Canon Harris’ recent manifesto (dated January 11) typifies the attitude of quiet resignation emerging from thoughtful circles within TEC. The title of his blog, “Enough: It Is Time to Move On” captures the essence of the moment, and his measured rhetoric models a “new tone” for the public persona of TEC.

Harris’ blog, and others like it, reveal that The Episcopal Church realizes, more or less consciously, that she is walking apart from the Anglican Communion – indeed, from catholic Christianity as a whole. Harris strenuously objects to such insinuations, insisting “The Episcopal Church has not walked away or left the Anglican Communion,” but “we have participated fully in its life.” What he means by this, by his own examples, is that TEC has attended meetings and engaged in conversations and joint projects as part of an international consortium of “churches”. What he demonstrates is that the life of Communion and the catholic expression of the Gospel are purely symbolic after all.

While Harris’ new tone strikes the reader initially as welcome and refreshing, the reader quickly recognizes a familiar self-pitying mode of self-justification. The author may be sincere in his desire to come clean before friend and foe alike, but his writing reveals more through the murkiness of his thought than through his exposition of a method and practice of ministry. I found myself agreeing with his one clear assertion: it’s time for the “churches” under the umbrella of TEC, each with its respective “vocation,” to move on.

What is the substance of this article that speaks rather clearly, even if between the lines? What is so revealing about this recent Manifesto from the Episcopal mainstream? I would like to suggest a response in a series of three articles, this first one focusing on Canon Harris’ illustrative usage of the biblical word “church”.

In what he admits is “a long piece” Harris uses the term “church” 90 times, 59 times simply as part of a title (as in The Episcopal Church or The Church of England). For the rest “church” is a word borrowed, not from the New Testament or even from post-Reformation Christendom, but from modern sociology: “church” as a type of human organization. There is one quasi-theological reference to The Episcopal Church as being “ordered as a missionary society,” but even this denotes a type of human society that happens to be religious. Of course there’s nothing unique in the usage of “church” as a sociological term. Each of the Reformation churches acknowledges its existence as a social organization, and in the modern era such social phenomena have legitimately been subjected to scientific analysis.

What is striking is the utter absence of theological meaning in Harris’ use of the word. The word “church” in the New Testament, deriving from secular usage as “assembly”, is infused throughout the NT with theological meaning. Indeed “church” invariably elevates the human assembly particularly in its human aspect, and no time more than when the NT writers address its most mundane affairs. Whatever it denotes on the human level, “church” is always and foremost a supernatural organism, coterminous with the Body of the Risen Christ.

It must be added that the term “Body of Christ” is taken literally in the NT, particularly by St. Paul (see 1 Cor 12:12). For him the church IS the body of Christ -- the Incarnation post-Pentecost. It is certainly not a religious metaphor, and it is anything but a concept from primitive social theory.

It is this supernatural, spiritual connotation of the word “church” that later is carried by the word “catholic”, even before ambitious prelates envisioned “catholicism” in terms of global empire. After all, “there is ONE Body and ONE Spirit: ONE Lord, ONE faith, ONE baptism”, even as there is “ONE God and Father of all.”

In Harris’ usage “church” illustrates the method of studied imprecision characteristic of liberal Protestantism since the Second World War. He takes the purely sociological connotation of a “churchy” sounding word (which happens, conveniently, to echo the Bible) and makes this multi-layered juxtaposition the basis for his present theologizing. There’s an art to such cross-fertilization of disciplines. Now “church” takes on a luminous quality as a human institution, and becomes an appropriate setting for “redemptive” social experiments. The substance of the “redemption” invariably defaults to the categories of sociology: it is whatever observable short-term benefit falls to the person being “redeemed”.

The very premise of his article, that TEC must above all be true to her unique “vocation”, further illustrates the theological sleight-of-hand that results from the manipulation of sociological categories that happen to be descriptive of religious organizations.

Canon Harris insists that TEC has a unique quasi-biblical vocation in the United States. He traces this vocation historically from the earliest days of the American republic, when the new Church defined herself over against the mother Church of England. The fact that the American Church modeled her polity after the American constitutional form of government, over against the monarchical polity of the Old World, was a formative moment for the Protestant Episcopal Church USA.

Harris is careful to link the English monarchical system with “patriarchy”, by which he means a hypothetical reactionary anti-feminism. His point is to justify the evolving system of TEC primarily through making negative associations. He knows his readers will have been well trained to fear such associations. Thus he knows from this point on his readers will be on the defensive themselves and not paying close attention to the finer points of argument. He can predict that they will likely capitulate to his premise out of fear for being labeled “patriarchal”, “sexist”, or worse. This is the passive-aggressive mode of discourse which has come to dominate the American political landscape in recent decades, and has gained respectability under the bookish sounding title of “post-modernism”. It is all-powerful against those who lack the strength of their convictions.

For the purposes now of theologizing Harris has isolated the American Church from the historic thrust of the Christian gospel. He calls this “contextualizing”. Because each ministry location is unique in terms of its historical circumstances, it is therefore unattached and unaccountable to other times and places. Each unique context is then reformulated in terms of biblical concepts (or jargon), which are pressed into service to generate short-term benefits of “redemption” as described above. Any such result is taken as a self-justification for both the ministry and method that underlie it. After all, they appears to “work”.

Harris is correct in identifying “contextual” analysis as basic to the missionary impulse of historic Christianity. But in isolating the American context from that of the catholic project over the centuries, he succeeds at best in affirming the notion that TEC now walks apart as a separate missionary enterprise. Rather than make such a bold admission, Harris, and those who share his method, claim to trump the accountability of Communion, which Drs. Ephraim Radner and Phil Turner have recently demonstrated to be the natural outgrowth of the NT notion of “church”. (See “The Fate of Communion”, Eerdmans, 2006)

Here Canon Harris would object strenuously again, citing the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral as the “the basis on which union with other Christian bodies might be achieved”. Since the American House of Bishops are the original authors of that text, presumably the present House of Bishops act in their spirit and with their same authority.

He fails to excerpt the following lengthy paragraph from the Quadrilateral which establishes the truly catholic “basis on which union with other Christian bodies [is] achieved”, and which defines the actual context of the Quadrilateral itself:

“…Furthermore, we do hereby affirm that the Christian unity can be restored only by the return of all Christian communions to the principles of unity exemplified by the undivided Catholic Church during the first ages of its existence, which principles we believe to be the substantial deposit of Christian Faith and Order committed by Christ and his Apostles to the Church unto the end of the world, and therefore incapable of compromise or surrender by those who have been ordained to be its stewards and trustees for the common and equal benefit of all men.” (See BCP 1979, p. 877.)

What Canon Harris has demonstrated conclusively is that The Episcopal Church in its present practice has chosen to walk apart, principally and primarily, from itself.

[This article will be followed by a subsequent analysis of the doctrine of authority implied in Canon Harris’ historic manifesto, “Enough: It Is Time to Move On”]

---The Rev. Canon Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of Saint Luke, Orlando, Florida. He is a regular VOL columnist.