Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction

The Abuja Affirmation marks the end of an era. The third largest Christian communion, Anglicanism (behind only Catholicism and Orthodoxy), has splintered. While its demise has been a drawn-out affair, the church has reached an inflection point. A crisis of authority has existed for over fifty years, a crisis that conservative Anglicans had long sought to resolve by returning Anglicanism to its scriptural roots. At a meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, this March, bishops from around the communion declared that the crisis had been resolved; the authority of the Scriptures had been restored. Their announcement was triumphant. But it contradicted reality.

Bishops of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) gathered in Abuja from March 3–6 ostensibly to  replace the hegemonic and symbolic power of the archbishop of Canterbury by electing a new primus inter pares (first among equals) for the (newly branded) Global Anglican Communion. However, instead of reorganizing the traditional authority structure within Anglicanism, they overthrew it, setting up their own institution with a corporate evangelical polity based in Protestant confessionalism. While GAFCON denies that it has split the Anglican Communion, for all intents and purposes there are now two communions: one institutional, centered around the See of Canterbury; the other confessional, centered around the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008. 

The ecclesial conflicts within the historic Anglican Communion are well known; but what about the new Global Anglican Communion? Its Abuja Affirmation stridently forms a new communion nested within the old while rejecting the ecclesial authority of apostate provinces or dioceses. And yet, the true cost of this new communion is not so much the schism it portends as the contradiction at its root. 

In the affirmation, the bishops state: “The Canterbury Instruments have compromised the authority of the Scriptures by normalizing hermeneutical pluralism, elevating cultural capitulation, and reframing the rejection of Scripture’s authority and clarity as ‘good disagreement,’ and not what it really is—false teaching.” The irony of this statement is striking. GAFCON treats any compromise on the “plain and canonical” teaching against homosexuality as the epitome of false teaching, yet it tolerates significant hermeneutical disagreement within its own ranks—most notably on the ordination of women and their teaching authority within the Church.

In discussing his departure from Anglicanism to Catholicism, the former GAFCON-allied bishop Michael Nazir-Ali once said, “Anglicans have always claimed that they do not believe anything that the Church of the early councils did not believe . . . [yet] we cannot make claims to continuity with the patristic Church, then adopt a laissez-faire attitude to innovation that proceeds without regard to first principles.” The Jerusalem Declaration, theoretically, shores up these first principles. Yet, Nazir-Ali’s prognosis probes deeper to the level of authority. Although he mentions homosexuality as the issue that ultimately tore the fabric of the Anglican Communion, Nazir-Ali notes that the root of all conflicts in the communion revolve around Scripture and authority. Who in Anglicanism has the authority to resolve disputes over the interpretation of Scripture? More pointedly, who in GAFCON has this authority?

The Abuja Affirmation goes on to attack former archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby for affirming “both a ‘traditional teaching’ and a ‘different teaching’” on human sexuality. Welby noted that those who adhere to the latter are “not careless about Scripture. They do not reject Christ. But they have come to a different view . . . after long prayer, deep study and reflection on understandings of human nature.” The affirmation then notes that this type of approach is “unambiguously contrary to Anglican doctrine as it has been received.” Besides being unambiguously contrary to Anglican doctrine, this is also unambiguously the exact same position GAFCON takes with regard to the ordination of women. While there is a traditional teaching that is “respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading” on whether women can be ordained, there is also a different teaching held by “serious” biblical scholars who also happen to support GAFCON and come from large influential provinces within the Anglican Communion. 

The Jerusalem Declaration states that “the Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.” But the general secretary of the newly formed Global Anglican Council states that the ordination of women (or lack thereof) is “a secondary issue” that Anglicans can agree to disagree on. GAFCON claims that it has reordered the Global Anglican Communion around a confessional identity, and yet on the second article of its confession—the plain and canonical authority of Scripture—it refuses to hold the line. 

It is true that the Anglican Communion has existed in a state of impaired communion over the issue of women’s ordination for almost half a century. Abuja enshrines this compromised contradiction while explicitly rejecting other compromises, all for the sake of a common confession. The fruit of this contradiction is the rejection of the teaching authority of the church’s historic and magisterial tradition, which Gerry McDermott articulates as the sola scriptura of liberal Protestantism, as distinct from the traditional Anglican and Hookerian approach of prima scriptura, which grants the Scriptures primacy while insisting that their authoritative interpreters are natural law and ecclesiastical tradition (as opposed to the magisterium of private interpretation that is rife in Anglicanism). By enshrining this liberal Protestant contradiction, GAFCON has doubled down on the ecclesiological issues of authority that led Nazir-Ali to join the Catholic Church, deepening rather than alleviating the compulsion of many faithful Anglicans to follow. 

Abuja is a pivotal marker in a new Anglican reformation. And yet, the English Reformation took over one hundred years to settle. If the Global Anglican Communion truly intends to be “the historic Anglican Communion reordered from within” and “a return to this historic sense of the Anglican Communion,” then she must actually return; she must go back. The only path that does not lead to the wholesale dissolution of the Anglican Communion must lie in a rejection of Abuja’s affirmations and the contradictions they enshrine.