One of the great pleasures of a vacation is time to do some of the things that usually get squeezed out of the schedule when working -- and going to the movies is one of those delights. Just before leaving for England I saw the latest Star Wars blockbuster, and today we took in a matinee performance of "War of the Worlds," Spielberg's remake of the classic sci-fi story by H. G. Wells -- hoping that it might hurry our granddaughter into the light of day.
This last of the "Star Wars" pieces was better than its two predecessors, although my complaint was that they went on a little too long showing off just how clever they were with special effects. As is usually the case with a Spielberg production, the visual effects of "War of the Worlds" were brilliant, but alas the subtleties of Wells's story were missing. I enjoyed it, and there were times when it got my adrenalin pumping nicely, but as is so often the case with a an over-hyped production, it promised far more than it was ever able to deliver.
What you have got in the last paragraph I wrote is neither a thumbs up nor a thumbs down on either of these movies, something more of a neutral judgement. Seeing these movies wouldn't be right up the top of my priority list of summer activities unless you are looking for somewhere cool to beat the heat, or (as here in England) avoid the showers.
As I sat this afternoon mulling over these two films, I came up with a commonality that intrigued me -- each in its own way is about the superiority of the human being, even in our weaknesses, over other ways there might be of existing. In "Star Wars" we are treated to Anakin Skywalker being transformed from a loving husband and loyal Jedi knight into the cyber-being Darth Vader, the Emperor's loyal lieutenant. In "War of the Worlds," the story is more about alien invaders who are felled by their immunity to the various bacteria and tiny organisms that are part and parcel of life on this planet.
In the former we watch a warm caring human lose his humanity and become a part-machine monster, in the latter we see humans, seemingly out-gunned and out-powered by these ghastly creatures in their tripod-legged war machines eventually beaten by the kind of germs that batter you and me every day. Coming from different directions, each movie is saying something affirmative about humanity while minimizing the alternatives.
Darth Vader seems so much stronger, so much more commanding when he ceases to be Skywalker, but actually he is diminished. All the characteristics that have made us delight in him, especially his love for his wife in her pregnancy, have been wiped from his character and something far less attractive has taken their place. When the Dark Side takes control of a being, and when he is so damaged that he needs to be rebuilt in a cross between a laboratory and an operating room, the outcome is not something greater but something far less. In a way we are being warned.
In Spielberg's work, from the moment that the aliens with their moving war platforms break from the ground in the New Jersey suburbs of New York, we are rooting for the humans not for the invaders. The director does all in his power to affirm their weakness when compared to the might of their enemy, and also how desirable it is that the human race is saved. Indeed, it is the flaws that make up their humanity that is so endearing -- as an aside, this is just about the first Tom Cruise movie I can remember seeing in which the man actually breaks down and cries.
The question that I have found myself turning over is if we so much appreciate all that it is that makes us human -- and weak humans at that -- then why is our culture so ambivalent about this? I want a long life, but I don't wish to live for ever, and I certainly have no desire that my body or brain should be enhanced, yet in a society that is confused about what comes next, we are constantly being prodded to want something like this.
I have believed for a long time that science fiction is often the very best "pre-evangelism" because it forces people to ask questions about themselves, their origins, and their destinies, that they might not have been willing to look squarely in the face until this point.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Monday, June 27, 2005
Looking Back and Looking Forward
Birmingham, England
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Often we do things because we know they are right and only after we have done them do we gradually recognize the reasons behind our actions. Several years ago I intuitively knew the time had come for me to step back into parish ministry, and I knew it was right to go somewhere or take on something that was "obscure," maybe to take on a challenge that no one else would be willing to accept.
Thus I ended up pastoring a disspirited handful of people whose brand new congregation had experienced a tragedy of vast proportions -- and which almost everyone believed was doomed. The for the congregation's survival got even longer when the Episcopal Church exploded in 2003, and then there were further ricochets that had us tottering in despair in 2004. The only thing I have been certain of in the midst of all this has been that God called me to be the pastor of the Church of the Apostles, although there have been times when it has felt as if the work
was destroying me.
Yet even as I had done the job, the objective reasons for my presence in this congregation have clearly presented themselves, and amidst so much thanklessness there has been stellar moments of great joy. Today, as I sit in a midsummer English garden and assess from a distance progress and failures, delights and disappointments, I have a growing list of good reasons why God called Rosemary and myself to that particular place for this particular season.
We have gone around some horrendous corners in the last few years, and we are still extremely vulnerable. I am already waking up in the night and worrying about the fallout from the General Convention in 2006, whose likely decisions seem almost certain to do further crippling damage to the mission to which God has called us, and we have the election of a new bishop in the midst of all this to worry about too.
If we get the wrong person (or if the General Convention refuses to confirm the bishop elected), then the fallout will be even more horrible.
It is tragic that most of the clouds on the horizon come not from the obvious enemies of a fallen world, but from our own denomination and its corporate blindness, and a folly that seems bent on self-destruction. Yet there must be meaning in even this mystery if we could but recognize it. As the old saying goes, God is good at drawing straight lines with a crooked stick.
As pastor of the Church of the Apostles, I feel as if I am on a high wire without a safety net. I feel as if every decision we make could have both painful personal consequences, as well as enriching or threatening the life of my small (but slowly growing) congregation. Yet one of the reasons I believe the Lord put us there is that we have spent much of the last 30 years in this mode, because most of the ministries in which we have been engaged have lived on the edge. The result is
that our spiritual muscles and sinew have been trained up for such a time as this.
My companion-in-book-form on this sunny English afternoon has been my old friend and mentor, Eugene Peterson, and in his most recent book he speaks of Israel at the time of the Exodus as having had "generations of slave-identity bred into them." Breaking that self-recognition "was not going to be easy, and certainly not quick -- no easier and certainly not faster for them than it is for us" (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, page 113).
What happened at Sinai was that a blue print for feedom was laid out for Israel, yet before Moses could even get to them with instructions from the Lord they had already swapped God's extraordinary hope for the golden calf. Their worship of the golden calf was "self-defining and self-serving" (p.114), and it nearly destroyed them.
I found myself as I read this musing that this was possibly a description of the emerging post-Christendom church situation. Israel would not shed the slave-image that had shaped its identity overnight, and nor shall we be released from our yearning for the Christendom years or the "good old days of ECUSA" in the twinkling of an eye. Yet is is on the fringes, in unlikely places like the Church of the Apostles in South Williamson County, Tennessee, that something new is happening.
Which brings me to Peterson's musings on the resurrection narratives, that things "start emerging with clarity that are significant for us as we ponder our cultivation of the wonder that is inherent in living well in creation" (p. 120).
One of the significant things about all this is that "marginal people... play a prominent role in perception and resposne" -- and the first resurrection appearance was to the most marginal of all Jesus's followers, none other than Mary Magdalene. As Peterson points out, we live in an age of media attention and celebrity endorsement where "fear-of-the-Lord wonder" is most likely to be cultivated by those on the edge of things.
"Bright light and amplification are not accessories to the cultivation of wonder" (p. 121), and I have learned this anew in a little congregation that meets in a worn out factory that once distributed boots around the world. We have no endowments to cushion and protect us from the harsh realities, we possess no glorious builing in which to perform magnificent liturgy, all we have is the Gospel, and discovering
how to speak that Gospel meaningfully into the chaos of an urban area being born, in the midst of the cultural chaos of these postmodern times.
Perhaps it is in congregation's like ours from which the tomorrow of American Anglicanism will emerge. We are on the fringe, and have nothing but the Word to speak, and the Spirit to guide and protect us.
Many of the gurus of the last 20 years have repeated the mantra that change comes from the periphery, and I believe there is some truth to that. But I also believe James Davidson Hunter's assertion that it is only by recovering the center and the structures of influence that change is enabled. I think that Hunter's position has a great deal of rightness about it, but it is at the periphery, on the edge, that we
experiment what it means to be fear-of-the-Lord believers attempting to witness to Christ meaningfully in a world and a denomination that finds us embarrassing, narrow-minded, believes we are unreflective, dense, thoughtless, unwilling to change with the times, or whatever other accusations that get thrown at us.
I confess as I sit here in the English sunshine that I have not enjoyed much of the last couple of years of ministry, for like St. Paul, the care of the churches, and my own church in particular, has rested heavily upon me (2 Cor. 11.29).
Yet I do feel as if we have been doing some momentous things, and setting out upon a momentous (and agonizingly burdensome) journey. With others we have, in effect, been re-designing and beginning to make the tools that will break the rocks of blindness and intransigence, and will lead us (as well as our successors) into the business of remaking the tired, corrupted, ethically compromised, Christendom-trapped church into something God can use in a different kind of world.
Even as I sit scribbling in the garden I can hear in the distance the shape of that world, for on this English Sunday an Islamic festival is in full swing in the park not a thousand yards away from where I sit. Meanwhile, the secularized English population goes about their lives thinking little of the needs of their souls, much like many Americans. In this multicultural city it appears that the Christian faith is struggling to keep its head above water.
However, this world craves to wonder at the risen Christ as much as any age before it, whether it is prepared to realize it or not. Being marginalized in my denomination I am now much more able to identity with the out-of-the-wayness of Mary Magdalene and accept her as a model in postmodernity.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Often we do things because we know they are right and only after we have done them do we gradually recognize the reasons behind our actions. Several years ago I intuitively knew the time had come for me to step back into parish ministry, and I knew it was right to go somewhere or take on something that was "obscure," maybe to take on a challenge that no one else would be willing to accept.
Thus I ended up pastoring a disspirited handful of people whose brand new congregation had experienced a tragedy of vast proportions -- and which almost everyone believed was doomed. The for the congregation's survival got even longer when the Episcopal Church exploded in 2003, and then there were further ricochets that had us tottering in despair in 2004. The only thing I have been certain of in the midst of all this has been that God called me to be the pastor of the Church of the Apostles, although there have been times when it has felt as if the work
was destroying me.
Yet even as I had done the job, the objective reasons for my presence in this congregation have clearly presented themselves, and amidst so much thanklessness there has been stellar moments of great joy. Today, as I sit in a midsummer English garden and assess from a distance progress and failures, delights and disappointments, I have a growing list of good reasons why God called Rosemary and myself to that particular place for this particular season.
We have gone around some horrendous corners in the last few years, and we are still extremely vulnerable. I am already waking up in the night and worrying about the fallout from the General Convention in 2006, whose likely decisions seem almost certain to do further crippling damage to the mission to which God has called us, and we have the election of a new bishop in the midst of all this to worry about too.
If we get the wrong person (or if the General Convention refuses to confirm the bishop elected), then the fallout will be even more horrible.
It is tragic that most of the clouds on the horizon come not from the obvious enemies of a fallen world, but from our own denomination and its corporate blindness, and a folly that seems bent on self-destruction. Yet there must be meaning in even this mystery if we could but recognize it. As the old saying goes, God is good at drawing straight lines with a crooked stick.
As pastor of the Church of the Apostles, I feel as if I am on a high wire without a safety net. I feel as if every decision we make could have both painful personal consequences, as well as enriching or threatening the life of my small (but slowly growing) congregation. Yet one of the reasons I believe the Lord put us there is that we have spent much of the last 30 years in this mode, because most of the ministries in which we have been engaged have lived on the edge. The result is
that our spiritual muscles and sinew have been trained up for such a time as this.
My companion-in-book-form on this sunny English afternoon has been my old friend and mentor, Eugene Peterson, and in his most recent book he speaks of Israel at the time of the Exodus as having had "generations of slave-identity bred into them." Breaking that self-recognition "was not going to be easy, and certainly not quick -- no easier and certainly not faster for them than it is for us" (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, page 113).
What happened at Sinai was that a blue print for feedom was laid out for Israel, yet before Moses could even get to them with instructions from the Lord they had already swapped God's extraordinary hope for the golden calf. Their worship of the golden calf was "self-defining and self-serving" (p.114), and it nearly destroyed them.
I found myself as I read this musing that this was possibly a description of the emerging post-Christendom church situation. Israel would not shed the slave-image that had shaped its identity overnight, and nor shall we be released from our yearning for the Christendom years or the "good old days of ECUSA" in the twinkling of an eye. Yet is is on the fringes, in unlikely places like the Church of the Apostles in South Williamson County, Tennessee, that something new is happening.
Which brings me to Peterson's musings on the resurrection narratives, that things "start emerging with clarity that are significant for us as we ponder our cultivation of the wonder that is inherent in living well in creation" (p. 120).
One of the significant things about all this is that "marginal people... play a prominent role in perception and resposne" -- and the first resurrection appearance was to the most marginal of all Jesus's followers, none other than Mary Magdalene. As Peterson points out, we live in an age of media attention and celebrity endorsement where "fear-of-the-Lord wonder" is most likely to be cultivated by those on the edge of things.
"Bright light and amplification are not accessories to the cultivation of wonder" (p. 121), and I have learned this anew in a little congregation that meets in a worn out factory that once distributed boots around the world. We have no endowments to cushion and protect us from the harsh realities, we possess no glorious builing in which to perform magnificent liturgy, all we have is the Gospel, and discovering
how to speak that Gospel meaningfully into the chaos of an urban area being born, in the midst of the cultural chaos of these postmodern times.
Perhaps it is in congregation's like ours from which the tomorrow of American Anglicanism will emerge. We are on the fringe, and have nothing but the Word to speak, and the Spirit to guide and protect us.
Many of the gurus of the last 20 years have repeated the mantra that change comes from the periphery, and I believe there is some truth to that. But I also believe James Davidson Hunter's assertion that it is only by recovering the center and the structures of influence that change is enabled. I think that Hunter's position has a great deal of rightness about it, but it is at the periphery, on the edge, that we
experiment what it means to be fear-of-the-Lord believers attempting to witness to Christ meaningfully in a world and a denomination that finds us embarrassing, narrow-minded, believes we are unreflective, dense, thoughtless, unwilling to change with the times, or whatever other accusations that get thrown at us.
I confess as I sit here in the English sunshine that I have not enjoyed much of the last couple of years of ministry, for like St. Paul, the care of the churches, and my own church in particular, has rested heavily upon me (2 Cor. 11.29).
Yet I do feel as if we have been doing some momentous things, and setting out upon a momentous (and agonizingly burdensome) journey. With others we have, in effect, been re-designing and beginning to make the tools that will break the rocks of blindness and intransigence, and will lead us (as well as our successors) into the business of remaking the tired, corrupted, ethically compromised, Christendom-trapped church into something God can use in a different kind of world.
Even as I sit scribbling in the garden I can hear in the distance the shape of that world, for on this English Sunday an Islamic festival is in full swing in the park not a thousand yards away from where I sit. Meanwhile, the secularized English population goes about their lives thinking little of the needs of their souls, much like many Americans. In this multicultural city it appears that the Christian faith is struggling to keep its head above water.
However, this world craves to wonder at the risen Christ as much as any age before it, whether it is prepared to realize it or not. Being marginalized in my denomination I am now much more able to identity with the out-of-the-wayness of Mary Magdalene and accept her as a model in postmodernity.
Saturday, June 25, 2005
A Letter to the Authors of "Understanding the Windsor Report"
TO: Ian Douglas and Paul Zahl
Dear Ian and Paul,
I read "Understanding the Windsor Report" on a transatlantic flight, on my way to England to meet my first grandchild, who is stubbornly refusing to be born anywhere close to her due date! The personal significance of the months of my daughter's pregnancy have taken me by surprise, a chapter change that has been further accentuated by the fact that I am on the verge of my 60th birthday.
Like both of you I am a lifelong Anglican, having been baptized in December 1945 in a parish church built on a spot where Romans had baptized their children. Despite my Church of England roots, three decades of my ordained life have been usefully spent in the Episcopal Church, but the period since GC2003 has been exquisitely painful as any I have endured.
More heat than light has been generated during this time, and it seems we have descended into an uncontainable kind of corporate lunacy. I have known each of you for a long time, and we have labored at times alongside one another, so it is a delight in the midst of such discomfort to see two men who I respect engaged in a conversation that is both readable, and which sheds some light into our unhappy state.
I bought "Understanding the Windsor Report" because I felt it my duty to do so, and reckoned I would scan it quickly, find a few some bon mots to squirrel away for future use, then shelve it. Instead I found myself treated to an erudite but accessible rehearsal of our present state of affairs following the publication of the Windsor Report, that is been both engaging and edifying. In the contributions that each of you makes I have been educated and challenged, and if there were nothing else of any substance, we would be beneficiaries because you have given us is an example of how to engage in debate forthrightly and with grace. Yet
there is a lot more to the book than this.
One of the horrors of these last two years has been the venom with which we have fought our way through these difficulties. Friendships have been severed forever, and I find myself regularly close to tears as faithful pastors and laity, men and women who have loved the Episcopal Church, have been forced to decide that they can no longer remain here. Some friends have left for AMiA, others have left for Rome, others for other traditions, taking with them both talent and some of the wholeness
of the Episcopal Church -- as well as breaking lines of communication with those of us they now consider part of their past.
Like Paul Zahl, I feel totally marginalized in ECUSA -- sometimes with anguish, and sometimes with relief. I once engaged in the wider life of ECUSA, but for several years now that has been impossible for my voice is not valued by those who hold power because although a mainstream Anglican being obedient to his ordination vows, I represent a theological viewpoint considered either dinosauric and objectionable.
Needless to say, because we evangelicals, charismatics, and catholics have been on the perimeter for such a long time, as Paul points out (page 124), we have become increasingly angular, grouchy, and difficult to live with. "The church has essentially said to us, de facto, Depart for me, I never knew thee" (page 125). Yet for many of us there is nowhere else to go.
While your conversation does not solve this problem, Ian to his credit does not dismiss the discomfort in which so many of us orthodox types find ourselves in the cavalier manner we have been treated to by so many others. For this I am profoundly grateful. I wonder whether this is because Ian is a global Christian, not entirely trapped in the cultural Americocentricity of the "left wing" of the Episcopal Church.
Probably the greatest contribution the pair of you have made in discussing the Windsor Report is to model a way of relating to one another in the midst of so much distress. In terms of my own reception of Windsor, I have found myself somewhere between Paul and Ian. I am not as negative about the Report as Paul, but I do not see all the positives that Ian seems to believe are there.
Each of you make a strong case, I believe, against the creeping prelacy that mars contemporary Anglicanism, and I agree with you that bolstering the episcopate in a more "catholic" manner is not the solution to this problem, what Paul describes as "the parts of the report that want to depict bishops as God's utter gift to the cosmos" (Page52).
Both the weaknesses and the strengths of the Windsor Report and its various suggested courses of action are nicely unwrapped in your conversation, especially its failure to represent theological and ecclesiastical heritage of Anglicanism summarized by the Lambeth-Chicago Quadrilateral. While it was inevitable that the product of such a diverse group of commissioners was not going to be acceptable in its entirity to any of us, you have done an admirable job finding weaknesses in their handling of Scripture, their structural and canonical attempts to fill the breaches, and their failure to address the presenting issue of homosexuality with the honestly and openness that one would have liked.
Ian rightly speaks in a reconciliatory mode, calling upon us to see how much we belong to one another in relation to the Father in the family of God, and that if we are to experience the fullness that God desires for us, then we must recogize that there are treasures that we all bring to the table. The problem with this is that Ian seems to expect more from the maintaining of relationships than relationships are able to deliver.
I would also add that despite his own drenching in the history and substance of Anglicanism, he does not seem eager to accept the given boundaries of faith that are there within the Holy Scriptures and the manner in which the church has historically handled them. While confessing that he is not a biblical scholar, he does little to justify his unwillingness to take seriously the prohibitions of the Scriptures when it comes to sexuality, and he is strangely willing to draw upon extraneous contemporary "findings," in order to justify his position.
This sits uncomfortably for me when viewed alongside his enthusiastic affirmation of the missiological imperative that is at the heart of being believers. While the raison d'etre of the church might be the fulfilling of the missio Dei, I am baffled by his willingness to then support an understanding of humanity that has wrought such strife within the church. Not only has the missiological component of Anglicanism been lost amidst the internecine feuding that is tearing us apart, but
by adhering inflexibly to a highly questionable agenda, this has done terrible damage in the short, medium, and long-term to the mission of the church, doing irreparable harm to the Gospel around the world and the Communion he loves.
While I accept that one of the challenges before Anglicans worldwide, as it is before others, is how to be faithful and welcoming among the vast diversity of cultures, the puzzle is why this contemporary tolerance of what Ian admits Scripture regards as questionable sexuality should be accepted as a diverse culture that is appropriately tolerated in the heartland of the church. Ian raises the question that Windsor, I think, challenges us to answer as to what are the limits of acceptable
diversity within the church? It is not only an issues of biblical hermeneutics, but of anthropological understanding, and where truth draws boundaries.
What is interesting is that I find myself more in Ian's comfort zone about the Windsor Reports approach to Scripture than Paul. Paul has misgivings. Having pondered his assertion that the report is unwilling to listen to the clarity of the Scriptural message, I think that he is more right than I might have earlier accepted, especially regarding what the Bible teaches about the nature and practice of our sexuality. This is not something I had properly picked up on my reading of the Report. I agree with him, although I do share with him and Ian that hermeneutics
and the place of the Holy Spirit in the reading and interpretation of God's will must be major items on the agenda in the days ahead.
Paul is right to assert that "the burden of proof is on the people who wish to change the inherited teaching" (Page 37), and I can only say that Ian displays lamentable weakness in responding to such a challenge as do most he make the case for the position he holds. For several years now I have been looking in vain for those on the "revisionist" side of this issue to come up with an approach that really holds water in light of the whole array of evidence, and so far they have failed to do so. The case is based, as Paul points out, on an almost uncritical
acceptance of the drift of postmodern culture.
Ian, who can be so astute, drifts with his EDS colleagues in this matter. While he admits that there is no case for same-sex elationships and the leadership of actively homosexual persons in the church, it just will not do to say that we now know better than they did in the past, or that the sort of homosexuality that we talk about today is not addressed in the Bible.
What I brought away from reading this delightful conversation is a shared sense with you both of distrust for creeping prelacy, and also a willingness to accept that we need to go back and rethink what we mean by "Instruments of Unity," and how these relate to our historic doctrinal and ecclesial heritage. It also has me thinking afresh about whether I like the gradual centralizing of Anglicanism that is taking
place, although while with Ian I affirm the individual identities of each province, I wonder whether the folks on "his side" who have pressed their agenda to the point where they are the ones who have compromised this.
Yes, you have given me lots to think about and I am profoundly grateful. Thank you both for writing this book, it is a real blessing.
In Christ,
Richard Kew
Dear Ian and Paul,
I read "Understanding the Windsor Report" on a transatlantic flight, on my way to England to meet my first grandchild, who is stubbornly refusing to be born anywhere close to her due date! The personal significance of the months of my daughter's pregnancy have taken me by surprise, a chapter change that has been further accentuated by the fact that I am on the verge of my 60th birthday.
Like both of you I am a lifelong Anglican, having been baptized in December 1945 in a parish church built on a spot where Romans had baptized their children. Despite my Church of England roots, three decades of my ordained life have been usefully spent in the Episcopal Church, but the period since GC2003 has been exquisitely painful as any I have endured.
More heat than light has been generated during this time, and it seems we have descended into an uncontainable kind of corporate lunacy. I have known each of you for a long time, and we have labored at times alongside one another, so it is a delight in the midst of such discomfort to see two men who I respect engaged in a conversation that is both readable, and which sheds some light into our unhappy state.
I bought "Understanding the Windsor Report" because I felt it my duty to do so, and reckoned I would scan it quickly, find a few some bon mots to squirrel away for future use, then shelve it. Instead I found myself treated to an erudite but accessible rehearsal of our present state of affairs following the publication of the Windsor Report, that is been both engaging and edifying. In the contributions that each of you makes I have been educated and challenged, and if there were nothing else of any substance, we would be beneficiaries because you have given us is an example of how to engage in debate forthrightly and with grace. Yet
there is a lot more to the book than this.
One of the horrors of these last two years has been the venom with which we have fought our way through these difficulties. Friendships have been severed forever, and I find myself regularly close to tears as faithful pastors and laity, men and women who have loved the Episcopal Church, have been forced to decide that they can no longer remain here. Some friends have left for AMiA, others have left for Rome, others for other traditions, taking with them both talent and some of the wholeness
of the Episcopal Church -- as well as breaking lines of communication with those of us they now consider part of their past.
Like Paul Zahl, I feel totally marginalized in ECUSA -- sometimes with anguish, and sometimes with relief. I once engaged in the wider life of ECUSA, but for several years now that has been impossible for my voice is not valued by those who hold power because although a mainstream Anglican being obedient to his ordination vows, I represent a theological viewpoint considered either dinosauric and objectionable.
Needless to say, because we evangelicals, charismatics, and catholics have been on the perimeter for such a long time, as Paul points out (page 124), we have become increasingly angular, grouchy, and difficult to live with. "The church has essentially said to us, de facto, Depart for me, I never knew thee" (page 125). Yet for many of us there is nowhere else to go.
While your conversation does not solve this problem, Ian to his credit does not dismiss the discomfort in which so many of us orthodox types find ourselves in the cavalier manner we have been treated to by so many others. For this I am profoundly grateful. I wonder whether this is because Ian is a global Christian, not entirely trapped in the cultural Americocentricity of the "left wing" of the Episcopal Church.
Probably the greatest contribution the pair of you have made in discussing the Windsor Report is to model a way of relating to one another in the midst of so much distress. In terms of my own reception of Windsor, I have found myself somewhere between Paul and Ian. I am not as negative about the Report as Paul, but I do not see all the positives that Ian seems to believe are there.
Each of you make a strong case, I believe, against the creeping prelacy that mars contemporary Anglicanism, and I agree with you that bolstering the episcopate in a more "catholic" manner is not the solution to this problem, what Paul describes as "the parts of the report that want to depict bishops as God's utter gift to the cosmos" (Page52).
Both the weaknesses and the strengths of the Windsor Report and its various suggested courses of action are nicely unwrapped in your conversation, especially its failure to represent theological and ecclesiastical heritage of Anglicanism summarized by the Lambeth-Chicago Quadrilateral. While it was inevitable that the product of such a diverse group of commissioners was not going to be acceptable in its entirity to any of us, you have done an admirable job finding weaknesses in their handling of Scripture, their structural and canonical attempts to fill the breaches, and their failure to address the presenting issue of homosexuality with the honestly and openness that one would have liked.
Ian rightly speaks in a reconciliatory mode, calling upon us to see how much we belong to one another in relation to the Father in the family of God, and that if we are to experience the fullness that God desires for us, then we must recogize that there are treasures that we all bring to the table. The problem with this is that Ian seems to expect more from the maintaining of relationships than relationships are able to deliver.
I would also add that despite his own drenching in the history and substance of Anglicanism, he does not seem eager to accept the given boundaries of faith that are there within the Holy Scriptures and the manner in which the church has historically handled them. While confessing that he is not a biblical scholar, he does little to justify his unwillingness to take seriously the prohibitions of the Scriptures when it comes to sexuality, and he is strangely willing to draw upon extraneous contemporary "findings," in order to justify his position.
This sits uncomfortably for me when viewed alongside his enthusiastic affirmation of the missiological imperative that is at the heart of being believers. While the raison d'etre of the church might be the fulfilling of the missio Dei, I am baffled by his willingness to then support an understanding of humanity that has wrought such strife within the church. Not only has the missiological component of Anglicanism been lost amidst the internecine feuding that is tearing us apart, but
by adhering inflexibly to a highly questionable agenda, this has done terrible damage in the short, medium, and long-term to the mission of the church, doing irreparable harm to the Gospel around the world and the Communion he loves.
While I accept that one of the challenges before Anglicans worldwide, as it is before others, is how to be faithful and welcoming among the vast diversity of cultures, the puzzle is why this contemporary tolerance of what Ian admits Scripture regards as questionable sexuality should be accepted as a diverse culture that is appropriately tolerated in the heartland of the church. Ian raises the question that Windsor, I think, challenges us to answer as to what are the limits of acceptable
diversity within the church? It is not only an issues of biblical hermeneutics, but of anthropological understanding, and where truth draws boundaries.
What is interesting is that I find myself more in Ian's comfort zone about the Windsor Reports approach to Scripture than Paul. Paul has misgivings. Having pondered his assertion that the report is unwilling to listen to the clarity of the Scriptural message, I think that he is more right than I might have earlier accepted, especially regarding what the Bible teaches about the nature and practice of our sexuality. This is not something I had properly picked up on my reading of the Report. I agree with him, although I do share with him and Ian that hermeneutics
and the place of the Holy Spirit in the reading and interpretation of God's will must be major items on the agenda in the days ahead.
Paul is right to assert that "the burden of proof is on the people who wish to change the inherited teaching" (Page 37), and I can only say that Ian displays lamentable weakness in responding to such a challenge as do most he make the case for the position he holds. For several years now I have been looking in vain for those on the "revisionist" side of this issue to come up with an approach that really holds water in light of the whole array of evidence, and so far they have failed to do so. The case is based, as Paul points out, on an almost uncritical
acceptance of the drift of postmodern culture.
Ian, who can be so astute, drifts with his EDS colleagues in this matter. While he admits that there is no case for same-sex elationships and the leadership of actively homosexual persons in the church, it just will not do to say that we now know better than they did in the past, or that the sort of homosexuality that we talk about today is not addressed in the Bible.
What I brought away from reading this delightful conversation is a shared sense with you both of distrust for creeping prelacy, and also a willingness to accept that we need to go back and rethink what we mean by "Instruments of Unity," and how these relate to our historic doctrinal and ecclesial heritage. It also has me thinking afresh about whether I like the gradual centralizing of Anglicanism that is taking
place, although while with Ian I affirm the individual identities of each province, I wonder whether the folks on "his side" who have pressed their agenda to the point where they are the ones who have compromised this.
Yes, you have given me lots to think about and I am profoundly grateful. Thank you both for writing this book, it is a real blessing.
In Christ,
Richard Kew
Sunday, June 19, 2005
A Historic Appointment Considered
I was peddling hard on my exercise bike early on Friday morning and watching the news on BBC America, when it was announced that John Sentamu had been appointed the new Archbishop of York. Since then I have been keeping my eyes open for comment -- and have heard very little, especially in the American church where our fixation on sexuality is distressing, pathetic, and complete.
Sentamu's predecessor was the godly and gracious David Hope, one of the last of the pious old-fashioned Anglo-Catholic prelates of the Church of England -- a godly man deeply rooted in Word and Sacraments. Bishop Hope has returned to his first love, which is parish ministry, believing that his active years should end where they began.
Following Hope you might say with the Monty Pythons, "And now for something completely different..."
John Sentamu is in his mid-fifties and is the only Ugandan in the English House of Bishops. I met him ten years ago when he was vicar of a South London parish, introduced to him by our mutual friend, Cyril Okorocha, now Bishop of Owerri, Nigeria. Our meeting was brief, and I suspect Sentamu would not remember it, but he made an impression on me. Since then he has gone from parish ministry to the suffragan post of Stephney in the Diocese of London, to Bishop of Birmingham. And now he moves to York where he will lead the northern province of the Church of England.
While there have been a number of leaders in the history of the English church who were not born in England, I find myself wondering if it is unprecendented since the Reformation for both the archbishops of the church to have been born outside of England -- and never has there been an African in one of these posts. That, I think, is what makes the Sentamu appointment so fascinating, for it says something about the way in which a church planted by the C. of E. is now providing leadership for it.
At the press conference that followed the surprise announcement of John Sentamu's appointment to York, the archbishop-elect said that those missionaries who risked their lives to go to Uganda, "brought a gospel of God's forgiveness for the past, new life for the present, and, indeed, hope for the future... Like those missionaries and martyrs who brought the gospel to my native Uganda, encouraged by their prayers and example, I hope that we can create a Church and a culture which is more relaxed and open to take risks and be more creative, so that the Church of England is once again a spiritual home for all English men and women - as the Elizabethan Settlement actually had hoped."
This attitude is something that makes Sentamu's presence in York so fascinating. Not only does he break a certain inherited mold, but he also illustrates that the funny old Church of England is committed to upholding its global heritage as a mission-sending and -receiving church, and as part of the worldwide Communion. John Sentamu is an intelligent and highly able man, so it would be patronizing and diminishing to suggest that his appointment is symbolic. There is no doubt he is there because of grace and ability, but having said that it is highly significant that an African now presides over the second province of the Mother Church.
The Archbishop-elect is likely to become familiar with the angst of the Anglican province in North America, as he is a member of the Panel of Reference established to examine issues related to alternative episcopal oversight in the USA. While I suspect that he will be fair in that position, I also suspect that as a straight-talker with a passion for human dignity, he will not necessarily be a comfort to either side of this divisive issue.
What John Sentamu really seems to be energized by is evangelism, and that has me jumping up and down and throwing my hat in the air. I met him at a Communion-wide evangelism conference, and he was a member of the steering group for the Decade of Evangelism, as well as being a board member of the Archbishops' Springboard initiative for evangelism. Unless we take seriously the business of conversion then we may as well surrender the church to every force in this troubled world, so this is the kind of leadership that is to be applauded.
One man in his fifties is unlikely to be able make a colossal difference in 10-15 years, unless he is someone like John Paul II, but I suspect that the vision and passion of John Sentamu can do something significant to change the trajectory of the Church of England, and this will be a blessing to all of Anglicanism. The tragedy is, having read the recent vacuous statement of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and seen the unrepresentative melange of people he has taken with him to address the Anglican Consultative Council, that we totally lack such imaginative and Gospel-driven leadership in the USA.
Sentamu's predecessor was the godly and gracious David Hope, one of the last of the pious old-fashioned Anglo-Catholic prelates of the Church of England -- a godly man deeply rooted in Word and Sacraments. Bishop Hope has returned to his first love, which is parish ministry, believing that his active years should end where they began.
Following Hope you might say with the Monty Pythons, "And now for something completely different..."
John Sentamu is in his mid-fifties and is the only Ugandan in the English House of Bishops. I met him ten years ago when he was vicar of a South London parish, introduced to him by our mutual friend, Cyril Okorocha, now Bishop of Owerri, Nigeria. Our meeting was brief, and I suspect Sentamu would not remember it, but he made an impression on me. Since then he has gone from parish ministry to the suffragan post of Stephney in the Diocese of London, to Bishop of Birmingham. And now he moves to York where he will lead the northern province of the Church of England.
While there have been a number of leaders in the history of the English church who were not born in England, I find myself wondering if it is unprecendented since the Reformation for both the archbishops of the church to have been born outside of England -- and never has there been an African in one of these posts. That, I think, is what makes the Sentamu appointment so fascinating, for it says something about the way in which a church planted by the C. of E. is now providing leadership for it.
At the press conference that followed the surprise announcement of John Sentamu's appointment to York, the archbishop-elect said that those missionaries who risked their lives to go to Uganda, "brought a gospel of God's forgiveness for the past, new life for the present, and, indeed, hope for the future... Like those missionaries and martyrs who brought the gospel to my native Uganda, encouraged by their prayers and example, I hope that we can create a Church and a culture which is more relaxed and open to take risks and be more creative, so that the Church of England is once again a spiritual home for all English men and women - as the Elizabethan Settlement actually had hoped."
This attitude is something that makes Sentamu's presence in York so fascinating. Not only does he break a certain inherited mold, but he also illustrates that the funny old Church of England is committed to upholding its global heritage as a mission-sending and -receiving church, and as part of the worldwide Communion. John Sentamu is an intelligent and highly able man, so it would be patronizing and diminishing to suggest that his appointment is symbolic. There is no doubt he is there because of grace and ability, but having said that it is highly significant that an African now presides over the second province of the Mother Church.
The Archbishop-elect is likely to become familiar with the angst of the Anglican province in North America, as he is a member of the Panel of Reference established to examine issues related to alternative episcopal oversight in the USA. While I suspect that he will be fair in that position, I also suspect that as a straight-talker with a passion for human dignity, he will not necessarily be a comfort to either side of this divisive issue.
What John Sentamu really seems to be energized by is evangelism, and that has me jumping up and down and throwing my hat in the air. I met him at a Communion-wide evangelism conference, and he was a member of the steering group for the Decade of Evangelism, as well as being a board member of the Archbishops' Springboard initiative for evangelism. Unless we take seriously the business of conversion then we may as well surrender the church to every force in this troubled world, so this is the kind of leadership that is to be applauded.
One man in his fifties is unlikely to be able make a colossal difference in 10-15 years, unless he is someone like John Paul II, but I suspect that the vision and passion of John Sentamu can do something significant to change the trajectory of the Church of England, and this will be a blessing to all of Anglicanism. The tragedy is, having read the recent vacuous statement of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and seen the unrepresentative melange of people he has taken with him to address the Anglican Consultative Council, that we totally lack such imaginative and Gospel-driven leadership in the USA.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Feeding the Imagination
This is the time of the year when I tend to add signficant amounts of fiction to my diet of reading, because it is at the end of a busy program schedule that I realize that my imagination is starved and needs reawakening. Pastoral ministry is a vocation that demands creativity from its practitioners, but most of us do not either cultivate it or even exercise it because we have sapped our imaginations of all their content and energy. Remember the great scientists like Einstein credit their imagations for their discoveries, just as much as their research.
I don't get a chance to listen to a lot of my colleagues' preaching these days, but one observation of what I hear now (and what I have heard in the past) is how ho-hum it often is. Not only is preaching usually poorly prepared with Scripture used in a vacuous or wooden manner, but it is also unimaginative, and therefore does not engage the heart and the mind. My own fiercest critic, my wife, knows when my batteries are beginning to run down because my preaching starts to become bland and colorless. I would have to say that as far as I am concerned, yesterday's preaching fitted into that category, reminding me that the time is here for refreshment.
It really doesn't matter what novels you pick up and read, as long as they engage you and feed you. Right now I am reading quite a long recently-published book that is both fascinating and wryly funny called "The Time Traveler's Wife," by Audrey Niffenagger. I have been fascinated for a long time by stories and ideas that seek to find their way around our captivity to the sequentiality of time. Here is one about a guy who has this chronological instability disorder and goes to and fro between past and present, during which time he becomes a friend during her childhood of the woman he will marry and, as it were, helps to raise her!
I have never been much into westerns or mysteries, but I love good science fiction, as well as books that explore characters and their identities. From time to time I will pick up a classic like a Jane Austen or something like that, but always what I am looking for is something that will engage me, entertain me, enrich me, and nourish that part of me that gets drained dry by the daily round and the common task. Perhaps in the summer I will read 10-12 novels, whereas for all the rest of the year the total might be half that number.
Novel-reading has so many benefits. Firstly, it introduces us into another's universe -- the way they think, what they believe, how they react to changing circumstances, and so forth. When we can see the world through someone else's eyes, then we are usually given fascinating raw materials for health and growth. Secondly, it allows our mind to escape into a world that is not ours. For example, I always find it particularly fascinating, as at the moment, to read materials written by women because the female perception of reality is significantly and often subtly different from the male. I would confess, however, that 75% of what I read is usually written by men.
A third good reason to read novels is that they are often a fine window into the mindset and worldview of the age in which they are written, and the way in which authors looks out on all that is around them -- whether they are setting the book in the present, the past, or the future. The Canadian, Robert J. Sawyer, is one of my favorite science fiction writers, who seems to have a pretty good grasp on the science of what he is writing about. He is someone who has opened my eyes to the implications of some of the things being explored in labs and research facilities today, as well as the yearning for the eternal that haunts postmodernity.
I have also developed a habit of reading the books upon which movies I might have seen are based. A few weeks ago I watched "Somewhere in Time," a movie that is something of a minor cult classic starring Christopher Reeve before his riding accident. It is a time traveler story with a twist, but on the screen is rather one-dimensional. So, I got hold of the book on which it was based, written 35 years ago by Richard Matheson. Reading the book was like being at that moment where Dorothy enters Oz and everything goes from black and white to color!
Some time in the winter, on one of the Encore channels we get with our satellite package, I saw the movie "Eniga," based on Robert Harris's book set at Bletchley Park, England, in the Second World War, and built around the encoding an encryption made possible by the Enigma machine the Germans used. The movie wasn't bad, but the book was a thousand times better. The characters had greater depth, and the interplay between them was so much richer.
I try each year to read a balanced diet -- plenty of theology, philosophy, and church history, but coupled with it is some stuff on management, a lot of history and biography, as well as some of the latest stuff that comes out on trends and the life of the church. I have to say that a lot of church-related how-to books I find pretty boring -- and only once in the while are they constructive and creative. However, I do read them (or scan them).
The preacher is called to be faithful to Scripture, and what God reveals of himself within it. But being sound does not mean being indigestible and unengaging. Novel-reading shines new light into our imaginations, but it also gives us models of ways in which we can use the English language. It helps us to see the world from a different viewpoint, one that we can then chew on and mull over in those spare moments we have driving the car, walking the dog, working out, or sitting with a cold drink on a beach staring into space.
So, if you are a physician of souls let me encourage you this summer to take on board some novels.
I don't get a chance to listen to a lot of my colleagues' preaching these days, but one observation of what I hear now (and what I have heard in the past) is how ho-hum it often is. Not only is preaching usually poorly prepared with Scripture used in a vacuous or wooden manner, but it is also unimaginative, and therefore does not engage the heart and the mind. My own fiercest critic, my wife, knows when my batteries are beginning to run down because my preaching starts to become bland and colorless. I would have to say that as far as I am concerned, yesterday's preaching fitted into that category, reminding me that the time is here for refreshment.
It really doesn't matter what novels you pick up and read, as long as they engage you and feed you. Right now I am reading quite a long recently-published book that is both fascinating and wryly funny called "The Time Traveler's Wife," by Audrey Niffenagger. I have been fascinated for a long time by stories and ideas that seek to find their way around our captivity to the sequentiality of time. Here is one about a guy who has this chronological instability disorder and goes to and fro between past and present, during which time he becomes a friend during her childhood of the woman he will marry and, as it were, helps to raise her!
I have never been much into westerns or mysteries, but I love good science fiction, as well as books that explore characters and their identities. From time to time I will pick up a classic like a Jane Austen or something like that, but always what I am looking for is something that will engage me, entertain me, enrich me, and nourish that part of me that gets drained dry by the daily round and the common task. Perhaps in the summer I will read 10-12 novels, whereas for all the rest of the year the total might be half that number.
Novel-reading has so many benefits. Firstly, it introduces us into another's universe -- the way they think, what they believe, how they react to changing circumstances, and so forth. When we can see the world through someone else's eyes, then we are usually given fascinating raw materials for health and growth. Secondly, it allows our mind to escape into a world that is not ours. For example, I always find it particularly fascinating, as at the moment, to read materials written by women because the female perception of reality is significantly and often subtly different from the male. I would confess, however, that 75% of what I read is usually written by men.
A third good reason to read novels is that they are often a fine window into the mindset and worldview of the age in which they are written, and the way in which authors looks out on all that is around them -- whether they are setting the book in the present, the past, or the future. The Canadian, Robert J. Sawyer, is one of my favorite science fiction writers, who seems to have a pretty good grasp on the science of what he is writing about. He is someone who has opened my eyes to the implications of some of the things being explored in labs and research facilities today, as well as the yearning for the eternal that haunts postmodernity.
I have also developed a habit of reading the books upon which movies I might have seen are based. A few weeks ago I watched "Somewhere in Time," a movie that is something of a minor cult classic starring Christopher Reeve before his riding accident. It is a time traveler story with a twist, but on the screen is rather one-dimensional. So, I got hold of the book on which it was based, written 35 years ago by Richard Matheson. Reading the book was like being at that moment where Dorothy enters Oz and everything goes from black and white to color!
Some time in the winter, on one of the Encore channels we get with our satellite package, I saw the movie "Eniga," based on Robert Harris's book set at Bletchley Park, England, in the Second World War, and built around the encoding an encryption made possible by the Enigma machine the Germans used. The movie wasn't bad, but the book was a thousand times better. The characters had greater depth, and the interplay between them was so much richer.
I try each year to read a balanced diet -- plenty of theology, philosophy, and church history, but coupled with it is some stuff on management, a lot of history and biography, as well as some of the latest stuff that comes out on trends and the life of the church. I have to say that a lot of church-related how-to books I find pretty boring -- and only once in the while are they constructive and creative. However, I do read them (or scan them).
The preacher is called to be faithful to Scripture, and what God reveals of himself within it. But being sound does not mean being indigestible and unengaging. Novel-reading shines new light into our imaginations, but it also gives us models of ways in which we can use the English language. It helps us to see the world from a different viewpoint, one that we can then chew on and mull over in those spare moments we have driving the car, walking the dog, working out, or sitting with a cold drink on a beach staring into space.
So, if you are a physician of souls let me encourage you this summer to take on board some novels.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Lessons from the European Worm Turning
The other Sunday I was desperate to find news of the outcome of the referendum on the European Union constitution in France. Apart from the Internet, all news outlets on this side of the Atlantic did not seem to know that a world existed outside these United States -- and what news was being reported was who won what golf tournament.
I was eager to know if the French had done what I had suspected they would do, and turn down this thoroughly indigestible constitution that their political masters in Brussels and Paris were foisting on them. It was a resounding "Non!" Three days later the Dutch outdid the French with 62% of them turning their thumbs down to something that might have further integrated Europe, and made it a significant political counter-weight to the USA and the rising of China.
Since then there has been a welter of analysis of what happened. Clearly, there were significant French and Dutch issues, particularly discontent with their governments that led to this rejection by two of the original members of what was then known as the Common Market. Their leaders coaxed and cajoled them not to do what they were obviously going to do, but they refused to listen. It was clear to everyone that they were rejecting their national political elites, as well as the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.
But something else was going on. There was a religous component to this, particularly in Holland where there have been massive in-migrations of Muslims in recent years. Now the folks who had given them this constitution, were talking to Turkey about joining the EU, which would further flood millions of Muslims into the European market place. The Dutch response was "Nee."
It is perhaps too early to say what all the implications are of this. I predict a ton of learned papers in the next year or two dissecting this situation, but maybe, just maybe, Europeans are waking up to the difficulties facing them in the years ahead if they continue to wind down their population creating a vacuum for millions of poor Muslims to come looking for work.
But this religious component is only part of an even bigger picture that we should look at -- for at the root of this is the issue of identity. One of the reasons the French rejected this constitution was that they did not like what they believed was too much Anglo-Saxon liberal market talk in it. Translated this means the French want to do things their way, much as the British want to do things their way, and the Italians have no desire to lose their Italian identity.
It is hardly surprising that there are Dutch and Italian voices who are now saying that they want their own currencies back and to abandon the Euro, reclaiming one of the distinctives of their national identity that was lost. The British, some of the most recalcitrant Europeans, have already breathed a huge sigh of relief, and have abandoned the notion of a referendum to confirm the constitution, and I suspect the Danes and others will follow suit.
Identity is something vital, and when it is attacked, from deep down inside comes the growl that affirms who I truly am. I know this from personal experience. In terms of nationality, I am a citizen of the USA. But that is more a legal reality than an issue of identity, for at heart I shall always remain not so much British as English -- and I make no effort to hide it. With distinctions between the various nationalities in Europe being blurred, folks are kicking back and claiming their true identity, beginning with nationality.
Identity is a huge issue in the 21st Century, and I believe it is one of the great channels along which we can take the gospel into people's hearts and lives. Consuming goods and services, the crass western approach to affirming identity, is no longer enough. The rise of the New Age and the other plethora of spiritual alternatives is evidence of this.
The young emergent Christians who are hungry for roots are tapping into this search for identity and a sense of belonging. They see their Christian identity as being more long-lasting and profound than anything anything nativist North American Christianity can come up with.
While I recognize that some who are leaving the wreck that is the Episcopal Church for Rome do so for reasons of theological conviction, I wonder whether there is within their transfer a sense of affiliating with a tradition that still seems committed to its identity more or less intact, when we have squandered ours in favor of something that we make up as we go along?
For a long time I have thought that enabling people to grasp their true identity is going to be very important. My hope is that we will help them form their identity in Christ, but also that an emergent faithful Anglicanism will be an identity-developing place for them to be.
I was eager to know if the French had done what I had suspected they would do, and turn down this thoroughly indigestible constitution that their political masters in Brussels and Paris were foisting on them. It was a resounding "Non!" Three days later the Dutch outdid the French with 62% of them turning their thumbs down to something that might have further integrated Europe, and made it a significant political counter-weight to the USA and the rising of China.
Since then there has been a welter of analysis of what happened. Clearly, there were significant French and Dutch issues, particularly discontent with their governments that led to this rejection by two of the original members of what was then known as the Common Market. Their leaders coaxed and cajoled them not to do what they were obviously going to do, but they refused to listen. It was clear to everyone that they were rejecting their national political elites, as well as the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.
But something else was going on. There was a religous component to this, particularly in Holland where there have been massive in-migrations of Muslims in recent years. Now the folks who had given them this constitution, were talking to Turkey about joining the EU, which would further flood millions of Muslims into the European market place. The Dutch response was "Nee."
It is perhaps too early to say what all the implications are of this. I predict a ton of learned papers in the next year or two dissecting this situation, but maybe, just maybe, Europeans are waking up to the difficulties facing them in the years ahead if they continue to wind down their population creating a vacuum for millions of poor Muslims to come looking for work.
But this religious component is only part of an even bigger picture that we should look at -- for at the root of this is the issue of identity. One of the reasons the French rejected this constitution was that they did not like what they believed was too much Anglo-Saxon liberal market talk in it. Translated this means the French want to do things their way, much as the British want to do things their way, and the Italians have no desire to lose their Italian identity.
It is hardly surprising that there are Dutch and Italian voices who are now saying that they want their own currencies back and to abandon the Euro, reclaiming one of the distinctives of their national identity that was lost. The British, some of the most recalcitrant Europeans, have already breathed a huge sigh of relief, and have abandoned the notion of a referendum to confirm the constitution, and I suspect the Danes and others will follow suit.
Identity is something vital, and when it is attacked, from deep down inside comes the growl that affirms who I truly am. I know this from personal experience. In terms of nationality, I am a citizen of the USA. But that is more a legal reality than an issue of identity, for at heart I shall always remain not so much British as English -- and I make no effort to hide it. With distinctions between the various nationalities in Europe being blurred, folks are kicking back and claiming their true identity, beginning with nationality.
Identity is a huge issue in the 21st Century, and I believe it is one of the great channels along which we can take the gospel into people's hearts and lives. Consuming goods and services, the crass western approach to affirming identity, is no longer enough. The rise of the New Age and the other plethora of spiritual alternatives is evidence of this.
The young emergent Christians who are hungry for roots are tapping into this search for identity and a sense of belonging. They see their Christian identity as being more long-lasting and profound than anything anything nativist North American Christianity can come up with.
While I recognize that some who are leaving the wreck that is the Episcopal Church for Rome do so for reasons of theological conviction, I wonder whether there is within their transfer a sense of affiliating with a tradition that still seems committed to its identity more or less intact, when we have squandered ours in favor of something that we make up as we go along?
For a long time I have thought that enabling people to grasp their true identity is going to be very important. My hope is that we will help them form their identity in Christ, but also that an emergent faithful Anglicanism will be an identity-developing place for them to be.
Monday, June 06, 2005
A Review of Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse"
"Collapse -- How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond
(New York: Viking, 2005) US$29.95 ($19.77 Amazon.com)
Review by Richard Kew
I bought Jared Diamond's latest book because, as you know, I am a bit of an eco-nut, but didn't get from it what I had expected. Diamond is a gifted polymath who teaches geography at UCLA, has won the Pulitzer Prize, and seems to know everything about the world. He is also one of those talented individuals who can gather a huge quantity of information and organize it in a manner that is digestible to ordinary mortals like you and me.
I was intrigued that someone had even thought that societies might succeed and societies might fail, and I have been gradually working through this 515-page piece for several months now. I have found myself chewing on a host of fascinating chunks of information about everything from the Norse settlement of Iceland and Greenland, to the problems of mining in Montana, to the felling of trees on Easter Island, and the perillous delicacy of the Australian ecosystem, and the effect of current agricultural practices and mining upon it.
What Diamond does is provide a huge array of case studies of societies that have gotten themselves into trouble and have either declined precipitously or have disappeared altogether. He has concentrated on how they have used and abused their environment. This is not a book written by a tree-hugger on a crusade, but a meticulous scholar who wants us to consider what there is to learn from failing societies, as we put unprecedented strains on our own ecosystem at a time when the fabric of the whole world is increasingly interwoven.
However he opens with a caveat that "we shouldn't be so naive as to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them... we also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them..." (Page 8). Yet it is wise to understand past collapses because we are prone to do the same kind of things, and follow the same kind of ideas that contributed to the demise of earlier peoples.
I said as I launched into this review that I did not get from this book what I had expected. I went looking for further insights into my understanding of the environment, and came away with a much better understanding of the nature of decision-making. These societies got into trouble because they were situated within fragile ecosystems, and over long or short periods there were significant failures in group decison-making with the result that problems accumulated until they were insurmountable.
It was as I pondered his insights into decison-making while I mowed my lawn on Saturday afternoon, that I realized that the continuous thread running through the last thirty years of my ministry has been that I have worked in fragile church or church-related ecosystems. My "speciality," if there is such a thing, has been start-up and clean-up. In the one you are working with nothing to make something, and with the other you are working with the outcome of an accumulation of failures in and effort to turn around what surely is (or looks like becoming) a disaster before it gives up the ghost completely.
Unlike a significant proportion of other Anglican clergy I have not spent much of my ministry living in a world of established budgets, buildings that are paid for or have been there for generations, and in some cases endowment monies that pay well and help cushion blows. My ministry has been in successive circumstances to define what the task is that needs to be done, then to chart a course to get there. This process requires gathering and weighing information and the careful making of decisions. It also requires the willingness to take calculated risks with the realization that if we make too many wrong moves then the whole enterprise could be in jeopardy.
In the sort of work I have done there have been very few safety nets. Money has always been in short supply, and we have been very much at the mercy of the external "climate." I recognize that the sort of ministry I have had has been very much the exception in the last 30-40 years, but in these present unsettled times, and with the secularization, moral, and spiritual ferment taking place in society, in the days ahead this is going to be very much the norm. Thus Diamond has a lot to say to us.
One of the points that shines clearly from the pages of Diamond's book is that the more fragile the ecosystem in which a society is established, the more dependent it is on appropriate decision-making. Diamond recognizes that there are four basic areas in which decision-making fails:
* The failure to anticipate a problem before it arrives.
* The failure to perceive a problem when it has arrived.
* That having become aware of the problem, the failure to try and solve it.
* That they might set out to solve the problem -- but because of inadequate information, wrong approaches, etc., they fail.
A classic example of failure to anticipate was the introduction of rabbits and foxes by British settlers in Australia. "These rate as two of the most disasterous examples of impacts of alien species on an environment to which they are not native" (page 421), and Diamond spends a number of pages spelling out the expense to environment and in dollars to the Australian people of these critters within such a dry and fragile setting as that continent.
In the category of failure to perceive a problem when it has arrived, Diamond comes up with two concepts that are particularly helpful. One is what he describes as "creeping normalcy" and the other is "landscape amnesia." The first is slow trends that get missed because they are concealed within noisy fluctuations so that year-to-year change is so gradual that we miss what actually is going on.
"Landscape amnesia" is illustrated by his experience of spending summers in the Big Hole Basin in Montana as a teenager and remembering the backdrop of glaciers and snowfields on the tops of the surrounding mountains. He returned 42 years later and that white crown of snow and ice was gone. Those who had lived there had been so conditioned by this gradual dwindling of the summer snow that they hardly noticed it, but not someone who had been away for more than four decades. Here was more evidence of global warming.
Then there are a whole variety of ways in which problems are not dealt with when they are perceived, from the sense that someone is crying "Wolf!" to a crowd psychology that blinds people to realities, and then to outright psychological denial. Added to this is delay and footdragging. Take the example of Dusky Seaside Sparrow in Florida, a species whose habitat dwindled to such an extent that in the 1980s it faced extinction. By buying the remaining habitat the US Fish and Wildlife Service could have guaranteed it continuity and developed a breeding program. By the time the political dickering was over, it was too late, so a species was lost forever and ecological diversity further threatened.
Then, "Throughout recorded history, actions or inactions by self-absorbed kinds, chiefs, and politicians have been a regular cause of society collapse... As (Barbara) Tuchman put it succinctly, 'Chielf among the forces affecting political folloy is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions."'" (Page 431).
A couple of pages later Diamond suggests that "Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change... Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gamples" (Page 433-434).
Yet even if a society or culture has "anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacity to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibitatively expensive, or our efforts may be too little and too late" (Page 436).
I have merely hop, skipped, and jumped around some of the most helpful material I have read for a long time about decision-making, because of lack of space. However, it does not require the brains of a rocket scientist to transfer what Diamond is teaching about the environment into the life of a congregation, a Christian organization, a seminary, a new ministry, a failing parish, a new mission, or a denomination that is in trouble. I have found myself as a result of reading Diamond looking back on the various successes and failures of my ministry and asking what part decision-making contributed to the outcomes.
If you are up for some meaty summer reading outside the realm of church-related subjects, then "Collapse" by Jared Diamond is a good buy. I noticed yesterday that it is still on the New York Times Best Seller list for Non-Fiction.
(New York: Viking, 2005) US$29.95 ($19.77 Amazon.com)
Review by Richard Kew
I bought Jared Diamond's latest book because, as you know, I am a bit of an eco-nut, but didn't get from it what I had expected. Diamond is a gifted polymath who teaches geography at UCLA, has won the Pulitzer Prize, and seems to know everything about the world. He is also one of those talented individuals who can gather a huge quantity of information and organize it in a manner that is digestible to ordinary mortals like you and me.
I was intrigued that someone had even thought that societies might succeed and societies might fail, and I have been gradually working through this 515-page piece for several months now. I have found myself chewing on a host of fascinating chunks of information about everything from the Norse settlement of Iceland and Greenland, to the problems of mining in Montana, to the felling of trees on Easter Island, and the perillous delicacy of the Australian ecosystem, and the effect of current agricultural practices and mining upon it.
What Diamond does is provide a huge array of case studies of societies that have gotten themselves into trouble and have either declined precipitously or have disappeared altogether. He has concentrated on how they have used and abused their environment. This is not a book written by a tree-hugger on a crusade, but a meticulous scholar who wants us to consider what there is to learn from failing societies, as we put unprecedented strains on our own ecosystem at a time when the fabric of the whole world is increasingly interwoven.
However he opens with a caveat that "we shouldn't be so naive as to think that study of the past will yield simple solutions, directly transferable to our societies today. We differ from past societies in some respects that put us at lower risk than them... we also differ from past societies in some respects that put us at greater risk than them..." (Page 8). Yet it is wise to understand past collapses because we are prone to do the same kind of things, and follow the same kind of ideas that contributed to the demise of earlier peoples.
I said as I launched into this review that I did not get from this book what I had expected. I went looking for further insights into my understanding of the environment, and came away with a much better understanding of the nature of decision-making. These societies got into trouble because they were situated within fragile ecosystems, and over long or short periods there were significant failures in group decison-making with the result that problems accumulated until they were insurmountable.
It was as I pondered his insights into decison-making while I mowed my lawn on Saturday afternoon, that I realized that the continuous thread running through the last thirty years of my ministry has been that I have worked in fragile church or church-related ecosystems. My "speciality," if there is such a thing, has been start-up and clean-up. In the one you are working with nothing to make something, and with the other you are working with the outcome of an accumulation of failures in and effort to turn around what surely is (or looks like becoming) a disaster before it gives up the ghost completely.
Unlike a significant proportion of other Anglican clergy I have not spent much of my ministry living in a world of established budgets, buildings that are paid for or have been there for generations, and in some cases endowment monies that pay well and help cushion blows. My ministry has been in successive circumstances to define what the task is that needs to be done, then to chart a course to get there. This process requires gathering and weighing information and the careful making of decisions. It also requires the willingness to take calculated risks with the realization that if we make too many wrong moves then the whole enterprise could be in jeopardy.
In the sort of work I have done there have been very few safety nets. Money has always been in short supply, and we have been very much at the mercy of the external "climate." I recognize that the sort of ministry I have had has been very much the exception in the last 30-40 years, but in these present unsettled times, and with the secularization, moral, and spiritual ferment taking place in society, in the days ahead this is going to be very much the norm. Thus Diamond has a lot to say to us.
One of the points that shines clearly from the pages of Diamond's book is that the more fragile the ecosystem in which a society is established, the more dependent it is on appropriate decision-making. Diamond recognizes that there are four basic areas in which decision-making fails:
* The failure to anticipate a problem before it arrives.
* The failure to perceive a problem when it has arrived.
* That having become aware of the problem, the failure to try and solve it.
* That they might set out to solve the problem -- but because of inadequate information, wrong approaches, etc., they fail.
A classic example of failure to anticipate was the introduction of rabbits and foxes by British settlers in Australia. "These rate as two of the most disasterous examples of impacts of alien species on an environment to which they are not native" (page 421), and Diamond spends a number of pages spelling out the expense to environment and in dollars to the Australian people of these critters within such a dry and fragile setting as that continent.
In the category of failure to perceive a problem when it has arrived, Diamond comes up with two concepts that are particularly helpful. One is what he describes as "creeping normalcy" and the other is "landscape amnesia." The first is slow trends that get missed because they are concealed within noisy fluctuations so that year-to-year change is so gradual that we miss what actually is going on.
"Landscape amnesia" is illustrated by his experience of spending summers in the Big Hole Basin in Montana as a teenager and remembering the backdrop of glaciers and snowfields on the tops of the surrounding mountains. He returned 42 years later and that white crown of snow and ice was gone. Those who had lived there had been so conditioned by this gradual dwindling of the summer snow that they hardly noticed it, but not someone who had been away for more than four decades. Here was more evidence of global warming.
Then there are a whole variety of ways in which problems are not dealt with when they are perceived, from the sense that someone is crying "Wolf!" to a crowd psychology that blinds people to realities, and then to outright psychological denial. Added to this is delay and footdragging. Take the example of Dusky Seaside Sparrow in Florida, a species whose habitat dwindled to such an extent that in the 1980s it faced extinction. By buying the remaining habitat the US Fish and Wildlife Service could have guaranteed it continuity and developed a breeding program. By the time the political dickering was over, it was too late, so a species was lost forever and ecological diversity further threatened.
Then, "Throughout recorded history, actions or inactions by self-absorbed kinds, chiefs, and politicians have been a regular cause of society collapse... As (Barbara) Tuchman put it succinctly, 'Chielf among the forces affecting political folloy is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions."'" (Page 431).
A couple of pages later Diamond suggests that "Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change... Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win their gamples" (Page 433-434).
Yet even if a society or culture has "anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacity to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibitatively expensive, or our efforts may be too little and too late" (Page 436).
I have merely hop, skipped, and jumped around some of the most helpful material I have read for a long time about decision-making, because of lack of space. However, it does not require the brains of a rocket scientist to transfer what Diamond is teaching about the environment into the life of a congregation, a Christian organization, a seminary, a new ministry, a failing parish, a new mission, or a denomination that is in trouble. I have found myself as a result of reading Diamond looking back on the various successes and failures of my ministry and asking what part decision-making contributed to the outcomes.
If you are up for some meaty summer reading outside the realm of church-related subjects, then "Collapse" by Jared Diamond is a good buy. I noticed yesterday that it is still on the New York Times Best Seller list for Non-Fiction.
Monday, May 30, 2005
Forging a Fresh Vision
The following was posted to my listserv, Toward2015, which can be found on the Episcopalian.org server:
During the last few days I have had several emails privately and there have been some messages posted to Toward2015 about refocusing of the list on our core essential -- exploring the reality of ministry in the 21st Century. I want to thank all of you for your your helpful insights.
One of the comments that has arisen is whether Toward2015 should be an open listserv or one that is limited to those who define themselves as orthodox and biblical. Certainly, such a notion is very attractive. I, for one, am sick and tired of the fighting and name-calling that spills over onto this forum from the larger church. Indeed, I would be perfectly happy if the fighting and name-calling would disappear from the church never to be heard or seen again, but that is not going to happen any time soon, therefore it shapes the real world within which we are called to live out and think out our faith.
However, what I want to say is that as I look back over more than forty years in ordained ministry or the study of theology, I have benefitted immensely from the presence of ideas and people against whom I have been forced to "cut my teeth," as it were. At each stage along my spiritual and intellectual journey I have found myself confronted by notions and circumstances that have forced me to ask fundamental questions about what I believe, why and how I believe it, and what its implications are in the church and in my own life.
Without this constant poking and prodding I know that my faith and my intellectual life would have settled into a comfortable little mindset that would have stunted my growth, and increasingly disconnected me from the challenges that face the faith within the culture. As I have worked since the beginning of January on a year-long study of 2 Corinthians, one of the things that has come home to me is how both external pressures as well as pressures from within the church played a part in shaping every facet of Paul's faith and ministry. To put it bluntly, the New Testament emerged from a boiling crucible -- so how can we expect anything different?
The value of having people whose perceptions differ on a listserv like this is that they prevent us from getting caught up in our own little postmodern ghetto or tribe which we have carefully insulated from other ghettos and tribes. The hyper-individualistic era in which we live makes it easy for us birds of a feather to flock together and then to reinforce one another's insights and perceptions, to the exclusion of challenging perceptions.
At the moment I am working on a book with someone from a quasi-Presbyterian community church background, whose ideas and perceptions have not been honed and hardened by the cut-and-thrust that we have had to endure in the Episcopal Church, and I can tell the difference. My friend is a highly intelligent and articulate person with theological, bioethical, and medical training under her belt, but having lived this out within a supportive and affirming environment, rather than one that questions and challenges, this has robbed her of some of the intellectual toughness needed at such a time as this.
I am profoundly grateful that I learned my theology in a hostile environment at the University of London, where many of my presuppositions were regularly put out to dry. I felt a lot of times in my undergraduate years that I sometimes faced a hurricane every week as some professor or other tossed off this idea or that. I then had to read, think, and get my brain around not only the notions being fed to me from the the podium, but how those notions related to a robust understanding of what the Scripture teaches. In the midst of this the authority of the Scriptures were constantly under scrutiny from every direction.
It was this experience that brought me to abhor theological sloppiness, of which there is enormous amounts on both sides of the aisle these days, and also doctrinal vacuousness. Then, having been ordained, I was tossed into the bubbling brew that was London in the late Sixties and early Seventies, where I discovered how important it was for the Gospel we proclaim to be able to stand on its own two intellectual feet while being ravaged by all-comers. George Weigel describes the intellectual atmosphere in Europe as being "Christophoic," yet it was that Christophobia which was starting to grow like a weed in those early years of my ordained ministry, and which I had to learn how to address.
Just as my muscles are strengthened each morning when I test them against my exercise bike, so our intellectual and spiritual muscles are strengthened in the cauldron of ideas. It is important to read things with which we disagree, to listen to positions that challenge our own, and to explore whether cherished notions will stand up under this pressure. If they will not, then it is vital that we reassess our position until we find ideas and beliefs that do.
Furthermore, such stretching leaves us in many instances with periods of limbo when we are not sure about something that may until recently have been a lynchpin in our thinking. Rather than running from this experience of ambiguity, it is essential for us to leap into the uncertainty and find an intellectually and spiritually viable way through. Often this means doing the thinking for ourselves, rather than depending on second-hand thought done by others who we believe to be our allies.
It is important that we bring our uncertainties into the arena of discussion, for it is there that they are shown the light of day and can be profitably explored. I have somtimes found in such settings that I have grasped my opponents' positions better than they have themselves, and as a result my own position has been enriched and strengthened.
I have an overriding belief in the sovereignty of God. That is, that the self-revealing God is Lord of the univere and the all-powerful holder of time and history in his hands. Scripture teaches that God is the source of all truth, and as we explore the truth in the company of the Christ, and within the context of his faithful people down through the centuries, this truth will set us free. But just as in the record of Isaiah, the prophet speaks of Cyrus, Israel's enemy, as "my anointed" (Isaiah 45:1), so there is a place in God's sovereign plan for the creative engagement of ideas, even ideas that we perceive to be false. The truth is that most of us are unwilling to explore the richness of divinely-given truth until we are challenged to do so.
I have found myself time and again coming back to a magnificent book published a dozen years ago, and which came from the fertile mind of Leander Keck, former Dean of Yale Divinity School. In "The Church Confident" he suggested that for mainline Christians there are four possible courses of action.
One is to become a counter-culture, determined to be a pure church. This is the option that some of our number have followed, but for many of us, and for a variety of reasons, this does not work. As Keck says, the whole of our history makes us tone deaf to such a summons.
A second is the trend that has deeply gouged into the life of our churches, that of "a social activism grounded in the assumption that the church must be the avant-garde of leftward social change -- the flipside of the rightward assumption that it should be the vanguard of the restoration of Christendom" (page 76). This is, Keck points out, a piece with secularization and is part of what I would call a questionable anthropocentrism. He writes in summing up the problem of this approach that "a truly inclusive church either becomes a replica of a pluralist secular society or a sect composed of those who agree on a particular kind of inclusivism" (page 79). Keck is truly perceptive in this observation.
A third approach is that championed by Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas that we be resident aliens. "The resident alien church is more concerned to be authentic than to be pure. And for its beat it listens to the Bible and the Christian tradition rather than the pounding rhythms around it" (page 76). This is a much more attractive option, but Keck did not believe this a viable approach in the early 1990s. I would suggest that we have moved on a lot since then as society has drifted further from Christendom, and the Christendom model of being church has crumbled further.
However, he comes up with his notion that "instead of being a community of resident aliens who, like some refugee and immigrant communities, enjoy the advantage of residence while eschewing public life, this vocation entails commitment to being a long-range influence for the common good. The image that comes to mind is that of dual citizenship, for that points to the necessary and inevitable tension that exists between loyalty to society and loyalty to the kingdom of God" (page 85).
This will require, he says, "patient and persistent pursuit of the ordinary that attitudes are formed and understandings are matured. Renewed and confident churches know that in the long run the character and quality of their steady routine is more significant than a frenetic 911 style." This is something that our tradition teaches us over and over again. It is in the routine of the Daily Office, the Holy Table, and the consistent exposition of God's Word, that lives are shaped and formed for the long term.
What we are attempting to do in the midst of the postmodern malaise is to bring into being churches of this kind. Authenticity takes priority over purity, because we know that purity is impossible. Our loyalty to the Kingdom of God takes precedence over any loyalties to the ragged remains of the Episcopal Church, yet it is within this context that we test the substance of the Gospel. It is also within this setting that we will be on the receiving end of the brickbats that come from those whose ideas we consider to be what Keck calls in another place "banal and bizarre" of those who would rework revealed truth and the tradition.
I leave the final word with Leander Keck, "...a new era is dawning. If in this yet ill-defined era the churches are renewed within because they recover their confidence in the gospel, they will be able to offer the 21st Century a vital witness to the truth about God -- and about ourselves.
Perhaps it is not too much to hope that in the closing years of this wretched century (remember, this was written in 1993), in which human ingenuity managed not only to turn technological marvels into unprecedented horrors but to legitimate the decimation of missions, we will see the beginnings of a sobered view of the human condition. The mainline churches, by contributing the wisdom of their heritage to such a rethinking, might desist from sanctifying utopian illusions and, instead, forge a vision of a new Christian humanism for Adam east of Eden" (page 121).
During the last few days I have had several emails privately and there have been some messages posted to Toward2015 about refocusing of the list on our core essential -- exploring the reality of ministry in the 21st Century. I want to thank all of you for your your helpful insights.
One of the comments that has arisen is whether Toward2015 should be an open listserv or one that is limited to those who define themselves as orthodox and biblical. Certainly, such a notion is very attractive. I, for one, am sick and tired of the fighting and name-calling that spills over onto this forum from the larger church. Indeed, I would be perfectly happy if the fighting and name-calling would disappear from the church never to be heard or seen again, but that is not going to happen any time soon, therefore it shapes the real world within which we are called to live out and think out our faith.
However, what I want to say is that as I look back over more than forty years in ordained ministry or the study of theology, I have benefitted immensely from the presence of ideas and people against whom I have been forced to "cut my teeth," as it were. At each stage along my spiritual and intellectual journey I have found myself confronted by notions and circumstances that have forced me to ask fundamental questions about what I believe, why and how I believe it, and what its implications are in the church and in my own life.
Without this constant poking and prodding I know that my faith and my intellectual life would have settled into a comfortable little mindset that would have stunted my growth, and increasingly disconnected me from the challenges that face the faith within the culture. As I have worked since the beginning of January on a year-long study of 2 Corinthians, one of the things that has come home to me is how both external pressures as well as pressures from within the church played a part in shaping every facet of Paul's faith and ministry. To put it bluntly, the New Testament emerged from a boiling crucible -- so how can we expect anything different?
The value of having people whose perceptions differ on a listserv like this is that they prevent us from getting caught up in our own little postmodern ghetto or tribe which we have carefully insulated from other ghettos and tribes. The hyper-individualistic era in which we live makes it easy for us birds of a feather to flock together and then to reinforce one another's insights and perceptions, to the exclusion of challenging perceptions.
At the moment I am working on a book with someone from a quasi-Presbyterian community church background, whose ideas and perceptions have not been honed and hardened by the cut-and-thrust that we have had to endure in the Episcopal Church, and I can tell the difference. My friend is a highly intelligent and articulate person with theological, bioethical, and medical training under her belt, but having lived this out within a supportive and affirming environment, rather than one that questions and challenges, this has robbed her of some of the intellectual toughness needed at such a time as this.
I am profoundly grateful that I learned my theology in a hostile environment at the University of London, where many of my presuppositions were regularly put out to dry. I felt a lot of times in my undergraduate years that I sometimes faced a hurricane every week as some professor or other tossed off this idea or that. I then had to read, think, and get my brain around not only the notions being fed to me from the the podium, but how those notions related to a robust understanding of what the Scripture teaches. In the midst of this the authority of the Scriptures were constantly under scrutiny from every direction.
It was this experience that brought me to abhor theological sloppiness, of which there is enormous amounts on both sides of the aisle these days, and also doctrinal vacuousness. Then, having been ordained, I was tossed into the bubbling brew that was London in the late Sixties and early Seventies, where I discovered how important it was for the Gospel we proclaim to be able to stand on its own two intellectual feet while being ravaged by all-comers. George Weigel describes the intellectual atmosphere in Europe as being "Christophoic," yet it was that Christophobia which was starting to grow like a weed in those early years of my ordained ministry, and which I had to learn how to address.
Just as my muscles are strengthened each morning when I test them against my exercise bike, so our intellectual and spiritual muscles are strengthened in the cauldron of ideas. It is important to read things with which we disagree, to listen to positions that challenge our own, and to explore whether cherished notions will stand up under this pressure. If they will not, then it is vital that we reassess our position until we find ideas and beliefs that do.
Furthermore, such stretching leaves us in many instances with periods of limbo when we are not sure about something that may until recently have been a lynchpin in our thinking. Rather than running from this experience of ambiguity, it is essential for us to leap into the uncertainty and find an intellectually and spiritually viable way through. Often this means doing the thinking for ourselves, rather than depending on second-hand thought done by others who we believe to be our allies.
It is important that we bring our uncertainties into the arena of discussion, for it is there that they are shown the light of day and can be profitably explored. I have somtimes found in such settings that I have grasped my opponents' positions better than they have themselves, and as a result my own position has been enriched and strengthened.
I have an overriding belief in the sovereignty of God. That is, that the self-revealing God is Lord of the univere and the all-powerful holder of time and history in his hands. Scripture teaches that God is the source of all truth, and as we explore the truth in the company of the Christ, and within the context of his faithful people down through the centuries, this truth will set us free. But just as in the record of Isaiah, the prophet speaks of Cyrus, Israel's enemy, as "my anointed" (Isaiah 45:1), so there is a place in God's sovereign plan for the creative engagement of ideas, even ideas that we perceive to be false. The truth is that most of us are unwilling to explore the richness of divinely-given truth until we are challenged to do so.
I have found myself time and again coming back to a magnificent book published a dozen years ago, and which came from the fertile mind of Leander Keck, former Dean of Yale Divinity School. In "The Church Confident" he suggested that for mainline Christians there are four possible courses of action.
One is to become a counter-culture, determined to be a pure church. This is the option that some of our number have followed, but for many of us, and for a variety of reasons, this does not work. As Keck says, the whole of our history makes us tone deaf to such a summons.
A second is the trend that has deeply gouged into the life of our churches, that of "a social activism grounded in the assumption that the church must be the avant-garde of leftward social change -- the flipside of the rightward assumption that it should be the vanguard of the restoration of Christendom" (page 76). This is, Keck points out, a piece with secularization and is part of what I would call a questionable anthropocentrism. He writes in summing up the problem of this approach that "a truly inclusive church either becomes a replica of a pluralist secular society or a sect composed of those who agree on a particular kind of inclusivism" (page 79). Keck is truly perceptive in this observation.
A third approach is that championed by Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas that we be resident aliens. "The resident alien church is more concerned to be authentic than to be pure. And for its beat it listens to the Bible and the Christian tradition rather than the pounding rhythms around it" (page 76). This is a much more attractive option, but Keck did not believe this a viable approach in the early 1990s. I would suggest that we have moved on a lot since then as society has drifted further from Christendom, and the Christendom model of being church has crumbled further.
However, he comes up with his notion that "instead of being a community of resident aliens who, like some refugee and immigrant communities, enjoy the advantage of residence while eschewing public life, this vocation entails commitment to being a long-range influence for the common good. The image that comes to mind is that of dual citizenship, for that points to the necessary and inevitable tension that exists between loyalty to society and loyalty to the kingdom of God" (page 85).
This will require, he says, "patient and persistent pursuit of the ordinary that attitudes are formed and understandings are matured. Renewed and confident churches know that in the long run the character and quality of their steady routine is more significant than a frenetic 911 style." This is something that our tradition teaches us over and over again. It is in the routine of the Daily Office, the Holy Table, and the consistent exposition of God's Word, that lives are shaped and formed for the long term.
What we are attempting to do in the midst of the postmodern malaise is to bring into being churches of this kind. Authenticity takes priority over purity, because we know that purity is impossible. Our loyalty to the Kingdom of God takes precedence over any loyalties to the ragged remains of the Episcopal Church, yet it is within this context that we test the substance of the Gospel. It is also within this setting that we will be on the receiving end of the brickbats that come from those whose ideas we consider to be what Keck calls in another place "banal and bizarre" of those who would rework revealed truth and the tradition.
I leave the final word with Leander Keck, "...a new era is dawning. If in this yet ill-defined era the churches are renewed within because they recover their confidence in the gospel, they will be able to offer the 21st Century a vital witness to the truth about God -- and about ourselves.
Perhaps it is not too much to hope that in the closing years of this wretched century (remember, this was written in 1993), in which human ingenuity managed not only to turn technological marvels into unprecedented horrors but to legitimate the decimation of missions, we will see the beginnings of a sobered view of the human condition. The mainline churches, by contributing the wisdom of their heritage to such a rethinking, might desist from sanctifying utopian illusions and, instead, forge a vision of a new Christian humanism for Adam east of Eden" (page 121).
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Reflections on the Changing Character of Classic Anglicanism
Classic Anglicanism can be compared to many things, but the exquisite beauty of a mature landscape or the subtle magnificence of a fine wine which the palate learns to appreciate are two analogies that come to mind. I have spent a lifetime discovering how to appreciate the richness of this tradition, which is mine as much by an accident of birth as personal conviction. Yet just as I am really beginning to appreciate its majesty I am watching it being devoured in a battle that seems to have some of the characteristics of a deathblow.
Anglicanism is an approach to catholic Christianity that has been forged and tempered by past conflicts and antagonisms. It has had this ability to marry a rich diversity of Christian expressions and experience in such a way that it enables us to live with some of the inevitable ambiguities of the life of faith. Classic Anglicanism also allows for the occasional maverick voice as well as a (sometimes grudging) respect for the convictions of the minority. There have been seesaw swings of influence and relative weakness as the variety of traditions within Anglican culture have rubbed against one another, almost always enriching one another in the process.
Alas, such mutual respect and comprehensiveness is now under threat as never before. The mature landscape is being plouged under. Polarization has taken place to such an extent that the internal debate that has always enriched Anglican Christianity has given way, in the United States at least, to angry accusation, counter-accusation, and what seems to be crass attempts to use raw influence and political power to impress its will on others. Why is it that ever since I heard then newly-elected Presiding Bishop, Edmond Browning, say in 1985 that there would be no outsiders in the Episcopal Church, that I, a mainstream classic Anglican if ever there was one, has felt and been treated more and more as an outsider?
Now we are hopelessly polarized. Perhaps it is no accident that this polarization reflects the deep polarizations that there are in our culture. I have during these last weeks watched with fascinated horror as the United States Senate has marched toward what has become known as "the nuclear option." The present majority seem determined to modify patterns of action that have made the Senate marvelously distinctive in American political life so that they can attain what they want regardless of the minority. Moderates have been unable to stop inevitable, and the subtlety and beauty will be lost and replaced by the tyranny of the majority -- and, inevitably, deeper polarization and recriminations.
These same polarizing forces are rapidly wringing the life out of what remains of the Episcopal Church, with the political majority (I do not think they are a majority on the ground), pressing an agenda that reaches far beyond the richness of classical Anglican comprehensiveness. The response of many of those who are being wronged as a result of all that has taken place is either anger, depression, or flight. There is hardly a thoughtful and reflective orthodox Christian in the Episcopal Church that I know who has not at least considered this last course of action. I certainly confess to have considered it, although my flight would have taken me back to England and not out of Anglicanism altogether.
Perhaps we should have realized that when the Boomers became the dominant force within the church and the culture they would rip its fabric to shreads. Our generation, sometimes aided and abetted by the Silent Generation before us, seems to have been more intent on destroying what it has been received rather than conserving, building upon, and enriching it.
Yet here is the interesting twist. Despite this tale of woe, there are still those outside the Anglican fold who look at the treasures of classical Anglicanism and say, "We want it... this is what we have been looking for all our lives."
The other evening I had dinner with Phil Harrold, an Episcopalian who teaches at Winebrenner Theological Seminary in Findlay, Ohio, and a couple of his students. Neither of these individuals was raised in an Anglican setting but each is drawn to its richness. The face of ECUSA might be extremely off-putting to these fine young pastors, but the substance of Anglicanism is like the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. That which the power brokers of the Episcopal Church are so eager to discard, putting the questionable insights of Freud and Jung above those of Scripture and the on-going tradition, these eager and enthusiastic Christians are willing to pick up revive, enrich, and carry forward -- and I am prepared to help them.
I don't know what I had hoped for myself by this point of my ministry, in my sixtieth year, my thirty-seventh year in orders, and celebrating this weekend the thirty-fifth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. If I listen to my ego and attempt to be honest, I suspect that I would have preferred to have been like one of those older priests of the early days of my ministry, who we looked up to with a certain degree of awe and whose measured words and wisdom were generally respected.
That is not my lot, however. Instead, I find myself still in the trenches, under God attempting to put together a new congregation that carries within it the riches of classic Anglicanism but adjusted to the stressful demands of the 21st Century. In this ministry there are few of those strokes and acolades that I would have appreciated. There are times when I get up in the morning wondering if I am a fool to be doing what I am doing -- but then I have to remind myself that we are called to be fools for Christ's sake.
I have a feeling, however, that I am doing something. What I am doing is playing a small cog-like role in what might be the re-emergence of genuine Anglicanism, as a coalescence takes place from within our fold and from beyond it. It seems to me that the young emergent churches, who met in conference here in Nashville last week, will have a part to play in this new kind of Anglicanism that builds upon what we have received, not what ECUSA seems intent on destroying.
If this is the case, then I am content. The apostles seem not to have been feted and honored in their own time, and so I feel a little ashamed that I should expect such a thing for myself -- a much less important mortal than any of them were.
Rosemary and I grew up amidst the ruins of England following the Second World War. We watched as heaps of rubble in the heart of London and other great cities were turned into something new, sometimes magnificent, sometims jerry built. What those early years of our lives taught is that nothing is permanent, and that everything can be rebuilt. Classic Anglicanism is too rich a treasure to go under, but we cannot expect the tired and corrupted old wineskins we inherited to last forever -- as new wine surges forth, so new wineskins are required, and that is what is going to be emerging in coming year.
Anglicanism is an approach to catholic Christianity that has been forged and tempered by past conflicts and antagonisms. It has had this ability to marry a rich diversity of Christian expressions and experience in such a way that it enables us to live with some of the inevitable ambiguities of the life of faith. Classic Anglicanism also allows for the occasional maverick voice as well as a (sometimes grudging) respect for the convictions of the minority. There have been seesaw swings of influence and relative weakness as the variety of traditions within Anglican culture have rubbed against one another, almost always enriching one another in the process.
Alas, such mutual respect and comprehensiveness is now under threat as never before. The mature landscape is being plouged under. Polarization has taken place to such an extent that the internal debate that has always enriched Anglican Christianity has given way, in the United States at least, to angry accusation, counter-accusation, and what seems to be crass attempts to use raw influence and political power to impress its will on others. Why is it that ever since I heard then newly-elected Presiding Bishop, Edmond Browning, say in 1985 that there would be no outsiders in the Episcopal Church, that I, a mainstream classic Anglican if ever there was one, has felt and been treated more and more as an outsider?
Now we are hopelessly polarized. Perhaps it is no accident that this polarization reflects the deep polarizations that there are in our culture. I have during these last weeks watched with fascinated horror as the United States Senate has marched toward what has become known as "the nuclear option." The present majority seem determined to modify patterns of action that have made the Senate marvelously distinctive in American political life so that they can attain what they want regardless of the minority. Moderates have been unable to stop inevitable, and the subtlety and beauty will be lost and replaced by the tyranny of the majority -- and, inevitably, deeper polarization and recriminations.
These same polarizing forces are rapidly wringing the life out of what remains of the Episcopal Church, with the political majority (I do not think they are a majority on the ground), pressing an agenda that reaches far beyond the richness of classical Anglican comprehensiveness. The response of many of those who are being wronged as a result of all that has taken place is either anger, depression, or flight. There is hardly a thoughtful and reflective orthodox Christian in the Episcopal Church that I know who has not at least considered this last course of action. I certainly confess to have considered it, although my flight would have taken me back to England and not out of Anglicanism altogether.
Perhaps we should have realized that when the Boomers became the dominant force within the church and the culture they would rip its fabric to shreads. Our generation, sometimes aided and abetted by the Silent Generation before us, seems to have been more intent on destroying what it has been received rather than conserving, building upon, and enriching it.
Yet here is the interesting twist. Despite this tale of woe, there are still those outside the Anglican fold who look at the treasures of classical Anglicanism and say, "We want it... this is what we have been looking for all our lives."
The other evening I had dinner with Phil Harrold, an Episcopalian who teaches at Winebrenner Theological Seminary in Findlay, Ohio, and a couple of his students. Neither of these individuals was raised in an Anglican setting but each is drawn to its richness. The face of ECUSA might be extremely off-putting to these fine young pastors, but the substance of Anglicanism is like the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. That which the power brokers of the Episcopal Church are so eager to discard, putting the questionable insights of Freud and Jung above those of Scripture and the on-going tradition, these eager and enthusiastic Christians are willing to pick up revive, enrich, and carry forward -- and I am prepared to help them.
I don't know what I had hoped for myself by this point of my ministry, in my sixtieth year, my thirty-seventh year in orders, and celebrating this weekend the thirty-fifth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. If I listen to my ego and attempt to be honest, I suspect that I would have preferred to have been like one of those older priests of the early days of my ministry, who we looked up to with a certain degree of awe and whose measured words and wisdom were generally respected.
That is not my lot, however. Instead, I find myself still in the trenches, under God attempting to put together a new congregation that carries within it the riches of classic Anglicanism but adjusted to the stressful demands of the 21st Century. In this ministry there are few of those strokes and acolades that I would have appreciated. There are times when I get up in the morning wondering if I am a fool to be doing what I am doing -- but then I have to remind myself that we are called to be fools for Christ's sake.
I have a feeling, however, that I am doing something. What I am doing is playing a small cog-like role in what might be the re-emergence of genuine Anglicanism, as a coalescence takes place from within our fold and from beyond it. It seems to me that the young emergent churches, who met in conference here in Nashville last week, will have a part to play in this new kind of Anglicanism that builds upon what we have received, not what ECUSA seems intent on destroying.
If this is the case, then I am content. The apostles seem not to have been feted and honored in their own time, and so I feel a little ashamed that I should expect such a thing for myself -- a much less important mortal than any of them were.
Rosemary and I grew up amidst the ruins of England following the Second World War. We watched as heaps of rubble in the heart of London and other great cities were turned into something new, sometimes magnificent, sometims jerry built. What those early years of our lives taught is that nothing is permanent, and that everything can be rebuilt. Classic Anglicanism is too rich a treasure to go under, but we cannot expect the tired and corrupted old wineskins we inherited to last forever -- as new wine surges forth, so new wineskins are required, and that is what is going to be emerging in coming year.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Trinity Sunday, 1970 to Trinity Sunday, 2040
Trinity Sunday this year is the 3rd Sunday in May -- as was the case in 1970. I guess I keep track of this bit of trivia because it was on Trinity Sunday 35 years ago that I knelt before Robert Stopford, Bishop of London, in St. Paul's Cathedral, and was ordained to the priesthood. Stopford was one of the last of the English prince-bishops, a man who had had "a good career in the church," as they quaintly put it in those days. Some of my class of twenty-three who were ordained on that day hoped that they would follow in Stopford's footsteps, others of us intuitively knew that for most people good careers in the church were a thing of the past.
All of us were serving in "Swinging London." Mary Quant had wowed the world with the miniskirt, protests against the war in Vietnam occasionally rocked the streets, the arrival of the pill had changed sexual mores, and in the previous few years the drug culture had left the Bohemian world of art schools and had surged into the mainstream on the coattails of the Beatles. Some things don't change, however, because the Rolling Stones were touring then -- and they are touring still!
Bishop Stopford had had a good career in a church which still acted as chaplain to the wider society, and we had been trained for ministry much in the same way that he was. Yet something we discovered when we had appeared as deacons in our newly-minted collars a year earlier, was that the ministry for which we were preparing when we entered seminary in 1965, no longer existed. The whole culture had totally turned over in those few years that we were digging at the books at the University of London and at seminary.
Much of the confusion in church life in those times was to know what we were supposed to be doing. Our ordination class was rebellious and stroppy, but with good reason: the sort of post-ordination training we were getting had absolutely nothing to do with the issues we were dealing with in the parishes where we served as curates. I remember a day wasted when a sweet old priest came to lecture us on something like the appropriate way to call on the sick in hospital, at the very time I had spent a week chasing a young man around London who was tripping badly on LSD. We had little clue how to deal with this kind of epidemic.
Our ordination class divided into roughly four different groups. There were the socialists with a radical theology who saw their ministry in terms of changing the status quo and bringing justice to housing developments, slums, and downtrodden neighborhoods. There were those who I would describe as the sports jacket and pipe types, whose Jesus was that rather bland figure who emerged from the collision between latitudinarian Anglicanism and watered-down 19th Century liberal theology. You could expect to meet these guys at the pub, and they were bound to apologize first before saying anything about the faith. Then there were the Anglo-Catholics who were so eager to now be called "Fah-ther," and these subdivided into the straights and the lace-clad gays.
Finally there was the two of us who were evangelicals. We were looked upon as rather odd because we married an old-fashioned kind of Anglican Protestantism with a passion for leading people to faith in Jesus Christ, and a commitment to Holy Scripture as God's Word Written. We were in the eyes of our peers more like mainline versions of the Jesus Movement, which happened to be emerging at that time, rather than priests of the established Church of England. Yet, and this is what puzzled our contemporaries, we of all our group happened to be the only ones ministering in parishes that were growing -- and growing younger. How could such a passe approach to believing have any legs?
Yet the Church of England was a big tent, and we were tolerated if not properly understood. Our way of believing, our colleagues were firmly convinced, would disappear as enlightenment advanced. I suspect, however, that the ordination class in the Diocese of London this year is made up predominantly of evangelicals of various flavors, and a few ardent Anglo-Catholics. Of course, what would make today's ordination class different is that it will contain women -- we were all male in those days, and one of the great debates was whether we would see women priests during our active ministry.
I paint this picture not only to reminisce, but also to illustrate how much things have changed as the older ones among my contemporaries are starting to retire -- and some have passed beyond the grave. During these 35 years in the west, Anglican Christianity has been struggling with all other flavors of believing, to work out how from within our rich tradition we can speak the faith meaningfully into a very starkly different kind of world.
Some have emphasized holding onto the traditions so that there is a bastion of security in the midst of sometimes terrifying insecurity. Others have gone with the flow, much as the Episcopal Church has, so that any distinctives are now ceasing to be seen. Others still have been asking and trying to work out how we can speak the biblical truth from the context of a church that is so shaped by our Christendom past that it may appear to all outside it as hopelessly irrelevant.
I am increasingly of the mind that we have yet to reach a tipping point of change. All that I have experienced through my ordained life has merely been preparatory for the crucial decades that now lie ahead of us, decades in which much of our pitiful ecclesiastical in-fighting is going to appear not only ridiculous but counter-productive. That is not to say that truth in unimportant, but we will need to find different ways to defend it.
In 35 years time the shape of my ministry will probably be seen as dinosaur-like as my take on Bishop Stopford who ordained me priest. Everything is heading into the hopper, including the structures that until a year or two ago seemed all too permanent.
I am seriously beginning to wonder, in an effort to be more united in the context of an increasingly hostile environment, whether we will not see some kind of rapprochment between faithful, historic Anglicanism and the See of Rome. I suspect that there will have been all sorts of other reallignments by then in the wake of amicable and nasty splits in every denominational tradition. I suspect also that a lot more of the initiative for the leadership of the church will come from the laity than is the case now, and I also think that the role of priest-pastor-minister will have changed quite radically.
These churches will be working in a very different world, with China as the most likely candidate for dominant superpower, and the Chinese church of some quarter to half a billion, ardently taking the gospel into all the world. It will be a world where global warming will be a real issue that folks will be confronting every day, and who can tell whether diseases like Ebola might have broken out of Africa and spread around the planet. It will be a world in the west that is predominantly older rather than younger, and in Asia where the radical imbalance between males and females as a result of today's selective abortion, will be a major destabilizing circumstance. It will be a world that is far less stable than today.
I suspect also that by that time the social experimentation that is going on now in the west will have shown itself to be immensely damaging to both the morale and the stability of society. In Europe, at least, a new moral fervor will be developing at the behest of the rapidly increasing Islamic population (When I was first ordained I used regularly to pass one of the very few mosques functioning in London, now there are hundreds).
As I say, what I have experienced in my 35 years as a priest has merely been the preface to what is coming. Hold onto your seats it is going to be rough (but at times exciting) ride. But as we look at all that this change will mean, Trinity Sunday reminds us that our God is unchanging: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit living in relationship, and drawing us into their community and fellowship with their One-ness.
All of us were serving in "Swinging London." Mary Quant had wowed the world with the miniskirt, protests against the war in Vietnam occasionally rocked the streets, the arrival of the pill had changed sexual mores, and in the previous few years the drug culture had left the Bohemian world of art schools and had surged into the mainstream on the coattails of the Beatles. Some things don't change, however, because the Rolling Stones were touring then -- and they are touring still!
Bishop Stopford had had a good career in a church which still acted as chaplain to the wider society, and we had been trained for ministry much in the same way that he was. Yet something we discovered when we had appeared as deacons in our newly-minted collars a year earlier, was that the ministry for which we were preparing when we entered seminary in 1965, no longer existed. The whole culture had totally turned over in those few years that we were digging at the books at the University of London and at seminary.
Much of the confusion in church life in those times was to know what we were supposed to be doing. Our ordination class was rebellious and stroppy, but with good reason: the sort of post-ordination training we were getting had absolutely nothing to do with the issues we were dealing with in the parishes where we served as curates. I remember a day wasted when a sweet old priest came to lecture us on something like the appropriate way to call on the sick in hospital, at the very time I had spent a week chasing a young man around London who was tripping badly on LSD. We had little clue how to deal with this kind of epidemic.
Our ordination class divided into roughly four different groups. There were the socialists with a radical theology who saw their ministry in terms of changing the status quo and bringing justice to housing developments, slums, and downtrodden neighborhoods. There were those who I would describe as the sports jacket and pipe types, whose Jesus was that rather bland figure who emerged from the collision between latitudinarian Anglicanism and watered-down 19th Century liberal theology. You could expect to meet these guys at the pub, and they were bound to apologize first before saying anything about the faith. Then there were the Anglo-Catholics who were so eager to now be called "Fah-ther," and these subdivided into the straights and the lace-clad gays.
Finally there was the two of us who were evangelicals. We were looked upon as rather odd because we married an old-fashioned kind of Anglican Protestantism with a passion for leading people to faith in Jesus Christ, and a commitment to Holy Scripture as God's Word Written. We were in the eyes of our peers more like mainline versions of the Jesus Movement, which happened to be emerging at that time, rather than priests of the established Church of England. Yet, and this is what puzzled our contemporaries, we of all our group happened to be the only ones ministering in parishes that were growing -- and growing younger. How could such a passe approach to believing have any legs?
Yet the Church of England was a big tent, and we were tolerated if not properly understood. Our way of believing, our colleagues were firmly convinced, would disappear as enlightenment advanced. I suspect, however, that the ordination class in the Diocese of London this year is made up predominantly of evangelicals of various flavors, and a few ardent Anglo-Catholics. Of course, what would make today's ordination class different is that it will contain women -- we were all male in those days, and one of the great debates was whether we would see women priests during our active ministry.
I paint this picture not only to reminisce, but also to illustrate how much things have changed as the older ones among my contemporaries are starting to retire -- and some have passed beyond the grave. During these 35 years in the west, Anglican Christianity has been struggling with all other flavors of believing, to work out how from within our rich tradition we can speak the faith meaningfully into a very starkly different kind of world.
Some have emphasized holding onto the traditions so that there is a bastion of security in the midst of sometimes terrifying insecurity. Others have gone with the flow, much as the Episcopal Church has, so that any distinctives are now ceasing to be seen. Others still have been asking and trying to work out how we can speak the biblical truth from the context of a church that is so shaped by our Christendom past that it may appear to all outside it as hopelessly irrelevant.
I am increasingly of the mind that we have yet to reach a tipping point of change. All that I have experienced through my ordained life has merely been preparatory for the crucial decades that now lie ahead of us, decades in which much of our pitiful ecclesiastical in-fighting is going to appear not only ridiculous but counter-productive. That is not to say that truth in unimportant, but we will need to find different ways to defend it.
In 35 years time the shape of my ministry will probably be seen as dinosaur-like as my take on Bishop Stopford who ordained me priest. Everything is heading into the hopper, including the structures that until a year or two ago seemed all too permanent.
I am seriously beginning to wonder, in an effort to be more united in the context of an increasingly hostile environment, whether we will not see some kind of rapprochment between faithful, historic Anglicanism and the See of Rome. I suspect that there will have been all sorts of other reallignments by then in the wake of amicable and nasty splits in every denominational tradition. I suspect also that a lot more of the initiative for the leadership of the church will come from the laity than is the case now, and I also think that the role of priest-pastor-minister will have changed quite radically.
These churches will be working in a very different world, with China as the most likely candidate for dominant superpower, and the Chinese church of some quarter to half a billion, ardently taking the gospel into all the world. It will be a world where global warming will be a real issue that folks will be confronting every day, and who can tell whether diseases like Ebola might have broken out of Africa and spread around the planet. It will be a world in the west that is predominantly older rather than younger, and in Asia where the radical imbalance between males and females as a result of today's selective abortion, will be a major destabilizing circumstance. It will be a world that is far less stable than today.
I suspect also that by that time the social experimentation that is going on now in the west will have shown itself to be immensely damaging to both the morale and the stability of society. In Europe, at least, a new moral fervor will be developing at the behest of the rapidly increasing Islamic population (When I was first ordained I used regularly to pass one of the very few mosques functioning in London, now there are hundreds).
As I say, what I have experienced in my 35 years as a priest has merely been the preface to what is coming. Hold onto your seats it is going to be rough (but at times exciting) ride. But as we look at all that this change will mean, Trinity Sunday reminds us that our God is unchanging: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit living in relationship, and drawing us into their community and fellowship with their One-ness.
Monday, May 09, 2005
A Strategy of Recovery
I have been interested by the responses I have received to my last piece, both on Toward2015 and personally. I recognize that many Americans who share my orthodox Anglican faith are disheartened, and sense that the battle is lost. From hereon out, as they perceive it, it is a rearguard action which will inevitably end in defeat.
I understand their misgivings and confess that there are days when I feel that way, too, however I do not believe that defeat is inevitable. But first we need to define our terms. For starters, I do not believe that we are in a contest for the worn-out structures of the Episcopal Church because they are already beyond our reach, and besides, most of them are irrelevant. I suspect that the actions of the General Convention 2006 and the Anglican Communion will play a role in significantly reshaping what tomorrow is going to look like, and those structures will be declared even more irrelevant.
Maybe I suffer from the shortcoming of being brought up to believe that even when you have your back against a wall and all looks lost, you keep on fighting the good fight. Churchill's "We will fight them..." speech, made almost exactly 65 years ago, and perhaps his greatest, was not delivered when things looked hunky-dory, but at that moment in 1940 when the British people believed that what would be required to save them from the wrath of Nazi-ism was a miracle. This is exactly what they received at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain.
Perhaps I have drunk too long at that old-fashioned well which says you stand firm on your principles, and you do all in your power to protect them, whatever the odds and whatever the consequences. Churchill knew exactly what he was doing in 1940 when he took power in Britain, and he knew precisely what it would cost -- the wholesale destruction of the British economy and the loss of the British Empire. But the principles upon which Britain stood were more important than these. Despite those miracles of 1940, from 1939-1942 the British people saw very few victories or encouragements, but their bulldog determination reflected that of their leader.
Under God, I suppose this attitude has always been the one that I have clung to when the going has got tough, as it has so many times in 36 years of ordained ministry. But I also believe wholeheartedly and without reservation, that the future of biblical Christianity is as much at stake here as trinitarian orthodoxy was at stake in the 3rd and 4th Centuries when the Arian crisis rocked the church. When I had the opportunity to leave the Episcopal Church some months ago and go back to my homeland to minister, that was when I realized that to leave now would have been to admit that error is stronger and more powerful than truth.
So, as has been asked, when "the triumphal actions of the liberals" are as dominating as they are, isn't restoring Anglican Episcopal Christianity more or less impossible? In the short term and from our human perspective, I would hazard that this is so, but need that be the case in the medium and long term?
1. It is wrong for us to define ourselves vis-a-vis those with whom we disagree. Episcopalians have had the infuriating habit of doing this for a long time. We need to define ourselves in terms of who we actually are. In this part of the world being an Anglican is "Not-being-Baptist!" This isnt' good enough. We need to have clarity about who we are, what we believe, and a positive way of affirming our identity -- because our identity is clear, great, a treasure, and something God-given. I find it much more pleasing to know that I am an Anglican Communion Christian in fellowship with a wonderful worldwide church, rather than an adherent of a little elitist American high church unitarian universalist sect, something that seems to be in vogue in the structures of ECUSA.
2. It is right for us to work hard to gain clarity when it comes to our theological foundations. This is what Trinity and Nashotah need to be working on in terms of leadership for us, as well as engaging those in the trenches in the process. Theology is not primarily clarified in the hallowed halls of Academe, but in the day-to-day struggles of parish ministry. We need to work especially hard to see where our theology is infected by the spirit of this age and to cleanse it, for if it is weakened by the zeitgeist it will not sound the clarion call of Christ into postmodernity.
3. It is right for us to develop the outline of a long range strategy, and then to stick with it. Of course there will be need for course corrections, etc., but these will be necessary. This was the way that John Stott and others led Anglican Evangelicalism out of a pitiful wilderness beginning with the tiniest patch of land in 1945. Today more than three-quarters of those training for leadership in the Church of England are evangelical and orthodox.
4. It is right for us to develop our own structures, networks, institutions, ministries, and so forth, and to put our heart and soul into them believing that what we are doing is creating something that will supercede that which is dying -- i.e. the 815-oriented structures. Hierarchies of the kind we have lived with for so long are a thing of the past, networks and horizontal ways of organizing are the thing of the future. They will take over the church whether the hierarchies like it or not. In these circumstances we might need to give some lip-service to the structures that are still there, but no more than is absolutely necessary.
5. It is right for us to major in what we do well, which is planting new congregations, reviving old ones, being pastors, teachers, evangelists, those who are equipped by the Spirit of God to be the People of God on earth. We want to be in the business of winning those beyond the church's doors to faith in Jesus Christ. This is where the wisdom of the likes of a Kevin Martin comes in. As I travelled the church for two decades it was not difficult to see where faithful ministry was taking place when compared to places where folks were going through the motions. Take my word for it, going through the motions is very much the flavor of many on the left.
6. It is essential that we do the political work necessary to maintain our strength where we can. This is something I leave to others because I am politically not so bright. However, this means using intelligence and prayer to move forward. In some dioceses I recognize that this is well-night impossible, but I believe in others there is a lot that orthodox people can do to put their stamp on what is happening. The caveat is that you can expect to be fought all the way, you can expect to be misrepresented, and to be misused, but if the true Israelites will come out of their caves and their holes in the ground there is a mighty host that will walk with us.
7. It is vital that we pray. Prayer is the fuel of any movement, and it is creating a movement that we are talking about. No work of God advances if it does not advance on its knees. As we pray, as we tune ourselves into the mind of God, then the miracles will start to happen, indeed, some of them are happening already. I am fond of quoting Prof. Herbert Butterfield of Oxford some time back, "History belongs to those who pray."
8. We need to use our intelligence, but we also need to be ready to both fail in some of our endeavors, as well as not get everything that we believe is right the first time around. I presented a motion to our diocesan convention in January that I did not expect to make it, it was intended as a signal of where the orthodox would want to go if they could. To my surprise we got it. It doesn't always happen like that, but we need to think about keeping coming back with what we believe to be right until it displaces the error that has been enthroned in the heart of the church.
9. We need courage and tenacity -- and above all we need leaders. It is not for old guys like me to keep on stepping up to the plate, it is for the next generation of Anglicans to say what sort of church they believe God is calling them to be part of.
What I have outlined above is not a program between now and General Convetion 2006, but an outline of what we need to be doing for the next 30-40 years. Unless an awful lot happens to improve longevity, the likes of me will not be around to see the fruits of such a strategy, but the next generation and the generation of my granddaughter to be born next month will see the fruit.
Anglicanism in North America will look very different in that far off time. There will be a rump of revisionists living off the innate spiritual curiosity of the American left, and also on the endowments built up by faithful people that they have commandeered. But there will also be convergences with those outside of the Communion now but on the Canterbury Trail, and, I suspect, some kind of rapproachment with Rome. It has the potential of being a powerful tool in God's hands -- but a lot will depend on how we handle ourselves in the next few years.
I understand their misgivings and confess that there are days when I feel that way, too, however I do not believe that defeat is inevitable. But first we need to define our terms. For starters, I do not believe that we are in a contest for the worn-out structures of the Episcopal Church because they are already beyond our reach, and besides, most of them are irrelevant. I suspect that the actions of the General Convention 2006 and the Anglican Communion will play a role in significantly reshaping what tomorrow is going to look like, and those structures will be declared even more irrelevant.
Maybe I suffer from the shortcoming of being brought up to believe that even when you have your back against a wall and all looks lost, you keep on fighting the good fight. Churchill's "We will fight them..." speech, made almost exactly 65 years ago, and perhaps his greatest, was not delivered when things looked hunky-dory, but at that moment in 1940 when the British people believed that what would be required to save them from the wrath of Nazi-ism was a miracle. This is exactly what they received at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain.
Perhaps I have drunk too long at that old-fashioned well which says you stand firm on your principles, and you do all in your power to protect them, whatever the odds and whatever the consequences. Churchill knew exactly what he was doing in 1940 when he took power in Britain, and he knew precisely what it would cost -- the wholesale destruction of the British economy and the loss of the British Empire. But the principles upon which Britain stood were more important than these. Despite those miracles of 1940, from 1939-1942 the British people saw very few victories or encouragements, but their bulldog determination reflected that of their leader.
Under God, I suppose this attitude has always been the one that I have clung to when the going has got tough, as it has so many times in 36 years of ordained ministry. But I also believe wholeheartedly and without reservation, that the future of biblical Christianity is as much at stake here as trinitarian orthodoxy was at stake in the 3rd and 4th Centuries when the Arian crisis rocked the church. When I had the opportunity to leave the Episcopal Church some months ago and go back to my homeland to minister, that was when I realized that to leave now would have been to admit that error is stronger and more powerful than truth.
So, as has been asked, when "the triumphal actions of the liberals" are as dominating as they are, isn't restoring Anglican Episcopal Christianity more or less impossible? In the short term and from our human perspective, I would hazard that this is so, but need that be the case in the medium and long term?
1. It is wrong for us to define ourselves vis-a-vis those with whom we disagree. Episcopalians have had the infuriating habit of doing this for a long time. We need to define ourselves in terms of who we actually are. In this part of the world being an Anglican is "Not-being-Baptist!" This isnt' good enough. We need to have clarity about who we are, what we believe, and a positive way of affirming our identity -- because our identity is clear, great, a treasure, and something God-given. I find it much more pleasing to know that I am an Anglican Communion Christian in fellowship with a wonderful worldwide church, rather than an adherent of a little elitist American high church unitarian universalist sect, something that seems to be in vogue in the structures of ECUSA.
2. It is right for us to work hard to gain clarity when it comes to our theological foundations. This is what Trinity and Nashotah need to be working on in terms of leadership for us, as well as engaging those in the trenches in the process. Theology is not primarily clarified in the hallowed halls of Academe, but in the day-to-day struggles of parish ministry. We need to work especially hard to see where our theology is infected by the spirit of this age and to cleanse it, for if it is weakened by the zeitgeist it will not sound the clarion call of Christ into postmodernity.
3. It is right for us to develop the outline of a long range strategy, and then to stick with it. Of course there will be need for course corrections, etc., but these will be necessary. This was the way that John Stott and others led Anglican Evangelicalism out of a pitiful wilderness beginning with the tiniest patch of land in 1945. Today more than three-quarters of those training for leadership in the Church of England are evangelical and orthodox.
4. It is right for us to develop our own structures, networks, institutions, ministries, and so forth, and to put our heart and soul into them believing that what we are doing is creating something that will supercede that which is dying -- i.e. the 815-oriented structures. Hierarchies of the kind we have lived with for so long are a thing of the past, networks and horizontal ways of organizing are the thing of the future. They will take over the church whether the hierarchies like it or not. In these circumstances we might need to give some lip-service to the structures that are still there, but no more than is absolutely necessary.
5. It is right for us to major in what we do well, which is planting new congregations, reviving old ones, being pastors, teachers, evangelists, those who are equipped by the Spirit of God to be the People of God on earth. We want to be in the business of winning those beyond the church's doors to faith in Jesus Christ. This is where the wisdom of the likes of a Kevin Martin comes in. As I travelled the church for two decades it was not difficult to see where faithful ministry was taking place when compared to places where folks were going through the motions. Take my word for it, going through the motions is very much the flavor of many on the left.
6. It is essential that we do the political work necessary to maintain our strength where we can. This is something I leave to others because I am politically not so bright. However, this means using intelligence and prayer to move forward. In some dioceses I recognize that this is well-night impossible, but I believe in others there is a lot that orthodox people can do to put their stamp on what is happening. The caveat is that you can expect to be fought all the way, you can expect to be misrepresented, and to be misused, but if the true Israelites will come out of their caves and their holes in the ground there is a mighty host that will walk with us.
7. It is vital that we pray. Prayer is the fuel of any movement, and it is creating a movement that we are talking about. No work of God advances if it does not advance on its knees. As we pray, as we tune ourselves into the mind of God, then the miracles will start to happen, indeed, some of them are happening already. I am fond of quoting Prof. Herbert Butterfield of Oxford some time back, "History belongs to those who pray."
8. We need to use our intelligence, but we also need to be ready to both fail in some of our endeavors, as well as not get everything that we believe is right the first time around. I presented a motion to our diocesan convention in January that I did not expect to make it, it was intended as a signal of where the orthodox would want to go if they could. To my surprise we got it. It doesn't always happen like that, but we need to think about keeping coming back with what we believe to be right until it displaces the error that has been enthroned in the heart of the church.
9. We need courage and tenacity -- and above all we need leaders. It is not for old guys like me to keep on stepping up to the plate, it is for the next generation of Anglicans to say what sort of church they believe God is calling them to be part of.
What I have outlined above is not a program between now and General Convetion 2006, but an outline of what we need to be doing for the next 30-40 years. Unless an awful lot happens to improve longevity, the likes of me will not be around to see the fruits of such a strategy, but the next generation and the generation of my granddaughter to be born next month will see the fruit.
Anglicanism in North America will look very different in that far off time. There will be a rump of revisionists living off the innate spiritual curiosity of the American left, and also on the endowments built up by faithful people that they have commandeered. But there will also be convergences with those outside of the Communion now but on the Canterbury Trail, and, I suspect, some kind of rapproachment with Rome. It has the potential of being a powerful tool in God's hands -- but a lot will depend on how we handle ourselves in the next few years.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
The Reclaiming of the Church
At the place where Frogmore Street meets Dundale Road in my home town of Tring in England, there once stood an elegant old Victorian building on several acres of land. It fell into disrepair and was finally purchased by my father's construction company during the 1960s. The Victorian structure would have required a lot of repairs, but it could have been made to look as good as new. However, it was eventually torn down and replaced with a quiet close of houses that we thought at the time looked oh, so, contemporary and chi-chi.
Whenever I am back in Tring I shudder when I pass that close of homes because those places that we thought looked such an improvement forty years ago now reveal in a stark manner just how ticky-tacky the new, modern, contemporary, 1960s actually were. The same thing was happening all over England at that time, as hideous monstrosities in concrete, steel, and glass took the place of buildings that had style and a human scale. Housing that was hailed as a great advance in the Sixties has become many of today's slums.
What was happening architecturally was also happening in the broadest reaches of the culture. Deconstructionism was on the march out of France, and the Beatles were proclaiming they were more famous than Jesus Christ. The 1960s were a cocky, self-confident, age, and those of us who belong to the generation that came of age in those heady times have carried with us many of these characteristics. It took me a long time to finally accept that although some good things happened in the 1960s, when all is said and done they were a time when irreparable damage was done in the western world.
This was the time when theology and church life went awry as well. The death of God theologians were hailed for the groundbreaking things they wanted us to believe. Tillich's views rode high, and in New Testament studies Rudolf Bultmann was king. This was the time when the bishops of the Episcopal Church refused to find James Pike guilty of the heresy that he clearly adhered to. I had lunch a few weeks ago with one of the few remaining bishops from that time, a gracious man, but his reasons for acting as he did seemed bizarre and thoroughly out of touch with biblical and catholic Christianity.
There was a termite quality to all that was happening in those days, gnawing away as it was as the heart and marrow of the faith in the mainline churches, until here we are now watching the shell of the structures we inherited coming apart -- helped along by the wrecking ball that the 1960s crew is still wielding. The instinct that many of us have had is to walk away from the damage that has been done and build our own ticky-tacky structures appropriate for the 21st Century, structures that surely have built into them our own contemporary strain of termites and death-watch beetle.
Yet it seems to me that destroying in order to replace the broken with something new is itself an inappropriate way of carrying on, wherever we can we should be seeking to repair and restore. I know that this is not possible everywhere, but in many places I think it is a lot more do-able than many might realize.
Actually, what is happening might turn out to be very good for us in the long-term.
Firstly, we are being forced to look beneath the surface at the real philosophical and theological issues that confront us. This is a time when there is no place for sloppy doctrine grounded more in pop psychology and a "feel good" entertainment mindset, whether with a conservative or a progressive flavor. This is a time when we are being asked to dig down deep into the resources that we have inherited from the centuries and begin rebuilding with materials that will last -- not cheap composites and ticky-tacky.
Secondly, while it will take a while, we are being freed from the tyranny of a centralized structure that thinks it knows best, and is prepared to squander millions trying to prove it. The denominational structures of ECUSA which we took so seriously as recently as a decade ago, have become little more than a costly irrelevance. As 815 Second Avenue, the Executive Council, and even the General Convention, become more and more of a bizarre postmodern circus, more and more folks are tending to ignore them -- and certainly cut off the spicket of money flowing in their direction.
Thirdly, we are seeing just how wrong have been many of our choices for leaders. The Episcopal Church has got the bishops it deserves because we have been thinking in terms of charm, good looks, Sixties-style management skills, when we have been out voting for these creatures. The places where progress is being made is were bishops focus their lives on Jesus Christ, preach the Gospel as revealed in Scripture faithfully, have thick skins and strong spines, and are prepared to begin making the sort of changes that are necessary if the church is to speak the age-old message into an even more hostile century than the last. Just as the Counter-Reformation swept away their corrupt 16th Century predecessors and remade the church, the same is true of our time.
Fourthly, the old diocesan structures that have been so disconcerting, are themselves in the midst of a shake-up. In August 2003 in most dioceses the implied trust that existed between the grassroots and the leadership dissolved. The laity are now voting with their feet and with their money. Dioceses like Newark are telling us that as many as 1/3 of their congregations are on the edge of becoming unviable -- what a great advertisement for their revisionist, 1960s-shaped theology and practice. If I were a bishop rather than the priest of a small, poor mission congregation, I would be having far more sleepless nights than I am getting. The old structures are finished, new horizontal networks are taking their place, whether the powers that be like it or not.
David Bailey was trying to explain to me the other day that times like ours when change is taking place on a giant scale are times of disequilibrium. Our desire in these times is to seek stability and equilibrium, but that, David assures me, is the wrong thing today. As soon as we restore a temporary balance we are missing the opportunities of being put out on the cusp by God to be creative for his Kingdom.
Last week, the Bishop of Northwest Texas told the faithful members of his largest congregation to vacate their buildings because they had reached the conclusion that they could no longer remain part of ECUSA. I don't know what the folks at St. Nicholas, Midland, are going to do, but after giving thought to friends who are members there my next thought was something like, "What a stupid man this bishop is. Instead of seeking to find a constructive way forward for both this congregation that has lost trust in a denomination that has turned its back on truth, and for his diocese, he has cut off his nose to spite his face. He sees the episcopate in terms of power not in terms of servanthood. He thinks like a captive of Christendom, not a prophet of the post-Christendom possibility."
It is this kind of self-destructive behavior that should encourage the faithful to hang in there, rebuild from the grassroots, and watch for a multiplication of assinine moves by those who have sold out to the spirit of the age.
I have said some pretty angry and brutal things about ECUSA in the last couple of years, but I am at the point where I am ready to reclaim the noble title "Episcopal." I am thankful to be an Anglican Christian, and I am grateful for the potential for mission that there is an an Anglican/Episcopal way of being a follower of the Lord Jesus. I also believe that as the 1960s termites do their worst they are preparing the ground for a new kind of Anglicanism to move forward in the future. Now is not the time to walk away but to re-engage, get the bug man in, and start re-ordering our household.
Whenever I am back in Tring I shudder when I pass that close of homes because those places that we thought looked such an improvement forty years ago now reveal in a stark manner just how ticky-tacky the new, modern, contemporary, 1960s actually were. The same thing was happening all over England at that time, as hideous monstrosities in concrete, steel, and glass took the place of buildings that had style and a human scale. Housing that was hailed as a great advance in the Sixties has become many of today's slums.
What was happening architecturally was also happening in the broadest reaches of the culture. Deconstructionism was on the march out of France, and the Beatles were proclaiming they were more famous than Jesus Christ. The 1960s were a cocky, self-confident, age, and those of us who belong to the generation that came of age in those heady times have carried with us many of these characteristics. It took me a long time to finally accept that although some good things happened in the 1960s, when all is said and done they were a time when irreparable damage was done in the western world.
This was the time when theology and church life went awry as well. The death of God theologians were hailed for the groundbreaking things they wanted us to believe. Tillich's views rode high, and in New Testament studies Rudolf Bultmann was king. This was the time when the bishops of the Episcopal Church refused to find James Pike guilty of the heresy that he clearly adhered to. I had lunch a few weeks ago with one of the few remaining bishops from that time, a gracious man, but his reasons for acting as he did seemed bizarre and thoroughly out of touch with biblical and catholic Christianity.
There was a termite quality to all that was happening in those days, gnawing away as it was as the heart and marrow of the faith in the mainline churches, until here we are now watching the shell of the structures we inherited coming apart -- helped along by the wrecking ball that the 1960s crew is still wielding. The instinct that many of us have had is to walk away from the damage that has been done and build our own ticky-tacky structures appropriate for the 21st Century, structures that surely have built into them our own contemporary strain of termites and death-watch beetle.
Yet it seems to me that destroying in order to replace the broken with something new is itself an inappropriate way of carrying on, wherever we can we should be seeking to repair and restore. I know that this is not possible everywhere, but in many places I think it is a lot more do-able than many might realize.
Actually, what is happening might turn out to be very good for us in the long-term.
Firstly, we are being forced to look beneath the surface at the real philosophical and theological issues that confront us. This is a time when there is no place for sloppy doctrine grounded more in pop psychology and a "feel good" entertainment mindset, whether with a conservative or a progressive flavor. This is a time when we are being asked to dig down deep into the resources that we have inherited from the centuries and begin rebuilding with materials that will last -- not cheap composites and ticky-tacky.
Secondly, while it will take a while, we are being freed from the tyranny of a centralized structure that thinks it knows best, and is prepared to squander millions trying to prove it. The denominational structures of ECUSA which we took so seriously as recently as a decade ago, have become little more than a costly irrelevance. As 815 Second Avenue, the Executive Council, and even the General Convention, become more and more of a bizarre postmodern circus, more and more folks are tending to ignore them -- and certainly cut off the spicket of money flowing in their direction.
Thirdly, we are seeing just how wrong have been many of our choices for leaders. The Episcopal Church has got the bishops it deserves because we have been thinking in terms of charm, good looks, Sixties-style management skills, when we have been out voting for these creatures. The places where progress is being made is were bishops focus their lives on Jesus Christ, preach the Gospel as revealed in Scripture faithfully, have thick skins and strong spines, and are prepared to begin making the sort of changes that are necessary if the church is to speak the age-old message into an even more hostile century than the last. Just as the Counter-Reformation swept away their corrupt 16th Century predecessors and remade the church, the same is true of our time.
Fourthly, the old diocesan structures that have been so disconcerting, are themselves in the midst of a shake-up. In August 2003 in most dioceses the implied trust that existed between the grassroots and the leadership dissolved. The laity are now voting with their feet and with their money. Dioceses like Newark are telling us that as many as 1/3 of their congregations are on the edge of becoming unviable -- what a great advertisement for their revisionist, 1960s-shaped theology and practice. If I were a bishop rather than the priest of a small, poor mission congregation, I would be having far more sleepless nights than I am getting. The old structures are finished, new horizontal networks are taking their place, whether the powers that be like it or not.
David Bailey was trying to explain to me the other day that times like ours when change is taking place on a giant scale are times of disequilibrium. Our desire in these times is to seek stability and equilibrium, but that, David assures me, is the wrong thing today. As soon as we restore a temporary balance we are missing the opportunities of being put out on the cusp by God to be creative for his Kingdom.
Last week, the Bishop of Northwest Texas told the faithful members of his largest congregation to vacate their buildings because they had reached the conclusion that they could no longer remain part of ECUSA. I don't know what the folks at St. Nicholas, Midland, are going to do, but after giving thought to friends who are members there my next thought was something like, "What a stupid man this bishop is. Instead of seeking to find a constructive way forward for both this congregation that has lost trust in a denomination that has turned its back on truth, and for his diocese, he has cut off his nose to spite his face. He sees the episcopate in terms of power not in terms of servanthood. He thinks like a captive of Christendom, not a prophet of the post-Christendom possibility."
It is this kind of self-destructive behavior that should encourage the faithful to hang in there, rebuild from the grassroots, and watch for a multiplication of assinine moves by those who have sold out to the spirit of the age.
I have said some pretty angry and brutal things about ECUSA in the last couple of years, but I am at the point where I am ready to reclaim the noble title "Episcopal." I am thankful to be an Anglican Christian, and I am grateful for the potential for mission that there is an an Anglican/Episcopal way of being a follower of the Lord Jesus. I also believe that as the 1960s termites do their worst they are preparing the ground for a new kind of Anglicanism to move forward in the future. Now is not the time to walk away but to re-engage, get the bug man in, and start re-ordering our household.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Schleiermacher, Oman, Benedict XVI and the 21st Century
I was never able to complete the post-graduate research degree I was doing in Britain prior to moving across the Atlantic in the 1970s, mainly because I was no longer compliant with the university residency requirements of the time. However, I learned a lot from both the required reading and the course-work that preceeded work on my not quite completed dissertation.
I struggled through seven or eight hundred pages of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the 18th and early 19th Century German who sought to address the faith to the "cultured despisers." I also had to read the Scottish theologian of the early part of the 20th Century, John Oman. These two gentlemen made another of the writers I had to read huge chunks of, John Henry Newman, seem like light relief!
During the last week I have found myself going back to Schleiermacher and Oman to mull over what I learned from them. Schleiermacher considered Scripture the record of the shaping of religious experience, and what he did was to analyze religious experience and distill from it what he then considered to be the essence of faith.
Schleiermacher handles the Scriptures in an entirely different way than anyone had to that point, thinking of them not as a collection of divinely-inspired utterances, but as an illustration of the development of religion, and his definition of it as a sense of absolute dependence. This gave him the platform from which to begin the work of redefinition that he engaged in.
In his massive work, "The Christian Faith," Schleiermacher wrote, "All attributes which we ascribe to God are to be taken as denoting not something special in God, but only something special in the manner in which the feeling of absolute dependence is related to him." Sin, therefore, is "an arrestment of the determinative power of the spirit, due to the independence of the sensuous functions."
I could go on, but I think you get the point. This is the original (rather turgid) mine from which 19th and 20th Century liberal Christianity was dug. Schleiermacher is echoed in the likes of Paul Tillich (another of the authors with whose works I wrestled), and John Robinson in his now infamous book, "Honest to God." Experience becomes definitive and that which disturbs our sense of dependence and freedom becomes questionable. Scripture in this tradition is used for illustration, not for authority, and I think these few broad brush strokes shape the influence this mindset has in the battles we fight today.
Benedict XVI is a German who thoroughly understands the seminal influence of Schleiermacher, and it is he who has had me dredging my memory, my bookshelves, and my notes to grapple again with this giant of the Romantic Era. When the Pope talks of the "tyranny of relativism" somewhere in his mind is the divergent track that Schleiermacher guided Christians off on for what is now the best part of two centuries.
We see the last dribblings out of Schleiermacher's influence in the mindset and positions taken by the 21st Century theological progressives and their agenda for the church. The path they are treading will probably be perceived as a massive diversion in centuries from now, but although it is now past its prime it is still incredibly powerful, as we see in ECUSA.
The romanticism that Schleiermacher enriched as well as fed from, taking, as it does, experience as definitive, has leeched its way into every facet of the western mindset to such an extent that "I feel" is almost synonimous with "I think." Historic evidence becomes less important than the senses, which then leads into a "willingness to jettison traditional teaching in favor of ideas which are apparently more acceptable to modern man" (Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith, London: IVP, 1969, page 116).
This is a meager summary of the background to Benedict's agenda as he begins walking in the shoes of the fisherman. He knows that he cannot have the impact that John Paul II had, so is going to aim his arrows at the suzerainty that Schleiermachian thinking has had in the world of western thought and theology. For BXVI there is a core orthodoxy that all catholic (with a small 'c') and biblical Christians can agree upon, and I would hazard he will make this the setting in which he will gather faithful from a variety of backgrounds in this mission.
He is, I think, calling us to look back at what has been the mainstream in the West until very recently, and still dominates in antiquated denominations like ECUSA, and recognize it for the long-term digression that it truly has been. Experience is, by its very nature, relativistic, and it is this that Benedict refuses to accept as definitive, neither is he prepared to read Christian doctrine and tradition through the narrow grid of contemporary experience.
During the last week BXVI has been identified by the American chattering classes with every conservative leader and cause, but this is unfair. I suspect that Benedict, a thoroughly European man, has as many misgivings about the economic and social policies tha dominate the American landscape as this European who has lived here nearly three decades. We need to understand the Pope as a brilliant Catholic mind who thoroughly understands the unraveling that is taking place in contemporary culture. He recognizes that it is only Christian orthodoxy that is able to make thorough sense of the chaotic fluidities of our time. We need to see him through the glasses of faith, not those of sociology and US politics.
This brings me to John Oman, who I mentioned at the beginning. Oman's book, "Grace and Personality," was published 120 years after Schleiermacher, and there is little doubt that he drank deeply at the Schleiermachian well having been one of the primary translators of Schleiermacher's "On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despiers" into English.
I spent many hours in my early twenties being irritated by him because I was finding it hard to understand what he was saying. Only when you recognized that he had undertaken a massive reinterpretation of the fundamental meaning of biblical terms like "grace" did you see the pattern of his thinking. Oman may not be popular today, but he is one of the godfathers of much revisionary thinking in the churches today, because when we do occasionally talk to one another we might use the same words, but the orthodox and the progressives fill them with profoundly different meaning.
The other week at a clergy gathering the word "reconciliation" was being merrily tossed around. Those on the left who were doing the tossing meant something different than I mean as one who seeks to understand reconciliation through the mindset of Scripture. I want to know how the Bible uses the word, fundamentally linked as it is to the reconciling work of Christ upon the Cross, then I want to know how the church has understood the word and concept down through the centuries, so I can put it in today's context.
But at that meeting more threads were at play than just me and them. There were orthodox Christians who thought they knew what the others meant by "reconciliation" without asking them, thus making lots of room for misunderstanding. Added to that there were conservatives who would probably interpret the word "reconciliation" differently than me by putting emphases in different places, or may not fully understand the biblical concept themselves.
How we use language and how we define words, ideas, doctrines, etc., is going to be an incredibly important part of the task of recovery and renewal in the church in the years ahead. I am coming to the conclusion that all that is happening is a painful but God-given opportunity. Conservatives and liberals, progressives and traditionalists, whatever label you put on them, have all become theologically lax. The Apostles, the Fathers, and the magisterial Reformers would shrug in horror at some of the stances of both liberals and conservatives alike -- and in all denominations.
Benedict looks as if he is going to be working on a tightening up the intersection of faith and doctrine in the Catholic Church. I suspect he will be painted as an inquisitor by those who don't like him, but that is more likely to be mud flung than anything else. As a son of the Reformation I am sure I am going to find myself in disagreement with some of his ideas and stances, I suspect that we will be far closer in principle than I am to my "liberal" sisters and brothers in ECUSA because we have a common understanding of revelation and the honor we should give to the church's tradition.
Cleaning up is always very necessary after a party -- and there has been a riotous party going on for the last several generations. In the cold morning light of the early 21st Century we are now dealing with the garbage, the mess, and the residue.
I struggled through seven or eight hundred pages of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the 18th and early 19th Century German who sought to address the faith to the "cultured despisers." I also had to read the Scottish theologian of the early part of the 20th Century, John Oman. These two gentlemen made another of the writers I had to read huge chunks of, John Henry Newman, seem like light relief!
During the last week I have found myself going back to Schleiermacher and Oman to mull over what I learned from them. Schleiermacher considered Scripture the record of the shaping of religious experience, and what he did was to analyze religious experience and distill from it what he then considered to be the essence of faith.
Schleiermacher handles the Scriptures in an entirely different way than anyone had to that point, thinking of them not as a collection of divinely-inspired utterances, but as an illustration of the development of religion, and his definition of it as a sense of absolute dependence. This gave him the platform from which to begin the work of redefinition that he engaged in.
In his massive work, "The Christian Faith," Schleiermacher wrote, "All attributes which we ascribe to God are to be taken as denoting not something special in God, but only something special in the manner in which the feeling of absolute dependence is related to him." Sin, therefore, is "an arrestment of the determinative power of the spirit, due to the independence of the sensuous functions."
I could go on, but I think you get the point. This is the original (rather turgid) mine from which 19th and 20th Century liberal Christianity was dug. Schleiermacher is echoed in the likes of Paul Tillich (another of the authors with whose works I wrestled), and John Robinson in his now infamous book, "Honest to God." Experience becomes definitive and that which disturbs our sense of dependence and freedom becomes questionable. Scripture in this tradition is used for illustration, not for authority, and I think these few broad brush strokes shape the influence this mindset has in the battles we fight today.
Benedict XVI is a German who thoroughly understands the seminal influence of Schleiermacher, and it is he who has had me dredging my memory, my bookshelves, and my notes to grapple again with this giant of the Romantic Era. When the Pope talks of the "tyranny of relativism" somewhere in his mind is the divergent track that Schleiermacher guided Christians off on for what is now the best part of two centuries.
We see the last dribblings out of Schleiermacher's influence in the mindset and positions taken by the 21st Century theological progressives and their agenda for the church. The path they are treading will probably be perceived as a massive diversion in centuries from now, but although it is now past its prime it is still incredibly powerful, as we see in ECUSA.
The romanticism that Schleiermacher enriched as well as fed from, taking, as it does, experience as definitive, has leeched its way into every facet of the western mindset to such an extent that "I feel" is almost synonimous with "I think." Historic evidence becomes less important than the senses, which then leads into a "willingness to jettison traditional teaching in favor of ideas which are apparently more acceptable to modern man" (Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith, London: IVP, 1969, page 116).
This is a meager summary of the background to Benedict's agenda as he begins walking in the shoes of the fisherman. He knows that he cannot have the impact that John Paul II had, so is going to aim his arrows at the suzerainty that Schleiermachian thinking has had in the world of western thought and theology. For BXVI there is a core orthodoxy that all catholic (with a small 'c') and biblical Christians can agree upon, and I would hazard he will make this the setting in which he will gather faithful from a variety of backgrounds in this mission.
He is, I think, calling us to look back at what has been the mainstream in the West until very recently, and still dominates in antiquated denominations like ECUSA, and recognize it for the long-term digression that it truly has been. Experience is, by its very nature, relativistic, and it is this that Benedict refuses to accept as definitive, neither is he prepared to read Christian doctrine and tradition through the narrow grid of contemporary experience.
During the last week BXVI has been identified by the American chattering classes with every conservative leader and cause, but this is unfair. I suspect that Benedict, a thoroughly European man, has as many misgivings about the economic and social policies tha dominate the American landscape as this European who has lived here nearly three decades. We need to understand the Pope as a brilliant Catholic mind who thoroughly understands the unraveling that is taking place in contemporary culture. He recognizes that it is only Christian orthodoxy that is able to make thorough sense of the chaotic fluidities of our time. We need to see him through the glasses of faith, not those of sociology and US politics.
This brings me to John Oman, who I mentioned at the beginning. Oman's book, "Grace and Personality," was published 120 years after Schleiermacher, and there is little doubt that he drank deeply at the Schleiermachian well having been one of the primary translators of Schleiermacher's "On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despiers" into English.
I spent many hours in my early twenties being irritated by him because I was finding it hard to understand what he was saying. Only when you recognized that he had undertaken a massive reinterpretation of the fundamental meaning of biblical terms like "grace" did you see the pattern of his thinking. Oman may not be popular today, but he is one of the godfathers of much revisionary thinking in the churches today, because when we do occasionally talk to one another we might use the same words, but the orthodox and the progressives fill them with profoundly different meaning.
The other week at a clergy gathering the word "reconciliation" was being merrily tossed around. Those on the left who were doing the tossing meant something different than I mean as one who seeks to understand reconciliation through the mindset of Scripture. I want to know how the Bible uses the word, fundamentally linked as it is to the reconciling work of Christ upon the Cross, then I want to know how the church has understood the word and concept down through the centuries, so I can put it in today's context.
But at that meeting more threads were at play than just me and them. There were orthodox Christians who thought they knew what the others meant by "reconciliation" without asking them, thus making lots of room for misunderstanding. Added to that there were conservatives who would probably interpret the word "reconciliation" differently than me by putting emphases in different places, or may not fully understand the biblical concept themselves.
How we use language and how we define words, ideas, doctrines, etc., is going to be an incredibly important part of the task of recovery and renewal in the church in the years ahead. I am coming to the conclusion that all that is happening is a painful but God-given opportunity. Conservatives and liberals, progressives and traditionalists, whatever label you put on them, have all become theologically lax. The Apostles, the Fathers, and the magisterial Reformers would shrug in horror at some of the stances of both liberals and conservatives alike -- and in all denominations.
Benedict looks as if he is going to be working on a tightening up the intersection of faith and doctrine in the Catholic Church. I suspect he will be painted as an inquisitor by those who don't like him, but that is more likely to be mud flung than anything else. As a son of the Reformation I am sure I am going to find myself in disagreement with some of his ideas and stances, I suspect that we will be far closer in principle than I am to my "liberal" sisters and brothers in ECUSA because we have a common understanding of revelation and the honor we should give to the church's tradition.
Cleaning up is always very necessary after a party -- and there has been a riotous party going on for the last several generations. In the cold morning light of the early 21st Century we are now dealing with the garbage, the mess, and the residue.
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