Anorak Aspects around the Covenant

All this Covenant talk and here we have some deep background debate regarding historical issues. As the General Synod debate approached, I gave up my self-exclusion from Fulcrum to respond to some points being made there. Issues arose regarding the Modern Church and Inclusive Church advert but particularly the treatment of Richard Hooker as a founder of Anglican plurality with a particular mention at Ekklesia and not forgetting the collection of resources at No Anglican Covenant and its original Hooker referring launch. I have no expertise (or even approaching) regarding Richard Hooker, but I do have some insight into English Presbyterian and Unitarian history, including Puritan origins, and also relationships between the Unitarians and the Anglican 'left' in the nineteenth century. Excuse the fact that these contributions of mine are written at incredible high speed and don't always read as sensibly as I thought they were being written as I wrote them.

There were assumptions about Puritans in the liberal approach that were not quite accurate, partly because in the United States there seems to be a clear historical opposition between Episcopalian and Puritan backgrounds and, of course, the Great Ejection of Puritans in England in 1662 (some of whom followed others to America). However, the essay material from Benjamin Guyer starting with the Puritans and moving on to Hooker makes the claim that the Anglican Covenant is loyal to a more unified past, the longer period of Anglican history. This I challenge, because the Church of England was never as unified as Guyer is claiming, whether the minorities were detested or not, and in any case there is little point in a Covenant ignoring the reality that developed so strongly from the nineteenth century on.

Plus here is a demonstration by a Covenant supporter that an aim of implementation is greater theological uniformity, whereas I would wish to point out that unity does not require uniformity. It just shows how the Anglican Communion Covenant is understood by some of its supporters and is hardly the same as in the content of the Archbishops Presidential speech to the General Synod.