The Global Anglican Future Conference and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches–which combined represent an estimated 85% of Anglicans worldwide in predominately non-Western countries–gathered in April of 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda to produce the Kigali Commitment, which has urged the leadership of the Church of England to repent, and called for a significant reset of how global Anglicans understand themselves and relate to one another. The Kigali Commitment’s summons to reset the global Anglican communion especially envisages a recovery of Holy Scripture as the final authority of the church’s belief and practice, in at least three regards. Lamenting current divisions caused by “failure to hear and heed God’s Word undermines the mission of the church as a whole,” the Kigali Commitment declares.

What gives global Anglicanism today its identity and coherence? After decades-long tensions reached a breaking point in early 2023, the global Anglican communion has entered a new era for its members’ relationships to one another and to the world. This provides a singular opportunity to recover and bolster the reformed and catholic character of global Anglicanism, and offers a pathway towards renewal.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has historically been an influential means for Anglican unity around the world, being recognized as a first among equals in the college of bishops in the Anglican Communion. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been regarded as neither an Anglican equivalent to the Pope in terms of ecclesiology and institutional power, nor as merely one more bishop among others, given the significant influence and potential to foster voluntary unity historically associated with the See of Canterbury. But a realignment has been underway for several decades, and a drastically different conception of what unifies the Anglican communion is now assumed by the overwhelming majority of Anglicans worldwide.
Tensions that had been mounting for decades reached a pivotal moment in February of 2023, when the General Synod of the Church of England voted by a majority to commend the blessing of same-sex couples/unions. Subsequently, the Global Anglican Future Conference and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches–which combined represent an estimated 85% of Anglicans worldwide in predominately non-Western countries–gathered in April of 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda to produce the Kigali Commitment, which has urged the leadership of the Church of England to repent, and called for a significant reset of how global Anglicans understand themselves and relate to one another. The Kigali Commitment’s summons to reset the global Anglican communion especially envisages a recovery of Holy Scripture as the final authority of the church’s belief and practice, in at least three regards. Lamenting current divisions caused by “failure to hear and heed God’s Word undermines the mission of the church as a whole,” the Kigali Commitment declares:
The Bible is God’s Word written, breathed out by God as it was written by his faithful messengers (2 Timothy 3:16). It carries God’s own authority, is its own interpreter, and it does not need to be supplemented, nor can it ever be overturned by human wisdom. God’s good Word is the rule of our lives as disciples of Jesus and is the final authority in the church… this fellowship is broken when we turn aside from God’s Word or attempt to reinterpret it in any way that overturns the plain reading of the text in its canonical context and so deny its truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency, and thereby its authority (Jerusalem Declaration #2).
Further, the authority of Scripture is identified as the issue at the heart of recent crises in the Anglican communion, declaring that “despite 25 years of persistent warnings by most Anglican Primates, repeated departures from the authority of God’s Word have torn the fabric of the Communion.” The most recent precipitating event from early 2023 is thus described as undermining of “biblical teaching,” and the Archbishop of Canterbury and other leaders are charged with having betrayed their vows “to uphold and defend the truth taught in Scripture.” The constructive alternative that the Kigali Commitment foregrounds that “‘communion’ between churches and Christians must be based on doctrine,” declaring “Anglican identity is defined by this and not by recognition from the See of Canterbury,” thus summoning the Archbishop to repentance and the global Anglican communion to renewal. In short, we might ask, how does the Kigali Commitment envisage what unifies global Anglicans? Rather than bare communion with a bishop or a set of common practices or aesthetics, the glue holding global Anglicans together is commitment to certain theological doctrines whose authoritative basis is Holy Scripture.
Perhaps the strongest critique that has been raised about the Kigali Commitment from within conservative Anglicanism is the June 2023 First Things essay by Hans Boersma, Gerald McDermott, and Greg Peters entitled “Is the Anglican ‘Reset’ Truly Anglican?” The authors are not concerned about the Kigali Commitment because they hold a progressive outlook on recent controversies, but rather:
We applaud our Anglican bishops’ willingness to reject neocolonial demands to accept the hegemony of the sexual revolution. But we are concerned that in an admirable attempt to resist the liberal project, they unwittingly have themselves opened the door to the use of Scripture for liberal ends. The Kigali Commitment repeatedly appeals to the authority of the Bible alone and fails to mention either the authority of the Church or the role of tradition, describing the Bible as “the rule of our lives” and the “final authority in the church” without mentioning that Scripture functions within the context of tradition—in particular, the common liturgy of the Church and the Book of Common Prayer—and the Church’s teaching authority.
Boersma, McDermott, and Peters agree with the Kigali Commitment that “the divine Scriptures are indeed the ultimate authority for matters of doctrine. The Church has no authority to define dogma that the Scriptures do not already contain or to admit heretical teachings that contradict them.” However, they are concerned that “a strict sola scriptura hermeneutic, which fails to recognize the Bible’s origin in the ancient Church and its authoritative interpretation by the Church fathers and creeds, opens the way to a liberal method in which every reader serves as his own authority.” Where the Kigali Commitment asserts a “plain reading” of Scripture, its “clarity,” and that Scripture is “its own interpreter,” Boersma, McDermott, and Peters contend “the Church cannot avoid interpreting the Scriptures, and she must do so faithfully, in line with sacred tradition. Without tradition as norm and guide, the canonical context and clarity of Scripture are meaningless… Kigali’s strict ‘Bible alone’ viewpoint is also a departure from the approach of the English Reformers,” from Thomas Cranmer through bedrocks of Anglican theology such as John Jewell and Richard Hooker.
The critique offered by Boersma, McDermott, and Peters is helpful and stimulating in many ways. A biblicistic disregard for the rule of faith, ecclesiology, and the Great Tradition indeed can have disastrous consequences in the life of the church. Does the Kigali Commitment’s theological prolegomena and hermeneutic unintentionally undermine its commendable aims? It is of dire importance that our reimagination of the global Anglican communion proceed on sound theological grounds, informed by theological practices that have preceded and will also long outlast us. Indeed, for Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker, as well as magisterial Reformers such as Calvin and Luther,[1] the authority, sufficiency, and clarity of Scripture were never imagined to mean that everything in Scripture is clear to everyone. Sola Scriptura after all, is a statement about Scripture’s authority, rather than a hermeneutical principle. Even at that, it might be better to say Prima Scriptura rather than Sola, since Holy Scripture is the highest, final, and primary authority for the church’s faith and practice, rather than the only authority.[2] If the Kigali Commitment indeed envisages an individualistic biblicism as the hermeneutic governing the church’s life, wherein every individual interpreter’s reading of Scripture becomes the final arbiter for faith and practice, abstracted from ecclesial structure, then indeed its efforts are in vain. That would be to cede the church’s theology to the whims of political biases and self-autonomous individuals, rather than the church’s reading of Holy Scripture being ordered to the rule of faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3), a torch passed down through the ages for us to pass on to others, especially in the ecumenical creeds and their early exposition and defense by the Church Fathers. But is that indeed the theological program and hermeneutic advocated for by the Kigali Commitment?
If we take into consideration the context assumed by the Kigali Commitment, then concerns of a biblicism that disregards Anglican tradition and the rule of faith are allayed. When the Kigali Commitment mentions the plain sense of Scripture in its canonical context, it cites the second statement of the 2008 Jerusalem Declaration. That section, and the two which follow, declare:

We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.
We uphold the four Ecumenical Councils and the three historic Creeds as expressing the rule of faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.

While these commitments to a catholic and evangelical theology under the historic and conciliar rule of faith are not made in the Kigali Commitment itself, the Kigali Commitment’s citation of the Jerusalem Declaration on this matter arguably means these concerns are part of the wider context within which the Kigali Commitment should be read.
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Christ told us where we would encounter him in this world, whether to our credit or shame, among the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger, sick, and imprisoned (Matthew 25:31–46); he declares, that “whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me” (John 13:20).

In the summer of 2021 I began driving an ice cream truck. My small contribution to Howdy Homemade Ice Cream, an ice cream shop that deliberately employs workers with intellectual, emotional, and/or physical disabilities, such as Down Syndrome, was to simply provide transportation for catered events so that Howdy Homemade’s workers were not only included but actively contributing their gifts in service for others to receive. At catered events in public parks, office buildings, private birthday parties, churches, soup kitchens, and more, young and old formed queues for ice cream that at times reminded me of the diverse crowd that processes to receive the Eucharist. The recent “Hiring Chain” advertisement by CoorDown well depicts my own aspiration, that some of these customers might observe Howdy Homemade’s workers in these different contexts and consider how they might create similar jobs in their places of employment, especially since so few good jobs with adequate pay and health insurance exist for people with significant disabilities.
There is probably a more technically efficient way to run an ice cream store than Howdy Homemade’s mode of operation. As John Swinton well describes in Becoming Friends of Time, people with disabilities tend to relate to time differently than those of us who have become habituated by modern life to following a clock, functioning more like machines than humans. But the reason Howdy Homemade narrowly survived the economic challenges of the pandemic is because the broader community of which the store is a part valued the humanizing goods HH contributes to the broader public, such as joy and hospitality, which derive from its founder’s self-consciously Christian aims and disposition.
Sadly, Howdy Homemade is an extraordinary exception to how people with Down Syndrome and other physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities are regarded in the world today. Remembering how Christians throughout the centuries have understood humanity to have been created in the image of God is a continual need in order for us to rightly discern our time and place in this world of wonders and perils. Not only can such a vision clarify our obligations towards our fellow human beings. It must also unsettle and re-make how we imagine what it means to be a human being.
Down Syndrome and Inhospitality
In her December 2020 piece in The Atlantic, “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” Sarah Zhang interviewed persons with Down Syndrome and families around the world who care for children with a range of more and less severe physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities related to Down Syndrome. Alongside her nuanced and intimate depiction of their plight, Zhang’s analysis raises a disturbing prospect, that we might have a future altogether without human beings who have Down Syndrome:
Denmark is unusual for the universality of its screening program and the comprehensiveness of its data, but the pattern of high abortion rates after a Down syndrome diagnosis holds true across Western Europe and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the United States. In wealthy countries, it seems to be at once the best and the worst time for Down syndrome. Better health care has more than doubled life expectancy. Better access to education means most children with Down syndrome will learn to read and write. Few people speak publicly about wanting to “eliminate” Down syndrome. Yet individual choices are adding up to something very close to that.
The complexities of abortion in the contemporary world are manifold; writing in Plough, Kirsten Sanders describes the decision making process of women considering an abortion as wrestling with ghosts. But the arrangement of our common life, encompassing vast healthcare systems and individual decisions, prevent most – and in some places, nearly all – people with Down Syndrome from ever being welcomed into this world. Routinely, pro-choice or pro-abortion advocates will criticize conservatives for trying to make abortion illegal while also advocating for austerity with respect to the welfare state, and rightly so. The conservative preference for an informal but strong network of local support from churches, family members, and friends is theoretically desirable. But in our increasingly fragmented and isolated modern world, where bonds that traditionally wove communities together are increasingly frayed, these networks are harder to form and maintain, such that policies of economic austerity can foster child poverty. Consequently, pro-life advocates are routinely stereotyped as valuing human dignity within the womb but not outside of it, not least when it comes to matters of poverty and justice in other arenas of political and socio-economical life.
However, a serious problem with that line of criticism is that countries with the very best social safety nets and the very best public health insurance in the world – the Nordic countries – have a slightly higher abortion rate than the United States. According to the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, “Some 57,000 induced abortions were performed in Finland, Sweden and Norway in 2019, that is, 12.4 abortions per thousand women of childbearing age (15–49 years).” According to the Centers for Disease Control, in the United States “in 2018, a total of 614,820 abortions were reported, the abortion rate was 11.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years, and the abortion ratio was 189 abortions per 1,000 live births.” So, while it is worthwhile to undertake whatever costs are needed to so support families in their material needs, to the benefit of parents concerned about their financial ability to care for children with intellectual and physical disabilities, it is not the case that public healthcare would necessarily solve this problem. In Iceland, the abortion rate is virtually one hundred percent where pre-natal screening indicates the child has Down Syndrome; in Denmark it is ninety-eight percent. As Zhang notes, there can be peer pressure not to end these pregnancies. Even if we regard universal public healthcare as a good worth pursuing, it not only does not reduce abortion rates but can actually increase them. According to a March 2022 report for the United States Senate Joint Economic Committee’s Social Capital Project, while medical advances have vastly expanded the life expectancy of people with Down Syndrome, up from 10 years of age in the 1960s to around 52 years of age in 2020, selective abortion means that in the last ten years about 67 percent of Down Syndrome pregnancies were aborted.
What’s So Great About Theological Anthropology in Pluralistic Societies?
In response to such trends, some point to the wonderful things people with Down Syndrome can do, accomplish, or enjoy. These truly significant accomplishments are indeed worth celebrating. Yet, as Justin Hawkins delicately warns, human worth and dignity are not determined by our perceived usefulness to others. People with Down Syndrome are not reducible to their achievements or capacity to enjoy things, nor is their existence reducible to inspirational examples for the ambition of others. But as wonderful as it is to find examples of people with intellectual and physical disabilities still accomplishing truly wonderful achievements despite all adversity, there are a great many parents of children with significant disabilities who may not ever accomplishment an athletic feat, hold a job, or speak – yet, even so, such people are no less human than you or I.
Our perceived utility to others, however great or small, might prove to be little more than the extent to which we can be exploited by dehumanizing forces and soon discarded, not least in the throwaway culture of land, animals, and human beings in the age of globalization.[1] Rather than envisioning the systems and tools of society as serving the good of humanity, instead conditions can emerge where human beings serve the ends of the systems and tools of society in a vicious, deleterious cycle. Historically, humanity has shown ourselves more than capable of confusing real virtues such as compassion and mercy with violence and brutality, taking it upon ourselves to put people deemed worthless out of their misery, as Lebensunwertes Leben, life unworthy of life. The marginalization and disposal of the lonely elderly, ethnic minorities, the supposedly unproductive, and especially those human beings with physical or intellectual disabilities is not only tolerated but becomes celebrated and championed as humane and dignified. We not only forget, but actively avoid realizing, that even the most fortunate, affluent, and privileged among us, in time, will become utterly useless to our own selves and depend upon the compassion of others as our mortal bodies decay. We are taken from dust, and to dust we shall return, despite all presumption, accomplishment, distraction, or protestation to the contrary.
Cultivating a self-consciously theological account of human dignity might seem like a non-starter to cure the ills of our common life, a confusion of categories as sectarian private values are imposed upon the so-called neutral liberal order of our pluralist societies. The rhetorical moves possible within public reason tend to create a neat distinction between public goods, such as individual liberty, and private values, such as one’s religious preferences. A metaphysical account of what human beings are, particularly one that explicitly draws upon the discourse of Christian theology, indeed breaks the rules of the liberal game for acceptable public discourse.
Yet, it is no secret that everyone who participates in the procedures of public reason does so not only despite, but often precisely because of, their sincerely held private values. One might argue in public for sincerely held, private values on moral and social questions, but must find seemingly neutral ways to argue for this vision in public, perhaps advancing a technocratic argument about how a political ruling on a moral and social question would affect the gross domestic product. But the political organization of our common life inevitably involves some understanding or another of what human beings are, which necessarily exceeds the constraints and limits of supposedly value-free, public neutrality. We might conclude, with Justice Anthony Kennedy, that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” but this raises significant questions about what the rights and liberties for those who due to intellectual disabilities are scarcely capable of conceptualizing existence.
Liberty in personal preferences, commitment to one’s local community, and consumer choices have their place. But purportedly value-free claims to neutrality are ill-suited tools for understanding and criticizing the market forces and organization of our common life which degrade the earth and deem some human beings as unworthy of life itself. For some problems, comprehensive doctrines and value claims are inescapable, not least on the question of which kinds of human beings should be welcomed and loved on the earth as our common home, or why persons who have Down Syndrome and other intellectual disabilities increasingly are unwelcome in this world.
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