What is the Anglican Covenant For? #nocovenant

A short article from Jonathan Clatworthy:

It was the Windsor Report in 2004 that first formally proposed an Anglican Covenant, chiefly in response to two events. A diocese in Canada had approved a same-sex blessing service and a diocese in the USA had appointed an openly gay bishop. Some threatened schism unless those churches were ‘disciplined’ or expelled from the Anglican Communion.

As the provinces are self-governing there was no legal means to do this. The Windsor Report blamed the North Americans, and proposed a Covenant as a way to ensure that future contentious actions are not taken without consulting the whole Communion. They envisaged an international authority, backed up by the threat of sanctions, empowered to instruct provinces regarding any future controversy. Many opponents believe this was the wrong response. Rather than siding with the objectors and seeking a formal structure to suppress debate, the Communion’s leaders should have insisted that genuinely held differences should be freely debated until such time as consensus is reached. 

The underlying issue is how Anglicans should resolve their disagreements. Ever since the Reformation, Protestantism has lived with tension between contrasting theories. According to one the Bible is the supreme authority and all disagreements should be referred to it, expecting to find a single authoritative answer. Many Protestant traditions thus expect uniformity of belief and prefer to split into separate denominations rather than tolerate diversity of opinion.

A very different theory emphasises the freedom of individual Christians to interpret scripture in their own way, the need for the Church to encompass a wide range of beliefs, and the value of seeking truth through public research, dialogue and debate, without threats of expulsion. Historically, this is how the Church of England has aimed to operate at least from 1660 onwards. It is expressed by Richard Hooker’s balance of scripture, reason and tradition.

The Covenant project was committed from the start to the uniformitarian theory. The Windsor Report and all the proposed Covenant texts see the recent controversies as an aberration which should not have happened. They sympathise with those who have threatened schism and seek a resolution not in public research and debate about the matter in hand, but in decrees by ecclesiastical authority. They expect such decrees to suppress further debate regardless of how many Anglicans remain dissatisfied. This is the main reason why we consider the Covenant misconceived: it was from the start a power struggle by uniformitarians against inclusivists.

The final text, published at the end of 2009, has attempted to address some opponents’ concerns, leaving the matter less clear-cut, though the underlying principles remain the same. The provinces, being autonomous, are under no obligation to sign up. None are keen to lose their own autonomy. Successive Covenant drafts therefore reduced the emphasis on sanctions and increasingly stressed that signatories would not lose their autonomy. Nevertheless, without any sanctions at all the Covenant could not achieve anything. The final text has abandoned the detailed punitive measures of earlier drafts and claims not to undermine provincial autonomy at all. Instead it gives the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion responsibility to study objections to the actions of a church and make appropriate recommendations. Churches refusing to accept the recommendations can be excluded from representative functions like international committees, and the USA already has been. They cannot be excluded altogether from the Communion, but there has been talk of treating them as ‘second track’.

Thus the Covenant is far less punitive than originally envisaged, and lacks any guarantee that sanctions would be applied in any particular case. Many of the Covenant’s original proponents have therefore abandoned their support. The Covenant cannot now perform its original task. Conceived as a way to keep the Communion united by giving uniformitarians what they wanted – an ultimatum to the North Americans – it cannot satisfy them, and we are now witnessing the kinds of schisms which characterise uniformitarianism. However it does not satisfy traditional Anglican inclusivists either, because it still proposes to suppress future controversies by ecclesiastical decree rather than allowing differences of opinion to be freely discussed.
For six years Covenant supporters have been claiming that it is the only way to keep the Anglican Communion united. It is now clear that it cannot. The most it can do is to formally declare the divisions. Many believe we would be better off without it. 

Jonathan Clatworthy

Gensec@modernchurch.org.uk
12th February 2011

For further information see:

www.noanglicancovenant.org

www.modernchurch.org.uk/anglicancovenant

www.inclusivechurch2.net