Father Jake has posted an essay about the top-down authority of Primates in much of the rest of the Anglican Communion, in contrast the limited authority given to bishops, and even the Presiding Bishop, in the U.S. Episcopal Church. The launching pad for his essay is the first chapter of Gays and the Future of Anglicanism: Responses to the Windsor Report, by L. William Countryman, a professor at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley.
Father Jake comments:
American Anglicans are not organized the same way as other parts of the Communion. Due to our particular history, we are not comfortable granting great authority to our bishops. We prefer to balance that authority with other clergy and lay people. We prefer to vote on things, rather than have pronouncements handed down by a prince of the church.
We Yankees have a deeply embedded distrust of the aristocracy. We don’t feel any need to apologize for our “locally adapted” historic episcopate. We think it works just fine, and are not interested in any attempts to change it.
* * *
Countryman continues by noting that the concept of “Primate” is also a foreign notion to most Americans. The title “Presiding Bishop” (never Archbishop or Metropolitan) is an honorary role, originally simply signifying our senior bishop who would preside over the House of Bishops. Our Presiding Bishop does not have the authority to speak for the Episcopal Church. The only entity given that authority is General Convention.
* * *
With the Primates insisting they be appointed to the ACC, they have effectively made themselves the most powerful source of authority within the Anglican Communion. The Archbishop of Canterbury appears hesitant to stand up against them. The Lambeth Conference meets every ten years, which is not often enough to allow Lambeth to be an effective counterbalance.
What this group of elderly men seem to not comprehend is that the more they throw their weight around, and the more threats they make, they give the Americans all the more reason to be suspicious of them. Yanks don’t respond well to threats. At least this Yank doesn’t.
* * *
I [Father Jake] will end with some of Countryman’s thoughts regarding our modern day Puritans;
The long period of dialogue in ECUSA leading up to the ratification of Gene Robinson’s election was marked by a “godlike” refusal of the evangelical right to participate.
It was a refusal that took various forms. To a great extent, they simply did not attend parish and diocesan events intended to encourage dialogue. When they did attend, they simply repeated their existing position without any effort to show how it might connect with other perspectives. Most damaging of all, they refused to listen to the other people present and merely dismissed everyone and everything with which they disagreed.
After the “dialogue,” they went right on identifying their position with that of the bible as if nothing else were possible, as if no one else had ever read scripture or argued for a different reading of the text.
(Extra paragraphing added.)
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