A proper reading of the covenant shows it is, on this account, indisputably Anglican and inclusive of all these components of our Anglican heritage accepting that \u201d\u02dceach of these has a place in the church\u2019s life\u2019.<\/p>\n
The critique of IC and MCU distorts this by unfairly and unreasonably painting the covenant as simply a mixture of two concerns pushed to their extremes: \u201d\u02dcstrict evangelical Protestantism\u2019 (the neo-Puritan method) and \u201d\u02dcRoman Catholicism\u2019 (more centralised and clerical, subordination to an international body). In doing so, they show no awareness of the many elements of the covenant reflecting their own emphases and its overall nuance and balance. Even more worrying is their apparent blindness to the dangers in their own tendency of \u201d\u02dcde-emphasising revelation and history\u2019. In fact, in the substance and tone of their campaign, they demonstrate that they have become \u201d\u02dcenthusiasts\u2019 for an isolated \u201d\u02dcreligious liberalism\u2019 who have little regard for \u201d\u201c or even fundamentally reject \u201d\u201c any \u201d\u02dclimits on the degree of adjustment to the culture and its habits\u2019.<\/p>\n
In summary, their response to the covenant reveals that they are far from being the authentic voice of Anglicanism or the Church of England. Instead, they are at risk of seeking to remake the Communion in their own particular Western liberal image and thus make it captive to what Oliver O\u2019Donovan described as The failure of the liberal paradigm in his first Fulcrum sermon on subjects of the day (now published by SCM as A Conversation Waiting to Begin). At root, their ill-informed polemic suggests that ultimately they cannot accept that their own tradition in Anglicanism must \u201d\u201c like evangelical and catholic perspectives \u201d\u201c also learn \u201d\u02dcto live with certain tensions or even sacrifices\u2019 if it is to be truly Anglican. As a result, they rail against a covenant one of whose main strengths is precisely that it prevents any one part of Anglicanism from heading where they sadly risk heading – \u201d\u02dcin a direction ultimately outside historic Anglicanism\u2019.<\/p>\n