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.

Review: Oliver O'Donovan's 'A Conversation Waiting to Begin'

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.