We have now celebrated the Feast of the Holy Spirit on Whitsunday and a week later we celebrate the Holy Trinity. Both these occasions are key moments in the Church’s year for considering the life of the Church in itself. What is the Church and how is it to live out its life in the world? What is the work of the Spirit in the church and what difference does that make to the world?
Though some of what they write may sound a little remote and abstract two professors of Divinity are currently arguing out this issue in the pages of the Church Times a journal not usually noted for giving serious academic consideration to Church politics. On the one side is Marilyn McCord Adams from Oxford and on the other John Milbank from Nottingham.
Professor Adams (an American) is deeply suspicious of what is going on in the Anglican Communion’s current attempts to come up with a covenant, which will enable its individual national churches to work more closely together and not to make independent decisions, which threaten the unity of the whole. The purpose of the covenant is to achieve greater institutional clarity and coherence. Hitherto each Anglican province has been autonomous, expressing their common identity through a more or less common liturgy and through the Lambeth conference and its resolutions, which have special authority in but are not legally binding on the life of each province. Our common identity has also been expressed through the Lambeth Quadrilateral’ defined in 1888. This sets down our common acceptance of Scripture, Creeds, episcopacy, and the sacraments of baptism and eucharist. What now principally divides us is the way in which scripture, creed and episcopal authority are to be interpreted.
Professor Adams approaches the problem from the perspective of the individual. She begins by stressing the distinction between God and the church, and the divine side and the human side of the church. It would seem that she believes God to be more on the side of the individual than the institution. God makes us in his image and it is our responsibility to bring out the distinctive godlikeness in ourselves. God does not wish to squeeze us into a set mould. We are each of us working out new ways of being. Social institutions are not ends in themselves their purpose is to train us up to be ourselves. Institutions can also, however, become structures that oppress and degrade because human beings are socially challenged presumably implying that sin arises through relationship and not in the individual alone. Only God can create the perfect society we have always to be prophetically alert to and critical of the evils in the societies we create. So the human side of the church as institution will always be flawed, the divine side is that which exposes the flaws. And the principle flaw is to confuse the divine and the human side and to use God to substantiate and defend a particular power base within the church. Only God is good enough to organise human attempts at such organisation will always fail, because we tend to conflate serving God with being God. We confuse being a channel of grace with controlling the means of grace. All attempts at inter-cultural, interdependent organic unity will it seems end up excluding or persecuting someone for the sake of unity and control.
And one of the images of unity which Professor Adams sees as a source of such confusion is the Pauline image of church as the body of Christ. She sees it in human terms as likely to become a fascist/Marxist political model. She finds in the image a built in threat to the individual because the whole body is seen as prior to and constitutive of the individual parts. The limbs can’t exist apart from the body or be themselves without it. A liberal enlightenment’ view would put the worth of the individual first before it contracts’ into society. Such a view privileges the worth and meaning of the individual over the social construct. The Professor’s sympathies are clearly with the latter model which she baptises’ by stressing the part played by our relationship with God in discovering our identity, while admitting that that identity is in part but only in part socially constructed. But where that identity goes wrong it is because of the evils with which social systems are rife. So within the church the community only minimally aids our self development. Ideally the church should be like the liberal state which exercises minimal constraint in regulating the individuals quest for self realisation.
I suspect that we shall have a certain sympathy with much of what the Professor says. She writes in the context of the conservative persecution’ of women and gays and in that context it is hard not to share her suspicions of what is currently going on in the Anglican communion. As a voice of prophetic suspicion it is a powerful voice, but I also suspect that her concerns have led to a misdirected theology a theology inadequate to the problems of the church or the modern liberal state in dealing with the social, moral, and intercultural problems which afflict us. The weaknesses in her position are made clear by Professor Milbank.
The early church spent many centuries wrestling with the question of the divine and human sides of Jesus’ nature. Their primary concern was that the human and the divine should be neither separated nor confused. Professor Adams errs perhaps in the direction of separation in her concern to avoid confusion. If we agree with the main voices of Christian tradition that the church is, as the body of Christ, in some profound sense the continuation of the incarnation then the complex relationship between the human and the divine is continued in the church. But again the human and the divine in the church are to be neither confused nor separated. We cannot therefore separate the individual from the community and privilege the former over the latter. We cannot privilege the vertical relationship with God over the horizontal relationship with neighbour. The commandments to love God and our neighbour run in tandem. The church is like a wagon wheel in the ancient analogy whereby the hub is God and we are the spokes; the nearer we get to one another the nearer we get to God and the nearer we get to God the nearer we get to one another. However flawed the institution of the church may be in every age we cannot in our journey towards God do without the church, its sacraments, its saints, its theologians and its daily domestic life in all its most humble as well as its most mystical aspects.
St Paul uses the image of the body of Christ in order to prevent the congregation in Corinth from trying to privilege certain ways of being a Christian over others. In her suspicion of hierarchy Professor Adams forgets to be suspicious of the illiberal tendencies of groups of individuals. She pays inadequate attention to what we have in common, what we share as human beings which enables us to love one another because we recognise our own needs in the needs of others. Ironically her position could lead to Mrs Thatcher’s declaration that there is no such thing as society.’
And yet the Christian vision of God is a vision of a society or communion of three persons in one God. It is in and through our relationships that we are saved and become what God wants us to be in our individuality. We are to love our neighbours as ourselves. None of this of course will blind us to the harm we do to one another through the failure to love but often that failure arises from a determination to protect my individual identity. There is an idolatry of the self as well as idolatry of power within the institution. The gay community might best be served by demonstrating a positive account of gay nature and its vocation to bring particular gifts to the variegated harmony of the whole community. The retreat into a defensive subculture may have some benefits in providing mutual support and encouragement but it could be said to provide an easier target for those who wish to exclude women or gay people from the mainstream life and leadership of the church. True liberation arises from the persistent, courageous, presentation of all our gifts, recognising that the more the body is allowed to become itself the more each of its constituent parts will discover new and creative contributions, which they can make to the whole.
The church must not see itself as a liberal society where people can do what they like in pursuit of self fulfilment, as long as they do no harm to others. That view both in America and Great Britain is now virtually bankrupt. Jesus did not say Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.’ Similarly, the church can never be seen solely in democratic terms the truth is not discovered through a majority vote. We are promised that the Spirit will lead us into all truth. But that truth emerges cautiously and through patient, persistent, honest and painful dialogue. More often than not it has been the minority or the remnant that has perceived the truth, clung to it and even where ignored or persecuted eventually been proved right. But in the process they have tried to remain loyal to the institution, which in its laws and customs will always move slowly because of the tradition which it is rightly charged to maintain and protect, until new ways of serving and interpreting that tradition have proved their worth. I am told that the Archbishop of Canterbury ended a recent lecture of multiculturalism with the word perhaps’ if that is true I do not see that Professor Adams need fear the dictatorship’ of Lambeth.
With my love and prayers,
Father Stephen
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker