Evangelical Anglicans arrived with the First Fleet in 1788 and they’ve been asked to stand between savagery and civilisation ever since. The first chaplain, Richard Johnson, could not take it for very long and returned home in some despondence. The second chaplain, Samuel Marsden, was oftentimes more magistrate than minister. Sydney’s Anglicans have subsequently shared in the building of a mighty city in what appeared to all as a godforsaken corner of the world only good for exiles and aborigines. They have felt themselves caught between their commission to preach the gospel of God’s free grace to sinners and the need to decry the licentiousness, greed and corruption upon which the new nation was being founded.
It has never been easy to peddle religion in this town. We should not overestimate the extent to which even nineteenth century Sydney was ever a ‘Christian’ society. There has always been a vigorously secular streak in the harbour city – exemplified by the jaunty articles in the colonial magazines Bulletin and Truth. ‘Wowser’ is a term of contempt and derision invented in Sydney to describe those who would seek to impose their morality on everyone else; and it illustrates the kind of reaction against institutional Christianity that some Sydney-siders have considered as an identifying mark. Journalist Mike Carlton’s satires of Sydney Anglicans sit in the tradition of scallywag stone-throwers against the perceived stained-glass pomposity of the city’s church leaders.
Since the 1960s the tide of secularism has turned even more decisively against the churches. Speaking from the vantage point of 2010, the triumph of secularism is almost complete and is, in human terms, almost completely assured. Though Australia is by and large conservative and cautious, it is true that an argument from apparent fairness will always convince them; and that they react badly to ecclesiastical intrusion into public affairs. Middle-aged Sydney siders, born in the mid-60s and early 70s, are by now a group of people who never even had the chance to walk away from church, since they were not taken to Sunday School and Youth Group by their parents. They are ignorant of the Bible and of Christian traditions and don’t particularly want that state of affairs to change.
The Sydney Anglican story could read then as a story of decline and retreat in the face of two centuries of barely-concealed hostility. While there has been remarkable work done in the last thirty years or so, it could be interpreted as merely a rear-guard action, a staving off for a generation of a collapse that must surely come. Compared to Anglicans elsewhere of course this halting of decline looks like roaring success. The average age of attendees in some Anglican dioceses is well over 70 years old. Never mind that: in real terms, the relative health of Sydney diocese could be read as really just a more muted failure.
Yet the vigour of the opposition has made Sydney Anglicans battle-hardened. They are toughened by bad news. They are used to ridicule. They are not shocked by invective against them. Insult them all you like: it makes little difference. You could also point to a resourcefulness of spirit and a stubborn determination to bear the gospel come what may. There is an edge to the Sydney diocese that has not yet been blunted by the relentless pressure to go quietly into what from a secularist point of view would be a sweet and silent oblivion.
It would however be a mistake to consider this gingery determination from a merely human angle. If it is a virtue, it is so only because it stems from a faith in the rule of all things by the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. This must not be interpreted, by opponents or by Sydney Anglicans themselves, as a kind of divine vindication of Sydney Anglicans for their faithfulness and their commitment to doctrinal purity. On the contrary: the Anglican Church in Sydney may completely collapse and empty and be in a century’s time a quirk of history, as defunct as the Bulletin and Truth. Faith in the sovereignty of God is faith that he will continue his work, not faith in the eternal security of Sydney Anglicanism.
This foundational theological belief in the sovereign rule of God in the risen Jesus Christ can be the basis for an attitude of confidence without lapsing into an ugly triumphalism or a defensive paranoia. The sovereignty of God is the basis not for a martyr complex, but for true martyrdom – which is witnessing to Jesus Christ come what may. A persecution complex is essentially self-interested and even narcissistic. A life lived for Jesus Christ, on the other hand, risks itself entirely for the good of the other without regard for self – knowing that it entrusts itself to the God who raised Jesus from the dead.
That then is the challenge for Sydney’s evangelical Anglicans: do they put their trust in the sovereign Lord, the God of the risen Christ? The circumstances of life in 21st century Sydney are uncertain for those who would seek to preach Christ. The rise of the New Atheists has given unbelievers are more confident and at times strident voice. The possibility of a public sphere that more strictly polices itself against the intrusion of the religious is imminent. There is less and less native traction for the Christian message amongst those who have a churched upbringing of some kind. There is the outright fear expressed towards the religious way of being because of its association with violence and prudery.
But from the perspective of Christian faith, these difficulties are quite trivial. The job of the fellowship of churches that make up the diocese of Sydney is not to defend their own establishment or privilege. Their call, alongside other Christians, is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen saviour and entrust themselves to providence...
Monday, November 29, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Male/Female
In my previous post I addressed the issue of gender relations as if it is merely an in-house theological discussion. Of course this is not the case. The question of differences between the genders and the way in which individuals can best express their masculine and feminine identities is one with which Western culture at large is still contending, with considerable pain and confusion. Kelly Burke, the Sydney Morning Herald religion reporter in early 2000s, noted how ‘laughable, if not downright offensive’ the notion of male headship is to most of her readers (and that Sydney Anglicans haven’t seemed to notice). At the same time, the pages of her own newspaper daily record the anxiety that our community experiences with regard to gender. More than ever before the issue of gender has become bound up with one’s own personal identity. Since the zeitgeist emphasises the freedom of the individual to self-create, especially over against any prefabricated notion of ‘roles’, the discussion of ‘headship’ is always going to jar with our wider cultural sensibilities.
Individual freedom, in other words, brings with it enormous anxiety. If the expression of my maleness or femaleness is not dictated to me by some social order and is something that I have to discover for myself, then an inner resourcefulness and self-awareness is asked of me that I may just not have. That is why, even given the freedom to experiment with how gender is expressed, most men and women conform to contemporary cultural norms of gender. They may not be men like their fathers or women like their mothers, but they are overwhelmingly pretty much the same as their brothers and sisters and friends. The vacuum of anxiety created by individual freedom is quickly filled, that is to say, by social conformity, fashion and self-help books.
Amidst this confusion and anxiety, Holy Scripture is not an embarrassment but a positive asset for Christians – whatever Kelly Burke’s readers might have thought. Evangelical Christians, whatever their view on the role of women in ministry and the home, have in Scripture a way of speaking of the profound and ineradicable sameness and mutuality of the human male and female. Men are not from Mars, and women are not from Venus: they are both very much of the Earth, and together image God. The Bible reminds us that we cannot conceive of maleness-without-femaleness or femaleness-without-maleness (1 Cor 11). Scripture gives an explanation, too, of the tension that exists between the sexes in their quest for power over one another. The Biblical pattern of marriage in terms of sacrificial love and submission is more than a remedy to this condition – it is an emblem of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Eph 5).
But Scripture gives us far less than we want vis-a-vis gender roles. The mistake made in moving from a ‘thin’ to a ‘thick’ complementarianism is to scour Scripture for references to men and women and make them somehow universal prescriptions for patterns of gender behaviours. Often what is adduced is a very culturally conservative version of gender and understood in ‘essentialist’ terms. For example, the directions that Paul gives to wives and younger women in Titus 2:5 that they are to be ‘busy at home’ is taken not as a teaching about the situation that most younger women would have found themselves in at the time, but as reflecting woman’s proper station – at home looking after children. Never mind that women like the business woman Lydia (Acts 16:14-15) and Chloe (1 Cor 11:1) seem to have been household heads.
Like political order, gender is a very human, culturally interpreted and negotiated realisation of the nature of our sexed bodies. This is not, in New Testament terms, some sort of complete gender relativism. Scripture takes very seriously the human arrangement of political and social authority but also shows how these are ultimately subject to divine rule. In 1 Peter 2:13, Peter enjoins Christians to honour and submit to all ‘human institutions’ That is: the political ordering of society is contingent and historical, a realization of delegated human authority. However, this contingence is providential (Rom 13). Unlike the modernist, who sees this historical contingence as an impetus for active subversion, the Christian submits to human orders – and ‘loyally resists’, offering the gospel. It is the gospel that transforms and subverts, not the human will. Thus 1 Corinthians 11 we find Paul upholding social conventions but with a transformed meaning (ie, the radical mutual dependence and constitution of the genders). The cultural development of gender is not absolute, but it is not irrelevant or unauthorized. Neither is it merely arbitrary.
The New Testament does a couple of other things that unsettle a ‘thick’ complementarian reading of gender. First of all, it celebrates singleness as a praiseworthy and even preferable calling for some Christians (1 Cor 7). Not only was Jesus single (though he is of course symbolically married to the Church), but Paul at the time of writing 1 Corinthians at least was advocating it – without lapsing into an anti-marriage asceticism. The single person is of course still gendered, but they are not expressing their gender in the socially conventional way. A single woman is not subject to a husband, and yet functions as full member of the household of God without in some way being a deficient woman. On the contrary, her singleness is to be honoured. The single person is a sign that the gospel of the risen and returning Christ has relativised the ‘natural’ order of things without overturning it.
Second, the New Testament asks men to imagine themselves in the ‘feminine’ position of submitting to and responding to the loving sacrifice of Christ, the head of the Church (Eph 5:22f). This is the analogy from which they are to learn, if they are husbands, to love their wives. Indeed – unless they can grasp what it is to be on the receiving end of the love of Christ and to submit to his headship, they cannot learn what it is to exercise headship. The 17th Century English poet John Donne rather shockingly expressed this gender reversal of faith in his poem ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God’ when, in his final line, he exclaims that he will never be ‘…chaste, unless you ravish me’.
‘Thick’ complementarianism, in my view, is lazy at best and legalistic at worst. It asks for Scripture to prescribe what Christians as redeemed men and women are called on to discern in the middle of history – and so it indulges itself in poor reading of the Bible. It posits a false dichotomy between the universal and the cultural – when the truth is that Scripture speaks a universal in and through the cultural. It is not an accident that, over the passage of time, those societies which have been more influenced by the Christian gospel have tended to embrace a much more egalitarian and companionate version of marriage. This is because the truth at the heart of the gospel that marriage is meant to enact is of power and authority exercised and received in loving sacrificial service for the good of the other. The notion of complementarity is not thereby overthrown. But it does mean that submission and headship will look remarkably different as the power differential between husbands and wives changes – as in fact it does. Amongst complementarian Christians that I know, marriages are remarkably egalitarian.
Individual freedom, in other words, brings with it enormous anxiety. If the expression of my maleness or femaleness is not dictated to me by some social order and is something that I have to discover for myself, then an inner resourcefulness and self-awareness is asked of me that I may just not have. That is why, even given the freedom to experiment with how gender is expressed, most men and women conform to contemporary cultural norms of gender. They may not be men like their fathers or women like their mothers, but they are overwhelmingly pretty much the same as their brothers and sisters and friends. The vacuum of anxiety created by individual freedom is quickly filled, that is to say, by social conformity, fashion and self-help books.
Amidst this confusion and anxiety, Holy Scripture is not an embarrassment but a positive asset for Christians – whatever Kelly Burke’s readers might have thought. Evangelical Christians, whatever their view on the role of women in ministry and the home, have in Scripture a way of speaking of the profound and ineradicable sameness and mutuality of the human male and female. Men are not from Mars, and women are not from Venus: they are both very much of the Earth, and together image God. The Bible reminds us that we cannot conceive of maleness-without-femaleness or femaleness-without-maleness (1 Cor 11). Scripture gives an explanation, too, of the tension that exists between the sexes in their quest for power over one another. The Biblical pattern of marriage in terms of sacrificial love and submission is more than a remedy to this condition – it is an emblem of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Eph 5).
But Scripture gives us far less than we want vis-a-vis gender roles. The mistake made in moving from a ‘thin’ to a ‘thick’ complementarianism is to scour Scripture for references to men and women and make them somehow universal prescriptions for patterns of gender behaviours. Often what is adduced is a very culturally conservative version of gender and understood in ‘essentialist’ terms. For example, the directions that Paul gives to wives and younger women in Titus 2:5 that they are to be ‘busy at home’ is taken not as a teaching about the situation that most younger women would have found themselves in at the time, but as reflecting woman’s proper station – at home looking after children. Never mind that women like the business woman Lydia (Acts 16:14-15) and Chloe (1 Cor 11:1) seem to have been household heads.
Like political order, gender is a very human, culturally interpreted and negotiated realisation of the nature of our sexed bodies. This is not, in New Testament terms, some sort of complete gender relativism. Scripture takes very seriously the human arrangement of political and social authority but also shows how these are ultimately subject to divine rule. In 1 Peter 2:13, Peter enjoins Christians to honour and submit to all ‘human institutions’ That is: the political ordering of society is contingent and historical, a realization of delegated human authority. However, this contingence is providential (Rom 13). Unlike the modernist, who sees this historical contingence as an impetus for active subversion, the Christian submits to human orders – and ‘loyally resists’, offering the gospel. It is the gospel that transforms and subverts, not the human will. Thus 1 Corinthians 11 we find Paul upholding social conventions but with a transformed meaning (ie, the radical mutual dependence and constitution of the genders). The cultural development of gender is not absolute, but it is not irrelevant or unauthorized. Neither is it merely arbitrary.
The New Testament does a couple of other things that unsettle a ‘thick’ complementarian reading of gender. First of all, it celebrates singleness as a praiseworthy and even preferable calling for some Christians (1 Cor 7). Not only was Jesus single (though he is of course symbolically married to the Church), but Paul at the time of writing 1 Corinthians at least was advocating it – without lapsing into an anti-marriage asceticism. The single person is of course still gendered, but they are not expressing their gender in the socially conventional way. A single woman is not subject to a husband, and yet functions as full member of the household of God without in some way being a deficient woman. On the contrary, her singleness is to be honoured. The single person is a sign that the gospel of the risen and returning Christ has relativised the ‘natural’ order of things without overturning it.
Second, the New Testament asks men to imagine themselves in the ‘feminine’ position of submitting to and responding to the loving sacrifice of Christ, the head of the Church (Eph 5:22f). This is the analogy from which they are to learn, if they are husbands, to love their wives. Indeed – unless they can grasp what it is to be on the receiving end of the love of Christ and to submit to his headship, they cannot learn what it is to exercise headship. The 17th Century English poet John Donne rather shockingly expressed this gender reversal of faith in his poem ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God’ when, in his final line, he exclaims that he will never be ‘…chaste, unless you ravish me’.
‘Thick’ complementarianism, in my view, is lazy at best and legalistic at worst. It asks for Scripture to prescribe what Christians as redeemed men and women are called on to discern in the middle of history – and so it indulges itself in poor reading of the Bible. It posits a false dichotomy between the universal and the cultural – when the truth is that Scripture speaks a universal in and through the cultural. It is not an accident that, over the passage of time, those societies which have been more influenced by the Christian gospel have tended to embrace a much more egalitarian and companionate version of marriage. This is because the truth at the heart of the gospel that marriage is meant to enact is of power and authority exercised and received in loving sacrificial service for the good of the other. The notion of complementarity is not thereby overthrown. But it does mean that submission and headship will look remarkably different as the power differential between husbands and wives changes – as in fact it does. Amongst complementarian Christians that I know, marriages are remarkably egalitarian.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Headship, and other difficulties
Evangelicals do not hold to an primarily hierarchical view of humanity, or of the church, or of the ministry. They are insistent on the profound equality of all human beings in God’s eyes – who will be equally judged by him and to whom Christ equally comes. In the nineteenth century, it was evangelicals who were in the vanguard of arguing for the rights of women, just as they had been at the forefront of the fight against slavery. They note that most ministry in the New Testament church is carried out amongst ‘one-another’; that gifts of prophecy come to both men and women (Acts 2, 1 Cor 11) and that the orders of ministry such as they are described in the New Testament do not convey special powers or superior spiritual status.
The Anglican church has though been for most of its history a child of its British culture, and so habitually hierarchical and clericalised. When in the 1960s the laity were admitted to the public ministries of the church such as reading, praying, service leading and so on, evangelicals warmly endorsed the change as being truer to the gospel of Christ. In retrospect, it was inevitable that the question of the elevation of women to all the ministries of the church from which they had been up till that moment denied access would prove a more troublesome prospect. Unlike Anglo-Catholics, it was not because the priest had some special spiritual status by dint of his ordination. The argument that Christ only chose male apostles and therefore we ought only to ordain male priests carries precisely no weight with Sydney’s evangelicals, especially as for evangelicals it is not about presiding at the Eucharist. It is primarily because here was a matter on which Scripture is not silent.
There is a single text which is decisive on the issue in the Sydney Anglican way of thinking. 1 Tim 2:11-15 reads:
11 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.
This passage does not speak about ordination per se. The apostle here addresses a particular activity – the business of authoritative teaching in the gathering. And he differentiates between the roles he gives to men and women in this activity.
Applying the principles drawn from this verse to the particular forms of ministry that they have inherited, Sydney’s Anglicans have most usually chosen to restrict the role of ‘priest’ or ‘presbyter’ to men – since this role most closely matches the role of authoritative teacher.
But there is also a deeper, theological conviction about the nature of church itself that provides a back-drop to the Sydney Anglican teaching on this subject. It is, as Broughton Knox said, that ‘[T]he Christian congregation should reflect the structure of the Christian home.’ In a piece dated around 1973, Knox insisted that it was the context of ministry in the congregation that made gender such an important issue. There was nothing in terms of ability that might prevent a woman from carrying out any of the functions of the ministry. They were obviously no more or less than capable to lead services, celebrate communion, visit the sick and bury the dead than their brothers. But these ministries take place in a congregation which is not a business meeting or a social club but rather has the character of a family. In the New Testament, the ministers are appointed from among household leaders (1 Tim 3:1-12, Titus 1:5-6) and part of their qualification for leadership in the church is the effectiveness and integrity of their leadership in the home as husbands and fathers. The New Testament in several passages speaks about the relationship of husbands and wives, not naming an essential hierarchy between them, but depicting a pattern of leadership-through-service, and submission as a response.
At this point, Knox does speak of hierarchy and refers his readers to 1 Cor 11:7-11. He isn’t persuaded that this passage is merely a reflection of 1st century culture, ‘though the consequence of this principle will vary in different cultures’. There is an order outlined in this passage from God to Christ to man and thence to woman. Between the man and the woman, however, the order is marked by a thoroughgoing interdependence in a way in which you could not say that the divine is dependent on the human. The note of hierarchy is muted by a profound mutuality and equality. It is not an order which is exercised in ‘lording it’ and a corresponding servility but is rather marked by sacrificial service and response. This is what is known as, for want of a better word, ‘headship’.
Application of the principles of headship and submission in church order complicates things further. Within Sydney diocese, and even on the faculty of Moore College, there is quite a lot of difference of opinion on how these convictions might be expressed. Some would hesitate to have women lead services or mixed bible study groups. Others would be in favour of women preaching, though not as the rector of a parish. Since women were admitted to the order of deacon in 1987 and licenced to preach even before that some parishes have had female preaching in mixed congregations for close to three decades. To a greater or lesser extent, what needs to be realised is the inexact fit between the church of the first century and the Anglican church of the twenty-first - something we should have learnt from Richard Hooker in any case. Anglican ordination and contemporary church leadership models do not merely replicate or signify the same thing as the biblical practice. Unfortunately, there are those who do not notice this gap, and who assume that their application of the principle is a direct application of the teaching of Scripture. Knox himself admitted to more flexibility in practice than is sometimes imagined of him. In the early 1970s he wrote this intriguing sentence:
The New Testament does not consider the anomaly when Christian men are incompetent, ill-prepared or unwilling to discharge the teaching ministry. In this anomalous situation it may well be that what is normal must give place to what is beneficial!
Knox was not, then, an absolutist in the sense that he holds that the principle he puts forward must be held whatever the circumstances. Recently, there was a programme on the ABC about the first Aboriginal woman ordained to the priesthood in the Diocese of the Northern Territory which provided just such a situation.
Those who oppose and criticise Sydney’s position on women’s ordination often resort to amateur psychology in order to demonstrate that this conviction about what Scripture teaches is unreal, or that it is a pretext for what amounts to the expression of a kind of collective psychopathy. This is rather typical of a kind of postmodern power-critique which cannot believe even what someone says about their own views and why they hold them. Its logic is reductive (‘you might say X, but really it is just because of Y’) and it proves nothing. After all, it is quite possible to believe the truth for the wrong reasons. Certainly, plain old sexism exists within the diocese of Sydney and this theology can be used as a pretext to justify it. But it is also the case that ordaining women to the priesthood and consecrating them as bishops has not eradicated misogyny either. The fact of the matter is that Sydney Anglicans are by and large people of conviction; and that this is their sincerely held conviction.
It is worth examining that convictional pattern just a little. The label ‘complementarian’ has been given to those who believe that there New Testament does place a restriction on roles for women in the church’s ministry. However, there are those who extrapolate from the evidence of the New Testament to a full theory of gender roles grounded in the creation perhaps in the very being of God himself. This is then a ‘thick’ description of complementarianism. A ‘thin’ complementarianism is wary of ontological statements and wants to uphold the profound equality of human beings expressed through the difference of roles indicated in Scripture. It would be accurate to say that most Sydney Anglicans are ‘thin’ complementarians in the sense that they don’t seek to import some view of the essential difference between men and women in the way that some American complementarians have. The risk of a ‘thin’ position is that it seems incomplete. It invites ‘thickening’. After all, as a broad cultural phenomenon we can see how fascinated people are with gender and how confused they are about manhood and womanhood. And yet, thickening the description of gender difference beyond the scope of Scripture may result in a coagulated mess.
The Anglican church has though been for most of its history a child of its British culture, and so habitually hierarchical and clericalised. When in the 1960s the laity were admitted to the public ministries of the church such as reading, praying, service leading and so on, evangelicals warmly endorsed the change as being truer to the gospel of Christ. In retrospect, it was inevitable that the question of the elevation of women to all the ministries of the church from which they had been up till that moment denied access would prove a more troublesome prospect. Unlike Anglo-Catholics, it was not because the priest had some special spiritual status by dint of his ordination. The argument that Christ only chose male apostles and therefore we ought only to ordain male priests carries precisely no weight with Sydney’s evangelicals, especially as for evangelicals it is not about presiding at the Eucharist. It is primarily because here was a matter on which Scripture is not silent.
There is a single text which is decisive on the issue in the Sydney Anglican way of thinking. 1 Tim 2:11-15 reads:
11 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.
This passage does not speak about ordination per se. The apostle here addresses a particular activity – the business of authoritative teaching in the gathering. And he differentiates between the roles he gives to men and women in this activity.
Applying the principles drawn from this verse to the particular forms of ministry that they have inherited, Sydney’s Anglicans have most usually chosen to restrict the role of ‘priest’ or ‘presbyter’ to men – since this role most closely matches the role of authoritative teacher.
But there is also a deeper, theological conviction about the nature of church itself that provides a back-drop to the Sydney Anglican teaching on this subject. It is, as Broughton Knox said, that ‘[T]he Christian congregation should reflect the structure of the Christian home.’ In a piece dated around 1973, Knox insisted that it was the context of ministry in the congregation that made gender such an important issue. There was nothing in terms of ability that might prevent a woman from carrying out any of the functions of the ministry. They were obviously no more or less than capable to lead services, celebrate communion, visit the sick and bury the dead than their brothers. But these ministries take place in a congregation which is not a business meeting or a social club but rather has the character of a family. In the New Testament, the ministers are appointed from among household leaders (1 Tim 3:1-12, Titus 1:5-6) and part of their qualification for leadership in the church is the effectiveness and integrity of their leadership in the home as husbands and fathers. The New Testament in several passages speaks about the relationship of husbands and wives, not naming an essential hierarchy between them, but depicting a pattern of leadership-through-service, and submission as a response.
At this point, Knox does speak of hierarchy and refers his readers to 1 Cor 11:7-11. He isn’t persuaded that this passage is merely a reflection of 1st century culture, ‘though the consequence of this principle will vary in different cultures’. There is an order outlined in this passage from God to Christ to man and thence to woman. Between the man and the woman, however, the order is marked by a thoroughgoing interdependence in a way in which you could not say that the divine is dependent on the human. The note of hierarchy is muted by a profound mutuality and equality. It is not an order which is exercised in ‘lording it’ and a corresponding servility but is rather marked by sacrificial service and response. This is what is known as, for want of a better word, ‘headship’.
Application of the principles of headship and submission in church order complicates things further. Within Sydney diocese, and even on the faculty of Moore College, there is quite a lot of difference of opinion on how these convictions might be expressed. Some would hesitate to have women lead services or mixed bible study groups. Others would be in favour of women preaching, though not as the rector of a parish. Since women were admitted to the order of deacon in 1987 and licenced to preach even before that some parishes have had female preaching in mixed congregations for close to three decades. To a greater or lesser extent, what needs to be realised is the inexact fit between the church of the first century and the Anglican church of the twenty-first - something we should have learnt from Richard Hooker in any case. Anglican ordination and contemporary church leadership models do not merely replicate or signify the same thing as the biblical practice. Unfortunately, there are those who do not notice this gap, and who assume that their application of the principle is a direct application of the teaching of Scripture. Knox himself admitted to more flexibility in practice than is sometimes imagined of him. In the early 1970s he wrote this intriguing sentence:
The New Testament does not consider the anomaly when Christian men are incompetent, ill-prepared or unwilling to discharge the teaching ministry. In this anomalous situation it may well be that what is normal must give place to what is beneficial!
Knox was not, then, an absolutist in the sense that he holds that the principle he puts forward must be held whatever the circumstances. Recently, there was a programme on the ABC about the first Aboriginal woman ordained to the priesthood in the Diocese of the Northern Territory which provided just such a situation.
Those who oppose and criticise Sydney’s position on women’s ordination often resort to amateur psychology in order to demonstrate that this conviction about what Scripture teaches is unreal, or that it is a pretext for what amounts to the expression of a kind of collective psychopathy. This is rather typical of a kind of postmodern power-critique which cannot believe even what someone says about their own views and why they hold them. Its logic is reductive (‘you might say X, but really it is just because of Y’) and it proves nothing. After all, it is quite possible to believe the truth for the wrong reasons. Certainly, plain old sexism exists within the diocese of Sydney and this theology can be used as a pretext to justify it. But it is also the case that ordaining women to the priesthood and consecrating them as bishops has not eradicated misogyny either. The fact of the matter is that Sydney Anglicans are by and large people of conviction; and that this is their sincerely held conviction.
It is worth examining that convictional pattern just a little. The label ‘complementarian’ has been given to those who believe that there New Testament does place a restriction on roles for women in the church’s ministry. However, there are those who extrapolate from the evidence of the New Testament to a full theory of gender roles grounded in the creation perhaps in the very being of God himself. This is then a ‘thick’ description of complementarianism. A ‘thin’ complementarianism is wary of ontological statements and wants to uphold the profound equality of human beings expressed through the difference of roles indicated in Scripture. It would be accurate to say that most Sydney Anglicans are ‘thin’ complementarians in the sense that they don’t seek to import some view of the essential difference between men and women in the way that some American complementarians have. The risk of a ‘thin’ position is that it seems incomplete. It invites ‘thickening’. After all, as a broad cultural phenomenon we can see how fascinated people are with gender and how confused they are about manhood and womanhood. And yet, thickening the description of gender difference beyond the scope of Scripture may result in a coagulated mess.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Theological Anthropology of Feelings/Emotions
For a paper on 'A Theological Anthropology of the Emotions/Feelings' ... what must I read?
Secular and Theological?
Secular and Theological?
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Only connect
When Peter Jensen – himself a convert from the ‘59 Billy Graham crusade - became Archbishop in 2001, he quickly announced that the first decade of the new millennium would be devoted to the proclamation of the gospel. He named a fanciful target – to have 10% of the population of Sydney in Bible-believing churches. The target was meant to be the catalyst for change in diocesan structures and to give energy to the parishes to be innovative and courageous. If the naming of the 10% target was often criticised, it was because it was frequently misunderstood.
Things did not go entirely according to plan. Looking back from the vantage point of 2010 it is apparent that change has been slow and momentum has been hard to gather. Devastating financial losses in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis have crippled much of the diocesan infrastructure. The most significant even of the past ten years has been the Connect ’09 mission. Planned to run exactly 50 years after Billy Graham’s first Sydney visit, it was almost the exact antithesis of that event. There was no ‘big’ overseas speaker brought in. There were no stadiums booked or mass events planned. Other than endorsement of the Bible Society’s Jesus –All About Life campaign, there was no mass media advertising. Distribution of the gospel of Luke in massive mubers was central to the strategy.
But in two ways Connect ’09 represented a shift in mentality – in the first instance back to the parishes and away from the centre, and second, from the gathered flock back to the community itself. ‘Connect’ was a brilliantly chosen slogan because it invited the parishes to start rebuilding the bridges that had been burnt in the 60s and 70s. It was not a strategy for revival on the old model – which depended in large part on a Christianised culture. A well-meaning nostalgia for those days was not going to make much headway in cynical post-Christendom Sydney. Instead, the emphasis was on community. The Executive Director of Connect ’09, Rev Andrew Nixon, wrote these telling words in 2008:
I spoke to a man the other day who does market research (focus groups and interviews) with a wide range of people: what they like and don’t like; what they think and feel about various things. He said that overwhelmingly what people want more than anything else is belonging: to fit in and be accepted; to have a role; to matter to other people. A place where they belong. Yet, he said, paradoxically, the places in society where people can find belonging – like tennis clubs, service clubs, churches, boy scouts and girl guides – are all in massive decline. It seems odd, but he swears it is true. We have bigger BBQs and TVs than ever before, and as we huddle round them we yearn for community; we yearn to belong…If what this man says is true, our suburbs are full of people who long deep down to have what we have. We belong to Christ our maker and we belong to one another as members of his body. By God’s grace we have ultimate belonging; the ultimate experience of community…It got me thinking: surely from those who are given much, much will be expected? How can we build that community beyond the doors of church and let it overflow into our streets and suburbs where it is so desperately needed?
The note of triumphalism is muted here, with recognition that the task of preaching the gospel in contemporary secular Australia is onerous. A ‘magic bullet’ approach of wheeling in the well-known overseas evangelist is not, humanly speaking, the way in which Australia will be reached with the gospel of Jesus.
The Connect ’09 strategy could represent a watershed moment in the Sydney diocese’s relationship to the community it lives to serve. It offers this potential in a number of ways. First of all, it hands the keys to the car back to the laity as the front-line of engagement with those outside the church. Clericalism was only ever going to be a saving strategy – it could never be a plan for growth. Connect ’09 liberated the parishioners of Sydney to think creatively about how they might reach their neighbours. This takes the pressure off the clergy of whom so much was expected and in whom so much was invested – and empowers them to be more effective.
Second, parishes were encouraged to see themselves as part of the local community and not merely separate from it. In many instances, the Anglican parish joins with the local primary school in being the last remaining non-commercial community organisation present in a suburb or town. The effects of contemporary urbanisation have wrought a devastating cost in social dislocation. Church buildings themselves stand against this tide – something which local communities themselves often recognise. The massive sandstone gothic of St Andrew’s Summer Hill was even adopted by the Ashfield council as its symbol for the area.
Third, the massive social welfare arm of the diocese, Anglicare, has been much better integrated with parishes. Instead of carrying the can for a social gospel against the prevailing theology of the diocese, Anglicare has been a remarkable engine of connection with the community at need, supporting the parishes of the diocese rather than working around them and even unbeknown to them. Co-operation with Moore College has also enabled some serious thinking to be done about community, social justice and care for the poor from within the convictional world of Sydney Anglicanism.
Fourth, Connect ’09 reminded Sydney Anglicans that the front line of ministry is always the parish church. The focus on the central institution has an unreality about it that is countered by the flesh and blood presence of the communities of God’s people dotted throughout the vast urban area. It is here that the gospel of Jesus Christ touches down and starts to make sense to those who do not yet know him. The gospel as it is embodied in the lives of those who believe it can be seen week by week in the gatherings of God’s people.
Fifth, Connect ’09 asks some challenging theological questions. It demands a recalibration of Sydney’s theological convictions to suit the requirements of mission in the contemporary world. As always, Sydney Anglicanism’s theological leaders will not abandon their commitment to the authority of Scripture or to the centrality of the blood of Christ given for sins. However, as Archbishop Jensen pointed out in his 2010 Synod address, a robust theological anthropology is required for the new day. The rise of a militant ‘new’ atheism has exposed some thorny theological problems, such as the nature of faith in its relationship to reason. The changing world demands an ecclesiology that is more porous and less defensive. If Sydney Anglicans are genuinely to connect with their neighbours, they will have to realise the complexity of the task of conveying the gospel message to them.
Despite all these promising signs, the challenge remains for Sydney Anglicans: will they be able to overcome the defensiveness that has marked their stance on public issues over the last few decades and move onto a more positive and even prophetic footing? Can they relate to the media not as another group determined to mark out its territory and defend its right to exist but as a community genuinely committed to the public good? Can they behave in public as if they really do believe in the supreme Lordship of Christ and that they have nothing to fear? If their gospel is the power and wisdom of God himself, then there is no need to act from insecurity. If fear is the basis from which Sydney Anglicans speak then they will find themselves talking only to each other and becoming increasingly incomprehensible to those on the outside.
To be a genuinely gospel-centred church engaged with the civil body-politic is not as straightforward as it sounds. However, the martyrs of the early church demonstrate that it is possible to stand fearlessly and loyally before Caesar’s representative and witness truly for Jesus Christ. This was possibly the most effective mission strategy ever devised.
Things did not go entirely according to plan. Looking back from the vantage point of 2010 it is apparent that change has been slow and momentum has been hard to gather. Devastating financial losses in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis have crippled much of the diocesan infrastructure. The most significant even of the past ten years has been the Connect ’09 mission. Planned to run exactly 50 years after Billy Graham’s first Sydney visit, it was almost the exact antithesis of that event. There was no ‘big’ overseas speaker brought in. There were no stadiums booked or mass events planned. Other than endorsement of the Bible Society’s Jesus –All About Life campaign, there was no mass media advertising. Distribution of the gospel of Luke in massive mubers was central to the strategy.
But in two ways Connect ’09 represented a shift in mentality – in the first instance back to the parishes and away from the centre, and second, from the gathered flock back to the community itself. ‘Connect’ was a brilliantly chosen slogan because it invited the parishes to start rebuilding the bridges that had been burnt in the 60s and 70s. It was not a strategy for revival on the old model – which depended in large part on a Christianised culture. A well-meaning nostalgia for those days was not going to make much headway in cynical post-Christendom Sydney. Instead, the emphasis was on community. The Executive Director of Connect ’09, Rev Andrew Nixon, wrote these telling words in 2008:
I spoke to a man the other day who does market research (focus groups and interviews) with a wide range of people: what they like and don’t like; what they think and feel about various things. He said that overwhelmingly what people want more than anything else is belonging: to fit in and be accepted; to have a role; to matter to other people. A place where they belong. Yet, he said, paradoxically, the places in society where people can find belonging – like tennis clubs, service clubs, churches, boy scouts and girl guides – are all in massive decline. It seems odd, but he swears it is true. We have bigger BBQs and TVs than ever before, and as we huddle round them we yearn for community; we yearn to belong…If what this man says is true, our suburbs are full of people who long deep down to have what we have. We belong to Christ our maker and we belong to one another as members of his body. By God’s grace we have ultimate belonging; the ultimate experience of community…It got me thinking: surely from those who are given much, much will be expected? How can we build that community beyond the doors of church and let it overflow into our streets and suburbs where it is so desperately needed?
The note of triumphalism is muted here, with recognition that the task of preaching the gospel in contemporary secular Australia is onerous. A ‘magic bullet’ approach of wheeling in the well-known overseas evangelist is not, humanly speaking, the way in which Australia will be reached with the gospel of Jesus.
The Connect ’09 strategy could represent a watershed moment in the Sydney diocese’s relationship to the community it lives to serve. It offers this potential in a number of ways. First of all, it hands the keys to the car back to the laity as the front-line of engagement with those outside the church. Clericalism was only ever going to be a saving strategy – it could never be a plan for growth. Connect ’09 liberated the parishioners of Sydney to think creatively about how they might reach their neighbours. This takes the pressure off the clergy of whom so much was expected and in whom so much was invested – and empowers them to be more effective.
Second, parishes were encouraged to see themselves as part of the local community and not merely separate from it. In many instances, the Anglican parish joins with the local primary school in being the last remaining non-commercial community organisation present in a suburb or town. The effects of contemporary urbanisation have wrought a devastating cost in social dislocation. Church buildings themselves stand against this tide – something which local communities themselves often recognise. The massive sandstone gothic of St Andrew’s Summer Hill was even adopted by the Ashfield council as its symbol for the area.
Third, the massive social welfare arm of the diocese, Anglicare, has been much better integrated with parishes. Instead of carrying the can for a social gospel against the prevailing theology of the diocese, Anglicare has been a remarkable engine of connection with the community at need, supporting the parishes of the diocese rather than working around them and even unbeknown to them. Co-operation with Moore College has also enabled some serious thinking to be done about community, social justice and care for the poor from within the convictional world of Sydney Anglicanism.
Fourth, Connect ’09 reminded Sydney Anglicans that the front line of ministry is always the parish church. The focus on the central institution has an unreality about it that is countered by the flesh and blood presence of the communities of God’s people dotted throughout the vast urban area. It is here that the gospel of Jesus Christ touches down and starts to make sense to those who do not yet know him. The gospel as it is embodied in the lives of those who believe it can be seen week by week in the gatherings of God’s people.
Fifth, Connect ’09 asks some challenging theological questions. It demands a recalibration of Sydney’s theological convictions to suit the requirements of mission in the contemporary world. As always, Sydney Anglicanism’s theological leaders will not abandon their commitment to the authority of Scripture or to the centrality of the blood of Christ given for sins. However, as Archbishop Jensen pointed out in his 2010 Synod address, a robust theological anthropology is required for the new day. The rise of a militant ‘new’ atheism has exposed some thorny theological problems, such as the nature of faith in its relationship to reason. The changing world demands an ecclesiology that is more porous and less defensive. If Sydney Anglicans are genuinely to connect with their neighbours, they will have to realise the complexity of the task of conveying the gospel message to them.
Despite all these promising signs, the challenge remains for Sydney Anglicans: will they be able to overcome the defensiveness that has marked their stance on public issues over the last few decades and move onto a more positive and even prophetic footing? Can they relate to the media not as another group determined to mark out its territory and defend its right to exist but as a community genuinely committed to the public good? Can they behave in public as if they really do believe in the supreme Lordship of Christ and that they have nothing to fear? If their gospel is the power and wisdom of God himself, then there is no need to act from insecurity. If fear is the basis from which Sydney Anglicans speak then they will find themselves talking only to each other and becoming increasingly incomprehensible to those on the outside.
To be a genuinely gospel-centred church engaged with the civil body-politic is not as straightforward as it sounds. However, the martyrs of the early church demonstrate that it is possible to stand fearlessly and loyally before Caesar’s representative and witness truly for Jesus Christ. This was possibly the most effective mission strategy ever devised.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Beyond Big Billy
Bill Lawton’s real (if not explicitly argued) insight is that an emphasis on a discontinuous and futurist eschatology has had an impact on the way in which Anglicans from Sydney have responded to the rising tide of secularism since the 1960s – a period which does indeed have some strong echoes of the late 19th century. In between these two eras was the high-water mark of church influence in Australian, and in Sydney especially. In the midst of the Great Depression Sydney Anglicans like the extraordinary Rev R.B.S. Hammond at St Barnabas’ Broadway distinguished themselves in remarkable service of the poor. The 1950s in particular was a time in which Australian society seemed more congenial to the influence of the church than it had previously.
This was demonstrated by the dramatic impact of the Billy Graham crusade of 1959 – an event which had all the appearance of the dawn of a new glorious age of Christian social influence through the work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of thousands of people who went forward in Sydney and Melbourne. More than 130,000 people made a commitment to Christ – a figure which represents nearly 2% of the Australian population at the time. Evangelical historian Stuart Piggin makes the case from the figures of the Australian Bureau of Statistics to show that there was a drop in alcohol consumption, extra-marital births and crime statistics during that time – signs as far as he is concerned that here was a genuine revival. Yet what looked like the herald of the new day turned out to be the evening star. The Graham crusade, at which a generation of the diocese of Sydney’s future leadership encountered Jesus Christ himself in a profound and life-changing way, coincided with a renewed impetus for secularisation and liberalisation in Australian society.
It would be impossible to understate the scale of the social changes that have occurred in a single generation, and which have direct impact on the church’s relationship with society. Anglicanism carries within its DNA an expectation that it is part of the social order and that it contributes to social cohesion. And yet along with other institutions that played this role in the old Australia, the church’s influence was now under attack. Australia’s development as a society of leisure had a lot to do with it – whereas once the churches were the hub of the local community’s social life, there were now many alternative way to make use of the freedom afforded by Sunday. The sexual liberation and the rise of feminism have been well-documented to the point of cliché. Successively, the churches failed to halt changes to laws providing for Sunday trading, no-fault divorce, later pub closing times, more gambling and casinos, the right abortion, rights for de facto marriages, homosexual practice and the removal of censorship. Whereas once the local media took a respectful interest in church affairs and sought the opinion of the clergy, it now could and wanted to tell a different story: of the decline and fall of a once mighty and vibrant institution. Attendance at church dropped away; though, somewhat mysteriously, belief in Christian teachings did not.
Observing this rapid loss of influence, it is not surprising that the churches feel somewhat besieged. They cannot keep the society Christianised, so they have sought to maintain their own identity and to negotiate their right to exist within the new social framework. Sydney Anglicans are not unique in this. Along with other churches they have sought to maintain their right to freedom from anti-discrimination laws. The vehement opposition of church groups to the proposal for a Bill of Rights under the Rudd government (2007-09) was largely because of the fear that the Bill of Rights would represent an opportunity for secularists to place churches under the anti-discrimination laws. Instead of considering what an opportunity for good the affirmation of human rights might mean for the vulnerable, the churches bemoaned the potential loss of their own privileged separation.
But Sydney Anglicans have not been inert in those decades. Far from it: they have pursued their understanding of mission with extraordinary vigour in those times. Sydney Anglicans faced their loss of social influence in the law and in the running of people’s workaday lives by reminding each other that that this was not what the call to make disciples of all nations meant anyhow. Perhaps more quickly than other Anglicans, these evangelical Anglicans realised that they depended on a divine work for the transformation of individuals. They did not become more politicised, but less. Where other Anglicans jumped on the bandwagon of progressivist social change, Sydney Anglicans saw this as craven capitulation to the spirit of the age. They did not pursue a reactionary politics, however. They pinned their hopes on evangelism and building the church through recruiting a generation of clergy.
Billy Graham was invited back in 1968 and 1979 and his brother-in-law Leighton Ford in 198? in an effort to recapture the atmosphere of the halcyon days of ‘59. These crusades were in themselves indicators of just how much had changed in a few short years. Whereas in 1959 the organisers could bus in thousands of nominal church-goers in hats and gloves, in 1968 and 1979 this was no longer a reality. In 1959 youth groups were full of young people for whom confirmation or baptism was a rite of passage. Only the children of church-goers remained by the 1970s. The conversions of 1959 had not arrested the slide into de-christianisation. The evangelists were now coming to a society for whom church involvement was a fading memory. Baptisms, church weddings and funerals conducted by clergy would in time become exceptions rather than the habit of Sydneysiders.
Sydney Anglicans pursued another strategy with better success – university ministry. This was not new for evangelical Anglicans of course - their presence at the leading British universities through the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now the UCCF) was longstanding. The Sydney University Evangelical Union had long been the recruiting ground for Sydney Anglican leaders, lay and clerical. By the early 1970s, however, the EU had become distracted by a variety of social causes and had lost numbers. At the University of New South Wales, however, the new chaplain, Phillip Jensen, was beginning a remarkable ministry of evangelism, bible exposition and recruitment for ministry which would reach its height by the early 1990s. By the late 1980s, the Sydney University EU had likewise experienced a remarkable renovation of purpose, with evangelistic missions in 1977, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1989 and 1991 (check EU website). The national student movement, AFES, rapidly came to be dominated by graduates of the UNSW programmes. Moore College’s numbers doubled in a decade. That this occurred when churches everywhere – and especially Anglican churches elsewhere in Australia – were in rapid decline made the achievement all the more remarkable.
The fundamental principle of this new strategy was the priority of gospel work over and against ‘ordinary’ work. The key to the advancement of the gospel in the secular age was to recruit young people for full-time ministry from the university campuses. Put in nineteenth century terms, the emphasis was on clerical rather than on lay ministry. The Ministry Training Scheme (MTS) invited young university graduates to embark on a two-year ministry apprenticeship at the university prior to theological training. This trainee period would prove to be the formative experience for a generation of Anglican clergy, university workers and missionaries – diminishing the impact of Moore College somewhat in the process.
As a scheme for ensuring the evangelical character and the strength of churches and other institutions it was, and continues to be, very successful. It produced competent, energetic and well-trained clergy and church leaders with a clear sense of what to do. Other theological colleges around the country relied on handfuls of part-time students and middle-aged ordinands. Sydney’s ordinands were well under that median age and had signed up for a life time of arduous work in the Lord’s vineyards. It was a less obviously successful strategy for evangelising a nation. It produced churches that were (and are) well taught, but by making the paid minister the focus it disempowered the best evangelistic asset that the church had – the laity.
An underlying eschatology of separation was to blame. Valuing gospel over secular work was a decision for the eternal rather than the ephemeral – because ‘the time is short’ (1 Cor 7). 2 Peter 3 was a passage often invoked in this regard – explained as a description of the coming destruction of the heavens and the earth. This theology had enormous power as a critique of middle-class idolatry of careers in the hothouse environment of the university campus. However it served less well as a theology to help Christian people who actually had to work for a living. The contrast between clerical and lay vocations had not been as starkly drawn since the monastic movement in the medieval period.
Christianity in Australia has never been as politicised as it is in the USA or even in the UK. There are obvious exceptions such as Daniel Mannix (dates), Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne for much of the 20th century, who openly intervened in political debates amid much controversy. But he is the exception that proves the rule. The relatively quietistic approach of Sydney Anglicans then should not be seen in isolation from that broader cultural pattern. Yet it is still the case that Sydney Anglicans find a particular basis for non-intervention in their theological understanding of the world. The transformation of the community at large is a happy by-product of preaching of the gospel for which thanks and praise ought to be given to God. It is certainly a proof of the truth of the gospel that it ‘works’ as a lifestyle. But the Christian task is to preach the gospel first and foremost as a matter of eschatological urgency. Social transformation is only ever a stopgap solution. Though Sydney Anglicans were prominent in the Lausanne movement which declared in 1974 that pursuit of social justice was not incompatible with preaching the gospel, they were not enthusiastic for political and social ends. They were in fact strong critics of a kind of Christianity that denied the pressing claims of the coming end of all things and instead become a social gospel.
Australia’s political culture is robustly democratic and so a quietist stance is not in itself problematic for the most part. Other groups tend to take up the cudgels against social injustices, and there are few issues in which the lines are sharply drawn. However, the cost of this passivity can be observed in the history of the Church of England in South Africa, with whom the diocese of Sydney has had historic links. CESA was not a racist church and it has long had black and white South African bishops. It did not provide a theological justification for the apartheid policies of the South African government. However, in the aftermath of the apartheid years, Bishop Frank Retief of CESA made this submission, in 1997, to a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission:
...when the government made legislation that accorded with our moral or biblical understanding, we supported them. However, on the great issue of justice for all, we were often insensitive. We had not made the connection between gospel and society…We were witnesses to how the Bible and its message can be misused to support an evil ideology. National government used the Bible to support its policies, to give the impression that they were a Christian government. But then so did some liberation theologians who finally supported violence as a means of continuing the struggle…Where we have been negligent, careless and insensitive to biblical injunctions and mandates as we have been, may the Lord graciously forgive us….The fact that the Bible was used in the past to condone injustice does not mean its true message may be ignored today…It is our belief that this day and hour calls for men and women of conviction and integrity to apply the message of the Bible more accurately and faithfully to our emerging society…
This is a courageous, impressive and moving statement from a cousin of the Sydney diocese recognising that the strategy of political withdrawal was a mistake for biblical Christians in South Africa, but recognising also that it was not the Bible itself that was to blame. Retief’s theological convictions are the same as Sydney’s, and he has often spoken in the pulpits of Sydney. What he notes here - and the message that Sydney needs - is that the theology of eschatological deferment runs the risk of becoming unable to say anything about the presence of a real evil.
This was demonstrated by the dramatic impact of the Billy Graham crusade of 1959 – an event which had all the appearance of the dawn of a new glorious age of Christian social influence through the work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of thousands of people who went forward in Sydney and Melbourne. More than 130,000 people made a commitment to Christ – a figure which represents nearly 2% of the Australian population at the time. Evangelical historian Stuart Piggin makes the case from the figures of the Australian Bureau of Statistics to show that there was a drop in alcohol consumption, extra-marital births and crime statistics during that time – signs as far as he is concerned that here was a genuine revival. Yet what looked like the herald of the new day turned out to be the evening star. The Graham crusade, at which a generation of the diocese of Sydney’s future leadership encountered Jesus Christ himself in a profound and life-changing way, coincided with a renewed impetus for secularisation and liberalisation in Australian society.
It would be impossible to understate the scale of the social changes that have occurred in a single generation, and which have direct impact on the church’s relationship with society. Anglicanism carries within its DNA an expectation that it is part of the social order and that it contributes to social cohesion. And yet along with other institutions that played this role in the old Australia, the church’s influence was now under attack. Australia’s development as a society of leisure had a lot to do with it – whereas once the churches were the hub of the local community’s social life, there were now many alternative way to make use of the freedom afforded by Sunday. The sexual liberation and the rise of feminism have been well-documented to the point of cliché. Successively, the churches failed to halt changes to laws providing for Sunday trading, no-fault divorce, later pub closing times, more gambling and casinos, the right abortion, rights for de facto marriages, homosexual practice and the removal of censorship. Whereas once the local media took a respectful interest in church affairs and sought the opinion of the clergy, it now could and wanted to tell a different story: of the decline and fall of a once mighty and vibrant institution. Attendance at church dropped away; though, somewhat mysteriously, belief in Christian teachings did not.
Observing this rapid loss of influence, it is not surprising that the churches feel somewhat besieged. They cannot keep the society Christianised, so they have sought to maintain their own identity and to negotiate their right to exist within the new social framework. Sydney Anglicans are not unique in this. Along with other churches they have sought to maintain their right to freedom from anti-discrimination laws. The vehement opposition of church groups to the proposal for a Bill of Rights under the Rudd government (2007-09) was largely because of the fear that the Bill of Rights would represent an opportunity for secularists to place churches under the anti-discrimination laws. Instead of considering what an opportunity for good the affirmation of human rights might mean for the vulnerable, the churches bemoaned the potential loss of their own privileged separation.
But Sydney Anglicans have not been inert in those decades. Far from it: they have pursued their understanding of mission with extraordinary vigour in those times. Sydney Anglicans faced their loss of social influence in the law and in the running of people’s workaday lives by reminding each other that that this was not what the call to make disciples of all nations meant anyhow. Perhaps more quickly than other Anglicans, these evangelical Anglicans realised that they depended on a divine work for the transformation of individuals. They did not become more politicised, but less. Where other Anglicans jumped on the bandwagon of progressivist social change, Sydney Anglicans saw this as craven capitulation to the spirit of the age. They did not pursue a reactionary politics, however. They pinned their hopes on evangelism and building the church through recruiting a generation of clergy.
Billy Graham was invited back in 1968 and 1979 and his brother-in-law Leighton Ford in 198? in an effort to recapture the atmosphere of the halcyon days of ‘59. These crusades were in themselves indicators of just how much had changed in a few short years. Whereas in 1959 the organisers could bus in thousands of nominal church-goers in hats and gloves, in 1968 and 1979 this was no longer a reality. In 1959 youth groups were full of young people for whom confirmation or baptism was a rite of passage. Only the children of church-goers remained by the 1970s. The conversions of 1959 had not arrested the slide into de-christianisation. The evangelists were now coming to a society for whom church involvement was a fading memory. Baptisms, church weddings and funerals conducted by clergy would in time become exceptions rather than the habit of Sydneysiders.
Sydney Anglicans pursued another strategy with better success – university ministry. This was not new for evangelical Anglicans of course - their presence at the leading British universities through the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now the UCCF) was longstanding. The Sydney University Evangelical Union had long been the recruiting ground for Sydney Anglican leaders, lay and clerical. By the early 1970s, however, the EU had become distracted by a variety of social causes and had lost numbers. At the University of New South Wales, however, the new chaplain, Phillip Jensen, was beginning a remarkable ministry of evangelism, bible exposition and recruitment for ministry which would reach its height by the early 1990s. By the late 1980s, the Sydney University EU had likewise experienced a remarkable renovation of purpose, with evangelistic missions in 1977, 1980, 1981, 1984, 1989 and 1991 (check EU website). The national student movement, AFES, rapidly came to be dominated by graduates of the UNSW programmes. Moore College’s numbers doubled in a decade. That this occurred when churches everywhere – and especially Anglican churches elsewhere in Australia – were in rapid decline made the achievement all the more remarkable.
The fundamental principle of this new strategy was the priority of gospel work over and against ‘ordinary’ work. The key to the advancement of the gospel in the secular age was to recruit young people for full-time ministry from the university campuses. Put in nineteenth century terms, the emphasis was on clerical rather than on lay ministry. The Ministry Training Scheme (MTS) invited young university graduates to embark on a two-year ministry apprenticeship at the university prior to theological training. This trainee period would prove to be the formative experience for a generation of Anglican clergy, university workers and missionaries – diminishing the impact of Moore College somewhat in the process.
As a scheme for ensuring the evangelical character and the strength of churches and other institutions it was, and continues to be, very successful. It produced competent, energetic and well-trained clergy and church leaders with a clear sense of what to do. Other theological colleges around the country relied on handfuls of part-time students and middle-aged ordinands. Sydney’s ordinands were well under that median age and had signed up for a life time of arduous work in the Lord’s vineyards. It was a less obviously successful strategy for evangelising a nation. It produced churches that were (and are) well taught, but by making the paid minister the focus it disempowered the best evangelistic asset that the church had – the laity.
An underlying eschatology of separation was to blame. Valuing gospel over secular work was a decision for the eternal rather than the ephemeral – because ‘the time is short’ (1 Cor 7). 2 Peter 3 was a passage often invoked in this regard – explained as a description of the coming destruction of the heavens and the earth. This theology had enormous power as a critique of middle-class idolatry of careers in the hothouse environment of the university campus. However it served less well as a theology to help Christian people who actually had to work for a living. The contrast between clerical and lay vocations had not been as starkly drawn since the monastic movement in the medieval period.
Christianity in Australia has never been as politicised as it is in the USA or even in the UK. There are obvious exceptions such as Daniel Mannix (dates), Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne for much of the 20th century, who openly intervened in political debates amid much controversy. But he is the exception that proves the rule. The relatively quietistic approach of Sydney Anglicans then should not be seen in isolation from that broader cultural pattern. Yet it is still the case that Sydney Anglicans find a particular basis for non-intervention in their theological understanding of the world. The transformation of the community at large is a happy by-product of preaching of the gospel for which thanks and praise ought to be given to God. It is certainly a proof of the truth of the gospel that it ‘works’ as a lifestyle. But the Christian task is to preach the gospel first and foremost as a matter of eschatological urgency. Social transformation is only ever a stopgap solution. Though Sydney Anglicans were prominent in the Lausanne movement which declared in 1974 that pursuit of social justice was not incompatible with preaching the gospel, they were not enthusiastic for political and social ends. They were in fact strong critics of a kind of Christianity that denied the pressing claims of the coming end of all things and instead become a social gospel.
Australia’s political culture is robustly democratic and so a quietist stance is not in itself problematic for the most part. Other groups tend to take up the cudgels against social injustices, and there are few issues in which the lines are sharply drawn. However, the cost of this passivity can be observed in the history of the Church of England in South Africa, with whom the diocese of Sydney has had historic links. CESA was not a racist church and it has long had black and white South African bishops. It did not provide a theological justification for the apartheid policies of the South African government. However, in the aftermath of the apartheid years, Bishop Frank Retief of CESA made this submission, in 1997, to a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission:
...when the government made legislation that accorded with our moral or biblical understanding, we supported them. However, on the great issue of justice for all, we were often insensitive. We had not made the connection between gospel and society…We were witnesses to how the Bible and its message can be misused to support an evil ideology. National government used the Bible to support its policies, to give the impression that they were a Christian government. But then so did some liberation theologians who finally supported violence as a means of continuing the struggle…Where we have been negligent, careless and insensitive to biblical injunctions and mandates as we have been, may the Lord graciously forgive us….The fact that the Bible was used in the past to condone injustice does not mean its true message may be ignored today…It is our belief that this day and hour calls for men and women of conviction and integrity to apply the message of the Bible more accurately and faithfully to our emerging society…
This is a courageous, impressive and moving statement from a cousin of the Sydney diocese recognising that the strategy of political withdrawal was a mistake for biblical Christians in South Africa, but recognising also that it was not the Bible itself that was to blame. Retief’s theological convictions are the same as Sydney’s, and he has often spoken in the pulpits of Sydney. What he notes here - and the message that Sydney needs - is that the theology of eschatological deferment runs the risk of becoming unable to say anything about the presence of a real evil.
Friday, November 12, 2010
A holy huddle?
To proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in brutal old Sydney town has never been easy. The second chaplain to the colony, Samuel Marsden, became known as ‘the flogging parson’ because of his over-zealous administration of his weekday duties as magistrate. Despite his evident enthusiasm to preach the good news in New South Wales and also in New Zealand, he became perhaps not unreasonably diverted by the task of building and maintaining social order in a hostile and fragile environment.
His successors likewise felt the combination of inertia and hostility to the gospel wearisome. In his study of Sydney Anglicanism from 1885 to 1914, former lecturer at Moore College Bill Lawton argued that the Sydney Anglicans of that period felt under pressure from the advance of secularism. In this period, churchmen noted and bemoaned the loss of respect for Sabbath observation, the prevalence of drunkenness and threats to traditional patterns of marriage as symptomatic of the decline in the church’s influence on social order. In response to this felt crisis, Lawton argued that local Anglican leaders such as the then Principal of Moore College the Welshman Nathanael Jones came to focus their attention not on society but on the ‘little flock’ – the small gathering of believers who were waiting deliverance from the trials and tribulations of the world. They were influenced in this by the Brethrenism and revivalism characteristic of the evangelicalism of the period. As Lawton writes:
The religion of these evangelicals was essentially introspective and futurist, fearful of the social and ideological changes taking place around them. Intuitionism combined with millennialism to inhibit their developing a coherent social theory. By concentrating exclusively on ends and goals, Moore College fashioned a clergy whose sole task was to interpret the mind of God to the people of God, but who failed to interpret that mind to a secularised society.
If the choice was between accommodation and retreat, then retreat was certainly preferable.
For Lawton, the teaching about the last things – eschatology – explains the increasing defensiveness of local church pronouncements on social issues. Eschatology inevitably leads to questions about the nature of present social order and the role of the Christian church in it. Jones and others taught a form of premillennialism shaped by the thought of the well know Irish preacher John Nelson Darby (1800-82). For Darby, Scripture was an essentially prophetic book which describes humanity as being progressively dealt with by God in a series of ‘dispensations’. Each dispensation begins with a divinely appointed task that comes with a promise of blessing, and ends with an act of divine judgement. In the present dispensation, that of the church, we are to live following the judgement of God on Israel for its hardness of heart and in the light of the expectation that God will restore the kingdom to Israel. The task of the Christian evangelist is to call people out of the fallen and disgraced world and into the church – to become one of the truly converted, spiritual gathering of believers. Failing to keep society Christian by legal means or by persuasion in the press, the evangelicals prayed for the coming of revival instead.
A case study from this period was the church’s response to the Divorce Extension Bills which were proposals for liberalising the divorce laws. While in 1886 there was intense debate about the issue of divorce, but the late 1880s, the local churchmen seemed to have retreated. Society’s unwillingness to respond to the Bible’s authority on this issue seemed to take the wind out of their sails. The intervention of the clergy on this matter had not endeared them to the public:
The daily press, and particularly the Sydney Morning Herald, responded at first cautiously and deferentially but soon editorials began a hostile attack on the churchmen’s lack of compassion and their legalistic concern for semantics.
The advancing tide of secularism was met by an attempt to use the law as instrument to bring about conformity to the will of God. However when it became apparent that a gap was opening up between Christian standards and the standards of the society at large, Anglicans turned their attention back to the ‘little flock’ as a community where divine law could certainly be maintained.
Lawton the historian writes:
Sydney evangelical Anglicanism drew upon the Brethren doctrines of the church as ‘gathered community’ and Bible as a record of unfulfilled prophecy. The denomination developed a futurist eschatology in which the local ‘gathered’ community of Christians was seen as the proleptic expression of the heavenly Church.
But this is also evidence of Lawton the contemporary (1987) churchman and commentator. Throughout his book Lawton shows himself convinced that this pattern of retreat and defence against the rising tide of secularism driven by a certain eschatology and ecclesiology is characteristic of present day Sydney Anglicanism. His clear purpose is not merely antiquarian interest but critique of the present by uncovering a genealogy of theological ideas and tribal instincts. Unfortunately, he makes this case only by inference and not so much by evidence. In order to be convincing, he would have to show that even though pre-millennial theology and holiness movement piety from Sydney Anglicanism since at least the 1950s has completely faded, their impress on the Sydney Anglican mindset is still in evidence. A former longtime lecturer at Moore College, Lawton doesn’t carry out this tracing of connections explicitly – probably because of the deep personal regard he felt for Broughton Knox and others. The lines of connection between the two phases of Sydney Anglican history are not simple and are drawn here over six decades or more. Yet the relationship of eschatology to a theological understanding of the world is a connection still very much in evidence.
His successors likewise felt the combination of inertia and hostility to the gospel wearisome. In his study of Sydney Anglicanism from 1885 to 1914, former lecturer at Moore College Bill Lawton argued that the Sydney Anglicans of that period felt under pressure from the advance of secularism. In this period, churchmen noted and bemoaned the loss of respect for Sabbath observation, the prevalence of drunkenness and threats to traditional patterns of marriage as symptomatic of the decline in the church’s influence on social order. In response to this felt crisis, Lawton argued that local Anglican leaders such as the then Principal of Moore College the Welshman Nathanael Jones came to focus their attention not on society but on the ‘little flock’ – the small gathering of believers who were waiting deliverance from the trials and tribulations of the world. They were influenced in this by the Brethrenism and revivalism characteristic of the evangelicalism of the period. As Lawton writes:
The religion of these evangelicals was essentially introspective and futurist, fearful of the social and ideological changes taking place around them. Intuitionism combined with millennialism to inhibit their developing a coherent social theory. By concentrating exclusively on ends and goals, Moore College fashioned a clergy whose sole task was to interpret the mind of God to the people of God, but who failed to interpret that mind to a secularised society.
If the choice was between accommodation and retreat, then retreat was certainly preferable.
For Lawton, the teaching about the last things – eschatology – explains the increasing defensiveness of local church pronouncements on social issues. Eschatology inevitably leads to questions about the nature of present social order and the role of the Christian church in it. Jones and others taught a form of premillennialism shaped by the thought of the well know Irish preacher John Nelson Darby (1800-82). For Darby, Scripture was an essentially prophetic book which describes humanity as being progressively dealt with by God in a series of ‘dispensations’. Each dispensation begins with a divinely appointed task that comes with a promise of blessing, and ends with an act of divine judgement. In the present dispensation, that of the church, we are to live following the judgement of God on Israel for its hardness of heart and in the light of the expectation that God will restore the kingdom to Israel. The task of the Christian evangelist is to call people out of the fallen and disgraced world and into the church – to become one of the truly converted, spiritual gathering of believers. Failing to keep society Christian by legal means or by persuasion in the press, the evangelicals prayed for the coming of revival instead.
A case study from this period was the church’s response to the Divorce Extension Bills which were proposals for liberalising the divorce laws. While in 1886 there was intense debate about the issue of divorce, but the late 1880s, the local churchmen seemed to have retreated. Society’s unwillingness to respond to the Bible’s authority on this issue seemed to take the wind out of their sails. The intervention of the clergy on this matter had not endeared them to the public:
The daily press, and particularly the Sydney Morning Herald, responded at first cautiously and deferentially but soon editorials began a hostile attack on the churchmen’s lack of compassion and their legalistic concern for semantics.
The advancing tide of secularism was met by an attempt to use the law as instrument to bring about conformity to the will of God. However when it became apparent that a gap was opening up between Christian standards and the standards of the society at large, Anglicans turned their attention back to the ‘little flock’ as a community where divine law could certainly be maintained.
Lawton the historian writes:
Sydney evangelical Anglicanism drew upon the Brethren doctrines of the church as ‘gathered community’ and Bible as a record of unfulfilled prophecy. The denomination developed a futurist eschatology in which the local ‘gathered’ community of Christians was seen as the proleptic expression of the heavenly Church.
But this is also evidence of Lawton the contemporary (1987) churchman and commentator. Throughout his book Lawton shows himself convinced that this pattern of retreat and defence against the rising tide of secularism driven by a certain eschatology and ecclesiology is characteristic of present day Sydney Anglicanism. His clear purpose is not merely antiquarian interest but critique of the present by uncovering a genealogy of theological ideas and tribal instincts. Unfortunately, he makes this case only by inference and not so much by evidence. In order to be convincing, he would have to show that even though pre-millennial theology and holiness movement piety from Sydney Anglicanism since at least the 1950s has completely faded, their impress on the Sydney Anglican mindset is still in evidence. A former longtime lecturer at Moore College, Lawton doesn’t carry out this tracing of connections explicitly – probably because of the deep personal regard he felt for Broughton Knox and others. The lines of connection between the two phases of Sydney Anglican history are not simple and are drawn here over six decades or more. Yet the relationship of eschatology to a theological understanding of the world is a connection still very much in evidence.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Nicholas Taylor on Lay Presidency
Opposition to Sydney’s proposal for lay presidency has been extremely strong from other parts of the Anglican world – even from churches who are allied with Sydney in the GAFCON movement. This proposal seems to be a step too far for many Anglicans.
An Anglican priest working in South Africa, Nicholas H. Taylor has written a substantial and sophisticated response to the proposal for lay presidency titled Lay Presidency at the Eucharist? An Anglican Approach. It has to be said that the depth and seriousness of Taylor’s book rather outweigh the short polemical pieces and committee papers that have been offered by those advocating lay administration. He offers an extensive and nuanced discussion of the nature of authority in Anglicanism and on the whole gives a careful exposition of the case for lay administration before countering it with his own.
Two features of his argument mar it, however. The first is that he attempts to say what ‘Anglican’ is, but can only do so by making his own, more Catholic interpretation of the Lord’s Supper paradigmatic for all Anglican practice. The problem comes when you romanticise the Anglican compromise as a wonderful synthesis, instead of acknowledging that the ambiguity in the formularies made possible, within the same ecclesiastical structure, the presence of two mutually exclusive views of the Eucharist; and that the fragility of this compromise meant that it resolved nothing, and was always going to fall apart at some point. Taylor is unable to acknowledge the legitimate and continuous presence of the alternative reading of the sacraments in the Anglican tradition, and fails to argue against it on its own terms. What he discovers is only that the Anglican evangelical view of the sacraments is not the same as the Anglo-Catholic one. We knew this already.
Second, though Taylor is for the most part a model of scholarly dispassion, when he comes to engaging with the diocese of Sydney he is unable to contain himself and slips in to a polemic which verges on nastiness. He calls Sydney ‘an ultra-Protestant fringe of Anglicanism’ whose ‘interpretations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer may alike be tendentious, and account of the historically somewhat liminal place this diocese has taken in the Anglican Communion, and even in the Anglican Church of Australia.’ The word ‘liminal’ – a word Taylor repeats - is the strange one here. Does he mean by it ‘barely perceptible’, or ‘a transitory state’? In any case, it is clear that Taylor wants to portray these, the most serious advocates for the position he wants to counter, as extremists and eccentrics barely worth taking seriously. He adds to this impression by pointing out to his readers the connection that Sydney Diocese has maintained over a number of decades with ‘the schismatic ecclesial group known as the Church of England in South Africa, which maintained close ties with the apartheid regime’. This is a largely irrelevant statement designed only to taint Sydney Anglicans with racism in the mind of his readers and so utterly prejudice the outcome of his discussion. The complex history of the ‘other’ Anglicans in South Africa is by no means without its regretful aspects (for which its bishop, Frank Retief, made a public declaration of apology and repentance in the 1990s); yet the phrase ‘close ties’ would be more than an exaggeration. The argument for Sydney’s ‘liminality’ means that he overlooks the long and vigorous history of evangelicals within the Church of England in almost every place that the Church of England has gone. It is a historically myopic view.
Taylor points out that while in many instances the argument for lay administration is driven by the practical problem of the lack of ordained clergy – most often in rural districts – in Sydney there is no such shortage compared to other dioceses. This observation is correct, although there are a greater number of people in congregations in Sydney Anglican churches, too. It is certainly difficult for a complete outsider to the diocese in question to offer his view on the practical needs of the ministry. He does not take into account the way in which the development of new congregations has put pressure on the current system of ordination. Nevertheless, he is correct to understand Sydney’s push for lay administration as theologically driven and not just pragmatic.
It is just that he cannot accept the theological views of Sydney as having a valid place within Anglicanism. Taylor characterises the diocese of Sydney in this way:
The agenda of the diocese of Sydney, under its current Archbishop, is to resume and bring to its completion the process of reformation disrupted by the deaths of Edward VI and Cranmer. Reform is to be continued along a theological trajectory in continuity with Cranmer.
On what evidence Taylor bases this suspicion I would like to know. He offers none. This kind of comment merely reveals the prejudice against with which his project unfortunately began. He takes Archbishop Peter Jensen to task for depending heavily on Cranmer’s views as normative for Anglicanism in his argument for lay administration. This would be to vastly overstate the claims that Jensen makes for Cranmer in his short piece on the subject. And yet, it would seem to strange to argue that, as the primary author of the Anglican formularies, Cranmer’s views are of very limited importance to the discussion. Taylor is right to point to the fact that Cranmer argues strongly for administration of the sacrament only by those duly authorised by lawful authority – but then, this is not really in dispute.
Taylor then tries to mount the perverse argument that the argument for lay presidency is actually designed to uphold hierarchical and patriarchal patterns within the diocese of Sydney:
It is not envisaged that delegation to lay people of functions such as preaching and administering holy communion in Sunday worship would involve any participation in the pastoral oversight exercised by the Archbishop and clergy of the diocese of Sydney. Power would remain vested in an exclusive male cadre, formed principally and definitively at Moore Theological College in the very particular and narrow theological tradition which Sydney represents.
The issue of lay presidency, he argues, must be linked to Sydney’s resistance to women’s ordination. If lay people – females among them – can be admitted to the business administering communion as well as communion, then what is it that not ordaining them excludes them from? Taylor deduces that it must be all about conserving the power of the clique, or the ‘cadre’, as he calls it. What ordination represents, in Taylor’s reading of the Sydney mentality, is not preaching or presiding but power. This is a kind of postmodern power-critique of the predictable kind, but it relies on speculation about the motives of others to which Taylor is certainly not privy. How is Taylor able to see what it is really about from his study on the other side of the Indian Ocean? Is he such a successful psychologist?
In fact, push for lay administration in Sydney began quite separately to and at around about the same time as the call of women’s ordination began in the wider Anglican Communion. Certainly, the proponents of lay administration have wanted to show that their understanding of ordination was not a specifically sacramental one, and that their objection to women’s ordination was not on the basis of the Anglo-Catholic reasoning about sacerdotal ministry. If anything, however, lay administration would open up leadership opportunities for lay men and women and for female deacons in Sydney, which is a diocese with a long history of active lay leadership by both genders and which employs more women in ministry than any other. Taylor’s comments about the ‘particular and narrow theological tradition’ represented by Sydney reveal only his (deliberate?) ignorance of the ongoing presence of evangelicals within Anglicanism around the globe. If it is only in Sydney that they have been able to influence an entire diocese in the way they have, it is because of the political hegemony of the liberal catholic party elsewhere. Most dioceses in the world would represent a ‘very particular and narrow theological tradition’ – namely, the liberal catholic one – under whose powerful rule it is oftentimes very difficult for evangelicals to live. It is a bit rich, quite frankly, to be lectured on power politics from the point of view of the most successful political grouping in the Anglican Communion.
Taylor makes a great deal of an almost throw away comment by Archbishop Peter Jensen. In advocating for liturgical change, Jensen described the current forms of liturgy as ‘almost irrelevant’ in the context of contemporary mission. By this he did not mean, as Taylor takes him to mean, that the gathering together of the people of God around the word and sacrament was irrelevant – only that the forms in which we have continued to practice our meeting have become inaccessible and impenetrable to the secularised world. Yet Taylor riffs on this phrase, claiming that
As a theology of the laity, it denigrates the people of God to whom the ‘almost irrelevant’ ministry of word and sacrament is entrusted, while clergy are engaged in the ministry which really matters.
This is just plain misreading – and it is certainly not the intention of those who argue for lay administration. What Taylor completely ignores is the vigorous support for lay administration from lay people themselves within the diocese of Sydney. Far from being a plot by the men at head office to shore up their own power, the envisaged change is meant to complete the ‘lay revolution’ begun in the late 1960s by admitting lay people to the ministry of the table as well as the ministry of the pulpit.
The pity is that Taylor’s book is an otherwise very accomplished and judicious work carried out with appropriate scholarly dispassion. At the end of his extended review of the subject, he argues that the issue of who presides at the Lord’s Supper is a second order issue, and that it is permissible in certain emergency situations. From Taylor’s point of view, the most suitable solution to the shortage of clergy is the ordination of local Christian leadership as ‘the most satisfactory alternative to authorized lay presidency at the eucharist’. I fail to see what the difference between lay administration and local ordination is, especially if you do not share a more catholic view of ordination. It is nowhere envisaged that lay administration would mean unauthorised administration – there would have to be a system of due authorisation of lay ministers, just as there is for lay preachers. And the authorisation would hold for the services in the local parish and not elsewhere. Is the difference between lay administration and local ordination only then a matter of what you call it? It would seem so – unless you have a quasi-mystical view of the effects of ordination. Local ordination is no less a novelty than lay administration. So why is this alternative preferable and the Sydney suggestion anathema?
An Anglican priest working in South Africa, Nicholas H. Taylor has written a substantial and sophisticated response to the proposal for lay presidency titled Lay Presidency at the Eucharist? An Anglican Approach. It has to be said that the depth and seriousness of Taylor’s book rather outweigh the short polemical pieces and committee papers that have been offered by those advocating lay administration. He offers an extensive and nuanced discussion of the nature of authority in Anglicanism and on the whole gives a careful exposition of the case for lay administration before countering it with his own.
Two features of his argument mar it, however. The first is that he attempts to say what ‘Anglican’ is, but can only do so by making his own, more Catholic interpretation of the Lord’s Supper paradigmatic for all Anglican practice. The problem comes when you romanticise the Anglican compromise as a wonderful synthesis, instead of acknowledging that the ambiguity in the formularies made possible, within the same ecclesiastical structure, the presence of two mutually exclusive views of the Eucharist; and that the fragility of this compromise meant that it resolved nothing, and was always going to fall apart at some point. Taylor is unable to acknowledge the legitimate and continuous presence of the alternative reading of the sacraments in the Anglican tradition, and fails to argue against it on its own terms. What he discovers is only that the Anglican evangelical view of the sacraments is not the same as the Anglo-Catholic one. We knew this already.
Second, though Taylor is for the most part a model of scholarly dispassion, when he comes to engaging with the diocese of Sydney he is unable to contain himself and slips in to a polemic which verges on nastiness. He calls Sydney ‘an ultra-Protestant fringe of Anglicanism’ whose ‘interpretations of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer may alike be tendentious, and account of the historically somewhat liminal place this diocese has taken in the Anglican Communion, and even in the Anglican Church of Australia.’ The word ‘liminal’ – a word Taylor repeats - is the strange one here. Does he mean by it ‘barely perceptible’, or ‘a transitory state’? In any case, it is clear that Taylor wants to portray these, the most serious advocates for the position he wants to counter, as extremists and eccentrics barely worth taking seriously. He adds to this impression by pointing out to his readers the connection that Sydney Diocese has maintained over a number of decades with ‘the schismatic ecclesial group known as the Church of England in South Africa, which maintained close ties with the apartheid regime’. This is a largely irrelevant statement designed only to taint Sydney Anglicans with racism in the mind of his readers and so utterly prejudice the outcome of his discussion. The complex history of the ‘other’ Anglicans in South Africa is by no means without its regretful aspects (for which its bishop, Frank Retief, made a public declaration of apology and repentance in the 1990s); yet the phrase ‘close ties’ would be more than an exaggeration. The argument for Sydney’s ‘liminality’ means that he overlooks the long and vigorous history of evangelicals within the Church of England in almost every place that the Church of England has gone. It is a historically myopic view.
Taylor points out that while in many instances the argument for lay administration is driven by the practical problem of the lack of ordained clergy – most often in rural districts – in Sydney there is no such shortage compared to other dioceses. This observation is correct, although there are a greater number of people in congregations in Sydney Anglican churches, too. It is certainly difficult for a complete outsider to the diocese in question to offer his view on the practical needs of the ministry. He does not take into account the way in which the development of new congregations has put pressure on the current system of ordination. Nevertheless, he is correct to understand Sydney’s push for lay administration as theologically driven and not just pragmatic.
It is just that he cannot accept the theological views of Sydney as having a valid place within Anglicanism. Taylor characterises the diocese of Sydney in this way:
The agenda of the diocese of Sydney, under its current Archbishop, is to resume and bring to its completion the process of reformation disrupted by the deaths of Edward VI and Cranmer. Reform is to be continued along a theological trajectory in continuity with Cranmer.
On what evidence Taylor bases this suspicion I would like to know. He offers none. This kind of comment merely reveals the prejudice against with which his project unfortunately began. He takes Archbishop Peter Jensen to task for depending heavily on Cranmer’s views as normative for Anglicanism in his argument for lay administration. This would be to vastly overstate the claims that Jensen makes for Cranmer in his short piece on the subject. And yet, it would seem to strange to argue that, as the primary author of the Anglican formularies, Cranmer’s views are of very limited importance to the discussion. Taylor is right to point to the fact that Cranmer argues strongly for administration of the sacrament only by those duly authorised by lawful authority – but then, this is not really in dispute.
Taylor then tries to mount the perverse argument that the argument for lay presidency is actually designed to uphold hierarchical and patriarchal patterns within the diocese of Sydney:
It is not envisaged that delegation to lay people of functions such as preaching and administering holy communion in Sunday worship would involve any participation in the pastoral oversight exercised by the Archbishop and clergy of the diocese of Sydney. Power would remain vested in an exclusive male cadre, formed principally and definitively at Moore Theological College in the very particular and narrow theological tradition which Sydney represents.
The issue of lay presidency, he argues, must be linked to Sydney’s resistance to women’s ordination. If lay people – females among them – can be admitted to the business administering communion as well as communion, then what is it that not ordaining them excludes them from? Taylor deduces that it must be all about conserving the power of the clique, or the ‘cadre’, as he calls it. What ordination represents, in Taylor’s reading of the Sydney mentality, is not preaching or presiding but power. This is a kind of postmodern power-critique of the predictable kind, but it relies on speculation about the motives of others to which Taylor is certainly not privy. How is Taylor able to see what it is really about from his study on the other side of the Indian Ocean? Is he such a successful psychologist?
In fact, push for lay administration in Sydney began quite separately to and at around about the same time as the call of women’s ordination began in the wider Anglican Communion. Certainly, the proponents of lay administration have wanted to show that their understanding of ordination was not a specifically sacramental one, and that their objection to women’s ordination was not on the basis of the Anglo-Catholic reasoning about sacerdotal ministry. If anything, however, lay administration would open up leadership opportunities for lay men and women and for female deacons in Sydney, which is a diocese with a long history of active lay leadership by both genders and which employs more women in ministry than any other. Taylor’s comments about the ‘particular and narrow theological tradition’ represented by Sydney reveal only his (deliberate?) ignorance of the ongoing presence of evangelicals within Anglicanism around the globe. If it is only in Sydney that they have been able to influence an entire diocese in the way they have, it is because of the political hegemony of the liberal catholic party elsewhere. Most dioceses in the world would represent a ‘very particular and narrow theological tradition’ – namely, the liberal catholic one – under whose powerful rule it is oftentimes very difficult for evangelicals to live. It is a bit rich, quite frankly, to be lectured on power politics from the point of view of the most successful political grouping in the Anglican Communion.
Taylor makes a great deal of an almost throw away comment by Archbishop Peter Jensen. In advocating for liturgical change, Jensen described the current forms of liturgy as ‘almost irrelevant’ in the context of contemporary mission. By this he did not mean, as Taylor takes him to mean, that the gathering together of the people of God around the word and sacrament was irrelevant – only that the forms in which we have continued to practice our meeting have become inaccessible and impenetrable to the secularised world. Yet Taylor riffs on this phrase, claiming that
As a theology of the laity, it denigrates the people of God to whom the ‘almost irrelevant’ ministry of word and sacrament is entrusted, while clergy are engaged in the ministry which really matters.
This is just plain misreading – and it is certainly not the intention of those who argue for lay administration. What Taylor completely ignores is the vigorous support for lay administration from lay people themselves within the diocese of Sydney. Far from being a plot by the men at head office to shore up their own power, the envisaged change is meant to complete the ‘lay revolution’ begun in the late 1960s by admitting lay people to the ministry of the table as well as the ministry of the pulpit.
The pity is that Taylor’s book is an otherwise very accomplished and judicious work carried out with appropriate scholarly dispassion. At the end of his extended review of the subject, he argues that the issue of who presides at the Lord’s Supper is a second order issue, and that it is permissible in certain emergency situations. From Taylor’s point of view, the most suitable solution to the shortage of clergy is the ordination of local Christian leadership as ‘the most satisfactory alternative to authorized lay presidency at the eucharist’. I fail to see what the difference between lay administration and local ordination is, especially if you do not share a more catholic view of ordination. It is nowhere envisaged that lay administration would mean unauthorised administration – there would have to be a system of due authorisation of lay ministers, just as there is for lay preachers. And the authorisation would hold for the services in the local parish and not elsewhere. Is the difference between lay administration and local ordination only then a matter of what you call it? It would seem so – unless you have a quasi-mystical view of the effects of ordination. Local ordination is no less a novelty than lay administration. So why is this alternative preferable and the Sydney suggestion anathema?
Friday, November 05, 2010
Losing the Plot? Psalm 17 and November 5th (a sermon)
On this day, November 5th, in 1605 a search of the dank undercroft of the House of Lords carried out in response to an anonymous tip-off discovered a cache of thirty-six barrels of gunpowder.
Guarding the horde was a thirty-five year old former soldier named Guy Fawkes. As a recent documentary presented by Top Gear’s Richard Hammond has amply and rather spectacularly demonstrated, this was more than enough gunpowder for its intended purpose: to ensure the utter destruction to rubble of the building and the death of anyone unlucky enough to be in it at the time. The planned time, the day of November 5th, was scheduled for the opening of parliament. The hope of the conspirators was of course that the Protestant King, James 1, would be among those destroyed in the blast and that they would thereafter by able to install his daughter Elizabeth on the throne as a Catholic queen. Instead of becoming a date of sombre remembrance, as September 11 has surely become in our time, Nov 5th became for the English nation a day of joyous celebration, with effigies of the hapless Fawkes placed atop large bonfires and fireworks exploding. And of course it was not merely held to be a national deliverance; it was a religiously significance moment. For years, the church bells would ring and special prayers and sermons would be offered on the day as a thanksgiving to God for his rescue of the English nation and its people.
The custom seems quaint to us today in this far off time and place. Yet there remains for us in our world a fine line between terror and triumph, between paranoia and providentialism, between fear and festival; and we ought to recognise that we sit at times on either side of that line. As in the past, we have a sense of the genuine fragility of our way of life and our deep dread of it all being swept away, not merely by some natural disaster, but by the hands of our enemies; and our feeling that if we survive it is because of, or evidence of, some divine vindication of our way of life. It is the theology of the golfer who thanks God for his victories, or of the movie star who clutches her Golden Globe in one hand and a claim of divine favour in the other. Like most bad theology it gains its power from being half-true.
Today’s Psalm seems to plunge us into that perspective, but very much on the side of fear. The Psalmist is, he feels, surrounded by his enemies (vs 9), pursued by them remorselessly (vs 10-11), the subject of what could be described as a vendetta (vs 11):
11 They lie waiting in our way on every side,
watching to cast us down to the ground;
12 Like as a lion that is greedy of his prey,
and as it were a lion’s whelp lurking in secret places.
He has, it seems, a good basis for his fear. His life is exposed to the wickedness of others. We shouldn’t imagine these fears to be baseless – even if we have not had the feeling of complete isolation and despair in the face of determined opponents who wish our destruction, we know of enough instances of this experience to understand it as a reality that some do experience. The canon of Scripture of course links this Psalm to the narrative of David’s life and his experience of Saul’s determined and murderous pursuit.
And so his appeal to Yhwh is desperate, made on the basis of his real experience of fear. He wants God to ‘Keep me as the apple of an eye; hide me under the shadow of thy wings, From the ungodly, that trouble me;’h - in other words, to secure him when all seems insecure. But more than this: he wants Yhwh to vindicate him by overthrowing his enemies (vs 13) –
13 Up, LORD, disappoint him, and cast him down;
deliver my soul from the ungodly, by thine own sword.
He appeals for a violent and decisive end to this persecution. And the appeal emerges from two convictions:
One is the conviction that his cause is just, and that he has himself not been dishonest in his appeal. We see this in vs 1-5. He is convinced of the rightness of his cause, and that if his heart is exposed to the judgement of God he will be found innocent. Likewise: his feet, he claims, have not slipped from the divine path – he has been a committed follower of God. He’s a victim, and he can see no way in which he is complicit in the crime.
We ought to note that there is no embarrassment about naming oppression and injustice, no sense in which he is a self-blaming victim. Though we should be aware enough of the capacity of human beings to self-justify and to overlook our own involvement in evildoing, we should not let ourselves become deaf to the cries of real victims.
Still, there is an awkwardness of the demand for divine vindication – since even if I am guiltless here, in this matter, I am certainly not, there, in that matter. Surely if nothing else a Christian frame of mind tells us to be wary here of catching specks while missing logs.
The second basis for his appeal is to the character of the Lord – he is the God of hesed, of steadfast love. The Lord is a saviour of those who seek refuge – the one whose renown down the ages has been for his rescue of the slaves from Egypt.
But both of these bases for his appeal require us as Christian readers to say more, given our knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.
The character of God the Psalmist knew from the Exodus and from his covenant with national Israel. The way in which we understand the salvation and the refuge of God and the steadfast love of the divine being is in the cross of Jesus Christ. We see there God’s commitment to his world not only as a victory, but as a victory won through the channel of defeat. We see there not only the divine conquest, but that the divine conquest comes in the midst of submission to the wickedness of humanity, absorbing the worst of its blows. The divine response to this human complaint is to make these words divine words – Jesus knew the fear, pain and isolation in the fragility of life surrounded by, taunted by and tortured by his enemies.
Already we can see how the second basis for the Psalmist’s appeal is open to a Christian understanding – the innocence of the Psalmist is the innocence of the Son, of Jesus himself, who was innocent of all deceit and wickedness, whose feet did not transgress, - and who was vindicated by God when he was raised from the dead and exalted to the highest place. It was he who ‘beheld God’s face in righteousness’; who met the conditions of the just judgement of God against the outrages of human behaviour and in whom we can know justification and righteousness, vindication, hope and security. It is Christ who makes this prayer our prayer – he makes it a prayer we can pray without self-justification, or self-righteousness, or triumphalism. He makes it possible for us to hope in the teeth of our terrible crisis. It makes it possible for us to receive God’s blessings without understanding this as something belongs to us by right, or as a sign of our own inherent superiority. It is a grace that teaches us gratitude. He makes it possible for us to name injustice and condemn it without hypocrisy. He enables us to be the ones that overcome.
Psalm 17, we discover, is a prayer a Christian martyr could pray – in hope that their cause is just and that God is a present help in trouble.
Guarding the horde was a thirty-five year old former soldier named Guy Fawkes. As a recent documentary presented by Top Gear’s Richard Hammond has amply and rather spectacularly demonstrated, this was more than enough gunpowder for its intended purpose: to ensure the utter destruction to rubble of the building and the death of anyone unlucky enough to be in it at the time. The planned time, the day of November 5th, was scheduled for the opening of parliament. The hope of the conspirators was of course that the Protestant King, James 1, would be among those destroyed in the blast and that they would thereafter by able to install his daughter Elizabeth on the throne as a Catholic queen. Instead of becoming a date of sombre remembrance, as September 11 has surely become in our time, Nov 5th became for the English nation a day of joyous celebration, with effigies of the hapless Fawkes placed atop large bonfires and fireworks exploding. And of course it was not merely held to be a national deliverance; it was a religiously significance moment. For years, the church bells would ring and special prayers and sermons would be offered on the day as a thanksgiving to God for his rescue of the English nation and its people.
The custom seems quaint to us today in this far off time and place. Yet there remains for us in our world a fine line between terror and triumph, between paranoia and providentialism, between fear and festival; and we ought to recognise that we sit at times on either side of that line. As in the past, we have a sense of the genuine fragility of our way of life and our deep dread of it all being swept away, not merely by some natural disaster, but by the hands of our enemies; and our feeling that if we survive it is because of, or evidence of, some divine vindication of our way of life. It is the theology of the golfer who thanks God for his victories, or of the movie star who clutches her Golden Globe in one hand and a claim of divine favour in the other. Like most bad theology it gains its power from being half-true.
Today’s Psalm seems to plunge us into that perspective, but very much on the side of fear. The Psalmist is, he feels, surrounded by his enemies (vs 9), pursued by them remorselessly (vs 10-11), the subject of what could be described as a vendetta (vs 11):
11 They lie waiting in our way on every side,
watching to cast us down to the ground;
12 Like as a lion that is greedy of his prey,
and as it were a lion’s whelp lurking in secret places.
He has, it seems, a good basis for his fear. His life is exposed to the wickedness of others. We shouldn’t imagine these fears to be baseless – even if we have not had the feeling of complete isolation and despair in the face of determined opponents who wish our destruction, we know of enough instances of this experience to understand it as a reality that some do experience. The canon of Scripture of course links this Psalm to the narrative of David’s life and his experience of Saul’s determined and murderous pursuit.
And so his appeal to Yhwh is desperate, made on the basis of his real experience of fear. He wants God to ‘Keep me as the apple of an eye; hide me under the shadow of thy wings, From the ungodly, that trouble me;’h - in other words, to secure him when all seems insecure. But more than this: he wants Yhwh to vindicate him by overthrowing his enemies (vs 13) –
13 Up, LORD, disappoint him, and cast him down;
deliver my soul from the ungodly, by thine own sword.
He appeals for a violent and decisive end to this persecution. And the appeal emerges from two convictions:
One is the conviction that his cause is just, and that he has himself not been dishonest in his appeal. We see this in vs 1-5. He is convinced of the rightness of his cause, and that if his heart is exposed to the judgement of God he will be found innocent. Likewise: his feet, he claims, have not slipped from the divine path – he has been a committed follower of God. He’s a victim, and he can see no way in which he is complicit in the crime.
We ought to note that there is no embarrassment about naming oppression and injustice, no sense in which he is a self-blaming victim. Though we should be aware enough of the capacity of human beings to self-justify and to overlook our own involvement in evildoing, we should not let ourselves become deaf to the cries of real victims.
Still, there is an awkwardness of the demand for divine vindication – since even if I am guiltless here, in this matter, I am certainly not, there, in that matter. Surely if nothing else a Christian frame of mind tells us to be wary here of catching specks while missing logs.
The second basis for his appeal is to the character of the Lord – he is the God of hesed, of steadfast love. The Lord is a saviour of those who seek refuge – the one whose renown down the ages has been for his rescue of the slaves from Egypt.
But both of these bases for his appeal require us as Christian readers to say more, given our knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.
The character of God the Psalmist knew from the Exodus and from his covenant with national Israel. The way in which we understand the salvation and the refuge of God and the steadfast love of the divine being is in the cross of Jesus Christ. We see there God’s commitment to his world not only as a victory, but as a victory won through the channel of defeat. We see there not only the divine conquest, but that the divine conquest comes in the midst of submission to the wickedness of humanity, absorbing the worst of its blows. The divine response to this human complaint is to make these words divine words – Jesus knew the fear, pain and isolation in the fragility of life surrounded by, taunted by and tortured by his enemies.
Already we can see how the second basis for the Psalmist’s appeal is open to a Christian understanding – the innocence of the Psalmist is the innocence of the Son, of Jesus himself, who was innocent of all deceit and wickedness, whose feet did not transgress, - and who was vindicated by God when he was raised from the dead and exalted to the highest place. It was he who ‘beheld God’s face in righteousness’; who met the conditions of the just judgement of God against the outrages of human behaviour and in whom we can know justification and righteousness, vindication, hope and security. It is Christ who makes this prayer our prayer – he makes it a prayer we can pray without self-justification, or self-righteousness, or triumphalism. He makes it possible for us to hope in the teeth of our terrible crisis. It makes it possible for us to receive God’s blessings without understanding this as something belongs to us by right, or as a sign of our own inherent superiority. It is a grace that teaches us gratitude. He makes it possible for us to name injustice and condemn it without hypocrisy. He enables us to be the ones that overcome.
Psalm 17, we discover, is a prayer a Christian martyr could pray – in hope that their cause is just and that God is a present help in trouble.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Still Anglican
While the puritan and evangelical heritage of Sydney Anglicans gives them ample grounds to stake out within the Anglican tradition and to resist being marginalised, the reality to be admitted is that both of these groups have had at times testy relationships with the structural and institutional side of Anglicanism. Puritans were frustrated with the lack of further progress in doctrinal and liturgical reform and so many of them left the Church of England or were forced out. Evangelical Anglicans have always freely co-operated with evangelicals in other denominations, and have prioritised gospel work at the expense of institutional conformity. As Turnbull writes, ‘[H]istorically, Anglican Evangelicals have proved flexible over church order in the interests of the gospel’. But if Anglicanism has been flexible enough to accommodate evangelicals, it has also been flexible with progressive liberalism. Evangelicals have felt stymied in their mission by an institution which in turn seems only too ready to endorse the liberal agenda in faith and conduct. For evangelical Anglicans in every generation the question arises ‘what is the tipping point as far as remaining an Anglican goes?
It was certainly an issue for evangelicals in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Could they continue to preach the gospel unhindered in the Church of England when all about ritualism and liberalism were advancing? At a gathering of evangelical clergy from the Eastern Counties on the 11th June 1879, Bishop J.C. Ryle of Liverpool delivered this stirring call to remain:
No doubt you live in days when our time-honoured church is in very perilous, distressing and critical position. Her rowers have brought her into troubled water. Her very existence is endangered by papists, infidels, and liberationists without. Her life-blood is drained away by the behaviour of traitors, false friends and timid officers within. Nevertheless, so long as the Church of England sticks firmly to the Bible, the Articles, and the principles of the Protestant Reformation, so long I advise you strongly to stick to the church. When the Articles are thrown overboard, and the old flag is hauled down, then, and not till then, it will be time for you and me to launch the boats and quit the wreck. At present, let us stick to the old ship….Why should we leave her now, like cowards, because she is in difficulties, and the truth cannot be maintained within her pale without trouble? To whom can we go? Where shall we find better prayers? In what communion shall we find so much good being done, in spite of the existence of much evil? No doubt there is much to sadden us; but there is not a single visible church on earth at this day doing better. There is not a single communion where there are no clouds, and all is serene.
The Evangelical Anglican concedes that he or she is not a member of a pure church, or a purely reformed church. But it is, as Ryle says, a theological mistake to expect purity and unity in any visible church.
A similar crisis point came in October 1966 when the free church preacher Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981), speaking at the National Assembly of Evangelicals, called upon evangelical clergy in denominations that were not exclusively evangelical to leave and to join with him in forming an evangelical denomination in which doctrinal purity could be assured. It seemed at the time like a reasonable appeal to evangelicals in the Church of England, who were increasingly marginalised and on the defensive, and who had watched openly radical scholars such as J.A.T. Robinson (1919 – 1983) rewarded for their unorthodoxy by elevation to the episcopate. At this point the acknowledged leader of the Anglican evangelicals, John Stott, intervened. This lead to the wholesale recommitment of evangelicals to working within the Church of England in 1967 at the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele. A similar conference was held in Australia, but with no lasting impact.
Encouraged by the lead of John Stott, evangelicals in the Anglican Communion have largely held their ground. In the last forty years, the Anglican denominational structures have been in many cases quite congenial to the missional aspirations of evangelicals. Where other types of Anglican churches have waned, evangelical churches have certainly not. In that time the increase of evangelical numbers in the churches of the west has opened up new divisions, it must be granted. Tensions over the emphasis on charismatic gifts and the ministry of women continue to simmer. The consecration of woman as bishops may prove to be a step too far for some evangelicals in the Church of England.
For Sydney Anglican evangelicals then there is every good reason to remain committed to the Anglican church. Sydney Anglicans have felt concern at developments in the national and global Anglican Communion and have frequently wondered aloud whether they could continue in fellowship with these bodies – or what form that fellowship might take. They ought to remember that, as well as being an age of terrible division and confusion, the last forty years have been an era of remarkable innovation and experimentation in the name of mission and there is much to give thanks about.
Yet if Sydney Anglicans want to stay within the fellowship of Anglican churches they need to do so in good faith. They cannot point the finger at those who transgress in the areas of faith and conduct if they themselves are in the process of eroding the Anglican edifice. For example, the supreme authority of Scripture in Anglicanism is given a particular mode of reception – by dint of the two great creeds, the sacraments and the role of the episcopate. Anglicanism is not a tradition in which every interpretation of Scripture is held to be equally valid – even if there is considerable room for disagreement. This is in contrast to churches that subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, which is far more detailed. It may be that, in all good conscience, some evangelical Christians need to admit that the Anglican expression of Christianity is not for them. They would not be the first.
Anglicanism doesn’t require much, but it does require some things. Just as I don’t think it is possible to remain Anglican and to deny the resurrection or the Trinity, I don’t think it is possible to remain Anglican with any authenticity and honesty and to have a greatly reduced role for the Lord’s Supper and Baptism. These examples are not equally serious, of course. However, a church which substituted the practice of the Lord’s Supper for a fellowship tea would not be an Anglican church and should have the honesty to say so. It may still be a Christian church – but it could not continue as an Anglican church.
It was certainly an issue for evangelicals in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Could they continue to preach the gospel unhindered in the Church of England when all about ritualism and liberalism were advancing? At a gathering of evangelical clergy from the Eastern Counties on the 11th June 1879, Bishop J.C. Ryle of Liverpool delivered this stirring call to remain:
No doubt you live in days when our time-honoured church is in very perilous, distressing and critical position. Her rowers have brought her into troubled water. Her very existence is endangered by papists, infidels, and liberationists without. Her life-blood is drained away by the behaviour of traitors, false friends and timid officers within. Nevertheless, so long as the Church of England sticks firmly to the Bible, the Articles, and the principles of the Protestant Reformation, so long I advise you strongly to stick to the church. When the Articles are thrown overboard, and the old flag is hauled down, then, and not till then, it will be time for you and me to launch the boats and quit the wreck. At present, let us stick to the old ship….Why should we leave her now, like cowards, because she is in difficulties, and the truth cannot be maintained within her pale without trouble? To whom can we go? Where shall we find better prayers? In what communion shall we find so much good being done, in spite of the existence of much evil? No doubt there is much to sadden us; but there is not a single visible church on earth at this day doing better. There is not a single communion where there are no clouds, and all is serene.
The Evangelical Anglican concedes that he or she is not a member of a pure church, or a purely reformed church. But it is, as Ryle says, a theological mistake to expect purity and unity in any visible church.
A similar crisis point came in October 1966 when the free church preacher Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981), speaking at the National Assembly of Evangelicals, called upon evangelical clergy in denominations that were not exclusively evangelical to leave and to join with him in forming an evangelical denomination in which doctrinal purity could be assured. It seemed at the time like a reasonable appeal to evangelicals in the Church of England, who were increasingly marginalised and on the defensive, and who had watched openly radical scholars such as J.A.T. Robinson (1919 – 1983) rewarded for their unorthodoxy by elevation to the episcopate. At this point the acknowledged leader of the Anglican evangelicals, John Stott, intervened. This lead to the wholesale recommitment of evangelicals to working within the Church of England in 1967 at the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele. A similar conference was held in Australia, but with no lasting impact.
Encouraged by the lead of John Stott, evangelicals in the Anglican Communion have largely held their ground. In the last forty years, the Anglican denominational structures have been in many cases quite congenial to the missional aspirations of evangelicals. Where other types of Anglican churches have waned, evangelical churches have certainly not. In that time the increase of evangelical numbers in the churches of the west has opened up new divisions, it must be granted. Tensions over the emphasis on charismatic gifts and the ministry of women continue to simmer. The consecration of woman as bishops may prove to be a step too far for some evangelicals in the Church of England.
For Sydney Anglican evangelicals then there is every good reason to remain committed to the Anglican church. Sydney Anglicans have felt concern at developments in the national and global Anglican Communion and have frequently wondered aloud whether they could continue in fellowship with these bodies – or what form that fellowship might take. They ought to remember that, as well as being an age of terrible division and confusion, the last forty years have been an era of remarkable innovation and experimentation in the name of mission and there is much to give thanks about.
Yet if Sydney Anglicans want to stay within the fellowship of Anglican churches they need to do so in good faith. They cannot point the finger at those who transgress in the areas of faith and conduct if they themselves are in the process of eroding the Anglican edifice. For example, the supreme authority of Scripture in Anglicanism is given a particular mode of reception – by dint of the two great creeds, the sacraments and the role of the episcopate. Anglicanism is not a tradition in which every interpretation of Scripture is held to be equally valid – even if there is considerable room for disagreement. This is in contrast to churches that subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith, for example, which is far more detailed. It may be that, in all good conscience, some evangelical Christians need to admit that the Anglican expression of Christianity is not for them. They would not be the first.
Anglicanism doesn’t require much, but it does require some things. Just as I don’t think it is possible to remain Anglican and to deny the resurrection or the Trinity, I don’t think it is possible to remain Anglican with any authenticity and honesty and to have a greatly reduced role for the Lord’s Supper and Baptism. These examples are not equally serious, of course. However, a church which substituted the practice of the Lord’s Supper for a fellowship tea would not be an Anglican church and should have the honesty to say so. It may still be a Christian church – but it could not continue as an Anglican church.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Evangelical and Anglican?
If Sydney Anglicans identify somewhat with the Puritans, especially of the Elizabethan era, it is also the case that they identify very strongly with the ‘Evangelical’ movement of the eighteenth century. The first chaplains of the colony were evangelicals and sponsored by the circle of Charles Simeon, one of the leading evangelicals of the Church of England. Like the Puritan movement, this was a movement that began within but subsequently exceeded the bounds of the Church of England. The established church proved too limiting for many and also sought to persecute and expel the proponents of evangelicalism. And yet, there is no doubt that evangelicalism has played and continues to play a major part in the history and ethos of Anglicanism. As Turnbull says, ‘…Anglican Evangelicalism is a manifestation of the Christian faith which gives fullness of expression to the core foundational beliefs of both Anglican and Evangelical Christian traditions’.
Most commonly, the Evangelical movement is thought to have begun in the eighteenth century with the conversion of John Wesley (1703-1791) in 1738. Labelled ‘enthusiasts’ by their opponents in the Church of England, the evangelicals were treated with a great deal of hostility and found difficulty in obtaining livings. This ‘enthusiasm’, though it seemed crass to some of their co-religionists, was representative of an extraordinary reawakening of ardent faith. It was also a judgement that the assumption that mere membership in the Church of England was sufficient for Christian identity was deeply flawed. It was after all a direct reaction against the dryness, formalism and rationalism that characterised much of early eighteenth century established Christianity. A Christianity without a heart for God was clearly deficient. The evangelical movement lead to missionary zeal and social reform on a grand scale; evangelicals formed societies and co-operated trans-denominationally. They wrote hymns that are still sung today. John Wesley and George Whitfield (1714-1770) become famous as open-air preachers. Like the Puritans, it is has to be said that the evangelicals oftentimes inhabited the fringes of the institutional church. They seemed less interested in ecclesiastical preferment and more concerned with missionary work. They were often directly persecuted by the authorities.
The term ‘evangelical’ itself is contested territory, both as a historical description and as a identifier for contemporary Christians. My purpose here is not to become entangled in this debate, but simply to show with broad brush strokes that evangelicalism and Anglicanism overlap considerably. Anglicanism is a great denominational home for evangelicalism, but it is not the only one. Likewise, evangelicalism has made and continues to make a considerable contribution to Anglicanism. The British historian David Bebbington’s description of evangelicalism is the best known and most widely used and will be sufficient to frame our discussion here. Bebbington speaks of ‘a quadrilateral of priorities’ – namely, conversionism, activism, Biblicism and crucicentricism.
Evangelicals are conversionist in that they proclaim the necessity of personal transformation in response to the gospel of grace. They preach to the heart, appealing for repentance of sin and turning to God in dependence. Their gospel is highly individualist in this sense – it is not sufficient for true Christian faith merely to be in possession of membership in a church grouping. Evangelicals are also, as Bebbington speaks of them, activist. They expected the evangelical conversion to result in a transformation of life. This meant that the believer was expected to be busy in the process of moral renewal and in seeking the conversion and moral renewal of others. The activism characteristic of evangelicals resulted in evangelistic mission but also in programmes for social welfare on a large scale. Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftesbury become bywords for the activist streak within evangelicalism.
Evangelicals have always been people of the Bible. Like their Reformation forebears, they have taken Scripture as the supreme authority for Christian life and for doctrine. The centrality of preaching for evangelicals is evidence of what this means in practice. As well as being Biblicist, the evangelical is also crucicentric – which means that central place is given to the atoning work of Christ on the cross. Christ is an exemplary figure and a moral teacher, but he is first and foremost the saviour who died for sin.
In bringing Anglicanism and evangelicalism together, Anglican Evangelicals have mostly but not exclusively subscribed to a form of moderate Calvinism. This description would apply to the faith of two of the greatest of evangelical Anglicans, Charles Simeon (1759-1836) and Bishop J.C. Ryle (1816-1900). They appealed for their identity within Anglicanism to the Protestant and Reformed nature of the Anglican settlements of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. However, they did not insist on the rigorous application of Reformed doctrine, especially over the extent of the atonement. Just as Article 17 is quite a restrained account of predestination, so Anglican Evangelicals have certainly asserted but not overemphasised this teaching. Most often co-operation in evangelism and fellowship with non-Calvinist evangelicals overrode concerns about absolute purity of doctrine. Even if the effects of the atonement were to be applied only to the elect, the preaching of the gospel was to be to all.
This ethos is perhaps where tension with the institutional framework of Anglicanism most often surfaces. More often than not, evangelicals have felt themselves excluded from the positions of power within the Anglican churches of the West. Their priority has always been the preaching of the gospel and not the maintenance of the institutional church. Their ecclesiology – and they most certainly do have an ecclesiology – does not tend to recognise the bureaucratic side of the denomination as ‘church’. If the institution inhibits the preaching of the gospel, then there is no question where compromise has to be made. For other Anglicans with a more hierarchical view this seems like schismatic behaviour.
As the Oxford movement grew in influence in the middle part of the nineteenth century, the evangelicals insisted on the Protestantism of the Church of England, often to the point of legal controversy. The most celebrated – or notorious, depending on your point of view - of these incidents was the ‘Gorham case’ of 1846-7. Evangelical clergyman Charles Gorham clashed with his Tractarian bishop Henry Phillpotts over the critical issue of infant baptism. Gorham, taking the evangelical position, asserted that baptism did not necessarily effect regeneration. After all, evangelicals believed in repentance and conversion. Phillpotts pointed to the wording of the Book of Common Prayer which seems to refer to the child as regenerate; and wanted to refuse him a post in his diocese as a man of unsound doctrine. The precedent set by the case could have made the position of every evangelical clergyman in England uncertain to say the least. The case made its way as far as the non-ecclesiastical Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which finally found for Gorham. What this meant was that the place of evangelicals within the Church of England was secured. Their interpretation of the formularies was certainly permitted, if not entirely endorsed.
In Sydney there is an entire diocese in a major city which is run by evangelicals. This breaks with the usual experience of evangelicals as having almost no institutional leverage and in having to live within diocesan structures which are liberal-Catholic in flavour. The evangelical behaviours which have irritated non-evangelical Anglicans historically are magnified in the case of Sydney. The unusual dominance of evangelicals in the diocesan structure of Sydney diocese means that Sydney does look strange to Anglicans who are accustomed to liberal-Catholic hegemony – and ecclesiology - elsewhere. Liberal-Catholics expect to be in charge of things. But they would be mistaken in calling evangelicalism ‘unAnglican’, for the moderate Calvinist evangelical outlook of Sydney with its missionary activism and its Biblicism and with its emphasis on the atoning blood of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for sins is utterly consistent with the evangelical Anglican tradition that has had an unbroken presence in the Church of England for nearly three centuries. The English evangelical Anglican Alister McGrath has written:
My concern is simply to insist that evangelicalism is, historically and theologically, a legitimate and respectable option within Anglicanism. At no point is evangelicalism inconsistent with any of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the only document apart from Scripture, the creeds and the Prayer Book, regarded as authoritative for Anglicans.
It has not only been my intention to show here that Sydney’s evangelical Anglicans have a legitimate place within Anglicanism. History shows that the evangelicalism held so dear by Sydney’s Anglicans arose from and was to a great extent nurtured by Anglicanism. The Anglican operating system was not always strictly compatible with the evangelical software, but at many points it actually helped -and helps - it to run better.
Most commonly, the Evangelical movement is thought to have begun in the eighteenth century with the conversion of John Wesley (1703-1791) in 1738. Labelled ‘enthusiasts’ by their opponents in the Church of England, the evangelicals were treated with a great deal of hostility and found difficulty in obtaining livings. This ‘enthusiasm’, though it seemed crass to some of their co-religionists, was representative of an extraordinary reawakening of ardent faith. It was also a judgement that the assumption that mere membership in the Church of England was sufficient for Christian identity was deeply flawed. It was after all a direct reaction against the dryness, formalism and rationalism that characterised much of early eighteenth century established Christianity. A Christianity without a heart for God was clearly deficient. The evangelical movement lead to missionary zeal and social reform on a grand scale; evangelicals formed societies and co-operated trans-denominationally. They wrote hymns that are still sung today. John Wesley and George Whitfield (1714-1770) become famous as open-air preachers. Like the Puritans, it is has to be said that the evangelicals oftentimes inhabited the fringes of the institutional church. They seemed less interested in ecclesiastical preferment and more concerned with missionary work. They were often directly persecuted by the authorities.
The term ‘evangelical’ itself is contested territory, both as a historical description and as a identifier for contemporary Christians. My purpose here is not to become entangled in this debate, but simply to show with broad brush strokes that evangelicalism and Anglicanism overlap considerably. Anglicanism is a great denominational home for evangelicalism, but it is not the only one. Likewise, evangelicalism has made and continues to make a considerable contribution to Anglicanism. The British historian David Bebbington’s description of evangelicalism is the best known and most widely used and will be sufficient to frame our discussion here. Bebbington speaks of ‘a quadrilateral of priorities’ – namely, conversionism, activism, Biblicism and crucicentricism.
Evangelicals are conversionist in that they proclaim the necessity of personal transformation in response to the gospel of grace. They preach to the heart, appealing for repentance of sin and turning to God in dependence. Their gospel is highly individualist in this sense – it is not sufficient for true Christian faith merely to be in possession of membership in a church grouping. Evangelicals are also, as Bebbington speaks of them, activist. They expected the evangelical conversion to result in a transformation of life. This meant that the believer was expected to be busy in the process of moral renewal and in seeking the conversion and moral renewal of others. The activism characteristic of evangelicals resulted in evangelistic mission but also in programmes for social welfare on a large scale. Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftesbury become bywords for the activist streak within evangelicalism.
Evangelicals have always been people of the Bible. Like their Reformation forebears, they have taken Scripture as the supreme authority for Christian life and for doctrine. The centrality of preaching for evangelicals is evidence of what this means in practice. As well as being Biblicist, the evangelical is also crucicentric – which means that central place is given to the atoning work of Christ on the cross. Christ is an exemplary figure and a moral teacher, but he is first and foremost the saviour who died for sin.
In bringing Anglicanism and evangelicalism together, Anglican Evangelicals have mostly but not exclusively subscribed to a form of moderate Calvinism. This description would apply to the faith of two of the greatest of evangelical Anglicans, Charles Simeon (1759-1836) and Bishop J.C. Ryle (1816-1900). They appealed for their identity within Anglicanism to the Protestant and Reformed nature of the Anglican settlements of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. However, they did not insist on the rigorous application of Reformed doctrine, especially over the extent of the atonement. Just as Article 17 is quite a restrained account of predestination, so Anglican Evangelicals have certainly asserted but not overemphasised this teaching. Most often co-operation in evangelism and fellowship with non-Calvinist evangelicals overrode concerns about absolute purity of doctrine. Even if the effects of the atonement were to be applied only to the elect, the preaching of the gospel was to be to all.
This ethos is perhaps where tension with the institutional framework of Anglicanism most often surfaces. More often than not, evangelicals have felt themselves excluded from the positions of power within the Anglican churches of the West. Their priority has always been the preaching of the gospel and not the maintenance of the institutional church. Their ecclesiology – and they most certainly do have an ecclesiology – does not tend to recognise the bureaucratic side of the denomination as ‘church’. If the institution inhibits the preaching of the gospel, then there is no question where compromise has to be made. For other Anglicans with a more hierarchical view this seems like schismatic behaviour.
As the Oxford movement grew in influence in the middle part of the nineteenth century, the evangelicals insisted on the Protestantism of the Church of England, often to the point of legal controversy. The most celebrated – or notorious, depending on your point of view - of these incidents was the ‘Gorham case’ of 1846-7. Evangelical clergyman Charles Gorham clashed with his Tractarian bishop Henry Phillpotts over the critical issue of infant baptism. Gorham, taking the evangelical position, asserted that baptism did not necessarily effect regeneration. After all, evangelicals believed in repentance and conversion. Phillpotts pointed to the wording of the Book of Common Prayer which seems to refer to the child as regenerate; and wanted to refuse him a post in his diocese as a man of unsound doctrine. The precedent set by the case could have made the position of every evangelical clergyman in England uncertain to say the least. The case made its way as far as the non-ecclesiastical Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which finally found for Gorham. What this meant was that the place of evangelicals within the Church of England was secured. Their interpretation of the formularies was certainly permitted, if not entirely endorsed.
In Sydney there is an entire diocese in a major city which is run by evangelicals. This breaks with the usual experience of evangelicals as having almost no institutional leverage and in having to live within diocesan structures which are liberal-Catholic in flavour. The evangelical behaviours which have irritated non-evangelical Anglicans historically are magnified in the case of Sydney. The unusual dominance of evangelicals in the diocesan structure of Sydney diocese means that Sydney does look strange to Anglicans who are accustomed to liberal-Catholic hegemony – and ecclesiology - elsewhere. Liberal-Catholics expect to be in charge of things. But they would be mistaken in calling evangelicalism ‘unAnglican’, for the moderate Calvinist evangelical outlook of Sydney with its missionary activism and its Biblicism and with its emphasis on the atoning blood of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for sins is utterly consistent with the evangelical Anglican tradition that has had an unbroken presence in the Church of England for nearly three centuries. The English evangelical Anglican Alister McGrath has written:
My concern is simply to insist that evangelicalism is, historically and theologically, a legitimate and respectable option within Anglicanism. At no point is evangelicalism inconsistent with any of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the only document apart from Scripture, the creeds and the Prayer Book, regarded as authoritative for Anglicans.
It has not only been my intention to show here that Sydney’s evangelical Anglicans have a legitimate place within Anglicanism. History shows that the evangelicalism held so dear by Sydney’s Anglicans arose from and was to a great extent nurtured by Anglicanism. The Anglican operating system was not always strictly compatible with the evangelical software, but at many points it actually helped -and helps - it to run better.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Puritan and Anglican?
Sydney Anglicans more often than not trace their heritage to the great Church of England figures of the sixteenth century – to Cranmer, to Latimer and Ridley and to the others who were leaders under Edward VI and martyred under his sister Mary. Marcus Loane (1911-2009), Archbishop of Sydney from 1966-81 and formerly Principal of Moore College, authored a number of popular histories of this period after the manner of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. The defiant stance of these figures on the basis of the Protestant and Reformed character of the Church of England was an marker of identity in 1950s and 60s Australia – a period in which sectarianism was much more prominent as a social issue and a period in which the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Anglican Church of Australia was making a great deal of headway. As the national church came together, would Sydney Anglicans remain true to the faith for which the great Marian martyrs died? Certainly they would.
The somewhat romantic appeal to the martyrdoms of the Marian reign is a hint that a particular reading of the course of the English Reformation is in place: that the short reign of Edward VI was a Protestant high water-mark for the Church of England, but that the programme begun in that brief period (1547-53) had remained unfinished. On this reading of the English Reformation, there is some sympathy for those who later chafed at the slow rate of change under Elizabeth’s rule and who became known as ‘the Puritans’. It is one of those words – like ‘fundamentalist’- that has become (indeed always was) a religious term of abuse, with its image of humourless and stern moral nitpickers. This label has been frequently applied to Sydney Anglicans by their detractors not only to indicate their determination to further reform Anglicanism along Protestant lines but also to their alleged moral seriousness.
Historically speaking, the label ‘Puritan’ is a broad brush. There were Puritans over the long period of their prominence (from 1560s through to 1680s) who strongly disagreed with each other over what needed to change in the church and which doctrines to emphasise. Ultimately it was the Puritans of Parliament who rose up against the forces of Charles I and had him executed in 1649, inaugurating the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653-58). Puritans were at various times persecuted and even expelled by the church authorities. Yet at the same time, the presence within the Church of England of those who might identify with the Puritan disposition has been ongoing. As Richard Turnbull has written ‘[T]hroughout the history of the Church of England there has also been a persecution of Puritan divines and yet also a continuing presence within the Church of those of Puritan disposition.’ This was so even after the ‘Great Ejection’, when nearly 2,000 Puritan clergy chose to leave their livings in protest against the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Interestingly, it was the issue of the royal supremacy which was most controversial. The restoration of the Book of Common Prayer, somewhat modified in line with Puritan sensibilities, was not nearly as problematic.
To identify with the Puritans, then, is not to repudiate Anglicanism. It is certainly to insist on the importance of right doctrine and on the propriety of ongoing reform of church practices in line with Scripture – and this is not to the taste of some other Anglicans. Some streams of Puritanism certainly found themselves outside the Church of England. Those Puritans who would advocate Presbyterianism, for example, found themselves outside of the bounds of the Church of England following the Restoration. It would be hard to make the case for a non-episcopal version of Anglicanism today. On matters of church governance, discipline and order, the normative rather than the regulative principle holds sway with Anglicanism. However, it was frequently matters to do with Church-State relations that led to the rebellion and then departure of Puritan clergy from the established church. It is fascinating to note that this was the very goad against which the Oxford movement kicked. John Keble’s famous 1833 sermon ‘National Apostasy’ was an attack on the collaboration of the Church of England with its government. For Anglicans not now living in England under royal supremacy, this issue is entirely irrelevant.
What this means is that Puritans have had a long-standing place within the Church of England and within Anglicanism, and that one of the major issues on which they took their stand they were not the only ones to do so and there is now in any case no longer any controversy. If Sydney Anglicans are Puritans, it does not follow that they are not also Anglicans.
The somewhat romantic appeal to the martyrdoms of the Marian reign is a hint that a particular reading of the course of the English Reformation is in place: that the short reign of Edward VI was a Protestant high water-mark for the Church of England, but that the programme begun in that brief period (1547-53) had remained unfinished. On this reading of the English Reformation, there is some sympathy for those who later chafed at the slow rate of change under Elizabeth’s rule and who became known as ‘the Puritans’. It is one of those words – like ‘fundamentalist’- that has become (indeed always was) a religious term of abuse, with its image of humourless and stern moral nitpickers. This label has been frequently applied to Sydney Anglicans by their detractors not only to indicate their determination to further reform Anglicanism along Protestant lines but also to their alleged moral seriousness.
Historically speaking, the label ‘Puritan’ is a broad brush. There were Puritans over the long period of their prominence (from 1560s through to 1680s) who strongly disagreed with each other over what needed to change in the church and which doctrines to emphasise. Ultimately it was the Puritans of Parliament who rose up against the forces of Charles I and had him executed in 1649, inaugurating the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653-58). Puritans were at various times persecuted and even expelled by the church authorities. Yet at the same time, the presence within the Church of England of those who might identify with the Puritan disposition has been ongoing. As Richard Turnbull has written ‘[T]hroughout the history of the Church of England there has also been a persecution of Puritan divines and yet also a continuing presence within the Church of those of Puritan disposition.’ This was so even after the ‘Great Ejection’, when nearly 2,000 Puritan clergy chose to leave their livings in protest against the 1662 Act of Uniformity. Interestingly, it was the issue of the royal supremacy which was most controversial. The restoration of the Book of Common Prayer, somewhat modified in line with Puritan sensibilities, was not nearly as problematic.
To identify with the Puritans, then, is not to repudiate Anglicanism. It is certainly to insist on the importance of right doctrine and on the propriety of ongoing reform of church practices in line with Scripture – and this is not to the taste of some other Anglicans. Some streams of Puritanism certainly found themselves outside the Church of England. Those Puritans who would advocate Presbyterianism, for example, found themselves outside of the bounds of the Church of England following the Restoration. It would be hard to make the case for a non-episcopal version of Anglicanism today. On matters of church governance, discipline and order, the normative rather than the regulative principle holds sway with Anglicanism. However, it was frequently matters to do with Church-State relations that led to the rebellion and then departure of Puritan clergy from the established church. It is fascinating to note that this was the very goad against which the Oxford movement kicked. John Keble’s famous 1833 sermon ‘National Apostasy’ was an attack on the collaboration of the Church of England with its government. For Anglicans not now living in England under royal supremacy, this issue is entirely irrelevant.
What this means is that Puritans have had a long-standing place within the Church of England and within Anglicanism, and that one of the major issues on which they took their stand they were not the only ones to do so and there is now in any case no longer any controversy. If Sydney Anglicans are Puritans, it does not follow that they are not also Anglicans.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Anglicanism as 'unabashed Protestantism'?
What is an ‘Anglican’? In one sense the term itself is anachronistic. The Church of England is primarily an institution, the national church of a particular country. It was only with the growth of the British Empire that the question of ‘Anglicanism’ arose – especially when there was now a political separation between England and the US. The Episcopal Church was not governed by the King of England from 1776 – so in what sense could it, and other former Church of England churches, understand their continuity with the church that had given them birth? It was an identity question that was felt with a particular pressure in the nineteenth century and which has decisive significance for the way we consider the question of ‘Anglicanism’ today.
Those of more Catholic disposition have emphasised the continuity of the English church today with the church of the pre-Reformation period. Even when it was in communion with the Church of Rome, the English church (the ecclesia Anglicana) had its own remarkable and somewhat independent identity. The tension between the papacy and the English monarchy – which came to a head in the Reformation – had many precedents, including the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, in 1170 by King Henry II’s henchmen. However, any assertion of a continuity of heritage between the pre-Reformation Church and what came later has to reckon with the complexity and diversity of that history. For example, in the seventh century AD both Celtic and Roman styles of Christianity competed for supremacy in the English Church. Which is to be held as more authentically ‘Anglican’? Or is it a synthesis between them? Where in the story does the radicalism of the Oxford scholar John Wyclif (1330-78) and the movement of his followers, the Lollards, fit in? That is to say: describing a continuous line from the pre-Reformation period to the present has more challenges than the standard Anglo-Catholic description allows. The demand for reform and the appeal to the authority of Scripture is part of the picture that ought not to be obscured.
Since the 1980s, revisionist historians such as Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy have tried to describe the English Reformation as a top-down and chiefly political movement which had little traction amongst the English people themselves. There is no doubt that the English Reformation was achieved through the workings of statecraft as much as through the conversion of souls. Henry VIII’s ‘great matter’ - the problem of his barren marriage to Catherine of Aragon – was the catalyst not only for an institutional break with the Church of Rome and with the papacy, but for a change in the theological outlook of the English church. While Haigh and Duffy try to paint this as entirely engineered by a coterie of theologians like Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, there is no question but that the faith of Reformation Europe had made some inroads among the English people, however clandestine.
Thomas Cranmer is not a figure for Anglicans equivalent to the way Martin Luther is for Lutherans. Nonetheless, Cranmer’s Reformation bequeathed to the English Church as particular theological outlook which cannot be eclipsed in any description of Anglican identity. Though some have tried, Richard Turnbull notes ‘[I]t is difficult to deny the formative role of the Reformation on the polity, theology and ministry of the Church of England.’
Cranmer set down three large foundation stones upon which henceforth the English church was subsequently built: the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal. These have not come down to us unaltered from his pen. They were subject to a degree of refinement and alteration. Even so, the attempt to minimise the importance of these formularies in some parts of the Anglican church in recent years only reveals an embarrassment with the unabashed Protestantism of these documents. While it would be historically naïve to think of the career of Cranmer as the reset point for Anglican identity – as if nothing has happened since then, or as if he is an Anglican Muhammad – it is certainly the case that no description of Anglican identity can bypass or minimise his contribution to the theological distinctiveness of Anglicanism.
‘Unabashed Protestantism’ – is that an overstatement? That the liturgy was now to be in the vernacular was in itself a recognition of a different – Protestant (or better, ‘evangelical’) - understanding of the very nature of Christian faith itself. The words of the Prayer Book were not meant to be experienced by the people as a mystery evading their understanding. The service of Holy Communion was, in successive editions of the Prayer Book, moving in a more Protestant direction. Recent work by renowned Oxford historian Dairmaid MacCulloch shows that Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology was becoming even less like Luther’s understanding of the ‘real presence’ and shifting towards a Reformed understanding. The document that became The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion is unmistakeably Reformed in character. It is true that the articles do allow for a deal of flexibility, and do not pronounce on some controversial matters. Yet that should not be mistaken for some policy of reticence or the endorsement of infinite variety. The embarrassment of liberal and Catholic Anglicans at the Articles is a fairly strong indication that the plain reading of them sees them as an expression of a Reformed theological outlook.
The Articles assert the primacy of the authority of Scripture for Anglican faith and practice. That is not to say that Scripture is the only authority, but it is held to be the supreme authority, even over the great creeds of the church (Article VIII). Article VI reads: ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation’. According to the articles, Scripture is to act as the measure of what Anglicans believe.
For two great Elizabethan Anglicans, Scripture was likewise of paramount importance. Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is often held up as the doyen of Anglican divines – ‘judicious’, rational, careful and moderate in tone. He was an opponent of the Puritan extremists in the Church of England who were moving against the episcopate and against all customs not explicitly sanctioned in Scripture. For a long time it was thought that he had endorsed ‘the three-legged stool’ of Scripture, Reason and Tradition as equal, mutually-informing authorities in Anglican thinking. Careful reading of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity tells another story. He writes:
What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason over-rule all other inferior judgments whatsoever ( Laws, Book V, 8:2; Folger Edition 2:39,8-14).
Scripture, reason and tradition do not have equal weight for Hooker. Quite clearly, Scripture has precedence, then reason and third, church tradition. Though the Puritans were mistaken when they opposed tradition where Scripture was silent, they were correct in placing Scripture ahead of all other authorities. Hooker can be described as endorsing the ‘normative’ view of Scripture with regard to church order and ceremonies, as opposed to the ‘regulative’ view championed by his Puritan opponents such as William Perkins and Thomas Cartwright. He conceded that the threefold order of ministry – bishop, priest and deacon – cannot be directly established from Scripture, but that the historic episcopate is nevertheless a good way to frame the polity of the English church.
In his 1562 work Apology of the Church in England, Bishop John Jewel (1522-71) of Salisbury made an ardent defence of the Reformation settlement in England, setting it over against the abuses of the Church of Rome. He depicted the Church of England as episcopal, but thoroughly Reformed in doctrine. The Church of England in its stance against Rome needed to be convincingly apostolic. It could do so by appeal to Scripture; but also by appeal to the Church Fathers and to the Councils. This was not to invest them with an authority independent of Scripture, but to show that, even on their preferred ground, the Roman Church was not the true heir of the apostolic teaching.
To the work of these two Elizabethan divines we might well add the declaration of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral in 1888 as an instance in Anglican history when the primacy of Scripture was clearly asserted. The 1888 Lambeth conference of bishops received in slightly amended form a document which had been passed by the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America in 1886. The four points of the quadrilateral are, in order: Holy Scripture as ‘the rule and ultimate standard of faith’; the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creed; the two sacraments; and the historic episcopate. The basis of the unity of the Anglican Communion is thus a common confession of faith derived from Scripture.
What these examples prove is quite modest, but it is sufficient. They demonstrate that those who hold that it is thoroughly and authentically Anglican to view Scripture as the supreme authority have a more than reasonable case grounded in the major documents of Anglican history and in the thought of its major theologians. Furthermore, on soteriology and the sacraments it is quite clearly possible to discern a succession of authoritative figures and documents that assert the Reformed view, however distasteful this might be to some contemporary Anglicans. There are other readings of Anglican history – most notably the reading perpetuated by the Oxford movement in the 19th century, which emphasised the Caroline divines and their appeal to the Church Fathers. Yet even this sketch of Anglicanism shows that this reading of Anglican history could only ever be a selective and polemical one. A Christian faith which places it emphasis on the supreme authority of Scripture for doctrine and practice and which upholds the Reformed view or salvation and the sacraments can with confidence assert its continuous place within the Anglican story. A view of Anglicanism which places Scripture as supreme authority and which has a Reformed soteriology and which has a flexible attitude to liturgical practice certainly has a good case to be considered as authentically Anglican. However, this plurality and flexibility is not infinite.
Those of more Catholic disposition have emphasised the continuity of the English church today with the church of the pre-Reformation period. Even when it was in communion with the Church of Rome, the English church (the ecclesia Anglicana) had its own remarkable and somewhat independent identity. The tension between the papacy and the English monarchy – which came to a head in the Reformation – had many precedents, including the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett, in 1170 by King Henry II’s henchmen. However, any assertion of a continuity of heritage between the pre-Reformation Church and what came later has to reckon with the complexity and diversity of that history. For example, in the seventh century AD both Celtic and Roman styles of Christianity competed for supremacy in the English Church. Which is to be held as more authentically ‘Anglican’? Or is it a synthesis between them? Where in the story does the radicalism of the Oxford scholar John Wyclif (1330-78) and the movement of his followers, the Lollards, fit in? That is to say: describing a continuous line from the pre-Reformation period to the present has more challenges than the standard Anglo-Catholic description allows. The demand for reform and the appeal to the authority of Scripture is part of the picture that ought not to be obscured.
Since the 1980s, revisionist historians such as Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy have tried to describe the English Reformation as a top-down and chiefly political movement which had little traction amongst the English people themselves. There is no doubt that the English Reformation was achieved through the workings of statecraft as much as through the conversion of souls. Henry VIII’s ‘great matter’ - the problem of his barren marriage to Catherine of Aragon – was the catalyst not only for an institutional break with the Church of Rome and with the papacy, but for a change in the theological outlook of the English church. While Haigh and Duffy try to paint this as entirely engineered by a coterie of theologians like Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, there is no question but that the faith of Reformation Europe had made some inroads among the English people, however clandestine.
Thomas Cranmer is not a figure for Anglicans equivalent to the way Martin Luther is for Lutherans. Nonetheless, Cranmer’s Reformation bequeathed to the English Church as particular theological outlook which cannot be eclipsed in any description of Anglican identity. Though some have tried, Richard Turnbull notes ‘[I]t is difficult to deny the formative role of the Reformation on the polity, theology and ministry of the Church of England.’
Cranmer set down three large foundation stones upon which henceforth the English church was subsequently built: the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal. These have not come down to us unaltered from his pen. They were subject to a degree of refinement and alteration. Even so, the attempt to minimise the importance of these formularies in some parts of the Anglican church in recent years only reveals an embarrassment with the unabashed Protestantism of these documents. While it would be historically naïve to think of the career of Cranmer as the reset point for Anglican identity – as if nothing has happened since then, or as if he is an Anglican Muhammad – it is certainly the case that no description of Anglican identity can bypass or minimise his contribution to the theological distinctiveness of Anglicanism.
‘Unabashed Protestantism’ – is that an overstatement? That the liturgy was now to be in the vernacular was in itself a recognition of a different – Protestant (or better, ‘evangelical’) - understanding of the very nature of Christian faith itself. The words of the Prayer Book were not meant to be experienced by the people as a mystery evading their understanding. The service of Holy Communion was, in successive editions of the Prayer Book, moving in a more Protestant direction. Recent work by renowned Oxford historian Dairmaid MacCulloch shows that Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology was becoming even less like Luther’s understanding of the ‘real presence’ and shifting towards a Reformed understanding. The document that became The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion is unmistakeably Reformed in character. It is true that the articles do allow for a deal of flexibility, and do not pronounce on some controversial matters. Yet that should not be mistaken for some policy of reticence or the endorsement of infinite variety. The embarrassment of liberal and Catholic Anglicans at the Articles is a fairly strong indication that the plain reading of them sees them as an expression of a Reformed theological outlook.
The Articles assert the primacy of the authority of Scripture for Anglican faith and practice. That is not to say that Scripture is the only authority, but it is held to be the supreme authority, even over the great creeds of the church (Article VIII). Article VI reads: ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation’. According to the articles, Scripture is to act as the measure of what Anglicans believe.
For two great Elizabethan Anglicans, Scripture was likewise of paramount importance. Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is often held up as the doyen of Anglican divines – ‘judicious’, rational, careful and moderate in tone. He was an opponent of the Puritan extremists in the Church of England who were moving against the episcopate and against all customs not explicitly sanctioned in Scripture. For a long time it was thought that he had endorsed ‘the three-legged stool’ of Scripture, Reason and Tradition as equal, mutually-informing authorities in Anglican thinking. Careful reading of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity tells another story. He writes:
What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason over-rule all other inferior judgments whatsoever ( Laws, Book V, 8:2; Folger Edition 2:39,8-14).
Scripture, reason and tradition do not have equal weight for Hooker. Quite clearly, Scripture has precedence, then reason and third, church tradition. Though the Puritans were mistaken when they opposed tradition where Scripture was silent, they were correct in placing Scripture ahead of all other authorities. Hooker can be described as endorsing the ‘normative’ view of Scripture with regard to church order and ceremonies, as opposed to the ‘regulative’ view championed by his Puritan opponents such as William Perkins and Thomas Cartwright. He conceded that the threefold order of ministry – bishop, priest and deacon – cannot be directly established from Scripture, but that the historic episcopate is nevertheless a good way to frame the polity of the English church.
In his 1562 work Apology of the Church in England, Bishop John Jewel (1522-71) of Salisbury made an ardent defence of the Reformation settlement in England, setting it over against the abuses of the Church of Rome. He depicted the Church of England as episcopal, but thoroughly Reformed in doctrine. The Church of England in its stance against Rome needed to be convincingly apostolic. It could do so by appeal to Scripture; but also by appeal to the Church Fathers and to the Councils. This was not to invest them with an authority independent of Scripture, but to show that, even on their preferred ground, the Roman Church was not the true heir of the apostolic teaching.
To the work of these two Elizabethan divines we might well add the declaration of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral in 1888 as an instance in Anglican history when the primacy of Scripture was clearly asserted. The 1888 Lambeth conference of bishops received in slightly amended form a document which had been passed by the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America in 1886. The four points of the quadrilateral are, in order: Holy Scripture as ‘the rule and ultimate standard of faith’; the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creed; the two sacraments; and the historic episcopate. The basis of the unity of the Anglican Communion is thus a common confession of faith derived from Scripture.
What these examples prove is quite modest, but it is sufficient. They demonstrate that those who hold that it is thoroughly and authentically Anglican to view Scripture as the supreme authority have a more than reasonable case grounded in the major documents of Anglican history and in the thought of its major theologians. Furthermore, on soteriology and the sacraments it is quite clearly possible to discern a succession of authoritative figures and documents that assert the Reformed view, however distasteful this might be to some contemporary Anglicans. There are other readings of Anglican history – most notably the reading perpetuated by the Oxford movement in the 19th century, which emphasised the Caroline divines and their appeal to the Church Fathers. Yet even this sketch of Anglicanism shows that this reading of Anglican history could only ever be a selective and polemical one. A Christian faith which places it emphasis on the supreme authority of Scripture for doctrine and practice and which upholds the Reformed view or salvation and the sacraments can with confidence assert its continuous place within the Anglican story. A view of Anglicanism which places Scripture as supreme authority and which has a Reformed soteriology and which has a flexible attitude to liturgical practice certainly has a good case to be considered as authentically Anglican. However, this plurality and flexibility is not infinite.
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