The Most Rev. Robin Eames, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, told an alumni convocation gathered Oct. 4 at Virginia Theological Seminary that the “distress signals” of division throughout the Anglican Communion have perhaps never been more acute.

If the Communion is to survive, Archbishop Eames said, the member provinces will almost certainly have to come to a common understanding on the authority of scripture.

Archbishop Eames was the chair of the Lambeth Commission on Communion, the 17-member task force appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to provide recommendations on how to maintain the highest level of communion among the 38 provinces. In the opening of a two-part series Archbishop Eames addressed “The Anglican Communion: A Growing Reality,” tracing the current crisis back to the failure of previous generations.

“Am I alone in thinking that at the root of those clashes, irrespective of our personal allegiances or preferences, lies the failure of succeeding generations of Anglicans to accept that there are parameters to divergence in scriptural interpretation, there are boundaries to ecclesiastical autonomy and there are limitations to what a world family of vague technical relationships can endure and still remain a cohesive entity,” he said. “I do not question the depth of sincerity of the conservative or liberal Anglican in any way. I seek only to try to decode the pressures which were to produce reaction to New Hampshire and New Westminster.”

The framers of the Windsor Report were confronted not so much by the challenge of change to historic “understandings” of human sexuality, but rather how a “voluntary allegiance of autonomous bodies” can reconcile over deeply held principles over which “there can be no compromise.”

It is possible, Archbishop Eames concluded, that future generations of Anglicans will regard this period of the Communion’s history not in a negative way, but rather as an “inevitable sign of growth, a sign of maturity even in the history of a most diverse world Christian family if the Communion can avoid becoming fixated on any one issue while it comes to agreement about “who decides” the “limits of diversity.”

Much Work Remains

In the second of his two addresses, Archbishop Robin Eames commended the Episcopal Church for its compliance with the Windsor Report, but suggested that more needs to be done to heal the breach in fellowship within the Anglican Communion.

Noting in his Oct. 6 address that he has long been a friend of the Episcopal Church, Archbishop Eames said, “I share the pain of ECUSA and Canada” at their estrangement from the wider Anglican Communion, but noted he believed the two had taken the Windsor Report and the primates’ Northern Ireland communiqué “very seriously.”

The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada “have complied, in so far as it lies within the power of bodies less than their national synod, to meet the requests made of them,” he said. “So far so good, but much remains.”

The House of Bishops’ March 15 Covenant Statement had expressed the requisite “regret” for breaching the Anglican Communion’s “bonds of affection” and had even “exceeded what was asked for by the Windsor Report,” he said.

Introduced by fellow Lambeth Commission on Communion member and VTS instructor Bishop Mark Dyer, Archbishop Eames thanked the seminary and the Diocese of Virginia for their support for the commission’s work. The Rt. Rev. Peter J. Lee, Bishop of Virginia, and the Rt. Rev. John B. Chane, Bishop of Washington, were also introduced to the gathering of students, alumni and friends of the seminary and thanked.

Archbishop Eames’ conclusion that the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada had made a good-faith effort to comply with the Windsor Report was well received. He stated the House of Bishops’ Covenant’s pledge “not to authorize” rites for the blessing of same-sex unions or to “bless” such unions had “met the precise wording of Windsor.”

While acknowledging that the Rt. Rev. Michael Ingham and the Diocese of New Westminster continued to permit blessings of same-sex unions, Archbishop Eames stated the Canadian diocese would “go no further” and that its bishop “has expressed his regret at the consequences of his actions.”

Archbishop Eames defended the Windsor Report from its detractors, saying it was not a “revolutionary document” but a restatement of classical Anglicanism. He encouraged the Episcopal Church to look at the report as a “tangible concept” for “living in communion” for the wider Church.

For the Anglican Communion to survive, he noted, the member churches must be willing to sacrifice their claims to absolute autonomy. “As long as total autonomy in the ecclesiological sense is a reality,” Archbishop Eames stated, “differences such as at present will continue to be a threat to any common expression of Anglicanism.”

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