MetaCatholic

Sometimes I wonder at a certain Christian mentality. The often stimulating After Existentialism, Light, for once, I think, gets it wrong in this post on why people leave the Church.

InsideCatholic recently did an interesting survey of the reasons Catholics (and, for that matter, Christians in general) leave the Church by asking several prominent Catholics (bishops, professors, lay authors, etc.) for their opinion on the reasons and solutions.

Kevin is far from alone in what I see as the main mistake here, rather I often hear many others doing precisely the same thing. But what distinguished Christians think might be beside the point. The problem is, the bishop he quotes gives a Christian and theological explanation. It shows no sign that the bishop has actually asked anyone who has left the church why they have done so, or that, if he has asked them, he has listened to them. Yet surely, asking leavers is the first and most obvious step towards an answer. There might then be room for some very interesting sociological and theological reflections on why people do so, that is not simply taking their answers at face value, but does involve accounting for those face value answers coherently and honestly. Empirical research is not heretical, although its rarity might make you think it was.

My own experience of asking that question suggests that the answers are quite diverse, sometimes profound, and often very mundane and practical. “I moved house” seems to influence both those coming back to church and those leaving it. Individualist conceptions of faith and cultural patterns of habitual behaviour means that they often don’t see that leaving church as any loss of faith, and that, catholic orthodoxy aside, it genuinely may not. Sometimes faith has comparatively little to do with church attendance, and conversely, leaving church has little to do with loss of faith.

Then again, I can think of some who might leave church because they simply can’t relate to a church which has bishops who actually talk about “modern man”.

written by doug

I would have thought one of you might have managed to blog on the serendipity of the feast of Pentecost celebrating the divine energising of our Mother the Church, with Mother’s Day. (Of course, over here in the UK we keep Mothering Sunday as hallowed by Church tradition, not hallmarked by card companies, so I can’t write that kind of post.)

written by doug

Halden attempts to plot ecclesiologies on a simple matrix. I found this a fascinating set of descriptions. What raises a question mark for me, however, is that I know my ecclesiology is high because it is strong, and that the two are interrelated. I wonder if this means that for the others there is a dominant component in the pairings also? Perhaps those who hold to different ecclesiologies could reflect on which their dominant trait is also.

written by doug

I have noted before that I expect my next computer to be a Mac. I think that’s probably the most rational decision for me. But one of the things that has slightly held me back from making the decision earlier has been some of the swivel-eyed enthusiasm evinced by some diehard fanbois. Despite this, most Mac users have been (or at least seemed) quite normal people.

Yet it has been impossible to speak to even a normal Mac user without them trying to persuade you of the benefits that will accrue if you, too, get a Mac. As far as I can see this is nearly universally true. Mac owners can’t seem to stop themselves evangelising for their technology, both its style and substance. In a technological world where fashion and style are also prized, this may sometimes come over as a bit overbearing, or even over-boring, but it hardly ever (fanboi zealots partially excluded) comes over as unnatural.

Compare this to efforts Christians make for evangelism properly so called. By comparison there seems to be something studied about it. The language is often borrowed and artificial, the ideas seem to be someone else’s, the phrases are often hackneyed and inexplicable. Moreover, people quickly learn to avoid the enthusiast for God. Now, no doubt, some of this is due to the fact that God is more demanding than a Mac. But it seems to me also to point to a certain way in which God-talk has become unnatural and often uncomfortable in our society. Evangelism for God needs programmes, encouragement, mission plans and college training.

Intriguingly, it seems to me that I can detect that same dichotomy in clergy and layperson alike. If they are Mac owners their enthusing about their computers is always more spontaneous and natural than their enthusing for God. And it nearly always begins with “Did you know you can do …?” or “Have you seen this?”

I suspect that sort of practical, results-oriented amazement was part and parcel of natural Christian evangelism in the first few centuries, aided (as Mac owners are today) by the sense of being something of a beleaguered minority. It was then, as it is today in many cultures, as appropriate and natural as Mac evangelism is in ours, even if most people remained pagans (or Windows users today).

None of this is intended to point a finger at any particular theological or technological stance. But it does leave me wondering whether the difficulties most Western Christians have with evangelism owes far more to the cultural waters we swim in, than to any theological weakness, or enthusiasm bypass in today’s churches.

written by doug

It is remarkable that new documents from the apostolic age should still come to light, but I’m privileged to offer a rough first draft translation of this newly discovered personal letter from James to Peter. Unfortunately it sheds no additional light on the difficult question of relating Galatians and Acts, but does have a strangely contemporary feel.

James, brother of the Lord to our well-beloved Rock, Peter: grace to you, and peace.

I remind you, brother, of the calling the Lord Jesus gave you, to strengthen the fellowship of his followers. These are dangerous times for the church of Christ in which many are departing from the scriptures and do not care whether they keep the covenant God made with his people. They claim to follow the Spirit of God, but how can they possibly be doing so when they are going against the plain teaching of scripture? Is it not written that when “the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God”, we are to “touch no unclean thing” and “to go out from the midst”?¹ Yet far from going out, they are eating and drinking together in the midst of uncircumcised sinners. How can the Spirit of the one who inspired the scriptures now be guiding people into the ways of disobedience? Is he not the Father of lights, with whom there is no shadow of change? How then can he contradict himself?

Brother, I implore you, uphold the faith and do not let the gates of Hades prevail against us. You say you will invite Saul and a group from Antioch to a conference here in Jerusalem. Will that not be seen as accepting them and their ideas? They are calling clean what God has called unclean. You yourself have been mislead by visions about this very thing. I bless the God of our ancestors that you have returned from the way of error and now no longer share the blessed meal with Gentile sinners. I must tell you in all honesty, brother, that there are those of the Way from among the Pharisees who wonder if you are not too closely associated with Saul, and have not spent too long in Antioch. Only in Antioch, it seems, could such things happen. Yet because of its power in the region it infects us all with its imperialist ways.

Even were it not for these faithful brothers of the Pharisee party, I must tell you that you have disturbed the simple faith of many. Do not forget, my friend, what the days of your fishing life were like, when your worries were simple, and you walked in the ways taught by our rabbis from the Torah. Yes, the coming of Messiah has changed all things, but I fear that we are being caught in the ways of the big city, the temptations of Babylon. Things still look different in the countryside of Galilee, our home, and in the holiness and beauty of Jerusalem, the city of our God. Here we do not have our eyes defiled and our thoughts muddled by the presence of idols.

Do not be misled by Saul. He was over-zealous when he persecuted us, and he is over-zealous now. He simply takes everything too far, and nothing in moderation. Yes, we may rejoice that the Gentiles are turning to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Yes, we may rejoice that they will bring their tribute to Messiah’s feet in Jerusalem. But we don’t have to eat with them. They must be summoned to turn from idols, and submit to the covenant of circumcision. Blessed be God who has shown them mercy through the coming of our awaited Messiah.

Do not, I say, be misled by Saul, do not treat him as one equal to us, apostles of the Lord and elders of his church. Calling a conference in which he is seated as equal with us will be a disaster for the church. The Pharisees will leave us, and the simple Galileans and countryfolk will have their faith shaken. The church will fall apart. May it never be so. This proposed council will be a disaster. You were called by the Lord Jesus to be the one on whom he built his church. Do not be the rock on whom it is shipwrecked. How I wish that abortion had never travelled to Damascus. Now he takes us all on the road to disaster.

My brother, remember your calling, and may peace be with you.

1. Ed - James is referring to Isaiah 52:10-11 [↩]

written by doug

I was going to post some more on this, but Justin Lewis-Anthony has really said most of it for me in these two posts:

• To what will I compare this generation
• The difference between score and performance

The latter post includes this useful link to a streaming video of the lecture.

I can’t help but add this, however. I note that when people call for “leadership” they always mean a leader who will take them where they want to go. Trying to take people where they don’t want to go is always called a “failure of leadership” in the media and popular thought. Oddly enough, some decades on it’s often looked back on as prophetic, and once it was even the means of salvation.

written by doug

Updated Friday 8 Feb, 10.45

The Internet seems to produce a rush to judgement, and blogging is it’s apotheosis. Today’s reaction to Rowan Williams’ rather academic (and therefore both obscure and nuanced) reflections on Sharia and UK law seem to typify that. See here, here and here (especially the comments on the latter two which exhibit most forms of prejudice known to humanity).

What seems to have been missed are some of the comparisons, I quote from the interview:

It’s not a new problem, not to mention the issues as I mentioned earlier the questions about how the consciences of Catholics Anglicans and others who have difficulty over issues like abortion are accommodated within the Law; so the whole idea that there are perfectly proper ways in which the law of the land pays respect to custom and community; that’s already there.

I think at the moment there’s a great deal of confusion about this; a lot of what’s been written whether it was about the Catholic church adoptions agencies last year, sometimes what’s written about Jewish or Muslim communities; a lot of what’s written suggests that the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody;

I think those are interesting comparisons: a religiously inspired exemption of conscience (from some 40 years ago) for doctors and nurses not to perform abortions; no religious exemption from last year’s law on adoptions. Looking at the comments on the various stories and postings I can’t help but think that most of those commenting would oppose one law for all in both these instances.

I am, myself, very dubious about the Archbishop’s musings here, although I do think he has identified an “unspeakable about” issue in current thinking that needs to be thought about coherently and consistently. He does sometimes seem oblivious to the impact of his position on his more academic reflections, and badly advised on their media spin. Were it not for people like Peter Akinola of Nigeria and Peter Jensen of Sydney (to say nothing of the Bishop of Rochester) he could appear his own worst enemy.

I shall wait for the full transcript of his remarks, and suggest that others should also.

Update: There is an excellent and helpfully moderate post on this over at Bishop Alan’s Blog. Also well worth reading is Paul Vallely’s reflection on, effectively, why the archbishop’s media officer isn’t up to the job.

written by doug

One of the features of the current Anglican shenanigans is that obfuscation rules the day. The web simply spreads that obfuscation, and places self-starter pressure groups of every shade on a par with long established organisations. Most of these groups seem short on explaining their governance, or whether they are simply self-selecting.

I thought I might get somewhere with at least one of them when I saw that Anglican Mainstream (according to their FAQ page) was a registered charity in the UK. It says so: No 290112. So there ought, I thought, to be some official information available. Silly me. According to the Charity Commission, when I plugged this number into their search, this is registered charity number of The Oxford Centre for Mission Studies (OCMS), which has as its charitable objects “To advance education, training and research for the public benefit in Christian mission, theology and related areas.”

The last filed set of accounts of OCMS makes no mention of Anglican Mainstream that I could see as a particular activity of the organisation. So I am confused. What is the legal status of one organisation operating under the charity number, and (presumably therefore) the charitable status of another? What exactly is going on here?

written by doug

The Anglican Communion is clearly in a parlous state at present, and there are a variety of current reasons for that. However, blogging my way through the 39 articles has brought home to me some of the ways in which today’s problems have their roots in the past. There are two particular aspects I want to note by way of concluding the series, before ending with some positive affirmations.

The first is that except for the fairly light revisions reducing Cranmer’s forty-two articles in 1552 to thirty-nine by 1571, the articles have been largely stranded in the past. Cranmer’s original work represented the high-water-mark of Calvinism in the Church of England (though Cranmer was never a five-point Calvinist), which somehow managed to live with most of his 1552 Prayer Book and the greater part of his formulation of the articles, long after the tide had receded to a far more moderate Calvinist position. In various ways the retention of episcopacy, the battle against the Puritans, the survival of the cathedral tradition, the routine of a daily liturgy of set prayers that also incorporated readings from the deutero-canonical books, and very noticeably the trauma of the Interregnum all combined to offset that Calvinism with something much more self-conscious about its (small-c) catholicity. In some ways the articles were always out of date, fighting the battles of a very particular period in history, and yet never updated.

In legal terms, the articles are now downgraded to historic formularies (although it took a long time to so) and clearly one among others. This is the preface to the declaration of assent required of all clergy:

[The Church of England] professes the faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation. Led by the Holy Spirit, it has borne witness to Christian truth in its historic formularies, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, The Book of Common Prayer and the Ordering of Bishops, Priests and Deacons.

In practical terms, most lay Anglicans are fairly unaware of them. If asked about what statements of faith are used by Anglicans, most would be more likely to answer in terms of the catholic creeds. The articles themselves, of course, strongly suggest their own reformability by the place they give to scripture, and the statements they make about the possibility of error even in ecumenical councils. Unfortunately, no-one found a way to reform them in practice, however needed or desirable such reform might have been. One thing I believe I have shown in my examination is that there is no group currently in the Church of England that really upholds the articles in their entirety, however much some small conservative evangelical groups like Church Society claim to do.

This lack of an agreed mechanism for, or possibility of, reforming the articles (and perhaps thereby making them a useful set of boundary markers for the contemporary church’s thinking and practice) leads into the second problem that seems to occur again and again. There is no really coherent ecclesiology in the articles, whether that be working out the relationship between congregations and the catholic church, or the eschatological nature of a divine society in human and historical institutional form. The Holy Spirit gets short shrift in the articles. Assertions about a national church are hardly well-grounded theologically, and depend on a mix of misapplied Old Testament typology and a pragmatic obedience to the monarch as the only alternative to papal authority.

The role ascribed to the Crown-in-Parliament becomes in practice a fig-leaf for covering diversity and calling it comprehensiveness. But once Parliament admitted first Dissenters and then Roman Catholics, its role as a lay assembly of the church gathered round the chief lay minister of the Realm could no longer be upheld with any integrity even by the most romantic, Erastian or imaginative Anglican. The question of where authority resided had always had an inadequate answer, but now even that inadequate answer was exposed as a fiction.

Furthermore, this model was not fully capable of export, although it appeared to function within the British empire about as well as it functioned at home. But in the USA, with its democratic traditions, lay votes were far more powerful than anywhere else, and its polity was far less episcopal than its name suggested. And in the newly formed post-imperial cultures of Africa, even among evangelicals, bishops attained a power and authority that would embarrass many a European Catholic. (That confusion worse confounds the dialogue of the deaf between many Anglican bishops today.) It seems clear to me that what Anglicanism needs most is a vast amount of ecclesiological work, that actually tries to address some of these many inherited problems.

Having said all that, you may be wondering whether there’s any point to being an Anglican after such an indictment. But if my trawl through the articles has revealed what I see as significant problems, it has also helped me clarify where I think the strengths lie.

• Its doctrinal statements exist in the context of a worshipping church, and more of what it believes can be found in its liturgy than in abstracted arguments.
• It shows a commitment to rooting itself in the scriptures guided by the scriptural reasoning of the patristic era especially, but also tradition more generally.
• It tends to distrust absolute commitments to inerrant truth and absolute authority, even if it achieves this both through and at the cost of muddle and mess.
• It is necessarily particular, and if that has proved to be a real problem in its concept of monarch and national church, it is nonetheless essentially committed to inculturation.
• The now outdated model of Crown-on-Parliament still bears witness to an essential role for lay people in the governance of the church, which is always balanced by its commitment to episcopacy.
• Wherever possible, it is a both-and church, and not an either-or one, however confused and confusing that con sometimes be.

I’m still reasonably convinced I’m in the right place.

written by doug

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

I take the two final articles together, since they raise essentially the same concern. (Not purely from a desire to be finished with this series!) Their statements perhaps, first of all, remind us that the articles are in many respects more like boundary markers than a confession of faith. Certain positions are dealt with and options ruled out simply because they are there, rather than from any significant internal logic.

XXXVIII. Of Christian men’s Goods, which are not common
The Riches and Goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast. Notwithstanding, every man ought, of such things as he possesseth, liberally to give alms to the poor, according to his ability.

XXXIX. Of a Christian man’s Oath
As we confess that vain and rash Swearing is forbidden Christian men by our Lord Jesus Christ, and James his Apostle, so we judge, that Christian Religion cloth not prohibit, but that a man may swear when the Magistrate requireth, in a cause of faith and charity, so it be done according to the Prophet’s teaching, in justice, judgement, and truth.

They are interesting less for what they actually say, and more as an example of the problems which the stress on “the plain meaning of scripture” could lead to. In the case of the first it would be quite easy to infer from Luke’s work generally, and the example of the apostolic church in Acts specifically, that the preferable model of the church is of a community that holds all things in common. Yet at the same time Paul’s letters clearly reflect social differences continuing to exist in the church, and the various house churches dependent on both the wealth and generosity of heads of households. Indeed, in the case of Phoebe, for example, it is her model generosity as a patron of Paul’s that is expected to commend her to the church in Rome.

In this case, there is clear diversity in the scriptures, and the enthusiastic picture painted by Luke of the eschatological community is relatively quickly sidelined in the face of a call to be generous with wealth, rather than surrender ownership. Within a few centuries the idea of common life becomes part of the vocation of monks and their witness to a more demanding form of discipleship. The day to day world of social interaction in a world of inequality is confronted by the more prevalent scriptural call to generosity, and not by this early form of communal existence. Here the tradition steers the reader between competing but equally plain texts.

In the second case, it is less obvious that there are competing texts in the face of a plain command; “Do not swear at all.” (Matt 5:34). Far from referring to “vain and rash Swearing” as the article puts it, the commandment in context refers to the taking of solemn oaths before the Lord. The difference between the oaths the text refers to, and those the article refers to appears to lie not in the rashness, but in whether they are voluntary self-decided oaths, or those required by authority (not addressed in the text). Unlike the idea of communal living, there are no other obvious counter-examples to this command in the New Testament, although Paul is reported as being under a vow (Acts 18:18 – which need not include swearing an oath) and Hebrews makes play of God’s swearing an oath (Heb 7:28). Peter’s swearing of an oath at his denial is hardly intended as a positive example to follow.

Looking at the text here, it seems rather more obvious that the “plain meaning” of scripture is more on the side of the Anabaptists than the Anglican Reformers, although it has to be said very clearly that there is no direct reference to a situation where an oath is required by a competent authority, far less a competent Christian authority. Noticeably, recent precedent, even in the Church of England, has given more credence to the Anabaptist reading: clergy on being ordained or licensed are now allowed to affirm their vows rather than swear them. The article, however, is quite clear that the “plain meaning” is that judged to be a fair interpretation by those who hold authority, and that traditional interpretations together with what seems a reasonable requirement of authority, will guide that interpretation.

What does seem evident is that not just the existence of the articles as a guide to how the Church reads scripture, but the content of these and others of them, continue to point to a need for authoritative interpretation, and a place for both present authority and past tradition. The idea of the “plain meaning of scripture” is one which is not meant to include just anyone’s reading of what the Bible says. Indeed these last articles exclude certain “plain meanings” in favour of (in article 38) other reasonable readings and (in article 39) traditional and pragmatic understandings of the scriptures. The Anabaptists showed the Anglican Reformers some of the possibilities of what sola scriptura might mean, and they did not like what they saw. The articles, and the continued testimony of the prayer book, both by their existence and their content, show that while the primacy of scripture might be deeply valued in the Anglican Church, one could never describe its position as “scripture alone”.

written by doug