There's a Worthwhile Essay by Prof Tighe

on Ms Gyapong's blog. It confirms the conclusion I've slowly been coming to myself: the Anglican "statement of belief" is normally taken to be whatever Book of Common Prayer is accepted in a particular jurisdiction. For those who do not accept the US 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which does not include the Thirty-Nine Articles in its main body, then they simply do accept the Thirty-Nine Articles, apparently without much thought: "the Articles are perfectly useless as a Confession of Faith for contemporary Anglicans".

Prof Tighe's essay does not, and was not intended to, address the issue that's closer at hand to my own concerns, which is the increasingly obscure implications of the Portsmouth Letter and what appear to me to be the muddled motivations of those who drafted it and those who signed it. The basic problem is that Anglicans don't necessarily believe a whole lot that can be pinned down, and Prof Tighe understands that this is a feature as much as it's a bug. What we have with the Portsmouth Letter is a splinter group of putative Anglicans, representing one particularly flaky wing of the whole movement, signing on to a statement of faith derived from a very different Christian tradition. Neither the drafters nor the signers appear to have given the implications of this much thought, although the Vatican's response appears to have been shrewd at the very least.

I suspect there were several different subtexts among the various signers, and it's significant that only a minority have so far availed themselves of the opportunity the Vatican provided to them. Archbishop Hepworth, for instance, a key drafter of the Letter, has not yet re-converted to Catholicism as a layman as far as I'm aware. Shouldn't this raise some questions about his own sincerity? Others who signed were no doubt being "good Anglicans" in the sense that they were bowing to perceived political pressure, and once that pressure seemed less powerful, they promptly unbowed to it. Archbishop Falk seems to have shifted positions with every change in the breeze.

My conclusion from my own observation, supported by opinions like Prof Tighe's essay, is that "continuing Anglicans" are little different from those of the discontinuing persuasion, and on the whole the US Episcopal Church has actually behaved with greater consistency than the ACA or the TAC. I find Bishop Bruno far more appealing a figure than Bishop Strawn, and indeed, Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori no more unpleasant than Presiding Bishop Marsh. Neither is an intellectual giant, though on balance I'd say Jefferts Schori behaves with marginally more integrity.