Church of England: Why and How?

What is the C of E, and how does it keep going? Andrew Brown asks, pertinently,

Can the church of England, or even the Anglican Communion, ever split? Or is it simply too disorganised to lose a unity which it never actually had?

Not a cruel question — an obvious and sensible one, and the answer is basically “yes.” This answer shows up something special about the character and process of the Church of England. Just like the Apostolic Church in Corinth, it’s always going down the pan, always sneered at and despised, always dying, yet behold we live. The offscouring of all things it may be, but it doesn't go away. Why not? “Is it a good way to be a Christian, or even a stable one?” asks Andrew. It’s certainly a very down to earth one.

Nick Baines observes with great clarity how the Church hangs together, in human terms. Such behaviour, seldom described but often experienced, resonates through Church life like Brighton goes through Brighton rock. Parishes freely welcome, then gently cherish and nurture, challenging people. Clergy cry at strangers’ funerals, and try to think of new and entertaining school assemblies, with governing body in the evening. Ringers slide off to the pub at 6·30 and catch up with the gossip. Lambeth does Indaba, sustained disciplined cross cultural listening. being this kind of Church annoys imperialists and bullies of all stripes, but we stick with it. You find similar processes of listening, respect and accommodation, if you look for them, on every level and, to a great or lesser extent in every place:

The Church of England is perhaps the only church witnessing to the pain of holding together instead of taking the easy option and simply splitting and going where your mates are. It costs nothing to form yourself into a community of like-minded people among whom you won’t have to struggle with challenge or difference. But that is not the Church. Just like the first disciples of Jesus, our vocation is to follow Jesus together. Jesus did not give any of his disciples a veto over who else should or should not be called into the company of disciples.

Secondly, instead of doing it the way the world does it (that is, running away from the tensions into safe groups of the like-minded), perhaps the Church of England has no option but to wrestle openly with its tensions in a way that refuses to pretend to the watching world that every issue is easily resolved or reality ignored. I get as impatient as everyone else at some of the things I hear, but they don’t give me permission to walk away.

Yesterday’s synod debate on the Uniqueness of Christ, with its landslide result (wonderfully live-blogged by Peter Ould), shows something significant and often forgotten. What basically holds the C of E together is a sense of Christ, and reverence for Christ, addressed from many different personal directions but focussed simply on him. The Rest is Noise. The Church simply has no big organisational Salt-Lake-City/ Vatican coherence. Whenever it tries to develop one, because human nature is always more comfy that way, it makes a fool of itself. Its power is profoundly voluntary and humane, rather than institutional. We can be as passionate as we are inspired to be, but we don’t do doctrinal fascism. Our cultural milieu is not confessionally Liberal, but it is profoundly Libertarian in a John Milton sense (Areopagitica). The Church is almost the ultimate Starfish, rather than Spider organisation. This, in fact, is its strength, not its weakness. Go figure.

Bank crisis: last gasp of a gilded age?

Reflecting of recent financial news, this weekend has produced two articles that have had me rocking on the seat crying “Amen, brother!” — Incisive, creative, and understanding reponses to the recent UK ban on Short Selling in the City.

Giles Fraser in the Church Times puts in a good word for the short sellers. We’ve all been on the game, and the easiest thing in the world is to fix on someone to blame, when, to use and abuse a metaphor from the world of choir training, we all need to tighten our underpants. “The Bubble needed to burst.”

... by blocking short-selling, all that the regulator does is to en­courage the value of stock to become over-inflated — and that is precisely the problem of our world markets. For instance, there is no way of short-selling the housing market. As a result, house prices have become absurd.

Householders may scream blue murder if the value of their property goes down, but it ought to be clear to most people that a great many houses are vastly overvalued. It is just this overvaluation that generated the sub-prime crisis in the first place.

Short-sellers are a vital corrective to the instinctive bullishness of most city traders. Sure, it is immoral to sell a stock, talk it down, then buy it for a large profit. But that is no different from buying a stock, talking it up, then selling it on at an inflated price — the “pump-and-dump” man­oeuvre.

Modernity has given us the myth of continual improvement; that technology and human advancement will lead us ever onward and upward. It is the philosophy of New Labour’s “things can only get better”.

And it is the naïve mantra of the city trader for whom the stockmarket always goes up. Such a philosophy encourages us to borrow money against our ever-rising fortunes. In such circum­stances, making money is easy: bor­row as much as you can, and invest. It is a proven recipe for boom and bust

My other weekend serendipity was Andrew Brown’s Guardian article. He starts from the twaddle the ignorant and foolish produce, painting Rowan as a crude Marxist (actually ludicrous, if you know anything at all about where he’s coming from) and draws attention to his work on Dosteyevsky, in which Rowan

...hates the consumerist ideology of limitless choice because he thinks it tears us way from our real and limited wants; and he sees it prefigured in some of Dostoevsky's villains, for whom "Everything depends on choice, and what is chosen today need have no relation to what is chosen tomorrow or what is chosen by anyone else". Reading these words detached from their context, it's obvious that they are also the perfect description of the workings of an untrammelled market, which may go up, down, or merely sideways depending entirely on the free choices of participants today. For Williams such a market is dehumanising and by extension diabolical:

What is depicted as The Devils moves towards its conclusion is the process by which the elevation of choice increasingly produces an evacuation of desire.

Bruce Springsteen put it in rather fewer words: "57 channels and nothing on".

...Williams's real objection to the market is that it turns its participants into things to one another – and that, he believes, is a blasphemy because we are not things, but, in some sense, images of God. Money allows us to treat other as impersonal means to an end, and this offends both his reactionary and his socialist instincts profoundly. In 19th-century Russian literature, it is almost always nobler to be a serf than a wage-slave. Though the relationship between a serf and his master is based ultimately on violence, it is personal violence, not the impersonal and invisible transaction of the market, and so it has more room for virtue, and for growth.

...There's a great deal that could be said about Williams's particular critique of the markets: although he's a very clever man, I don't suppose he knows any more about economics than all the other very clever people currently bewildered by the question "What should we do?"; and to know that the archbishop supports a ban on short-selling doesn't make it much clearer that this ban is a good thing.

But the one thing you can't say is that this is a knee-jerk response, or a piece of publicity seeking. The belief that capitalism tends towards evil is one of his deepest convictions.

This is not crude Marxism. The old puritans drew all their theology from what they called “total depravity”. The current bonfire of the vanties on Wall Street is its own critique of human tendencies to build castles in the air out of fantasy. Perhaps the whole sorry business started in the garden, when Adam and Eve chose “choice.” It’s no more realistic to point a grizzled finger at City Traders as though they were somehow qualitatively more selfish than the rest of us — Christian views of the human condition caution about idolising “choice”. We are all in need of redemption, including our fears and fantasies... interesting times!

One silly tipple — Online Rage

A while ago, I was interested to hear from someone who runs Samaritans, a UK suicide helpline, that most of their contacts come as emails. Perhaps the comparative anonymity of the keyboard provides an open space where shy people can open up. But, as my first vicar used to say, every silver lining has a cloud. What if the internet is the ideal low-accountability zone for people to lash out angrily, plumbing new depths of ad hominem sarcasm, rubbishing whole swathes of humanity with simplistic “them and us” namecalling? People who are otherwise perfectly nice say things online in ways they would never dream of talking to flesh-and-blood human beings.

In a brilliant Op-Ed for the Guardian, Andrew Brown talks of the sincere but more nuanced way his forebears drank with and against their religious enemies in Northern Ireland:

How very different the conduct of religious discussions on the internet. On the web the participants are often sober and they spare no pains to offend and insult one another, even when there is nothing at stake. I nearly wrote "nothing but prestige" but prestige in whose eyes? Who is watching? The strange, weightless intimacy of online communication has enabled complete strangers to hate each other passionately within minutes. This has had measurable effects in the real world. In the US, for instance, the breakup of the Anglican Communion has already resulted in some huge and juicy lawsuits and will certainly result in many more as conservative parishes try to remove their churches from the liberal central body. The schism could never have happened without the internet, which allowed each side to see exactly what the other was up to, and then deliberately to misunderstand it.

If it’s any consolation for Anglicans, Atheists vs Creationists are equally rude, dismissive and vituperative... But why carry on mindless slugging matches, shouting past each other into empty space, anyway?

In County Fermanagh, religious differences were real enough for people to kill one another: my great-grandfather is buried in Enniskillen, which was the scene of one of the worst bombings. Perhaps because of that, people learned not to give offence unless there was something really serious at stake. But online, everything feels like a game, and in the teeth of all the evidence we persist in believing that there is a clear sharp line between gaming and reality.

Perhaps Christians who, like me, believe in the authority of Scripture, would do well to remember that, even online:

1. “the faith once delivered to the saints” does actually include the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the conversation with the woman at the well.
   
   
2. “human anger does not work the righteousness of God.”
   
   
3. Jesus said his disciples would answer for saying “raca” to a brother in the fire of hell.

Now there’s a thought to stoke the heat up...