The proposed Anglican Covenant is seen by some as a beneficial way to reestablish trust within the Anglican Communion and to ensure orthodoxy in Anglican theological and social practices. My own view is that such a covenant is not only unnecessary but potentially harmful to our life together in Christ. The first section below has to do with the idea of a covenant in general. The second section contains my critique of the draft proposed by the Covenant Design Group.
The genius of Anglicanism is its gracious comprehensiveness in allowing for pluriform, contextually responsive theologies and hermeneutics throughout the global Church. Our heritage and our Christian witness are enriched by the presence of evangelicals, conservatives, moderates, and progressives in our midst, engaging in spirited dialogue that respects the culture and insights of each believer and each local church. The Baptismal Covenant, the Creeds, and the Eucharistic liturgies we use have all been developed with extraordinary care over the centuries and are sufficient as the “fundamentals” that bind us together officially. To suggest that we need another covenantal authority beyond those is not only to innovate in an undesirable way regarding the central characteristic of Anglicanism. It is also to dishonor, however unwittingly, those ancient and great instruments of unity.
Historical precedents in adiaphora—such as the Church’s positions on various social questions and liturgical options over the centuries—should be mulled with respect, but they should never be bowed to as if they were idols. The truth of this claim should be transparently obvious just on the face of it, but I would add a particular reason in light of our current debates: the voices of women, the poor, and openly gay persons have been suppressed in the councils and other judicatory bodies of the Church since its inception. I am astonished whenever anyone, progressive or conservative, suggests that the fact that the Church has “always” done something or “always” said something means that the Church has necessarily been correct on the matter. It is abundantly clear that the Church has made disastrous missteps in its history—the Crusades, colonialism, and chattel slavery are only three examples out of many that could be cited. Creating a covenant that enshrines any historical status quo as such would be a dangerous and harmful move in our polity.
It is politically naïve and theologically suspect to suggest, as some have, that having an Anglican Covenant will keep us in conversation on divisive issues. Our commitment to our Lord Jesus Christ should already keep us in loving and patient conversation on every issue of importance to the Church and the world. Those for whom our unity in Christ is not sufficient reason to remain in dialogue will not be one iota more inclined to listen to Christians with whom they disagree if we establish a new and weak political instrument.
It has also been suggested that a Covenant could serve a spiritual-formation purpose as a rule of discipline that fosters virtue in the life of the Church. To propose that a juridical instrument could serve that purpose effectively is to gravely misunderstand what polity is for and how spiritual formation in community may be nurtured. In my view, that suggestion also subtly denigrates the rich traditions of spiritual formation on which Anglicans already draw.
The concern of some that global mission and relief work will be fatally compromised if we do not have a Covenant is understandable, but in that case, the terms of the issue are being illogically framed. Service delivery systems are already in place within the Anglican Communion and outside of it. Those who are committed to relief of the poor and to mission work will continue to minister in those arenas, and where collaborative relationships have (already) broken down, new relationships with other partners can be forged. The problem should be understood for what it is: the unconscionable refusal of some Global South primates to accept resources from provinces that do not hew to their own particular patriarchal, misogynistic, and homophobic views. If relief work suffers in the short term—which will be a tragedy—it will be because of the intransigence of those primates, not because of the absence of an Anglican Covenant or the failure of the Episcopal Church to yield to pressure on one or another matter of our local polity.
There can be no question that the proposed Covenant will be used in pragmatic terms to derail local autonomy, threatening discipline or exclusion of those whose Christian witness does not conform to androcentric and heteronormative values (which are by no means as obviously “scriptural” as their adherents claim). The causes of our current divisions are many and complex. As all agree, a fundamental disjuncture has to do with divergent ways of conceiving Scriptural authority in different cultural contexts. The uneven deployment of economic resources globally and reactions against Christian and secular Western colonialism are also in play here. I see little reason to expect that the innovation of a potentially punitive instrument of extra-provincial polity will help us to address these challenges more effectively. To the contrary, such a Covenant would likely only exacerbate the bitter struggles for power that we are currently experiencing.
I am firmly opposed to the idea of an Anglican Covenant and hope that it does not succeed. But If it becomes inevitable that we adopt an Anglican Covenant, it should not look like the proposed draft in any case.
1 Preamble: the suggestion is that our “covenanting together” would be “in order to” proclaim the Gospel more effectively, offer God’s love, maintain the unity of the Spirit, and grow up together into the full stature of Christ. Hegemonic control of local autonomy and suppression of prophetic witness in the absence of consensus will not assist anyone in proclaiming the Gospel. We already offer God’s love to the needs of the world, and an extra-provincial juridical structure will not inspire a deeper or more constant love in us, nor will it ensure collaboration where such collaboration does not exist already. The idea of the “unity of the Spirit” is being disastrously confused throughout this document with human consensus on social and political matters. This is one of the most dangerous mistakes that this document makes, and it should be utterly refuted. Finally, as baptized Christians we already are growing into the full stature of Christ together, both in our arguing and in consensus-seeking and reconciliation. Indeed, our very disagreements could be lively and fruitful occasions for transformation, healthy and productive for all concerned, if folks would forswear the acrimony and venom that are currently characterizing our discourse. “Growing up together” ought never be conceptualized as requiring a kind of theological lockstep. How the richness of the Christian tradition would have been impoverished if we had understood “growing up together into Christ” as meaning that we needed to achieve and enforce consensus on every issue since the first century!
2 The Life We Share: the proposed ## 1, 3, and 4 are fine but do not need to be spelled out in a Covenant. # 2: we already claim in our heritage that Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation. We should not add that Scripture is “the rule and ultimate standard of faith”—understood tacitly as something juridically enforceable—unless we are prepared to spell out with considerable nuance our hermeneutical positions on at least the following:
It is clear that disagreements over how to read Scripture lie at the heart of our current disputes. A reductionist, content-focused, prooftexting approach to Scripture is amenable (at least on the surface) to the simplistic formulation that Scripture should be “the standard of faith.” What cannot be summed up easily in such a simplistic formulation is precisely what the Anglican Communion needs: a more nuanced appreciation of Scripture’s multivocality and the multiple hermeneutical choices that must be made by every intelligent and responsible believer reading the Bible in community. It dismays me deeply to see the Scriptures continually used with intolerance and even viciousness as a weapon in our ecclesial arguments. If there is any statement about Scripture’s role in our common life in this Covenant, it is imperative that such a statement not imply that Scripture may fairly be used as a weapon to judge and disenfranchise those believers who do not subscribe to Biblical reductionism or literalism.
# 5: we may have borne witness to some Christian truth in the Thirty-nine Articles, the 1662 prayer book, and other ordinals, but surely we dare not claim to have borne witness to fully sufficient or complete truth in those insightful but limited human documents. This effort to elevate a few important documents in our tradition to quasi-scriptural status is bizarre—even alarming—and should be staunchly resisted.
# 6: “our loyalty to this inheritance of faith”: no. We are loyal to Jesus Christ. It is absurd to imply that loyalty to a particular instantiation of Anglican polity or ecclesial practice should be our chief “inspiration and guidance” in proclaiming Christ. Where elements of our historical tradition are illuminating and foster transformation, of course we will draw on them in our proclamation of the Gospel, as we always have. But Christians do not and should not vow loyalty to the accidents of any denominational history.
3 Our Commitment to Confession of the Faith: This section is problematic. What are “biblically derived moral values”? Obviously that question cannot be resolved with a single neat answer—even a convinced Biblical literalist would have to engage in ridiculously reductive hermeneutics to come up with a single answer. I fully embrace the idea that Anglican believers should turn to Scripture as the authoritative and living Word of God; but the ways in which faithful believers “derive moral values” from Scripture have varied widely throughout Christian history and cannot be legislated. The suggestion that member churches have “received” a monolithic “vision of humanity” is strange and not supportable from Scripture, narrow readings of Genesis 1-3 and Romans 1 notwithstanding. There is no way to “ensure” that Biblical texts are handled in a particular way—would we send the Hermeneutics Police to watch over pulpits, Bible studies, and publications? And what does it mean to “pursue a common pilgrimage”? We already walk together as disciples of Jesus Christ, whether we agree on a particular exegetical, theological, ecclesial, or social issue or not. Does a “common pilgrimage” mean that the destination must be one and the same for every believer? or that we must all walk in the same manner hermeneutically or spiritually? or that there is only one path toward the destination? The metaphor simply does not work, and it has worrisome implications.
4 The Life We Share with Others: This whole section is lovely, with one crucial exception: the Church was never “undivided,” as any reputable scholar of early Christianity will affirm and as any alert reader of the Gospels and the Book of Acts can see. The familiar move of harking back to a romanticized early unity is an insidious way to create a fictional hegemonic rule out of the lively, multiform, and diverse origins of the Christian faith. The statements in this section about providence, shared mission, and ministry imperatives are all stirring, but they belong in sermons, in spiritual guides and meditations, and in addresses to the faithful. If this Covenant is to serve as a juridical tool to enforce orthodoxy, then these kinds of rhetorical gestures do not belong here and serve only to confuse the genre of the document.
5 Our Unity and Common Life: the simple descriptions of the Instruments of Unity do not belong in a Covenant and most assuredly should not be implicitly offered as non-negotiable features of Anglican identity. The Primates’ Meeting in particular, as has been noted by many, is a recent innovation. It may be a helpful feature of our life together (and, on occasion, it may be unhelpful), but there is no reason for it or any of the other tools of our polity to be named so prominently here as if they were on a par with Scripture and Eucharistic practice. And once again, the subtle implication that political consensus is the same as spiritual unity is a dangerous one that threatens to rob Anglicanism of its cherished and characteristic rich diversity.
6 Unity of the Communion: It is extremely problematic to concentrate power in the hands of the Primates’ Meeting. The failure of a significant number of primates to recognize the validity of women’s call to holy orders and the ongoing inability of some to affirm the importance of lay leadership indicates that these primates will not respect the polity of any province in which lay leadership and women’s clerical leadership are supported. The Primates’ Meeting is unrepresentative of the wider Church and, in its current incarnation, has shown itself to be willfully ignorant of the polity of the Episcopal Church, claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Any provision that gives the Primates’ Meeting a measure of juridical authority over the entire Anglican Communion or any part thereof should be rejected.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ will continue to be proclaimed, and loving ministry with the poor and oppressed will continue, through and beyond our current theological and political disagreements. Our unity is in Christ. Our diversity as Anglicans honors the particular contexts in which we minister and thereby honors the Incarnation of our Lord Himself. If a proposed Anglican Covenant could ensure that we remember to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbors as ourselves, I would support it. If a proposed Covenant could ensure that we continue to pray for one another, read Scripture together, and meet the Risen Christ in the Eucharist together, I would support it. But no ecclesiological document could ever guarantee that which should already be written on our hearts. This proposed Covenant will only increase the ways and means by which we try to silence each other and put constraints on the powerful work of the Holy Spirit.
Carolyn J. Sharp
Associate Professor of Hebrew Scriptures
Yale Divinity School
7 June 2007