The covenant has been portrayed, and betrayed, by its detractors as a dangerous, monolithic innovation of regulatory control, which will stifle freedom and diversity. But forced assimilation is not on the table, and it is false witness to dress it up as such. Gregory Cameron (secretary to the group who produced the covenant) and Andrew Goddard (Anglican ethicist) have demonstrated that its detractors have seriously misconstrued the text and its intention.
The model of the covenant is drawn from family ties and kinship and bounded by mutually agreed norms of behaviour which benefit everyone. It is not a document of doctrinal specifications, like the conservative Jerusalem Declaration, drawn up mostly by those who boycotted the Lambeth conference. Nor is it a contract, as feared by its liberal critics. It is truly a covenant.
In his address to the Lambeth conference 2008, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, was pithily penetrative and perceptive in drawing out contrasts: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us’. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”
I think the problem is that those whom the Covenant would help are indifferent to it for its obvious problems with the corrupt and revisionist adjudicating body of the “Standing Committee.”
You have a variety of groups in the AC dealing with the Covenant. Those on either end — let’s say as examples the flaming revisionists that make up the vast majority of the bishops of TEC and the HOD and the Executive Council, and then the Sydney Anglicans — do not want the center to hold at all.
They are disinterested.
Their answer to this question: “Do we consider each other and decide we belong together, or do we do our own thing and hang apart? is “we do our own thing and hang apart except when we want to get together for some odds and ends, and of course we’ll continue to all be a part of the same entity, which is the Anglican Communion.”
Then you have the people in the broad swathe which I call the informed middle-right. Various Primates who have watched the antics of TEC and then of Rowan Williams and the “Standing Committee.” I don’t see that they have any taste for the Covenant at all, nor see how the Covenant could help anything. After all — it doesn’t get rid of TEC’s current frothing revisionist leaders, nor will it. They still have to be trapped in the same body with those guys capering about foaming and prancing and doing clown masses and Glasspool-consecrations.
PLUS, one has the charming and corrupt Standing Committee along with the ACC in charge of it all, with practically no Primatial authority at all [other than, of course, Rowan Williams’ when he feels it convenient.]
So what we’re left with is the broad swathe of uninformed moderates. They just want the whole thing to go away. I feel sure that they’ll sign on to the Covenant in droves. But I don’t know that the approval of the broad swathe of uninformed moderates [the COE Synod springs to mind] is really what the Anglican Communion needs.
At the end of the day, I think that RW played way way too many games over the past 7 years, with the result that the informed middle-right has no interest in what he has done — which of course in part includes the shambolic and unhelpful Covenant, mired with the oversight of a corrupt revisionist “Standing Committee” and with no discernable help coming from that Covenant to deal with the gangrenous TEC.
This isn’t helped by the moderate AC leaders all trilling about how TEC doesn’t need to worry about the Covenant because nothing will be done to any province who violates the Covenant. Why on earth would a Province of the informed middle right wish to enter into a Covenant that doesn’t do anything to fix the problem with having gangrenous TEC trampling about the earth doing what it pleases *within the Anglican Communion*?
I certainly wish that it weren’t so. But since the Covenant does nothing to fix the AC’s issues — TEC will still be representing the AC with vim and vigor as a full member no matter what it does — it appears that there will simply be permanent division within the AC. The informed middle right has made it clear they aren’t leaving. So what we have is the informed middle right coupled with Sydney-type folks [by that I mean the folks who never needed “the center” to hold anyway] over there in one segment. And then the foaming raging heretics over here in one segment. And then the uninformed moderates just sort of standing about.
I look for those chasms to deepen and broaden, and for participation in the various official bodies of the AC to continue to greatly decline, since there’s no real reason to participate in such bodies with gangrenous TEC.
This is a useful analysis. One option you fail to note here is the one ACI has urged. Sign the covenant as a workable document and let the signers work toward creating an interim Committee of their own, until/unless the present SC is properly representative.
But that is going over old ground.
One thing I do not understand is the so called progressive position on this. I accept that they view with great caution/loathing the covenant (though one can wonder why, especially since the present SC is completely on their side). What is unclear is what kind of global anglicanism they envisage. It is not like default to the status quo, by killing the covenant, is workable. The communion is shattering. Is the point that this is all OK, and that then everyone gets to do what they want? Global associations will get reconfigured to track with this? The churches in various provinces will divide and splinter? This is the price for moving ahead with SSBs and it is worth it? The covenant sets forth a vision for Communion, in continuity with what the Communion has been and reliant on healthy instruments (which aspect is now not present). If not this, what do the progressives want in terms of international anglicanism of a workable sort? One can get the impression that ‘all is well’ so long as the dreaded covenant is defeated. But all is not well. Unless one just wants to say those were arrangements we never liked anyway, and goodbye to them.
Good piece from Bishop Kings. Also Andrew Goddard has a detailed response to some of the organisations opposing the CofE signing on to the Covenant here