MetaCatholic

Claude Mariottini picks up on a story from this side of the pond, of the girl who lost her fight to wear a chastity ring at school. He’s relying on the Times story, which seems a little light on detail. As a result he notes:

[Other] religious groups are allowed to wear, as the report said, headscarfs, religious bracelets, veils, garments, and other items that clearly express religious faith. However, the same privileges are denied to others just because they are Christians. To me, this is a double standard that must be addressed.

There is a fuller report in today’s Church Times, which suggests it is not quite like that:. It concludes:

In the past, the school had permitted a Muslim girl to wear a headscarf where it was considered by her to be a requirement of her faith. Two Sikh girls had been allowed to wear a “Kara” bangle on the same basis. A pupil was allowed to wear a headscarf, as it was believed that that form of dress was required as part of her faith as a member of the Plymouth Brethren.

By contrast, said the judge, there was no evidence that Lydia’s religious belief required her to wear the ring (and she did not suggest that it did), and the school offered her other means by which she could express her belief.

There was no evidence, the judge said, that Lydia had been unlawfully discriminated against, even though others had been treated as exceptions to the school rules. The school had reached carefully considered decisions on each occasion.

I don’t know if any American schools have “uniform policies” in the way that many English schools do. But as someone who in the past has been involved in agreeing them as a governor, I have a great deal of sympathy with this school. It sounds to me as though they had both a clear policy (to which the girl in question and her parents had signed up) and a careful response to exceptions.

They made those exceptions when the wearing of an item of clothing, or in one instance a bangle, were seen as requirements of the faith in question, and one of those exceptions was for the member of a Christian grouping. One of the reasons why, I suspect, Christians will normally be unable to lay claim to exceptions is that our faith places no such requirements of outer manifestations of belief on us.

I don’t disagree with Claude that there is sometimes a double standard (which I see primarily as a confused one) at play in these matters. I just don’t think this is an instance of it.

The introduction to this series is here.

The first of the 39 articles begins with the traditional doctrine of God.

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

First, I note that this is of a piece with those that follow immediately, and together they locate everything that follows (the immediate disputes of the day) in the shared tradition of the Church catholic. In this it differs from, for example, the Westminster Confession which begins with methodology, with a doctrine of Scripture to set against and sift the tradition. This rooting of Anglican faith in the classic tradition of the Church is one that continues in its major early writers, and should not be overlooked.

It is also of a part with an attachment to the Vincentian canon, that the Anglican Church holds to “that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all” (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus). Historians now would dispute that such a state of affairs ever really existed, but such a patristic golden age is a significant myth for Anglican self-understanding. Methodology belongs to subsequent and rational reflection on that inheritance, and to finding appropriate grounds to dispute some of the developments of it.

A very large number of contemporary Christians, conservative and liberal alike, actually have (usually unrecognised) problems with this article, and especially with the phrase “without body, parts, or passions” (incorporeus, impartibilis, impassibilis). For some, this is proof of the Platonizing tendency of the early church, and thus a move away from the (presumed) “simple faith of Jesus”. For others it is simply ignored in favour of straightforward interpretations of biblical metaphors of God’s changing his mind, or of his being angry. For almost all, “God is love” is subconsciously heard as carrying overtones of passionate love.

This article, and the classic tradition which it expresses, is sometimes as much at odds with contemporary understandings of faith than any of the more obviously controversial ones. It requires considerable weight to be given to the tradition of the church, and a trust that these ancient ways of reading scripture were actually rightly guided by the Spirit. The number of verses in the canonical scriptures that suggest passion and change in God far outweighs the solitary verse that appears to affirm divine immutability:

[God is]  the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. (James 1:17)

Ironically, of course, this supporting metaphor for the whole Greek philosophical superstructure of impassibility and immutability comes in the most Jewish book of the NT.

But what this article does is assert the importance of the tradition for reading scripture. Language about God becoming angry is to be seen as metaphor and analogy. All those many references to God changing his mind are not to be read literally. Whatever else the articles will say about the privileging of scripture over tradition (and they will say a lot) they begin in a different place, with the tradition and not against it. They also place the apophatic methodology of those three adjectives incorporeus, impartibilis, impassibilis firmly within Anglican tradition.

This offers a challenge, obviously, to any simple claim to perspicuity or literal readings of which the drafters may not have been fully aware. In their day impassibility was hardly challenged, and so the meaning of scriptures concerning God was probably more clear for them than for us.

But impassibility is about the “God-ness” of God, which traditional doctrine this article so strongly affirms: his perfection in eternity, and his being “not such a one as us.” Not contingent, not in need of growth, not externally influenced. A failure to truly appreciate God’s transcendence lies behind a great many of the atheist objections to God’s “existence,” which they confuse with the existence of all other things, visible and invisible. But it also lies behind many of the trite expressions of Christian faith and worship which all too often reduce the Almighty to the All-matey.