By Matthew S.C. Olver
 
A shrewd observer of the 114th Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas [Oct. 16-18] might have noted a similarity to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, insofar as resolutions and floor debate were scrapped in favor of corporate discernment on the nature of communion and the Anglican Covenant (following the invitation of Resolution D020 of the Episcopal Church’s 2009 General Convention).   
 
The Rt. Rev. James Stanton, Bishop of Dallas, also found a precedent for this approach in the first convention of the diocese in 1895, where, following the lead of Bishop Alexander Garrett, delegates “sat, almost through the whole of it, as a Committee of the Whole”—speaking directly to each other, debating, and considering drafts of their Constitution. That convention moreover began its work with the ecclesial equivalent of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, quoted by Bishop Stanton at the beginning of his address:
 
“Every Diocese is an independent and sovereign state, held in the unity of the Catholic Church by its Episcopate, according to the rule of St. Cyprian … The Diocese thus becomes the ecclesiastical unit, a full and perfect integer sufficient of itself for all purposes of growth and development.”
 
In turn, this convention, Bishop Stanton explained, should aim to “grow in the perception and understanding of the character of our diocese and the proposed Anglican Covenant.” And then, in Eastertide of 2010, a special convention will consider “resolutions of substance” and take up a formal response to the covenant.
 
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The October convention centered around three major papers, which may be found on the Diocese of Dallas's website for its publication, Esprit. Following is an interpretive summary of each.
 
Bishop Stanton’s address, “Diocese and Covenant: Reflections on Dallas, its History and Future,” set forth “the classic understanding of the polity [i.e., canonical ordering] of the Episcopal Church and the place of the diocese” within it. It turns out that the Episcopal Church (TEC) does have a unique polity (as critics of the covenant also maintain), insofar as we chose to eschew a hierarchy of archbishops or metropolitans like that in the Church of England. In this regard TEC uniquely embodies (though not completely so) what many in the “primitive church” assumed, namely, that “the diocese, not the parish, is the local Church—the whole of the Church in a given place.”
 
One can hear in this a strong echo both of the latest statement of the Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue (cited in the covenant text) and the work of Orthodox theologians such as John Zizioulas. In Zizoulas’s recent summary of St. Cyprian, for instance, “every bishop is to lead his own diocese, ordain whomever he wishes, and be responsible directly to God” (Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, 142). In turn, however, “the great deposit of authority resides not in each individual bishop, but in the complete apostolic college. It resides in the whole body of bishops.” This fits with the covenant’s insistence that adopting churches be “mindful of the common councils of the Communion and our ecumenical agreements” (1.2.1; cf. 3.1.2).
 
On all counts, the notion “that the province is the supreme authority over every diocese” is mistaken, Bishop Stanton argued, on historical and theological grounds, as well as the grounds of TEC’s own canon law. After all, dioceses are first formed before they are “admitted” into union with the General Convention (Title 1, Canon 10.4). Church historian Powell Mills Dawley noted this peculiar feature of TEC’s polity when he wrote that dioceses “possess an independence far greater than that characteristic in most other churches with episcopal polity ... [W]hile the bishop’s exercise of independent power within the diocese is restricted by the share in church government possessed by the diocesan convention and the standing committee, his independence to the rest of the church is almost complete” (The Episcopal Church and Its Work, 115f.). If a certain autonomy attaches to TEC as a provincial church, therefore, the dioceses of TEC “have the same if not even a greater claim to autonomy,” Bishop Stanton concluded.
 
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Mark McCall, Esq., an associate of the Anglican Communion Institute, presented the second paper, “TEC Polity, the Civil Law and the Anglican Covenant.” Mr. McCall moved the convention’s focus from the diocese to the province in a careful summary of legal issues surrounding the covenant, beginning with the fact that civil law considers TEC a “voluntary association.”
 
A corporation, on the other hand, only exists when “the state ... issues a certificate of incorporation.” A voluntary association is distinguished by, among other things, the fact that the members can agree on their own governing rules.
 
Accordingly, “probably the most important legal question” regarding TEC and the Anglican covenant is: “Who are the members of the voluntary association that is TEC?” And the answer of TEC’s constitution is dioceses, since they join the General Convention through “accession.” This is demonstrated at General Convention in votes by orders wherein “each diocese gets one vote when the lay order votes and one vote when the clergy vote.” Another kind of legislative body sits alongside General Convention, however, namely, diocesan conventions
 
This therefore forms an overlapping or “concurrent” jurisdiction, a commonplace in American government. Not only do “the Congress and state legislatures frequently legislate on the same things,” but the President, with the concurrence of two thirds of the Senate, can enact a treaty which is “inconsistent with a statute” enacted by the Congress. In this second instance, the “last in time” rule applies, where the later statute prevails. But in the first instance, state legislatures do not have the option to make such an appeal because of another kind of rule, which adjudicates overlapping jurisdiction in terms of “supremacy.” The U.S. Constitution has such a supremacy clause that makes federal law “the supreme law of the land.”
 
TEC’s constitution, however, “has no such supremacy clause giving General Convention priority over diocesan conventions.” In fact, “the closest the TEC constitution comes to this concept is in the provision making the bishop and standing committee ‘the ecclesiastical authority’ in the diocese,” which means “the Presiding Bishop, the General Convention and the Executive Council are not.” Moreover, the absence of a supremacy clause in TEC’s constitution means that “we have concurrent jurisdiction without supremacy among the General Convention and the various diocesan conventions, and each can theoretically undo what the other has done.” And since the diocese meets in convention three times as often as the General Convention, “this gives a distinct legal advantage to the diocese, and as a practical matter, the diocese gets the last word.”
 
The implications of this for TEC and the covenant are threefold. “Dioceses have the inherent authority to commit themselves to the covenant as soon as it is available.” Likewise, “dioceses that do not want to assume the obligations of mutual responsibility entailed by the covenant ... would be able to nullify that adoption and those commitments for their dioceses.”
 
The Anglican covenant, and the Anglican Communion as a whole, has nothing to say about TEC’s polity and no power to affect it. The covenant text explicitly states as much in 4.1.4 with reference to provincial — and, it is implied, diocesan — autonomy, that is, local canon law.
 
Autonomy-in-communion means that, as the Windsor Report put it, “communion is the fundamental limit to autonomy,” which Mr. McCall spelled out in practical terms: “the Communion does not care how we do what we do,” but “they do care — deeply in some cases — what we do. There are some things that TEC could do — some say has already done — that put TEC outside the Communion. This has nothing to do with TEC’s polity, but with what that polity produced …. [T]hat is why the refrain ‘you don’t understand our polity’ is irrelevant.”
 
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The convention’s final paper, “Crossroads Are for Meeting (Again)” by the Very Rev. Philip Turner of the Anglican Communion Institute, moved the discussion back one step again to the level of the Communion to answer the question of how “autonomous churches, called to carry out God’s mission at a particular time and place,” may “remain at the same time in a Communion that is catholic in both belief and practice.”
 
Dean Turner spent a significant part of the address responding to the claim that a covenant is “un-Anglican” by its very nature, even as the drafters of the text “bent over backwards to protect the autonomy of the provinces.” Section 3.2 is especially instructive here, in its exhortation to “have regard for the common good of the Communion” via “mutual responsibility and interdependence,” that is, a commitment to test new insights “by shared discernment,” so as “to seek a shared mind with other churches, through the Communion’s councils, about matters of common concern.”
 
Again, one could amplify the argument with reference to John Zizioulas, who writes of councils: “Whenever the issues are common, a council is required, the authority of which is limited to that issue. A council cannot impose anything on a Church, unless other Churches are affected by the consequence of its action” (Lectures, 143). This fits rather neatly with what Bishop Garrett called “the confirmatory action of conciliar ratification”— discerned in the interplay between local and universal.
 
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“The question is not whether we need a covenant,” Bishop Stanton offered near the end of his address, “but what the nature of the covenant is that we already have — that already in some sense underlies being an Anglican.” And I suppose that that is a good way to think about the summons of the proposed Anglican covenant: as a way to grow more fully into who we already are, “in continuity and consonance with Scripture and the catholic and apostolic faith, order and tradition.”
 
The Rev. Matthew S.C. Olver is curate at the Church of the Incarnation, Dallas.
 
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