Sermon for St. George’s Chapel, October 21, 2007 – Pentecost XXI (P. 24C)
The scripture readings set for Sunday, October 21 in the American B.C.P are:
Genesis: 32.3-8 & 22-30
II Timothy: 3.14 – 4.5
St. Luke: 18.1-8a
Preliminary Note
The story of the wrestling Jacob is so full of possible sermon themes that I found it hard not to begin work on it. On the other hand, the gospel reading did not seem so promising. It is not one of the more vivid parables relayed to us by Luke, and in light of work on the parables by scholars like C. H. Dodd, Joachim Jeremias and Eta Linnemann one has to wonder whether its original intention was to teach perseverance in prayer; after all, Mt. 6.7 tells us mê battalogêsête, ‘don’t use repetitious prayers’. Moreover, the whole issue of intercessory prayer is skating on thin ice (see my posting of Saturday, July 28 – The Use of Praying), and, so, I turned to the Epistle.
The set reading is a continuation of sections from the Pastoral Epistles, which, though still announced as by St. Paul, are probably not. II Timothy 3.16 together with
II Peter 1.21 have been regarded as key texts by those who have fought for a theory of plenary verbal inspiration. David R. Law in the recently published Christianity: The Complete Guide (Ed. John Bowden, London 2005, pp 629ff.) has an excellent short article on “Inspiration”. He notes that it was in the era of “Protestant orthodoxy” (c. 1600-1750) that this theory received a great deal of attention. Another very busy period was the latter part of the 19th century in the writings of the Princeton Seminary Calvinists. The claim that the doctrine, with particular emphasis on the inerrancy of the text, is taught by the bible seems to be a perfect of example of a circular argument: these key texts say that the words of the bible are inerrant, and since they are written by biblical authors, the key texts themselves must be inerrant. Law writes: “The Protestant concern with the inerrancy of scripture is a consequence of the doctrine of sola scriptura. Since for Protestantism the only legitimate foundation for theology is the Bible, this foundation had to be made absolutely secure”. (p. 630).
Conservative Reaction to Historical Criticism
Another crucial factor in the conservative position, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, was an increasing fear in the latter part of the 19th century of scientific and historical study. In the Roman Catholic sphere this took the form of fierce opposition to democratic movements and the institution of the “anti-Modernist Oath”, required at ordination of all R.C. priests well into the 20th century. In Protestant circles, it led to the issuing of the The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, a series of booklets published in the U.S. betwen1910 and 1915.
The sermon, which now follows, is over-long, though many members of the congregation assured me that they would have been happy to have another thirty minutes. It is also, inevitably I think, over-simplified. There are, after all, problems with historical method, and alternative ways to think about biblical inspiration that do not involve ideas of plenary verbal inspiration. All this, however, would have added much more than thirty minutes and would have made the sermon even more like a lecture than it already is.
The Sermon
Whenever we open a bible, we are faced by a challenge, but the reading from the Letter to Timothy raises the question about the status and use of scripture quite explicitly.
What precisely is the challenge? Very briefly put it is: How do we understand the biblical message in 2007? How doe we read the accounts that imply a world-view that is, and indeed for several centuries has been, untenable?
The N.T. writers fairly often refer to the sacred books as “the scriptures”, or in Greek, the writings, and it is cleat that they mean the sacred writings of the Hebrews, what we call the O.T. It is clear that the earliest Christians accepted the Rabbinic view that God spoke through the Prophets, and, of course, that included Moses. Today’s epistle speaks of the “writing(s)” and refers to them as “inspired”; a literal rendering of the Greek would be, “breathed by God”.
Within the historical context of the first century C.E., all this made sense. It was the normal view of the divine throughout the world that the gods spoke directly to people, that they directed events in a singularly ‘hands-on’ way and that, furthermore various rituals, prayers and holy people could interact with the divine forces to change the weather, to heal people or to kill them, and, in short, to ameliorate any conceivable divine action. Of course, within Judaism there was a different view of God: for the Jews there was only one God, whose name was Yahweh, and he was not a capricious God. Nevertheless, the principle remained that Yahweh directly orchestrated all the natural phenomena of weather, farming, and human health and wealth.
It is a vast over-simplification, but in the most general sense true, that this view of the world lasted for almost 1500 years. A good example would be the history of what meteorologists call the “little ice age” which lasted for over four hundred years. During the early centuries of the second millennium, famine became endemic in N. Europe, and millions died. Contemporary science suggests three possible causes for the frigid summers and almost arctic winters: a reduction of radiation from the sun; a significant increase in volcanic activity or, paradoxically, the previous warming period that poured vast quantities of fresh water into the Atlantic, cutting off the warming currents. The one explanation that is unacceptable today is the one given at the time based on the world view which the writers of the biblical books shared: the terrible crop losses were the result of the activity of the devil operating through witches, (and of course, passages of the O.T. demanded the death penalty for witches). Perhaps as many as two thousand people were executed as witches accused of causing the withering of crops and the devastation of the herds. It is another aspect of this same world-view that the vast majority of those murdered were women.
Origen & Allegory
Before the 15th century, reading the bible was not without problems. That there were challenges is not in doubt. A very early one was to question why the Hebrew bible was part of the Christian scriptures. It has, after all, a remarkable number of stories that seem to negate the picture of God we find in the teaching of Jesus, for example, the approval of genocide of Canaanite peoples in order for the Hebrews to inherit the promised land, and long lists of forbidden foods; the latter was a particular stumbling block for the early Christians since they knew that Jesus had “declared all foods clean”. (Mk. 7). An early theologian called Origen commented at the beginning of the third century that if the dimensions of Noah’s ark were accurate, there would be room to take onboard only two elephants and their food supply for the duration of the flood. The escape from these conundrums was provided by that same Origen. He stressed the undoubted spiritual nature of the writings, and said that very often the surface, obvious meaning, was not primary; what mattered was the inner, spiritual significance. In short, he claimed that the bible writings were one big Allegory whose hidden meanings we had to tease out. Shell-fish became quite OK for Christians because what the book of Leviticus was really telling us was that sins of the flesh are like limpets that once attached stick hard, and that is what we must avoid. All the early commentators treated the parables in this way: the Priest and the Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan are not there because it is a realistic story, a scene that any traveler might have witnessed. Rather they represent the priestly class of the Hebrews, superseded by Christ. The oil and the wine are not (as , in fact, they were), the normal first-aid kit of the first century, but the sacraments of the Eucharist and anointing.
Changing World-View
About five hundred years ago, the intellectual climate began to change. Long-accepted formulae began to be questioned. It is not necessary to trace out the course of the scientific revolution that began with a new examination of the vast universe around us and moved on to the discover the miniscule universe within us. Parallel to, and closely linked with the scientific revolution was a revolution in how history is to be understood. Sources have to be checked, early MSS have to be examined, and obvious prejudices of the writers have to be taken into account: these factors and many others, it was realized, are essential for understanding the past, rather than merely creating an ideological account of it. Thus as the scientific advances exposed more and more problems with the biblical text, (like the impossibility of the earth’s being a mere 4004 years old), the study of history provided a new way of reading the scriptures. It became clear that the Bible is not a coherent single document. It is a collection of different texts, composed, revised, re-written by dozens of often anonymous authors spanning nine centuries. But it also became clear that we could trace growth in how we might think about God. We were not forced to continue to hold early ideas of a God directing every minute detail of the material universe or as leader in wars of extinction.
Centrality of Rule of God in teaching of Jesus
Above all, we could take a new look at the teaching of Jesus. To take one quite central factor, we were no longer forced to hear the parables as allegories. We understood that they are stories that try to get across a central point. The details are not important in themselves, as, say in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; they are there because that is how the story goes. This approach made it clear that Jesus’ teaching centers firmly on the coming of the Kingdom of God, the Rule of God. It was those disciples who heard the teaching and passed it on to the next generation that formed the community within which they believed (and still do believe) that the living Jesus continues to operate. At its best (which has not been all that often) the Church has lived by and held up for the world a view of God as loving and suffering with humanity.
How Envisage God?
This revolution in the understanding of the bible involves abandoning older views of God, and I think that it may well be this factor rather than a slavish insistence on the absolute accuracy of the biblical text that lies behind much contemporary fundamentalism. To have a god who continually manipulates our environment, a god to whom we can send a message asking for a situation to be altered (be it the removal of a terminal disease or the lack of a parking place when shopping), may be much more comforting than having One who is love incarnate, and who, instead of changing things, agrees to suffer along with us giving us new life based on love rather than power.
Inspired how?
Finally, of course, this approach to the bible requires us to abandon the older view of the divine inspiration of the scriptures, which, you may recall, was my starting point. Instead of a mechanical view where God uses the writers as a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy, we need to envisage the writer as a member of a believing community, who as a representative of that community is deeply in touch with the divine and who often in poetry, tries to put into words the meaning of the divine for human life.
We stand within that community and we share the faith that Jesus inspired in those first intimate disciples that the Rule of the God of love is the ultimate reality of the universe. Because of the insights of historical study, we understand the words of Jesus in today’s gospel not as asking God to do things for us that he hadn’t noticed we needed, but as an unshakeable faith that God wills “quickly to grant justice” to all humankind.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Covenants Old & New
The recent turmoil in the loosely affiliated churches that are described as “The Anglican Communion”, has produced or thrown into prominence several new committees and quasi executive bodies. Among them is a group that is called, somewhat quaintly, “The Primates’ Meeting”. These meetings began after the Lambeth Conference of 1978, but only recently have they seemed to mimic some of the organs of the much more tightly hierarchical Roman Catholic Church. Thus, at a fairly recent meeting in Tanzania, they requested (though, directed would seem more accurate) the Bishops of ECUSA, to “make an unequivocal common covenant that the bishops will not authorize any Rite of Blessing for same-sex (they mean, I assume, same-gender) unions in their diocese or through General Convention”. The Primates go on to insist that anyone living in a same-sex (sic) union should not be approved for Episcopal orders. I am not clear whether this means that such a life-style is permissible for deaconal or presbyteral orders.
Déjà Vu
Whatever else can be said about the current imbroglio, as a student of nineteenth century history, I experience an intense sense of déjà vu. One recalls the events of 1840-60: the fuss over Professor Hampton, the Gorham case and the Colenso affair; then, in following decades the rash of litigation over lighted candles, chasubles, thuribles and even vested choirs, and it begins to sound eerily familiar. I had thought that the main parallels lay mainly in the area of challenges to traditional theological formulations and inherited Christian behavior patterns. A recent conversation with the Bishop of Niagara, however, revealed that the conservative evangelical objection to vestments and ceremonial practices is still a potent issue. He reported that at a recent Ordination in (I think) St. Paul’s, almost a dozen candidates refused to wear a stole, and some even a cassock. How many deck chairs can we re-arrange?
The Church of England in the Nineteenth Century
Owen Chadwick’s The Victorian Church is required reading about all this. It might be a good idea, rather along the lines of the story of 70 Rabbis who produced the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures (the Septuagint, or LXX) to lock up the bishop of Pittsburgh, his US co-schismatics and the swelling number of African diocesan satellite bishops, with Chadwick’s two volumes, and let them out only when they could complete a searching exam on the history of the Church of England in the 19th century.
Church & State
Chadwick’s account of the attempts to revive the Convocation(s) is revealing.
The Convocation of Canterbury had not been allowed to meet since 1717, except at the call of new Parliament when an address affirming the royal supremacy was made to the King/Queen.
The attempt to re-vivify the Convocation began in the wake of the Gorham case debacle, which started in 1847 and dragged on until 1853; in that year the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overturned the judgment against Mr. Gorham for departing from the apparent teaching of the Book of Common Prayer (B.C.P.) that infant baptism alone resulted in unconditional regeneration. Evangelicals were not happy with any view of the Sacraments that smacked of ex opere operato, insisting that baptism needed conscious repentance to achieve moral regeneration. The issue was clouded because the B. C. P. and Thirty-nine Articles (XXXIX) are not entirely consistent on the matter, but it was the assertion of State power over Church Doctrine that was at the center of the uproar. It was now the turn of the Tractarians to threaten wholesale departure from an Erastian church. (The Evangelicals had threatened departure should the judgment against Gorham be upheld).
Two Churches
Owen Chadwick has a riveting account of the whole affair, (The Victorian Church - Part 1, pp.309-324). At one point when Lord Aberdeen was, briefly, Prime Minister, it seemed clear that a meeting of Convocation to receive a committee report could not be stopped. The Law Lords so gave their opinion. Aberdeen had searing memories of the split in the Established Scottish Presbyterian Church in 1843 when over the very issue of the power of the State to dictate to the Church, rather more than one third of the ministers seceded to form the Free Church. It is reported that Aberdeen said to his son: “Your friend is right who says the Church of England is two churches only held together by external forces. This unnatural apparent-union cannot last long, but we may as well defer the separation as long as possible.” (p. 319).
The Proposed Covenant
One of the efforts now under way to hold the Anglican Communion together (no longer, be it noted, merely the Church of England) is the establishment of a Covenant to which all the autonomous churches of the Communion must assent.
In the Church Times last year, David Edwards, the retired Provost of Southwark wrote:
“[T]he new Anglican Covenant is not likely to provide a permanent identity…. it avoids any clear statement of the reasons for Anglican diversity or disunity. Thus it does not mention the controversy about homosexuality, in which biblically derived morality is in tension with the modern knowledge that this condition is natural for an important minority of humankind, as created by God through evolution.”
Here Edwards puts his finger on a central facet of the Conservative Evangelical position. Not only does it insist on the inerrancy (not necessarily, be it noted, a literal reading) of the text, but it does this, by and large, by an anti-intellectual stance that puts ideology before the results of careful empirical science. The force of scattered texts in the Book of Leviticus whose interpretation is tentative at best is opposed to the growing evidence that homosexuality is a “condition natural” for many people.
The problem of setting up ‘confessional’ standards for the whole Church of England, let alone the whole Anglican Communion in its post-imperial, and now, even post-Commonwealth mode of operation, is well illustrated by a consideration of the Thirty-nine Articles
The Thirty-nine Articles
Soon after he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942, it is reported that William Temple while chatting to Winston Churchill complained about the problems of maintaining Lambeth Palace in war time: there are, he moaned forty bedrooms in the place; to which Churchill is said to have replied, “How inconvenient when you have only Thirty-nine articles”. Whether Winston consciously equated that strange document, the XXXIX Articles, with chamber pots is not clear, but he certainly was not alone in wanting them to be pushed securely out of sight under a bed.
Apart from a very brief period, they had never represented the actual spectrum of belief allowed in the post Henrician church. This mishmash of Lutheranism, Patrological references, virulent anti-papalism mixed with lacings of Calvinism certainly did not get the Articles into the league of the great Continental Reformation Confessions. Indeed, following the failures of various Puritan efforts, e.g. the Savoy Conference, the document remained rather like an inactivated bank account: remained that way, that is, until the very end of the 18th century.
A Very Brief History
Strictly, the XXXIX Articles are not part of the Book of Common Prayer, but have been printed with it, in the U K, since the 1662 B.C.P., and on and off since the 1800s in the US Episcopal book. The history of their development is long and, not surprisingly, given the contentiousness of the times, convoluted. I am indebted to Marion Hatchett - Commentary on the American Prayer Book, pp. 583ff for a succinct summary of some tiresome history. In the Background are the Continental Confessions, particularly Augsburg (1530) and Württemberg (1552), both of which focused on controversial questions. On the way to the XXXIX Articles we pass through the Ten Articles under Henry, and the Forty-two, set out in 1553: written largely by Cranmer, all beneficed clergy were required to sign on pain of deprivation. Naturally, no one was too concerned about Protestant Confessions (or Covenants, which once again seem to be hovering over us in a menacing way) during the reign of Mary Tudor. The Thirty-nine finally emerged after the accession of Elizabeth I, the result of many deletions, emendations and substitutions. (For details, see Hatchett 587). In the seventeenth century, the Puritans refused to subscribe to them because they had not rooted out noisome papist elements like episcopacy and baptismal regeneration: in the eighteenth century, they made the Latitudinarians very unhappy because of narrow atonement theology and Augustinian-like original sin statements. During the nineteenth century they were partly the cause of several high profile cases that went to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and by the twentieth, I suspect, that they were only mentioned in the Evangelical Theological
Colleges like Clifton, Bristol and Wycliffe Hall.
The American Book
The newly autonomous Episcopal Church of the United States of America havered for quite while. After all, Article 38 read, “The King’s Majesty hath the chief power in this realm of England, and other his dominions….and is not, nor ought to be subject to any foreign jurisdiction". Other changes can be found by reading the miniscule italic print in the Articles as printed in the Historical Documents of the Church in our 1979 P.C.B. (pp. 867 ff.).
The Deputies held back the Bishops from including a revised version of the Articles in a proposed Prayer Book in 1789, and consideration was twice more postponed in 1792 and 1795. It was not until 1801 that “both houses approved a resolution that the Articles… be set forth”. (Hatchett 587). In their revised form they were placed between the Psalter and the Ordinal; in 1886 they began their journey to their present status as an “historical document”, being removed to the end of the Prayer Book. In the present (1979) book they share the dubious distinction of being in the same section as the Athanasian Creed, of which it has been aptly said “it is neither by Athanasius nor a Creed”.
Some Reflections on a Covenant
This somewhat truncated account of the XXXIX Articles does not inspire confidence in the future of an Anglican Covenant. To take two specific examples:
Atonement Theory
1) Is it conceivable that consensus can be achieved on the theology of the atonement? Many conservatives will insist on an Anselmian “penal substitution” theory. I personally find it quite unacceptable, but would be able to live with those for whom it is “the gospel truth” so long as I could turn to Abelard, Aulen and many others for enlightenment; unhappily it seems, conservatives cannot live with what they designate as “heretical” views.
The Inerrancy of Scripture
2) A much more intractable subject would be the interpretation of scripture and the understanding of the nature of Christian Doctrine (Dogma).
Here are two absolutely central issues:
A) How do we read the biblical texts, taking into account the MSS studies, the archeological finds, the historical researches, the critical studies and, above all, the results of careful empirical scientific investigation of the past three centuries?
B) How do we shake off the habit of treating doctrinal statements (Dogmas) as though they are a direct communication from God, totally immune from linguistic, cultural, economic and political conditions current at the time of the original formulation?
The drift to an inerrant reading of the biblical texts is quite obvious in the US and also in many of the Anglican autonomous churches that have sprung from the Colonial era. I also suspect it is quite a prevalent in the Church of England; even a scholar like Tom Wright seems, since assuming the cloak of Durham, to have moved away from his original conservative critical positions, (as when I knew him as Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford),and only the other day, the New Yorker reported that the bishop of Carlisle attributed the dreadful weather this summer to divine retribution for the moral slide of the UK: surely the kind of opinion that springs from a pre-critical reading of the bible and a totally outworn dogmatic view of divine providence.
From the time of Essays and Reviews, on through the writings of the likes of Gore, Headlam, R.H Lightfoot, Hebert, Michael Ramsey and countless others, the Anglican tradition has been able to absorb the best of critical scholarship which a conservative statement of plenary biblical inspiration would surely not embrace.
Conclusion – What is the Anglican Communion?
The all-pervasive lack of clarity about the nature of this conglomerate body no doubt reflects the fuzziness of the “good old Church of England”, a fuzziness that has enabled the two (or more) churches to hold together in some recognizable form.
Some helpful notes on the legal status of the Church of England can be found on the Web site of the History Department of the University of Botswana. The author points out that the Church of England “is not a voluntary society with rules made by compact. Instead, its laws are part of the English legal system”. It was not until 1919 that Parliament gave the church some limited authority by setting up the Church Assembly. Even so, its limitations were made glaringly obvious when Parliament refused to pass into law the revised B.C.P. of 1928. The note continues, “In the 1970s the Church Assembly was replaced by the General Synod, but the basic procedure remains”.
A contemporary conundrum for the Church of England is what to do about the Parliamentary approval of a covenant between same gender couples, in effect, recognizing a form of civil union.
Autonomous Churches – Not Provinces of the Church of England
Perhaps more problematic is what to do about the so-called Anglican Communion. One small pointer to the confusion is, I think, the use of the term “Province” for what is clearly now an autonomous church, which once had very close links to the Church of England. So, the Church in S. Africa was regarded as a kind of extension of the Church of England, a kind of addition to the traditional Provinces of Canterbury ad York. That the Province of S. Africa was so regarded is surely validated by the fact that J.W. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, having been deposed by a synod of African Bishops (1862), successfully appealed to the Privy Council. “On 20 March 1856 the judicial committee [of the Privy Council] held that the proceedings of the synod were null and void.” (Chadwick Part II, p. 9).
Clearly, the Anglican Church in S. Africa is no longer a “province” in the 1862 sense, though it continues to be called so, as do other affiliated Anglican bodies. The issue of nomenclature may be a small matter, but it cloaks a great deal of confusion, the sort of confusion seen when the Primates in Tanzania assumed that the ECUSA bishops alone, with no reference to the General Convention, could give them the assurances they demanded.
Perhaps we might most helpfully see the Anglican Communion as a kind of spiritual analog of the Commonwealth, which emerged, it seems, to perpetuate a shade of the dissolving empire. Having served its purpose, the Commonwealth is hardly seen any longer as a functioning organization; even its symbolic aspects are slowly slipping away. Perhaps the Anglican Communion could discreetly join the cortege? Or, maybe, it already has.
Déjà Vu
Whatever else can be said about the current imbroglio, as a student of nineteenth century history, I experience an intense sense of déjà vu. One recalls the events of 1840-60: the fuss over Professor Hampton, the Gorham case and the Colenso affair; then, in following decades the rash of litigation over lighted candles, chasubles, thuribles and even vested choirs, and it begins to sound eerily familiar. I had thought that the main parallels lay mainly in the area of challenges to traditional theological formulations and inherited Christian behavior patterns. A recent conversation with the Bishop of Niagara, however, revealed that the conservative evangelical objection to vestments and ceremonial practices is still a potent issue. He reported that at a recent Ordination in (I think) St. Paul’s, almost a dozen candidates refused to wear a stole, and some even a cassock. How many deck chairs can we re-arrange?
The Church of England in the Nineteenth Century
Owen Chadwick’s The Victorian Church is required reading about all this. It might be a good idea, rather along the lines of the story of 70 Rabbis who produced the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures (the Septuagint, or LXX) to lock up the bishop of Pittsburgh, his US co-schismatics and the swelling number of African diocesan satellite bishops, with Chadwick’s two volumes, and let them out only when they could complete a searching exam on the history of the Church of England in the 19th century.
Church & State
Chadwick’s account of the attempts to revive the Convocation(s) is revealing.
The Convocation of Canterbury had not been allowed to meet since 1717, except at the call of new Parliament when an address affirming the royal supremacy was made to the King/Queen.
The attempt to re-vivify the Convocation began in the wake of the Gorham case debacle, which started in 1847 and dragged on until 1853; in that year the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overturned the judgment against Mr. Gorham for departing from the apparent teaching of the Book of Common Prayer (B.C.P.) that infant baptism alone resulted in unconditional regeneration. Evangelicals were not happy with any view of the Sacraments that smacked of ex opere operato, insisting that baptism needed conscious repentance to achieve moral regeneration. The issue was clouded because the B. C. P. and Thirty-nine Articles (XXXIX) are not entirely consistent on the matter, but it was the assertion of State power over Church Doctrine that was at the center of the uproar. It was now the turn of the Tractarians to threaten wholesale departure from an Erastian church. (The Evangelicals had threatened departure should the judgment against Gorham be upheld).
Two Churches
Owen Chadwick has a riveting account of the whole affair, (The Victorian Church - Part 1, pp.309-324). At one point when Lord Aberdeen was, briefly, Prime Minister, it seemed clear that a meeting of Convocation to receive a committee report could not be stopped. The Law Lords so gave their opinion. Aberdeen had searing memories of the split in the Established Scottish Presbyterian Church in 1843 when over the very issue of the power of the State to dictate to the Church, rather more than one third of the ministers seceded to form the Free Church. It is reported that Aberdeen said to his son: “Your friend is right who says the Church of England is two churches only held together by external forces. This unnatural apparent-union cannot last long, but we may as well defer the separation as long as possible.” (p. 319).
The Proposed Covenant
One of the efforts now under way to hold the Anglican Communion together (no longer, be it noted, merely the Church of England) is the establishment of a Covenant to which all the autonomous churches of the Communion must assent.
In the Church Times last year, David Edwards, the retired Provost of Southwark wrote:
“[T]he new Anglican Covenant is not likely to provide a permanent identity…. it avoids any clear statement of the reasons for Anglican diversity or disunity. Thus it does not mention the controversy about homosexuality, in which biblically derived morality is in tension with the modern knowledge that this condition is natural for an important minority of humankind, as created by God through evolution.”
Here Edwards puts his finger on a central facet of the Conservative Evangelical position. Not only does it insist on the inerrancy (not necessarily, be it noted, a literal reading) of the text, but it does this, by and large, by an anti-intellectual stance that puts ideology before the results of careful empirical science. The force of scattered texts in the Book of Leviticus whose interpretation is tentative at best is opposed to the growing evidence that homosexuality is a “condition natural” for many people.
The problem of setting up ‘confessional’ standards for the whole Church of England, let alone the whole Anglican Communion in its post-imperial, and now, even post-Commonwealth mode of operation, is well illustrated by a consideration of the Thirty-nine Articles
The Thirty-nine Articles
Soon after he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942, it is reported that William Temple while chatting to Winston Churchill complained about the problems of maintaining Lambeth Palace in war time: there are, he moaned forty bedrooms in the place; to which Churchill is said to have replied, “How inconvenient when you have only Thirty-nine articles”. Whether Winston consciously equated that strange document, the XXXIX Articles, with chamber pots is not clear, but he certainly was not alone in wanting them to be pushed securely out of sight under a bed.
Apart from a very brief period, they had never represented the actual spectrum of belief allowed in the post Henrician church. This mishmash of Lutheranism, Patrological references, virulent anti-papalism mixed with lacings of Calvinism certainly did not get the Articles into the league of the great Continental Reformation Confessions. Indeed, following the failures of various Puritan efforts, e.g. the Savoy Conference, the document remained rather like an inactivated bank account: remained that way, that is, until the very end of the 18th century.
A Very Brief History
Strictly, the XXXIX Articles are not part of the Book of Common Prayer, but have been printed with it, in the U K, since the 1662 B.C.P., and on and off since the 1800s in the US Episcopal book. The history of their development is long and, not surprisingly, given the contentiousness of the times, convoluted. I am indebted to Marion Hatchett - Commentary on the American Prayer Book, pp. 583ff for a succinct summary of some tiresome history. In the Background are the Continental Confessions, particularly Augsburg (1530) and Württemberg (1552), both of which focused on controversial questions. On the way to the XXXIX Articles we pass through the Ten Articles under Henry, and the Forty-two, set out in 1553: written largely by Cranmer, all beneficed clergy were required to sign on pain of deprivation. Naturally, no one was too concerned about Protestant Confessions (or Covenants, which once again seem to be hovering over us in a menacing way) during the reign of Mary Tudor. The Thirty-nine finally emerged after the accession of Elizabeth I, the result of many deletions, emendations and substitutions. (For details, see Hatchett 587). In the seventeenth century, the Puritans refused to subscribe to them because they had not rooted out noisome papist elements like episcopacy and baptismal regeneration: in the eighteenth century, they made the Latitudinarians very unhappy because of narrow atonement theology and Augustinian-like original sin statements. During the nineteenth century they were partly the cause of several high profile cases that went to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and by the twentieth, I suspect, that they were only mentioned in the Evangelical Theological
Colleges like Clifton, Bristol and Wycliffe Hall.
The American Book
The newly autonomous Episcopal Church of the United States of America havered for quite while. After all, Article 38 read, “The King’s Majesty hath the chief power in this realm of England, and other his dominions….and is not, nor ought to be subject to any foreign jurisdiction". Other changes can be found by reading the miniscule italic print in the Articles as printed in the Historical Documents of the Church in our 1979 P.C.B. (pp. 867 ff.).
The Deputies held back the Bishops from including a revised version of the Articles in a proposed Prayer Book in 1789, and consideration was twice more postponed in 1792 and 1795. It was not until 1801 that “both houses approved a resolution that the Articles… be set forth”. (Hatchett 587). In their revised form they were placed between the Psalter and the Ordinal; in 1886 they began their journey to their present status as an “historical document”, being removed to the end of the Prayer Book. In the present (1979) book they share the dubious distinction of being in the same section as the Athanasian Creed, of which it has been aptly said “it is neither by Athanasius nor a Creed”.
Some Reflections on a Covenant
This somewhat truncated account of the XXXIX Articles does not inspire confidence in the future of an Anglican Covenant. To take two specific examples:
Atonement Theory
1) Is it conceivable that consensus can be achieved on the theology of the atonement? Many conservatives will insist on an Anselmian “penal substitution” theory. I personally find it quite unacceptable, but would be able to live with those for whom it is “the gospel truth” so long as I could turn to Abelard, Aulen and many others for enlightenment; unhappily it seems, conservatives cannot live with what they designate as “heretical” views.
The Inerrancy of Scripture
2) A much more intractable subject would be the interpretation of scripture and the understanding of the nature of Christian Doctrine (Dogma).
Here are two absolutely central issues:
A) How do we read the biblical texts, taking into account the MSS studies, the archeological finds, the historical researches, the critical studies and, above all, the results of careful empirical scientific investigation of the past three centuries?
B) How do we shake off the habit of treating doctrinal statements (Dogmas) as though they are a direct communication from God, totally immune from linguistic, cultural, economic and political conditions current at the time of the original formulation?
The drift to an inerrant reading of the biblical texts is quite obvious in the US and also in many of the Anglican autonomous churches that have sprung from the Colonial era. I also suspect it is quite a prevalent in the Church of England; even a scholar like Tom Wright seems, since assuming the cloak of Durham, to have moved away from his original conservative critical positions, (as when I knew him as Chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford),and only the other day, the New Yorker reported that the bishop of Carlisle attributed the dreadful weather this summer to divine retribution for the moral slide of the UK: surely the kind of opinion that springs from a pre-critical reading of the bible and a totally outworn dogmatic view of divine providence.
From the time of Essays and Reviews, on through the writings of the likes of Gore, Headlam, R.H Lightfoot, Hebert, Michael Ramsey and countless others, the Anglican tradition has been able to absorb the best of critical scholarship which a conservative statement of plenary biblical inspiration would surely not embrace.
Conclusion – What is the Anglican Communion?
The all-pervasive lack of clarity about the nature of this conglomerate body no doubt reflects the fuzziness of the “good old Church of England”, a fuzziness that has enabled the two (or more) churches to hold together in some recognizable form.
Some helpful notes on the legal status of the Church of England can be found on the Web site of the History Department of the University of Botswana. The author points out that the Church of England “is not a voluntary society with rules made by compact. Instead, its laws are part of the English legal system”. It was not until 1919 that Parliament gave the church some limited authority by setting up the Church Assembly. Even so, its limitations were made glaringly obvious when Parliament refused to pass into law the revised B.C.P. of 1928. The note continues, “In the 1970s the Church Assembly was replaced by the General Synod, but the basic procedure remains”.
A contemporary conundrum for the Church of England is what to do about the Parliamentary approval of a covenant between same gender couples, in effect, recognizing a form of civil union.
Autonomous Churches – Not Provinces of the Church of England
Perhaps more problematic is what to do about the so-called Anglican Communion. One small pointer to the confusion is, I think, the use of the term “Province” for what is clearly now an autonomous church, which once had very close links to the Church of England. So, the Church in S. Africa was regarded as a kind of extension of the Church of England, a kind of addition to the traditional Provinces of Canterbury ad York. That the Province of S. Africa was so regarded is surely validated by the fact that J.W. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, having been deposed by a synod of African Bishops (1862), successfully appealed to the Privy Council. “On 20 March 1856 the judicial committee [of the Privy Council] held that the proceedings of the synod were null and void.” (Chadwick Part II, p. 9).
Clearly, the Anglican Church in S. Africa is no longer a “province” in the 1862 sense, though it continues to be called so, as do other affiliated Anglican bodies. The issue of nomenclature may be a small matter, but it cloaks a great deal of confusion, the sort of confusion seen when the Primates in Tanzania assumed that the ECUSA bishops alone, with no reference to the General Convention, could give them the assurances they demanded.
Perhaps we might most helpfully see the Anglican Communion as a kind of spiritual analog of the Commonwealth, which emerged, it seems, to perpetuate a shade of the dissolving empire. Having served its purpose, the Commonwealth is hardly seen any longer as a functioning organization; even its symbolic aspects are slowly slipping away. Perhaps the Anglican Communion could discreetly join the cortege? Or, maybe, it already has.
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