The Incoherence of GAFCON and the Global South

Charles Raven’s recent article,“To Mend the Net?” and Andrew Atherstone’s earlier article, “The Incoherence of the Anglican Communion,” prompted me to give further thought to the implications of a number of recent developments. These developments include the Global South Primates’ recognition of the Anglican Church in North America as a mission partner, their admission of its Archbishop to voting membership in their Council, and the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and the Sudan’s House of Bishops’ urging of Sudan's Primate to recognize the ACNA.

Atherstone in his article draws attention to the lack of any coherent form of identity in the Anglican Communion. The article written in 2004 predates the two attempts to “assist a coherent doctrinal identity for the Communion” – An Anglican Covenant and The Jerusalem Declaration. Both documents were based upon the premise that the Communion needed a common confession of faith to unite it. Historically the Thirty-Nine Articles had served this purpose. However, some provinces no longer accepted the authority of the Articles. Others such as the Episcopal Church in the United States had never accepted their authority.

An Anglican Covenant and The Jerusalem Declaration take different approaches to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Section 1.1.2 of An Anglican Covenant states:

The historic formularies of the Church of England, forged in the context of the European Reformation and acknowledged and appropriated in various ways in the Anglican Communion, bear authentic witness to this faith.

This statement permitted the signatories to the covenant a measure of latitude where the authority of the Articles is concerned.

The Jerusalem Declaration is more straight forward in its acceptance of the authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles. It states:

We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.

The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans had concluded that the words of Canon A5 of the canons of the Church of England best expressed the doctrinal foundation of Anglicanism.

The doctrine of the Church of England is grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures.

In particular such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion,The Book of Common Prayer, and the Ordinal.

This doctrinal foundation, the FCA believed, defined its members' core identity as Anglicans.

The GAFCON Theological Resource Group compiled an official commentary on The Jerusalem Declaration. Titled Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today, the purpose of this commentary was to forestall multiple interpretations of The Jerusalem Declaration. In the commentary the GAFCON Theological Resource Groups note in relation to the authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles that the Articles “have long been recognized as the doctrinal standard of Anglicanism, alongside the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal.” The GAFCON Theological Resource Groups goes on to note that “acceptance of their authority is constitutive of Anglican identity.”  It further points out:

The Jerusalem Declaration calls the Anglican church back to the Articles as being a faithful testimony to the teaching of Scripture, excluding erroneous beliefs and practices and giving a distinctive shape to Anglican Christianity.

The concept of a common confession of faith is consistent with the principles of historic Anglicanism. The problem since the publication of the final drafts of these documents is getting all the Anglican provinces to agree to them. This includes the present candidate for “an orthodox Anglican alternative” to the Episcopal Church in the USA and the Anglican Church of Canada—the Anglican Church in North America.

ACNA leaders claim that the jurisdiction affirms the two documents. However, a careful examination of the ACNA’s own formularies does not support this claim. The ACNA’s tacit rejection of the authority of the historic Anglican formularies evidenced in its own formularies cannot be interpreted by any stretch of the imagination as a form of acknowledgement and appropriation of the historic Anglican formularies—far from it. The positions of the ACNA on the historic Anglican formularies also conflict with the positions of The Jerusalem Declaration and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans.

Rather than encouraging the ACNA leadership to bring the jurisdiction’s formularies more in line with An Anglican Covenant and The Jerusalem Declaration and offering incentives for the ACNA leadership to take this important step, the GAFCON and Global South Primates have extended unqualified recognition to the Anglican Church in North America and admitted its Archbishop to their councils. What is the basis of their recognition? It is certainly not the ACNA’s acceptance of the authority of the historic Anglican formularies. The main basis on which the GAFCON and Global South Primates are recognizing the ACNA appears to be the jurisdiction’s adherence to the catholic creeds, its acceptance of a traditional view of marriage and human sexuality, and the ties that the different founding entities of the ACNA formed with various GAFCON and Global South provinces. In basing their recognition of the ACNA on these three criteria, the GAFCON and Global South Primates are contributing to the doctrinal confusion in the Anglican Communion.

In the Anglican Church two views of the episcopate have existed in tension with each other since the nineteenth century. The first view has its origin in the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement and while it is often associated with the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church, it is not exclusively the view of that wing.

The second view has its origin in the nineteenth century Catholic Revival. It is often associated with the Anglican Church’s Anglo-Catholic wing but it too is not exclusively the view of that wing.

Both views have adherents outside these two ecclesiastical traditions.

Among the differences between the two views is its position on episcopal authority. This particular difference was brought to the fore in the doctrinal and liturgical controversies of the nineteenth century. In first view bishops were subject to the same rules and conventions as other clergy and lay people. If the church adopted a standard for doctrine and worship, they were expected to conform to that standard. In the second view bishops were “a law unto themselves.” They were free to ignore the rules and conventions that applied to everyone else. They were not subject to such rules and conventions but were above them. They were free to do what was right in their own eyes. They were not bound to conform to any doctrinal and worship standard that the church adopted if they did not agree with it. Their acceptance of such a standard was purely voluntary on their part.

The positions that the GAFCON and Global South Primates have taken in regards to the Anglican Church in North America in their unqualified recognition of that jurisdiction and their admission of its Archbishop to their councils is highly suggestive that these bishops have been strongly influenced by the second Catholic Revivalist view of the episcopate. Irrespective of whether their predecessors or their province accepted the doctrinal and worship standards articulated in An Anglican Covenant and/or The Jerusalem Declaration, they give the appearance of not feeling any sense of obligation themselves to conform to this standard or to apply it to the Anglican Church in North America. Such an attitude, however, if it exists, undermines the purpose of these two documents, which is to re-establish a coherent form of identity in the Anglican Communion.

Historical Anglicanism has what may be described as a hierarchy of authority in matters of doctrine and practice. At the top of the hierarchy is God. Beneath God is the Bible, his revelation of his mind to us. Beneath the Bible are the historic Anglican formularies, including the two Books of Homilies. The historic Anglican formularies derive their authority from the Bible. Beneath them are the bishops of the church. They are subject to God, the Bible, and the historic Anglican formularies.

A bishop cannot set aside the teaching of the Bible or the doctrine of the historic Anglican formularies. Among the duties of a bishop is to “banish and drive away all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word; and privately and openly to call upon and encourage others to the same.”

One of the main functions of the Thirty-Nine Articles is to establish the boundaries of what are acceptable teaching and practices in the Anglican Church, teaching and practices that are agreeable to the Scriptures. Along with the Bible itself, the historic Anglican formularies lay out principles of doctrine and worship to apply in determining what is agreeable to the Scriptures and what is not.

In their failure to apply these doctrinal and worship principles to the unreformed Catholic teaching and practices that the Anglican Church in North America mandates or sanctions in its formularies, the GAFCON and Global South Primates are ignoring this hierarchy of authority and creating a new one—a hierarchy in which they places themselves above the historic Anglican formularies. In doing so, they are committing the same error as the liberal bishops of the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada. They are placing themselves above the Bible and ultimately above God.

Whatever they are doing, the GAFCON and Global South Primates are not helping to resolve the doctrinal incoherence in the Anglican Communion. They are contributing to it. 

A side note: As Charles Raven points out in his article, “To Mend the Network?” the report outlines an eight-step disciplinary process. Step 8 in that process was that the Primates Meeting would suspend the “intransigent body” and offer advice to the Archbishop of Canterbury on how he should go about organizing a new Anglican province in that region. Raven does not mention this second part of step 8 in his article. It is a significant omission.

The process envisioned in To Mend the Network: The Anglican Faith and Order for Renewed Mission includes some form of supervision of the organizers of the new province and specific guidelines for its organization. Here Raven’s equation of the GAFCON and Global South Primates’ disfellowshiping of the Episcopal Church in the USA and their recognition of the Anglican Church in North America with step 8 does not hold up. No discernible form of supervision was offered to the Common Cause Partnership in the critical early stages of the formation of the ACNA. If the GAFCON and Global South Primates provided specific guidelines for its formation, they have never been made public and we have no way of judging their adequacy or appropriateness.