The Colenso Affair and the Anglican Covenant
We are once again indebted to Dr Alyson Barnett-Cowan for damning the Anglican Covenant
with faint praise, in her Living Church article. Dr Barnett-Cowan begins by tracing
the idea of a covenant to the opponents of Bishop Colenso who sought to condemn him
at the first Lambeth Conference of 1867. This, she tells us, was ‘the first attempt
to provide a platform for churches of the Anglican Communion to discern together
what to do in new situations’.
This is the kind of gloss now being put on the Anglican Covenant by its supporters.
In reality Colenso’s opponents were not trying ‘to provide a platform for churches
to discern together what to do’: on the contrary they were trying to impose their
view on the whole Communion. In exactly the same way, recent proponents of the Anglican
Covenant have wanted gay bishops declared unacceptable throughout the Communion.
While the specific reference to same-sex partnerships is being backpedalled for the
moment – Covenant supporters are playing it down while the provinces are being asked
for their support – there is no doubt that many intend to use it, not just to forbid
gay bishops but on other issues too.
By reminding us of the Colenso affair Dr Barnett-Cowan also draws our attention to
the 1867 Lambeth Conference’s good sense. At the heart of the debate was Colenso’s
controversial theory that the biblical narrative of the Exodus was not historically
accurate. Many bishops were appalled. No reputable biblical scholar today is; on
the contrary, Colenso has been proved broadly right. If the Lambeth Conference had
supported the condemnation, the whole Anglican Communion would have been stuck with
a commitment to an outdated biblical literalism.
The Anglican Covenant, once passed, would provide a process for present and future
litigious authoritarians to impose their view on their pet hobbyhorse onto the whole
Communion. One can only hope that the leaders of Anglicanism today find the courage
to follow the wise lead of their 1867 predecessors.
