Who's fooling who about history?

I wrote today to fellow bishops, along with many academic colleagues more skilled in the field than me, to see if they might care to correct a foolish historical howler in the understanding that informed their recent letter on same-sex marriage.

It seems to me vastly unfair on those who struggled against Deceased Wife's Sister marriages between 1842 and 1907 to suggest that a marriage setup that potentially breaches Leviticus 18:18 should be a minor matter of “accidents” whilst one that potentially breaches Leviticus 18:24 should be a fundamental matter of “substance.”

What really intrigues me about the whole rhetoric of "redefinition" (as developed by the Moral Majority on the West Coast in the 1990's) is how appealing it is to those who don't want to allow gay people to marry, but how completely foolish and ineffective it has been with everyone else. 
 Not only did it pancake seriously in both houses of the UK parliament, but all the right wing websites that swore to carry on the struggle for ever, even lie down in the road in front of the bulldozers, after the legislation went through last year seem to have packed up and gone home. I wonder why?

27^th February 2014 

Dear Bishop, 

Error in the Bishops Guidance on Same Sex Marriages 

We write to alert you to the fact that an important statement in the Bishops Pastoral Guidance on Same Sex Marriages issued on 14th February is wrong.The guidance claims that: "There will, for the first time, be a divergence between the general understanding and definition of marriage in England as enshrined in law and the doctrine of marriage held by the Church of England and reflected in the Canons and the Book of Common Prayer." - House of Bishops, 14th Feb 2014, Appendix, para 9. 

This is inaccurate. Civil law and church teaching have diverged before, on at least two occasions. The first was in relation to the marriage to a deceased wife's sister, the second in relation to the remarriage of divorcees.There has been a robust discussion of this topic between experts on ecclesiastical history, law and sociology which Dr Scot Peterson summarises here. We are all in agreement that the statement in the Bishops Guidance is mistaken and misleading. Since it forms an important part of the case which is being made, we felt it was right to draw the mistake to your attention. We respectfully ask that it be corrected. 

Our attempts to resolve this matter by writing to Mr Arora and Mr Fittall have failed. There is growing concern amongst the academic community about the situation. 

Looking to the future, some of us are anxious to improve channels of communication with the Church, so that our research and scholarship can be used constructively. If you would be interested in a meeting to discuss this issue, we would be very grateful if you would reply to Professor Woodhead. 

Yours truly, 

Professor Callum Brown FRSE, University of Glasgow  

Professor Arthur Burns, King’s College London 

The Revd Dr Mark Chapman, Ripon College Cuddesdon 

Professor Grace Davie, University of Exeter 

The Revd Duncan Dormor, St John's College, University of Cambridge 

Professor Kenneth Fincham, University of Kent 

Professor Sarah Foot, Christ Church, University of Oxford

Dr Matthew Guest, University of Durham 

The Revd Dr Carolyn Hammond, Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge (member of FAOC) 

Professor Gerard Loughlin, University of Durham 

Elizabeth MacFarlane, St John's College, University of Oxford  

The Revd Dr Judith Maltby, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford 

Professor Iain McLean FBA, Nuffield College, Oxford  

Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch FBA, Saint Cross College, University of Oxford 

The Revd Professor David Martin  FBA, London School of Economics 

Dr Charlotte Methuen, University of Glasgow (member FAOC)  

The Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, King’s College, University of Cambridge 

Dr Scot Peterson, Balliol College, University of Oxford  

Professor Alec Ryrie, University of Durham 

The Revd Dr Robert Tobin, Oriel College, University of Oxford 

Revd Dr William Whyte, St John’s College Oxford 

The Rt Revd Dr Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham  

Professor John Wolffe, The Open University, President of the Ecclesiastical History Society  

Professor Linda Woodhead, University of Lancaster 

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...

People of the Book? Really?

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new History of Christianity: the first Three Thousand years arrived in the post last Thursday. This is not a skimmer, and it certainly deserves a good day out to read it properly. This reading challenges our customary English-speaking Rome-Centric interpretation of Church history that has tended to ignore the lives of the majority of Christians, who actually lived in the East and had nothing to do with Rome or the partcular issues that marked out Western Christianity. For that reason alone the book is worth a read, let alone for its elegance, good humour, sure-footedness and clarity. Dipping in at a few points around which I have specialist knowledge, MacCulloch came up trumps every time. Overviews require profound understanding and broad reach, and in those terms this book is a phenomenal achievement.

MacCulloch locates the Bible historically in the Christian tradition, in a way that is true to the actual contents of the Bible. This challenges the slick and unreflective use of the adjective “Biblical” as a synonym for “Customary morality wot I like” that we sometimes encounter:

The Bible thus embodies not a tradition but many traditions. Self-styled “Traditionalists” often forget that the nature of tradition is not that of a humanly manufactured mechanical or architectural structure with a constant outline and form, but rather that of a plant, pulsing with life and continually changing shape while keeping the same ultimate identity. The Bible’s authority for Christians lies in the fact that they have a special relationship with it that can never be altered, like the relatinship of parent and child. This does not deny relationships with other books which may be both deep and long-lasting, and it does not necessarily make the parental relationship easy or pleasant. It is simply of a different kind, and can never be abrogated. Once we see this, much modern neurosis about the authority of the Bible can be laid aside. Maybe the Bible can be taken seriously rather than literally...

All the world faiths which have known long-term success have shown a remarkable capacity to mutate, and Christianity is no exception, which is why one underlying message of this history is its sheer variety. Many Christians do not like being reminded of Christianity’s capacity to develop, particularly those who are in charge of the various religious institutions which call themselves Churches, but that is the reality and has been from the beginning.

I am very much looking forward to the attendant TV series, but above all to some hours reading this book properly this autumn...

Good news in Gerrards Cross

Delighted to be in Gerrard's Cross for their 150th anniversary celebrations yesterday. It’s one of our very few large UK churches that have broken through what one could call the 400 barrier, with two or three times that number of regulars. It remains very much a parish Church, serving its locality more than hoovering in people from far and wide.

The Crown jewels of St James’ parish, are

1. enabling servant leadership at all levels, rather than fat controller indoor games. Martin Williams, ministry team and lay leaders are very mutual and focussed.
   
2. passion to foster people in varying styles of discipleship, traditional, Charismatic, Conservative and open (to use current jargon). The characteristic virtues of these expressions of faith become cumulative and shared, rather than being played off against each other, wittingly or unwittingly.
   
3. Commitment to clear and charitable attitudes that are good news across the board. Evangelical values are very much more important than -isms — politics or labels.
   
4. A general culture of excellence in all things. People work as hard, and in as focussed a way, as a commercial concern would at its operation.
   

Using Ephesians 3, we explored the uncertainties of the world around, in 1859 as much as today, and what it means to be called by a faithful God to be rooted and grounded in love.

The height, depth and breadth of that reality inspires not optimism, but a firm hope. Just for the record, and because some asked, the Credit Cruncher of 1859 I quoted was a gentleman called D. Morier Evans, and this was what he learnt from the string of financial crises in his day:

Each separate panic has its own distinctive features, but all have resembled each other in occurring immediately after a period of apparent prosperity, the hollowness of which it has exposed.

So, what goes around comes around. It’s a standing invitation not to take ourselves, or the news of the moment too seriously, and to fix our hearts where true joys are to be found.

Time Marches on: 1612-1713

The March of Time on Twitter strides boldly into the future, going where no one has gone before... to infinity and beyond. There are interesting milestones on the way. In May we did the 17th century:

19.04 (1611) — the King James Bible hits the news stands... Great Date for literary/ cultural as well as theological history, surely?

20.04 (1612) — Edward Wightman, a Baptist Minister, is last person in England to be burnt at the stake. March of Namby Pambly Liberals begins, as staking ceases. Also the year of the Northampton Witch trials - woman plus four executed by dunking for bewitching pigs. Pendle Witch trials later that year.
 History doth not record whether bewitched pigs do that funny wiggle thing with their noses Samantha York used to do on TV, or fly.

21.04 (1619) — first meeting of Jamestown (Va) House of Burgesses (first representative assembly) of American colonies
. First boatload of black indentured laborers delivered to America by Captain Jope, to be traded for food and supplies :-(

22.04 (1624) Oops! Oslo and Dunfermline burn down. Versailles started, as Cardinal Richelieu joins Louis XIV's government

23.04 (1638) world’s first movable type newspaper in Beijing; Swedes make Peace of Hamburg with French and found "New Sweden" in Delaware.
 We, the last generation to bother with movable type newspapers salute the pluck Ming Dynasty for the Beijing Gazette of 1638!

24.04 (1647) Civil War starts up again Parliamentarians raze Aberystwyth Castle, and ban Christmas. Lord Rochester the Restoration Rake born...
 (3 R’s?) Also in 1647, Dutch West India Co appoint Peter Stuyvesant Governor of New Amsterdam (> NY): Face that launched a million Cancer Sticks
. Also, Rhode Island separate Church and State: Humans get the State and Poultry the Church?

25.04 (1672) Synod of Jerusalem: Orthodox response to challenges raised by Western Protestantism. In UK Charles II Declaration of Indulgence tolerates Protestants along with booze, chocs & floozies: Parliament not impressed
. Meanwhile in Dutch "rampjaar" of 1672 everyone, for different reasons decides to invade Holland simultaneously. Just one of those things. They got over it.

26.04 (1688) The Glorious Revolution — incl. Very exciting Battle of Reading where Dutch whupped the Irish. James II ran away soon after... not everyone realises there was a glorious revolution in England. King loses Crown, both literally and metaphorically. Subsequently English Monarchy goes Dutch, with William & Mary. Also in 1688, Turks besiege Vienna, & Edward Lloyd goes into Insurance business.

27.04 (1690) Battle of the Boyne consolidates William III's position. The Pope was actually on the Dutch Protestant side, (Anti-French League of Augsburg). 
Also new in 1690 — Clarinet (Nürnberg), American Paper Money (Massachussetts), and the Planet Uranus (Titter ye not) sighted by John Flamsteed

28.04 (1700) What d/you get man with everything? Louis XIV gets Spanish Crown for nephew Philippe & triggers War of the Spanish Succession. Oops! Messy!

29.04 (1708) Queen Anne refuses to sign Scottish Militia Bill - last time a monarch witholds Royal Assent. J. S. Bach gets a job in Weimar...

30.04 (1713) Treaty of Utrecht ends war of Spanish Succession; Philip d'Anjou gets Spain. British get Gibraltar & Menorca. Monkeys delighted...

How to read the Bible story fruitfully

Holy Week is built around multiple retellings of the passion story. As well as events in Church, round here that means listening to the whole of two Bach passions. To profit from this week’s activity, we need to hear the story in itself as for the first time, noticing fresh details, engaging our imaginations with the world around us and our personal circumstances, and listening for a sympathetc resonance between those realities.

We live in a world of powers and empires, of brands, logos and globalized world order. St Paul’s letter to the Colossians engages with the realities of empire, its principalities and powers, and reveals Christ above and beyond it all, yet also deep within us.

There’s a wonderful description of how the Church uses Scripture corporately for this purpose in a great, creative commentary on Colossians I have been reading recently:

In order to have vision we must have memory. Indeed forgetfulness or amnesia is precisely what strips us of vision — without the past there can be no future. So our contemporary improvisation must be informed and directed by both a profound indwelling of the biblical vision of life and a discerning attentiveness to the postbiblical scenes that have already been acted out in the history of the church.

There is a certain dynamic in this approach to Biblical authority that could be described as a dance between innovation and consistency. Our serious reading of Scripture must be characterized by fidelity to the thrust of the narrative and thus provide our life with a stability and consistency, a rootedness. At the same time, however, the Bible as an unfinished drama gives us freedom for historical innovation and thus a creative and imaginative flexibility in our historical responses. It is only by maintaining the essential relationship between stability and flexibility that we “may avoid the hazards” of both a rigid fossilization of our faith and “a deeper relativizing that gives up everything for a moment of contemporary relevance.”

As we read through the Biblical Story, it is clear that the Israelites themselves retold their stories with such fidelity and innovation. As the ancient Israelites encountered new situations, they remembered and interpreted their traditions in such a way that they engaged contemporary problems and concerns. Indeed without such dynamic interpretation, the texts and traditions contained within them were seen to be incomplete...

Stability and flexibility, fidelity and creativity, consistency and innovation — these are key if a narrative text is to have any current authority in our lives.

Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat
Colossians remixed — Subverting the Empire
pp 134-5

Ecclesiology: What is Church, then?

Saturday I drew the short straw — helping enable a discussion at Diocesan Synod on the ecclesiological dimensions of ordaining female bishops. What then is “Church?” I tried to frame the discussion in four dimensions of being Church.

Every licensing we proclaim “The Church of England is part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.” What does this really mean?

1. Church as Missional Community
   Romans 16 gives a snapshot of the embryonic Church at Rome — people gathered as a society of friends. Its Leadership serves the community, not the other way round. In gender terms, its sociological set-up reflects the reality of the community served, with women among its prime apostles, but a non-institutionalised understanding of what that involves. Beware the thought we either could or should simply go back to being an embryo; but be aware that all our set-ups are provisional.
   What kind of continuity are we meant to seek and experience with our past sisters and brothers?
   The visible Church in every age is a delivery system for the kingdom, not an end in itself.
   Right Wing danger:
   the fallacious belief this continuity can be adequately expressed and conveyed by setting the institutional structure of the 11th century in concrete, driving structure hard, and ignoring process. The institutional structure is a transmission system. You have to ask yourself “For what?”
   Left Wing danger:
   Casting off history: the church becomes a merely present-tense existential experience; a concept not a community
   Perpetual Issue:
   getting the top down/ bottom up balance right — what’s the “top” and what’s the “bottom” and what does the way they interact say?
   
   
2. Church as Catholic whole
   “Securus judicat orbis terrarum” — Augustine. The whole world of Christians is safest judge. The Creeds define the core, but the details seem to have to be worked out in realtime. If all the Christian expressions in the world agreed on something, it would be a safe judge. Sadly they never have and are never likely to do that in a hurry on anything uncertain. How do we map the whole “orbis terrarum?” Some will define “Orbis terrarum” “The Roman Church” — but no one denomination encompasses the whole, and in some ways the most exclusive and doctrinaire ones reflect it less well than others.
   What kind of accountability do we hold to our present sisters and brothers around the world, especially those beyond our own expressions?
   There are various ways of mapping “The whole visible Church.” We need to be clear about the one we adopt, and why, and what its implications might be.
   Right Wing danger:
   Having too narrow and institutional a definition of “orbis terrarum,” going beyond the creeds, often around hot-button issues on which they say nothing.
   Left Wing danger:
   Consumerizing religion. Becoming self-absorbed and obsessed by contingency and a concern for “relevance” that attenuates the spiritual content of the message to a mere reflection of our own desires. Communities can be egotistical and blind, as well as individuals.
   Perpetual Issue:
   Balancing the need for being real in the here and now against the dimension of the whole. “It takes a whole world to know Christ.”
   
   
3. Church as social and human reality — “enfleshed incarnation”
   as Maximus the Confessor put it. We are responsible to proclaim afresh the works of God in every culture and generation in terms that connect with it. This means being open to culture, as Paul was at the Areopagus, but radically grounded in Jesus and the resurrection. The early Church embraced the culture, say of slavery, in order, ultimately to subvert it from within. The missional principle applies — in the early Churches, be a good slave, so that your master is won for Christ...
   How do we interact with our context openly enough to engage, but with a solid enough core to offer something that is salt and light?
   Jesus was able to walk redemptively through dangerous and unclean predicaments (like the woman in adultery) reframing them rather than being compromised by them. His body today should be able to do that, boldly and confidently...
   Right Wing danger:
   turning Christianity into a discarnate absolute ideology; refusing to engage, indulging in judgmentalism, Pelagianism and fantasy
   Left Wing danger:
   becoming so laid back as to fall over backwards. Salt that has lost its flavour, and capacity to be salt?
   Perpetual Issue:
   engaging with the things that must be engaged with positively and negatively, whilst not getting carried away into mere culture wars.
   
   
4. Church as structured society, shared institutional reality
   This is where Canon Law comes in. It’s desperately unsexy, but having a public context to which we hold ourselves accountable, that writes into our life a framework which provides space for people to grow, respect others, and transmit faith that is authentic across the whole community, discipled, and built on learning from past experience.
   Law can’t do the discipleship for us; it’s a boundary around the pitch that makes civilised interaction possible, not an end in itself
   The ways in which we take our structures seriously, or don’t, are windows into the soul. Without any such structures and assumptions, however, the whole body can easily become a mass ego-trip.
   Right Wing danger:
   Legalism and obsession with structure; lack of self-awareness and versatility especially about process and systemics.
   Left Wing danger:
   Individualism, egotism, anarchism, eyes that say to the hand “I have no need of you...”.
   Perpetual Issue:
   How to maintain a viable working structure to support a community of Grace, not law, founded on faith not works.
   

All I’d add is that we need to be very careful not to perpetuate the “Father Ted fallacy” that somehow “The Church = the Clergy.” Father Dougal had a tee shirt that said “You Wouldn’t understand. It’s a Priest Thing.” “Going into the Church = joining the clergy.” Hear the prophet William Stringfellow who said our view of priesthood:

is so radically misconceived that the clergy have become a substitute laity whose function is to represent publicly – in place of the laity – the presence of the church in the world... a superficial, symbolic, ceremonial laity

A Public and Private Faith, p 38

You do not make the church the church by whom you ordain, or don’t ordain, but by the quality of the whole Christian community’s faith, hope and love.

Follow-up fifth element posted here, with grateful thanks to JohnG for putting me onto the idea.

Dwinding congregations: the Truth?

When and why did the English stop going to Church en masse? Earlier than we think, perhaps. The Church in an Age of Danger, Parsons and Parishioners 1660-1740 is a rewritten PhD thesis by Donald Spaeth, that pokes about in the unfashionable basement of popular religion in 17th/18th century Wiltshire. He suggests the rot set in earlier than we like to think, and for relational rather than theological reasons.

Health warning: I have received considerable spiritual benefit from Evangelical and Tractarian revivals, and spent 21 years of ministry as a resident parson in a parish. What follows is hypothetical historical sketching, not bitter twisted comment on any of those fine things in themselves. But, remembering Ronald Reagan’s wise words “Don’t be afraid to see what you see,” here goes...

Evangelical and Tractarian historiographies have tended to suggest their people saved the Church from terrible neglect.

Terrible it may have been, but, paradoxically, far more people went to Church. Every place had its own story, but the mass of people seem to have become detached from their village churches as relationships broke down. The English did not become anticlerical like the French did, but got into habits of ploughing their own furrows, as the Church became more top-down, professional and exclusive.

So here’s one possible historical narrative of how congregations dwindled.

With box pews, churches began to look and feel like cattle pens, or our swimming pool changing rooms. Religion was becoming radically privatised. The parish church became an icon of class division, imposing a top-down order, dismantling previous relationships and practice, enforcing various new model ideologies. This set the stage for three new reforming clerical waves:

1. the Evangelical revival, with clergy enforcing their own particular apparently narrow bands of belief, Calvinistic or Arminian, as the way to salvation.
   
   
2. Resident gentlemen clergy after residence was legally enforced in the early nineteenth century. In came big Georgian rectories, out went peasant curates who were less learned and often part time, but radically incarnational in village life.
   
   
3. the Oxford movement, with robed choirs in the chancel and powerful organs to deal with the rough and ready village band.

All three waves brought new model professional guardians of the sacred, each with powerful authoritarian notions of how things should be, and a tendency to impose their will regardless. Each new wave recruited smallish groups of enthusiastic blue eyed boys & girls, but alienated all the others. As people moved to industrial towns in the 19th century, the village church was part of the social baggage they gratefully left behind.
Et Voilà! Any questions?

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.

Retreat Notes 2: Tradition and “Traditionalism”

Tradition is lived reality — in the New Testament “I received of the Lord what I passed on to you;” I received it as I received it, and you received it as the person you were, lived it fallibly, but authentically enough to pass it on. Thus tradition renews itself in each generation, out of circumstances, by Grace and the Holy Spirit.

Therefore Tradition is always touched by human hands, never pure and unsullied, always subject to seasons and sin. Pure objective points exist, but they are beyond me. If, driven by fear and insecurity, I extract some element from my life in Christ and try to erect it into an objective norm to bypass the messy process, I am basically making an idol. The tradition I pass on wouldn’t need pickling if it were actually alive.

That is why we need faith; and that is why splinter movements, even Lefèvrist ones with traditionalist good intentions and bright beginnings, always end up petering out inconsequentially, unless they find a way to reintegrate. Separated from the vine they wither and die.
Good religious communities are laboratories within which we can see the dynamics of tradition properly working. The life to which Benedict calls Christians renews itself generation by generation, as it is lived. Here is Dom Antoine Levasseur writing about Saint Wandrille:

His biography is far more than an informative record about a character from the dark ages. It must live in us. That is difficult for our modern minds to grasp, given our habit of considering ancient writings as mere records, or souvenirs of a past age. This is that, but it seeds itself afresh in each successive present, in order to engage us and train us for the future, to live the life for real.

Lived tradition challenges tendencies, understandable in times of fast change, to romanticize, confabulate, fantasize or panic. It is those tendencies which invite us to fix on some Big Thing, hang desperately onto it, then make it the Grand Shibboleth.
Here’s a recipe for “traditionalism.” Half digest some of key ingredients from a living tradition in a rather modernist way, pickle them up, then pack them up in the old kitbag as weapons. You half digest because the days are evil and you are in a hurry. If you really digested the tradition you would be aware of its subtleties, vulnerability and ultimate mystery.

The Religion may be laid on with a trowel, but there is little faith involved. There used to be a thing in England called the “society for the maintenance of the faith”; a rather extraordinary object for a society, the more you think about it. Or at least so it seems in a place where the week’s ferial collect contained a daily reminder it is God alone de cuius munere venit, ut tibi a fidelibus tuis digne et laudabiliter serviatur (“of whose resource alone it comes, that your faithful may do you appropriate and praiseworthy service”). This monastery wears its religion sincerely, but lightly and realistically. After 1359 years of the process Dom Antoine describes, there’s nothing left to prove. Amen!

A Short History of Progress

You can be too thin, and you can probably be too rich. But can you have too much progress? Our Victorian great grandparents would have said no, but Ronald Wright makes you think. Consider a tribe of Neanderthal hunter gatherers. They take a month to trap a Wooly mammoth. Boring. Then someone invents a map that doubles their monthly Wooly Mammoth haul. Progress. Then some other geeky Neanderthal invents a more efficient Wooly Mammoth tracking device,a compass. Three a Month. More progress.

But imagine at this point Big John Wayne arrives in a Time Machine with satelite tracking and a tommy gun; or more likely you brilliantly work out how to drive a whole herd of 100 wooly mammoths over a cliff; progress? not really, because not only have you no way of turning 90% of the catch into usable food before it goes off, but you have just trashed your whole food supply for the forseeable future. Cue one heck of a party, followed by famine, and possible extinction. Too much progress?

Of course that’s them, not us. We wouldn't be so stupid. Oh no. But all sorts of people have been — the Mayans, the Romans, the Ancient Sumerians, the Easter Islanders. Did the man who cut down the final tree on Easter Island realise he was dong rather a silly thing? Did he know he was sticking the last nail in the coffin of his whole civilisation? Why did he have to do it? Did he have a choice? and, considering the wraths and sorrows of our own binge on the fantasy of limitless progress, consumerism, and attendant environmental degradation, do we have a choice? And if we do, are we willing to exercise it?

I am banged up having my annual reality check at Saint Wandrille, Normandy, until Saturday. This entry has been preposted. The internet is switched firmly off for the week, and I will be delighted to respond to comments, but only at the weekend.