From
Living Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Evangelical Lutheran Church In America
Volume 2, Number 4
Epiphany 1998
Ecumenism and Full Communion
Report on Lutheran-Episcopal Relations:
Frank C. Senn
You invited Bill Roberts and
myself, as the ecumenical officers of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago and the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Metropolitan Chicago Synod respectively,
to give a report on Lutheran-Episcopal Relationships. The invitation to address
this symposium was extended before the votes were taken at our respective
church assemblies this past summer. The planners of this symposium probably
assumed that the Concordat of Agreement
would be passed by the General Convention of The Episcopal Church and the
Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and that we
could report on how full communion between our Churches was being implemented.
Now, of course, we can only report that the
Concordat was passed overwhelmingly by the two houses of The Episcopal
Church and failed by six votes in the Churchwide Assembly of the ELCA; so full
communion is not yet in the process of being implemented.
The failure of the ELCA to
muster a clear two-thirds majority of its Churchwide Assembly to adopt the Concordat was as much of a surprise to
many in the ELCA as it was to The Episcopal Church and the rest of the
ecumenical community. The failure to adopt the Concordat even put a damper on the successful passage of the Formula of Agreement between the ELCA
and the Reformed Church in America, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., and
the United Church of Christ. Up until the year before the full communion votes,
many would have guessed that the Lutheran-Reformed proposal would have had a
tougher time passing than the Lutheran-Episcopal proposal. After all, there are
no church-dividing theological issues between Lutherans and Anglicans, as there
are between Lutherans and the Reformed. Thirty years of national and
international bilateral dialogue have declared this to be the case. The
Lutheran and Anglican Churches of Northern Europe have entered into full
communion on the basis of the Porvoo Agreement. Of course, the Lutheran
Churches in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia have either retained the
historic episcopate or restored it, and the Churches of Norway and Iceland have
at least retained an episcopal polity.
Full
communion with The Episcopal Church would have required the ELCA to implement
the historic episcopate over a period of years. The drafters of the Concordat didn’t see a problem with this
since the Lutheran Confessions are not opposed to it if that is part of what is
comprehended under “the traditional polity,” which the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article 14, expresses a desire
to retain. The Concordat also
committed The Episcopal Church to immediate recognition of the ordained
ministry in the ELCA by suspending, in the case of the ELCA only, a three
hundred-year-old canon so as not to suggest that anything was being added to
the requirements of Christian unity other than the agreement in the Gospel and
the Sacraments that Article 7 of the Augsburg
Confession says “is enough” (satis
est). But it was not enough! Enough members of the ELCA Churchwide Assembly
were opposed to implementation of the historic episcopate, as proposed in the Concordat, to scuttle the Agreement.
The
Assembly itself was so shocked by the failure of the Concordat just minutes after it had adopted by 80% the Formula of Agreement, that former
Governor Al Quie of Minnesota, who had led the floor fight against the Concordat, entered a motion to
reconsider the matter. He said he was impressed by the fact that 66.1% of the
assembly---a clear majority!--- indicated that it could accept the historic
episcopate. But the motion to reconsider was decisively defeated--wisely in my
opinion, since if it had passed on a second vote, say by a margin of 6, this
would have ripped apart the Church. No, the nature of the debate disclosed that
Lutherans have a lot of homework to do on this issue. This was reflected in two
resolutions that passed overwhelmingly the next day. One resolved to “seek
conversations with The Episcopal Church, building on the degree of consensus
achieved at this assembly and addressing concerns which emerged during
consideration of the Concordat of
Agreement. The aim of these conversations is to bring to the 1999
Churchwide Assembly a revised proposal for full communion,” and in the meantime
“the 1982 agreement for ‘Interim Eucharistic Sharing’” would “continue to guide
joint ministry efforts in worship, education, and mission.” The second
resolution requested the Presiding Bishop, Church Council, Department of
Ecumenical Affairs, and Conference of Bishops to “create opportunities for
dialogue and teaching within the ELCA concerning the possible avenues for full
communion with The Episcopal Church.” Such educational possibilities are to be
created “in consultation with The Episcopal Church,” with the aspiration of
ratifying an agreement for full communion at the 1999 Churchwide Assembly.
Indeed,
the issues raised in the discussion of the Concordat
must not be studied only by the rank-and-file clergy and laity in the Church;
those who must do the teaching also need a more solid understanding. The case
for the Concordat was not helped by
lack of an answer to a delegate’s question as to why only bishops should
ordain, which left the assembly with the impression that the agreement we would
require this just to please The Episcopal Church. When delegates expressed
concern that the adoption of a more hierarchical model of the church would
jeopardize the priesthood of believers, there was no adequate response either
in terms of the fact that the church has a hierarchical nature, since it lives
under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the head of his body, or in terms of the
true meaning of the priesthood of believers in the Lutheran tradition, which has
more to do with Christian vocation in the world than with polity in the church.
It apparently didn’t occur to anyone to point out that the Church of Sweden,
with its claims of apostolic succession and three-fold order of ministry, also
has an impressive praxis of the priesthood of believers even in terms of the
governance of the Church. And the argument of a number of ELCA bishops,
expressed in a circular letter to the delegates before the Assembly, that these
two proposals for full communion were necessary for “mission” was weak, since a
word-and-sacrament understanding of the missio
Dei was not advanced over the usual understandings of mission as church
programs and planning, which we can already do together.
Still,
one wonders whether the tactical inadequacies of the Concordat’s managers and proponents could have offset the visceral
opposition, especially of those in the Upper Midwest. This is the heartland of
what Professor George Lindbeck of Yale has called “denominational Lutheranism.”
Denominational Lutherans hold the assumption that the schism of the 16th
century is permanent and has among its institutional manifestations a Lutheran Church. It is noteworthy that misgivings
were expressed from this quarter about all three ecumenical proposals, including
the Joint Declaration on Justification by Faith between the Lutheran World
Federation and the Roman Catholic Church that the ELCA passed by a nearly
unanimous vote. “Denominational Lutheranism” may be contrasted with the agenda
of the evangelical catholics to heal the breach of the 16th century and to work
toward reconciliation with the Bishop and Church of Rome. It must be admitted
that some of the evangelical catholics did not regard full communion with the
Episcopal Church as a way of advancing this agenda. They had misgivings about
adopting Anglican orders and about the decision of the church court that tried
the Bishop Righter case that separated moral teachings from core doctrines of
the faith. However, neither their misgivings (expressed in the Summer 1997
issue of the independent journal, Lutheran
Forum) nor the opposition to the
Concordat by prominent elder churchmen (also published in the Summer 1997 Lutheran Forum), was really decisive in
the defeat of the Concordat. It was
defeated by the anti-hierarchical pietism of the Upper Midwest “denominational
Lutherans” that has dogged consensus on issues of ecclesiology and ministry
since the formation of the ELCA.
I’m
sorry to have to air our internal problems in an ecumenical forum, but full
communion is an ecclesiastical-political proposal and is therefore subject to
the vicissitudes of ecclesiastical politics. I don’t imply by “politics”
something seamy and underhanded; since we live in Chicago I need to say that,
because here “politics” has a less-than-pure connotation. While, unfortunately,
there was a bit of sleaze associated with the campaign against the Concordat, I’m really talking about
“politics” as “polity”--the way a community organizes itself and does its
business. The fact is that full communion with the Episcopal Church was spiked
by the polity decisions resulting from the six-year, multi-million dollar Study
of Ministry that was mandated at the formation of the ELCA in order to make the
merger possible, and which represents, in my view, a sorry conclusion that
precludes moving toward the kind of ecumenical consensus on ministry embodied
in the World Council of Churches Faith and Order Statement on Baptism, Eucharist, Ministry. The fact
is that the restoration of the historic episcopate and the three-fold ordering
of the one divinely-instituted ministry of word and sacrament, as articulated
in the BEM document, was considered
in the discussions surrounding the formation of the ELCA, but was rejected by
the Commission for a New Lutheran Church as something a major segment of
Lutherans was not prepared to accept.
The
ecumenical establishment has been focused on dialogues in which each side
presents its pristine position. I think our understaffed Office of Ecumenical Relations
was not prepared to deal with the messier in-house discussions that it will
take to pass ecclesiastical-political proposals of full communion. The rest of
you need to study what happened in the ELCA and be instructed by it, even
though for each of our Churches the neuralgic issues will be different. In the
ELCA the depth of feeling about the issues of ministry and polity has been
expressed by Gracia Grindal of Luther Seminary, who represents many of her
colleagues when she asserts (in the Fall 1997 issue of Dialog), in the face of the massive reflections on the doctrine of
the church in 20th century theology, that “Ecclesiology is the dreary science
of the theological encyclopaedia, one that Lutherans have generally agreed on
until now because of our strong theology of the word alone.” Compromise, in her
view, is impossible: “You can’t have the historic episcopate, plus the word
alone.” Arguing that we have been asked to give up our unique theological voice
in the ecumenical choir, she represents a wide constituency when she claims
that “The idea that real bishops because of their ordination receive the
charism to effect [sic] the sacrament
and make real priests is what this is all about, not the unbroken link with
Peter. It’s beyond hierarchy; it’s the theology-izing of power.”
Quite
frankly, I don’t know how compromise is possible with this point of view; nor
does it lend itself to any ecumenical breakthroughs on issues of polity and
ministry. This is the Protestant principle upheld as a position in itself
rather than as a corrective to the catholic tradition, such as I understand the
Lutheran “solas” to be. A doctrine of the church is impossible to develop from
the “word alone.” It has nothing to say about church structures. It does not
provide an answer to even such basic questions of church order as: Who preaches
the word that convenes the church? Who authorizes someone to exercise the
office of the word and the sacraments? How is that office supervised? You may
come up with answers quite different from those proposed in the Concordat of Agreement, but you can’t
ignore these ecclesiological questions. But there has been no proposal coming
from the “denominational Lutherans” other than tinkering with the forms of
ministry that emerged in the two emergency situations of the Reformation itself
and the need to minister to the congregations that sprang up in American
frontier settlements. It should not escape notice that it is in metropolitan
areas today that interest in the “traditional” episcopal and diaconal
ministries is strongest, and that these ministries are connected more with
mission than with privilege.
It
has been said that ecumenical work helps one come to terms with one’s own
tradition. But we are coming to realize now that our own tradition is not just
what is presented in the Confessions; it is also what is held in actuality for
other historical reasons (e.g. bad experiences with the hierarchy in the
Churches of countries of origin) and what is practiced in actual church life
(e.g. the ideology of democracy). One of the problems with the Concordat, such
as the impression that the ELCA must adopt the Episcopal Church’s orders of
ministry, could be circumvented if the ELCA simply made a decision to acquire
the historic episcopate from Lutheran Churches which have it, and with which we
are in full communion. But nothing can be done that simply; and the fact is
that it is episcop_ that is the
problem for American Lutherans.
We
have come to remarkable convergences in bilateral dialogues by revisiting
confessional documents and conciliar decisions; but the results of those
dialogues can founder on the shoals of actual church authority-structures. The
highest authority in the ELCA is a 1,000-member Churchwide Assembly that is
brought together for a week every two years. Such an Assembly can be subject to
mood swings in its own deliberations and in the wider church in which truth
becomes almost irrelevant. Even ecumenical councils could be subject to mood
swings, but what balances the force of passing moods is an awareness on the
part of bishops and theologians that they represent the apostolic tradition in
the decisions they must make. The ELCA Churchwide Assembly is not capable of
“teaching” with authority, in spite of its constitutional legitimacy, because
it is 60% composed of lay people who are not, in the words of the Augsburg Confession, Article 14,
“regularly called” to the teaching office of the Church. Responsibility for
transmitting the apostolic tradition has not been laid on them, so the collapse
of confessional doctrine, ecclesiology, liturgical norms and moral teaching
follows as a matter of course. We see this reflected in the decisions of this
past summer. This Churchwide Assembly entered into full communion with Churches
with whom we do not have agreement in eucharistic faith and practice; it could
not seize an opportunity to begin a process of restoring a polity that its own
Confession prefers. It did not think to remove from a statement on “The Use of
the Means of Grace” a provision that allows bishops to authorize lay persons to
preside at the Eucharist. And it was unable to order the Church’s Board of
Pensions to stop paying for abortions through its health plan. In each case the
decision made required no change of the status
quo. I wonder what would have been the fate of the Formula of Agreement if it had required polity changes on our part
to be more explicitly presbyterian.
This is the actual ELCA authority
structure with which other Churches must deal once we move past the stage of
dialogue to the stage of implementing real ecclesiastical-political
relationships of full communion. Perhaps there are other ways of expressing
church unity than by means of the ecclesiastical-political enactments of full
communion. This is something that needs to be explored since the actuality of
ELCA church life is reflected in the actuality of other Churches as well. There
are no greener pastures. There are only pastures which, in the course of our
spiritual journeys, we discover to be truly our own. This was John Henry
Newman’s discovery, too, when he concluded that he could not so much find a
true Church as a “real” one. As best as I understand him, by “real church”
Newman meant one that could act with authority because it had a real
magisterium, not an “unreal” one (e.g. like the British Parliament, like a
churchwide assembly). As I have studied his life, I have found that Newman’s
journey illumines my own confessional and ecumenical journey, perhaps because
we are led by the same “kindly Light.” That light shines on the ecumenical path
of all of us. Perhaps you too will resonate with the sentiments of Newman’s
poem.
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on;
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on:
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
Frank C. Senn
Pastor, Immanuel,
Evanston
Ecumenical
Representative of the Metropolitan Chicago Synod