Vogel, Arthur A. 1990. "Authority: The challenge to Anglicanism." Anglican Theological Review 72, no. 1: 8. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed October 14, 2010).
"Authority" is a social term. It describes a relationship between people, and the kind of relationship people have determines how authority is exercised among them.
A society whose members have nothing more in common than principles of law will exercise authority one way, while a group of people whose members constitute a community--a group of people who share a common interest and who trust each other--will exercise authority in quite a different manner.
For many generations the Book of Common Prayer was held in common by the Churches of the Anglican Communion around the world. The Prayer Book was a bond of the individual Provinces within the Communion, and its use distinguished those Churches from other religious communities in the world. The Book of Common Prayer was the distinguishing feature of Anglicanism; it was the source of Anglican identity, and it supplied the most universally acknowledged answers to questions about Anglicanism. The common form of Anglican prayer showed what Anglicans believed and consequently gave the norm of Anglican authority. To be a good Anglican a person had to learn at least one Latin sentence: Lex orandi; lex credendi.
The Book of Common Prayer as the common distinguishing feature of Anglicanism has now been lost. Only the title of the prayer books of the Anglican Provinces remains common: liturgical revision and national linguistic patterns have removed the uniformity which had been the common Anglican inheritance from the past.
Would it be too much to say that Anglican liturgical worship, as the result of liturgical revision, may now be characterized as more generally Christian than peculiarly Anglican? That would not be to say that the former worship of Anglicans was unchristian; it would rather mean that such worship is now more easily identifiable with the wider Christian community. The anguish and difficulties within the Anglican Communion arising from the process of liturgical revision pose some penetrating questions. What did a common prayer book formerly mean to the Anglican Communion? Was the book a means which enabled Anglicans to realize their Christian vocation, or was it a possession which kept them from their full Christian calling? If the Book of Common Prayer was little more than a possession owned by an institution, and if liturgical revision is calling Anglicans into the wider Christian experience, then it may be correct to say that the challenge of liturgical renewal in the Anglican Communion is actually a call to Anglicans to move from what they had in history to become more what we are in Christ.
Another way of putting the challenge to the Anglican Communion which we have just mentioned is to ask, "Can we as Anglicans respond to the call of what we are meant to become after suffering the loss of pride in what we had?" "Being Christian" is always a response to a call, and the response is always one of constant change; it is not a state in which we can rest while remaining just as we are.
Anglicans constantly profess that all things necessary to salvation are found in Holy Scripture. If we turn to Scripture, more specifically to Paul's letter to the Romans, we may find help in understanding the crisis of authority Anglicans are presently experiencing.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul criticized the people Israel for taking the Law, which had been given to them as a means of living beyond themselves with God, and trying to turn it into a possession, which they then used to set themselves above the other nations of the world. They turned a challenge into a possession and then congratulated themselves on being God's chosen people.
Israel, according to Paul, instead of living the Law as a gift and becoming different as a result, turned the Law into a mechanism, the operation of which guaranteed their chosen status. The other nations of the world were less favored because the Law was not given to them. Pride of possession obliterated the call to humble service.
As relations with God and other people were externalized and mechanized according to the letter of the Law, authority, too, became rigid, external, and mechanical. So it was that Paul criticized those who lived according to the letter of the Law rather than according to the Law's spirit.
Does Paul's criticism of the people Israel have anything to say to Anglicans today? Have Anglicans ever used the Book of Common Prayer the way Paul criticized Israel's use of the Law? What does our worship mean? What does it say about us? Is the way we worship anything more than the book we use? Have we lost common authority in the Anglican Communion with the loss of a common, formalized style of worship? Has the loss of the uniformity of the old Book of Common Prayer been the loss of Anglican identity? If so, where will we find a new identity and a new source of authority?
The nature of authority in a community arises out of that community's self-understanding. If persons in a society relate only externally to one another as separated individuals, authority will be exercised externally also. Authority will then be reduced to power, and the person with the greatest power, be it legal, economic, physical or social, will have the greatest authority. That is the authority condemned by Christ in his reference to the way the rulers of the nations exercise lordship over their subjects. (Mk. 10:42; Matt. 20:25)
Authority will always be operative in human relations; the only question is where the authority will be located. Will it be located in a common understanding or will it be located id isolated individuals'? Will authority be recognized by people in their interrelations and interdependence on each other, or will each person try to be his or her own authority in everything?
The tendency is certainly towards the latter in our day--both in society at large and in the church. The individualism running rampant in our world reduces authority to the personal views people have about things. One such view is as good as another, and truth about political, ethical, and religious issues is reduced to personal opinion. No one person's opinion is better than any other's.
Individualism produces either chaos or a "marl;etplace society." Nothing can survive in chaos, so individualistic societies tend to be of the marketplace variety. A marketplace is governed completely by external forces interacting with each other: as many products as possible are available, and the consumer may choose any one he or she wishes without condemnation or censure. It is all a matter of taste. The dynamics of a marketplace would be violated if an authority told consumers which product to buy. Consumers have the right to make tip their own minds, and the only pervasive law in such a society is that no one has the right to interfere with the rights of anyone else.
Such marketplace individualism is the destruction of Christianity. The Christian witness--arising from our Judaic origin--is that God chose a people for himself. In calling Abraham, God called a holy nation into existence, God's own people. God does not call individuals one by one, save them, and then tell them to get together because they have been saved. God saves individuals by calling them into his community. Another name for the church, God's people, is "the communion of saints." Christians believe that God himself is a communion of Persons; the life of the Trinity is the heart of the Christian faith.
Christianity is a revealed religion. Christian truth arises from historic events which did not have to happen--the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Witness is the only means by which the truth of such events can he known; thus personal witness is the source of Christian belief. Christians believe that Jesus revealed the truth of God to us by his witness to the Father. Christian truth arises from the witness of Christ and continues in the world only as witness to that truth is made in the world. The truth of Christianity depends on interpersonal relations, for witnessing is the way persons relate to one another. That means that Christians are essentially interdependent on each other in their knowledge of the truth by which they are identified.
The church is a community which can discern its truth only as a community. It took the church the better part of five centuries to finalize its communal faith in the Nicean Creed. It is because of the communal nature of Christian faith and the need to discern God's truth communally, that it is true to say that schism is worse than heresy. But we must say more than that. Let us now look at the specific nature of Christian authority.
The Report of the section on Dogmatic and Pastoral Concerns of the Lambeth Conference of 1988 states that the source of authority, as understood by Christians, is the divine Trinity. (Paragraph 73) The ARCIC Statement, "Authority in the Church I," begins by asserting that God has given all authority to Jesus as Lord, the same point the Lambeth Report just referred to makes in its next sentence. (Cf., Matt. 28:18) The statement of the section on Dogmatic and Pastoral Concerns of Lambeth, 1988, continues by stressing that the primary function of authority in the church is nurture and assurance. (Paragraph 89) Christians see authority as coming from God and committed to Jesus the Christ for such positive reasons as salvation, nurture, and assurance. Jesus is not a law-giver whose primary concern is to tell people what they should not do.
It is important to remember that the basic purpose of authority is not prohibition and restraint. The Greek Word for authority, means "from the nature" or "from the being" of something. True authority is grounded in the very nature of reality, and the core of reality is positive, not negative. Jesus, the incarnate Word, the one through whom the heavens and earth were made, reveals the fullness of the Father's will for creation to us. The source of the reality of the world is thus, for Christians, the source of all authority in the world.
Certainly it is to Jesus that we should go as the source of authority. But is that all there is to it?
Who is the man, Jesus, to whom we go?
When we meet the only Jesus there is, we find him to be a person of mystery. He is someone we do not understand. At best he is a mystery come to take us into mystery.
When it is said that Jesus is the source of all authority for Christians, the sentence is formally correct, but it is too often materially wrong. As the sentence is used in Christian discussion, the Jesus referred to is frequently not the Jesus of the gospel but the Christ of conciliar definition.
Authority is exercised differently in the name of Christ than in the person of Christ. The word, "Christ," which has been turned into a name, means "anointed one." "Being anointed" describes a condition which is quite understandable. The situation is different, however, with the person of Christ, for that person is the mysterious man of Nazareth, Jesus. The title, "Christ," describes a state, condition, or category which can be easily defined. A person, on the other hand, can only be received, he or she cannot be defined in his or her unique historical existence. Our personal differences are relativized by our common relations to a person beyond us, but we are distinguished from each other by our abilities to define.
All of the major Christian denominations accept the Scriptures as normative for the Christian life. But when the Scriptures are declared to be "the soul of sacred Theology," as Vatican II did in the last chapter of its Constitution on Divine Revelation, or when the Scriptures are said to "contain all things necessary to salvation," as Anglican formularies do, "Scripture" does not mean the bare words and sentences of a book. Scripture, as the norm of Christian living, refers to the events and experiences out of which the propositions of Scripture arose and to which printed sentences in documents try to give expression. God's revelation does not arise from sentences in a book; instead revelation speaks through them.
Holy Scripture witnesses to the belief that God's Truth mysteriously entered time and history in Jesus of Nazareth. Christians see Jesus as God's Truth expressed in and through the ambiguities and limitations of historical existence. When the Word became flesh, God in his love, came to be with us, not at us. In the incarnation, God's truth became temporal and historically conditioned; it became located within the horizon of human ambiguity and uncertainty. Jesus was truly a man of faith; he was not a divine actor pretending to be what we are.
A principal difficulty for all of the Christian communions today may be the loss of the Jesus who lived historically in the world, as we do, to the propositionally defined Christ whose office, as the Anointed One, sets him apart from the world in a manner in which we would also like to be set apart.
The difficulty with authority exercised in the name of the propositionally defined title "Christ" is that the authority may be no more than a proposition deduced from a proposition. The statement has formal rigor, but it has no value in the daily lives of men and women because its source, whether taken from a biblical sentence or a conciliar definition, does not have any contact with those lives.
When people do not recognize a source of authority as authoritative, i.e., as significant, the pronouncements of the authority have no significance. The conciliar definitions of the true nature of Christ's divinity and humanity are important for the Christian life, but, as we know, the definitions do not explain how Christ can be truly human and truly divine. Actually, the purpose of conciliar statements is not to explain Christ; instead their purpose is to preserve the mystery of God's revelation in Christ by ruling out simplistic explanations which would destroy the mystery.
Jesus said, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." Does that statement explain either Jesus or the Father? Certainly the Father's mystery is not explained to us by Jesus' statement. How we see the Father when we see Jesus also remains a mystery. Christian authority comes from Jesus all right, but when we meet Jesus, we meet the ultimate mystery of reality in human terms, not a person we can explain. Meeting Jesus neither provides human beings with authority they can understand nor allows them to exercise authority as his vicar, i.e., a person present who acts in the name of a person absent. There is no substitute for the historical Jesus of Nazareth; that is what the historical nature of Christian revelation means.
All Christian authority comes from Jesus, and it is to Jesus that Christians go in their need for authority. If we go to the Jesus who truly lived, to the Jesus of the gospel witness, however, we will find someone who identifies with us in our problems rather than someone who gives us answers to questions which were not asked in his day. The Incarnation consists of the second Person of the Trinity truly identifying with us in our time rather than taking us from our time to his earlier time in first-century Palestine.
The glorified Jesus who lives does not give us simple answers to complex questions; instead he gives us his Spirit to lead us ever deeper into the Truth he is. Jesus is an eschatological Person; his Truth is eschatological also.
The Truth that is Jesus is eschatologically related to us; the full manifestation of that Truth is still beyond us. The gift of the Spirit we receive in Jesus' name is a gift from our future to lead us into the future. Our future in God's Truth is truly future; it is not a completed future given to us in the present. Even within the gift of the Spirit, we must live by faith as we journey into a glory not yet fully known to us.
Christians believe there is an essential unity between the glorified body of Christ in heaven and the mystical body of Christ on earth. Neither mode of Christ's body is itself without the other. After the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost, Christ's glorified body cannot be separated from his universalized mystical body in the world. On the one hand, the glorified body of Christ in heaven is the guarantee and hope of the mystical body in the world, and, on the other hand, the glorified body of Christ in heaven is not its full self until God is all and all in the mystical body.
Persons become their Christian selves only when united with each other through their Head in the Spirit. Christian being is communal being, and Christian discernment is communal discernment. The church is a eucharistic fellowship, and the eucharist is the paradigmatic act of Christian community. The eucharistic body is the means by which the mystical body becomes its full self in the glorified body. The eucharist is the food God gives his people to sustain them in their journey in the world--a journey still going on.
Now we can perhaps see better why schism is worse than heresy. Christian truth is a communally discerned truth, given by witness, that is in process of discovery; it is the completed possession of no one. Discernment can come only through dialogue within the on-going life of the eucharistic community. Separation from community removes one from the receiving agent of God's revelation, for God has chosen a people for himself, a people who are ultimately to include all the people of the earth. The church's discernment of God's truth involves not only dialogue within the church; it also requires dialogue between the church and the world, for God's truth is found in the world as well as in the church.
The eucharistic celebration is a celebration of a community's identity in Christ. Certainly, there must be a communal identity to celebrate. The celebrating community must have a common faith to profess and to give it its identity in the world, but the community's faith is primarily a faith in the location of a mystery in the world and a faith in the manner of living that mystery in the world.
The Incarnate Lord, the source of all Christian authority, bore his witness to the Father by proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God. Christ's consuming proclamation and witness were to the reign of God in the world--to the way human beings relate to each other in the will of God; he was not concerned about establishing, setting up, and perpetuating a new institution. The reign of God proclaimed by Christ is concerned with one thing only--the relation of people in the world to each other in the presence of God. The church is not a separate entity, hermetically sealed, sent into the world to be different from the world. It is because God so loved the world that the Word came and dwelt among us. The church is different from the world at large only because the church is that portion of the world which recognizes something already going on in the world the rest of the world misses.
The church must not be guilty of trying to make a possession of Christ and thinking it is more than the world because of what it has, as the Israelites tried to do with the Law. For all the good the church does, God's grace is doing more in the world beyond the church than through the church. Our privilege--and our condemnation--in the church is to recognize that fact.
Jesus is recognized as Lord and Savior only because of his resurrection from the dead. We do not proclaim Jesus as Lord because of his infallibility. He was wrong, for example, about who wrote the Psalms, and he seems to have been wrong about the manner of the kingdom's coming in relation to the end of the world. Jesus is recognized as Lord and Savior because of his indefectibility--because he rose from the dead. Why should the church, the mystical body of Christ, have more ability than its Head?
The church's primary task is to proclaim the mystery of God in Christ and to be consumed by that mystery in serving the world in love. The Church's authority springs from the resurrection, from the believed certitude that it cannot fail, not from the believed certitude that it cannot err. Christians must remain together in the quest for truth; community--the only means by which Christian truth is discerned--is more important in any given moment of the Church's life than a majority--or minority--opinion of the community's members.
Christians' basic life together is the sacramental life. If the source, nature, and goal of sacramental living can be shared by God's people, that is sufficient creedal uniformity to sustain them in the uncertainties and ambiguities arising in the course of their serving the world in God's name.
Authority is--and should be--used to exclude persons from community who deny the community's means of discernment, for dialogical discernment is the community's manner of being itself and receiving its Truth. If the reign of God is found within the church, as well as being something to be brought to the world, nothing less than the authority of God will define the tolerance of the church as community.
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By ARTHUR A. VOGEL
[*] The Rt. Rev. Arthur A. Vogel is the retired bishop of West Missouri. A former professor of Systematic Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, he holds a Harvard Ph.D. and is the author of several books, most recent of which is I Know Cod Better Than I Know Myself.
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