MetaCatholic

(This post is part of a series on the 39 articles of the Church of England)

I’m vaguely aware that Christmas is past and that I want to get to the end of the 39 articles by the end of 2007. Unfortunately, I’m not at all sure what to make of the next one to come under scrutiny, the thirty-seventh. More than many, it breathes the air of a bygone age, but it also throws up subjects like capital punishment and war which need whole series of posts of their own.

XXXVII. Of the Civil Magistrates

The King’s Majesty hath the chief power in this Realm of England, and other his Dominions, unto whom the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign jurisdiction.

Where we attribute to the King’s Majesty the chief government, by which Titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended; we give not to our Princes the ministering either of God’s Word, or of the Sacraments, the which thing the Injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen do most plainly testify; but that only prerogative, which we see to have been given always to all godly Princes in Holy Scriptures by God himself; that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evildoers.

The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.

The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences.

It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.

It is noteworthy that the sole (quite frequently quoted) reference in the articles to the pope comes in this article on civil power. “The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” No doubt in part that recognised the de facto reality that the pope was one among many competing political powers in Europe, whatever else his role might have been. Alongside this, during the whole mediaeval period, bishops more generally were powerful nobles in their own right, and exercised considerable secular power from their castles and palaces. On the ground it was not easy to distinguish between temporal and secular authority. Handing heretics over to the “secular arm” for the death penalty because the church could not execute people was in some respects a legal fiction. This jumbling up of authority was the daily reality of life, irrespective of theological perspective, even as it was increasingly coming under threat from the widespread social changes that marked the end of the late mediaeval period, and the beginning of the early modern, with the bourgeoisie coming into their own, and changing the balance of power between monarch, nobles and bishops.

What was largely different theologically was that where the Reformation generally made a theological virtue out of the practical necessity of turning to princes for protection from the pope, the Anglican Reformers developed a particular theory of monarchical power rooted in the Old Testament. So in the early stages of the Reformation they proclaimed the boy-king Edward VI as a new Josiah, and took the model of the Deuteronomic reforms as the model for Protestant reformation. In a way, Anglican England began life as a theocracy, and as the symbiosis between temporal and spiritual power diluted itself in myriad ways in the succeeding centuries, competing accounts and visions of authority emerged, none being particularly successful nor becoming triumphant.

In many respects this was not, and is not, simply an Anglican problem but a Christian one. (Even Rome’s answer is only achieved by maintaining a small corner of the Eternal City as an independent theocracy.) The primary theological resources of the New Testament (and its earliest interpreters)  had little to say about the exercise of power or any theology of the State. The church was ill-equipped to respond to becoming either the official or a majority religion, and has continued to struggle with it. The Reformers’ abandonment of the mediaeval theologians’ work exacerbated the lack of guidance in the patristic era to which they turned. The best they had was Augustine, veering between his magisterial vision of the City of God, and his practical turn to the secular power to defeat the Donatists. In the end, perhaps, they were more ready to follow the lead of Eusebius’ baptism of Constantine’s ascendancy as providence.

Something of the problem is suggested by the last two clauses of the article, asserting the rightness both of capital punishment and waging war. With the partial exception of John Paul II, there really has been very little coherent theology done on either of these two topics by theologians working within the mainstream churches in their varied relationships with the State. The only Anglican theologian of any note working in this area I’m aware of is Oliver O’Donovan, whose work seems a marginal interest for most. The loudest voices come from the descendants of the Anabaptist tradition, ruled out as “slanderous folks” by this article, and generally condemned by the magisterial Reformers. The European consensus on these matters, largely shared by the international left-leaning parties, that both war and the death penalty are largely failures of a civilised society, is usually simply assumed. In fact there is a greater gulf between the Christian tradition and the contemporary consensus here than there is on any matter relating to sexuality.

In the spirit of this article, I fail to see how the Anabaptist tradition offers any answer other than an opt-out, a misplaced application of eschatology to the created order. The Anglican tradition may have been singularly poor at producing a coherent political theology for a multi-cultural democracy in the modern world, but its history points strongly to the need for an affirming one that gives God an interest in the ordering of society, and encourages political participation as a Christian vocation. I cannot see that a term such as Anabaptist Anglican, however well-intentioned, is anything more than an oxymoron. For Anglicans, a commitment to God’s ordering and re-ordering of the world as a question of justice means that a theology of law, statehood and even of war is something at which the church and its theologians should be working. However difficult it is now, and however inadequate or wrong-headed it was in the past, this is an aspect of the tradition that no church—concerned for its members to live in the real world—can afford to neglect.