Mark McCall–Fatal Flaws: A Response to Dr. Joan Gundersen

I would like to thank Dr. Gundersen, a church historian, for reviewing my recent paper, “Is The Episcopal Church Hierarchical?”. Reading her response, one could perhaps be forgiven when informed that my paper contains a “fatal flaw” for thinking that she had discovered that TEC’s constitution did in fact contain explicit technical legal language identifying General Convention as the supreme or highest authority. But she makes no such claim. Nor did she discover that the Church of England, contrary to the claims in my original paper, lacked a “Supremacy Act” and an “Oath of Supremacy” at the time TEC was being formed. Or that the governing legal instruments of other churches widely-regarded as hierarchical are actually devoid of the legally-precise hierarchical language identified in the original paper. Because those points are at the heart of the argument developed in that paper, one senses right away that the “fatal flaw” is unrelated to the main lines of the paper. What is not so quickly apparent, however, is that Dr. Gundersen’s critique itself contains a “fatal flaw”: she overlooks my discussion of the very topic she says is not there. It is Dr. Gundersen who engages in an anachronistic and legally uninformed reading of the text, and it is she who clearly misunderstands legal terminology, preferring to use colloquial definitions and references to an ordinary dictionary for the legal terminology analyzed in the original paper.

What follows is necessarily technical, but to avoid the anachronistic reading Dr. Gundersen gives the language in question some technical understanding is required….

Read it all and note that a fuller version with footnotes is available.