I've not been doing a lot of commentary on things in the Anglican Communion lately, knowing that there are people out there who are much better at such things (and have more time), but there are several ramifications in the GAFCON final statement that I want to write about, therefore clarifying my thoughts around the issues.
The first is the nature of authority in the Anglican Communion. The statement is made that "we do not accept that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury." I would ask what basis there is for this. In every definition I've ever seen of the Anglican Communion, communion with the See of Canterbury is part of it. While it is certainly possible to be a protestant church descended from the Anglican Church (as are Baptists and Methodists), being Anglican necessarily entails communion with Canterbury. If Canterbury were ever to break communion with the Episcopal Church, we would still be Episcopal, but we would no longer be Anglican. Instead, the GAFCON group wants to set up a primates' council of six unelected bishops who get to determine who is an "orthodox" Anglican (and therefore a REAL one) and who is not. This is dangerous, as it removes all pretense of catholicity from the church. It also leads to the next point - the concept of "Confessing" Anglicans.
A "Confessing Anglican" is sea change in the idea of Anglicanism. It has often been said that Anglicans are Creedal, not Confessional. This means that our unity is around the historic creeds, not around a confession like the Lutheran Ausburg Confession or the Roman Catholic Catechism. The idea seems to be to re-define Anglicanism around the 39 Articles and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a centralized confession. The problem is, neither of these documents have been a major part of Episcopal Church history, and the same is true of many other Anglican provinces. In fact, the Lambeth Conference of 1968 suggested that the 39 Articles be removed from Prayer Books:
"The Ministry - The Thirty-Nine Articles
"The Conference accepts the main conclusion of the Report of the Archbishops' Commission on Christian Doctrine entitled "Subscription and Assent to the Thirty-nine Articles" (1968) and in furtherance of its recommendation:
(a) suggests that each Church of our Communion consider whether the Articles need be bound up with its Prayer Book;
(b) suggests to the Churches of the Anglican Communion that assent to the Thirty-nine Articles be no longer required of ordinands;
(c) suggests that, when subscription is required to the Articles or other elements in the Anglican tradition, it should be required, and given, only in the context of a statement which gives the full range of our inheritance of faith and sets the Articles in their historical context."
One of the Episcopal Church's greatest high-churchmen, WIlliam Reed Huntington, wrote in 1907:
"The Confessions have their day and cease to be; the Creeds live on—all the days are theirs. The Creeds are like Stonehenge and the Pyramids;—to go at them with hammer and chisel, under a pretext of reparation, were little short of sacrilege. The Thirty-nine Articles are a sixteenth century Episcopal residence of many rooms, some of them much out of repair."
What I see happening here is the formation of a new denomination - one that has many of the trappings of Anglicanism, but is indeed rooted singularly in the experience of those areas evangelized by the Church Missionary Society. It will be characterized by its' strict confessionalism and extreme evangelical character. It will eschew catholic tradition by disregarding traditional ties to the Archbishop of Canterbury. And it will fly in the face of all that has been accomplished since 2003 by attempting an end-run around the Windsor Report. I cannot understand why any self-respecting Anglo-Catholic would be interested, but some seem to be.
Even NT Wright, who is very evangelical and sympathetic to their position, seems concerned.
I'll quote from a post by Michael Russell from San Diego:
There is no occasion since the fully public inception of this movement of them actually getting anything they wanted. Neither TEC nor the C of Canada have been sanctioned or side streamed, and the reasserters have not been proclaimed as the true Anglican presence by anyone with any actual authority to do that.
The promises made to parishioners that they would soon be the acknowledged by the Archbishop of Canterbury as the true presence has not and will not happen.
The Jerusalem Declaration has pinned its future to an arcane formulation of "authorities" that most Anglican provinces worldwide are not going to endorse: specifically the 39 Articles and the 1662 BCP as standards of the faith.
Nor will most of the Anglican provinces endorse their peculiar formulations and doctrine of Scripture as found in the Document.
So after a dozen years of planning and six years of bullying and threats, this movement has a smaller affiliation circle and less influence than five years ago.
I agree.
David+
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