The Gift of Authority

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan, 2000 by Michael Root

An Observer's Report and Analysis

On 12 May 1999, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission released its most recent agreed statement, The Gift of Authority: Authority in the Church III/(hereafter GA).(1) This statement takes up one of the most difficult ecumenical topics -- the authority within the church of official teaching -- and addresses some of its most difficult aspects, from the role of the laity in teaching to the special teaching role of the bishop of Rome. The commission makes large claims for its work: "We believe that if this statement about the nature of authority and the manner of its exercise is accepted and acted upon, this issue will no longer be a cause of continued breach of communion between our two churches" (GA [sections] 51).

How does the commission reach this conclusion? What does it have to say about authority in the church? How does what it says relate to discussions in the wider ecumenical world, especially within the Faith and Order movement? In addressing these questions, I shall limit myself to the text of GA and not comment on what I observed within the work of the commission as the Faith and Order observer from the World Council of Churches. While seeing the text develop certainly aids in understanding it, what is said here does not depend on "inside information". (I must add that the commission was unfailingly gracious in its welcome to me.)

Moreover, I will relate this report to the wider ecumenical concerns of Faith and Order, although my own Lutheran perspective will undoubtedly shape what I have to say. A bilateral dialogue, especially between churches as closely related as the Anglican and Catholic churches, naturally can agree in greater detail than is possible in the multilateral discussions typical of Faith and Order. We who are neither Catholic nor Anglican need both to ask ourselves what aspects of this text can be taken up into the wider discussion and to let ourselves be challenged by the specificity of what Anglicans and Catholics can say together.

Some preliminary considerations

Anglican-Catholic dialogue since the Second Vatican Council has gone through three institutional phases. A preparatory commission worked during 1967 and 1968 to devise a programme and structure for the dialogue.(2) On the basis of its work, a first Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission began work in 1970. It produced a series of texts during the 1970s, which were gathered together with a preface and introduction in the Final Report of 1982.(3) In addition to sections on the eucharist and on ministry and ordination, the Final Report contained two texts on authority (titled simply Authority I and Authority II) and a set of Elucidations to Authority I (these texts will hereafter be referred to as Auth I, Auth II and Auth El). Unlike the texts on the eucharist and on ministry, the texts on authority indicate continuing areas of significant disagreement (e.g., Auth I, Preface, [sections] 24; Auth H, [sections] 29).(4) ARCIC was reconstituted following the release of the Final Report, and a new team produced a series of further statements on Salvation and the Church (1987), Church as Communion (1991) and Life in Christ (1994).

Meanwhile, the Final Report was being evaluated by the Anglican and Catholic churches. The 1988 Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops sought to summarize the responses from the various provinces of the Anglican communion. While it affirmed the eucharist and ministry documents as "consonant in substance with the faith of Anglicans and ... a sufficient basis for taking the next step forward towards the reconciliation of our churches", the statements on authority were said simply to be "a firm basis for the direction and agenda of the continuing dialogue.(5) The provinces had responded with "a clear `yes'" to the eucharist and ministry texts, but their evaluations of the authority statements were only "generally positive", raising questions "especially concerning primacy, jurisdiction and infallibility, collegiality, and the role of the laity".(6) The Vatican response, not released until 1991, was more negative in its assessment of the authority texts, especially in relation to the treatment of infallibility and reception, where it found "a different understanding" from that of the First Vatican Council.(7)

The responses to the Final Report thus laid a double burden on ARCIC when it returned to the question of authority. On the one hand, the agreements on eucharist and ministry made authority appear as the one major stumbling block on the path to Anglican-Catholic communion (especially if differences over the ordination only of men are seen as a function of differences over authority).(8) On the other hand, the somewhat guarded Anglican affirmation and critical Vatican response meant that the commission needed to revisit with some care issues already addressed.

GA is striking in its combination of concrete suggestions for ecumenical action with theological discussions of foundational questions of Trinity and of ecclesiology. While a number of journalists have focused their reports only on GA's proposal regarding the exercise of papal primacy even prior to full communion, the preface invites readers "to follow the path that led the commission to its conclusions". Bishop Mark Santer, Anglican co-chair during the production of GA, emphasized at the press conference releasing the text that people should read the agreed statement rather than immediately react to reports of its recommendations.(9) A first general rule of interpretation should thus be always to place GA's concrete proposals in the context of its wider theological analysis.