BLOGGING-THOMAS

Dr. Wayne Whitson Floyd, a lay theologian, chairs
the Education and Formation Committee
at St. Thomas’ Parish, Dupont Circle, Washington, DC

One of the recommendations of the 2004 Windsor Report, written in response to reaction against the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, was that the Anglican Communion move towards the adoption of a so-called Anglican Covenant. Despite many gallant attempts to make Windsor into a statement of the beauty-of-unity that is the Anglican Communion, I remain unconvinced. As the old Southern saying goes: “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” I say this because I am convinced that such a document — however nuanced its wording — would in effect state the means by which official condemnation of the Episcopal Church’s full inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians at all levels of church life could be justified. It also would define the Episcopal Church’s action in consecrating Bishop Robinson as having removed TEC from the fellowship of the Anglican Communion. Dress it up however you want, but IMHO it’s still a pig.

To its credit, the response of the Episcopal Church up to now has been far from enthusiastic about such a Covenant — “it would be a bad idea that I do not support” Washington’s Bishop John Chane was overheard to say recently. Our bishops and Executive Council and General Convention deputies have agreed, however, to study the idea and make recommendations about the Covenant (the official study guide can be found here), which is in its second draft (the full text can be found here).

The Diocese of Washington’s Episcopal Cafe recently commissioned a series of articles on the Covenant, which give you an idea of how it is being approached officially by the Episcopal Church. And the General Theological Seminary’s Desmond Tutu Center, following its April 2008 conference on the proposed Covenant, has posted on its website more html, mp3, and pdf resources and responses to this than most Episcopalians will ever have the patience to absorb.

I realize I betray my own heterodox Episcopalianism — and poor Southern manners — by having lost already most of my patience to participate in what already is a several years long extended series of debates among our bishops, Executive Council members, General Convention deputies, seminary faculty and all manner of cogs in the complex machinery that is the Episcopal Church. This will continue past this summer’s Lambeth Conference, into the 2009 General Convention, and certainly beyond.

From the outset, I must say that I simply think the whole endeavor is a bad idea, but a bad idea whose time appears to have come.

It’s a bad idea for some fairly simple reasons:

• It is disingenuous (lacking in candor, giving a false appearance of simple frankness, calculating). Under the guise of a laudable quest for the unity of the Body of Christ, the Covenant not only is divisive, but actually would enable the disenfranchisement of gays and lesbians in the Anglican Communion, and all national churches — read: The Episcopal Church — who fully recognize gays and lesbians as full participants at all levels of the life of the Church.
• While the current draft explicitly states that “to covenant together is not intended to change the character of this Anglican expression of Christian faith,” in fact for Episcopalians it does propose a radical revisionism, making the so-called “bonds of affection” among the members of the worldwide Anglican Communion more important than the bonds of the radical hospitality of the love of Christ, particularly for the outcast, the downtrodden, the disenfranchised. The Covenant seems to forget: the measure of the kingdom is that “the last shall be first, and the first last.”  
• The genius of the “primacy of Scripture” for Anglicans as the first and irreplaceable source of authority for our understanding of God and all creation is being replaced by a creeping authoritarianism of “the Word of God” – interpreted as if the past 400 years of Biblical scholarship had not even taken place.
• The broad and open doors of the Anglican tradition are being replaced by a rigid and boundary-guarding traditionalism, whose purpose is not really passing on the “tradition,” anyway, if “traditio” means passing on the scandalous story of God’s extravagant forgiveness, unconditional love, and boundless hospitality, which we enjoy not because of our merits, but because of God’s gracious gift to us — not because of our deserving, but because of God’s unswerving faithfulness. God doesn’t let us in the door because we believe the right doctrine; we believe in God because we trust what God has done, which includes letting the likes of me in the door, and inviting me to the table without asking me first to try to be anyone other than the person God has created me to be.
• The ecclesiology, or theology of the church, that defines Anglicanism as a communion is based in our common baptism into the laos tou theou — the people of God, the laity, as my colleague John Booty at Sewanee decades ago never tired of reminding us all.  This now is in danger of being replaced by a new quasi-catholic clericalism. And while claiming that “Churches of the Anglican Communion are not bound together by a central legislative, executive or judicial authority,” the Covenant would authorize the bishops of the church, particularly the primates, to act as ultimate arbiters of biblical interpretation and theological belief.
• It is a cynical document, based largely on self-interest, guaranteeing the numerical majority of ultra-conservative primates the ability to demand doctrinal and behavioral conformity, and in the absence of that, to be authorized to pronounce non-conformists to be anathema, denounced and banned from full participation in the life of the Church, if not the communion of the Body of Christ.

This Anglican Covenant is just a bad idea. But if its time has come, then it is time for the Episcopal Church to stand up and say “No!”

God in Christ has called us not to less than this, but to more, to something harder than this, but something in the end more gracious and loving, more Christ-like. Christ did not die to exclude many, and include only those the church lets in, but to make a church out of all those who will hear Christ’s welcome as their own, and accept the hospitality of God’s invitation to eat at the table of everlasting life, side by side with all the other “tax collectors, publicans, and sinners”.

If this can no longer be believed within the Anglican Communion, then I agree with Archbishop Akinola: “There is no longer any hope, therefore, for a unified Communion.” I hope that to the contrary the time has come to put this Highly Conditional Covenant to rest, so that we may get back to living as if the Unconditional Love of Christ actually reigns among us.