The Fundamental Declarations of the Anglican Church in North America: The Insights of the Late Peter Toon [Link now working]

I originally posted this article on September 20, 2011 - three years ago. The essay "Does 1662 rise as 1928 falls?" has since that time been removed from the Internet. and the website 1928bcp.com taken down. I did not discover until Sunday evening that the link to the article was not working. I have corrected the problem. What Dr. Toon wrote about the original version of the Common Cause Theological Statement to a large extent applies to the final version of that statement, the seven points from which were subsequently incorporated into the Anglican Church in North America's constitution as the ACNA's Fundamental Declarations. 

In August 2007 the late Peter Toon wrote an essay entitled “Does 1662 rise as 1928 falls?” in which he speculated upon the sudden popularity of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer at that time and the possible outcome of this popularity. Among the reasons that he surmised as accounting for the 1662 Prayer Book’s sudden popularity was that the Common Cause Partnership had no future or meaning without the active support of the Global South Provinces, which had constitutions based upon the historic Anglican formularies and which in a number of cases used the 1662 Prayer Book. The Common Cause Partnership would have an easier walk with the Global South Provinces if the CCP adopted the same formularies as those Provinces.

The Common Cause Partnership, however, had no intention of recovering the authentic Anglican Way, as Dr. Toon would hopefully speculate in his essay. Its adoption of the classic formularies, as the passage of time has revealed, was purely cosmetic. The CCP was seeking to give the appearance of accepting the authority of the classical formularies. The Common Cause Theological Statement was so written that the entities forming the alliance could in actual practice evade their authority. The Theological Statement contained a number of major concessions to the Anglo-Catholic entities in the alliance. It also reflected attitudes toward the classic formularies that the Common Cause Partners as former Episcopalians had brought with them from the Episcopal Church. This became all too evident with the formation of the Anglican Church in North America and the adoption and ratification of its present governing documents and the approval of its new ordinal.

The former Common Cause Partnership would gain what it coveted—the recognition of the leading Global South Provinces. Their primates would endorse the newly formed Anglican Church in North America as “a genuine expression of Anglicanism.” Since that time the leaders of the ACNA have been pushing the limits, not only within that ecclesial body but also outside it, seeking to see how far they can go without causing an outcry from the member churches of the ACNA or the Global South Provinces. Far from leading a recovery of the authentic Anglican Way in North America, the leaders of the Anglican Church in North America appear to be set on leading the ACNA even further away from historic Anglicanism. The College of Bishops approved an ordinal that authorizes the use of ceremonies and ornaments long associated with doctrines and practices that the classical formularies reject. By its authorization of these ceremonies and ornaments the ordinal sanctions the associated doctrines and practices. Read more