Editor's Notes

In the beginning was the Word: words, images, gestures all create, enliven, challenge, and form worlds. Christian faith depends on God’s self-expression and consequently on the words, images, and gestures in which human life is always immersed. All of us are engaged in meaning making, poiesis, in every word, image, gesture we use.This issue of the Anglican Theological Review brings this reality to the fore in a variety of ways.

One of the most significant is in the expanded section of poetry we have included in this issue. Some of our authors and readers have noted with considerable feeling that fewer and fewer theological publications include poetry. The ATR has regularly included poetry for decades, and we will continue to do so. We recognize that we need poetic expression to convey and receive the full texture, color, and vibrancy of our faith. Poetry is more evocative than analytic and expository. Its particular combinations of words and its use of imagery call forth more depth of understanding, as well as other meanings. Poetry steadfastly refuses to explain itself; in reading and hearing poetry, we are given a surplus of meaning, often inexhaustible, that leads us to contemplate what is evoked and to attend to its resonances and challenges. And we find ourselves changed by it. Readers will find in this issue ten poems, rather than the usual five. Not all are explicitly “religious” or “Christian” in their themes; not all are overtly serious. But each illuminates something we might otherwise overlook or pass by. All of us are grateful to Poetry Editor Sofia Starnes for her selections, and for the unseen work she does in supporting and working with those who offer us these words and images.

The major articles in this issue address meaning-making in more analytic and expository modes. The first article, by Patrick Malloy, examines the types of worship favored by emerging church communities, which often find experience more compelling than truth claims. Emergent churches may look to early Christianity for models of common prayer, and it has been widely observed that the Anglican liturgical tradition may hold particular attractions for those trying to create an ancient-modern style of worship. Malloy notes that embedded in the liturgical materials--words, images, gestures--are claims about the Holy and our encounter with it. Yet these claims are often overlooked in emerging faith communities. Malloy calls for an ecumenical conversation that will yield a coherent liturgical and sacramental theology for the emerging church. He then discusses the contributions Episcopal congregations, their leaders, and their members may be able to make to this effort, and underscores some of the skills they will need to develop if they are to do so.

In a similar vein, J. Barrington Bates looks at some of the principles for liturgical revision that seem to have guided liturgical reform in the past. Sixteenth-century reforms maintained earlier traditions while putting them in vernacular forms. At the same time, Cranmer and others drew on Eastern rites as well as on the work of the Continental Reformation, laying the groundwork for a church united through its liturgy while varying in its beliefs. Subsequent revisions fit the prayer book with varying contexts, acknowledging the importance of vernacular worship. The liturgical movement that began in the middle of the twentieth century emphasized the centrality of the Eucharist, the fundamental importance of baptism, and the necessity of “proclamation and social involvement.” From the 1980s forward, discussion of liturgical reform has been intentionally more consultative across provincial and denominational lines. Bates draws on the principles evinced in each of these moments of revision to suggest what principles are likely to be helpful as we engage in liturgical reform once again.

James Turrell’s subject is “Communion, Covenant, and our Anglican Future,” Rowan Williams’s essay on the Episcopal Church’s 2009 General Convention in which he addressed particularly the Convention’s formal actions on the ordination of partnered gay clergy and on the provision of rites to bless same-sex unions. Turrell concludes that the Archbishop’s essay is deficient on a number of grounds: it distorts the arguments with which Williams disagrees, reducing appeals to inherent human dignity as “simply about civil liberties or human dignity.” Thus, the essay glosses over the centrality of the properly theological focus on baptism that permeates much of the recent discussion. Turrell also finds that Williams continues to diminish the importance of provinces, urging instead a vision of the church as universal and local, a church whose intermediate levels, provinces, have no ecclesiological significance. Turrell concludes that “while Williams’s words may benefit the institutional Communion, they do not advance true communion.”

German theologian Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, has identified reason as one of the central parts of Christian belief, along with faith and love. Pablo Blanco Sarto examines the intimate relation of these three in Ratzinger’s theology. For Ratzinger, as for much of the Christian tradition, faith and philosophy coexist amicably. Logos refers not only to the second person of the Trinity, but also to “the most noble dimension of humankind.” Modernism, however, has tended to oppose faith and reason, reducing reason to “the purely mechanical reasoning of rationalism.” What is needed is a recovery of the interrelation of faith, reason, and love, a “new Enlightenment” that is open to faith, to feeling, and to human activity. When faith, reason, and love are properly related, they enrich human existence in accord with the purposes of God, and they put checks on each other’s excesses.

In his essay on the ordering of ministry, Don Saines, like Ratzinger, turns to the doctrine of the Trinity and its emphasis on inherent relationality in order to address what some consider “a crisis in the understanding and practice of ministry.” Certainly, Anglican approaches to ministry have shifted and expanded significantly, globally as well as in North America. The renewal of the diaconate, the developing role of the laity, the recognition of priestly ministry beyond congregations: all of these indicate a broadening and deepening of ecclesiology as well as ecclesial practice. Because God is triune, we must speak of the divine in relational terms, an insight upon which communio ecclesiology builds. This ecclesiology emphasizes the development of an ecclesial disposition that can emerge only in and through complex interactions and relationships, a disposition of “being-toward-and-for-another.” The disposition for communio is present in all ministries. Ordered ministries--which may be lay or ordained--involve a repositioning of relationships, rather than the presence of unique charisms or modes of being (ontology). As this is the case, “The ordering of ministry requires our continual theological reflection” as the church is faithful to its calling to proclaim and manifest the redemptive work of God.

Finally, I want to bring readers’ attention to something that is not in this issue. In the issues of Winter 2009 and Winter 2010, ATR published two extended reviews by David Gortner on literature in the area of leadership and how it may and may not be helpful to church leaders. Those two articles are now posted on the ATR website under the “Conversations” tab, along with the extensive bibliography of the various works Gortner reviewed. I hope you will go to http://www.anglicantheologicalreview.org/read/conversations to explore this material. And I hope you will commend it to everyone you know who is involved in leadership, inside and outside the church, particularly those who are struggling with the leadership challenges many of us are facing in the church today.