What she said: Professor Marilyn McCord Adams on Primatial usurpation.

Yesterday morning I posted my thoughts on the introduction to the Draft Covenant. I was particularly concerned about the assumed power of the Primates. I said, "The Primates assume extraordinary power in this process and that assumption must be challenged now."

Yesterday afternoon there began to be reports of the speech given by the Rev. Canon Marilyn McCord Adams, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in London. It is an astounding critique of the current goings on in the Anglican Communion. I will post more on this remarkable document. I first got a copy by way of a friend, Nan Mein. Since then it has been posted in more user friendly form on Episocpal Cafe, the nifty new pages of the Daily Episcopalian. You can read it in its entirety HERE, on the new Episcopal Café pages.

Here is a quote from that speech, regarding the issue of Primatial power.

"While the political theory of TWR (The Windsor Report) has been convincingly critiqued from many angles in Gays and the Future of Anglicanism, our clear and present danger arises not so much from TWR itself as from what has come to be known as "the Windsor Process" that has been accelerating with alarming speed. TWR is written in a tone of presumptive legitimacy--as if TEC and New Westminster had violated already extant covenant obligations--and it goes on (like an American jury) to identify what sanctions should be imposed ('time-out', voluntary ex-communication from the decision making processes of the Anglican communion). But TWR has not yet been passed or covenanted to by any national church and so as yet has no de jure force. Rhetorically, this principle of presumptive legitimacy is also extended to church study documents such as Issues and Some Issues, and to Lambeth Resolutions--not least Lambeth 1.10, which is regularly forwarded as 'the teaching of the Church on human sexuality'. But these have no legal force either.

Somewhat unaccountably, the Primates' meeting at Dromantine endorsed TWR as 'a way forward', many seeing TWR as a basis for discussion rather than a conciliar pronouncement. But TEC's General Convention in June 2006 failed fully to meet the Windsor ultimata. Moreover, it elected the first woman presiding bishop, a woman who had authorized the blessing of same-sex couples in her own diocese. These actions of TEC, together with the (planned) appeal of 7-8 TEC dioceses for alternative primatial oversight, provoked the ABC's "Challenge and Hope" which identifies covenanting to Windsor polity as a necessary condition of being a full communicant member of the Anglican communion. National (now called 'local') churches who fail to give veto power over innovations in doctrine and practice to the 'instruments of union' {note: these are the "instruments of communion"} will become, not exactly Gentiles and tax collectors, but like the Methodists!

In advance (last summer), the covenant process was envisioned as something that might take a decade to complete. In the summer, some still held out hope that it might be a creative and constructive exercise in which both the content and the purpose of the covenant would be up for worldwide discussion at all levels of the church (primatial, episcopal, clerical, and lay). According to Kathryn Grieb (VTS professor and member of the covenant drafting committee), this vision was quickly exploded. In the event of the drafting, several of the liberal members of the carefully 'balanced' committee were unavoidably absent. The time-table was telescoped because the purpose was quickly identified as gate-keeping and ecclesial control. According to Grieb, the Tanzania Primates' meeting took the draft for the finished product and applied it to issue ultimata to TEC: its House of Bishops must enforce a moratorium on the ordination of coupled homosexuals to the episcopate and promise to end the blessing of same-sex couples by 30 September, or else!

In taking this authority to themselves, the Tanzania primates interpret TWR polity to mean, not that all four instruments of union (whose membership would include not only primates but all bishops, not only the episcopate but priests, deacons, and laity as well), but that the primates have authority to act alone to dictate policy and threaten sanctions on national ecclesial bodies."

There is more, lots more, in this very important speech. Read it.