In this context, what are we to make of the controversial comments by Archbishop Williams regarding the local bishop and diocese? Insofar as he has defined bishop and diocese as “primary” with respect to ecclesial “identity” and insofar as he has identified them as the “organ of unity” as opposed to the “abstract structures” of the province, he is presenting a vision of the Church that at least fits within the general notion of pastoral synodality I have outlined above. But might he also be setting his vision in tension with actual Anglican practice? I would argue that he is in fact expressing a tension that Anglicanism itself is working to overcome precisely by moving in the direction of the fundamental reality of pastoral synodality.

There is no question but that Anglican churches have by and large functioned according to a post-Nicene set of structural assumptions. But that functioning has always been under question, and it is the rise of the Communion itself that has had the greatest role in setting up dynamics that have moved us towards a re-appropration of the ante-Nicene understanding, not because it marks some Golden Age to be repristinated, but because it is in fact more properly expressive of the kind of missionary context in which Anglicanism herself has come to flourish. Once Anglican churches grew up within contexts in which they necessarily existed alongside other Christian churches, the Nicene model by definition was deprived of any even tenuous or imaginary theological rationale. The idea that geographical episcopal boundaries demand strict imposition when in fact multiple and often mutually non-communicating Christian churches exist within the same local area simply cannot be sustained with integrity. And even within the single tradition of Anglicanism, unless one views the world’s political nations as the primary ordering of human life ”“ a deeply problematic notion from a Christian perspective to say the least ”“ the division of Anglican churches into national, regionally political, or ethnic groups whose boundaries prove more powerful and imposing than Christian communion itself can only end up by subordinating ecclesial reality to human political and cultural limitations. And it is these that the episcopal press for synodality properly ends by overcoming.

The first Lambeth Conference of 1867 was obviously aware of this tension already inherent in the expanding Anglican churches around the world.

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The presiding bishop’s condemnation of the culture of individualism was not misplaced, Dr.[Mark] Thompson [Dean of Moore College in Sydney] said, but the theological approach she was taking to address the problem was erroneous. “No one was suggesting that Paul ignored the corporate implications of shared salvation,” he observed, but an “unrelenting dichotomy between the individual and the corporate” was a modern phenomenon.

Augustine, Luther, the Protestant Reformers and the Anglican divines all taught that “God’s purposes are deeply relational and hence the very opposite of fragmented, isolationist individualism. Yet they also extend further than simply corporate identity to call on human persons as persons to repent and believe the gospel,” Dr. Thompson said.

For evangelical’s “more serious still” was the presiding bishop’s “caricature” of a confession of faith that she said made salvation dependent “on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus,” Dr. Thompson said.

The confession that “Jesus Christ is Lord” was “certainly a form of words,” but “they are never simply words,” he explained. “They represent a fundamental orientation of life which includes a willingness to have our thinking and behaviour shaped by the One we acknowledge has such a supreme claim upon us,” he noted.

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