Primates Meeting: Get Ready for More Indabas! UPDATED

News from the Primates Meeting so far isn’t exactly encouraging.

For one thing, those of you who were hoping that a Covenant would help resolve the Anglican Communion’s issues, I hate to break this to you. But it looks like you are being played for suckers. For it now appears even less likely that the Covenant will have any teeth.

There has been a “pulling back from the language of sanctions and teeth” in the crafting of the Anglican Covenant, the Primate of Australia told reporters at the Primates' Meeting in Alexandria on Feb 2.

The Most Rev. Philip Aspinall said that whereas earlier drafts of the covenant envisioned sanctions for violations, disciplinary mechanisms were not likely to make it into the final draft.

“Hitting people over the head with sticks” was not what the Anglican Communion wanted to do to provinces that violated the Covenant, Archbishop Aspinall said. Instead, the covenant—designed to set the parameters of Anglican life and worship—is evolving into a document about “koinonia…fellowship…of communion” between churches, and would not be a sanctions-based legal code, he explained.

In other words, when heretics give the finger to the faith and to the orthodox majority (for now) of the Anglican Communion, the solution will be . . . MORE INDABAS! YEAAAA!


UPDATE: Was Aspinall’s analysis wishful thinking on his part? Ephraim Radner thinks so and has taken him to task on it.