14/02/2012

No Anglican Covenant Coalition ~ new Patron


The Revd Dr Lesley Crawley, Moderator of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition, and Dr Lionel Deimel, the Coalition’s Episcopal Church Convenor, have announced the appointment of Professor Marilyn McCord Adams as a Patron of the Coalition.

Professor McCord Adams joins Bishops John Saxbee and Peter Selby, and Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch whose appointments were announced previously.

“Professor McCord Adams’s experience in both the Episcopal Church and the Church of England gives her a much broader understanding of the workings of the Anglican Communion,” said Deimel. “Coming on the heels of the decisive synod votes in Derby and Gloucester, it is an exciting time for the No Anglican Covenant Coalition.”

“The proposed Anglican Covenant was conceived in moral indignation and pursued with disciplinary intent,” according to Professor McCord Adams. “Its global gate-keeping mechanisms would put a damper on the gospel agenda, which conscientious Anglicans should find intolerable. The Covenant is based on an alien ecclesiology, which thoughtful Anglicans have every reason to reject.”

McCord Adams is Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. From 2004 to 2009, she was RegiusProfessor of Divinity at Oxford University and Residentiary Canon at Christ Church, Oxford.

She also served as a member of the Church of England General Synod at the time when the Anglican Covenant was being developed. She has written two books on the religious understanding of evil, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, and Christ and Horrors: the Coherence of Christology. Her most recent book, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.


3 comments:

  1. This is an exciting time for the 'No Anglican Covenant'.

    It's beginning to feel as if the Covenant is an idea that has had its day, especially if a majority of English synods vote against it ... surely after that it can't survive?

    If they were to push on with it after that, it would be the most divisive 'instrument of unity' ever!

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  2. I don't think 'they' will give up even if the majority of English dioceses do vote against - it won't be an overwhelming defeat.

    But they will will be deeply wounded and (from the Global South's perspective) any later endorsement of the Covenant by the English Church will be deeply suspect.

    So what would follow defeat of the Covenant?

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  3. Paul: I assume that you have asked a real and not rhetorical question?

    What would happen if by the grace of God the Covenant were to be defeated?

    Why, nothing would happen and that would be the best outcome, except that Rowan Williams' exit would be hastened.

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