By Robin G. Jordan
In his October pastoral letter FCA Chairman Archbishop Iluid
Wabukula persists in ignoring the elephant in the FCA living room. One is hard put
to see how he can keep pretending that the elephant is not there. It is a very
large elephant. Its trumpeting is growing noisier and noisier. The louder it
trumpets, the more determined he and other FCA leaders appear to ignore it.
Sooner or later, however, Archbishop Wabukala and the other
GAFCON Primates will have to face up to the growing doctrinal disparity between
the Anglican Church in North America and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans,
its failure to fully accept the Bible as a canon or rule of faith and life and
the Anglican confessional formularies as its standard of doctrine and worship,
and its deliberate exclusion of Anglican Reformed doctrine and practice from
its own formularies. The elephant may have been easier to ignore as a calf. But
now it is a full-grown bull elephant with tusks that can gore and feet that can
trample.
Overlooked in his remarks about the Anglican Church in North
America is that GAFCON called for the establishment of an alternative province
to the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church at the urging of the
Common Cause Leadership Council. It was not entirely a GAFCON initiative. The
Common Cause Leadership Council lobbied GAFCON to take this action to give
legitimacy to its own efforts to create an alternative jurisdiction to these
two Anglican provinces.
Also not mentioned in the pastoral letter is that the Common
Cause Leadership Council had signaled with its adoption of the Common Cause
Theological Statement that the Common Cause Partners forming the alternative province were
prepared to chart their own course. Upon returning from the 2008 Global
Conference that adopted the Jerusalem Declaration, Common Cause Bishop Jack
Iker in an interview stated:
“… while it is clear that there is no future in The Episcopal Church for traditional Anglo-Catholics, there will be a secure, respected place for us in the province being birthed. Our theological perspective and liturgical practices will be permitted, protected and honored. Our succession of catholic bishops will be secured.”
Bishop Iker further stated:
“It is important to remember that the direction of the province that is envisioned will be under the Common Cause Partnership, and for this reason, we must look primarily to the wording of Theological Statement agreed upon by Common Cause some time ago [emphasis added]. There are some slight differences in wording and emphasis in that document from the final statement that came out of the Jerusalem meeting. Suffice it to say that Anglo-Catholics in the future will continue to regard the 1662 Prayer Book, the 39 Articles, liturgical practices, and the Councils of the patristic church just as the Oxford Movement did under Pusey, Keble, and Newman, our fathers in the faith.”
The rest of the interview may be found here.
At the Provincial Council meeting held before the inaugural Provincial
Assembly at which the final draft of the constitution and canons of the Anglican
Church in North America was adopted, when CANA Bishop Martyn Mimms pointed to the need for
changes in the proposed ACNA fundamental declarations to make them more
acceptable to evangelicals, the Anglo-Catholic Council members essentially
threatened to go their own way if any alterations were made to its provisions.
The only change Anglo-Catholic Council members would agree
to was changing the date of the Thirty-Nine Articles from 1563 to 1571. Since
the proposed ACNA fundamental declarations equivocated in their acceptance of
the authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles, this change was purely cosmetic,
even though the 1571 version of the Articles excludes the Lutheran view of the
eucharistic presence.
Since that time it has become increasingly evident that a significant
number of the ACNA bishops see the Articles as a historical document that they
can do with what they wish. Bishop Iker’s statement that the direction of the
new province would NOT be determined by GAFCON and the Fellowship of Confessing
Anglicans has proven to be the case.
Needless to say despite these developments Archbishop
Wabukala and other FCA leaders cling to the mistaken belief that the Anglican Church
in North America is walking in step with the Fellowship of Confessing
Anglicans. It boggles the mind trying to make sense of their obstinate refusal
to take notice of the widening gap between ACNA doctrinal positions and FCA doctrinal positions and the ACNA's exclusion of confessing Anglicans adhering to FCA doctrinal positions. If they have any concerns about developments in the ACNA, they have not expressed these concerns publicly in any meaningful way. FCA leaders have not given confessing Anglicans being frozen out of the ACNA due to their full acceptance of the authority of the Bible and the Anglican confessional formularies any reason to believe that FCA leaders are cognizant of, much less sympathetic to their plight.
Photo: thehindi.com
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