Greg Jones has posted the third in his series of “Anglican Centrist” essays. In this one he’s sharing some of his thoughts on what the proposed Anglican Covenant.

“The Windsor Report suggested that the Anglican Communion is missing a key organ of unity — a definitively cohesive something that will authoritatively bind us one to another as a household. The Windsor Report suggested such a new organ of unity be a kind of an Anglican Covenant. Since this idea was put forth, there have sprung up a chorus of critics and proponents of the ‘Anglican Covenant.’

It has been decried as a return to ‘papacy’ by Western Anglicans who seem to prefer provincial ecclesiastical liberty more than even national sovereignty. (Honestly, it seems the very same types of North American liberals who favor world-courts, a powerful United Nations, and the like are patently opposed to the same types of dynamics in Anglicanism.)

It has been hailed as the long-awaited binding confessional statement of evangelical Anglicans. (Honestly, the classical evangelical teaching of ‘communion’ has to do not with sacramental unity but with ideational/confessional unity.)

But, despite all the blessing and cursing of the proposed Anglican Covenant — the fact remains — nobody has any idea what the ‘Anglican Covenant’ will look like. Not even the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

Interestingly, he points out that the Covenant is solving a different problem than most seem to be imagining. He sees it speaking to a lack of eclesiological vision in the Anglican Communion rather than speaking to the issues of human sexuality.

(Which is again the same point made by Archbishop of York in his conversation with Andrew Gerns.)

Read the rest here: Anglican Centrist 3