Global South Anglican

I am not surprised that there is an argument at GC over whether or not to vote on the clear recommendations of the Windsor Report. After all, that is precisely what GC has been asked to do by the rest of the Communion, and doing so constitutes the practical nub of the peculiar challenge that the Episcopal Church and Communion are facing with respect to their future life together. We all expect disagreement on this matter. What appalls me is hearing representatives of our church charged with this decision describing it in terms of a choice between adopting the “language of the Windsor Report” or being “led by the Holy Spirit”. Were the stakes not so high in preserving a functioning church at all, describing the choice this way would simply be silly, and not pernicious, as in fact it is.

What kind of understanding of the Holy Spirit could possibly be held that would lead Christians to present the choice in these terms: Windsor language or the Holy Spirit? The assumption seems to be that the Holy Spirit is not tied to particular language, or certainly not, as one member of the Committee charged with formulating these resolutions put it, to language articulated “two years ago”. So, what exactly is the shelf-life of the Holy Spirit’s guidance? One year? 6 months? A day? One sees how preposterous this line of reasoning is: why bother having a resolution voted on at all, if its pneumatic import so easily molders? Indeed, why gather, ponder, and pray? Why speak, even in the most broad of ways, of the “deposit of faith”?

The Windsor Report isn’t Holy Scripture, of course. No one has ever claimed it to be so. But it was put together through a careful process that did in fact involve the entire Communion’s representatives, it was done carefully and prayerfully over several months (not within a few days of frantic hearings) and its conclusions and recommendations have passed through the approbation and commendation of a series of symbolically unitive councils and offices of our Communion. Most recently, a number of important representatives of this process, as well as leaders from around the Communion and within the Episcopal Church, have stated that the “language of Windsor” is the most accurate, helpful, and finally restorative and reconciling language to use if our Convention is to be understood by the Communion as responding positively to the accepted Report’s recommendations.

So we might ask: is the Holy Spirit absent from this “Windsor process” that has most recently included a request to use its “language”? The issue here is clearly one of relative discernment: how shall we, at this time and in this context and within this church and with the gifts and treasures we have been given to guard and use, determine a matter that affects and will affect our life together as Christian witnesses here and in the whole world? A comprehensive ecclesial process has come to the conclusion that “these recommendations need to be responded to”, and representatives of this process have said “the language of the recommendations themselves will best serve your response”. Ought this to influence our discerning actions? Or shall we say that the Holy Spirit is “less present” in this process and urging than it would be were we to “throw the Windsor language out” and respond with “our own language”, so avoiding “red herrings” and opening ourselves to a “new work” of God? On what basis, theologically, would anybody measure the Holy Spirit’s work in this way? Why would one want to?

The hoped-for localization, and thereby domestication of the Holy Spirit’s reality by those who would so measure its work according to private freedoms as opposed to the larger Church’s public council is a crude stunting of discernment altogether. In and of itself it constitutes a melting away of the One, Holy, Catholic Church, in all of her guided diversity, into a private and evaporating pond. Furthered by the kinds of arguments we are hearing in committee and elsewhere, we are witnessing a poverty of Christian mind that is itself dispiriting.

–The Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner is rector of Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado, and a fellow of the Anglican Communion Institute

A related talk by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali (Rochester, UK) on the subject of the Holy Spirit’s role in the Church can be found here