Daily Archives: November 24, 2010

Walking Apart: The End of the Anglican Communion

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So, it turns out it wasn’t the Episcopal Church or the Anglican Church of Canada forced out of the Anglican Communion by the Global South Primates, but rather the Global Primates who have walked away. And they chose to do it on the same day that the Church of England General Synod voted to send the Covenant to dioceses for discussion.

For all the criticism of the Archbishop of Canterbury, on this blog and elsewhere throughout the last weeks, criticism that continues even today, the effects of his statements and years of effort, however futile, seem to have preserved something of Anglicanism, in spite of it all. Oh, there are apparently those who are leaving, the GAFCON Primates who signed the statement yesterday that they will not attend the Primates Meeting in Ireland in January. But as others have observed, it’s never quite clear whether all the signatories of GAFCON statements have actually signed or even agree with the statement. They have also made clear that they are having nothing of the covenant. The full statement from that group is here.

Mark Harris’ comment on this development is spot on:

GAFCON is on its way to forming an alternate way to be Anglican in the world, one which the Covenant does not support and the existing unifying elements in the Anglican Communion are irrelevant.

His full commentary is here.

Here is what Tobias Haller has to say.

Oh, I have no doubt that this is not the end of efforts to keep things together. But the Covenant was the last best shot from Williams, et al, to hold things together, and with the GAFCON folks not playing along, I see no way forward. Unless something radical happens, the Primates Meeting will be a rump; the conservative Primates not attending, or forcing the ABC to disinvite our Presiding Bishop, which would also lead to others pulling out, I suspect.

Whatever they will say about the Archbishop of Canterbury down the line, they won’t be able to criticize him for not trying hard enough to keep the Anglican Communion together. In my view, the timing of the GAFCON statement was a direct attack on Rowan and on his vision for Anglicanism.

David Hall on Puritans and Thanksgiving

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According to his Op-Ed in the NYTimes today, the first Thanksgiving undoubtedly included turkey. More importantly, Hall, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, attempts to set the record straight on the misconceptions we have about the early New England colonists.

Hall stresses the political legacy of the Puritans. They were suspicious of hierarchy, both political and religious and sought to keep rulers on a short leash. Their congregational polity invested power in the laity, not in the clergy. Politically, they required annual elections and required that any law needed the consent of the governed to be valid.  In 1648, the Mass. Bay Colony published the first code of laws in the Anglo-American world.

According to Hall, they also sought the common good:

Contrary to Hawthorne’s assertions of self-righteousness, the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another. Celebrating the liberty they had gained by coming to the New World, they echoed St. Paul’s assertion that true liberty was inseparable from the obligation to serve others.

Another reminder of the importance at getting history right.