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Towards greater unity and closer friendship: people
of the Porvoo Communion today and tomorrow1

MICHAEL JACKSON

Introduction and language: Towards …

THE VERY TITLE of this paper points us to the inherent provisionality rather
than to the insurmountable problems of the areas under consideration which
are the joint areas of unity and friendship. Provisionality is essential to a work-
ing understanding and receptive appreciation of Anglicanism because provi-
sionality itself moves us on towards eschatology and the divinely sanctioned
incompleteness of our earthly e?orts, not least in the church. The church is a
gift of God most certainly, but constructed and deconstructed by human be-
ings. Anglicanism is not a confessional way of believing and therefore the
churches constituent of the worldwide Anglican Communion are not, in any
sense, members of a confessional church. Provisionality is, therefore, all the
more important in understanding the Anglican witness and presence in living
history. Provisionality honours the need for interpretation as a primary doc-
trinal tool and places Anglicanism at quite a far remove from prescriptive con-
fessionalism. Provisionality also o?ers a way of living fruitfully, creatively, criti-
cally, respectfully and relationally within the inherited tradition. The shorthand
terms for this Anglican theological method are Scripture, Tradition and Rea-
son. In my thinking, provisionality makes the vital di?erence to their dynamic
application as, in some sense or other, these three terms are common to most
religious traditions.

The other reason I use the term provisional is that the primary Biblical
paradigms for unity and for friendship in the New Testament are St John 17.11:
My prayer for you is that you may be one even as my Father and I are one; and
St John 15.12,13: Greater love has no one than to lay down his or her life for his
or her friends. And so, we are asked to grapple in the here and now with a de?-
nition of unity which believes in us so fervently as to want to draw us into the
being and the dynamic of the Godhead; and to invite us to live in and live by a
de?nition of friendship which is so sacri?cial as to articulate its greatest glory
as its most costly loss in terms of the self. And so, by drawing us into the life of

1 An introductory paper for the York Meeting of September 2014.

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