Thanks to MCU, their qualms state some of my qualms.

Leaving scholarship to one side while asking the Primates to be our leading theologians aka high court judges will only result in the sorts of fiasco that we saw at Lambeth 1998 and elswhere/else-when: Some really IN bishop trying to exorcise demons of homosexuality out of a gay clergy person? Or refusing to really be equal and fair to all neighbors while exchanging views in platforms built by the likes of FIF or Reform or gasp Anglican Mainstream? Or refusing to stay in meetings or join in Eucharist because this or that hot button is hot?

None of that is the best of our Anglican heritage. Can the Elizabethan Settlement be that other sort of Anglican law, written on our hearts, renewed in common prayer, and cradled in bonds of affection which nourish on the hearty vitamins of best practice modern inquiry?

Or is mob violence against queer folks in Jamaica or state sponsored violence in Nigeria or ... a sad but strict Anglican vision predicted retrograde into our newly covenanted conservative Anglican futures?

On a more personal level can I dare to trust that Gomez will not stand by while somebody else does me and my family in, as violently as he or she may please thanks to Leviticus or Romans or some other hot button proof text now made the worldwide law of Anglican Lands? Given the strictures of these new covenants as drafted so far, we only get one chance to get it really wrong here, and yet we otherwise could have many, many chances to keep trying to get it right as our understandings change?

If a hot button controversy or difference has been juridically settled, what new empirical data or other best practices inquiry would provide grounds for reconsidering or re-opening the juridical Anglican rulings? The real written history of Lambeth views is a history of change in significant aspects across times and peoples and places.

(See:http://episcopalmajority.blogspot.com ) (Four brief essays on the various statements of various Lambeths by Chris Webber.)

Who carries the ball on growth and corrected understandings without risking complaints and sentencing from the new Anglican judicial councils? Is this really the best way forward that all our brightest minds and warmest hearts can imagine?

Bravo, MCU! Given traditional Anglican trust and respect, a new covenant would be unnecessary. Absent these qualities, it could only further divide the tottering Anglican Communion.

"No!" is long overdue!

Bravo! This does say very well why what is proposed sounds so foreign to the ears of some of us. The draft looks too much like a Constitution for the Anglican Communion, whereby an institution would be created in place of a work of the Spirit. Surely we can see that such a change arises directly and solely out of the felt need by some for Letter in place of Spirit. When we know that 'the letter killeth', why would we be wanting to hand such an instrument to some who seem to want it for that express purpose?

This seems to put it all out there very clearly -- anyone from the Reagan era still have "Just Say No!" buttons?

The fact is that the Windsor Report was a bad & rushed job & the Covenant notion is just another example of this (IMHO).

Could there be a good "covenant" (wrong word for the Scots)? Of course! But none of the proposals so far even come close. The best comments have all been politely worded objections.

No Covenant as proposed, and the Bible Traffic Wardens will walk and start their own alternative Anglican Communion which allows the Letter of Scripture, as understood by them, although their interpretation may be contrary to what the authors intended, to trump and stifle the Spirit. After all, in their view, we are not saved by Christ but by covenantal nomism (i.e., boundary issues that determine who is in and who is OUT).

my real worry about this, is what we will call the bishops if we enter into a convenant. john hind, bishop of chichester is very helpful about the present situation: 'The formal mode of address of the Bishop of Chichester is “My Lord Bishop”.' it's important to get these things right. http://www.diochi.org.uk/

but we'll be without a rudder on all this if we move into a new conventual relationship, and then where will we be? it's very worrying.

There are some who are not going to "play ball" unless this covenant is brought in. They don't know how to be civilized to people who disagree with them nor tolerate them having a voice.

However, if this covenant was brought in, they would be amongst the first to work out how to use it and to organize the lynch mobs to expunge the impure.

Don't worry, look globally, there's enough evidence now of how some souls misuse power to “control” the cleanliness of parishes and/or dioceses.

The tactics of shunning, back stabbing, misrepresentation, censorship, hate sermons, sabotage, setting snares, exaggeration are used with impunity by some souls. The most despicable thing is that there are bishops who repeatedly orchestrate such attacks, and who advise parishioners and others how to hide the evidence.

They have no problem labeling souls as delusional, obsessive, attention-seekers, possessed, evil incarnate, power hungry, ambitious, impure, unclean, and/or ignorant. They have no problem breaking up families, forcing people out of jobs, exacerbating depression or addictions, or even driving souls to suicide.

Shame on them.

Shame on the Anglican Communion if they allow themselves to be duped by such souls into thinking they need to give them even more weapons. They can and have been doing quite enough damage with what they've got already.

Ezekiel 8:12-13 “…have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the darkness, each at the shrine of his own idol? They say, ‘The LORD does not see us; the LORD has forsaken the land.’ ”

Ezekiel 29:13-24 "The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me .Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men. Therefore once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish… In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll, and out of gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind will see… The ruthless will vanish, the mockers will disappear, and all who have an eye for evil will be cut down— those who with a word make a man out to be guilty, who ensnare the defender in court and with false testimony deprive the innocent of justice…”

Fr. Jakes not buying into it either:

http://frjakestopstheworld.blogspot.com/

"such a change arises directly and solely out of the felt need by some for Letter in place of Spirit"

Exactly! As to why, I think it's because they need to have clearly expressed laws. It may be based on fear that God will not love them if they disobey a law, thus the laws must be clear lest there be confusion or oversight, and they end up tortured for eternity. It may be because clearly expressed law makes it easier to see who is better than whom as judged by the degree of their obedience. The first is justification by works, the second is just self-righteousness. Neither is a good reason for putting a human manufactured convenant in place of the one given to us by God and sealed in His Blood, I shouldn't think.

The appendix clearly needs to be rewritten, but at least the idea of mediation might be retained. After all, we might not be in this mess if we had done a better job of talking to each other we might have managed to avoid this mess in the first place.

Jon

Yes, indeed, bravo!

By the way, has anyone ever seen a good justification for why the provinces of the Anglican Communion should have a different standard for full communion amongst themselves than for full communion with other churches outside the Communion?

If the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral already establishes the minimum standard for full communion, as it does - while also allowing adequate room for diversity and local needs - why then do we need something new at all?

What exactly makes this proposed double-standard for full communion necessary?

So what would happen if the Church of England ran afoul of the instruments, if the C of E were asked to agree that they had withdrawn from the meaning of the covenant? Would the See of Canterbury (which is the Canterbury diocese and not the Archbishop alone) be out of communion with itself? I ask this because I think it points to the problem of defining formal systems, systems of rules: they often (and famously in philosophical terms) tend to contradict themselves.

As Lister said, the letter killeth, and no 'lettering' is going to obviate the need to attend to the Spirit. The historic Anglican commitment to ecumenism is based on our belief that there is only one Body of Christ -- no matter what we say or do. Our unity, such as it is, is always a grace, never solely an accomplishment. Our disunity, though obviously real, hides a more basic lie. Legislating for disunity, even if it includes a process for overcoming disunity, is the institutionalisation of hard-heartedness, no matter how or where the hard-heartedness rears itself.

As people are saying elsewhere, 'Let's just say "no".' But, then, no one's asking most of us. Does anyone else feel railroaded in all of this, bullied into believing that Windsor is the only hope, that commitment to a covenant of some indeterminate sort is the price of admission to Lambeth, and so on?

Joe

What is happening here is an attempt to start a new Church: the world-wide Anglican Church (which has never existed before)!

Writing it down has the imminent capability of destroying it altogether.

Well yes I do feel a lot of bullying going on in the conservative realignment campaign, but then one gets numb to it after so many years of childhood and youthful threatening hellfire sermons in the USA Bible Belt growing up. If only I had a dollar or two for ever single needless, sleepless, restless hour of the night and day, sadistically tortured and troubled not by real good conscience but by the nastiness and meanness of the bully preacher and his own neurotic bad conscience, given as gospel.

Rowan's interest in having a covenant is not at all clear to me. He seems to regard it as some sort of indelible marker, and likes to go on about so-called Windsor bishops and so forth. But all this simply detracts from our real communion, you know the one given by God's grace, in Jesus; and even sometimes replaces it as a stand-in because different groups of believers cannot uniformly agree on each detail of how to understand grace, especially when one tries to translate grace into legalistic enforcement terms suitable to new Anglican policing and Anglican punishments.

It is all like a bad sitcom flashback, alas. I think we better just keep trying to follow Jesus of Nazareth, as honestly as possible; and not put too much trust in covenants to save us.

Besides, from a realignment point of view, covenant is simply newspeak for policing-punishment. Just try a backward word replacement in almost any realignment discussion that goes on about just why we need a new covenant, and you will quite often clearly get the mistaken translation and the trickster equivalencies. Surprising that somebody of Rowan's keen mind and education would fall for it, any of it, for even a split second.

Joe Cassidy --

That is an excellent point!

I think this is a case of the C of E leadership assuming that what has happened elsewhere can't happen to them (& they are delusional).

"What exactly makes this proposed double-standard for full communion necessary?
Posted by: christopher+"

The gays!

It says

We, the Churches of the Anglican Communion, under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, solemnly covenant together...

And the paragraph 8.4 has

(a) the Church involved may declare voluntarily that it relinquishes the force and meaning of the purposes of the Covenant, or (b) the Council shall resolve whether the Church involved may be understood to have relinquished the force and meaning of the purposes of the Covenant.

Am I losing something here? Is this the same thing as being removed from the Anglican Communion? Because 8.5 as well as trying to get said Church back into the Covenant, 8.4 removes from the force and meaning of the Covenant, not exclusion from the Anglican Communion.

It seems to me that the purpose of the Covenant is to maintain the Covenant, whilst the Anglican Communion as such is unaffected - there might be two divisions. The upshot of removal from the Covenant is a lot of continued talk.

My objection to this is that it is pointless. I think objections like the equality of testaments and still too much to these Instruments and so on are all valid, but I still think it adds up to a lot of nothing much. But I may have got this wrong.

I wonder what the results would be if there was a non-binding/no names released survey of the primates, just two questions. 1) Do you really want a formal covenant? and 2) do you think it will preserve the Anglican Communion?

Much too direct, of course - but I wouldn't be surprised if a majority would just as soon let the yellow light turn red.

Joe speaks wisely about legislating for disunity. From another perspective though, consider the possiblity that diversity is in fact a necessary precondition for unity. (Not original to me, see Vatican II). If so, then the sort of unity that some would press for is really uniformity, which is actually an illusion of unity. Provincial autonomy is necessary for the development of authentic contextual theology, which gives rise to more diversity, which gives rise to the opportunity for God to reveal the sort of real unity that we cannot create with covenants, and this covenant pays lip service to Provincial autonomy, but then neutralizes it in the dispute settling mechanism.

Do we want to go down the road of providing tools for the stifling of the development of the Communion, left only with the illusion of unity and the illusion of Provincial autonomy? And the illusion of Communion?

I second many of the comments above, particularly Joe Cassidy's remark that the Covenant would be a triumph of hard-heartedness.
Not only do I fail to see any need for anything beyond what we already share, I don't see the emergency. And yet, so many people feel it is urgent that we put up sandbags and barbed wire right now. What exactly needs to be protected, and from whom?

Christopher+ (10:45 GMT), I think that this is precisely where +Cantuar might have deployed his formidable mind to great advantage--that is, in explaining why our relationship with him is more valuable than our (TEC) relationship with the ELCA or why his relationship with us should have different ground rules than his relationship with the Scandinavian Lutherans or Old Catholics. Perhaps no one has asked him to do so, but (as I have said here before: this is my day for repeating myself) I suspect that there actually _isn't_ any such reason, other than sentimental Anglophilia (and, mind you, I type that looking across the room at a map of Hampshire, a color photo of the Queen and a hunk of oak from the last reconstruction of _HMS Victory_). There isn't actually anything theologically significant about the Anglican Communion as opposed to other communions we are part of, and the Covenant is in part an attempt to legislate such significance into existence, even at the price of betraying such Anglican history as we do have in common.

did i miss something? is the word "reason" nowhere to be found in the text?
and a not-so-minor note: the Archbishop of Canterbury is referred to specifically as "he"-- sorry, guys. this whole thing is patriarchal, condescending, and firmly rooted in pre-modern concepts about the world and society.

Robert - on reason,
Clause 1.2.2 says:
to uphold and proclaim a pattern of Christian theological and moral reasoning and discipline that is rooted in and answerable to the teaching of Holy Scripture and the catholic tradition and that reflects the renewal of humanity and the whole created order through the death and resurrection of Christ and the holiness that in consequence God gives to, and requires from, his people;

The commentary on it says:
One of the questions addressed to the Design Group was “Where in the Covenant does the lively and responsible role of human reason, so consistently important to Anglican practice, find a substantive mention?” Taking up one suggestion, the active and disciplined use of reason in theological and moral decision-making, bound to Scriptural authority, was used to replace a previous paragraph (3.3).

Which I think means that reason may be included but only as subordinate to Scripture and tradition.

Pluralist, as I read it 8.4 says the offending Church has a choice - they can jump or they can be pushed out.

8.5 says, implicitly, that if the offending Church changes its mind and repents of its actions (i.e. accepts the finding of the court that has just expelled them) they may be readmitted to the club. (The same clause was in the previous draft.)

And all this is based on the presumption that to be part of the Anglican Communion is identical with being a signatory to the Covenant in good standing. No more 'in communion with the see of Canterbury'.

The above are some of the best contributions I have seen on TA.

Further to Joe's point about being railroaded: Yes, I do feel that. Instruments or no Instruments, I am not selling my birthright for this mess of potage and I have no intention of breaking communion with TECUSA.

I'm still baffled - genuinely. Gomez in interview said no exclusions and TEC would not be excluded, and whilst it says "We solemnly Covenant together" it nowhere says that being in the Anglican Communion is ended by not accepting the Covenant.

If everyone (you all see to agree) and the MCU is right, then the tentative appendix does make this unacceptable in an authoritarian sense. Clearly it is centralisation, legalism, relying on those who can't and should not have to be relied upon to make their conclusions. It is not Anglican.

But if my puzzlement is that this amounts to so little, then it is just a lot of smoke and mirrors to keep people busy.

If Churches see this process as indeed authoritarian, they won't sign up to it.

Either way the policy is a disaster and just is unsustainable.

Pluralist --

Maybe this is the sort of thing that the ABC had in mind (who knows) with that long ago suggestion of a "two-tier" Communion -- there would be those in Communion with Canterbury & then there would be the signatories of the Covenant (although I'm not sure who will be left to sign on).

Thanks Prior Aelred - and quite.

What then if another Church produces a different Covenant, and that also recognises the Archbishop, but is just a set of simple Anglican statements and no disciplining structures. Many that could not sign the first might sign this.

The St. Andrews Covenant would deflate in a second. The new draft might be called Sharia, just for fun.

4May1535+,

"There isn't actually anything theologically significant about the Anglican Communion as opposed to other communions we are part of, and the Covenant is in part an attempt to legislate such significance into existence, even at the price of betraying such Anglican history as we do have in common."

Very well put! I plan to keep asking this question, by the way, because we keep hearing how very, very critical it is that we Anglicans now develop a covenant. Nonsense. This is only necessary if all provinces really want to have dictated to them by a very few other provinces what they may and may not do as regards nonessentials. Again I say, nonsense.

I'm concerned by the apparent lack of concern for building up charity among the comments here and elsewhere in the Anglican blogosphere. How can one increase charity in a group that has been afflicted by infighting? The only way I know of is to find some way to encourage all sides to choose to trust the others and to work together in things on which they already agree. Tat is the only reason I can see for pursuing an Anglican covenant. Granted some will try to use it to purge the communion of "undesirables," and we need to be on our guard against those attempts, but even the appendix of the St. Andrew's day draft, as bad as it is, provided significant defenses against such abuse (NB: only the ACC could decide that a province had given up the covenant, and that is the hardest body in the communion to control.) When it gets rewritten to reflect the sensible concerns about the timeframes for response as well as dealing with the possibility of proposals being rejected by a province on the grounds that they are unworkable or uncanonical in the province it could turn out to be quite tolerable as a mechanism for reminding each province of the importance of remaining accountable to our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Jon

"...a mechanism for reminding each province of the importance of remaining accountable to our brothers and sisters in Christ."

You see, that's the problem. I have never considered myself to be accountable to anyone except my own conscience and God, at least as regards matters of faith.

"The only way I know of is to find some way to encourage all sides to choose to trust the others and to work together in things on which they already agree."

So why is a convenant necessary for us to do this? We did it quite well for 500 years till now. There is a group of conservatives who are quite clear that their issues go way beyond the "gay thing". They have grave concerns about what they see as apostate innovations from "liberals". This covenant is a means of ensuring that people, by force, are restrained from going where the conservatives don't want them to go. It's a power grab. There are fundamental things on which we don't, have never, agreed. Now one side, driven largely by fear it seems, is unable to continue tolerating those who think differently, and want to force compliance. I think fear is the driving force because of what the conservatives say. A glaring example is how TEC is trying to "force" her ideas on everyone else. TEC has never even hinted that other churches should so much as be nice to gay people. She has not condemned, for instance, Nigeria's Church backed attempt to oppress gay people. Yet, the Right claims TEC is forcing them to accept something. Either they are lying through their teeth, or they actually believe this. If they believe it, when it is patently not the case, then their perception of reality is severely warped by something, and I think it's fear. Where will it stop? If you are afraid of your lack of control over others, you will never be unafraid.