Go to Part 2 of this series.

The proposed covenanting of Anglican churches that is embodied in the Covenant “process” now before the Anglican Communion has brought to the fore an important question: what is the appropriate “church” body to adopt the Covenant? Is it a province or a diocese? The question has already stirred acrimony in debate, because it is seen to touch at least two current sore spots in the Communion’s life: that is, the status of churches who a.) have left TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada, gone “under” the temporary jurisdiction of non-North American provinces, and are now forming a “new” North American province (ACNA), and b.) those dioceses within TEC whose bishops would like, if necessary, to covenant directly with other Anglican churches around the world, independently of their province’s decision on the matter. The issue of ecclesial status within the Communion raised by these cases is potentially fraught with legal and property implications, and therefore the theological issues behind it have been only partially examined in their own right. Yet the theological aspects are wide-reaching, touching not only on local and Communion ecclesial ordering, but on the character and shape of ecumenical vocation.

It was the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who personally pointed to the theological matter. In a letter of October 14, 2007 to Bishop John Howe of Central Florida, designed to be made public, the Archbishop made a more political point regarding the need for congregations to remain bound to their diocese. But he upheld this advice with an ecclesiological claim: “The organ of union with the wider Church is the Bishop and the Diocese rather than the Provincial structure as such…[there is a …] need to regard the Bishop and the Diocese as the primary locus of ecclesial identity rather than the abstract reality of the 'national church'.” Here the Archbishop makes several important assertions: first, ecclesial unity is given directly through a bishop and diocese, not a province; second, by consequence, provincial “structures” are not organs of unity “as such”; thirdly, “national churches” are somehow equivalent in this regard to “provinces”; and fourthly, the “abstraction” of a national church may even therefore apply, in its lack of ecclesiological concreteness, to provinces.

What are we to make of these assertions, not so much in the context of current Anglican debate, but “in themselves”, as it were, as theological claims? What follows is an attempt to lay out these theological issues in just such a way as to avoid, for the present, the political issues of the moment. It is not possible, however, to do this without at least noting some of the historical realities that have shaped the theological vision involved.

What is a province?

Let us begin with perhaps the easiest issue, since it represents mostly a descriptive matter: what is a “province”? The fact that Abp. Williams speaks ecclesiologically of a province in terms of “structure” and even “abstraction” indicates that a “provincial church” may be a problematic category on a purely theological level. And so the category’s historical emergence demonstrates. For all the retrospective attempts to link provincial, and in particular those provincial structures associated with well known “patriarchal sees” in the early Church, to theological claims of special apostolicity, historians today are loathe to attribute the provincial organization of the Constantinian church to anything but primarily political and administrative expedience. De Vries speaks of the “political principle” as the fundamental one in organizing the newly expanded church within the Christian “empire” along the lines of the Empire’s already established provincial system (in which, under Diocletian, even the secular political unit of the “diocese” preceded that term’s application to ecclesial units). Key urban centers within the civil sphere accrued, quite pragmatically, organizational status.¹ That this development might also be “providential” no one doubted, although just what Providence had in mind and why is another question. ²

Already by the 3rd c. (cf. Cyprian, Letter 19), we are told that bishops gathered in council from local “provinces”, in this case referring to geographical extent according to civil nomenclature, without any formal ecclesiastical structure implied. But the established order of civil administration was the de facto basis for the Church’s new formal political structuring in the 4th century, and one that made pragmatic and unquestioned sense. The Nicene claim to grant particular authority to the “patriarchates” of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem (along with Rome and the “new Rome” of Constantinople) was a matter of political reality, and generally accepted as such at the time, while the notion that these areas had a special apostolic origin was virtually unmentioned for centuries (cf. the Council of Nicea, Canons 6 and 7). To be sure, “custom” was cited as a reason for the respect, and thereby authority, to be accorded these sees, but nothing is said that explains this tradition in a theological way.

The notion of “primacy”, which is eventually bound up with the emergence of “metropolitan” and patriarchal sees, is one that, again, was only gradually articulated in a theological manner. Obviously, this development centered on the Bishop of Rome and his own primacy. And even today – e.g. in the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) document Gift of Authority (45) – it is the Pope’s argued role as a “universal” primate that informs the notion of primacy among other churches, including Anglicanism. But here as well, it should also be argued historically, the administrative ordering precedes the theological speculation, and the latter, frankly, lags the former by centuries and, in some cases, millennia. At best, one can argue for an emergent respect for episcopal “seniority” in consecration in certain regions before the 4th century. Still, the consistent ordering of primatial powers along these lines is clouded and disputed, sometimes following the demarcations of civil administration, sometimes of exemplary life.

By the time that the Pope saw fit to establish “patriarchates” and archiepiscopates in areas already served by existing patriarchs (e.g. in the 16th and 17th centuries, not to mention the earlier imposition of a Latin episcopal system onto the Greek Church in the 13th century), the theological claim had ironically outstripped even the most realistic administrative facts. (Theological reasoning did, however, manage to provide a new basis for political expedience [e.g. in allowing the Catholic bishop with charge over British Catholics in the 17th century to carry the title of Archbishop of Chalcedon]). It is only recently that Catholic ecclesiology has sought to free the character of primacy from this seemingly ineluctable political current, and in so doing open up a path for ecumenical discussions around ecclesial authority. Thus, a normative statement of papal primacy – e.g. "the Pope, Bishop of Rome and Peter's successor, 'is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful’” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 882) – will make use of notions of “unity”, episcopacy, and the people of God in a way that is not immediately bound to political structures.

In short, if the notion of “primacy” is to have any theological weight, it will come from its elucidation of the apostolicity of the Church, not from its association with provincial and administrative structures. This has been the only real theological container in which responsible Anglican claims to Canterbury’s particular “primatial” role can have any ballast, although it is one that thereby lays that claim open to potential questioning at various times. It is, likewise, the only basis upon which the archiepiscopal ordering of Anglicanism can have any theological integrity, again providing the basis for that ordering’s potential relativizing. Of course, to press the argument in the direction of apostolicity is to press is it back “down”, in terms of structure, to the level of the episcopate itself (see below).

Before doing so, however, it will be helpful to address the question of the meaning of a “diocese” and “parish”. In fact, these two terms also derive from secular administrative units initially as well, with little theological content. In Roman civil law, a “diocese” (a Latin transliteration of the Greek term for a household unit) evolved from indicating local political entities within provinces, to larger divisions of the empire (under Diocletian) within which provinces were located. Before Nicea, bishops were usually spoken of as overseeing a “church” (ecclesia), and the civil terms were not applied. By the time of Nicea, however, the term used for a bishop’s territory of jurisdiction was “parish”, the paroikia or literally “neighborhood”, while the term “diocese” was reserved for the larger patriarchal areas of oversight (see e.g. Nicea, Canon 26). This distinction remained in use in the East, and, for a much lesser period, in the West where, over time, the term “diocese” supplanted “parish” as the designation for the area of specifically episcopal jurisdiction – although well into the Middle Ages one sees confusion of these categories in their application.

In any case, dioceses in the West seem to have followed the “political principle” as much as in the East. In Gaul, Britain, Wales later, as well as elsewhere, we see that diocesan ordering generally followed first Roman, then non-Roman political boundaries of local kingdoms and fiefdoms, or later (as in 1111 in Ireland) were determined naturally by geographic markers like rivers and mountains.

Without over-extrapolating meaning from these kinds of historical observations, it is possible to conclude the following: the key issue in defining geographical ecclesial units once this became desirable at the time of the “Church’s imperial reorganization”, eventually lay in the reality of episcopal oversight, to which political and civil terms ready at hand were appropriated. As with provincial ordering, practical expedience – including elements of travel and clarity of natural boundary -- seems to have had the greatest role in the geographic ordering of the Church. The fact that “parish” proved to be the primary usage in this regard at first, however, indicates the continued pull of local conceptualities on this matter, borrowing a term with connotations of personal relationship and residential proximity and hospitality.

The rise of the parochial subdivision of dioceses (in what became the normal Western usage) also follows a relatively straightforward development of administration as the church itself spread across rural areas especially that required regular local pastoral oversight. Even here, as we see in the case of England, there are the clear traces of various older civil orders that lie behind the parochial system, determined by taxation/tithe purposes, and often bounded by the borders settled through the local proprietorship of larger landowners and their tenants. Significant differences in these secular systems account for what eventually proved to be the highly diverse forms of parish organization in northern and southern England. Nor were these secular templates merely vestiges of the distant past: in the 19th-century, the “civil parish” unit of secular government was based, in many areas, on 13th c. village boundaries of the north, and was often irregularly linked to church parishes that had their own earlier origins.³ Obviously, with non-established churches in areas of newer civil invention, like the United States, these kinds of historical arrangements did not obtain. But even in the Episcopal Church, early canons dictated that parish “boundaries”, unless otherwise stipulated, coincide with the civil limits of “villages, towns, townships, boroughs, cities, or such divisions of a city or town” as might be expressly noted (I.vi.2 of 1875).

If there is a theological meaning to the “parish”, it also emerges only long after the organizational unit itself was adapted. Among churches of catholic self-understanding – as opposed to the Congregationalist ecclesiology developed in some forms of 17th-century Protestantism – such a meaning is completely dependent upon the theological significance of episcopally-ordered communities, at best an extension of this reality. To be sure, congregationalism has often culturally influenced many Western catholic churches, but that practical reality has rarely been directly acknowledged let alone affirmed. Most fully, the parish it usually understood as the local embodiment of the diocesan community, eucharistically ordered. The notion of a “particular Church” in Roman Catholic ecclesiology lies at the heart of this. ⁴

With this background on the development of dioceses and parishes, we turn in Part 2 to the historic development of the episcopate.