I'm grateful to see this wonderful quotation from Kant. It points to a serious problem in the St. Andrew's Draft Covenant. We face Kant's dilemma right now in the Covenant’s quick and dirty consensus on baptism and on bishops.

Almost reflexively (why would anyone object to what's in the catechism?) the St. Andrew's Covenant includes a five hundred year old Reformation claim that there are two "dominical sacraments" (Baptism and the Lord's Supper). The Reformers meant by that to reduce five other Western Catholic sacraments to creations of the church, claiming (on Biblical authority as they had it) that Jesus himself had instituted Baptism and Eucharist.

Did Jesus institute baptism? The only explicit command of Jesus to baptize is Matthew 28:19, the second last verse of Matthew's Gospel, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." The tidy Trinitarian formula and absence of the text from earliest manuscripts convince most Gospel scholars that this is an early church addition to the Gospel. Elsewhere the Gospels tell us that Jesus didn't baptize. Matthew 28:9, read in good Anglican fashion, demands that we acknowledge the church's continuing responsibility (and legitimate authority) for making and shaping sacraments. Baptism belongs to the church. The apostles (apparently) chose to institute it in imitation of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist and as a partial borrowing of Jewish initiation practice of uncircumcised God-fearers. Does it matter if the sacrament is not historically ‘dominical?’ The bitter, violent religious divisions of our world would prompt us to ask that question seriously. If baptism is a legitimate sacrament of the church’s making, it’s also the church’s legitimate task to reinterpret it and remake it in succeeding generations.

Kant describes exactly how binding ourselves to one moment's doctrinal understanding and interpretation ties our hands for years to come.

The Covenant’s other quick and dirty appeal to consensus is in the too easy appeal to 'historic episcopate.' What does that mean? The confirmation class version that many Episcopalians seem to believe defines us is a hand-to-head, hand-to-head line of ordination successions back to the apostles. Historically we know that’s too simple, but it’s a bit of Episcopal church historical fiction that nearly blocked our efforts to make a Concordat with the Lutherans.

Not only does our ability to trace any line of ordination succession stop before we get to the time of the apostles, but the succession's first witness, Irenaeus, offers an 'apostolic succession' of TEACHERS going back to the apostle John. That earliest list appeals to an unbroken line of public teaching with the bishop's word (and witness as teacher) that it's the same faith that he received ('And he knew Papias and he knew John').

The Covenant's use of an archaic reformation critique of the the Western Catholic Church's seven sacraments would formally close off the church's legitimate authority to shape a theology and practice of baptism for mission.

And an a-historic definition of 'historic episcopate' ties our hands ecumenically, giving Covenant authority to the a mythologizing of the original apostolic succession that has made us deny the apostolicity of protestant sisters churches are not apostolic.

Can we bear the hard conversations we’ll need to have if we take Kant’s warning to heart?

My husband happens to have taught this very text in his philosophy course today, and used Gene Robinson in his illustration of Kant's point.

Where does the proposed Covenant say "and this is established by our hands unchanging for ever and ever"? Why assume the the goal of the covenant is dogmatization of statements that have been widely respected in the communion for many years? It seems more sensible to insist that the covenant is simply a restatement of Anglican identity coupled with some method of improving the interprovincial communication (recognizing that the faith isn't properly talked about as if it was strictly a matter of opinion). The fact that some GS primates might want it to do more is largely beside the point as long as their view isn't explicitly embraced by the covenant itself.

Jon

I think Kant's point is not that such a covenant is merely inadvisable, but that it is literally impossible. There is nothing that one generation can do that another cannot undo. This is why, for example, the Constitution of the US has a whole set of amendments attached to it -- some of which are fundamental alterations of what was once understood to be "settled." Law is only settled until someone unsettles it.

Oh, Tobias, I disagree. Kant is saying more than it is impossible (which it is), but also that it is criminal to bind the future generation's hands.

When I read this quote from Kant last night I was reminded of Thomas Jefferson - whose view was that constitutions should (as a matter of ethics) be rewritten on a regular basis.

It's interesting that Jefferson also wrote the following in the Virginia Stature for Religious Freedom: "And though we well know that this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right."

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_vsrf.html

John, should have said "not only" -- as he says that the subsequent generation may judge the attempt (or its content) as criminal. (A good example might be the reversal of the Dutch Reformed on the matter of apartheid.) So the attempt may well be criminal as well as ill-advised -- but I think Kant is primarily noting the essential folly of this kind of intent: not only may it be judged wrong, but it is always futile.

Meanwhile, this passage also reminds me of this from the judicious Hooker:

Neither councils nor customs, be they never so ancient and so general, can let the Church from taking away that thing which is hurtful to be retained. Where things have been instituted, which being convenient and good at the first, do afterwards in process of time wax otherwise; we make no doubt but that they may be altered, yea, though councils or customs general have received them. And therefore it is but a needless kind of opposition which they make who thus dispute, "If in those things which are not expressed in the Scripture, that is to be observed of the Church, which is the custom of the people of God and decree of our forefathers; then how can these things at any time be varied, which heretofore have been once ordained in such sort." (T.C. lib. iii. p. 30) Whereto we say, that things so ordained are to be kept, howbeit not necessarily any longer, that till there grow some urgent cause to ordain the contrary. For there is not any positive law of men, whether it be general or particular; received by formal express consent, as in councils, or by secret approbation, as in customs it cometh to pass; but the same may be taken away if occasion serve. Even as we all know, that many things generally kept heretofore are now in like sort generally unkept and abolished every where. LawsIV.XIV.5

Interesting that it was Calvinists then as now who want to set their laws in stone...