Updated Easter Monday morning
American sources dominate so far.
The Living Church has Latest Covenant Draft Vests Adoption and Discipline with Provinces.
Episcopal News Service has Covenant design team sends ‘best possible draft’ to Anglican Consultative Council.
Episcopal Café has substantial discussion, first at Latest draft covenant available and then at A troubling interpretation and then at Capturing the castle through the back door.
The TitusOneNine thread referenced in the above articles is here.
Covenant-Communion also has extensive comment. See First Impressions of the Ridley Cambridge Draft of an Anglican Covenant and Is ACNA one of the “other Churches” the Anglican Covenant addresses?
Updates
Lionel Deimel has produced a PDF file titled Scripture References for the Ridley Cambridge Draft of the Anglican Communion Covenant.
Adrian Worsfold aka Pluralist has written at Episcopal Café, see The Covenant giveth and the Covenant taketh away. His final para:
This Anglican Covenant now acknowledges the potential for change, if all it wants to do is get international Instruments to direct and defer – without directing and probably not achieving any deferring. What a document! This Covenant is a completely contradictory mess, and the best place for it is the bin.
My piece at Episcopal Café will appear on Monday, Jim Naughton tells me, so I’m holding back otherwise, except to do a run up, and in the run up it is worth seeing what some of the intentions were and then, for my own part, on and after Monday, I’ll rabbit on about whether this achieves any purposes.
http://www.pluralistspeaks.blogspot.com/
If you see the entry I made while busy, you can see some of the chopped down passages that struck me of concern or issues, and then I developed an argument around most of those but in a different order.
I did initially support this draft, but after I read Ephraim Radner’s comments on TitusOneNine, I have the same questions as everyone else. It looks as though — perhaps this is an uncharitable reading — this version of the Covenant was deliberately crafted to allow ACNA to 1) achieve provincial status then 2) replace TEC in the Anglican Communion. The crafting of a “replacement province” for TEC, installed through a Canterbury-facilitated coup, has been the strategy of the English consevos and the American IRD/AAC right-wing since the late 1980s. Early on, the Covenant process was seized upon by a part… Read more »
What Charlotte said.
The proposed Covenant seems designed to increase the divisions that purportedly is intended to heal.
When people refuse to talk to one another, it is not possible to establish mutual understanding & concord (IMHO).
” Evidently this faction continues to dominate the Covenant process, as certain provisions of this draft of the Covenant seem designed to serve no other purpose than the installation of ACNA as a replacement province to TEC.” – Charlotte – If Charlotte is indeed correct, and Ephraim Rader’s interpretation of the covenant process really does have an expectation of replacing TEC with the ACNA sodality, then all would be lost – as not many provinces in the Anglican Communion would want to see any replacement of TEC or the Anglican Church of Canada by a groups of dissidents. The true… Read more »
For the record, I hope I am wrong. And I would be very willing to accept a Covenant — though not one with the sort of ulterior motive I suspect here (I hope wrongly).
This redraft of the pending proposed covenant does little or nothing, just as the others do or did. What has changed is context – the virtualized emergence of consevo claims about ACNA, and that is pretty much all that has effectively changed from the past draft to the present one. Meanwhile, the gaps, lacks, and outright spin of previous drafts also gets embodied in this latest one. It offers little or nothing that we do not already have available, and much better said in most cases, via our library of scriptures plus existing treasure house of believer documents plus empirical… Read more »
why is TEC bothering???? And at what cost to its people????
“why is TEC bothering???? And at what cost to its people????” – Cybil Respectfully, Cybil, I think TEC is concerned about the outcome of any sort of Covenantal relationship because it believes it is already a constituent part of the Anglican Communion, whose basic theology is not religiously fundamentalist, and therefore incompatible with other Anglican Churches who see the Gospel as the outworking of a theology of Love having replaced the aridity of judgement by The Law. Most TEC members, I would venture to suggest do actually value their close relationship with the other members of the Anglican Family who… Read more »
“why is TEC bothering????”
The principle of the thing? Not only that, but these conservatives like to promote themselves as the True Christians in all this, they even have the unmitigated gall to call themselves “orthodox”. Well, they are pretty good at showing how big a lie that is, but it’s nice to make it even more obvious from time to time, I think.
Besides, bullies can’t be allowed to just get away with whatever they want.
What does the Ridley covenant provide that is not already available through our existing structures and constitutions? GAFCON and its affiliates will continue their refusal to officially accept homosexuality and some will contue to refuse communion with those who do accept gay people. The Covenant does not supercede existing authority structures. It makes much of ‘the authority of Scripture’ but does not define it and all of us have our own insigts as to what it means but some of these are not acceptable to those with a more fundamentalist outlook. A huge amount of work for very little result… Read more »
Had the Ridley Covenant been in force some fifty years ago it is unlikely today that there would be any ordained women and the 1928 prayer book would probably still be the only acceptable revision of the 1662 one. The problem of a papal-style committee acting as the arbitor of acceptable or non-acceptable ‘inovations’ is that the committee itself is the greatest inovation for nearly half a millennia and totally abrogates two key principle of the Anglican Communion – one is the free association of provinces based on our common bond in Christ and our shared history, the other our… Read more »