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Permalink: http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/560
Fulcrum Subjects: Anglicanism, Windsor Process / Anglicanism, Church of England Other articles by Andrew Goddard are available from this site Discuss this Article on the Fulcrum Forum See the 4 comments on this article Framing the Anglican Covenant: Trick or Treat?
A Response to Inclusive Church and Modern Church by Andrew Goddard
The advertisement’s distorted account of the covenant brought to mind Mrs Thatcher’s perception of Europe as described in Geoffrey Howe’s famous resignation speech - a “nightmare image...conjured up by my right hon. Friend, who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people, scheming, in her words, to "extinguish democracy"”.
We are presented with a vision of the covenant as an oppressive mechanism which will be used against us by such dangerous elements as “neo-Puritans” and “Anglicans in other parts of the world”. It has allegedly “been kept so quiet” because it will “impose restrictions on any future church developments which another province opposes”, “make the Church of England subject to an outside power for the first time since Henry VIII” and “subordinate” General Synod to “new centralised authorities” in order to “make Anglicanism more dogmatic” instead of “Classic Anglican theology’s balance of scripture, reason and tradition”. Every one of these claims and every answer to the seven questions IC & MCU ask is flawed, at best incomplete, often simply erroneous.
What does the covenant do? It does not enable anyone – certainly not some self-appointed ‘objectors’ – to forbid new developments in the Church of England or any other province. It simply sets out a path by which proposed controversial developments in provinces can be weighed across the Communion (as happened with women’s ordination) and establishes agreed processes for responding to relational difficulties when there is conflict. The Standing Committee is neither required to grant permission to anyone nor authorised to forbid anyone in relation to anything in any province. The most it can do is to respond to tensions by making proposals to the Instruments and provinces about relational consequences between churches. Those proposals are for the provinces and Instruments to respond to as they wish. At no point does the covenant state, imply or produce the effect that the Communion or Anglicanism will be redefined by withdrawing recognition although its development means that relationships within the Instruments between signatories and non-signatories may need to be considered at some stage in the future. Astonishingly, the authors imply the covenant has been kept quiet. Did they really fail to notice it has been through four versions with each earlier draft posted on the Anglican Communion Office website and sent to provinces for comment (and the Church of England’s comments proving influential)? Have they forgotten that General Synod has also had no less than five opportunities to discuss Communion governance and the covenant since it was first proposed in October 2004? A very strange way to keep something quiet. Given such a distorted perception, predictably all eight claimed consequences for the Church of England are highly tendentious. Some are simply false – there is no subordination to an international body or increased interference from outside. In fact, quite the opposite. Covenanting churches affirm that ‘each Church, with its bishops in synod, orders and regulates its own affairs and its local responsibility for mission through its own system of government’ and that ‘Churches of the Anglican Communion are bound together “not by a central legislative and executive authority, but by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops in conference” and of the other instruments of Communion’ (3.1.2). Signatories must commit to ‘respect the constitutional autonomy of all of the Churches of the Anglican Communion’ (3.2.2) and the covenant explicitly states that signing it ‘does not represent submission to any external ecclesiastical jurisdiction’ as ‘the Covenant does not grant to any one Church or any agency of the Communion control or direction over any Church of the Anglican Communion’ (4.1.3). Some claimed consequences are also incoherent. For example the two groups shift from appealing to being an established national church to seeking to wear the mantle of catholicity and they claim that the covenant would somehow make us more inward-looking because it would require us ‘to seek a shared mind with other Churches’. Throughout there is an apparent blindness to the fact that the covenant seeks to be truly catholic and uphold ‘universal Christianity’. It does so by facilitating global discernment together that will help distinguish potentially Spirit-led developments from idiosyncratic actions of misguided minorities that if followed by a province would make it what the advert warns against Anglicanism becoming - ‘a sect with its own distinctive doctrines’. The fatal flaws in its understanding also undermine its claims about what would have happened if we had the covenant. Leaving aside the rather ridiculous merging of slavery, divorce, contraception and ordination oaths into the same category and the repeated falsehood that the covenant gives provinces the right to veto a province developing its teaching and practice, there is the suggestion the covenant would have forbidden women priests in every Anglican province and may yet delay women bishops in England. This shows remarkable ignorance of not only the covenant text but also of how these developments – in contrast to recent developments in relation to same-sex relationships - occurred precisely through the sort of corporate discernment processes now being explicitly articulated in the covenant (for a summary of the process see Colin Craston's article). So, who wants an Anglican covenant? For some reason it is never acknowledged that the only province to sign up so far is Mexico, whose primate is a Patron of Inclusive Church (the other province close to signing is that well-known neo-Puritan African province, South Africa). He perhaps wants it for the same reasons many others have welcomed it.
The covenant will, for example, force the Church of England to stop thinking of itself simply as, in the words of the advertisement, ‘the mother church of the Communion’ whose actions are so important that on its own it can prevent developments such as the covenant. It will create a more egalitarian and post-colonial international fellowship of churches affirming not simply an English 'mother church' but a common inheritance of faith and shared vision of life together “in communion with autonomy and accountability” (3.1.2). That will then shape their commitments, including mutual accountability, to one another and to a pattern of life marked by such virtues as spending time "with openness and patience in matters of theological debate and reflection, to listen, pray and study with one another in order to discern the will of God" (3.2.3).
Above all, the covenant will hopefully help refocus the Church of England and all covenanting churches on mission. That mission is not, as in the advert, defined by whether or not some outside the church are ‘put off by the Church’s apparent reluctance to change’. It is rather ‘God’s call to undertake evangelisation’ and ‘share in the healing and reconciling mission’ of God in Christ ‘"for our blessed but broken, hurting and fallen world"’ (2.2.1). Discuss this Article on the Fulcrum Forum Forum Posts About This Article:
Posted by: Graham Kings
Friday 5 November 2010 - 04:57pm
Gregory Cameron, the Bishop of St Asaph and Secretary to the Anglican Communion Covenant Design Group, 2006-9, has written a trenchant letter to the Church Times, published today 5 November 2010. It is worth reading in full, together with the article, by Ed Beavan, in the Church Times about the letter. Sir, — There was a very curious document in last week’s Church Times (full-page advertisement, page 7). In it, two organisations, Inclusive Church and Modern Church, for which I have formerly had the highest regard, turned themselves into the nearest to an ecclesiastical BNP that I have encountered. They resort to the old tactics of misinformation and scaremongering about foreigners and outside influences to whip up a campaign against the Anglican Covenant, and replace reasoned argument with a “Man the barricades!” mentality that is little short of breathtaking. We are to beware, the advertisement says, of the machinations of “another Anglican province anywhere in the world” and of a move “to subordinate the Church to the judgements of the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion. [The Covenant] would thereby make the Church of England subject to an outside power for the first time since Henry VIII.” The main target of their opprobrium, worse than a European Commission or a Spanish Inquisition, is “a new international body, the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion”. In fact, this body is the same Joint Standing Committee that has muddled through the business of Anglican Communion affairs now since 1969. It is scarcely new — even if it was given its new name by a two-thirds-majority vote of Anglican provinces ratified at the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Jamaica in 2009. And the most extreme power at the Standing Committee’s disposal under the Covenant is — wait for it — “to make recommendations” (4.2.7). It is this potential for shock “recommendations” that has Inclusive Church and MCU quaking in their boots, since they argue that any such “recommendations” will “subordinate [the General Synod] to the new centralised authorities”. In fact, the Covenant text clearly says: “Each Church or each Instrument shall determine whether or not to accept such recommendations” (4.2.7). The Covenant also states quite clearly that “mutual commitment does not represent submission to any external ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Nothing in this Covenant of itself shall be deemed to alter any provision of the Constitution and Canons of any Church of the Communion, or to limit its autonomy of governance. The Covenant does not grant to any one Church or any agency of the Communion control or direction over any Church of the Anglican Communion” (4.1.3). Like so much else in this advertisement (and I could offer an extensive list), the assertion is simply rubbish. During the past 150 years, many of the Churches of the world have been formed into Christian world communions; the newest was formed this year, the World Communion of Reformed Churches. There is a general recognition that if local or national Churches are to be truly international and live in a global fellowship, they must do more than just assert their autonomy, but seek to live into an interdependence that truly honours the fellowship of the whole body. This truth was recognised by the Lambeth Conferences of 1920 and 1930, and the Covenant is a careful attempt to balance autonomy with responsibility. There is no element of coercion anywhere in the text, but there is an acknowledgement that neither can everything that one Church does be foisted on the whole Communion without the recognition that relations can be damaged. What the Covenant sets out in Section 4 is a proper mechanism that allows the articulation of discomfort, even distance, but which honours autonomy. But this is too much for our latter-day Little Englanders, who bemoan the passing of the armchair bonhomie of the Athenaeum as the measure of Anglican inclusivity. They would, it seems, rather see the disintegration of the Anglican Communion into a series of acrimonious factions than restate a common faith and witness and find grown-up and responsible mechanisms for the articulation of the life of a whole Communion. Well, I suppose they’re entitled to their opinion, but I do wish that they wouldn’t resort to scaremongering and the misrepresentation of a text in an attempt to swing the debate. GREGORY K. CAMERON Secretary to the Anglican Communion Covenant Design Group 2006-09 Esgobty, Upper Denbigh Road St Asaph LL17 0TW
Posted by: Graham Kings
Thursday 4 November 2010 - 05:17pm
Peter Carrell has written a perceptive article about the 'No Anglican Covenant Coalition', entitled 'Wrongly named International Coalition favours covenant', Anglican Down Under site, 4 November 2010. Posted by: Richard Wilkins Monday 1 November 2010 - 11:35am Thank you, Andrew, for your analysis of the IC/MC effusion about the Covenant. I would argue only with your opening shock-horror that institutionalised liberalism's lapse from reasonableness is a 'frightening (presumably new) development'. One of our own prophets, Francis Schaeffer, made a reputation out of his contention that liberal Christianity is a prime example of that Escape from Reason which characterises modern western thought. On looking at the IC/MC statement, I am grateful for a phrase of Archbishop Rowan's which Graham Kings recently brought to us in Fulcrum - 'complacent bigotry'. Bigoted liberalism is not new to us; but its present hysteria is a new tone which jars with its customary complacency. Richard Wilkins 
Posted by: Jody
Sunday 31 October 2010 - 05:40pm
Dear Friends we've just published 'Framing the Covenant: Trick or Treat?' by Andrew Goddard please use this thread for discussion. blessings, Jody |
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