1. A failure to address the issue
Any covenant document has to recognise fully the mischief it seeks to address. This document makes no mention of the crisis which has generated the call for such a remedy, which is a crisis of obedience to Scripture. Further, it fails to recognise that in the eyes of many the ”˜instruments of Communion’ (3.1.4) are themselves part of the problem. This means that trying to use such failed instruments as arbiters of a future solution is problematic in the extreme. Put bluntly, this covenant will not allow the real issues to be addressed.
2. An illegitimate notion of autonomy
The understanding of the individual Churches of the Communion throughout this document is fatally ambiguous. The language of autonomy in communion is introduced in 3.1.2., but there has been no justification produced for this concept in the preceding sections. More seriously this language is unqualified and so fails to distinguish between matters on which Scripture is silent (and where there may be legitimate liberty and indeed diversity) and matters on which Scripture has spoken definitively (and where autonomy is therefore a euphemism for sin). Our obedience to Scripture and our responsibility to each other must significantly qualify all talk of ”˜autonomy’ with reference to any congregation, diocese, province or, indeed, the Communion itself.
3. No biblical theology
The entire document, and particularly the statement concerning ”˜the inheritance of faith’ in paragraph 1, is detached from the Scriptural narrative of salvation and redemption from sin, which Churches in the Communion have seen realised. The principal concerns of Scripture are ignored as the document concentrates on matters which are dependent and consequential upon those concerns. The unity of Christians flows out of the redeeming work of Christ and the incorporative ministry of the Spirit. Any attempt to generate or sustain such unity on our own terms and by our own institutional efforts without reference to this prior and determinative reality must be judged sub-biblical.
“The proposed legal framework in any event exhibits the same flaws as the parent document, notably in the way unity is abstracted from biblical faithfulness and no account is taken of the possibility that the instruments of Communion themselves might be the focus of objection.â€
The ‘source’ and the ‘guidance’ of the covenant must be “biblically correct,†otherwise the covenant becomes a document built upon the ever shifting sands of secular culture.
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“It fails to recognise the disproportionate influence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who invites to the Lambeth Conference, chairs the ACC and calls the Primates’ Meeting.â€
We Anglicans treasure our roots that extend deeply into the Anglican Church of England and the rest of Great Britain. Having said that, it is a temporal anomaly that the Anglican Communion’s leader is chosen from among Britons living in Great Britain by the Sovereign and the Parliament of Great Britain and is not held accountable to the Anglican Communion outside of Great Britain.
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“…the prominence given to the Joint Standing Committee of the ACC and Primates raises problems in increasing further the ability of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the ACC to exercise disproportionate influence over the Primates, thereby tending in effect to silence dissentient primatial voices.â€
To many, it seems that the ACC has become ‘a law unto itself,’ a ‘star chamber’ that has become the “tail that wags the dog.†Given the radical and extremely progressive nature of those whom the ACC seems to ‘favor,’ the ACC appears to have become an ‘out of control’ “dictatorship of the proletariat.†And I am not going to expound on the influence of American money, ECUSA money, on the ACC.