Editor's Notes

Anglican Theological Review, Summer 2006 by Wondra, Ellen K

"Church scholars." What images does that phrase conjure? Learned women and men in book-lined studies, sitting in armchairs and reading? Or bent over cluttered desks marking student papers? Teachers in seminary classrooms making erudite comments to wideeyed, eager young students? Someone in a white coat presiding over "classrooms and labs, loud boiling test tubes"? Perhaps an archaeologist on a dig in the Sinai Desert; or a researcher in a monastery library, leaving stacks of books to pray the Daily Office? How about a group of people in a windowless hotel conference room, carefully working out every word, every phrase of a document going to the next General Convention?

This last image may seem improbable, but in fact a great deal of the church's work is done by scholars who are members of the church's standing commissions, committees, agencies, and boards. In the wake of the Episcopal Church's most recent General Convention and the Anglican Church of Canada's most recent General Synod, and as the preparation for the 2008 Lambeth Conference begins, it's worth pausing a moment to acknowledge this too often unheralded work.

In the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, it is these commissions, committees, agencies, and boards that devise new rites for worship, negotiate ecumenical agreements, write and evaluate ordination exams, and consider and develop the church's theology of mission or its ethics for end-of-life issues. And the scholars who serve on these groups put in hours, days, or weeks each year researching, writing, presenting, and commenting. The contributions of the Episcopal Church's scholars are spread throughout the "Blue Book"; the resolutions sent to Convention committees, the House of Bishops, and the House of Clerical and Lay Deputies; and the reports filed by title in the proceedings of General Convention.

What is noteworthy here is not that scholars are asked to use their expertise for the sake of the church-that is certainly as it should be. Rather, the work scholars do in these settings is often very different from their "own work"-those ongoing projects of research, writing, and teaching that many of us think of as "real scholarship." Often, church scholars are asked-and consent-to setting aside their personal interests or points of view in order to lend their knowledge and skill to some work that the church needs to have done. For example, a biblical theologian may write a question for the General Ordination Examination that can reveal the extent of students' abilities to follow a theme through both testaments of the Bible and then teach it in an adult education setting in a small parish. Or a church historian may write a succinct account of the local adaptation of the episcopate in two different churches now trying to overcome historic divisions. A theologian may be asked to give theological support for a practice of the church that the theologian him- or herself finds problematic. A liturgiologist may be asked to assess a eucharistie rite intended for use in very specific circumstances. The outcomes of such efforts may be filed away somewhere rather than published, or they may appear as the work of the group as a whole. Such presentations may not be what scholars create as part of their ongoing constructive work. But they are what the church needs.

My sense is that most church members have little or no awareness of this part of the work of church scholars, or its importance to the church's ongoing life. Academic institutions-and, indeed, other scholars-do not easily see the value of a scholar's writing a paper on someone else's topic. Church scholars themselves may chafe at what ATR Board member Bill Petersen calls "the vocation to anonymity." But "vocation" is surely the right word.

The ATR regularly publishes the work of church scholars as part of our mission of contributing to the thoughtful consideration and careful discussion of matters facing the church and its members. Sometimes these are conference papers, sometimes assessments of and responses to important documents or events. Recently we've published some of the papers prepared for the Theology Committee of the House of Bishops. In this issue, we are printing two responses to some of those papers as a way to broaden the conversation, the debate, on something that affects us all. Such learned conversation is part of the Spirit's work in the church, I am convinced. Without it, the church succumbs to the temptations of reactivity, of vet more reiterations of entrenched positions (and often more strident ones at that), of appeals to what we may remember of long-past "golden days," and of recourse to anecdotes whose import is evident perhaps only to the speaker. Sound scholarship, critical and self-critical reflection, and careful discussion are indispensable as we wrestle with the many issues, events, and eontroversies that are so much of our calling of faithfulness to the gospel. Thank God for the work of church scholars.