Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

Notes on the Conference at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary

June 4 through 7, 2008

Meeting of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius

Rome, Constantinople and Canterbury, Mother Churches?

By The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius is eighty years old. It was founded in England to encourage person to person ecumenical dialogue and fellowship between Anglicans and the Eastern Orthodox. The fellowship publishes the highly respected journal Sobornost. The mission of the Fellowship has been expanded over the years to include Christians of other traditions who are committed to East-West dialogue. The Fellowship website is http://www.sobornost.org/. MP3s of all the talks are available at http://ancientfaith.com/specials/svs_jan2008/.

The conference was held at St. Vladimir’s in Crestwood, New York which is in a leafy suburb just outside New York City. The facilities were lovely. The conference began and ended each day with Orthodox liturgies in the beautiful but intimate chapel and on Saturday there was an Anglican Eucharist celebrated in the Anglo-Catholic style by Bishop Keith Ackerman in the Church of St. James the Less in Scarsdale, N.Y. The rector there, Fr. Tom Newcomb is an old friend from S.E.A.D. days. The conference was international with many attendees from England who were supporting the re-launch of the Fellowship in North America. There was quite a wonderful atmosphere of genuine Christian hospitality and charity generated by the Orthodox and one could not doubt the genuine desire on the part of our hosts to have real koinonia with Christians of other traditions. Of course this fellowship could not extend to sharing the Eucharist. There was a good showing of Anglican participants both as presenters in attendance. I saw many friends from S.E.A.D. days and from Mere Anglicanism. There were faculty from Trinity, Nashotah House and Berkeley at Yale.

The topic of the conference was the meaning of primacy both in terms of the primacy of a mother church and the meaning of episcopal, regional and universal primacy. The topic is pertinent to the ecclesiological crisis in the Anglican world. The Orthodox world is split into competing jurisdictions which means that a given city may have as a dozen or so different Orthodox bishops. The Orthodox are painfully aware of the negative impact of this reality on mission. There is also a hot discussion in the Orthodox world about whether the Ecumenical Patriarch, the first among equals of all the Orthodox primates, should be the bishop of an old imperial capital with a dwindling flock and who is compromised by the interference of a government hostile to Christianity.

The first speaker was Metropolitan Phillip (Saliba) of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. This is the Orthodox jurisdiction that has ordained a number of former Evangelicals including Peter Gilchrist, the former Intervarsity worker. They have also developed a Western rite liturgy that is oriented toward former Anglicans. His topic was “Canon 28 of the 4^th Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon in 451, Relevant or Irrelevant Today?” Canon 28 of the Council proclaimed that Constantinople as the new Imperial capital or the New Rome should have the same dignity and authority as the old Rome in ecclesiastical matters and that the Metropolitan of Constantinople should be Patriarch and Primate of the churches in the old Eastern Roman provinces and that all the metropolitans of these provinces should be ordained by him. Metropolitan Phillip identified three kinds of canons; dogmatic canons, contextual canons and dead canons. He identified as dead canons several canons that were essentially anti-Semitic including a canon that forbade the Orthodox to consult Jewish doctors or bathe with Jews. He said that he had Jewish doctors and also bathed in the ocean where certainly Jews had bathed and so had run afoul of these “dead canons.” Dogmatic canons are things such as canons defining the Incarnation. Contextual canons are canons developed to respond to particular historical situations and ++Phillip put Canon 28 in this category. He pronounced the idea of Rome, second Rome (Constantinople) and third Rome (as Moscow is called) “absurd.” These sees have had pre-eminence in the past because of their political significance. These canons defining their primacy have been historical and administrative and they are no longer relevant. Jerusalem alone has a claim to primacy which is not contingent on changing historical and political circumstances.

The application of Canon 28 in North America has created chaos and led to a proliferation of competing jurisdictions. Metropolitan Phillip gave a very scathing indictment of the ethnocentrism of Orthodoxy in North American and their lack of missionary and evangelical zeal. He spoke very forcefully against the notion of the Orthodox in North America as a diaspora. This concept encourages overlapping Orthodox jurisdictions. He spoke of the need for a united Orthodox jurisdiction in North America and of the failures of SCOBA (Standing Committee of Orthodox Bishops in America). He ended by saying that the church in North America was mature enough to govern itself and should not be organized ethnically and encouraged the beginning of unity with the clergy and laity on the local level. He called for the creation of an inter-Orthodox commission in Geneva to vigorously address these problems.

As an aside in his lecture Metropolitan Phillip told the story of Peter Gilchrist coming to him. It was very moving story told with great humility by a man with a warm missionary heart who felt that the Lord was presenting him with a clear challenge to respond to the Great Commision.

After each talk there was a time of questions and answers. There were a number of thoughtful comments but I noted the response of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware who is one of the most widely published Orthodox authors in English. He has been a long time Oxford Don and supervised the thesis of Rowan Williams among others. His comment was that the purpose of the church is to celebrate the Eucharist which unites all people of all races. He said that the Orthodox needed to get away from autocephalous ecclesiology (each national church as independent and self-governing) and should not practice canonical fundamentalism, taking canons out of context.

I will be putting up over the next several days notes on the recent conference of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. I encourage my readers to join the society which exists to promote one to one ecumenical fellowship between the Christians of the East and West. I believe that it is vital for missionary purposes to cultivate an ecumenical consciousness. The spiritual skills and disciplines which are necessary for ecumenical fellowship and dialogue are the same skills and disciplines needed to hold local churches together. The unity of the churches is vital to the Gospel mission.

You can find out more about the Fellowship and join by paypal here 

Report from the Conference, “Rome, Constantinople, and Canterbury, Mother Churches?” Sponsored by The Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius

Held at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary, June 4 through June 7, 2008.

I have been attending a really fascinating conference at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Crestwood, New York the last few days. The topic of the conference has been the meaning of mother churches for the identity of local churches and how primacy is to be properly understood. There have been Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican speakers including such luminaries as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Bishop Keith Ackerman and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. I hope to put up a summary of the conference at a later time. This morning we were addressed by Fr. Jonathan Goodall, the chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who read us a paper by Rowan Williams which the Archbishop had hoped to give in person. Rowan Williams has belonged to the society of St. Alban and St. Sergius since he was nineteen and is a patron of the society which exists to promote ecumenical fellowship between the Eastern and Western churches. Below I am putting up some quick impressions of this talk. It bears importantly on the crisis of authority in Anglicanism. As of yet I do not see the text of the talk on the internet. MP3s of all the talks are available at http://ancientfaith.com/.

Rowan Williams’ paper read by Fr. Goodall was extremely clear and lucid. It began with greetings to the society and a commendation of the theme of the conference, the meaning of primacy. “The subject matter could hardly be more timely.” The ABC repeatedly made the point that every church is a daughter church except the church in Jerusalem. Each church receives the Gospel from elsewhere and this dependence on that which is received is vital because it reminds each local church that it is not self-sufficient.

There followed a recommendation of the communion ecclesiology of John Zizioulas and others which emphasizes the church as local Eucharistic fellowship gathered around a bishop and which critiques institutional and bureaucratic understandings of church authority. “The church is not an organization controlled from a single point.” However, the ABC went on to say in his paper that “the pendulum has swung too far.” Communio ecclesiology is sometimes taken in a way that encourages an understanding of the church which misses the necessary interdependence of local churches and their existence in an economy of giving and receiving the Gospel. “One bishop is no bishop.” I didn’t get the exact words in my notes but the ABC said in effect that one local church is not the church, again stressing the interdependence of churches.

The paper continued with a reflection on the role of the bishop and of primacy. “The bishop sustains and nourishes his churches’ dependence on the larger church especially as the celebrant of the catholic oblation.” “Identification of primacy apart from the fellowship of all the bishops is questionable.” Primacy should be exercised in terms of sharing the gift of the Gospel and the Spirit. The exercise of the primatial office in the promulgation of a Gospel that cannot be shared outside of the context of one local church and culture is a contradiction of the office of episcopacy and primacy and this is a problem on both the left and the right in Anglicanism.

The paper then went on to criticize Roman Catholic conflation of primacy with legalism and juridicalism and the rigidity of the Orthodox limitation of primacy to the ancient sees. He critiqued Anglican understandings of primacy for not having thought through the necessary structures that would be required to allow an appropriate primacy to work and for the consequent inadequacy of the current structures of church discipline. He urged all three traditions to rethink episcopacy and primacy in terms of mission.

This is my best reconstruction on the basis of my notes. I will be happily corrected by others who were in attendance or by the subsequent publication of the text. It was a very lucid and well reasoned paper that gave an encouraging display of Rowan Williams talents as a theologian. It was also very clear and not couched in excessive theological jargon. In my view though no explicit mention was made of the American House of Bishops, the vision of the church and the episcopacy and primatial ministry that was outlined in this paper describe recent actions of the House of Bishops of TEC, beginning with the consent to the ordination of Gene Robinson and subsequently, as culpably communion breaking and a contradiction of the proper role of bishops in the church. In Rowan Williams’ ecclesiology as articulated in this paper there is no room for such unilateralism as has been exercised by the American church. How the ecclesiology of Rowan Williams the theologian is expressed in the actions of Rowan Williams the primate remains to be seen. I pray that this paper represents a vision for which he is willing to give the most robust leadership in the coming weeks.