A Covenant with Death

The Saint Andrews Draft Covenant (SAD) represents a marked improvement over the earlier effort. Many of the concerns that I had expressed in earlier commentary have been addressed, and a number of the troublesome details have been eliminated. The few that remain are hardly worth noting because, unfortunately, the main problem still persists, like a stubborn stain that will not give in to the most rigorous scrubbing.

The details never were the primary concern. Rather it was, and is, the as yet unanswered (or at least not clearly answered) questions: What is this covenant for? That is, what goal is it intended to achieve that we have not already reached, or cannot achieve by less formal means? How does this covenant advance or improve on our present capacity for mission and ministry?

The whole covenant process to date — apart from the efforts to frame a covenant based on cooperative missionary and ministerial efforts — has inherited a fatal flaw from its genesis in the Windsor Process: the idea that a mechanism can be developed by which people will always get along, and by means of which the disagreeable or the difficult can be excluded either temporarily or permanently from participation. One need look no further than the current fracas over Lambeth invitations to see how hopeless it is to develop such an agreement with the present cast of characters. There are some who are already well advanced on the road to "walking apart" from the rest of us; however much they employ the relativistic language by which it is not they who are moving but everyone else.

A covenant such as this SAD one will not solve our problems — it will express them: and it will be a tautology at best, since only the agreeable will agree to it. But if people are already absenting themselves from the Lambeth Conference — attendance at which is purely voluntary once the invitation has been extended, and the criteria for invitation to which are minimal (only a very few not having been invited) --- if they do this when the wood is green what will they do when it is dry? You can not make people be agreeable.

It still seems to me that very few people are actually sanguine about the development of such a covenant at all. Most people, again it seems to me, without having done exhaustive research, are more or less happy with the status quo and laissez-faire of the present Anglican Communion. Perhaps this and only this question should be put before Lambeth (not that I want to accord it particular authority, but just to test the waters): Do we need a written covenant? Yes or no. I do not sense at this point that the motion would carry in the affirmative.

So while I continue to support the idea of continued conversation around a covenant of sorts, it needs to be of a very different sort: a covenant affirming the common mission and ministry of the Church, our common membership with one another in the communion of the Body of Christ, a communion which is irrevocable, and from which no one shall or can be excluded other than by their own deliberate action. This is a covenant based upon the notion of grace which is a gift of God which one can refuse to accept (and so alienate oneself) but from which no power on earth can expel. What God has joined together, let no one put asunder.

We are already married, friends. It is too late to think about concocting a pre-nuptial agreement. We are stuck with each other: for life, for better for worse. Let us not allow the death which comes by reliance on the Law (a new Law or an old one) to overtake us. Let us deal with our difficulties under that rubric: Live + Jesus.

Tobias Haller BSG