Not sure our comments in the ether change anything at all but at least we get to discuss things ...anyway  - a covenant is before the AC with section 4.    Opposition to having a covenant failed as it merely affirms what most Anglicans think anyway.......    But revisionists should not be "misunderstimated" (as 'dubya' might say).  Now the revisionist priority is to make the covenant toothless e.g. by talking forever about it or  signing with no intention of keeping the letter or spirit of it, playing for more years and decades of delay ........ a strategy based on the same lack of principle that lies behind "don't ask, don't tell" stances ....which are not to the credit of any involved in that duplicity. 

The last 7 years show that some in the current AC leadership are quite happy to accept self-destructive delay, perhaps hoping for a "synthesis" of views, if the alternative is making a decision which might exclude the tiny group of revisionists who have been tearing the fabric of the Communion for years and decades......wouldn't be surprised to see a faux indaba about having  a committee to review the report from a commission.....  but, given the experience of the last 7 years, it is not likely that any common sense (and biblical!) position will come about e.g. asking people who disagree with the Communion on major issues, like the authority of scripture, to form their own and stop tearing apart the AC....too many working for a fudge, too many satisfied with that sugary confection even if the price of it is truth.....even though we have seen AC unity shattered in the last several years.   

Revisionists are very smart in AC politics -  despite being a tiny group, they know how to play the game (and use their cash for leverage) to maintain their position at the top table, while still tearing the fabric of the communion.....there is no two ways about it, they have succeeded in their aims since 2003.....Windsor made some recommendations about the councils of the Communion.....just look at those councils....turkeys don't vote for ..... anyway,  revisionists have "played a blinder" politically and are winning by still being in the game, still at the top table, still keeping everyone talking, still pursuing their revisionist agenda regardless.....success "an inch at a time"....neutralising the covenant is just the latest obstacle  -  the last 7 years should give them confidence.

Some years back I was one who, as an Anglican, blogged consistently against the Covenant, and many who were progressive argued that it could be bent into a progressive direction, and made a broad and useful Anglican document. If I have had any effect, it is that few now at the progressive end support signing the Covenant, and there is more conclusive energy against it as the shananigans have been observed around it, the latest being these supposed pastoral visitors to Canada who have again descended to the lowest of institutional levels. Anglicanism almost needs cleaning up, but it won't be cleaned up with this Covenant, only after it has failed and there is a kind of post-mortem of a disastrous policy of direction and centralisation. If sufficient Western Churches won't sign it it will fail and something important about Anglicanism will be rediscovered.

Not sure about the sand thing....anyway, Canada may prefer to stay in the AC and accept the covenant to do so  --  it is really tiny, like tiny TEC(usa) in % of population attending, and its bishops may need to feel that they are part of something big.  Given they have repeatedly gone against the mind of the Communion but faced few or no  consequences, there is little cost to staying in....lots of effort going on to make sure the covenant is toothless or so slow in operation that it could be even worse than toothless -  so revisionists are likely to be able to sign with no fear of consequences for tearing the fabric of the communion.   Because very few Canadians bother to turn up to hear revisionist musings on a Sunday, it might make sense  for revisionists there to sign the covenant and stay in the AC....just to be noticed somewhere and on the basis that some in the AC bureaucracy have successfully stalled any real attempts at discipline in the AC in the last nearly 7 years and are likely to continue to do so.

This, in a report, that is supposed to carry some weight, is more than just passing on a view of [some] Canadian bishops that they are not as in the USA:

“We sensed that in Canada there was a general consensus on the nature of orthodoxy, with fewer extreme views of the kind that have led to some of the aberrations south of the border,” the report said. “Even the bishops who were strongly progressive in the matter of same-sex blessings insisted that they stood firmly within the creedal mainstream.” This, the report said, is “an encouraging sign that it allows for a more obviously Christ-centred approach to issues that currently divide the Communion, to say nothing of the wider church.”

The second sentence, especially after only 'sensing',  is nothing more than inference of contrast with the US, and any proper report construction would have edited that otherwise.

I assume Peter you are referring to Mark Brunson and about him and his stance in life I have no idea.

Who knows what the next grain of sand does to the sandhill. Maybe nothing, maybe everything.

Why pluralist ....you, as a non-Anglican, feel free to give your views on various Anglican provinces and bishops without going to them first?   Thanks partly to the interweb, the whole AC world knows how TEC(usa) has walked apart  from the AC-   nobody needs to go there to see that.......   it is harder to say one thing and do another than it was 20 years ago  -   that is a good thing.....perhaps it is why even people like an ABC from the left is backing a covenant with sanctions (sect 4)

I followed a link and ended up on your site where I was somewhat surprised to see that you think your posting here might be doing something to hold off the Covenant.....  do you really think that?   

If you are going to make actual comments about the American Church perhaps such should follow visits to and interviews in that Church, rather than sweeping comments about the neighbouring Church in order to pat the head of the one you are at in order to further the Covenant process and try to prevent the loss of signatories.

The low level to which ecclesiastical politics sinks is amazing. Now we have two bishops directed by Rowan Williams to go to Canada and seek to tell them they are relatively OK in their same-sex blessings etc. because they don't have the extent of the theological extremities of the United States Episcopalians. No names, no evidence, not even an argument. This is known as divide and rule, to try to get the Canadians to sign on to the Covenant and act differently from their neighbours whilst seeking to bash The Episcopal Church yet again in the expectation that excluding it only will just about do the job.

The people who do this must think that people are stupid. The ex-bishop of Coventry is not engaging in some pastoral exercise to smooth the Anglican Communion but engaging in institutional politik, as in going to Canada to pronounce on the United States' Anglicans and promote the Covenant with its section 4.

Thanks Graham  - it is great to see you contending for the truth on TA but do you think you are persuading anyone with a revisionist view?   Or is the discussion doomed to failure unless you (or evangelicals in general) give up on the covenant respecting "the mind of the Communion"?  

Do you see the view of some there that signing the covenant is possible but with no intention of keeping the spirit or letter of it?  I suspect the "open" evangelical stance on the covenant (more patient and institutionalist than GAFCON - not a criticism, just a fact), will be used by those who want to play for time......having  failed to force change nearly 7 years ago now, some revisionists realise it's best to get back to playing the long game, "an inch at a time".  I hope "open" evangelicals will not help revisionists gain many more years in the coucils of the communion, disrupting the AC.

The first ideological and theological Unitarians in central Europe and in England and Wales read their Bibles in a literalistic fashion (German Biblical criticism came later) and they could not see the Doctrine of the Trinity. They very much affirmed that Jesus Christ was the Son, as indeed they believed in the miracles and the resurrection. What they did not believe was that the Son was co-equal and co-eternal with God. He was either God's first born of creation, who then proceeded with creation, or, and became more the case, they believed with Paul that Jesus was chosen by God to be the sole mediator of God and means to salvation.

As for later Unitarianism, that was affected by German biblical criticism, as indeed were all denominations, and also by an evolutionary view of liberalism rather than one tied particularly to a theological insight and, in Britain and America, the original merchant class that became a capitalist middle class and all that liberalism implied to them, including a French revolutionary spirit and a Scottish led Enlightenment. The later British Unitarians were rather more 'Anglican' than the earlier denominationalists, though the Americans coming from the Puritans were never quite 'Anglican' because of the division there - with the one exception of Kings Chapel in Boston which was (like Britain's Essex Church) an Anglican into Unitarian development.

So the answer is no, originally, they did not deny the Son because it is you who impose the doctrine of the Trinity on to the Bible whereas they were stricter literalists. Later on it was a case of Unitarianism more honestly dealing with and incorporating German Biblical criticism rather than stretching the meaning of the Trinity so that so many people mean by its use today (an example of God the Trinity being in God's own community) what others would have regarded as loose and heretical.