The immediate result of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) held last week in Jerusalem is the formation of a ‘ginger’ group calling itself the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FOCA). FOCA, we are told, is no more and no less than a ‘movement.’ They are adamant that FOCA is not a church within a church, yet they have drawn up their own doctrinal statement called The Jerusalem Declaration.
Evidently, FOCA intends to judge who can be in fellowship with them on this basis. This is not the way of the Anglican Communion, and many Anglicans will find all this bewildering.
First of all, confessional language is uncharacteristic of classical Anglicanism. We have never been a confessing church, in the sense of being bound to any particular confession of faith. Anglicans claim to live and proclaim only the one catholic and apostolic faith. Of course this stance is deeply evangelical, arising directly from the good news of the gospel.
We Anglicans adhere to the Old and New Testaments as the fundamental rule of faith, together with the catholic creeds, the sacraments of baptism and eucharist, and the historic episcopate. The slogan lex orandi, lex credendi - as we pray so we believe - explains the honoured place The Book of Common Prayer enjoys in our formularies. Traditionally and literally, orthodoxy means ‘right praise.’
Secondly, FOCA claims to represent true Anglicanism, ‘solemnly declaring the following tenets of orthodoxy which underpin our Anglican identity’, but the Jerusalem Declaration is a strangely inadequate attempt at orthodox Christian teaching.
Astonishingly, the place of marriage appears to rank as more important than Christian mission in the world, while the Elizabethan 39 Articles of Religion seem to be raised to the same status as scripture and the creeds. To say the least, such eccentricity is hardly recognisable as traditionally Christian let alone Anglican.
I have mentioned just a few examples of many disturbing innovations found in the Jerusalem Declaration. What concerns me more, however, is the virtual absence of Trinitarian language. God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit appear here and there, but there is no real emphasis anywhere on the uniquely Christian revelation that God is love.
The eternal exchange of love between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the ultimate communion or fellowship into which all humankind is drawn barely rates a mention.
There is no sense here that Jesus became what we are so that we might become what he is, no indication of the real purpose of Christmas and Easter, scripture and sacrament, ministry and mission – namely that human beings may share the life of the Triune God.
The declared aim of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FOCA)is protecting people from false teaching, but this patchy document is sectarian rather than orthodox, and offers no way forward.
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