Questioning Authority

Ellen K. Wondra

Questioning Authority

The Theology and Practice of
Authority in the Episcopal Church
and Anglican Communion

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wondra, Ellen K., author.

Title: Questioning authority: the theology and practice of authority in the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion / Ellen K. Wondra.

Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2018.

Series: Studies in Episcopal and Anglican theology, vol. 13
ISSN 2168-3891 (print) | ISSN 2168-3905 (online)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018018355 | ISBN 978-1-4331-3216-2 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-5791-2 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-5792-9 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-4331-5793-6 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Authority—Religious aspects—Anglican Communion.

Anglican Communion—Government. | Authority—Religious aspects—Episcopal Church.

Episcopal Church—Government.

Classification: LCC BX5008.5.W66 2018 | DDC 262/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018355

DOI 10.3726/978-1-4539-1711-4

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

Cover photo courtesy of Albin Hillert/WCC.
Used with permission.

© 2018 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

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Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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About the author

ELLEN K. WONDRA, an Episcopal priest, is a member of the World Council of Churches’ Commission on Faith and Order and Research Professor Emerita in Theology and Ethics at the Bexley-Seabury Seminary Federation in Chicago, Illinois. She is Editor Emerita of the Anglican Theological Review.

About the book

Questioning Authority analyzes current conflicts concerning authority in the Anglican church and offers a new framework for addressing them. It argues that authority in the church is fundamentally relational rather than juridical. All members of the church have authority to engage in discerning the church’s identity, direction, and mission. Most of this authority is exercised in personal interactions and group practices of consultation and direction. Formal authority in the church confers power so responsibilities can be fulfilled. Church relations always include conflict, which may be creative and helpful rather than divisive. Conflict arises because persons and groups follow Christ in ways related to their own cultural context while also being in communion with others. Communion in the church requires embracing diversity, recognizing and respecting others’ perspectives, and working together to discover and create common ground. Today’s church needs more participatory forms of governance and decision-making that are conciliar and synodal.

Advance Praise for Questioning Authority

“Ellen K. Wondra has done us an enormous service by taking on the vexing issue of authority in the Anglican Communion. The theology, history, and contemporary story of Anglicanism’s love-hate relationship with authority are carefully woven together in this substantial volume. Dr. Wondra argues for an understanding of authority which is relational and dispersed rather than juridical and focused. In such a system communion is experienced in diversity not in spite of it. This is a catholicity ordered in a ‘conciliar economy’ in which authority enhances communion while involving the whole body of the church in taking responsibility for its mission.”

Rt. Rev. C. Christopher Epting, Presiding Bishop’s Deputy for Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations (Ret.)

“In this wide-ranging work, Ellen K. Wondra doesn’t so much question authority as reclaim what true authority consists of in the Anglican tradition. Authority derives its power to initiate and confirm action from the common life of individuals bound together by history, obligation, affection and shared hope. Hence, authority is essentially relational. Wondra demonstrates how this moral philosophical claim is reflected in the ancient ecclesial principle of conciliarity: bishops, personally embodying the unity of the church, only exercise leadership in concert with the people of God as a whole. Its Anglican focus notwithstanding, this study is deeply ecumenical, particularly in its steady insistence that when disagreement and difference coexist in community, there true authority is to be found, however messy and fluid it may be.”

Rt. Rev. Thomas E. Breidenthal, IX Bishop of Southern Ohio

“This important book on authority fulfills two major tasks brilliantly: first, the author clarifies the splendid complexity of the institutional forms of the worldwide Anglican communion. Second, the author develops an original and persuasive theological analysis of authority as relation explicitly in church, but also implicitly in state, university, business and family. A major work on an issue that affects us all—the true nature of authority.”

David Tracy, Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies and Professor of Theology and the Philosophy of Religions, the University of Chicago

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Foreword by Michael B. Curry

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1 Introduction: Communion Challenged

2 Impaired Communion

3 The Highest Degree of Communion Possible

4 Questioning Authority

5 Power, Responsibility, and Authority

6 Differentiated Authority

7 Relational Theology

8 Catholicity and Conciliarity

9 Conclusions and Prospects

Index←ix | x→ ←x | xi→

Foreword

Michael B. Curry

Archbishop-emeritus Desmond Tutu once described the Anglican Communion as “messy but loveable.” The past several years in the life of our worldwide Communion have certainly displayed the messiness, but all too often the loveable qualities have proven harder to see. Let there be no doubt, the loveable is truly there! Still, as we have seen many times from the very beginning of the Jesus Movement, collaboration and care between the followers of Christ have at times given way to confusion and conflict. In such times, the question of leadership and authority becomes important…indeed, critical.

And it is with great thanks that I saw this new work by Ellen K. Wondra, well-known scholar in the Episcopal Church and former editor of the Anglican Theological Review. Through her careful examination of many and varied sources, Dr. Wondra gets to the heart of the question of what authority really looks like in this Anglican branch of the Jesus Movement. Fearlessly treading through complex issues of colonialist legacies, the nature of authority as power, and the limits of centralization, she offers a study that can help promote provocative conversations and fresh understandings of what it means to move through disagreement to mutual learning and deeper communion with one another.

In the Encyclical Letter of the Lambeth Conference of 1920, the Anglican bishops there gathered together from throughout the world boldly proclaimed←xi | xii→ that “the secret of life is fellowship,” and went on to assert that “it is not by reducing the different groups of Christians to uniformity, but by rightly using their diversity, that the Church can become all things to all.”

The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry,
Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church←xii | xiii→

Acknowledgments

I have been questioning authority in Anglicanism for many years, and many people have contributed to that process, far too many to name here. Among all of them, I want to thank particularly:

• Stanley F. Rodgers and Shunji F. Nishi, seminary mentors who urged me to keep theology and practice woven together;

• Faculty, student, and staff colleagues at Bexley Hall Seminary, Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, the Bexley-Seabury Seminary Federation, the Episcopal Divinity School, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago;

• Colleagues on the Anglican-Roman Catholic Consultation in the U.S. (ARCUSA), the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Ecumenical and Inter-religious Relations and Office of Ecumenical and Inter-religious Relations, the World Council of Church’s Commission on Faith and Order and its director and staff, and many other ecumenists with whom it has been my pleasure and honor to work;

• The editors, staff, and Board of Anglican Theological Review, as well as those who generously submitted manuscripts I have been privileged to read;←xiii | xiv→

And of course, all of the mistakes are mine alone.←xiv | xv→

Abbreviations