Over the course of the last week or so a misunderstanding has arisen as to the nature of the Covenant the ABC suggested or envisioned in his Reflection. Many, both orthodox and revisionists, have assumed that the ABC’s vision is his answer or response to the specific problem of ECUSA’s failure to comply with the Windsor Report.
This morning Stephen Bates writing in the Gaurdian adds to this confusion:
There is a question of how prescriptive such a covenant would be (and, if it’s defined so loosely, what is the point of having it?) Last week, I interviewed Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, the primate of Canada, on the day the Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter was published, and he told me: “If the covenant helps collaboration, absolutely. But if it is exclusionary and disciplinary, that would be utterly inappropriate and un-Anglican and something I would not favour at all.”
Later that afternoon, highly unusually, a senior figure at Lambeth Palace rang me nervously to ask how Dr Williams’s statement was going down. I told him Archbishop Hutchison’s response (and since the two of them had had a 90-minute meeting at Lambeth only four days before, Hutchison must have known what was on Williams’s mind). Oh, said the senior Lambeth person, it wouldn’t be exclusionary or disciplinary. That wasn’t the idea at all.
Well, in that case, quite a few people around the Anglican communion have got the wrong idea about what the Archbishop of Canterbury is proposing. Not least of them, Peter Akinola.
The confusion arises from the conflation of two processes into one. The caller from Lambeth describes the covenant as neither “exclusionary” or “disciplinary”. Of course it is not. But that does not mean that ECUSA and Canada will not be disciplined and/or excluded from it.
The covenant creation process is one thing. The process of assessing ECUSA’s compliance with the Windsor Report is quite another.
The ABC made this very clear in his letter to the primates that accompanied his Reflection. The letter states:
These reflections are in no way intended to pre-empt the necessary process of careful assessment of the Episcopal Church’s response to the Windsor Report. Rather they are intended to focus the question of what kind of Anglican Communion we wish to be and to explore how this vision might become more of a reality.
The ABC is merely reiterating what he had previously clarified when the subject of the Covenant arose several months earlier: the Covenant creation process and the Windsor process are distinct and seperate.
That means that Mr. Bates’ call with the official from Lambeth isn’t really news. The covenant process is not intended to be “exclusionary” or “disciplinary.”
But the Windsor Process has the potential to be both.
Thus, there is very good reason to doubt that ECUSA and/or Canada will be included in the covenant creation process.
In that sense, ++Akinola may in fact be “wrong” (to quote Mr. Bates) in the sense that perhaps he may also have conflated the two processes. I don’t know that he has and I would not venture to guess.
In any case, is very important to especially given the current state of affairs in the Anglican Communion to remember and retain the distinction between the Covenant and Windsor Processes. Failure to maintain this distinction has led to a great deal of confusion on all sides.
16 Comments •
The covenant process is not intended to be “exclusionary” or “disciplinary.”
But the Articles of Religion were. They were developed by Cramner to define rather precisely what it means to be Anglican. That’s why ECUSA threw them overboard in the earliest stages of its “walk apart.”
We don’t need some kind of new covenant. The solution is quite simple—either accept the Articles of Religion as binding or stop pretending to be Anglican.