Bishop Duncan: "The disintegration means that a new consensus is on the way."

From Matt Kennedy at Stand Firm, a live-blog transcript of Bishop Duncan's address at the Mere Anglicanism conference this past week in Charleston, S.C.:

. . . These are signs, manifestations of Mere Anglicanism: Truly Catholic, truly Evangelical, and truly Pentecostal and truly reasonable.

Mere Anglicanism is truly evangelical, truly catholic, truly Pentecostal and is reasonable

What is Mere Anglicanism? This synthesis, this via media this construct, the students above are trying to structure their lives around it and they believe this construct is real but it is hard to see because what has been the construct is disintegrating

What I want to suggest about what has gone wrong is this: you all remember the Elizabethan settlement. We say that Mere Anglicanism and Mere Christianity are actually he flowering of that settlement.

And what has happened is that that consensus has disintegrated. The substance of the settlement, not the idea itself, has disintegrated. A new consensus has to emerge and we are a long way from that.

The systems that characterized the Elizabethan settlement, there were three:

1. Anglicanism was agreed to be under the Word. Are we there now? No. We use these words sometimes but they no longer have the same meaning. The settlement was that the church was to be under the Word.

2. The second thing that was true is that the Settlement: was under the prayerbook. We don’t have that anymore. There is nothing in terms of our prayer that is common. There is nothing that might lead us to believe that what we pray is really what we believe. We no longer pray the same things so we no longer believe the same things. The book has collapsed. The book was our magisterium. We did not have a Roman Magisterium. We had a book. It was our articulation of doctrine. It was the theological construct in which we prayed. But just like the word that we believed judged us rather that us it, the book has collapsed.

Third: the Settlement exchanged an international leader for a local leader (pope to king). All this took place under British systems. Theses systems were remarkable. Even after the collapse of the Empire everyone was still under the systems. Who calls the primates together? Who gives the mandate to the ACC and who appoints the General Secretary? The consensus that had existed that was the settlement and the settlement worked in a system.

The system has worked, the settlement has worked for 400 years, but the agreement that authority rests in the bible, in the prayerbook and the English church system…all of that is collapsing

What I am suggesting is that sustaining a Mere Anglicanism that is catholic, evangelical, pentecostal, and reason, is not working under the old settlement. . .

Read it all.