In reality, the Anglican constitution is a fantasy of Bishop Doss, as the paper ignores how the Anglican Communion came into being, including the concessions that the American Church had to make first to the Episcopal Church of Scotland and then to the Church of England in order to receive Episcopal orders from those churches. These concessions both included doctrine in the form of creedal language and changes in the prayer book. It also ignores the Colenso controversy which sparked the first Lambeth Conference and the first Anglican border crossing – the creation of the Diocese of Mauritzberg which was coterminous with the Diocese of Natal. I don\u2019t think any paper can effectively address the structure of the Anglican Communion without addressing these two issues – the admission of the Episcopal Church to communion with the churches in Britain and the Colenso controversy. To ignore these issues is like talking about weather while not discussing cloud formations, or maybe a discussion of shoes without addressing the issue of feet. If anything constitutes a common law of the Anglican Communion, it is these two issues and how they were handled.<\/p>\n
The paper, in addition to ignoring the foregoing issues, lacks concreteness by previous examples (perhaps precedent from a common law legal point of view) in its assertions of what this Anglican constitution really is, other than citation to Hooker for his three strands and how the Church of England dealt with competing theologies and practices before the Anglican Communion was ever established. During these times, a hierarchical structure governed in the Church of England (and, arguably, still does) which enables someone to impose a solution on various disputes. The Queen enforced a prayer book. I note that Doss does not suggest that the Queen do so again, but comprehensiveness does not exist in a vacuum – someone has to provide to glue to hold the comprehensive church together. Doss, while arguing for keeping the structure (or lack thereof) that we have in the Anglican Communion, supplies no glue for holding things together.<\/p>\n
The paper also assumes, without proof, that same-sex sexuality and the doctrinal innovations of the Episcopal Church are good and true, essentially foreclosing any further discussion of them. It lays the blame for the current controversies squarely at the feet of traditionalists and ignores the fact that the innovations of the Episcopal Church, while perhaps not challenging the mythical Anglican Constitution (if such even exists), are squarely against the Christian thought and teaching of a majority of Christians and certainly Anglicans. While the paper recognizes the fact that the Anglican Communion is built partially on like-mindedness, it then ignores the evaporation of this like-mindedness as a cause for the current controversies.<\/p>\n