Any answers to his questions?
***Second, I am troubled by the absence of a final court of appeal in controversies of faith and morals. We Anglicans are now witnessing first-hand the disintegration of a world-wide communion partially because of the absence of a divinely instituted organ of central authority.***
The final court of appeals is Jesus Christ, who is "standing in the middle of the lampstands" and has the power to take away the candle from any church which disobeys him.
Why we think we need to jump in there and settle all matters (often with a judicial sword might I add) is beyond me.
Jesus said, "Any plant that my Father hath not planted shall be rooted up". He didn't say, "I want you to go root them up."
If the Anglican communion disentegrates it is because the real court of appeals, the heavenly court, has passed sentence on it and it's light has been taken away.
Every Western Christian community has a history in Orthodoxy, using historic Western liturgies, not the Eastern Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. The Orthodox West went off the track with the papal "reform" in the 9th-11th centuries, led by Frankish popes and the abbey of Cluny. This produced papal monarchy (or imperialism), the imposition of the filioque, clerical celibacy, and the Great Schism. The Norman Conquest, for example, was in part a religious war, to impose the papal "reform" on Orthodox England and Ireland.
The excesses resulting from the papal "reform" also made the Lutheran Refomation necessary. Luther and his early Lutheran colleagues were arguably trying to restore Orthodoxy to the West. But they had no living Orthodox community to serve as a template for this, so they (doing the best that they could) fell short of the mark. The other Protestants, for the most part, went even farther astray, and had no real interest in restoring Orthodoxy.
Despite the host of Orthodox theologians who attack "the heresies of the Latins", Orthodoxy is not inherently anti-Western. Western Christian churches, in dialogue with their Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters, need to find their way home. All the post-modern issues facing the Anglican, Lutheran, and even Roman Catholic communions show the reason why!
I imagine it has a lot to do with the present state of perversion in the Western churches and the spiritual rebirth in the Eastern Church.
And yet even without one conviened the Orthodox Church has survived 4 times as long since the last Ecomunical Council then the Anglicans as a whole. Conservatism vs the spirit of the day has prevailed and will continue to do just that until the Second Coming.