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.

GAFCON’s position is that sexuality touches core doctrines of creation, incarnation, and the moral law in ways that ministerial ordering does not. One can dispute this theological judgment. But to call it incoherent requires ignoring the entire Anglican tradition of theological triage. Thomas doesn’t refute GAFCON’s distinctions; he simply pretends they don’t exist.

Thomas repeatedly invokes “the church’s historic and magisterial tradition” as though this settles the matter. But whose tradition? Interpreted how? Adjudicated by whom?

Here’s where Thomas’s argument reveals its true colors. His appeal to natural law and magisterial tradition as co-equal authorities with Scripture sounds Anglican—until you remember that the English Reformers explicitly rejected precisely this formulation. Article VI doesn’t say Scripture is prima inter pares among authorities; it says Scripture “containeth all things necessary to salvation” and that nothing not found there or provable thereby may be required as doctrine. Article XX forbids the Church from ordaining “any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written.”

Thomas’s prima scriptura isn’t classical Anglicanism—it’s Anglo-Catholicism’s attempted rehabilitation of the dual-source theory of revelation that the Reformation rejected. No wonder he favorably cites Nazir-Ali’s swim across the Tiber. The logic is impeccable: if you genuinely believe ecclesiastical tradition possesses independent magisterial authority, Rome is the only honest destination for Western Christendom. At least they have a mechanism for adjudicating which traditions are binding.

Most tellingly, Thomas never specifies what alternative he’s proposing. “Reject Abuja’s affirmations,” he cries. And then what?

Submit to Canterbury’s authority—the same Canterbury that has spent decades systematically dismantling biblical teaching on sexuality, blessing what Scripture condemns, and disciplining those who maintain orthodoxy? Return to an “authority structure” that has proven itself utterly incapable of maintaining doctrinal integrity?

Thomas gestures vaguely toward “going back,” but back to what, precisely? The 1998 Lambeth Conference, whose clear affirmations on sexuality the Communion’s leadership spent the next quarter-century undermining? The Windsor Report’s failed attempts at managed decline? The Primates’ meetings that issued stern warnings Canterbury promptly ignored?

Orthodox Anglicans didn’t abandon the Canterbury-centered Communion on a whim. They have been forced out—or came to understand they were participating in an institution fundamentally committed to theological revisionism. Thomas’s essay reads like it was written in 2008, blissfully unaware of everything that’s happened since.

Thomas assumes confessional integrity requires absolute uniformity on all interpretive questions. By this standard, the Augsburg Confession was incoherent (it allowed diversity on ceremonies), the Westminster Standards were contradictory (they accommodated multiple church polities), and even Rome is hypocritical (Dominican and Jesuit theological schools disagree substantially within supposed magisterial unity).

The Elizabethan Settlement itself embodied comprehensive orthodoxy—maintaining doctrinal boundaries while permitting ceremonial and interpretive diversity. GAFCON’s approach mirrors this pattern: communion despite disagreement on women’s ordination, boundaries on sexual ethics. This isn’t contradiction; it’s classical Anglicanism.

Unless, of course, you believe classical Anglicanism is itself incoherent—in which case, why remain Anglican at all?

Thomas deploys Michael Nazir-Ali’s conversion like a trump card, as if the former bishop’s departure proves GAFCON’s incoherence. But this proves exactly the opposite of what Thomas intends.

Nazir-Ali left Anglicanism because he became convinced that legitimate ecclesial authority requires visible, juridical continuity centered in a magisterial office. Fair enough. Many thoughtful people reach this conclusion. But it’s a Roman Catholic conclusion, not an Anglican one. Nazir-Ali’s trajectory demonstrates that certain premises about authority and tradition lead inexorably to Rome—which is why the English Reformers rejected those premises.

If Thomas thinks Nazir-Ali’s logic is sound, he should follow him across the Tiber. But he can’t invoke Nazir-Ali’s departure as evidence of GAFCON’s failure while simultaneously claiming to articulate an Anglican position. The Reformers made a decisive choice: doctrinal faithfulness to Scripture over institutional continuity with a corrupted authority structure. GAFCON is simply making the same choice in different circumstances.

Here’s the actual contradiction: Thomas appeals to Anglican identity while advocating for an authority structure that Article VI, Article XX, and the entire trajectory of the English Reformation explicitly rejected.

He’s stuck. Submit to Canterbury, and you abandon orthodoxy. Embrace his magisterial-tradition theory, and you’re functionally Roman Catholic without the honesty of conversion. Demand absolute uniformity on all questions, and you’ve rendered classical Anglicanism impossible.

GAFCON’s “contradiction” amounts to this: they’ve made theological judgments about which hills are worth dying on. They’ve decided sexuality is a first-order issue, women’s ordination second-order. One can disagree with these judgments. But calling them incoherent requires either ignorance of the Anglican tradition of theological triage or a bad-faith refusal to engage with GAFCON’s actual reasoning.

Thomas writes as though GAFCON’s “wholesale dissolution of the Anglican Communion” were a bug rather than a feature. But the Communion was already dissolved—by Canterbury’s systematic abandonment of biblical authority, by the consecration of Gene Robinson, by the blessing of same-sex unions, by the discipline of orthodox bishops who maintained traditional teaching.

GAFCON didn’t dissolve the Communion. It created an alternative structure for those who refused to participate in heresy dressed as comprehensiveness. Thomas’s essay never grapples with this reality. Instead, it fantasizes about “going back” to an institutional unity that existed only because the orthodox hadn’t yet realized how thoroughly the game was rigged.

The “contradiction” Thomas identifies isn’t GAFCON’s problem—it’s his own. He wants Anglican identity without the Protestant commitments that made Anglicanism possible. He wants confessional boundaries without the hard work of deciding where to draw them. He wants the authority of tradition without specifying whose tradition or how it’s adjudicated.

GAFCON’s confessionalism may be imperfect. Its attempts to maintain communion across the women’s ordination divide may create tensions. But at least it’s attempting to navigate real questions in a real ecclesial situation—not retreating into abstract appeals to “tradition” that functionally mean submission to either a revisionist Canterbury or an honestly magisterial Rome.

For orthodox Anglicans who wish to remain both orthodox and Anglican, GAFCON’s “contradictions” look less like fatal flaws than like the necessary untidiness of maintaining biblical faithfulness within the Anglican tradition. Thomas offers no alternative except nostalgia for an authority structure that failed and implicit capitulation to authorities that explicitly reject biblical teaching.

That’s not a contradiction worth solving. That’s a clarity worth defending.