Aren't you trying to mount a general defence of Anglicanism in this thread Keble?
No.
The ongoing problem here seems to be a chase for an Orthodox standard that is uniquely Orthodox. What keeps happening is that principles are stated that are also held to outside of Orthodoxy.
The consensus problem is one of these. Consensus is in fact an ordinary secular standard. And what one sees in modern Christendom is that this is not happening, because issues of small-o orthodox belief have been married to polity, and therefore one sees a lot of sectarian divisions. Orthodoxy itself participates in this sectarianism by dividing itself from the other churches, and often enough they return the favor.
(Let me hasten to add that by "Orthodoxy" here I mean the picure of Orthodoxy being presented in this thread. I recognize that Orthodoxy is of the Church, and I don't mean to imply otherwise. To even
have this discussion I'm going to have to criticize some positions which I understand to be more fully Orthodox than just the private expressions of Orthodoxy of which this disucssion largely consists. If the moderators find this too objectionable I'll just have to abandon the discussion.)
One can interpret Christian history in terms of the development of these divisions. Gnosticism failed, and Arianism failed (and its reinvention by the JWs is set against a widespread consensus about how bogus their scholarship is). After that problems arise. Oriental orthodoxy continues in spite of Chalcedon; the Augustinian West continues in the face of the Othodox East. There is a hollowness to a consensus that is acheived through deliberately creating these schisms, and Orthodoxy most certainly has taken that route. Indeed, there comes a point where the unOrthodox are going to tend to view the Orthodox "consensus" as a private interpretation, because of the tendency to simply ignore Western input (and indeed, as I find myself doing here, complaining because Orthodox authors can't get Western positions right).
Anglicanism makes a (basically unsuccessful) attempt at faking a consensus by trying to interact with non-Anglican positions. It's fake, of course, because the interaction ends up happening within Anglicanism (except to the degree that there are representatives of the different parties within Anglicanism, as there is for instance on the Catholic-Evangelical spectrum). And Anglicanism officially admits that this is unsatisfactory.
But that's not the way this discussion went. As soon as the issue of establishing a proper consensus in an attempt to transcend sectarian divisions was broached, the response was to ridicule the the other parties-- mine in particular-- to avoid having to bother to convince us. That is the purest expression of sectarian sentiment possible.
And the thing is that, at Nicea for instance, I don't think the intent was so much to create a division as it was to work out the best expression of the nature of the Godhead. Trinitarianism endures even outside Orthodoxy because the arguments do hold up when re-examined. That's a higher standard than the claim that it is what Orthodoxy teaches, because since it is true, Orthodoxy teaching it is defensible without any circular reference to Orthodox authority. Later councils often do appear to have the intent of making divisions, and as Orthodoxy continues to develop, old issues do reappear; iconoclasm as an issue in Christendom is never going to go away as long as images are venerated, because of the potential for actual practice to drift away from conciliar principles and into frank idolatry.
Consensus, ordinarily, is not an absolute standard, nor is it, ordinarily, a permanent standard. Nor does it live successfully with "No compromise!" Anglicanism simply stands in as one of the more demanding contrary theoies about how a consensus ought to be formed, and because I feel I can represent it better than I can other traditions.
