A Future for Anglicanism
Seeking to model coherence within the givenness of the Resurrection life
This week has taken me back briefly to London once again, albeit for further reflection at a consultation upon the continuing theme of the future of the Anglican Communion. This was precisely the topic explored with Bishop Poggo, the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion Office, last Sunday in the Entr’acte and on Monday morning immediately after a special Choral Matins. Very happily, it proved possible for our own diocesan Bishop Whitworth to join us and speak then, as well as Assisting Bishop Ian Douglas, the former bishop of Connecticut, together with Bishop George Sumner, the former bishop of Dallas who is now a member of this parish.
A recording of Monday’s Session will soon be available as it very much lived up to expectations in providing us all with a unique insight into the challenges and proposals that the worldwide Communion has to address in the run up to the next ACC meeting this summer in Belfast.
The Anglican Communion Office’s reporting on Bishop Poggo’s visit to The Advent:
Reflection upon the underlying theological questions brought to mind three people I have known who have written with great distinction upon them – albeit from differing angles, namely: Oliver O’Donovan, the former Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford; Rowan Williams the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury; and Avery Cardinal Dulles, the theologian. To set out substantively their theological views would be far beyond what is appropriate here, but they provide characteristic perspectives that can serve as positive pointers towards what should be considered and which could be helpful as we seek a path forward for the Communion remaining in the highest degree of Communion possible in the years ahead.
The full text of the Nairobi Cairo proposals and the latest amended versions can be read via the link here:
https://anglicancommunion.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Supplement-to-NCPs_Lent-2026.pdf
and
The theological models of Avery Dulles
Cardinal Dulles was famous for his use of a models-based analysis of different theological positions. This enabled him to engage on given topics with considerable breadth and to recognise that any one theory or model could not capture all that needed to be said. Indeed, each could illuminate different facets of the underlying theological mystery under discussion. This pluralism of method could nonetheless be employed without surrendering the claim that there is real binding truth to be confessed by us as Christians.
More widely, the theology of revelation and of the church formed two main axes of his work.
In ecclesiology, he resisted reduction of the Church to a purely juridical institution or a purely inward spiritual fellowship, and still less to a mere agent of social change. But his typology of models allowed him both to uphold visible structured elements as authentic parts of the Church (including the roles of teaching, sacramental ministry and service) while also affirming its essential spiritual roles as a channel of grace and the transforming work of the Spirit.
In respect of revelation, he held both that it is not simply a set of abstract propositions, nor merely a body of subjective experience, but rather is comprised of God’s self-communication severally in history, symbol, and event but most especially in the person of his only-begotten son Jesus Christ. In addition, we should understand revelation as articulated in Scripture; upheld and expounded with the aid of tradition, and as word and doctrine accessed through the living spirit-filled reality that is the church.
These various elements, when held together, can allow both doctrinal precision and historical continuity, yet also genuine theological plurality in terms of theological expression. Thus with Dulles, we can take seriously the challenges posed by modern philosophy, historical criticism, and religious pluralism, but do so without a retreat to premodern forms and sheer fideism, or the surrender of doctrinal claims.
Theology can thus be in the service of the Church, with real accountability to the weight of scriptural witness and traditional teaching, while nonetheless retaining a critical and exploratory function that can yield even now new but still authentic expression within the life of faith.
All this can also allow for differing Christian traditions to come into serious dialogue, acknowledging and respecting both genuine convergences and differences without demanding premature uniformity. Approached in this way, theological plurality can exist (potentially even in mutually corrective relationships) while remaining conceptually manageable and without abandoning the claims to truth which the mysteries of faith must as a given still make – if Christianity is to be true to its historic self-understanding.
This last point leads well to the highly thoughtful theme of givenness that we find in different forms in both Oliver O’Donovan and Rowan Williams, to which we may next usefully turn.
Oliver O’Donovan : Morality in the light of the Resurrection
Oliver O’Donovan sees givenness as entailed by the classical Christian understanding of creation and from this he argues that it must follow that moral reflection does not start with an abstract rational subject confronted by neutral choices, but with a human being who is the creature addressed, judged, and renewed by God in Christ. Christian ethics must therefore be undertaken in the light of Christ’s resurrection, with the consequence that moral order is something disclosed rather than constructed by human will.
The Resurrection of Christ is in no way a matter to one side of a free-standing independently devised moral theory; it is the definitive act in which God confirms and reveals the intelligible order of creation and thereby enables genuinely Christian moral knowledge.[1] This perspective therefore contains a strong ontological realism that undergirds the view of the world as possessed of an objective order given by God and which is therefore antecedent to human deliberation.
Moral discernment here becomes a work of recognition rather than invention. To judge rightly is to attend to the structures of created reality and to acknowledge the good that God has already bestowed. Accordingly, O’Donovan eschews any form of voluntarism, whether theological or moral, that would treat obligation as the product of sheer decision—be that divine fiat abstracted from wisdom, or human resolve abstracted from reality.
Also to be rejected on this view is any ethical system that regards moral norms as mere social conventions, or presently, negotiated outcomes of preference-satisfaction. To do so would be to forsake endorsing and enacting the good for an improper aspiration to construct the good instead. In other words, moral action is to be assessed in relation to the advance or actualisation of the coming Kingdom of God, when all shall be made good, which the resurrection both reveals and anticipates, and not by such reasonings’ conformity to present social expectations or immediate utility. Also to be rejected are both liberal narratives of self-assertion, (in which agency is construed as the unconstrained projection of individual choice), and passivist spiritualities that underplay human responsibility in the name of submission or dependence.
Instead, the human person is to be understood as genuinely active, yet active as one whose agency is always received: by virtue of being created by God, and as situated within an order that is not of our own making, and also as renewed through the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.
Authentic agency participates in the moral order that God has disclosed and can never be a rival source of the normative. And virtues cease to be merely interior psychological dispositions and become modes of being rightly oriented to the self within the world and time––which at all points stands under both God’s judgment and promise. Virtue is that whereby an agent is fitted to respond truthfully and freely to the reality that God has made and redeemed.
Love also cannot be reduced to subjective sentiment, nor some overarching rule that overrides all other moral considerations. Rather, love names the fulfilled form of action undertaken within a rightly ordered community, embodying the pattern of life in which truth, judgment, and freedom are held together.
To love is to will and enact the good of another in a way that corresponds to God’s ordering of relationships and institutions. This means that love is inseparable from truthful perception of reality and from responsible judgment about what is fitting in any concrete circumstance. All of which – in an echo of the tensive relations we see in Dulles – entails that O’Donovan can hold together a deontological seriousness about moral claims—which resist arbitrary exception—with a teleological orientation toward the good and beatitude, that does not reduce obligation to mere rule-keeping on the one hand or dissolve norms into mere open-ended aspiration on the other.
But what about the church? For O’Donovan it belongs intrinsically within the created and historical order; it is part of the public reality of the world and bears the responsibility of recalling society to its true moral form.
As an Anglican theologian, O’Donovan also develops a distinctive account of the church’s public role. He resists any construal of the church as a purely inward or private association, insulated from the structures of social and political life. This involves a vocation not to dominate public life, but to bear truthful witness about authority, justice, and peace in the light of the gospel. As such, its role therefore is to illuminate rather than replace the political vocation of the temporal order, drawing it back toward an order that is understood as both created and yet ultimately eschatologically fulfilled.
This public and ecclesial orientation is closely bound up with what one might call the distinctively Anglican character of O’Donovan’s moral theology. And here it is important to note that O’Donovan’s work combines a marked concentration, rigid moral system-building, and unstructured subjectivism.
While O’Donovan is suspicious of moral formalism and ethical schemas that claim to abstract rules from the concrete drama of salvation history—he is also unwilling to surrender the claim that there is objective moral truth and he therefore firmly eschews relativism.
This leaves an overall approach that many see as very Anglican in being strongly scriptural yet also ecclesial and historically informed in its judgments, seeking at all points to discern and be attentive to the given structures of created order, as those structures are understood through the lens of Christ’s resurrection –– an approach which in theological terms reconnects ethics with dogmatics. Moral thinking is held to be an interpretation of reality that stands under the gospel: seeking to articulate as one commentator has put it “a coherent theological account of moral knowledge, human agency, and public life grounded in creation and consummated in the resurrection of Christ.”
This brings us to the third theologian I suggest we engage here, namely Rowan Williams.
Rowan Williams: Seeking coherence in assurance of Christ
The theme of givenness is once again very important for him also, since it provides a key dimension of assurance which he sees as underlying the authentic nature of Christian community. First, because God’s justifying grace creates a “noncompetitive Christian community” where one’s being is fundamentally “given” by God rather than attained through moral achievement or special action. Moreover, as Christians we experience our existence as secured by God’s love for us, which again is a given and not something we must defend or create for ourselves.
Viewed in this light, there is an important consequence – namely that in the end no one’s belonging to or access to God can ultimately be threatened by the actions of others. In addition, Christian unity is best understood, Williams argues, as rooted in the Triune God and “union with Christ,” within which context unity is a pure gift, given prior to any human consensus or agreement on specific ethical questions.
All this allows Williams to assert that, in a very deep sense for Christians, Christian unity can be known as real and ultimately a fact which can be known ahead of achieving actual agreement in this life. Such a perspective can warrant (especially with what we may call and Dulles explores, namely a sacramental ecclesiology) our holding that communities that disagree in their views on particular moral issues can nonetheless rest upon this assurance in some degree that is sufficient to allow us to remain in communion at another level while disagreeing upon those issues.
From these theological foundations goes yet further by suggesting that, rather than measuring human action against abstract principles or rules, we should ask two questions of any action:
“Can it serve as a gift that builds up the community?” and
“Does it manifest the selfless holiness of God in Christ?”
These point to the criterion that good acts are those that build up the Body of Christ through selfless engagement with the interest of others, while also witnessing to God’s self-giving nature revealed in Jesus.
The further concept of recognition next operates on three interconnected dimensions in Williams’ thought, and now merit attention, and stand in an important relation to the theological concept of reception which applies when putative new insights are advanced and need to be tested in the faith of the whole church in order to discern if they may be validly received (during which time those of opposing views are called to hold back from rejecting those with whom they differ upon them).
First, recognition involves seeing other persons in relation to Christ—recognizing in them fellow believers, redeemed sinners, and persons on the way to transformation in Christ. This Christological identity establishes a basic recognition of persons as sharing membership in the same community, the Body of Christ.
Second, recognition applies when new practices emerge that challenge existing tradition, so Williams argues that any such action “must be recognizable as an action that in some way or another manifests the character of the God who has called the community.” Thus, new practices must ultimately be judged to make sense in terms of the common language of faith and demonstrate why they might be a way of speaking the language of the historic schema of Christian belief authentically and without distortion.
Third, recognition applies to relations between persons and the practices that enable people to see one another as belonging to the same community––namely what Williams calls “markers of Christian identity,” which include attention to scripture, patterns of prayer, sharing in Baptism and the Eucharist, global mission and ministry, and participation in episcopal ministry.
In addition, Williams also identifies a “grammar of obedience”—by which is meant a mutually recognized attitude of seeking to be obedient to truth that unfolds through shared spiritual life and habits. It can be through such shared markers, rather than explicit agreement on specific ethical issues, that Christians should be enabled to recognize one another as people to whom they are bound through a given, identifiable fellowship.
Amidst all this it is important to note that Williams firmly distinguishes his approach from ethical relativism or mere toleration. Mutual recognition requires active efforts to understand and make oneself understood, an effort to reach deeper shared ethical understanding, and openness to one’s own position being challenged. Accordingly, when another Christian reaches different conclusions “this leaves my own decisions to some extent under question,” but such relinquishing of absolute certainty is not relativism but rather the kind of “putting oneself at risk” necessary in genuine moral discernment.
Nonetheless, Williams does also acknowledge that communities may reach “points when recognition fails”—when certain actions put a church “across the central stream” of Christian life or systematically undermine the unconditionality of the Gospel’s offer. However, he warns against deciding prematurely where non-negotiable boundaries lie.
All of which points to a vision of “a Church that is neither tightly centralised nor just a loose federation of essentially independent bodies—a Church that is seeking to be a coherent family of communities.”
By proposing concrete processes whereby communities can navigate moral disagreement while maintaining genuine unity to the highest degree possible through shared practices, obedience, and mutual recognition, Williams’ thought offers a valuable further way to expand on the work earlier outlined above.
Given the painful continuing reality of global diversity and ethical disagreement that challenge the Anglican Communion, such reflections are timely!
[1] In his, Resurrection and Moral Order, the resurrection of Christ functions as the decisive hermeneutical key to moral reality: it is the event in which God reaffirms the goodness of creation, judges the powers that distort it, and inaugurates the new age in which the true moral form of the world is manifest. Creation, redemption, and eschatology, therefore, belong to a single theological logic; they are not three disconnected themes, but one divine action viewed under different aspects.