In this ambitious work, John Betz aims to reinvigorate the place of metaphysics in the theological enterprise, specifically in Catholicism, but ecumenically as well. For him analogy is shorthand for proper theological method, and in its defense he jousts, predictably, on the theological side against Karl Barth (in his debate with Erich Przywara), and on the philosophical side primarily against Martin Heidegger. In the former case, Betz thinks that Barth failed to see the implications of his own position, while in the latter Heidegger lacked the courage to follow the implications of being and language to their true conclusion. Along the way Betz takes the reader on a lively journey through an array of modern Catholic authors and theological loci (after acknowledging the accidental similarity to a work with a similar title by Rowan Williams).

Analogy is first of all to find a similarity between how the creature and Creator can be described, together with the acknowledgment of a yet greater dissimilarity. Betz goes on to argue that the premise for this pattern of continuity and discontinuity is a prior act of self-offering by the triune God who creates the world as gift (e.g., pp. 172ff., 453ff.). There can be analogy, with our minds reaching up toward God because he has first stooped down toward us. (One thinks naturally of Eph. 4:10 and its ascending that is descending). To Betz’s mind, Barth should have been satisfied that the priority of revelation would be a safeguard against metaphysics as a human project such as he thought modern theology in general had become.

Betz (in his treatment of Wittgenstein) eschews what he calls “nominal” analogy for the fuller, metaphysical claim (p. 433). But I cannot help but think that my teacher, George Lindbeck, would both have appreciated this deeply ecumenical work, and would have read it in his own “grammatical” way. Betz by this account is offering a kind of rule for theological discourse: a) avoid univocity and equivocity and b) make sure the “incarnational” moment of divine initiative precedes and enables such speech. In such a way the Cappadocians deployed and overcame Platonism, just as Thomas did the same for Aristotle. It could be argued that Barth himself did this for modern German philosophy, by a kind of “ad hoc apologetics” (Werpehowsky), as may be better seen in his later writings. Theologians have to speak, and in so doing are bound to use someone or other’s philosophical parlance, and, in so doing, should cleave to Betz’s twofold rule. As a result, Barth and Przywara were saying things that were non-contradictory, though leaning to one side or the other of the rule. So a “grammatical” reading appreciates Betz’s point.

This book has something important to say to Christians of all traditions in our theologically lean time. But a review needs a worry, so here is mine. Betz says that it is too little to call Jesus Savior and Redeemer (p. 1!) — he must also be the Word of creation, and so he is. But only by being the latter can he accomplish the former; they are already knit together theologically (Luke 7:48-50). Furthermore there is another account of us humans for which metaphysics is less helpful: the human as sinner. Christian theology is an interconnected web of claims, and hamartiology would add yet another layer of complexity, another gloss on the Scriptures, in whose service all theology, all doctrine, and so, all metaphysics too, are servants.

Karl Barth was a man of strong leftward political commitments, which sometimes surprise those who hear his objections to any cultural accommodations of the gospel with the liberalism of his time. To these he uttered his famous Nein. Such accommodations may today come in different forms, ranging from programs on social issues that seem like “the Democratic Party at prayer” on the left to calls for a “Christian nationalism” on the right. But how, Herr Professor, am I to discern when to speak? Christology, of course — or, put negatively, the question whether there is, even implicitly, some other Lordship afoot in the agenda. For then one would find oneself in the status confessionis. Does the blurring of politics and theology mean that the possibility of speaking and hearing the gospel is at stake?

In the latter 20th century, no theologian was of more consequence at the borderline than Reinhold Niebuhr, who became in essence the theologian of Cold War America. What matters most for our purposes was his Augustinian awareness of the pervasive reality of original sin in all of us, including political actors. In light of moral theologian and pacifist Stanley Hauerwas’s trenchant criticism of him, it was interesting to hear Stanley, at our recent RADVO conference in Dallas, say that he should have given more attention to the rule of law. Now there is a crypto-Niebuhrian thought indeed: Luther’s first use of the law to restrain evil! We can disagree often and vehemently with one another, but, in the spirit of Niebuhr, we need an Augustinian defense of democracy, and in particular the checks and balances of our inheritance. They imply an Augustinian awareness of the corrupting effect of power. We need not just a pragmatic, but also a theological, defense of democracy, even when it results in policies that we inveigh against.

The only living witness I would summon is Alasdair MacIntyre, a moral philosopher, though as a Thomist he has theological interests as well. He might have several words of critique to bring to our moment. He is of course famous for the genealogy of thought in the modern age offered in After Virtue. There he shows how easily the emotivism of modern liberalism, unmoored as it is, drifts all too easily into a reduction to the will to power, most forcefully articulated in Nietzsche. It is hard not to find his fingerprints today across the political scene, from left to right. While politicians focus on banning this book or that, deconstruction has been burrowing into the humanities for half a century. Corroboration may be found by rereading Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, popular two generations ago. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, so much of libertarianism may be traced back to the Nietzschian perspectives of Ayn Rand. The appeal to power has come to be more overt. The tale of Rod Dreher’s movement from endorsing MacIntyre’s vision of a new Benedict to praise for the authoritarianism of Viktor Orban is cautionary indeed. My point is simple — those inhabiting the edges of our political and ideological spectrum are intellectual cousins more than they wish to admit.

Readers of MacIntyre will recall the importance of the virtues in his account of traditions, practiced along with the rehearsal of a narrative within which claims to truth are made. In this regard we cannot help but note how awash in wrath our political scene is. Again, this has always been thus, but in our time there is an intensity, along with an unhinged quality, that feels different.

Here I must note that all the thinkers cited thus far knew nothing of the ominous new fact of technology, the incubator of that rage, not to mention sexual degradation, crackpot political theories, and attack by our foes. Less dramatic, but also worrisome, is social media’s inherent encouragement of disembodiment and a distorted search for community. So our last voice from the cloud must be the modern Christian prophet Jacques Ellul. He saw the rise of la technique, by which he meant technology’s inherent drive to “bind them all” (see for example The Technological Age).

By his encouragement, we as Christians need to make our witness to the truth in real and embodied communities, even as we insist on the inherent dignity of humans as they work, speak, and suffer. We do not yet know what an Ellulian Christian politics should look like. At the very least we need to see how technology has made problems raised by our other witnesses yet more vexed. Hobbit-like though we be, the churches, small in scale, diverse, local, corporate, exemplifying the “mediating institution” embodied, as places where human suffering and dying receive God’s blessing and promise, might come to have, in God’s providence, an outsized influence. With the help of such a cloud of witnesses, moving at society’s margins, may we, by God’s grace, make our witness of protest and solidarity, in the time that is upon us.

A month and a half ago, on a Zoom meeting of the House of Bishops, the demographic news about our church was yet more grim than we might have thought. The bottom has fallen out of the number of marriages, and baptisms are not far behind. Average Sunday attendance nationally is down a third, to 35. The shortage of clergy for a plethora of small, often rural, churches is severe.

Answers are not immediately evident, so let us begin somewhere else, somewhere earlier. For this is not the first time we Americans have been here. Go back 300 years, and the statistics on colonial America would have been worrisome too. The founding fathers and mothers were often, surprisingly, doctrinally shaky, and quite suspicious of the domineering features of organized religion they had fled (that, by the way, means us Anglicans). Some were proto-“spiritual not religious.”

Then something remarkable happened, first on the far side of the Atlantic, and then here. A first wave in the east, in the generation before the American Revolution, and then a second across the prairie in the generations after. We were awakened. You know the story. The great preachers of what came to be called “evangelicalism” were Anglicans: John Wesley and George Whitefield. They were colleagues of other converted Anglicans like Augustus Toplady (think “Rock of Ages”) and John Newton (think “Amazing Grace”), not to mention the hymns of brother Charles Wesley such as “O for a Thousand Tongues” or “Love Divine All Loves Excelling,” by which we can still join the vibe of that Great Awakening. This movement in England influenced what followed in the colonies, with Wesley and Whitefield actually coming over to preach.

There ensued a first wave in the east, in the generation before the American Revolution, The Second Great Awakening took place in the generation that followed. In the latter, while our Anglican forebears were reluctant to leave their comfortable Eastern parishes, our Methodist brothers and sisters raced across the south and west with the gospel, ending up in Texas, among other places. But their spiritual bloodline too went back to the Anglican/Episcopal divines.

We must be brief, so here is the important thing, what I want to call “the matrix for renewal and mission.” Here are the features this twofold movement, on two sides of the Atlantic, showed.

First, grasping anew the faith of the Bible and creed: it was a traditional movement.

Second, being grasped by a personal faith, of heart as well as head. It was a movement of a “heart strangely warmed,” as John Wesley famously said.

But third, the separation of religious expression from political power. The gospel works through culture and daily life, not from a human throne, no matter how much we Americans enjoy royal weddings and fancy coronations. Our churches are on their own, which means freedom (hence our insisting on calling ourselves “the Episcopal Church,” so as to mark a new beginning).

This goes along, fourth, with innovation, in ways of actively getting to and speaking with people. The outdoor sermon, for example, was an evangelically Anglican invention. This showed them to be aware of the ways in which culture and society had changed, and the need to go out and find the listener. It was thoroughly, missional, as we say nowadays.

Fifth, face-to-face small groups. A 20th-century book on the influence of small groups in American culture was titled I Come Away Stronger, but we must remember that the Methodists invented this. Undiminished today is the power of such small groups.

Sixth and finally, reconciliation of race and class. The early Methodists sought out the working class. The Second Great Awakening was closely linked to the abolitionist movement. The gospel message of reconciliation naturally finds the place where the rubber hits the road.

Word, Conversion, Freedom, Missional, Small Groups, Reconciliation: whether we use the word evangelical or not, this was invariably the matrix in which renewal happened, and through it the Holy Spirit moved and worked where we human beings could not see a way forward. I am tempted to say “formula,” except that it would come to naught were it to rely on our power rather than that of the Holy Spirit.

As an aside, I recommend highly the book by the late Anglican priest and sociologist David Martin called ‘Tongues of Fire,’ in which he contends that this movement, this nexus of beliefs and practices, constitute the great contextualization or adaptation of the Gospel to the modern world.

The story so far, though long ago, is not far away. It has everything to do with our history, and with the denominational landscape around us. And it gives a very clear message to us, its great-great-great-grandchildren, about where renewal lies. But the story does not end there.

While one gospel arrow headed west across the Atlantic, and then across the American continent, another headed south, across the Mediterranean and Sahara to Africa, west and east. Now you can see how my talk has everything to do with “Africa in Dallas and Dallas in Africa.” The arrow of renewal and mission westward to the Americas was in the 18th and 19th centuries; the second arrow to Africa was in the 19th and 20th.

Whatever our churchmanship, they, we, share the same Anglican and evangelical DNA. Let’s follow this out. Those same English men and women were committed to sharing the gospel across the world as well as across the street. They were great creators of societies, of groups, once again — for the relief of famine, for the protection of young women (in a group called the Mothers’ Union, please stand!), and last but not least, for the evangelization of countries and continents hearing the gospel for the first time. (We see the effect of this still in the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, the Daughters of the King, the Order of St. Luke, all church societies, and on and on.)

They brought the same faith to Africa, which was kindled anew in England; they worked from the very same matrix. In addition to forming a mission society, they preached for conversion. They knew that where they were going the gospel would have none of the protections of the state as they had in England. The church was on its own, which is to say, free. And they meant to preach at the same time that they challenged the scourge of slavery, Islamic in the east and European in the west.

Conversion and racial reconciliation were, here too, inseparable. The slides show some of the famous figures in the struggle against slavery. I know that the word missionary has a dubious ring in some ears. They made mistakes. But many missionaries went there, before the era of quinine, with the virtual certainty that they would die in their new home. Most were women with vocations to teach. And everywhere they went, the bulk of the work of spreading the faith was actually done by local, native catechist-evangelists. Africa is simply too vast for any other possibility.

We are happy to welcome our visiting bishops this morning. For a moment I want to focus on our preacher, Bishop Joseph Wandera of the Diocese of Mumias in Kenya. For spiritually he is a great-great-grandson of the renewal movement called Balokole, the east African revival, which had a powerful effect on Stephanie and me as missionary teachers in neighboring Tanzania 40 years ago. And I might add that our friend and bishop from north Tanzania, Mwita Akiri, whose choir has produced our commissioned new hymn for this occasion, which we will hear shortly, is likewise a child of the movement. I want briefly to tell the story of that revival, for it vividly illustrates my point.

It began in 1930s. The coming of the gospel, the age of martyrs, seemed distant. The challenges of a new culture and its compromises proved hard to navigate — could the Gospel really meet them? Furthermore, there were tensions between white missionaries and black local Christians. An Anglican evangelical missionary with the improbable name of Joe Church decided the matter, along with a friend, a church elder named Simeon Nsibambi.

They spent a whole night putting their mutual resentments, their failings, their sins, “in the light,” as they said, so that they might come to a place of brotherhood, of oneness, of reconciliation born not of their themselves but of the cross. About their meeting the news spread, as did the power of the Holy Spirit to overcome enmity, to bridge chasms, to break through intractable problems. From that meeting came a movement, primarily of lay people, of putting old sins in the light, of receiving a new assurance of salvation (hence the name “Balokole,” the saved ones).

They challenged those who accepted sleepy and compromised church life. Sometimes they made mistakes and went too far. But they believed that God could bring about new life, as if an old man could indeed be born again. They challenged the missionaries and the seminaries: were they lost in distractions instead of preaching to the bondages people actually experienced?

And here is the remarkable part. Upon being given a second chance, we Anglicans got it right. By this I mean that, in the first instance, we allowed the Methodists to break away, to our great loss. But with the east African revival we kept the fire of the Spirit in the fireplace of the church, we kept the power of renewal within the church, no matter how unsettling it would prove to be.

And what resulted was dramatic growth in east and central Africa (the great evangelistic story in the west, in Nigeria, is a story for another occasion). It was a lay movement, ordinary Christians sharing their faith. I have included a picture of Apolo Kivebulaya, missionary to people like the Batwa, as the Kellerman Foundation these days reminds us. It was also a movement of martyrdom, as when Archbishop Janani Luwum said, “Father, forgive them they do not know what they are doing,” as Idi Amin’s henchmen murdered him, and the great bishop and preacher Festo Kivengere, after he fled, wrote a book called Why I love Idi Amin, whom I heard preach as a seminarian. Histories such as this one are why the new center of gravity of world Christianity now lies in the Global South (as the great scholar at Baylor, Philip Jenkins, has taught us in books like The Next Christendom).

Why the mini-history lesson? The great Southern novelist William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” In the moment in which we stand, there are so many imponderables, so many worrisome trends before us. The demographics of our church, post-COVID, is daunting. They take the worrisome graying of our society and accelerate it. To be sure, we are somewhat insulated from these trends, given the number of our young ordinands and the economic vitality of our part of this country.

But just the same, our church as a whole, with its raft of small, part-time, rural parishes, cannot go on as it has. We are facing massive changes we cannot yet discern due to the ongoing technological revolution. Along with this go fundamental debates about the very nature of the human. What lies ahead is, in short, dramatically different from the world we know, much less the world of 18th^–century England or 19th-century Africa, much less the ancient church. We look into a glass very darkly.

But in the face of these changes, what history teaches us is reliance, by God’s grace, on the same matrix of renewal that we have seen in previous crises — divine word, personal conversion, evangelistic freedom, mission, face-to-face communities, racial reconciliation. The more the world changes, the more the Methodist/Anglican matrix stays the same, even as it display its remarkable flexibility.

What indeed has Dallas got to do with Africa, or Africa Dallas? The simplest answer is the best: those verses from the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus, which we recite at every baptism: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. We and they are in Christ one. In this talk I have intended to give you a second reason, that we are related one to another, more specifically, as offspring of the same movement, though we live on opposites sides of the globe from England. And there is a third reason as well. For you see, that same history I have described is around us and it is in us, not least as we face unprecedented circumstances of our own. We need the guidance of the legacy of renewal, and we need one another, as we feel our way into a new chapter of the church’s life in this 21st century.

To repeat: because the circumstances are dauntingly strange, the matrix out of which we must minister had better be the same. Let me, one more time, define the lines of that matrix. Renewal in our tradition is as global as it is local. It begins with the Bible and the creed. It is at once personal, the converted heart and mind, though it is expressed, and then tended, in groups, in societies of prayer. Naturally it goes out to find its audience, even as it assumes no cultural privilege. Finally, it does so arm in arm with brothers and sisters across lines of class and race. The more ecumenical it is, the more truly Anglican/Episcopal it proves itself to be. The matrix is the same, in circumstances that are in no way the same as we are accustomed to, since the matrix is actually derived from the apostles.

Let me end with a point of personal privilege. During COVID, I very much enjoyed a Lenten Zoom group with St. James, Texarkana, in which we read Anglican poets. At the end of the series we read these words by T.S. Eliot, American, poet of modern trauma and despair, who finally found harbor with Jesus Christ and became a devout Anglo-Catholic.

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

As a young seminarian, I was struck powerfully by the passage in First Kings when a servant of King Josiah was rummaging in the basement of the Temple in Jerusalem during its renovation (I am sure the dean will get the feel for that passage). He finds an old book, the Torah, and brings it to the king, who immediately rends his garments. The words are new and they are fire.

We too will come to the same place, within the same matrix, and will know the place as for the first time. That is the nature of renewal. There is so much that is blessedly unfamiliar — the risky adventure of planting, young clergy being raised up, the denominational scene upended and requiring adjustment. But the face we will see there is the same; familiar, yes, but never worn out, always new, the face about which I leave you with the words of Paul: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”

This essay has been lightly modified from the originally published version in order to more closely approximate the address as delivered. — Editor

We all know of sins of commission and omission, doing what we ought not to do and not doing what we ought to do. But let us think about a third kind, with something of both in it, which we will call “hiding.” The human being creates something outside himself or herself upon which can be placed responsibility. We outsource our guilt. The verse I have in mind is Adam’s hiding from the Lord God in Genesis 3, in response to which the Lord says “where are you?” We create an objectified entity that we invest with responsibility. Compare this to the child, caught with the forbidden cookie in his grip, who says “my hand took it.”

The sin of hiding enlightens the political landscape. The libertarian has hidden from solidarity as part of our nature, while Marxism hides from individual responsibility — humans have become units, or a mass, of economic activity.

The paradigmatic example is technology. The machine, creature of our hands, comes to have a kind of quasi-life. With the contemporary debate about AI, this has come to prominence. Three generations ago, Jacques Ellul was a rare prophetic voice of technology as a “power and principality.” In The Technological Society, he emphasized that it was all means and no ends. His concept of “le technique” included both machines and systems of thought that objectified the human. Together they made up a matrix with its own inexorable drive toward integration. Like Frankenstein’s monster, technology has its own kind of agency, by which we hide from ourselves our responsibility.

But as Mary Shelley’s prescient book illustrates, hiding as a strategy turns on the hidden. The monster has its own ideas. The powers and principalities too may have begun as a spiritual tool, only to have their own ideas. This of course brings us to the impasse we now find ourselves in. Many with a disquietingly high level of knowledge warn us that in the time of AI, the machines may make their own advances, of which they tell us nothing. No less an authority than Geoffrey Hinton, late of the University of Toronto and Google, thinks so, without any axe of his own to grind. We meant to hide from God, and now it seems our creation is doing some hiding of its own.

With the latest disputes about the nature of the Anglican Communion, how we order our common life (such as it is), and especially the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury within it all, we need careful thinking. Here I offer three observations, drawn from African Anglicanism, which set the stage for a thought experiment.

My first example stems from my early years of ministry in Tanzania. African culture has a deep appreciation for the wisdom of its elders, urithi wa hekima ya mababu na mabibi (literally “the inheritance of the wisdom of the grandfathers and grandmothers”). This carried over to the coming of the gospel to East Africa. In this sense, the missionaries were spiritual ancestors. Communications from Global South Anglicans regarding their relationship to Canterbury reflect this concern with ancestry.

Think also of the importance of the history of the martyrdom of the first generation of Christians in Uganda. To pass on faithfully what is inherited (what the ancient Church called tradition), in this case the gospel, is a virtue and a calling that African Anglicans can remind us of. This is the same reason that visitors from around the communion find a tour of Canterbury Cathedral so moving. It is a quasi-sacrament of the history of costly witness, which is their inheritance too. In this spirit, symbolically, spiritually, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the heir of Augustine, Becket, Cranmer, Temple, is their (and our) grandfather too. Can the confusion of a few years negate the inheritance of more than 14 centuries?

My second example is roundabout. I’ll start with the recent Global South Fellowship Covenant. You may recall that the original idea of an Anglican Communion covenant was proposed by a design group commissioned by Archbishop Rowan Williams to consider the early conflict over Anglican churches’ stance on same-sex unions. The prominent theologian Oliver O’Donovan called it the “only game in town.” At the heart of the idea was the possibility of provinces banding together because of common commitments. However, the prospect of discipline led to several campaigns against the proposal, and the covenant as an official feature of the communion came to naught. But the idea did not die. A version of the covenant has sprouted from the ground up, as it were.

This covenant is not part of the official ecclesiastical structure of Anglicanism, but it arose to renew and challenge that structure, not to abandon it. In this, it reminds me of a word that Eliud Wabukala, retired Archbishop of Kenya and chairman of GAFCON, once spoke to me when he was visiting Toronto (since he was a graduate of Wycliffe College). He said that he thought of that then-new movement of traditional Anglicans as something similar to Balokole, the East African Revival. The latter was a movement of renewal meant to awaken the Christian somnolent, eventually throughout East Africa. We might say that it was in its own way an earlier form of what is now called “differentiation,” a group challenging the Church as a whole on behalf of the whole. The Global South Covenant could be seen in the same way.

We should take these ideas and bring them to bear on today’s situation. Most prominently, at the recent Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Ghana, there was at least an honest recognition that we are in a fractured state, and new possibilities for the future need to be considered. Archbishop Welby admitted the impossibility of his position, with its conflicting simultaneous demands. At the same time, we recognize that the easiest solutions, to drift into autonomous corners or simply to fracture in two, do not constitute answers to the question of how we are to have koinonia, a common life. Leaving aside the rich symbolic legacy of the See of Canterbury would be a great and unnecessary loss. There is surely not one answer to the future. New thinking about Canterbury, which I will describe in a moment, needs to be considered with other needed initiatives constantly in view.

One such concomitant idea is that of principled differentiation, which our premier theological group, the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order, has been tasked with considering. Differentiation recognizes that differences are found not only between, but also within, provinces and churches. At this point we can see how differentiation may have a relation to the idea of a covenant. It is a means by which members can join together in a common witness about truth. Those who do so are answering the questions “Who are we really? What is the norm of belief by which we must live?” Within a larger body, this implies a vocation to witness to the truth as the Word of God enables us to understand it.

Third, I offer a constitutional and canonical example. For years, in the constitution of the Anglican Church of Kenya, the primate had automatically also been the bishop of the megacity of Nairobi. Other provinces, such as the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, had wrestled with the question of whether primacy and a diocesan see can be handled simultaneously. In 2002, under the leadership of David Gitari, the Kenyan church came up with a creative solution: it carved a tiny jurisdiction, specifically the area of the cathedral, out of the whole, and created a kind of mini-diocese. Since then the primate has also been the bishop of the Diocese of Nairobi Cathedral. This precedent might indeed be applied to the conundrum of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Assuming all that has preceded, we come around to our proposal. The See of Canterbury combines, impossibly, leadership of the Church of England and of the Anglican Communion. It is hedged in by ancient canonical legal requirements and political pressures born of establishment. But its symbolic weight is irreplaceable. Leave the Archbishop of Canterbury in place, as one of the two primates of the English church, with all that goes with that office. And then create a new episcopal office, the Bishop of Canterbury Cathedral, within the bounds of the grounds. This could be by analogy with the Secretary General, though it would need the agreement of the Church of England. Together build a second cathedra, from the wood of every province, and place it off-center in the sanctuary.

Pause for a moment to consider such a symbol. The Bishop of Canterbury Cathedral, most likely now from the Global South, sits in the chair of the grandparent, spiritually speaking. It will be a chair for an apostolic envoy to the communion, a chair filled with 1,500 years of history, a missionary chair not only in the line of Augustine, but also of Kivebulaya, Azariah, and Luwum and all their global mission colleagues. It will embody the reach of the gospel to the ends of the earth and back to the apostles. And yet the Bishop of Canterbury Cathedral inhabits a cathedral now with two bishops, itself a symbol of complexity and differentiation, and in the midst of that a symbol of collegiality too. The second cathedra evokes deep and ancient memory, of the martyrs, of the margins of the church, whose representative now sits on the chair of authority.

So many details would remain to be worked out. The following are jottings at best. Financial and administrative oversight would be seconded to the Archbishop of Canterbury permanently, while its liturgical life is overseen by a vicar of the Church of England of the new archbishop’s choosing. The Bishop of Canterbury Cathedral would have, as a minimal job description, chairing the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates’ Meeting. Maximally the Bishop of Canterbury Cathedral would summon the Communion to the embrace of truth and unity (Ps. 85:10-13). The bishop would be given offices at Lambeth and Canterbury, but the main working office could be in the home church. Regulations that govern the communion would need to insert the words “Bishop and Cathedral.” (But, I should hasten to add, all other rules and protocols would remain in place. A new Canterbury would have no more power to change the autonomy of provinces, nor membership in the communion, than the old one.)

Solving some of the practical questions that ensue becomes thornier, but it would still be possible, since all the rights and responsibilities of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England remain untouched. The Bishop of Canterbury Cathedral would remain a member of the House of Bishops at home, with some kind of licensing or reception in the Church of England. Such a bishop would need to be chosen by the communion. (Amid much talk about post-colonialism, this would be a concrete step in that direction.) I suggest that both the primates and the Anglican Consultative Council collaborate on a list of candidates from among all active bishops in good standing in the communion. Then all bishops of the communion would vote.

I do not claim this one idea solves all our issues — it would be enough that this act of disentanglement and global empowerment makes a contribution. Have you thought of problems with it that I haven’t? Good! This idea would require many people and considerable time. You may reject this whole idea, finally. Okay, but bear in mind that the structure we now have has shown itself to be broken, over a period of years, and more vividly in the past few months. Some new direction is required. May the Holy Spirit open this path for our whole communion.