Our "native High Church traditions"

In my post reflecting on the Scottish Episcopal Church, I suggested that a "relaxed, natural catholic Anglicanism" - something I have experienced in Scotland and New England - contrasted with the "often artificial anglo-papalist ethos ('more Roman than the Romans') of many English anglo-catholic parishes". From a different perspective, an anglo-catholic blogger has suggested something similar.

Fr Ivan D Aquilina commented in the aftermath of the launch of FCA. He was one of very many disappointed anglo-catholic bloggers critical of the conservative evangelical dominance at the launch - despite the presence of some anglo-catholic bishops from the States:

"The fact that Anglo-Catholics in North America are part and parcel of this movement does not mean that we should be too. Many readers will know that Anglo-Catholicism in the States and here is different, especially in the way we think about re-union with the See of Peter".

Aquilina's observation regarding the papalist focus of English anglo-catholicism perhaps reflects something of the fact that the Oxford Movement was conceived and born in a crisis over authority - a crisis that found its iconic resolution in Newman's move to Rome. The catholicism evident in parts of TEC derives from both the high church tradition in the northern colonies pre-dating 1776 and Seabury's relationship with the SEC, with its theological and liturgical traditions derived from Laud's 1637 Prayer Book. It is, to use the words of Peter Nockles, one of those "native High Church traditions" that stands historically apart from the Anglo-Catholic movement which emerged from Oxford.

Nockles states:

"In truth, the significance of 1833 in the annals of the nineteenth-century Church of England has been misunderstood. The Tractarians sharpened a sense of High Church party identity in the Church, but they did not and could not create it ... Thus Tractarian historiography was mistaken in suggesting that the Oxford Movement first rediscovered 'Anglicanism' and that what became known as 'Anglo-Catholicism' was a natural or lineal evolution".

It is perhaps somewhat pejorative to describe these two traditions as those of Anglican papalist catholicism and Anglican patristic catholicism. But two quite distinct traditions there are.

The Guardian and Alpha

One of the Guardian's bloggers - Adam Rutherford - is blogging an Alpha Course every Friday. The course is at St Mary's, Islington.

Could prove to be an interesting blog. Rutherford describes himself as an "orthodox atheist". His assessment at the end of the introductory night is noteworthy:

"I leave St Mary's looking forward to next week's session. I spend precisely no time with people openly discussing their faith in a very personal way. Mostly when I think about religion it's the foolish edicts of preposterous old men in dresses. But sitting down with people who choose to spend a sunny Tuesday evening discussing the meaning of life with strangers seems to be a much more interesting insight into what makes people of faith tick. We shall see".

The flawed hermeneutics of FCA

The launch of FCA has unsurprisingly provoked much comment. I found +Sydney's keynote address - with its declaration of "ideological war" - profoundly depressing. It's not just bad politics. It's bad evangelism. The irony is that his address was couched in terms of "how can we test your resolve to evangelize your people?" A declaration of culture war is not evangelism. It is politics.

However, what did particularly strike me was +Sydney's comments on hermeneutics. Admittedly it followed his assertion that "sexual ethics is where the contest is sharpest" between the Gospel and culture - an assertion surely worthy of challenge. There is not doubt that the God's purpose for His creation in Jesus Christ do challenge contemporary sexual mores - just as much as they did so in 1st century Rome or 5th century Hippo. But the suggestion that it is here - rather than, say, western Christian attitudes to money, power, conflict, the dignity of the human person, or the secularised public square - where "the contest is sharpest" is revealing. It demonstrates, to use the Archbishop's words, a "culturally captivated" analysis: he contends that it is not the market, not the state, not secular society, but the bedroom where "the contest is sharpest" between Gospel and culture.

Back to heremeneutics. +Sydney declared that two incompatible views of Scripture exist in contemporary Anglicanism:

"Those who hold that the Bible is the inspired word of God will see in it a unity which holds all things together. Those who regard it as a human witness to God, drawn together as a sort of library, will find contradiction and tension throughout".

Admittedly the Archbishop was constrained by time and content, so it might be unfair to read too deeply into those words. Nevertheless, they do appear to be very simplistic. On the one side are the liberals - they are the ones who see only contradiction and tension, because they do not recognise Scripture's status as inspired. On the other, the - what shall we call them? - traditionalists. Because they know Scripture is inspired, they are not hampered by any contradictions or tensions in the text.

The problems are obvious with +Sydney's choice of words. He demeans, almost overlooks, the human participation in the writing of Scripture. It appears to be a form of Docetism - it looks like a human document, but it's not. N.T. Wright's language that Scripture is "one of the points where heaven and earth overlap and interlock" (alongside the Incarnation and the sacraments) is a necessary correction to the Archbishop's words.

But there is the other problem - only liberals, he tells us, are hampered by "contradiction and tension" in the text of Scripture. Yesterday in the daily office lectionary in the Church of Ireland we had 1 Samuel 15 as one of the readings. It includes this verse, God's words to Saul:

"Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey".

The verse, 1 Samuel 15:3, is part of the Canon of Scripture. The church is not at liberty to deny its canonical status. But I found it impossible to read that text without experiencing contradiction and tension between it and the rest of Scripture, above all with the revelation of the God of Israel in the Incarnate Word. Affirming that Scripture is "God's Word written" does not remove the hard challenges posed by contradictions and tensions.

O'Donovan's A Conversation Waiting to Begin warns against any approach to Scripture which "tend to make the interpretation of Scripture seem superfluous". He emphasises the need to recognise the "hermeneutic distance":

"That term refers to the gap between the reader and the text, the gap that understanding has to bridge ... It is the characteristic 'conservative' temptation to erect a moment in scriptural interpretation into an unrevisable norm that will substitute, conveniently and less ambiguously, for Scripture itself ... the text and my reading of the text are two things, not one, and the first is the judge of the second".

It is the humility and patience urged by O'Donovan that appear to be lacking in +Sydney's summary of heremeneutics. The critique of the culture war declaration pales into insignificance beside this. The hard work, the challenge of reading Scripture in 21st century North Atlantic society (or 5th century Hippo or 16th century Wittenberg or 21st century Zimbabwe) appears not to be present in +Sydney's view. Perhaps such a heremeneutic inevitably leads to the other easy option - declaration of culture war, rather than the hard work of engaging with contemporary culture.

A Highland parish in summer

More than a Via Media has previously reflected on personal experience of TEC, urging Anglicans not to be too hasty in condemning an entire national church as 'revisionist' on the basis of statements or actions by some bishops or dioceses. The Scottish Episcopal Church is widely regarded as belonging to the same 'revisionist arc' of North Atlantic churches as TEC. Richard Holloway probably has much to do with this reputation – not least his increasingly Spong-like statements towards to the end of his time as Primus.

This week has been my first experience of the SEC since early teenage years. St. Kentigern's is a Highland rural parish in the village of Ballater, approximately 40 miles from Aberdeen. The Sunday eucharist had an attendance of around 50. The liturgy bore the hallmarks of a relaxed, natural catholic Anglicanism – not unlike my experience of parishes in Cape Cod and Maine. The contrast with the often artificial anglo-papalist ethos ('more Roman than the Romans') of many English anglo-catholic parishes is worth examining. SEC's 'patristic catholicism'(more of which on this blog anon) probably originated in the 1637 Prayer Book devised by Laud – the same liturgical tradition that helped to shape the ethos of TEC in the northern States post-1776. This can broadly be identified with the pre-Tractatarian high church tradition outlined by Nockles. Some 19th century developments – not least the widespread use of eucharistic vestments – could appear much more organic and less divisive in this context.

This patristic catholicism is, then, a tradition indigenous to Anglicanism, perhaps given sharper focus when Anglicanism was a minority amongst Scottish Presbyterians or New England Congregationalists.

A patristic catholicism, of course, is not merely a matter of a 'catholic' eucharistic prayer or the use of the chasuble. Pre-eminently it is concerned with proclamation. Which brings me to Sunday's sermon in St. Kentigern's. It was a serious engagement with Scripture – in this case, the healing of the woman with the issue of blood and the raising of Jairius' daughter. There was no attempt to explain away 'miracle'. For at least 20 minutes (i.e. not short by North Atlantic Anglican standards), we were challenged to think through what these miracles said about Jesus Christ, the Kingdom and ourselves.

A serious engagement with Scripture. Then the Nicene Creed – rehearsed by 50 people in a Highland parish, declaring the mighty acts of the God of Israel, the God and Father of Jesus Christ. And then we shared in the eucharist, with a eucharistic prayer that proclaimed the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ, centred around His own words of institution.

All of which leads me to wonder to what extent the terms we attach to other Anglicans – revisionist, conservative, catholic, evangelical – are essentially political acts: and as with all political acts, they miss the realities and nuances of lived experience. Anytime I hear others speak of the SEC, my mind will return to St. Kentigern's – and the patristic catholicism evident in the faith proclaimed in Word and Sacrament in that parish on a Sunday in July 2009.

Revisionist acts by revisionist bishops do not – should not – have the last word. In 'liberal Scotland', in 'liberal New England', the evangelical faith and catholic order of Anglicanism re-asserts itself in normal parishes doing the things Anglicans do – baptising, celebrating the eucharist, maintaining the three-fold ministry, continuing the ordered reading of Scripture in the Office and eucharist, teaching the faith. Revisionist bishops will come and go. Anglicanism's experience and manifestation of patristic catholicism remains. Or, in the words of the motto of SEC, "evangelical faith and apostolic order".

Anglicanism and the public square after Christendom

It is one of the ironies of Anglicanism that, despite our tradition's historic vocation as an established, national church providing a civic ministry to a polity and society (even when dis-established - the role of the National Cathedral in Washington is evidence of this), in the 20th century we lost any confidence in articulating a convincing vision of this civic vocation.

Part of the reason for this loss of confidence has been examined in two articles in the Church Times by historian JCD Clark. In the first he suggested that Anglicanism had lost the 'history wars', failing to invest any importance in historical study and thus "losing command of its history". In the second, he argued that the loss of a historical "grand narrative" had left Anglicanism without any sense of an authentically catholic identity.

Clark's now classic 1985 revisionist work, English Society 1688-1832, provided an historical account of Anglicanism in 18th century England fundamentally shaping the self-understanding of state and society. So much so, indeed, that he declared Anglican political theology to be the predominant political ideology in Georgian England. Clark's two articles are written against the background of his historical thesis. In "losing command of its history", Anglicanism lost any real sense of shaping our society's understanding of itself.

I offered some reflections on the first article in the Church of Ireland Gazette, particularly drawing attention to 21st century Anglicanism's embarrassment over one decisive aspect of its past:

"Anglicanism’s historical experience has been overwhelmingly defined by the Church of England’s status over the centuries as an established Church. Establishment - Christendom - brought an intimate relationship with the powers of this world. There is an overwhelming suspicion amongst 21st century Christians that Christendom compromised the Church of Jesus Christ. But not only was establishment a common experience for Churches throughout Europe before and after the Reformation, it allowed national Churches to shape national cultures in a distinctive Christian manner. The theologian, Oliver O’Donovan, has articulated the theological rationale behind Christendom. Christendom was, says O’Donovan, 'the logical conclusion of [the Church’s] confidence in mission.' Establishment, whatever its flaws, was a testimony to the acceptance by rulers and societies of the public truth of the Christian proclamation".

Now, there is - obviously - no going back, as O'Donovan succinctly notes: "I take it as beyond dispute that Christendom has in fact ended". But this does not require Anglicanism to desert the public square, retiring sect-like into public irrelevance. Indeed, O'Donovan reminds us that the good news compels us into the public square. In post-Christendom our vocation - while given different expression to, say, Anglican political theology in the 18th century - remains fundamentally public, not individualist and not sectarian. To quote The Desire of the Nations:

"If the Christian community has as its eternal goal, the goal of its pilgrimage, the disclosure of the church as city, it has as its intermediate goal, the goal of its mission, the discovery of the city's secret destiny through the prism of the church".

In other words, in the Word proclaimed and lived out by the church, the city comes to discover its true identity as a polis brought into being and sustained by the Triune God. What would a contemporary Anglican understanding of this vocation in the public square look like? A recent sermon by Bishop N.T. Wright - preached at the Civic Service of Thanksgiving and Dedication
at the launch of the new Unitary County Council in Durham - provides an incredibly useful outline.

Wright captures something of the essence of the traditional Anglican teaching on passive obedience and non-resistance - the God-ordained role of civil authority to maintain the order required for the common good, a necessary corrective to the view that the state merely exists to protect the free market and our desires as individuals:

"We all still know that we need rulers and authorities. We don’t want to live in chaos and anarchy, where powerful bullies can push the rest of us around. We know in our bones that order matters, that structures of society are necessary for the health and flourishing of the whole. Governments at every level are there to provide the appropriate balance between freedom and order, between human flourishing and the necessary structures of public life".

He went on to emphasise three things that flow from the Christian proclamation when applied to the public square:

"we must put the needs of the poor before the desires of the rich ... developing a community of character ... the leadership of servants rather than the busyness of bureaucrats".

Wright ended his sermon by reminding his hearers that this vision of the church encouraging, urging rulers to pursue the common good is not an attempt to restore lost Christendom, but a necessary and inherent part of the church proclaiming the good news:

"In proposing that we put back together what never should have been separated, God and public life, I am not at all therefore suggesting that we return to a pre-modern image of theocracy. I’m suggesting that we move forward towards Jesus’ very different vision, the vision for which he lived and died, the vision which, when he rose again, became a reality on earth as in heaven, creating a new world with new possibilities and new energy which we call the Holy Spirit".

It is time to lose our embarrassment over the historical era of Christendom and to recover our confidence as those called and sent into the public square. The mission to the nations is a mission that compels the church to enter the public square and seek to shape it in obedience to the Crucified and Risen Lord.

Beginning the Conversation

Amidst Anglicanism’s ongoing confrontations on the issue of same-sex relationships, it is rare to hear voices urging a patient and authentic wrestling with Scripture. Thanfully, Oliver O'Donovan's excellent and challenging A Conversation Waiting to Begin is such a voice. At heart, O'Donovan offers an apologia for Lambeth 1.10 – and, importantly, 1.10 in its entirety. He summarises 1.10 as “generally conservative in posture ... overwhelmingly supported ... [and] open to further exploration”. A Conversation Waiting to Begin is a deep reflection on the relationship between the affirmation of the conservative posture and the call to further exploration.

The critique of the revisionist position is robust. Liberals' protestations, that the grounds of Christian communion are in the creeds alone, fail to recognise that the Christian creedal affirmations have a “specific moral shape”. The hermeneutic with which liberalism approaches Scripture prevents any meaningful sense in which “an answer [is] not already contained in the question”. Perhaps most damningly, of all, however, is O'Donovan's assessment that the failure of the revisionist position to give a proper account of the relationship between creation and redemption “is the doctrinal proposal that is likely to shake the foundations”. Readers of O'Donovan's classic Resurrection and Moral Order will recognise the outlines of his affirmation in A Conversation Waiting to Begin:

“New creation is creation renewed, a restoration and an enhancement, not an abolition”.

Reading the book as a supporter of 1.10, however, I found myself challenged. The challenges were 3-fold.

Firstly, O'Donovan reminds us that any view on the part of those of us who are traditionalists/conservatives/anti-revisionists that we instinctively ‘know’ that Scripture condemns same-sex activity – what O'Donovan terms “a confidence in the immediacy of moral judgments” - actually undermines the practice of the Church faithfully attending to Scripture as the Word of God. As O'Donovan puts it:

“The immediacy of the insight tends to make the interpretation of Scripture seem superfluous”.

To authentically wrestle with Scripture and be challenged by Scripture, requires us not to become merely a right-wing image of the revisionist case. In other words, we should not approach Scripture with questions already containing the answer.

Secondly, we are reminded that the Church has previously wrestled with 'categories' of persons whose manner of life produced pastoral challenges and dilemmas. O'Donovan points to three in particular, asking what the good news was understood to mean for them:

“For the teacher of literature, for the civil magistrate, or for the successful merchant (to name three categories that the early church viewed with the same narrowing of the eyes that a homosexual may encounter today)”.

Profound pastoral issues and challenges presented themselves to the patristic churches as they shared the good news with the teacher of pagan literature, the magistrate who upheld the authority of the Empire, the merchant who bought, sold and made a profit. O’Donovan couches this discussion in terms of ‘vocation’. The good news had implications for the teacher of literature, the civil magistrate and the merchant in their specific vocations. Mindful of these patristic parallels, our contemporary challenge is to discern the implications of the gospel for the 21st century gay person beyond the false notion that ideas, power, money or sexuality are mere “neutral technicalities” not addressed by the gospel.

Finally, O'Donovan refers to the “interesting, if teasing analogy” of “the rather careful hermeneutic of scriptural teaching on divorce and remarriage”. A Conversation Waiting to Begin closes with a reference to the diversity of teaching and practice on this issue:

“That disagreement has not gone away; but if today it bulks less threateningly than it once did, that is because we are so much more clear about the extent of the agreed ground all around it – God's intentions for marriage, the pastoral desiderata in dealing with broken marriage and the like. It no longer evokes threatening resonances. It is a problem reduced to its true shape and size”.

O'Donovan is self-evidently not urging a cheap grace, cheap unity option of 'live and let live'. Such unreflective, pragmatic pluralism is an all too-obvious attempt to bypass the hard work of patiently searching the Scriptures and patiently listening to one another in that process. But it is a significant reminder that Christians have found pastoral accommodations when confronted with the reality of differing understandings of the meaning of marriage in the context of God's purposes in creation and redemption.

The implications of this “teasing analogy” for Anglicanism's present discontents are, quite rightly, not made explicit by O'Donovan. We have much more work to do on establishing “the agreed ground” before reaching such a point.

Lewis Anglicanism

Over on the Crunchy Con site I came across a thread discussing "Lewis Episcopalians" - "people from an evangelical background, their faith much enriched by the writings of C. S. Lewis, [who] went into the Episcopal Church".

It's an excellent term. Lewis' generous orthodoxy, his love and reverence for Scripture without subscribing to rationalist concepts of inerrancy, his impatience with those concerned with whether the person in the next pew crossed themselves or did not cross themselves, his immersion in the riches of the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and his commitment to engaging the culture with the Gospel: here is a model for a generous but robust Anglicanism.

As to what such a generous but robust Anglicanism might look like with regards to the contemporary controversies surrounding human sexuality, Radical Orthodoxy's leading voice - John Milbank - perhaps gives us a clue in his comments on Oliver O'Donovan's recent A Conversation Waiting to Begin:

"[O'Donovan] hints that [a consensus] might well be at once more conservative and yet more radical than the political moralising and prudishness of theological liberals might desire. Yet, if campaigning for 'gay rights' is dismissed as inappropriate and premature, the schismatic reaction of certain evangelicals is roundly condemned. Indeed, O'Donovan has has here achieved nothing less than an indication of just how Anglicanism can in the future reconstruct itself through a recovery of a Hooker-like sense of Episcopalian catholicity, and the patristic integration of Platonic wisdom with biblical revelation, on the part of more discerning evangelicals like himself".

Lewis, O'Donovan, Hooker. They offer the vision of an Anglicanism that is not defined by its travails and frustrations, nor by the politicised and narrow agendas of radical left or radical right, but rather by a generous, engaging orthodoxy - a vision rooted in Trinity and Incarnation, baptism and eucharist, and the ordered reading of Scripture.