McCall, Mark Response to Mullin Summary

 ACI’S POSITION ON TEC POLITY

• TEC is organized legally as a voluntary association. This is a recognized legal structure that TEC’s founders chose by explicitly using this precise legal terminology.
• The original members of this association were the independent state churches that joined together to form TEC. Additional members have since been added as new dioceses formed themselves and were then admitted to the association. TEC’s constitution is very precise that the formation of new dioceses “originates” in the unorganized area, which “duly constitutes” itself before being admitted to union with the other member dioceses in General Convention. New dioceses are not formed as in other hierarchical churches by an act of a central body “establishing” or originating the new diocese and specifying its governing instruments.
• TEC’s governing instrument, its Constitution, contains no provision giving any central body hierarchical authority over its member dioceses. Instead, the Constitution specifies that diocesan bodies or offices are “the Ecclesiastical Authority” in the diocese.
• This structure of a dispersed hierarchy among the member dioceses was the intentional choice of TEC’s founders, who had before them models of organization specifying central hierarchies that they decisively altered to remove such authority from any central body they created. This continued to reflect the distinct independent nature of the churches that existed prior to the creation of TEC.

This analysis is the traditional understanding of the polity of the church. Given the revisionist reinterpretation of this polity in recent years, ACI has articulated again the traditional polity in a number of papers published over the last two years, including my own paper “Is The Episcopal Church Hierarchical?” published in September 2008.[i] This analysis was subsequently developed further by fifteen bishops of the church joined by three noted theologians from ACI.[ii]

Mullin’s response came a year later and must be considered the best effort to defend the view that TEC has a hierarchy that begins with the General Convention, The Executive Council

TEC’s Presiding Bishop has also submitted this paper to the General Synod of the Church of England.  It has, in short, been put forward to the Anglican Communion as an accurate account of TEC’s polity

Here follows the main points of Prof. Mullin’s argument along with a refutation of his argument that will show that the argument is riddled with historical inaccuracies and profound misunderstandings of legal concepts and failures of legal logic. Indeed, it contains so many errors of basic fact and such a failure to comprehend legal concepts that it undermines the legal case it attempts to support.

To take only a few examples:

• The theory of TEC’s formation elaborated by Dr. Mullin—that it was not the union of pre-existing independent state churches but the “revival” of a pre-existing “national” church—was explicitly rejected by the founders at the time and has been rejected by almost every historian since, including the one on whom Dr. Mullin primarily relies.
• Dr. Mullin’s claim that “There was no language of the Episcopal Church of a given state” only of the Episcopal church in a state is refuted by obvious examples too numerous to cite in full.
• Dr. Mullin’s claim that “the summoning language referred to the Episcopal ‘Church’ in each state, rather than separate ‘Churches’ in the states” is also plainly false, that very term being used, among other places, in passages Dr. Mullin himself quotes selectively, omitting this term.
• Dr. Mullin’s claim that in the 1780s “one sees no discussion of dioceses, which was a different concept and not present in early America” is refuted by the fact that the very first canons in 1789 use the term “diocese” repeatedly, including a canon quoted later by Dr. Mullin himself.
• Dr. Mullin’s argument that “As early as August of 1789, the General Convention asserted the right to legislate, not from constitutional mandate, but out of its very nature representing the wider Church. At that meeting, the General Convention adopted a series of canons, even though the Constitution had not yet been finally ratified!” is factually misleading in the extreme and his interpretation was repudiated at the time by those present who reenacted the canons after the Constitution was formally ratified