness of the darkness in which God is shrouded, of the limits of our religious discourse and cognitive capacities. That self-conscious awareness takes the shape of a distinctive sensibility with us, according to which we have, or perhaps should have, the courage to live with the fact of our ignorance rather than hiding it via spurious speculation and made-up authority. Holmes may be thinking that once we can admit to the darkness of God and our ignorance, we can be kept from suppressing or persecuting those at variance with us by the recognition that we may be wrong about the points of contention. The moderation that goes with this Anglican sensibility, Holmes may contend, is worth defending, and especially worth catholic Christians defending.
This Anglican sensibility, for Holmes, implies the freedom that gives Anglicanism its distinctive content, a content Holmes recommends as of great value. In effect, to recommend Anglicanism is to recommend taking catholicity with this distinctive sensibility.
reading & the anglican right
The latest dust-up, this time over the canonical status of the HoB votes to depose Bishops Cox and Schofield, is ripe for reflection.
Critics and defenders of the vote seem to approach the canons with a curious strategy, namely that the meaning of the text can be apprehended in abstraction from how the text was read--and acted upon--in the past. That is, in the case of the canons, critics seem to interpret the text in abstraction from tradition, according to how it seems to make sense in their own eyes at the moment.
Here's an illustrative comment:
Now let me list three phrases. Those who think the depositions were canonically valid, would you please be kind enough to point out the one phrase that is not like the others:
1) “all Bishops entitled to vote”
2) “by a majority of those present”
3) “whole number of Bishops entitled to vote”
I am not sure why, Mark, you don't seem to think that phrases 1 and 3 have a common meaning, with 2 being the odd man out. Instead, you seems to believe that phrase 1 is the odd man out, with 2 and 3 having the common meaning.I think the canons are very clear as to what the required number of consents are, the this number was simply not obtained. [boldface added]
What is all this thinking based on? Who knows--maybe what strikes competent users distributively as obvious? Would this be a sound approach to Holy Scripture? Rubrics?
The temptation to try to encapsulate the normative content of a historical practice--like voting or praying--in a declarative sentence or two seems absurd. That approach would not do well when it comes to learning to tango, or learning how to ride a bike, or learning to love; in all these cases there is something more to the practice in question than can be learned reading books. Nobody, I hope, would dream of writing a book exhausting the significance of Macbeth or Heart of Darkness, but when it comes to the peculiar darkness and ambiguity of the canons, are matters significantly different?
Another way of putting the point woule be to refer to Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein on the rule-following paradox, but perhaps that is using a cannon to kill a gnat. There are a number of other ways to drive the point home: rules gather meaning only from being embedded in wider practices.
Thus, the relevant question for anyone questioning the HoB vote is whether those votes to depose are logically consistent with other instances. Do they fit with precedent? If they do, there is insufficient ground to object on the basis of the canons themselves--though one could well object on other grounds, say, that the canon or its practice ought to change. Thus, I think one should read this comment from T19,
Using the you cite figures from 2006, it really boils down to this: do you need a vote by 32 Bishops in order to depose a Bishop who is alleged to have abandonned the Communion of this church, or do you need 142?
as an inadvertently disguised claim for formally revising the canon. As settling the meaning of the canons in question, it's not the right kind of consideration to carry that kind of weight.
I am unsure how history breaks on this question, although from the fragments I have gathered it seems the HoB has not always followed the critics' reading, and in fact bishops have been deposed with a procedural variety seeming on its face to defy the gravity requisite for such proceedings in critics' eyes.
Critics and defenders of the vote seem to approach the canons with a curious strategy, namely that the meaning of the text can be apprehended in abstraction from how the text was read--and acted upon--in the past. That is, in the case of the canons, critics seem to interpret the text in abstraction from tradition, according to how it seems to make sense in their own eyes at the moment.
Here's an illustrative comment:
Now let me list three phrases. Those who think the depositions were canonically valid, would you please be kind enough to point out the one phrase that is not like the others:
1) “all Bishops entitled to vote”
2) “by a majority of those present”
3) “whole number of Bishops entitled to vote”
I am not sure why, Mark, you don't seem to think that phrases 1 and 3 have a common meaning, with 2 being the odd man out. Instead, you seems to believe that phrase 1 is the odd man out, with 2 and 3 having the common meaning.I think the canons are very clear as to what the required number of consents are, the this number was simply not obtained. [boldface added]
What is all this thinking based on? Who knows--maybe what strikes competent users distributively as obvious? Would this be a sound approach to Holy Scripture? Rubrics?
The temptation to try to encapsulate the normative content of a historical practice--like voting or praying--in a declarative sentence or two seems absurd. That approach would not do well when it comes to learning to tango, or learning how to ride a bike, or learning to love; in all these cases there is something more to the practice in question than can be learned reading books. Nobody, I hope, would dream of writing a book exhausting the significance of Macbeth or Heart of Darkness, but when it comes to the peculiar darkness and ambiguity of the canons, are matters significantly different?
Another way of putting the point woule be to refer to Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein on the rule-following paradox, but perhaps that is using a cannon to kill a gnat. There are a number of other ways to drive the point home: rules gather meaning only from being embedded in wider practices.
Thus, the relevant question for anyone questioning the HoB vote is whether those votes to depose are logically consistent with other instances. Do they fit with precedent? If they do, there is insufficient ground to object on the basis of the canons themselves--though one could well object on other grounds, say, that the canon or its practice ought to change. Thus, I think one should read this comment from T19,
Using the you cite figures from 2006, it really boils down to this: do you need a vote by 32 Bishops in order to depose a Bishop who is alleged to have abandonned the Communion of this church, or do you need 142?
as an inadvertently disguised claim for formally revising the canon. As settling the meaning of the canons in question, it's not the right kind of consideration to carry that kind of weight.
I am unsure how history breaks on this question, although from the fragments I have gathered it seems the HoB has not always followed the critics' reading, and in fact bishops have been deposed with a procedural variety seeming on its face to defy the gravity requisite for such proceedings in critics' eyes.
Radner & ACI & the furture of Anglicanism
There is no Anglican Church.
If you keep that in mind, much of the diaphanous sophistry of the ACI dissipates like a chill mist gradually burned away in the rosy-fingered dawn.
Uses of "Anglican Church" make sense, to be sure, in that they are parasitic on applications of "church" to genuine churches. We know what it means to say "the Church of England" or "the Roman Catholic Church", and the Anglican Communion at times may resemble these, like a glass eye may resemble a live eye--so one might even innocently utter "the Anglican Church" referring to the Anglican Communion.
But Radner and Seitz' uses are rather darker, part of a larger attempt--an effort that I strongly suspect meets with the avid approval of our Archbishop--to impose a reality, an Anglican Church, on the heels of imposing a new usage, where "Church" in "the Anglican Church" is univocal with "Church" in "Roman Catholic Church." So you see, Schofield did not really abandon the communion of this church by joining the Southern Cone--they would seem to say there is no real distinction between the communion of the Episcopal Church and the communion of the Southern Cone because what may seem to some to be their distinct communions are really the same as the one communion of the Anglican Communion.
But that gets the notion of communion backwards--the communion of the Anglican Communion could only supervene on the communions of its member churches, at least for now. That's why, for instance, we say our common life is damaged when some member withdraws from it, as Nigeria's Primate boycotts the Eucharist with the other primates, and threatens to withold its bishops from Lambeth. It can't be that the various communions of the member churches derive their being from the communion of the Anglican Communion, particularly if they exist in such a way that they may withdraw from it and form other, really distinct networks. At most one could argue the being of a member church's communion is filled out or amplified by its being a member of the larger network--a matter not of esse, but of plena or bene esse, a contingency. To get what the ACI wants, the AC would have to change what it is, and its members would have to change what they are as well.
The long term goal seems to at least include the imposition of a centralized, bureaucratic structure, with power of its own to discipline and observe at the level of the Anglican Communion as a whole, an imposition whose practice is carefully circumscribed by a constitution or social contract so as to be incapable of responding to correction from the Holy Spirit that would require communion-wide repentance and amendment of life, as with adoption of the ordaining of women or the breaking down of race barriers. To conservatives, this is merely insurance against what some would call "social justice" and what they might call "liberalism": Amaziah of Bethel banning Amos.
Ironically, the scheme is directly analogous to Gordon Tullock, James Buchanan, and Hayek's thoughts on constitutions and Keynesianism. The idea with Hayek et al. was that economic management by the federal government--as in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, WIC, etc--could be eliminated and in the future precluded by constitutional reform, esp. reform locking out deficit spending, and the leading edge of what they saw as socialism. And a general potentially growing threat to the institution of private property could be cut off, or as Norquist would later say, strangled in the bathtub. Buchanan, additionally, saw himself as preserving something precious from the heritage of the Old South. Of course, these guys are all liberals--classical liberals in the mode of Say, Sisimondi, "Smith": what we would now call "right-wing liberals." Structurally, ACI seems to be inthe same boat, so to speak. It is odd--to say the least--to see Williams and Radner plumping for a structural solution to our crises in the style of classical liberalism, of all things.
If you keep that in mind, much of the diaphanous sophistry of the ACI dissipates like a chill mist gradually burned away in the rosy-fingered dawn.
Uses of "Anglican Church" make sense, to be sure, in that they are parasitic on applications of "church" to genuine churches. We know what it means to say "the Church of England" or "the Roman Catholic Church", and the Anglican Communion at times may resemble these, like a glass eye may resemble a live eye--so one might even innocently utter "the Anglican Church" referring to the Anglican Communion.
But Radner and Seitz' uses are rather darker, part of a larger attempt--an effort that I strongly suspect meets with the avid approval of our Archbishop--to impose a reality, an Anglican Church, on the heels of imposing a new usage, where "Church" in "the Anglican Church" is univocal with "Church" in "Roman Catholic Church." So you see, Schofield did not really abandon the communion of this church by joining the Southern Cone--they would seem to say there is no real distinction between the communion of the Episcopal Church and the communion of the Southern Cone because what may seem to some to be their distinct communions are really the same as the one communion of the Anglican Communion.
But that gets the notion of communion backwards--the communion of the Anglican Communion could only supervene on the communions of its member churches, at least for now. That's why, for instance, we say our common life is damaged when some member withdraws from it, as Nigeria's Primate boycotts the Eucharist with the other primates, and threatens to withold its bishops from Lambeth. It can't be that the various communions of the member churches derive their being from the communion of the Anglican Communion, particularly if they exist in such a way that they may withdraw from it and form other, really distinct networks. At most one could argue the being of a member church's communion is filled out or amplified by its being a member of the larger network--a matter not of esse, but of plena or bene esse, a contingency. To get what the ACI wants, the AC would have to change what it is, and its members would have to change what they are as well.
The long term goal seems to at least include the imposition of a centralized, bureaucratic structure, with power of its own to discipline and observe at the level of the Anglican Communion as a whole, an imposition whose practice is carefully circumscribed by a constitution or social contract so as to be incapable of responding to correction from the Holy Spirit that would require communion-wide repentance and amendment of life, as with adoption of the ordaining of women or the breaking down of race barriers. To conservatives, this is merely insurance against what some would call "social justice" and what they might call "liberalism": Amaziah of Bethel banning Amos.
Ironically, the scheme is directly analogous to Gordon Tullock, James Buchanan, and Hayek's thoughts on constitutions and Keynesianism. The idea with Hayek et al. was that economic management by the federal government--as in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, WIC, etc--could be eliminated and in the future precluded by constitutional reform, esp. reform locking out deficit spending, and the leading edge of what they saw as socialism. And a general potentially growing threat to the institution of private property could be cut off, or as Norquist would later say, strangled in the bathtub. Buchanan, additionally, saw himself as preserving something precious from the heritage of the Old South. Of course, these guys are all liberals--classical liberals in the mode of Say, Sisimondi, "Smith": what we would now call "right-wing liberals." Structurally, ACI seems to be inthe same boat, so to speak. It is odd--to say the least--to see Williams and Radner plumping for a structural solution to our crises in the style of classical liberalism, of all things.
Loose Canons?
So far as I can tell, discussion of the HoB's recent vote to remove Schofield and Cox fails to establish what the precedent is for such votes. Surely there is a body of precedent, and if it is consistent, it could lend some guidance to what the canons should be taken to require, no?
Arguing a priori from what seems like the obvious and clear sense seems tendentious when there should be a body of practice already in place. Does anyone have information about what such a history would indicate?
Arguing a priori from what seems like the obvious and clear sense seems tendentious when there should be a body of practice already in place. Does anyone have information about what such a history would indicate?
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