Keeping It Together

One of the questions I said the other day that I wanted the majority in the Church of England to answer was, Why are we bothering to accommodate those who are against the consecration of woman as bishops? If we discover answers to that question, more than just the cynical ‘Because we can’t do what we want unless we do accommodate them’, we might be willing to do more actually to make it happen. One of the possible answers is that the antis bring something valuable to the Church which we don’t want to lose, and I’ve been thinking around that over the last couple of days.

Richard Hooker wrote that the three sources of thought on which the Anglican Church relies are Scripture, Tradition and Reason: we were taught that at St Stephen’s House and I trust it gets mentioned in other colleges and training courses too. You can obviously relate these to the three main divisions within the Anglican Church today. Evangelicals place the Biblical documents at the centre of their thinking; Catholics put a strong emphasis on what the Church as a whole has taught across time and geographical distance; Liberals draw lessons from the world they observe and experience to interrogate both the words of Scripture and the tradition of the Church.

All three in their thinking will inevitably get stuff wrong. I am rather a conservative sort of liberal, and so while I support the consecration of women as bishops I can understand the arguments the two sorts of antis, Catholic and Evangelical, are making. I think they are wrong, but possibly that they are wrong for the right reasons. I believe that, in their anxiety to preserve the importance of the Biblical witness, the conservative Evangelicals are misinterpreting that witness; and I also believe that, in their concern to keep Anglicanism linked (at least in the way it looks) with the other bits of Catholic Christianity, the Catholics are overemphasising the wrong parts of that tradition. But their concerns are, at root, sound ones.

My frustration with some, let’s say, less reflective liberal Christians is that they are, conversely, often right for the wrong reasons. It’s perfectly possible to be a Liberal Anglican and have a great concern for Scripture and the Catholic identity of the Church, but too many Liberals seem to sit very light to both, and often not even to understand them. I suspect, as I’ve let on in the past, that there is stuff in Scripture and the Tradition of the Church that we don’t really grasp yet, but that we have to engage with rather than just junk in order to work out what it is that God really wants us to take on board.  The tragedy of schism, of Christians breaking fellowship and ceasing to talk and worship together, is that it makes it less likely that this will happen. When Churches divide and set up new, separate structures, we fall in with the competitive model under which the World operates, not the model of the Kingdom – with all its frustrations. Different sorts of Christians with different biases get nice, comforting, if smaller groupings in which they will only need to deal with people who think the same way they do, and they then compete with each other.

We need to think deeper than just that ‘the Church of England is a broad church and so we want to keep everyone on board’. That’s a weak version of the real situation – which is that precisely because we think differently we need those differences in order to tack towards the truth. You only have to look across the Atlantic to see what happens when Anglicanism blithely severs itself from parts of its identity. Think of Catholics, Evangelicals and Liberals not as ‘bringing different things to the table’, because that image implies that you could, if necessary, live without any of those things (I’m pretty sure my Catholic and Evangelical brethren each believe they could very cheerfully manage without the other two). It pays lip-service to the ideal of unity without really believing that you might be affected, changed, as a result of dealing with those challenging others. Instead, those three elements are like tethers that keep us attached to what are, basically, channels of the Holy Spirit’s teaching us: the Biblical witness to Jesus, the Church’s inheritance of spiritual experience and thinking, and the constant interrogation of both those things by what we actually see and hear around us. We need people who prioritise one or another of those, because our natural human tendency is to downplay the ones we’re less biased towards. And that’s what it is and what makes it so maddening at times – a necessary combination of prejudices.

And why should we bother preserving that? Why not just let one wing or another go off and do their own thing? I believe very strongly that the answer is because the Church of England has, dare I say it, a particular eschatological role. We have, very peculiarly and strangely, developed this mad, frustrating, divided identity – alone among the Churches, at least to this degree. It’s because we are committed to keeping together our connections to those three sources of the Spirit’s guidance that we mediate those other Churches which emphasise one or another. The time will come, I think, when the Church of England will play some deep role in the reunification of the sundered branches of Christ’s Church, and we’ll be able to do it precisely because we’ve kept together internally. Of course God’s plans will happen regardless, but if we actually get in the way of them he’ll be terribly sad …

Maintaining the breadth of the Church of England isn’t just nice if we can manage it. It’s the point of the whole thing. We need those people we disagree with in order to do what God wants of us. None of us, Catholics, Evangelicals, or Liberals, can do it on our own, because we are flawed, limited, biased human beings. And we should be willing to sacrifice virtually anything to keep it.