Ephraim Radner: Time for Separation?

A somewhat lengthy but incisive article by Dr Ephraim Radner of the Anglican Communion Institute suggests that division in the Communion is inevitable and necessary. The article is significant not least because the ACI is described by Fulcrum, a group for English ‘Open Evangelicals’, as representing their own ‘Communion Conservatives’ position: “conservative on sexual ethics but [having] a high regard for the ecclesiology and the recommendations of the Windsor Report” and “keen to hold to the concept of Communion.” Radner now seems to have adopted the view of the Bishop of Winchester, that ‘orderly separation’ may be “the best and most fruitful way forward for the Anglican Communion.” Radner’s conclusions are worth reading in full. I have extracted highlights below, but would encourage full reading of the text.

 

Truthful Language and Orderly Separation
Written by: Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

The Anglican Communion is currently pursuing a number of activities in response to the acrimonious struggle over sexual teaching and discipline within our churches. These activities have been encouraged by the Communion’s leadership, including at the recent Lambeth Conference. I have, to various degrees, been a supporter of these activities, not least because I have trusted those who have promoted these means towards ecclesial healing. I am increasingly skeptical, however, that the way these activities have been framed – descriptively and practically – represents the true nature of our disputes.

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1. A change of practice for gay inclusivists has become impossible. [...]

... the notion, advanced by some inclusivists, that there is such a thing as “incarnational” discernment within the church in the case of gay partnerships, marriages, and families is at best an illusion, at worst a disingenuous strategic ploy. For short of also saying that one may well “discern” that partnerships, marriages, and families already constituted, not only by civil law but by long-term experience and emotional ties, ought in fact to be dissolved, there are no practical alternatives among which to “discern”. Once one has established “facts on the ground” in this area of life, by definition discernment is terminated in any concrete and immediate sense.

2. Traditionalists, by contrast, are expected to “listen” and “learn” with an eye to altering their attitudes on questions of sexuality. This is both a hope on the part of inclusivists, but also a practical and reasonable expectation in some cases, because “sensitivity” to the relational dynamics involved in the constructed irreversibility of homosexual partnerships and families can indeed be predicted to mitigate opposition.

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The point is, change is expected, logically, only from one “side” of the current argument. Ironically, the traditionalists seem far more “pragmatically open” than do the inclusivists.

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... it is not clear how traditional Christian ecclesiology has a future that can be logically linked to inclusivist ecclesial existence within a pluralistic democracy. Inclusivists, from their side, have shown little interest in trying to explain to traditionalists how this might be possible. Within the Anglican Communion, this failure has proven, perhaps more than anything, to be the basis for the practical and profound mistrust that traditionalists hold for inclusivists.

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in the present case of asymmetrical engagements, it is obvious that a moratorium can only mean, or can at best mean a delay with the presumption of resuming a practice, since in this case, as I am arguing, the practice of gay partnerships is not logically removable from its currently rooted locale. Although I have myself encouraged the use of the term “moratorium” around these matters over 15 years ago, I no longer believe the term is honestly practical.

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... the notion of moratorium is not equivalent in the case of same-sex partnerships and boundary-crossing: the one will never be extricated from the life of certain parts of the Communion, and the other is dependent on just such extrication. Morality – degrees of goodness and badness — has nothing to do with the difference here, except in a very distant way. It is a question of the practical referents of the terms in use with respect to “moratorium”: one will never happen; the other might, but is linked to the impossibility of the first.

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It is by now clear that in the case of gay partnerships, families, and ordinations, “reception” of such practices as affirmable by the church would mean “rooting” them within the life of the Church. But in many parts of the Anglican Communion, due to ecclesial and civil activism and protection, these practices are already rooted. By contrast, then, non-reception would have to mean “uprooting” these already-rooted practices, which is an impossibility in the case of churches in Western societies.

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Those Anglicans who do not accept the validity of women’s ordination would probably agree that, once initiated in one part of the Communion as taking place within a “process of reception”, women’s ordination has become, like gay partnerships in certain contexts, ineradicable – and that therefore it is not a proper object for “reception”. To be sure, some ordained Anglican women have given up their orders in the midst of current discernment, but very few. In any case, I am not aware of partnered gay family-members who have dissolved these relationships as a result of ecclesial discernment.

Practically, the categories of women’s ordination and gay-inclusion may not be equivalent (I do not think they are); but this is debatable. Still, the question as a whole is sufficiently open that I have begun to wonder if the category of “reception” in the present context of Anglicanism is now proving unhelpful.

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Frankly, the Listening Process thus far has had its power to teach love constricted from the start, not perhaps of its own steam but because it is embedded in a set of ecclesial relationships that themselves are embedded as unequal adversaries of engagement. Indeed, it is a fact that the failure to prosecute or receive the Listening Process is a topic that inclusivists constantly return to as an accusation against traditionalists, a proof used against them that they are in fact recalcitrant hypocrites who refuse to learn anything new despite being urged by Lambeth (so inclusivsits argue) to do so. The very nature of “talking” has been rendered incoherent at an ecclesial level in this context.

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The example of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who can entertain questions and probing ideas, but wishes to uphold the actual public teaching and discipline of the church, has become paradigmatic: it now assumed that such a balancing of views must indicate hyposcrisy, cowardice, or both. The assumption, however, is quite wrong: it is precisely because he knows that the rooting of gay inclusion in the practice of the church ossifies positions, first and primarily among gay inclusivists, and second, in reaction and through rejection on the part of traditionalists, that he is unwilling simply to allow space for “incarnational discernment”. Once rooted, discussion is destroyed.

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... the asymmetrical engagements and practical logics of gay inclusivists and traditionalists within the Anglican Communion are now a matter of record, and plain for all to see. Furthermore, this very asymmetry of logics, as it is embraced by churches, is contributing to the incoherence of traditional ecclesial existence. Can an Anglican Communion that has in fact affirmed itself as a “traditional” ecclesial entity in its teaching, discipline, and witness over matters of sexual and family life maintain this affirmation in the face of such an embrace of incoherence?

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... I do not want such a separation. I pray against it’s demand. It is not something that I think our Lord confronts, in his own heart, with anything but sorrow. But I agree that the sheer practical dynamics of the situation we are now in may well uphold Bp. Scott-Joynt’s views. It is not so much that the Lord will weep, but that even now He is weeping.

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... what shall we say of “orderly separation”? Such a separation of parties – leaving aside its shape — may be necessary, if the integrity of language, practice, formation and witness is to be maintained, even with clarity of concepts and categories restored. That separation is not to be prayed for as an end in itself; but the means needs to be soberly formulated and allowed to be used so that the firm embrace of asymmetrical logics can find its resolution in coherent lives that no longer threaten common dissolution. In fact, it could be argued that any church needs to have as part of its ecclesial polity some means within it either to resolve such asymmetrical logics or to disentangle them from its common life.

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... it now looks as if separation is simply necessary, not historically so much as logically and morally. A more adequate vocabulary that takes the place of “moratoria,” “reception”, “listening”, and so on makes this logical necessity plain by showing the conditions of coherence. And the survival of catholic Christianity makes plain the moral necessity of such orderly separation by demonstrating the demands of one logic over the other. It is separation that preserves Anglicanism as a Catholic form of Christianity.

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