By George Conger, Anglican Ink. (Editor’s note: I recommend this essay for its clarity and grasp of the issues)
Jay Thomas’s recent First Things essay “Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction” purports to expose fatal logical flaws in GAFCON’s Jerusalem Declaration. In reality, it reveals something far more interesting: how easily appeals to “Anglican tradition” can mask fundamentally un-Anglican premises. Thomas’s argument doesn’t just fail—it fails instructively, demonstrating precisely why orthodox Anglicans found GAFCON necessary in the first place.
Thomas’s thesis is straightforward: GAFCON stands guilty of rank hypocrisy. The movement condemns the Canterbury-centered communion for treating sexuality disagreements as legitimate “good disagreement” while simultaneously treating women’s ordination as a tolerable “secondary issue”. This, Thomas insists, exposes GAFCON’s fundamental incoherence — an “overthrow” of traditional Anglican authority in favor of “corporate evangelical polity based in Protestant confessionalism”.
The smoking gun? Michael Nazir-Ali’s departure for Rome, which Thomas wields like a prosecutorial exhibit. If even GAFCON’s former champion couldn’t stomach its contradictions, the argument goes, perhaps the whole project is bankrupt. Thomas’s prescription: reject the Abuja Affirmation, embrace the authority of “the church’s historic and magisterial tradition,” and return to an Anglican prima scriptura that balances Scripture with natural law and ecclesiastical tradition. It sounds compelling. It’s also nonsense.
Thomas’s entire argument rests on a sleight of hand: treating all theological disagreements as fungible. Women’s ordination, human sexuality, the filioque, baptismal regeneration, episcopacy—all just data points on an undifferentiated spectrum of “disputes.” Agree to disagree on one, you must agree to disagree on all. Draw a line anywhere, and you’re arbitrary.
This won’t do and is not a sophisticated analysis of the issues.
Classical Anglicanism has always recognized hierarchies of doctrine. The Thirty-Nine Articles themselves distinguish between matters “necessary to salvation” and things indifferent (adiaphora). The Caroline Divines debated vigorously which questions fell into which category, but none—not Hooker, not Andrewes, not even Laud—imagined that uniformity on all questions was either possible or necessary.
Jay Thomas’ essay here