Let's get this right

The ACI has made a helpful suggestion about the body which is key to the effectiveness of the Covenant, the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion. This is the introduction to their essay:

"As we have noted several times in recent months, the final text of the Anglican Covenant assigns important tasks defined in Section 4 to a committee designated the “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion.” There is currently no committee in the Anglican Communion bearing that title or capable of performing those tasks. The ACC standing committee was briefly referred to by the Section 4 title, but that name was not given it by the ACC. In any case in July 2010 the standing committee of the new company intended to replace the former ACC, noting objections to the title, agreed that it would be known simply as the standing committee.

Moreover, the ACC committee cannot fulfill the role defined by the Covenant, which makes the Section 4 committee “responsible to” both the Primates’ Meeting and the ACC, in the case of the latter as it was defined by its former constitution. Under the ACC’s new corporate arrangement, the members of its standing committee now comprise the entire membership and management of the ACC for legal purposes. Nor is there any meaningful way in which that committee could be said to be responsible to the Primates’ Meeting as contemplated by the Covenant."

Read it all here.

Apparently congratulations are in order ...

... a leading voice in the Anglican Communion is engaged. (H/T others ... I am the last to know these things!)

Anglican Voices Today

No time to write further this weekend on the gospel or Anglican or Christian unity and the Covenant ...

But others are writing, and I draw your attention to two very different, but very Anglican issues:

Just what is going on in the upper echelons of the Anglican Communion's governance and management? ACI continues their persistent, and so far largely unanswered questioning of the Anglican Communion Office and the process of changing the constitution of the ACC.

Just what is going on in the eucharist, as Anglicans understand it? Among many learned voices on the matter, Cranmer's continues to speak with profound insight and challenging wisdom. More than a via media offers a reflection on Cranmerian eucharistic theology here.

Covenant Clarification, attempted

From a previous post a commenter has raised some questions about what I am trying to say via comments on a (now quite long) thread of comments ... I partly plead in my defence that I find 'comment' become somewhat rebellious when too much is written!

Questions:

(1) Am I confusing two matters? "... you have two different threads running currently on your site. One is your passion to have a well-defined, distinctive Anglicanism with clearly defined boundaries of in and out all neat and tidy. An Anglicanism clearly distinct from other Christians. The other is your passion for a single, unified Christian church which includes all Christians regardless of current background. You may understand others, possibly without your agility, may struggle to hold this tension as you appear to do."


(2) Am I painting my opponents' position (re the Covenant) unfairly? "It does not help the discussion to keep moving one’s own position flexibly around and yet paint positions differing to your own moving one in words that they themselves might never consider using. Here the Covenant ceases being for you the opportunity to henceforth make Communion-wide decisions (which you claim we have done previously also – but I cannot find a single one) and now the Covenant “could play a powerful role in keeping focus on what being Anglican means”. The suggestion that those uncertain about the efficacy of the Covenant can’t articulate “what being Anglican means” is IMO grossly unfair. I think that the first three clauses of the proposed “Covenant” are quite a good brief summary. ... I think we have already been given enough, including God’s covenant, and the danger is that by adding more we will actually be diminishing."

Responses:

(1) Yes I am trying to work forward to unity among all Christians. I think it would be a help on this journey if Anglicans became more united, and I think the Covenant could be a means to secure greater unity because taking the Covenant seriously forces us to think about what unites us and to consider changing what currently divides us. A united Anglican Communion could then work more effectively as an ecumenical agent - a distinctive role it has enjoyed in the past, but one for which we seem to have lost our way at this current time. The Covenant would not necessarily define an Anglicanism distinct from other Christians: it could help Anglicans to become more truly Christian! We keep forgetting that on one presenting matter, the holiness or otherwise of same-sex partnerships, some Anglicans hold a belief which is considerably at variance with most Christians!

(2) Yes I may have painted my opponents unfairly. Of course non-Covenant proponents can articulate what being Anglican means. But it is interesting that 'what being Anglican means' seems to vary from liberal or progressive opponents of the Covenant to conservative opponents of the Covenant. One point of the Covenant is that it could - if we get behind it, but not if we do not - help 'what being an Anglican means' to be something we are united on, rather than something we are not (even) united on.

There is one gospel, only one, because there is only one Jesus Christ

The gospel is about Jesus Christ. It is both the message Christ proclaims and the message which proclaims Christ. It is one message because there is only one Christ, not two or three or more. Only one Christ has spoken to us, and only one Christ has died on the cross and risen again for our sakes. The fact of Christian disunity is at variance with the uniqueness of Christ and of his gospel. The deconstruction of disunity and reconstruction of Christian unity is urgently required as testimony to the uniqueness of Christ and the singularity of the gospel. Plaintive cries about the value of diversity in Christianity and the celebration of difference between Christians can hide a lack of understanding about the calling of those who claim to be followers of Christ, those named Christians after the one Christ: the calling is not to be divided but to be one body.

'There is one body and one Spirit - just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call - one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.' (Ephesians 4:4-6).

With respect to the Anglican Communion, and to individual member churches of the Communion, we are a very long way from appreciating these simple facts of the Christian faith. For a long time now we have had bishops and theologians who have shied away from public commitment to the centrality and uniqueness of Christ. At all levels of the church we have had a rising chorus of affirmation of 'diversity' unchecked by any control through unequivocal commitment to one gospel and one Lord Jesus Christ. Further, we have utterly failed to work resolutely towards Anglican means of ensuring that our Communion together is based upon one gospel and one Christ. Mention the possibility of a doctrinal commission with teeth, propose a Covenant which could reinforce and renew our understanding of unity in truth with binding and loosing powers in respect of disunity, then stand back and wait, for about a second, for outrage and scorn (at worst) or doubt and objections (at best). We are in a fool's paradise if we think that we can renew our communion together while we have 'Instruments of Communion' that are not co-ordinate with each other, and the greatest energy of some of our most intelligent theologians and bishops is spent on pointing out all the reasons why we should not have a Covenant, let alone an Anglican magisterium!

Thanks to an American correspondent, this post (which is far from the final one in this series!) can conclude with this fine essay on the one gospel by Williams Porcher Du Bose:

"My own firm conviction is that the variant conceptions of the Gospel in the New Testament, so far from being different gospels, are consistent and mutually completive aspects of the one and only Gospel. In proportion as we conceive the Gospel of God in its entirety and in its immensity, in just that degree do all scriptural, as well as all truly Christian and catholic, statements of it, no matter how partial and seemingly contradictory in themselves, fall into their proper places and serve to magnify the greatness and harmony of the whole. If the Gospel is divine at all, it is the divinest fact of the universe, the final cause of creation, the end for which all else exists. Mistake any one fragment or aspect of it for the whole, and all the other fragments and aspects will be involved in confused and hopeless contention with it for the usurped position. Let the whole stand out for itself in its complete proportions, and every part falls of itself into its proper place, and is confirmed and supported in it by every other part. . . .


I have recognized the fact that even within the narrower limits of the Gospels which give us our record of the Gospel, there are not only possible but actual diverse impressions of what the Gospel is; and that not only is full justice due to each such impression, taken by itself and for its own sake, but that the very fullest justice to each is the only way of arriving at the truth of all, or at the truth of the whole of which they are the complementary and necessary parts. The one great lesson that must forerun and make ready the Christian unity of the future is this: that contraries do not necessarily contradict, nor need opposites always oppose. What we want is not to surrender or abolish our differences, but to unite and compose them. We need the truth of every variant opinion and the light from every opposite point of view. The least fragment is right in so far as it stands for a part of the truth. It is wrong only when, as so often, it elevates into a ground of division from the other fragments just that which in reality fits it to unite with and supplement them. . . .
So let us agree to disagree, if conscientiously we must, in all our manifold differences; and, bringing all our differences together, let us see if they are not wiser than we, and if they cannot and will not of themselves find agreement in a unity that is higher and vaster than we.

From the preface to The Gospel in the Gospels by William Porcher Du Bose (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908)".

Back to the Gospel

Resuming some thinking about the Gospel as the core message of the Christian faith.

So far:

- the gospel is something true with grave consequences.

- the gospel is not:


(1) One thing for one people group, or one era in history, and another for a different group or era.
(2) A message for some (those disposed to live by it) but not for others (those disinterested in it). Another way of putting this: the gospel is not the charter or constitution of a hobby group or club called 'church'.

(3) A human proposal up for debate because, like all human proposals it has flaws, needs revising for the needs of the day, etc.

Putting these observations together, the gospel is truth revealed from God for every human being in every generation which has grave consequences.

But what is the content of this non-trivial truth? What does it contain that cannot be deduced from looking around the world and out into the universe? What makes it truth with grave consequences?

The search for answers to these questions is complicated when we read the New Testament. On the face of it the answers we find if we confine our reading to the Gospel according to the four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are different to the answers yielded if we confined our reading to the epistles of Paul. (To an extent this observation explains some significant differences about the gospel between churches through the ages). The challenge is to find the one gospel in the midst of its diverse expressions in the New Testament.

Here I offer just one proposal about the content of the gospel: it is about Jesus Christ.

More soon ... but I may be distracted, as in the previous posts, by beautiful books and seductive sojourns into Communion politics!

Lust

From Hendrickson's Advertisement:

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What texts can I find in the Codex Sinaiticus?

As it survives today, Codex Sinaiticus comprises just over 400 large leaves of prepared animal skin, each of which measures (13.6 inches) wide by 380mm (15 inches) high. On these parchment leaves is written around half of the Old Testament and Apocrypha (the Septuagint), the whole of the New Testament, and two early Christian texts not found in modern Bibles. Most of the first part of the manuscript (containing most of the so-called historical books, from Genesis to 1 Chronicles) is now missing and presumed to be lost. .
The Septuagint includes books which many Protestant Christian denominations place in the Apocrypha. Those present in the surviving part of the Septuagint in Codex Sinaiticus are 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, 1 & 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach. .

The number of the books in the New Testament in Codex Sinaiticus is the same as that in modern Bibles in the West, but the order is different. The Letter to the Hebrews is placed after Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians, and the Acts of the Apostles between the Pastoral and Catholic Epistles. .

The two other early Christian texts are an Epistle by an unknown writer claiming to be the Apostle Barnabas, and ‘The Shepherd’, written by the early second-century Roman writer, Hermas."

We tend to lust after the things we want but cannot have. Hendrickson's Advertisement tells me that there are seven hundred and ninety-nine reasons why neither I nor the theological institute I work for are likely to get our hands on this masterpiece.