Chris Sugden and Vinay Samuel have responded to my Fulcrum piece and this can be found here

Andrew

Peter Carrell, on his Anglican Down Under site today, has written a fine comment on Andrew Goddard's articles concerning Inclusive Church and Modern Church - in the left corner - and Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden - in the right corner. It is called 'A Plague on Both Yer Houses' and copied below.

I was asked some time ago on a Fulcrum forum about how the present situation relates to my quadrant suggestion outlined here. It seems to me that Inclusive Church and Modern Church are being true to their 'Federal Liberal' colours and Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden are being true to their 'Federal Conservative' colours.

A Plague on Both Yer Houses?

 

That the Covenant might just be the right document for the Anglican Communion at this time is evidenced by its opponents. When a progressive and a conservative challenge to the Covenant agree in judgement that it is the wrong document for the Communion, there might just be something in favour of it. I call it 'the silent majority'!

Anyway, Andrew Goddard    , whom I anoint as unofficial spokesperson for the centre of the Communion (and please direct concerns about how the centre is defined to him ... :), having recently taken on the English progressive challenge, takes on Sugden and Samuel's conservative, let's-hear-it-for-GAFCON challenge to the Covenant. Here are the final two paragraphs:

"One suspects that the authors may hope that GAFCON/FCA will benefit if the covenant fails but the weaknesses in that approach are already becoming clear in multiple ways. Its internal tensions are increasingly evident in, for example, the decision of AMiA to change its status in ACNA, the decision of a diocese in the Southern Cone to seek membership in another province following the province’s decision - on what is supposedly a ‘matter of indifference’in GAFCON - not to permit it to ordain women priests and the departure to Rome of some involved in the launch of FCAUK. It has also failed to build out from its original base and attract more Primates from the wider Global South to its Primates’ Council. More fundamentally, it is possibly fatally weakened by its failure to complement its proper confessional concern with the sort of practical commitments to patterns of common life and processes of common discernment found in the covenant.


If GAFCON and its supporters are genuinely seeking to be not an alternative Communion hoping for the breakup of the existing Communion but a reform movement within the Communion then rather than majoring on the covenant’s minor weaknesses and disparaging and distorting its content they should be embracing and working with the covenant as a reform which moves us in the right direction. Although not without its problems, by God’s grace and through our patience and perseverance the covenant holds out the prospect of gradually bringing greater faithfulness and order to global Anglicanism and so strengthening us to share in the mission of God."

Thank you for the detailed 'Critique'.  As  'conservative' Canadians waiting for clarity on what it means to be Anglican we do hope that the Covenant can provide a common ground from which to move forward with confidence.

It seems fair to point out The Anglican Mainstream article's omissions and and inaccuracies outlined in the first two subsections and to conclude that the authors have an agenda.  However, the lack of timely accountability in the covenant is not addressed.  TEC has confirmed Mary Glasspool's episcopacy and yet still controls the standing committee of the ACC with no deadline set for TEC's response to the covenant.  Similarly in Canada, there are several dioceses who refuse to abide by the Windsor moratoria and there is no deadline set for diocesan ratification of the covenant. It does not inspire confidence in the covenant as a practical document.

The false dichotomy between truth and conviction described in the third subsection is worth noting. However, a commitment to timely judgements and relational consequences would go a long way to allaying conservative fears that the truth in Lambeth 1:10 has so far not had any relational consequences for those who defy it.  Where is the promised accountability?

I agree with the points made in the fourth subsection regarding the covenant's celebration of Anglican life, doctirne and practice, but again when will we see the promised fruit of accountability, mutual responsibility and interdependence?  The final draft of the covenant was available in Dec 2009, the Canadian General Synod was in June 2010... there is still no publicised deadline for the covenant's ratification.

The fifth subsection wonders which issues the Anglican Mainstream authors categorise as 'fundamental non negotiables' on which the Bible is clear and which are 'matters of indifference' on which it is unclear. "The covenant therefore rightly views negatively any unilateral intervention  based on purely provincial rather than conciliar assessments that fundamental non-negotiables are at stake" is a fair call to patience. However, I imagine the Anglican Mainstream authors objected to Canon Barnett-Cowan's Church of England Newspaper article of November 12 because her statement rules out the 'exercise of a veto'.  But shouldn't wrong teaching as embraced by TEC as a whole and several dioceses withing ACoC be vetoed?

The sixth subsection  poses the question at the heart of our hopes and fears for the covenant:

"OK, the covenant does allow such judgment in theory but will it ever happen in practice?" 

It is hard to accept that the standing committee contains members from provinces whose actions reject the covenant.  When will ' provisional limitation of participation in, or suspension from, that Instrument" take effect? We need a vision of justice as well as patience and mercy.

The seventh subsection is a welcome defense of the covenant's section 4.

However, we in North American provinces are already forced to maintain full relationship with those who claim the right to "actions incompatible with the covenant".  

Will the wider communion quail at "interfering in the life of a province" when, in defiance of the Windsor recommendations, parishes are refused communion-faithful episcopal oversight by their bishop as in the Diocese of New Westminster?  The Canadian House of Bishops failed to 'interfere' and care for the parishes.  Can individual parishes ratify the covenant when their diocese won't? Can the Southern Cone's response to a pastoral invitation be seen not as a cross-border intervention, but as covenant-honouring service?

The juxtaposition of the "opposite scary scenario(s)" in the eighth subsection rightly call us to grow in hope and prayer rather than projecting our fears onto the future.

The final section fairly highlights some of the emerging tensions within ACNA, GAFCON and FCAUK.  We would be far better off working for the unity that Jesus said would be one of our chief witnesses to the world he longs to redeem and restore.

Do correct me if I am wrong, but didn't something similar happen a few years ago when a group of concerned and pious laity sought to reinstate heresy trials in the CoE, with the support of both ++Williams and ++Sentamu, only to be defeated by a veritable coalition of the unwilling - namely, "evangelicals" and "liberals" who each, in their own respective ways, did not want their theological and liturgical innovations challenged or disciplined?

Because the Covenant is not yet adopted, it is easy for critics to make it a screen upon which their own worst fears are allowed to play out.  Yet, what is at the root of these projections - we might call them fantasies, or perhaps even idolatries - is the fear felt by various groups that they will no longer be able to live as islands within the Church of England, but will now have to be part of the mainland.

The veritable shrieking against the Covenant heard from certain corners of our Communion is, in fact, the sound of idols being sounded out.

The problem for these conservative types is that the Bible as they interpret it and Creeds etc. produce a list of dos and don'ts, and as regard the don'ts the mere existence of talk during suspension of activity isn't good enough. There is, as such, nothing to talk about. From the liberal view, the talk is a means to slow change down to near zero while the objections come in, and they'll never stop coming in. Whatever, the fact is that the Covenant is becoming its own object to kick around and thus one good reason why it is better if it was dropped. But it is the case that what the author intends (and do we know what the 'author' intends any more?) is not necessarily how something gets used. A really bad piece of law is when no one is sure how it is going to be used, and how it gets used goes off in different directions, and the bad piece of law becomes as bad as the situation it was supposed to help solve.

Dear Friends

In response to Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden's recent article, Truth or Conviction: Questions Over the Anglican Communion Covenant, we have just published Conservatives' Covenant Concerns: A Critique

Please use this thread for discussion.

All the best,

Andrew.