From "First Things": A Consideration of the 'Anglican Reset'

Hans Boersma, Gerald McDermott, and Greg Peters collectively ask: "Is the Anglican "Reset" Truly Anglican?" in First Things, posted on June 9 of this year:

The Kigali Commitment of April 21, 2023, was a shot heard around the world. Thirteen hundred Anglican leaders, dominated by bishops and clergy from the Global South, gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, to declare that they no longer recognized the Archbishop of Canterbury as their leader. Representing 85 percent of the Anglican Communion, they pronounced their determination to “reset the Communion on its biblical foundations.”  

The boldness of this statement is striking. Not only does it signal the end of English domination of the Communion, but it also demonstrates counter-cultural courage. The leaders of the Global Anglican Fellowship Conference (GAFCON) and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) have defied Global North elite opinion and financial coercion by denouncing the Church of England’s February 2023 decision to bless same-sex couples. . .

The question they ask, while commending the one thousand, three hundred leaders for taking a stand, is if they've taken their stand on the right foundation:

The Kigali Commitment repeatedly appeals to the authority of the Bible alone and fails to mention either the authority of the Church or the role of tradition, describing the Bible as “the rule of our lives” and the “final authority in the church” without mentioning that Scripture functions within the context of tradition—in particular, the common liturgy of the Church and the Book of Common Prayer—and the Church’s teaching authority.

They cite Bishop John Jewell (1552-1571), Richard Hooker (1554-1600), and Bishop Francis White (1564-1638), and more recently, the 2002 statement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together to demonstrate that Anglicans and even some Evangelicals have acknowledged "there is no such thing as Scripture without tradition, that every person reads Scripture through the lens of some tradition or other, whether he realizes it or not", attributing that sentiment to Hooker. This is in contrast to the Kigali Commitment's reliance on the "clarity" of the Biblical text as Boersma, McDermott, and Peters see it.

That reminded me that Catholic World Report recently featured an interview with Casey Chalk about his new book  The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (Emmaus Road, 2023). Chalk also refers to this hermeneutic of interpretation as "perspicuity", citing the Westminster Confession of Faith, paragraph 7:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.

Chalk's comment:

The above statement requires a little bit of unpacking. The Westminster divines are not saying that all of Scripture is equally clear, but that enough of it is that both learned and unlearned Christians, relying on the Holy Spirit in prayer and leveraging things like biblical preaching or good commentaries, that they should be able to understand what is necessary for salvation.

So, anytime you talk to a Protestant and he or she says something like “the Bible clearly teaches X,” they are making recourse to the doctrine of clarity. Of course, a lot of times that person may be going well beyond what the Westminster divines had in mind, given their narrow understanding of perspicuity. But the basic premise is that Scripture is clear enough on what’s necessary for salvation, or the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, that any well-meaning Christian should be able to read his or her Bible and find precisely that.

Be that as it may, when I read the text of the Kigali Commitment, I did note that the signers of this document did appeal to Anglican tradition and the teaching authority of the Church of England, specifically to the Lambeth Conference of 1998:

Public statements by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other leaders of the Church of England in support of same-sex blessings are a betrayal of their ordination and consecration vows to banish error and to uphold and defend the truth taught in Scripture.

These statements are also a repudiation of Resolution I.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, which declared that ‘homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture,’ and advised against the legitimising or blessing of same sex unions’. 

This occurred despite the Archbishop of Canterbury having affirmed that ‘the validity of the resolution passed at the Lambeth Conference 1998, I.10 is not in doubt and that whole resolution is still in existence’. (page 2)

I thought of what Saint John Henry Newman might say about this putative schism in the Anglican Communion. Or rather, what he did say to those in "the Religious Movement of 1833" who had remained in the Church of England as he referred to them in his lectures on Anglican Difficulties.

In the first lecture "On the Relation of the National Church to the Nation" he warned them:

I have said all this, my brethren, not in declamation, but to bring out clearly to you, why I cannot feel interest of any kind in the National Church, nor put any trust in it at all from its past history, as if it were, in however narrow a sense, a guardian of orthodoxy. It is as little bound by what it said or did formerly, as this morning's newspaper by its former numbers, except as it is bound by the Law; and while it is upheld by the Law, it will not be weakened by the subtraction of individuals, nor fortified by their continuance. Its life is an Act of Parliament. It will not be able to resist the Arian, Sabellian, or Unitarian heresies now, because Bull or Waterland resisted them a century or two before; nor on the other hand would it be unable to resist them, though its more orthodox theologians were presently to leave it. It will be able to resist them while the State gives the word; it would be unable, when the State forbids it. Elizabeth boasted that she "tuned her pulpits;" Charles forbade discussions on predestination; George on the Holy Trinity; Victoria allows differences on Holy Baptism. While the nation wishes an Establishment, it will remain, whatever individuals are for it or against it; and that which determines its existence will determine its voice. Of course {9} the presence or departure of individuals will be one out of various disturbing causes, which may delay or accelerate by a certain number of years a change in its teaching: but, after all, the change itself depends on events broader and deeper than these; it depends on changes in the nation. As the nation changes its political, so may it change its religious views; the causes which carried the Reform Bill and Free Trade may make short work with orthodoxy.

We'll have to wait and see how the Archbishop of Canterbury, et al, respond to the Kigali Commitment, but Newman predicted the direction the Church of England would go: following the Nation, the Parliament, and the zeitgeist of the age.