Friday, January 8, 2010

How to ensure the Covenant will pass muster ...

... resort to these kinds of arguments:

"I was struck by the irony that the so-called conservatives are pushing for the most radical redesign of the Anglican Communion imaginable. Instead of a fellowship of Churches united by bonds of affection and a common heritage, these wide-eyed revisionists and radicals would have us become a legalistic bund, with central control by a secretive and thoroughly unaccountable star chamber. If one were to take the worst excesses of Pius IX, Joseph Stalin, Joe McCarthy and Oliver Cromwell, you couldn't have come up with a worse system."

Thanks Simple Massing Priest for your contribution to the cause!

But better by far would be some solid logic re the Covenant, as Neal Michell offers,

"we need a Covenant that allows our ecumenical partners—most notably the Roman Catholics and Orthodox—to be able to know who is actually authorized to speak on behalf of Anglicanism in ecumenical conversation. How can any trustworthy ecumenical agreements be had with representatives of the Anglican Communion if there is no Communion-wide consensus as to whether a certain individual or individuals actually shares the covenanted concerns of the Communion in such as way as is recognizable and accepted by all other parts of the Anglican Communion."

with some solid Anglican history undergirding the argument such as,

"The draft version of the original American Book of Common Prayer, prepared in 1785, called for some major changes from the 1662 version of the English prayer book upon which it was modeled. Among other changes, the proposed American version called for the deletion of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, the removal of the phrase concerning Christ’s descent into Hell from the Apostles’ Creed, as well as alterations to the baptismal service, matrimonial office, and other similar changes.

How did bishops in England respond? Richard Peters of Philadelphia met with the archbishop of Canterbury and filed this report:
I find that we can have no Bishop till we let the prelates see what Church we have made. I think it would be prudent in our Church, to put off any material alterations till we have Bishops consecrated; if we make any substantial alterations they will be carped at by those who will make the Bishops uneasy, and so, to keep peace at home, they will refuse to meddle abroad [that is, to consecrate bishops of the church in America]. The Making of the First American Book of Common Prayer, Marion Hatchett, p. 65.

These English bishops refused to consecrate any bishops for the Church in America until the American church remedied these errors in their proposed prayer book. In effect, upon the objections of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other English bishops, all of the major revisions were abandoned in favor of conformity with the English prayer book, except for the continued omission of the Athanasian Creed.

The aim of the first drafters of the first American Book of Common Prayer was to establish a church that preserved the unity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America with the Church of England. The words of the Preface to this prayer book state this intent: “this Church is far from intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or worship . . .”

Here we have the beginnings of what it means to be a transoceanic and worldwide Communion: the proposed innovations of the Americans to their Book of Common Prayer so departed from the English bishops’ understanding of the faith that the latter could not in good conscience consecrate bishops for the American expression of the Church of England. Because these proposed revisions would have shaped a church ostensibly consonant with the Church of England but actually departing from her in some “essential point of doctrine, discipline, or worship,” the English bishops refused to consecrate American bishops until the American church came into conformity. To use the Windsor Report language: Autonomy submitted itself to Communion."

I did not know about that example of interdependence. Did you?

5 comments:

Janice said...

Have you read "Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies" by David Bentley Hart? I haven't finished it yet but what I've read so far has given me so much to think about that I think I will have to read it again and again.

One of the books' themes is modernity's idea of freedom to choose versus the Church Fathers' idea of freedom to choose well.

And that has something to do with this article on Radical Orthodoxy.

Peter Carrell said...

Hi Janice
No I haven't read it - I have heard it is a good read though!
I will look forward to reading the RO article - something I know a wee bit about.

Anonymous said...

It is a good book but more cultural in focus than philosophical. A philosphical-theological argument against atheism can and must be made. Touchstone website, for which Hart writes sometimes, has stuff on 'The New Atheism', and also features Doug Farrow on 'The Savior State' - an excellent read on implications of same sex marriage, state control of education, the new state religion etc; see also his 'Nation of Bastards'.

Kurt said...

“The draft version of the original American Book of Common Prayer, prepared in 1785, called for some major changes from the 1662 version of the English prayer book upon which it was modeled. Among other changes, the proposed American version called for the deletion of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, the removal of the phrase concerning Christ’s descent into Hell from the Apostles’ Creed, as well as alterations to the baptismal service, matrimonial office, and other similar changes...These English bishops refused to consecrate any bishops for the Church in America until the American church remedied these errors in their proposed prayer book. In effect, upon the objections of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other English bishops, all of the major revisions were abandoned in favor of conformity with the English prayer book, except for the continued omission of the Athanasian Creed.”

Not quite. You see, we Americans then went on to remove both the Articles of Religion and the Black Rubric from the authorized Prayer Book of 1789. So what we gave the English bishops with one hand, we took away from them, so to speak, with the other.

Kurt Hill
Brooklyn USA

Peter Carrell said...

Thanks Kurt for the clarification re the giving and taking away!