Encouraging what engagement? How?

Looking at the Covenant documentation for General Synod, it seems one laudable aim is to promote closer engagement between Churches.
Institutional structures can assist as well as impede strong and fruitful relationships, of course. Having a formal marriage certificate doesn’t stop marriage partners loving each other — indeed it ought to help, all ohter things being equal. What it cannot do is make people love one another.

Direct meeting is a gospel value. And if this is the aim, one way to judge the Covenant proposal will be to ask “How might it deliver what kind of closer engagement between Churches?” A new refereeing institution could bring churches together when they make decisions others abhor. That‘s the theory, rather like requiring divorcing couples to seek counselling.

Yet wise counsellors with whom I’ve worked in prisons and counselling centres have always told me how difficult mandated counselling is. For it to be effective people have to be willing to contemplate changing something about themselves, and to be committed enough to the process to give it a go. They have to be equal enough to talk and often if they had been that in the first place they wouldn't have got into the situation they're in.

A couple who both believe profoundly “I am in the right and it’s basically my partner needs to change” are unlikely to find counselling effective. Anyone who is not reasonably committed to the process will spend their counselling session staring out the window or at their watch. Again, the exercise is almost certainly pointless, and the kindest thing a counsellor can do is point this out honestly from the outset rather than stage a charade where there is no meeting of minds, or will to reach it, or preparedness to change.

I’m also struck, as I look back to the spat that gave rise to the Windsor report, how the human impact of what was going on had explicit and implicit expressions. On the one hand various politicians, scribes, pharisees and manipulators proclaimed their righteous indignation from the housetops, along with what others had to do to call off the dogs of war.

On the other, many gay clergy colleagues bottled up, often bravely and quietly, what must sometimes have seemed intolerable burdens of depression, frustration and pain. This came from a feeling they were being institutionally rubbished by the Church that had nurtured them, and to which they felt profoundly committed, personally and spiritually. Someone told me it felt like being mugged by a parent, at the behest of a nasty neighbour. Many found it almost unbearable to talk about, in the way people who had been in the trenches couldn’t and didn’t want to talk about what they had witnessed when they got home. The clearest expression of the hurt beng experienced by gay clergy wasn’t imposing declarations but days off sick with depression and stress, many of them never even logged as such.

Of course people should engage. But engaging institutionally and legally is nothing like as important as engaging personally and spiritually with real human beings. That’s why boycotts are usually evil, because they are excuses not to engage but to feel as righteous as if you had. People matter so much more to God than the abstract issues ever could. We owe far less to dogma, than to the people our dogma impacts, because that is the way of Christ, and the Scriptures teach us that love is the fulfilling of the law, whatever law you may have in mind, even the ten commandments.

I notice how the wording of section 4 of the various drafts of the Covenant has become less legalistic and more relational. Good. But I want to know how positively relational it really is now, or is this just a drafting cleanup because people wouldn't swallow the medicine for what it actually was, neat?

I want to know, in close particulars, how the new structures being proposed will give what voice not only to the Scribes, Pharisees and bureaucrats, who in my experience can usually speak for themselves, but also to the poor blighters in the dust who look to us, bishops especially, because they thought in all innocence that bishops were supposed to be more committed to the way of Jesus Christ than the way of Caiaphas.

It could be that a new refereeing body gives a voice to the voiceless. OK. How? And if this process does not go out of its way to do this, and especially if it contents itself with pious intentions and merely institutional stitching up, it will only make our spiritual sickness worse, not better.

Church and churches

There’s been interesting discussion on Fr Milovan Katanic’s blog and elsewhere (including Steve Hayes’ wonderful blog) about hobnobbings between Roman Catholic and Orthodox leaders and the prospects for some kind of institutional merger. It may seem harsh to think everything ecclesiastical couldn’t simply be popped in the pot and boiled up into some great and glorious stew. However, because it has no externally imposed universal papcy, the Orthodox vision of God demands a kind of holistic coherence that calls for clarity and integrity on its own terms. Boiling up the stew would actually mush the ingredients to death.

So we come up against the mystery of the Church (in its broadest sense) as a clearly articulated but provisional reality. Every genuine expression of Christian discipleship carries within it the seeds of the whole, and one or two particular strands of glory. However, part of that inheritance is an awareness that its human expression is provisional (this side of glory). It does its job when, by its very limitations, it points beyond itself. The real glory of the Church lies wabeyond syncretism, and aly so beyond rational-bureaucratic imperialism.

An organic but limited and provisional awareness needs to inform any debate about the limits of national Churches. What rights does one church (small c) have to park its tanks on other churches’ lawns? Say “none,” and you compromise the totality of the vision that says we all belong to each other. Say “every right” and you walk the foothills of the toxic mess I’ve just called rational-bureaucratic imperialism. There has to be a better option than either of those.

One comment does stick in my mind from Fr Katanic’s blog, by Romanós.

All this smooching between hierarchs and popes is really quite comical, if not even tragic at a deeper level. I have long since personally given up hoping for as well as renouncing the kind of “unity” that this represents. For me, it is simply a non-issue. The unity which Christians share is above all a grace of Christ in the Holy Spirit, and we know that the Church has never been divided and never can be, but for those who battle it out on the external level. The canons of the Church are in place for good reason, and the lines have been drawn with good intentions, but all of these are temporal and fade away at the approach of Christ, for whose sake all who follow Him have given up all, and in whose presence all our righteousness, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, for all their “glory”, are still just filthy rags. Christ has saved us in spite of ourselves, so our best response is to love one another as He has loved us, without plucking each other’s eyebrows in the process.

From Jesus to Church?

How did they get from the simple carpenter of Nazareth to the institutional Church, and why?

Over Easter various UK media have been preparing us breathlessly for the Archbishop of Canterbry to denounce the RC church as having lost all credibility in Ireland, indeed a 14 second soundbite implying this was carefully trailed by the BBC, and some of the ignorant and foolish fell for this advertising puff.

When Andrew Marr’s Start the Week symposium went out yesterday morning it became instantly obvious that one tiny soundbite had been culled for advertising purposes from a small section of a sentence in what was actually a highly intelligent discussion involving a fascinating cast of characters, masterfully chaired by Andrew Marr. In 45 minutes of radio, almost nothing was said about the RC Church and the travails of that particular denomination — I think I counted four sentences. The rest was a brilliant discussion of how a simple message becomes institutionalised, for good and evil — UK public radio, in fact, at its very best!

The notion that all institutionalisation is badis one core idea of Philip Pullman’s new book, and paticpants were Andrew Marr (Political commentator) Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury), Philip Pullman (novelist and atheist), Mona Siddiqui (Muslim and academic) and David Baddiel (comedian, who describes himself as “10/10 atheist”).

The debate, available for a week on iPlayer and, I believe as a podcast. I found this section fascinating — very much the money shot. It reflects ideas I remember sketching as a possible first chapter for a book twenty years ago, but being rather too busy in my day job of being an urban vicar for it to come to anything...

AM

In many ways Philip Pullman is novelizing or fictionalizing... the institution and the essence?

RW

I think one of the main themes to come out of Philip’s book is that very strong sense that the price you pay for transmitting a spiritual vision in institutional terms can be very high. And the question sometimes is not so much about the nature of the vision as about the price you want to pay for sustaining it. The argument of the book, if I read it rightly, is that Christianity has paid too high a price. I obviously think not, but..

PP
You’re absolutely right. That’s what I’m saying...

AM

Is it possible to have an effective transmitted religious life that doesn’t have large institutional structures around it?

RW
I think it’s quite hard to imagine because you look at movements which try quite systematically to avoid that, and fifty years down the line you see mysteriously that the surface is beginning to harden. You’re beginning to get institutional transmission. Look at even the history of the Society of Friends, which I suppose in the Christian spectrum is the most anti-institutional of all. It still swings inexorably towards that, because you need some way of recognizing from generation to generation that you’re taking about the same vision. What matters is not, to me, so much whether you have the institution or not as whether the institution has in it enough things to rein you in, to draw you back to where you started and give you a real ground for saying ‘wait a minute! That’s not it...’.

DB
It may be the case, though, that the urge to institutionalize is with all parts of human endeavor because even atheists have the Humanist Association... There are atheist schisms, there certainly are. People define themselves as agnostic or atheist or whatever. It might seem like the most individual choice, but there is a need to communicate whatever belief you have.

MS
There is a difference, however, between institutionalized expressions of religion which give context to religious expression and context to people and reference points, and then how sacred the people who are the leaders within that structure become, and I think we need to differentiate between that.

PP

The process seems to me always that there’s a great original visionary who says “a time is coming soon when heaven will be fulfilled and earth will be full of plenty and delight and wonder” and so on, and then it doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen and it goes on not happening and eventually the people who want to preserve this vision have to set up institutions to validate their own positions.

AM

but there also have to be rules, don’t there, because all religions have a vision of the good life and what is a good way of living and that requires rules, and therefore somebody to...

RW

That’s a vision that has a shape, and therefore you can’t say anything counts as a good life, but the temptation then is to push that more and more and more towards codes, where you can tick boxes, and.. present your score at the end, and that is one of the things that the Gospels do really try to undermine and, actually not just the gospels. I think that it’s a great fallacy to say that there’s a big difference between Jewish and Christian Scripture on this. Something of this is going on in a lot of what we call the Old Testament, as well.

PP

Bureaucracy always overcomes vision. It’s a tragedy, and it always will be a tragedy.

AM

But if you’ve got stories which have a strong moral or ethical content and people are forced to go back and reading the stories again and reinterpreting the stories, isn’t that part of the answer to the constant fossilization or hardening caused by the structures?

PP

Bureaucracy will always be undermined by stories, but int he end bureaucracy will always win. That’s why I think it’s a tragedy.

RW

In that sense you're saying a tragedy with no possible way out. the bureaucracy always wins. I think I’d say the stories are stronger than that. I hate saying that to a novelist! But I think stories are very very tough...

DB
But isn’t part of the point of Philip's book that the bureaucracy is set up, as it were, to inject another element into the original story. i.e. to preserve what Philip talked about as a greater truth that is nothing to do with history i.e. to take what might be a story of a man who just said some good things, and make it into a much much great more powerful thing. And that’s what the bureaucracy is set up to do.

RW

That seems to me a bit more intentional than the way a lot of these things work. What I see as I read the New Testament is a central event, the life of Jesus, the words of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and for me also the resurrection of Jesus, causing such an... explosion of ideas and puzzles that the language that already exists can’t cope with, that you have a very complicated period during which the language is settling down in new ways, and you then begin to see the emergence of what we’re calling a bureaucracy, an institutional structure to hold it all. But it’s not quite as though someone comes along and says, “That’s a really good idea here, I’ll market it for you...”


All I would add is that the authority of the Church does not lie in itself. There is a dangerous delusory tendency towards what Pullman calls the magisterium, and ultimately it can compromise and can even undermine the source of faith. The Church’s real authority is emergent, and lies in its capacity to transmit the story authentically.

The measure of its success is not that it swells into a mighty institutional empire, but that it is still possible, even after all the refractive and corrupting influence of the human beings who make up the transmission chain, to distinguish Jesus’ message from its original context, and to attempt to live it in another. The story continues to judge the medium through which it is transmitted. This is the key insight of the Reformation, and the essence a Reformed Catholic Church, to hold that the Church is always accountable to the Word and its original founder.

This programme struck me as a very much more interesting and significant dialogue between sincere atheists and Christians/ Muslims than stale idiotic sixth form knockabout...

Ride a dead horse...

As our politicians try to find ingenious ways to save cash, Private Eye tells us that in 2007, The Ministry of Defence managed to find £700m of efficiency ssings, whilst the National Audit Office found that MoD’s procurement budget had ballooned by £733m the same year through “deliberate delays.” The dear old NHS last year saw a 2% rise in the number of nurses, 6% in the number of medical consultants, and 12% in the number of managers.

Meanwhile, in Churches all over the country, some programmed activities stagger on way past their sell-by date, bereft of passion, commitment and support, running on guilt and the fading memory of supposedly glorious days gone by.

Into these troubling predicaments ride Jeff and Caroline Wilkinson of Towson, Maryland, USA, (h/t Ali Kaan) with a breakthrough discovery for manegement consultants everywhere:

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount." However, in modern business, education and government, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Threatening the horse with termination.
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other countries to see how others ride dead horses.
6. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
7. Reclassifying the dead horse as "living impaired".
8. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
9. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed.
10. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance.
11. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance.
12. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
13. Rewriting the expected performance requirements on all horses.
14. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

One might add “introducing a new appraisal scheme” and “setting smart targets.” Why don’t Christians have a more coherent internalised theology of death and resurrection? We are called to what St Paul called “carrying about in the body the death of the Lord Jesus so that the life of the Lord Jesus may live through us.” That’s why churches rot away on the outside, but are continually renewed within, by God’s good providence.

Inability or refusal to grasp and internalise this basic “life and death” principle of Christianity leads to triumphalism, dead institutonalism, infallibilism, fundmentalisms various, and paranoia about being persecuted. It saps energy and stirs contention. It encourages Christians in stormy waters to cling to the wreckage, when they should be putting out into the deep.

Real Easter faith, is accepting the deadness of what really is dead and to trusting in God, who raises the dead, for all that is to be. As demonstrated by Jesus on the night of his arrest, saving faith is about knowing we have come from God and are returning to him, whatever may come in between...

image of King Wenceslas riding a horse upside down from Adam Paul: All rights reserved. Used by kind permission.

The Goodman Philip and the Scoundrel Pullman?

Philip Pullman’s Godman Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is no crude atheist rant, but a perceptive and thoughtful storyteller’s retelling of the Gospels.

It rests on a single artful high concept — that Jesus, like Sherlock Holmes, had a smarter brother. Christ, for it is he, was a kind of shadow side to the authentic Jesus — ISTJ in contrast to the author’s hero Jesus, who is a lovable mop-haired ENFP.

This book is not, in any sense, history. It assumes quaint 19th century demythologising, like Rénan and Co — ‘When the crowd realised how wise Jesus was they all got out the sandwiches they’d forgotten they’d brought, and shared them’ = ‘the feeding of the 5,000.’ No it doesn’t. Therefore this book is historically, er, light as air, but a fascinating contemporary myth about Jesus, a genre that has been spun around him ever since those primitive gnostic infancy miracle stories right up to Kazantzakis Last Temptation.

You have to remember when watching the Life of Brian that actually there wasn’t a man called Brian born in the next stable. Therefore you have to remember this book is storytelling for its own sake, not history. Pullman draws a rigid distinction between history and truth — “Jesus” embodies one, and “Christ” the other, and never the twain shall meet.

The author is a vivid and thoughftul narrative artist, and his accounts of gospel parables, sometimes brought to life as incidents served up with a twist of lemon, deserve serious attention from anyone trying to write a mystery play for today. His lines are models of conciseness, clarity and power. Pullman’s way of framing the perennial “why did Judas do it?” question is especially suggestive. Occasionally he penetrates the heart of the teaching in a really direct way, as when Jesus says:

Marriage is a serious business. So is hell. And that’s where you’ll go if you think that as long as you avoid the big sins, you can get away with the little ones

I hope it won’t spoil the plot for readers to give away its second great twist, a creative touch that is implicit but unmistakeable — ISTJ “Christ” turns out, in fact, to be Judas. Judas/Jesus: what the hell’s the difference? Like Iran and Iraq. However, this Judas is no simple baddie, but a complicated, high-minded and conflicted pragmatist:

‘I love my brother. He has a great task, and I wish I could serve him better than I do. If I sound downcast, it’s perhaps because I’m conscious of the depth of my faiure to be like him.’
‘Do you want to be like him?’
‘More than anything. He does things out of passion, and I do them out of calculation. I can see further than he can; I can see the consequences of things he doesn’t think twice about. But he acts with the whole of himself at every moment, and I’m always holding something back out of caution, or prudence, or because I want to watch and record rather than participate.’
‘If you let go of your caution, you might get carried away by your passion as he is.’
‘No,’ said Christ. ‘There are some who live by every rule and cling tightly to their rectitude because they fear being swept away by a tempest of passion, and there are others who cling to the rules because they fear that there is no passion there at all, and that if they let go they would simply remain where they are, foolish and unmoved; and they could bear that least of all. Living a life of iron control lets them pretend to themselves that only by the mightiest effort of will can they hold great passions at bay. I am one of those. I know it, and I can do nothing about it.’
‘It’s something to know it at least.’

As s/he reads this book and reflects, any good Christian should ask, “Is it I, Lord?” Pullman’s great Bogeyman is his auld enemy — “the Magisterium,” understood as a body of power and control. For the Scoundrel Christ, such an organisation is a cultural necessity without which Jesus’ simple message would be dead in the water. Indeed one can capture the thought by a variant of Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy being an awful form of government, but the alternatives being even worse. ENFP Jesus, the good man, does see the need for something, though. In a garden soliloquy he says:

Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should weild no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn but only forgive. That it should not be like a palace, with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood to the carpenter, but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. Does the tree say to the sparrow “Get out, you don’t belong here?” Does the tree say to the hungry man, “That fruit is not for you?” Does the tree test the loyalty of the beasts before it allows them into the shade?’

Amen! This is, culturally, a rather “C of E” style of ecclesology; The Church is anything but perfect, but always in need of necessary reformation. This comes from its interaction with the society it serves, not some infallible magisterium. Its teaching is found to be authoritative insofar as it is authentic and recognizably transmits the story and values of Jesus as fully as possible. The Church is authentic insofar as it allows its every activity to be judged by the Carpenter of Nazareth. Infallibilism, along with other fundamentalisms, neutralizes this discipline to vanishing point, weakens accountability, and thus becomes compelling but dangerous fantasy — a mere playing at Church-by-numbers.

Such a church’s greatest weakness, its provisionality and porous boundaries, are, in fact its greatest strengths. It does not claim always to have been right, but the fact that it is as possible, after two thousand years of this process of transmission, to weed out the golden thread of good news from its accompanying circumstatial dross in such a way that sincere personal response is possible, says something for the activity of the Holy Spirit within it.

So there is much moving material for reflection in this book. Of course history and truth do in the end, relate to ach other. The fact is and was only ever, in fact, one Jesus. The power, richness and complexity of the gospel narrative is such that that pretty much all the dark materials for this book, the ISTJ and the ENFP, could both be quarried sincerely from the same New Testament.

A book with this provocative a title will annoy all sorts of people. Some good and faithful Christians will, like Peter in the garden, draw their weapons to defend the Master. I would bid them put up their swords and reflect: ‘How is your Texas Evangelical Hardball Jesus, “good news” to any but yourself? Specifically what good news does he offer infidels heretics and sinners? And if your Jesus fails to be good news at that point, however internally coherent and compelling your vision may be, it falls short.’

Theologically speaking, this book will especially irritate those whose Jesus is somehow more than fully human for various reasons — Nestorians, Sabellians, and Monophysites — to use geeky terms. It will also annoy Docetists, that is people who absolutize an ideal Christ at the expense of the historical Jesus. It will not appeal to Pelagians, for whom “faith” is actually the only work that matters. It must also mildly annoy historians because it is so shamelessly unhistorical, not only in its central conceit, but also in its willingness to sunder history radically from truth.

This is, however, a thoughtful storyteller’s second take on the gospel story he would have liked. “Going through the gospels carefully and filleting out the bits that work for me” is, indeed, a discipline that could make any discple more self-aware, as long as we don't kid ourselves that just because it we did the filleting, the result is somehow the whole truth.

All reprocessings of the Gospels stand in the same relation to the originals from which they are drawn as a hamburger to a Cow. You have to kill the original to be able to enjoy the derivatve. However this book is one of those high-class hamburgers you buy in sharp City eateries, not a Big Mac. I was glad to have read it.

Dignity at work: Systemics

A few things are becoming clear to me from the excellent discussions we have been having on clergy bullying (of and by):

1. The doctrine of original sin happens to be true, and reveals itself esoecially at work, like it does among drivers. Bad stuff goes on everywhere and at all times. I met a postie recently, who told me his Union took a less than laid-back Buddhist attitude to his refusal to join in a recent strike. One of the worst and most disturbing example of bullying I’ve encountered was of a member of the clergy by a journalist from a national newspaper. So we’re all in this thing together. There is none guiltless, no not one — why should we wish to be deceived?
   
   
2. Christianity is a social and personal means of redemption — a process of grace working through real people. Therefore this phenomenon does matter, and does, continuously, need to be addressed. Failing to engage with it denies dignity to the victim and the possibility of redemption to the perpetrator. G. K. Chesterton was right to say, in his quaint way, “we are sick and very sad who bring good news to all mankind,” but that can never be the last word. Jesus said “by this shall all know that you are my disciples, by the love you have... love one another as I have loved you.” That is the Gold Standard — not a discussion starter, but a way of life.
   
   
3. Whistleblowing and transparency are essential weapons against abuse. They can never, however be the whole answer, because making them so puts most, if not all, the responsibility on the victim, as though it was somehow their fault. This is morally wrong, because it leaves control (with diminished responsibility) in the hands of the institution, not the victim.
   
   
4. Therefore those who lead the institutional Church, fallen people that we are like everyone else, need to do serious intentional work to create a consistent culture of respect and justice within our own spheres of influence and authority. That defends the faith much more effectively than making snarky comments on atheist websites. Throughout the organisation, in every way, as far as lies in us, we have to express values that support human dignity. I have disussed this question carefully with some vastly able big hitters who have led particular UK public institutions through the transformation of their cultures of equality and diversity. This has convinced me that the only way we can transform ours is by producing and enforcing, in a publicly accountable way, routines that express these values. This will sometimes mean the organisation moving ahead of people. So be it. It’s only as this is done that decency becomes the shared norm in any organisation.
   
   
5. The basis for real Church life is not Instutionalism. It’s repentance and faith. As I read the NT I ask “what kind of attitude to relationships would you expect in a community which existed on this basis, and was trying to do it now as a way of life together?” the answer is mutual accountability — each to the other, all to each, each to all, corporately to God. This is the NT principle that is sometimes quaintly called “mutual submission.” We all have eccentricities. One of mine is that when I put a new priest in, and they make their declarations and oaths, I often express publicly my view that this ceremony marks me as being as accountable to them as they are promising to be to me. Ministry is fruitfully exercised with mutual accountability — anything less is a control game that leads easily to abuse.
   
   
6. Finally, please help me out. We are currently considering how to further the work of our Diocesan Committee for Racial Justice to advance Equality and Diversity best practice. The new Equalities Act will bring various strands together, and it’s important for our work to reflect reality and opportunity, and to be morally cogent and consistent with our values. This process of discernment makes me ask, “Prcatically speaking, what kind of a body, involving who, how, will best secure and advance in our diocese our accountability to values of equality, diversity and justice?” all answers, please, gratefully received...
   

Two ways to win an argument...

Some people have been asking me what I think the way forward might be on serious non credal issues arising from cultural diversity.
Somewhat in haste, it strikes me there are two well-worn but very different paths the Church could take to handle them:

1. From the outside in.
   Pressure groups enforce their perceptions and will by political means — alliances, smokescreens, salvoes, outmanoevring others, Big Position Statements, threats and throwing wobblies, ignoring and belittling the others, doing down the opposition until it’s as though they didn’t exist.
   
   
2. From the inside out.
   Hearts and minds stuff. Begin with a serious pragmatic realism and clarity about the people concerned. Apply the Gospel = (Benedictine hat going on) radical mutual accountability at every level, about the means and notives as well as ends, combined with a commitment to excellence of execution within an overall aim of fostering discipleship

One is fun, but... But what do I know?

What kind of Unity? and of Church?

Rowan Williams’ lecture in Rome marks an interesting reframing of ecumenical futures. There is, of course, the conventional RC model. The Church achieves the Unity for which Jesus prayed when every Christian in the world submits to it as a Divinely sanctioned Imperium. Or try the Protestant version. Structural and organisational convergence will somehow produce a complex multiplanar hybrid. Everyone trades in their old but coherent structural and accountability models to the shining new one. Unity remains a future goal, and we all have to make it happen.

Those two notions have their finer points. The retro-RC one has the virtue of coherence and vertical accountabioity lines, allbeit a coherence that many of its own followers ignore. It does actually exist. The Liberal Protestant one respects the value of every strand and models mutuality, consent and fellowship but, here comes the twist, it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, like its Roman colleague, it has a tendency to homogenise everything into what it wants them to be, rather than taking the trouble to understand the particularities which make up any Church. Surely these amount to more than simply a ghastly mistake on God’s part.

What the last thirty years has revealed, however, is that a simple binary unity based on Imperium or Liberal democracy raise questions as well as answering them. The great ecclesiologists of Vatican II have established a great deal of common ground theologically, but considerable divergence organisationally and politically. At which point, enter Cardinal Kasper with a model I think is fundamental to what we are trying to do in England today. In a vitally important address delivered in St Albans in 2002, Cardinal Kasper suggested we accept the old Structural/bureaucratic ecumenical quest had gone as far as it could in its own terms, and it was time for fresh thinking. He suggested what he called Receptive Ecumenism. This means that everyone lays gently on one side the dream of Homogenised unity, and concentrates on seeing how they can be a gift to the whole company of Christ’s faithful people. Equally tellingly, we try to develop attitudes and practice in receiving the others as gift not threat. Do that for a bit, and see where it gets us. So out go big merger schemes based on fudge, and quests for imperial hegemony. In come processes of Appreciative Inquiry and clarity.

How is Rowan sharpening up these questions? He’s asking what the great degree of theological convergence revealed by the work of the past thirty years amounts to. He’s diagnosing two principles inherent in the life of the baptized — a Conciliar horizontal plane, and an ordained vertical line of accountability. He’s asking how these integrate in the actual lives Churches and Christians live, as well as the notional sructures within which they find themselves. Catholic is both a macro-concept, but also an inherent dimension of local, micro Christian life. Playing one off against the other is foolish, wherever you’re coming from.

Catholic Unity isn’t something humans create by obiterating others. God created it on Good Friday, and it’s inherent in the Unity of Christ. Is Christ divided? When Jesus prayed for Unity, did God say “no?” or did God decide that the effectiveness of the whole enterprise depends on ecclesiastical politics come right? Or did he say yes, create a spiritual unity by the death and resurrection of Jesus, clothe Jesus’ followers in it by baptism, and ask them to make sense of Unity, not as a goal on the distant horizon to be achieved by diplomacy or conquest, but a resource to be realised in an emergent way by faithfulness in a multiplanar reality we call “communion.” The submission required is necessary but mutual, not one-way. The obedience is primarily to God in Scripture, mediated through the whole life of all the baptised...

Image via Wikipedia

All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full – and then to ask about the character of the unfinished business between us. For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn’t, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?

Small Earthquake in Rome?

Serving in a part of the Lord’s vineyard with a valued but proportionately tiny Anglo-Catholic strand (for the past four hundred years, anyway), I am surrounded by silence about the latest Vatican scheme for special Angican ordinariates. I have to admit I don’t know what an “ordinariate” is, but some of my Anglo-Catholic friends who claim they do are delighted, so I’m glad to share their joy.

Not being of a Chauvinistic/ Imperialistic bent about religion, I’ve always thought people should serve within the denomination in which they can best be discipled. All denominations are only delivery systems for the Kingdom, after all.

This new scheme has some rather odd resonances — if a clergy colleague came to see me to say they believed God was calling them to be a Baptist, if that’s discipled, I’d be delighted. If the Baptists then announced they had a special scheme for Anglicans where you could be a Baptist but also, as a former Anglican, you could carry on doing infant baptisms, my eyebrows would raise.

How jolly postmodern of them, I’d think, but wait a minute. Assimilating a lot of people who perhaps have struggled, and some might even say haven’t made a raging success of living within their own tradition, you’ll get two sorts of “convert”:

1. people who really should try out and perhaps are called by God to be part of the Roman tradition. Becoming Roman Catholics will enable them to be better disciples, so the whole Church of God, every denomination, is enriched — the wealth of one Christian expression is the resource of all: Hip, hip, hooray!
   
   
2. people who aren’t terribly good at living in any tradition on anything but their own terms. “The disciplines and relationships of Community are for the little people...”

This second sort of “convert,” often has what St Benedict called the Gyrovague personality. The symptom, says the Rule, is a compulsive habit of “murmuring.” Gyrovagues will carry on inexorably being as they are, because their aproach to authority is personality based and they can’t help it.

The latest special offer may not be good news for the Pope’s own people. There are, for example, genuine Roman Catholic clergy who have faithfully and heroicially struggled and somehow managed to live sacrificially within their Church’s discipline, because they sincerely believed it was necessary. Where does it leave them to know that Auntie in Rome is now doing a PostModern family promotion for married Anglicans, but they’re not invited? However delighted I might be, were this me, that Auntie is now being jolly and Post-Modern to the Anglicans, I’d hope she manages to find some way, after all these years, of being jolly and Post-Modern to me…

Church Establishment and Freedom

It’s interesting to see Denmark extolled by a thoughtful commentator as the freest country in Europe, most open to humane debate, with the world’s most atheist-friendly culture. Many believe you can’t pass go in becoming a free society until you have separated church and state. So how do they handle religion in Denmark? I turned to wikipedia:

The Danish National Church, Church of Denmark or Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark (Danish: Den Danske Folkekirke or Folkekirken, meaning '(The Danish) National Church' or 'People's Church') is a state church and is the largest Christian church in Denmark, including Greenland. It is a Lutheran body and is officially supported by the government, but membership is voluntary. The Queen heads the Church, with the Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs, currently Birthe Rønn Hornbech, as the highest administrative authority of the Church. The Danish parliament, Folketinget, is the supreme legislative authority for the church. 82.1% of the population of Denmark and 90% of the ethnic Danes are members of the National Church.

So here’s a jolly paradox: Some of the freest and most open societies in the world do Church according to this Nordic pattern. Various surprising conclusions follow:

1. There is an third way, although everyone laughs at it — an alternative to coercive theocracy, or the modernist option of simply privatising religion. None of us, surely, can be naive enough to think that just because it is private, the coercive might of US preachers is not power. The challenge for the US model is that privatised consumerist religion, far more accountable to its shareholders than the public, actually does rather well — a problem for atheists, but also for Christians who happen to believe, on gospel grounds, that the Church should be in the public service game, not the power game...
   
   
2. Establishment nobbles the internal dynamics of a Church. If the legal bit is entirely publicly accountable, laid down by law, the small amount of cracking the whip that must be done is handled by lawyers, not clergy. This fact, limiting to some clergy no doubt, creates a broad space for the vast majority of them, most of the time, to get on in a generally disinterested way with the work of their calling, reading the Bible, praying, preaching, networking, exploring the richness of mystery, building local community, rather than playing power games, nobbling politicians, or suing the pants off each other about who owns the buildings. Illogical, but I’ve seen it done.
   
   
3. Mature, implicit established Churches have a great opportunity to be blessedly free of paranoia. This creates a generous open space for learning, theological expression and creativity, along with all public discourse. The basic idea is that God’s truth can be trusted to look after itself. This benefits atheists, along with everyone else. Everyone, pragmatically, is free to believe whatever they find convincing, generally without the power dynamics of denominational corporate strategy and manipulation. The result is messy and sometimes illogical, but seldom abusive. Sure it is anomalous, to those who take denominationalism very seriously, that Queen Elizabeth is Anglican in England and Presbyterian in Scotland. Yet it keeps them all in their place, doesn't it, without threatening the identity of any of them, perhaps. Nobody is forced to believe anything. They don't have to be, in the way people have been compelled in formally atheist societies like the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Enver Hoxha’s Albania, Honecker’s East Germany...
   
   
4. A non-Imperialistic Monarchy and Church, however laughable, has facilitated not only Britain’s retreat from Empire without collapse, but Sweden’s, and Denmark’s. Far from suppressing political freedom and security, such an order of church and state has generally underpinned it. With generally pragmatic and responsive established Churches, neither the UK nor the nordic countries have had a religious war in hundreds of years. As the US Empire crumbles, it’s interesting to see how much US religion operates in an increasingly shrill mode rather than asserting context, tradition and stability.
   

It may well be the days of this whole Northern European way of doing Church are numbered. If this is the case, there will loss as well as gain for everyone involved. I am not convinced that fewer Denmarks and more Irans, or Texases, is the answer. I’m sure some would love it, and it’s the way the culture’s going no doubt, but in a week bishops have been excoriated for uttering opinions about supermarkets, there’s something makes me queasy about the Church of England as the religious equivalent of Tesco’s.