It seems to me that many people are not happy about the proposed Anglican Covenant, and I have been asked in the comments of a blog post whether there is a draft letter available to sent to General Synod members (or indeed your Bishops). There isn't a draft letter available, to my knowledge, but I think I would put the following points forward:
- We are not a confessional church requiring members to sign up to a statement of beliefs, we work on the basis of Scripture, Reason and Tradition.
- Provinces should be autonomous and disciplinary action for holding alternative views is abhorrent. How can we be mission focussed if our decisions depend on churches thousands of miles away in radically different contexts?
- Anglicanism is not monochromatic but diverse; it thrives in the tension between different ecclesiological traditions and religious beliefs - we do not need uniformity to have unity. We have traditionally been a broad church.
- Decision making in the Anglican Communion belongs with elected lay people, clergy and Bishops, not with a ‘Standing Committee’.
- We will become stagnant if we sign the Covenant - decisions like the admission of women to the priesthood would have been impossible if we had needed the 'Standing Committee' to agree. The church has changed its position on slavery, marriage of divorcees, women in ministry, we do not stand still on these things.
- It won't work anyway - there will be endless squabbles if the Covenant is signed - Provinces wanting to throw each other out. This is not the route to unity.
- In a world where authoritarianism is increasingly distrusted and we wish the bishops, priests and people to have adult-adult relationships, this takes us back to 'Father knows best' and centralisation of power. It is extremely unwise.
For more ideas, look here. Please chip in with more thoughts.
10 comments:
You could always try that it won't work!
It seems to me like a couple who are arguing too much who decide to get married to fix it - like that will work!
I'm always astonished that Synod is so willing to sign away its own powers to make decision. I can't imagine a more unlikely scenario and yet it seems to be precisely where this is going.
Thanks for this, Lesley. I'm away from my desk for next couple of days but as soon as I get back I'll get started on my letter.
Lesley, with respect I think the "we aren't a confessional church" argument which is doing the rounds isn't a very good one. It's ideologically loaded and suits a certain group of people who aren't very comfortable with the idea of defined beliefs. We are a confessional church, but the point is we already have a confession, in the form of the historic creeds. Adherence to the creeds rather than to any later formulation of doctrine is a recognised feature of Anglicanism.
I think the argument about authority is the better one. I find it stunning that the Bishops are cheerfully planning to sign up to something that puts authority in the hands of the beaurocracy.
In any case it will have the opposite effect of what was intended. The reason Anglicanism hangs together is because the ties that bind are loose enough to allow wriggle room. If we try to bind it more tightly, it will fracture very quickly.
Very clearly stated, Leslie. I see where Charlie is coming from, although I think "confessional church" is something of a technical term among certain of the theological set and it means those who sign on to the Westminster Confession or some other such document - which the Anglican Church had the chance to sign on to but, in its wisdom, declined to do. Still, to get away from shorthand phrases, perhaps we should say that we affirm our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed or that we do have a confession, in the form of the Nicene Creed as Charlie puts it.
I had hoped that the Covenant would simply die on the vine, but I guess the desire to punish TEC (and perhaps others) is very strong. Or something.
"we work on the basis of Scripture, Reason and Tradition"
[*FX* polite cough]
We are now being taught that Anglican Theology is based on Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience.
Aren't the Thirty-Nine Articles a confession of faith? I realise that nowadays most people ignore them, and I certainly have problems with some of their content, but I don't think there's any getting around the fact that when they were produced, they were designed to function exactly as the Westminster Confession, Augsburg Confession etc. And they were certainly seen as the authoritative Anglican confession of faith in the nineteenth century, which is why Newman spent so much energy writing Tract XC to try to get around them. Just check out the introduction to the articles in the 1662 BCP here, and then tell me they weren't meant to be a confession of faith!
I think that when so many modern Anglicans say 'We aren't a confessional church', what they actually mean is 'We don't like the confession we've actually got, so we ignore it and pretend it never existed'.
Don't get me wrong - I think we have a perfect right to say, as a Church, 'The 39 Articles were OK for their time, but now we need to move on'. But to say that we've never been a confessional church is dishonest to our history, in my opinion.
Whilst the Church of England may or may not be confessional, and that can be debated, the Anglican Communion is not see this description.
Whoops - description here.
Of course the Anglican Communion is not confessional, because the Anglican Communion does not exist (in the sense of being a church). Whether or not the member churches of the Anglican Communion are constituted as confessional churches can only be decided on a case by case basis by looking at their founding documents.
But when it comes to the C of E, it's clear that historically it was seen as a confessional church - that's what the Articles were created for. And Canon A5 still says:
'The doctrine of the Church of England is grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures. In particular such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of
Religion, The Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal.' And as recently as the 1970's, when my father was inducted as a vicar in a C of E parish, he was required by law on his first Sunday in his new parish to read the Thirty-Nine Articles publicly and give his assent to them.
Again, I'm not saying that I don't have any problems with the 39 Articles (I do), or that we can't change them (we can and should). I'm just saying that to pretend that Anglicanism has never been confessional is historically dishonest.
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