Discipline and the Bishops in a Time of Confusion and Discernment: The Case of Bishop Duncan

http://anglicancommunioninstitute.com/content/view/129/1/

[Anglican Communion Institute] 24 Jan 2008--III. However, third, it is an open question as to whether "the Doctrine, Discipline, or Worship of this church" are in fact being upheld and/or embodied by the current executive offices of the Episcopal Church. (Myself, I believe they are not; but that is not the point here.) The question is "open" because it has been in dispute, at least since General Convention 2003. It has been disputed in the explicit mind of a series of TEC bishops, theologians, clergy, and laity, as well as in the explicit mind of other formal leaders and members of the Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is bound, by its own Constitution, to be a "constituent member". The dispute has been openly engaged, and has continued unabated, and in fact with growing force, despite attempts by General Convention 2006 and meetings by the TEC's House of Bishops to answer, in certain respects, charges as to the constitutional integrity of its executive life.

IV. Fourth, and to further explicate the previous point, this dispute is not an artificial or tendentious construct insofar as it touches the "Doctrine, Discipline, and Worship of this church". The matter of "discipline" is bound up with a host of extensive theological and practical realities that, as we know, include liturgy and liturgical form, teaching, moral behavior, and the more narrow "disciplinary" matters of how clergy and bishops are directed, admonished, and corrected. When, as has happened in now literally hundreds of cases among clergy (and some bishops), an ordained Episcopalian declares that it is no longer possible to "keep" his or her "ordination vows" given the formal teaching, decisions, and actions of the executive leadership of the Episcopal Church itself, and on grounds that have been concretely enumerated in a host of cases and with respect to a host of matters, just insofar as this, the question of whether that leadership itself has openly renounced the Doctrine, Discipline, and Worship of this church has been formally raised. Raised and asserted, furthermore, by the departure of many thousands of the faithful.

V. Fifth, the Title Review Committee that received the charges against Bishop Duncan and formally "certified" his "abandonment of communion" simply and irresponsibly ignored this serious dispute in question and its constraining implications for their decision-making. They did not even make an attempt to assess the nature of the charges brought to them and argue for their pertinence to their judgment.