One measure of something important being announced is whether people are still talking about it afterwards. The conservative Anglican network Gafcon’s conference in Abuja in March passes that test because it is still being talked about.
Debate 1: Do we need a Pope-Lite?
The big surprise from the conference – not for the Aussies there – was for the conservative provinces formed into a Global Anglican Communion not to have a figurehead like the Archbishop of Canterbury. In other words, Sarah Mullally was not going to have a rival. No Pope or pope-lite figurehead.
Instead, an expanded council would lead the reset Anglican communion. Locally, Kanishka Raffel, Archbishop of Sydney, has now joined the Global Anglican Council.
An intriguing response came from retired Theology Professor Paul Avis, who argued churches have geography so need worldwide leaders, while commenting on other proposals to downgrade Canterbury, writing in the Church Times (but I link to a non-paywalled version): “Any form of presidency or primacy, however constrained, needs to be recognisable and findable. It needs to have ‘a local habitation and a name’, if it is not to be ‘an airy nothing’. Rome is the locus of the papacy and Constantinople the locus of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Their faithful know where to look. Anglican primacy or presidency (different as it is particularly from that of Rome, though not so different from that of Constantinople) is located at Canterbury and so is recognisable and findable; it has its local habitation and its name. A floating Primates Council, which exercises the functions of primacy/presidency but has no home in the world does not do it.”
Similar objections to the Gafcon move have come from within Gafcon’s Anglican Church in North America, which has a strong Anglo-Catholic wing.
But there’s scant evidence in the Bible that there should be one strong leader of the multinational church. If there was a recognisable and findable locus for the early church, it was in Jerusalem. Yet in Acts 15 we read of a council – the Jerusalem Council – which made the decision that gentile Christians did not have to observe the Jewish ceremonial laws.
Christian Jews could keep the laws; Gentiles did not have to. There was no one supreme leader, no Pope, there to ensure that everyone had to follow his (unlikely to be her at the time) way of doing things.
Debate 2: two ways to do church
This ability to have more than one way in the church is reflected in Gafcon’s embrace of Anglicans who have differing views on women’s ordination.
This treatment of the women’s ordination has been attacked in the conservative magazine First Things, by Jay Thomas a minister from Georgia, who identifies with the ACNA’s Anglo Catholic wing. He argues that if Gafcon rejects homosexuality, it should also reject women’s ordination.
And for Australians, the question might be asked, why does the strongly complementarian Sydney Diocese want to be in Gafcon, which includes women priests and bishops?
“[Gafcon’s]Jerusalem Declaration states that ‘the Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading,’ Thomas writes. But the general secretary of the newly formed Global Anglican Council states that the ordination of women (or lack thereof) is “a secondary issue” that Anglicans can agree to disagree on, GAFCON claims that it has reordered the Global Anglican Communion around a confessional identity, and yet on the second article of its confession—the plain and canonical authority of Scripture—it refuses to hold the line.”
A strong defence of Gafcon’s position comes from Anglican minister and journalist George Conger.
“Classical Anglicanism has always recognised hierarchies of doctrine. The Thirty-Nine Articles themselves distinguish between matters “necessary to salvation” and things indifferent (adiaphora). The Caroline Divines debated vigorously which questions fell into which category, but none—not Hooker, not Andrewes, not even Laud—imagined that uniformity on all questions was either possible or necessary.
“GAFCON’s position is that sexuality touches core doctrines of creation, incarnation, and the moral law in ways that ministerial ordering does not. One can dispute this theological judgment. But to call it incoherent requires ignoring the entire Anglican tradition of theological triage. Thomas doesn’t refute GAFCON’s distinctions; he simply pretends they don’t exist.
“Thomas repeatedly invokes “the church’s historic and magisterial tradition” as though this settles the matter. But whose tradition? Interpreted how? Adjudicated by whom?
“Here’s where Thomas’s argument reveals its true colours. His appeal to natural law and magisterial tradition as co-equal authorities with Scripture sounds Anglican—until you remember that the English Reformers explicitly rejected precisely this formulation. Article VI doesn’t say Scripture is prima inter pares among authorities; it says Scripture “containeth all things necessary to salvation” and that nothing not found there or provable thereby may be required as doctrine. Article XX forbids the Church from ordaining “any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written.”
“Thomas’s prima scriptura isn’t classical Anglicanism—it’s Anglo-Catholicism’s attempted rehabilitation of the dual-source theory of revelation that the Reformation rejected.”
Image: Anglican Compass Rose (right) and Gafcon or Global Anglican Communion Logo (left)
‘GAFCON’s position is that sexuality touches core doctrines of creation, incarnation, and the moral law in ways that ministerial ordering does not.’
For well over 200 years there have been prominent Anglican leaders who have denied Christ’s physical resurrection. Sexuality is not as crucial a doctrine as the resurrection. No-one has ever been able to explain to me why GAFCON have left over sexuality while they could tolerate resurrection deniers. Anyone?