Archival Documents
427 results for
ACI STATEMENT ON THE ANGLICAN CONSULTATIVE COUNCIL Yesterday’s session of the Anglican Consultative Council is an embarrassment to Anglicans everywhere. Members were given complex resolutions right before the vote without sufficient time to study them and understand their consequences. Resolutions that had been distributed earlier were replaced by resolutions drafted by a committee largely composed of members from provinces known to be opposed to the Ridley Cambridge Draft. Before a vote could even be taken on these resolutions, however, Archbishop Aspinall introduced a third resolution that...
“Would John Calvin Stay in the Episcopal Church?” John Jefferson Davis Professor of Systematic Theology & Christian Ethics Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary Readers of this article in the Episcopal Church may rightly ask, “Why should we care about what John Calvin would think about the current problems in the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican communion? He lived in the sixteenth century, and we live in the twenty-first; and he was a Presbyterian anyway, not an Anglican.” The reason why the question posed in the title is of interest to Episcopalians asking themselves, in the midst...
Date
LOSING THEIR NERVE: WHAT THE COURTS WOULD DISCOVER IF THEY EXAMINED TEC POLITY AFRESH Several years ago I was in a meeting at a large London law firm. We were working on a very complex matter, and this was one of a series of meetings that went on for several years. This particular one was quite large with 30 or so lawyers from several London and New York law firms. Representatives of Her Majesty’s Government were also there. During the morning, one of the junior partners of the host firm was asked to address a difficult legal question. He spoke for a considerable time, over an hour, without...
Date
HALLER DISCOVERS GAMBLING IN THE BACK ROOM; THINKS IT MUST BE LEGAL Tobias Haller disagrees with our recent analysis showing that General Convention lacks constitutional authority to authorize supplemental liturgical materials. [insert links to our piece and Haller’s] His response begins as follows: “Those who are ignorant of history...are doomed not to know what they are talking about. He thus starts his misadventure at legal reasoning with an obviously false (implied) premise: that we are unaware that General Convention has purported to “authorize” supplemental materials for a long time...
What will happen in TEC in the next five years? It will be necessary to implement the justice agenda for the GLBT bloc. “Marriage equality” will require a BCP with bona fide rites that are “equality” based and so identical to those now in existence for “traditional marriage.” This will come in phases: first, supplemental texts, and then BCP provision. But overtaking all of this will be media reports like the one regarding the National Cathedral that speak of “same sex marriage” right now. The decorations distinguishing “provisional rites” from “marriage rites” will be set aside in the area of...
A QUESTION FOR PROGRESSIVE EPISCOPALIANS THE REV. DR. PHILIP TURNER Chief among the claims now made by The Episcopal Church (TEC) is that it is an inclusive church that is open to a variety of opinions and practices. This self-definition is an updated version of the traditional claim that Anglicanism represents a via media between extremes of one sort or another—Catholic/Protestant, liberal/conservative, modern/traditional, etc. The simple fact is, however, that the policies and actions of the progressive leadership of The Episcopal Church have exposed the false nature of these claims, at...
Date
On supremacy: From “Is The Episcopal Church Hierarchical?”, pp. 11-13. So, how are we to interpret the silence in the TEC constitution regarding hierarchy? To begin, two points are paramount. First, it is a fundamental principle of many legal systems, including both United States constitutional law and Anglican canon law, that power is generally reserved to a local body if not explicitly granted to the central body. As summarized by the foremost expert on Anglican canon law, Norman Doe, in the context of provincial assemblies: “It is a general principle of Anglican canon law that, unless a...
Date
The Episcopal Church and the New Episcopal Church In 2013 an “Ecclesiology Committee of the House of Bishops” produced something they called “A Primer on the Government of the Episcopal Church and its underlying theology.” We have evaluated the document in detail at the Anglican Communion Institute website. 1 Recently the document appeared again, this time at a House of Bishops meeting in North Carolina. 2 What is the purpose of trying to secure a place for this understanding of TEC’s polity at this point in time? Leaving aside a possible pragmatic purpose (to aid in litigation), one thing...
Date
The Anglican Communion Institute has received the news, as is now customary (via the blogs), that the Episcopal Diocese of Texas has proposed a special plan for how it will accommodate same-sex blessings, should these be resolved as appropriate by the General Convention. The details of that plan are not the subject of this statement, and the plan itself can be read at a number of web-sites and links. (Equally, we are not concerned in this context with the status and character of General Convention resolutions in respect of diocesan reception and implementation or constitutionality). One of the...
DON ARMSTRONG ON TITUS 1:9 4/20/07 Don Armstrong Says: April 20th, 2007 at 4:03 pm Not that this is particularly relevant to this thread, but I do want to make clear a couple of matters concerning ACI. The confusion concerning ACI’s own funding by my parish is born out of an single action taken by a vestry trying to fight a full frontal attack by the Diocese of Colorado (that included my own inhibition and absence from the system) and people writing on blogs whose major source of information is bad newspaper reporting. The goal of the Diocese of Colorado has been and continues to be my own...
Date
