Anglican Samizdat

From here:

The Church of England cannot sign up to a plan aimed at preventing the global Anglican Church from splitting up after half its dioceses voted against it.

The Archbishop of Canterbury backed the Anglican Covenant in a bid to ensure divisive issues – such as gay bishops – did not cause the Communion to split.

The Lincoln diocese has become the 22nd of 44 CofE dioceses to reject the plan.

The covenant had already been rejected by conservative global Church leaders, whom it was intended to placate.

Conservatives rejected the covenant because it didn’t have the teeth to prevent provinces like TEC and the ACoC from doing what they enjoy most: going deeper – into heresy. What conservatives wanted was a covenant that would work.

Liberals like the manic No Anglican Covenant crowd will no doubt rejoice at their apparent victory, blissfully unaware that when God punishes people, he often gives them what they want with the inevitable result that they become the authors of their own demise.

The seat of Anglican Christianity has shifted to Africa where it is flourishing and growing; in contrast, the vitality of Western Anglicanism is shrivelling in proportion to its obsession with homo-eroticism.

From here:

The Rev. Dr. Marilyn McCord Adams, a U.S. philosophy professor and author, has become the most recent patron of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition.

McCord Adams, a member or the U.S. Episcopal church, is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and served as regius professor of divinity at Oxford University from 2004 to 2009. She also served as a member of the Church of England’s General Synod at the time the covenant was being developed and was known for correcting misinformation among Britons about the Episcopal church.  Her latest book was published in 2010 by Oxford University Press.

“Prof. McCord Adams’s experience in both the Episcopal church and the Church of England gives her a much broader understanding of the workings of the Anglican Communion,” said the coalition’s Episcopal church convenor, Dr. Lionel Deimel, in a press release. “Coming on the heels of the decisive [anti-Covenant] synod votes in [the dioceses of] Derby and Gloucester, this is an exciting time for the No Anglican Covenant Coalition.”

McCord Adams herself minced no words in the press release when speaking of the covenant. “The proposed Anglican Covenant was conceived in moral indignation and pursued with disciplinary intent,” she said. “Its global gate-keeping mechanisms would put a damper on the Gospel agenda, which conscientious Anglicans should find intolerable.

The Covenant is based on an alien ecclesiology, which thoughtful Anglicans have every reason to reject.”

What is the real reason she doesn’t like the Covenant?

It has more to do with putting “a damper on” the ACoC and TEC’s excursion into glorifying aberrant sexuality than “putting a damper on the Gospel agenda.” Watch this:

Giles Fraser doesn’t like the Anglican Covenant because it attempts to define what an Anglican is by asserting what an Anglican must believe. Since being a Christian is defined by what one believes, this doesn’t seem like a particularly unreasonable limitation – but, then, for the anti-Covenant anti-confessional muddled middle ground brigade, Christianity may well not be a prerequisite for Anglicanism.

What is important to Fraser and his ilk is to eschew all things binary – a perversely obtuse eccentricity in the digital age. There must be no Either/Or, no Black or White no certainties, no definitiveness. No truth; instead, let there be Common Ground.

From here:

The reason why the Covenant is such a terrible idea is that it replaces the search for common ground with a fear that the Other is out to get me. It gives the Other a means of my exclusion, and thus turns the Other into the enemy.

The Covenant contains the idea of a two-tier Communion — those who signed up being on the inner tier; those who do not being on the outer tier — which is not quite the ecclesiastical equivalent of outer darkness. The idea that the C of E itself might be in the outer tier makes a nonsense of the whole Covenant idea. Communion with the see of Canterbury has always been the defining feature of what it means to be an Anglican.

From here:

For his part, the Rev. Malcolm French, the coalition’s [No Anglican Covenant Coalition] Regina-based Canadian convenor, points to an inherent anti-American bias at the heart of the covenant. “Certainly the venom level went up once the Episcopal church had a female presiding bishop and, oddly, this is why the covenant has appealed to some people in the U.K. who would otherwise be seen as perhaps politically on the left. It connects to a larger anti-Americanism that has nothing to do with church politics.”

This is rather an odd statement coming as it does from the political leftist and theological liberal, Rev. Malcolm French. Up until now, being anti-American was the sine qua non of the French id, it was what brightened his day, put a spring in his step and lent fuel to his rejoicing at living in the country of the sainted Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton rather than the land of the devil worshipping George Bush.

What Rev. French really means, of course, is that the Anglican Covenant is against the heretical theological meanderings which are afflicting American Anglicanism. The Covenant, even if adopted, is insufficiently potent to do much about that, but even a whiff of rebuke is enough to start Anglican liberals foaming at the mouth in indignation.

This almost makes me want to support the Covenant.

From here:

Over the next few hours, they discussed several matters, among them the Anglican Covenant and the educational guide posted last summer on the website of the Anglican Church of Canada. “Archbishop Williams had obviously read our material, and he seemed appreciative that Canada was giving the covenant a fair hearing,” says Feheley.

I had no idea that Paul Feheley had a sense of humour.

From here:

The Rt. Rev. Dr. John Saxbee and the Rt. Rev. Dr. Peter Selby have been appointed the first episcopal patrons of the international No Anglican Covenant Coalition, whose slogan is “Anglicans for Comprehensive Unity.”

Oddly enough, Saxbee and Selby are also patrons of the Anglican homosexual lobby group Changing Attitudes. Funny coincidence, that.

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Although a vote passed in the Church of England synod saying “[t]hat the draft Act of Synod adopting the Anglican Communion Covenant be considered”, the homosexualist lobby, having decided that there is no Anglican crisis, has already rejected it and now the GAFCON Primates, having decided that the crisis has already broken the Communion beyond repair, have also rejected it:

For the sake of Christ and of His Gospel we can no longer maintain the illusion of normalcy and so we join with other Primates from the Global South in declaring that we will not be present at the next Primates’ meeting to be held in Ireland. And while we acknowledge that the efforts to heal our brokenness through the introduction of an Anglican Covenant were well intentioned we have come to the conclusion the current text is fatally flawed and so support for this initiative is no longer appropriate.

Rowan Williams’ strategy all along has been to find a middle ground in all this. He has been forced to do that himself since he is personally sympathetic to homosexual marriage and homosexual bishops but leads millions of Anglicans who are not. The Covenant, to some extent, represents the middle ground that he seems to be comfortable with; it is not something he will be able to sell to the rest of the Communion, though.  That is probably because for those with a less convoluted thought process than Rowan, it is obvious that to pretend that two irreconcilable opposites can comfortably coexist is blatant  hypocrisy.

That’s the sum total of the argument to be found on a new site proclaiming “Anglicans for Comprehensive Unity”, a phrase whose oxymoronic message is aggravated by the uneasy proximity of “Anglicans” and “Unity”.

Anglican churches are being asked to adopt a so-called Anglican Covenant that seeks to bind them more tightly to one another and to codify procedures by which future disputes within the Anglican Communion will be resolved.

We believe that this covenant is ill-conceived. In response to the reputed “crisis” in the Communion, drafters of the covenant have favoured coercion over the hard work of reconciliation.

Of course, if it is only a “so-called” Covenant, not a real one and the crisis is only a “crisis” by repute, why even bother to set up a so called No Anglican Covenant Coalition? Must be because we don’t need no stinkin’ covenant.