Reinventing Anglicanism: A Vision of Confidence, Community and Engagement in Anglican Christianity

By Bruce Kaye

Anglicanism world-wide faces many problems in the post-Empire era. Churches that were originally founded as colonial and missionary outposts by Great Britain and the United States have now become autonomous Anglican provinces; and what used to be a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon group of churches in the northern hemisphere has become a truly global community, most of whose members live in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. Using the experience of the Anglican Church in Australia, Bruce Kaye tracks the modern story of Australian Anglicanism and reconsiders key elements of the New Testament, the English Reformation, and the ongoing theological traditions that relate to this story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2004
• ISBN: 9780898697667

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

There is no doubt that conflict and hostility make for good television, at least as perceived by those who produce television programs. Such conflict feeds our voyeuristic interest in power. Malcolm Muggeridge, who in his day had a vivid sense of the power of the press and television, records an occasion when a friend suddenly confessed to him that he did not know if he was licking the right boots. It introduced a discussion of what Muggeridge described as that ‘inexhaustibly fascinating’ subject of power. This interest of the media in power may account for the steady stream of stories about power politics and conflict in Anglican churches. The 1998 Lambeth Conference was a media bonanza, because it combined all the elements for dramatic media stories: conflict which involved bishops, sex and race. Within days of the announcement in January 2002 of the retirement of George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury the British papers were littered with stories of intrigue and power plays for the appointment of his successor. In Australia the press love to portray conflict among the Anglicans, especially among the bishops.

Even taking into account the fascination of the media with conflict, it nonetheless seems to me that there has been increasing conflict among Anglicans in the last forty years. There have been serious conflicts before, I am sure, but we have been witnessing sustained conflict over a period of time. It is no accident that this has coincided with a period of quite remarkable change in the institutions of Anglicanism world wide as Anglicans have had to respond to changes in marriage patterns, the role of women and same sex relations, the advent of effective birth control and changing perceptions of authority.

But what actually is going on here? Two streams of influence have come together in this period to create a confluence of change and challenge to Anglicans’ sense of their identity and the shape of their institutions. An endogenous stream flowing from the inner history of this tradition of Christianity has come to a point of significant crisis. The tradition of the Church of England and its style of Christianity has now moved outside the confines of the English culture and social institutions which formed it. It is now scattered in many countries and cultures which have little consonance with the English seed from which this straggling rose has sprung. The journey of this faith tradition has spread out into a delta of multiple streams and locations and it is not clear where the river runs. Secondly, there is an exogenous stream of external influences brought by the impact of global changes and by the variety of the local contexts in which Anglicans live and practise their faith.

This environment of change means that institutional authority is less strong and thus is open to more challenge. That inevitably means that there is more exercise of power in these communities, and that means life in the community is more political as people test the power of groupings. Because the church is essentially a voluntarist community and professedly religious, the conflict is verbal rather than physical. A great deal of rhetoric is to be heard in connection with people carving out elements of influence and territory. That rhetoric often focuses on three areas in this tradition: the English Reformation of the sixteenth century, the Bible (especially the New Testament) and the broader theological tradition of Christianity of which Anglicans are a part. People do not want to be called fundamentalists, though others think of them in those terms. Others do not want to be called liberals, though they are thought of in those terms. The naming game is really part of the rhetoric of claiming publicly defensible parts of the tradition for oneself and ascribing other less defensible parts to others.

If we are interested in the future of Anglicanism, how might we respond to this crisis? Obviously there are a number of different ways into the question, and a number are clearly represented in the literature. We might deal with the identity challenge by seeking to demonstrate that some particular marker or characteristic is the key identifier of Anglicanism. In the third quarter of the twentieth century there was a habit of saying that what marked Anglicanism out was that it sustained a liturgical pattern of worship. So dress and style of choreography were the bearers of Anglican identity. It hardly made sense if you lived in a predominantly Roman Catholic or Orthodox country. Episcopacy was claimed by some to be the distinctive mark, but that only made sense if your horizon was Geneva and its children. Yet others said synodical decision making, but other churches have that too. Some approached the problem by trying to find a distinctive Anglican doctrine or practice that marked out Anglican identity. It has been all very confusing and a little like the search for the lost chord. It is not surprising that the quest for the distinguishing marker seeped away into the sand.

A variation of this approach suggested that Anglicanism was identified by a certain characteristic ethos or style. Stephen Neill made this a popular approach, but it proved very difficult to be specific about the style, except that maybe it looked a little like the common room of an Oxbridge college.

Yet another approach to the identity issue has been to see Anglicanism as essentially a transitional form of Christianity whose great role is to be a bridge in bringing the churches back together again. So it used to be claimed that Anglicans were talking to more ecumenical partners than any other church. Such an approach looked to the Church of North India, and perhaps a little less enthusiastically to the Church of South India, as examples of the way for the future of the unity of the body of Christ. So the dialogue with Roman Catholics (ARCIC) took on great programmatic significance. This approach has now been given an extra impulse by the formation of a joint Anglican–Roman Catholic bishops group to work out the practical steps that might follow the agreements said to have been reached in the ARCIC declarations. Conceiving themselves as bridge builder in the process of ecclesial and ecclesiastical incorporatism has been and is still a way that Anglicans are using to deal with their identity problems.

Organisational development and acceptance is another way. Thus we notice the emergence in the Anglican Communion of new organisational arrangements which are increasingly episcopal. The growth in size and presentational significance of the Lambeth Conference of Bishops in the second half of the twentieth century has been a remarkable feature of worldwide Anglicanism. The establishment of the Anglican Consultative Council reverted to a more conciliar model, with representatives from the provinces, including bishops, clergy and lay people. But now we have seen the emergence of a meeting of the primates, at first once, then occasionally, and now each year, initially for consultation and private encouragement and support, but now with a public agenda and a program of activities which compete for funds in the budget. The development of economical and fast international air travel and of efficient and sophisticated communications has meant that it is possible for the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury to be extended and enhanced, though that process has placed great strains on the incumbent, not least in relation to his responsibilities in the Church of England.

All of these approaches are very understandable and are undoubtedly ways of handling the identity challenge facing Anglicans at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Another way of looking at the present issue is to look at the rhetoric used in the debates between Anglicans. Getting behind the rhetoric to find out what people really believe is always difficult. But an examination of the rhetoric would provide a basis not so much for identifying what people using the rhetoric actually believe in the quiet of their own rooms, but rather would reveal what they think are the elements in Anglicanism to which they can publicly appeal with advantage. One fascinating aspect of such an approach would be what it revealed about the nature of the power which was consciously or unconsciously being used and adopted by the deployment of this rhetoric.

The issue of power, politics and authority has been opened up in a most helpful way by Jeffrey Pfeffer. While he is primarily concerned with the business corporation, his analysis is germane to the present situation of Anglicanism. He makes a distinction between power, which is the effective changing of another’s behaviour, and authority, which is power exercised within an agreed institutionalised framework. This is not dissimilar to the contrast between binary and ternary relationships developed by Alistair Mant. A binary relationship is, for example, one between a master and a servant—a one-to-one power relationship. A ternary relationship is one which exists within the framework of agreed values and structures to which both parties are committed.¹ In an open and social context, power in Pfeffer’s sense becomes political power. In order to highlight the qualities of political power Pfeffer has in mind, I list some of the contrasts he makes between dimensions in a bureaucratic model and a political power model.² Clearly there is much in these comparisons which shows that a good deal of the activity in Anglicanism falls within what Pfeffer calls the ‘political power model’. Given the present circumstances of Anglicanism, that should not be too surprising, though it is hardly a pattern to be content with in the long run.

People often appeal to history in this rhetoric. That reflects the accepted traditional character of Anglicanism. This appeal to history is very often an appeal to the history of the sixteenth-century Reformation. It is of course not always clear whether this appeal to the Reformation is made because it is a publicly suitable appeal which can be fitted into the ambitions of activists or because of an unambiguous desire to retain the qualities of the Reformation. After all, the will to power is an all too human quality and can be presented in a myriad of ways, just as church politics can be very subtle and relentless.

But this appeal to history is not simply a matter of demonstrating what ‘actually happened’ in some Rankean sense. Rather, it is a matter of interpreting the past in the light of the present, or of seeking to give sense to the present in the light of the past. I believe that this process, properly conducted in the public arena of open conversation, is not only inevitable but essentially correct for Anglicans to be engaged in. It follows from this that such an interpretation of the Anglican past must be part of any continuing public conversation and, furthermore, that this conversation must be sufficiently informed to stand up to critical and scholarly examination. For this to happen, there needs to be some acceptance of the importance of this kind of conversation. That was the claim of Richard Hooker, as it was of Irenaeus and many others.

What is true in regard to history and the particular example of the sixteenth-century Reformation is equally true in regard to the other principal foci of appeal in Anglican rhetoric, namely Scripture and the ongoing theological tradition. These appeals are susceptible to the same kinds of conscious or unconscious corruptions, as they are also open to the kind of public conversation which can enhance both the understanding of the Anglican tradition and the quality of the contemporary conversation among Anglicans.

Rhetoric is a form of influence and an instrument of power in a loose-knit community such as the Anglican Communion, or indeed the various national Anglican churches. The management and manipulation of information is another form of power, and that would also provide an interesting point of entry into understanding the present identity issues in Anglicanism.

Similarly, patronage is a discrete exercise of power. It used to have a great deal of influence in the Church of England in clergy appointments in a formal sense. What I have in mind here, however, is the more informal exercise of patronage whereby the right people are enabled to find their way into the right places at the right time for them to be able to enlarge their own and their patron’s influence. Tracking the lines of personal and institutional patronage would be a fascinating way into the issues of contemporary Anglican identity.

However, the position of this book is different from these approaches to the question. I have approached this matter by regarding Anglicanism as a tradition, indeed a discrete tradition within the broader tradition of Christianity. The present crisis in Anglicanism is created by the confluence of the two streams: the external historical developments of the second half of the twentieth century and the point of development from national church to international Communion of churches which is the story of the last three hundred years of Anglicanism. Each of these influences has an ambiguous impact on contemporary Anglicanism and is capable of moving the tradition in different, even mutually contradictory, directions. The future of Anglicanism will depend to a great degree on how the tradition responds to these two forces. It will need to find the resources within its own journey to enable it not only to respond but also to reinvent itself in a way that is both creative and faithful. In that sense my position on Anglicanism at the dawn of the twenty-first century is that it is a discrete tradition of Christianity in need of reinvention.

In order to give the discussion some focus, I shall take Australia as an example of the problems. It serves that purpose well because it has some of the problems in sharp form and it also happens to be the form of Anglicanism I know best.³ I recognise that this example will not meet every particular form of the Anglican issues, but the conversation in global Anglicanism must inevitably be to some extent a conversation from different particulars. Writing from within a particular part of the tradition enables others to listen in on the conversation. This example may also contribute in another way, in that Australian Anglicanism is underrepresented in the literature, largely because Australians in the past have tended not to record their story or to have written about its meaning. A small contribution on that front might be useful.

Conscious of these limitations and fully recognising that Australia is different from other places, even though it highlights the central issues before Anglicanism at the present time, I believe that the form of Christianity embodied in Anglicanism is a modest but important part of the general spectrum of Christianity and that its reinvention is a pressing question for Anglicans and others. From this position this book seeks to present an argument which tries to take the tradition seriously and pays attention to the current dynamics in Anglicanism by looking at those elements most used in the contemporary rhetoric, namely the New Testament, the English Reformation of the sixteenth century and the ongoing theological tradition. These sources will be looked at selectively: the New Testament in order to raise some issues sharply, the Reformation to test its relevance and to engage with its place in the journey of Anglicanism, and the theological tradition in order to illustrate a few ways forward. Those elements will be referred to in relation to three crucial issues for modern Anglicans: what kind of confidence can they have in the present uncertain times, what kind of community can or should they be, and how can they appropriately engage with their contemporaries?

This approach to Anglicanism leads me to view Anglicanism as a tradition with certain qualities.

1.   Anglicanism has survived, as one of the discrete traditions within western Christianity, because it contained within it crucial elements of a theological kind which have made it resilient. Those marks are:

a.   a conception of God who is participating in the human condition—an incarnational God

b.   connectedness in its ecclesial conceptions—a real sense that God is present

c.   an instinct about authority which derives from this and which is marked by qualities of open-endedness, porous borders, tentativeness, contingency awareness, and an authority experienced and exercised by the whole people of God

d.   enmeshment in the social and cultural context and thus being guided by an awareness of both contingency and providence in regard to both ecclesial and social institutionality

e.   a particular way of dealing with origins in relation to Scripture which sets it in a context of continuity with the early church.

2.   The current ‘moment’ which faces Anglicanism is one of a series in its history. Some of the earlier moments include

a.   the Saxon–Celtic interface, marking out a tradition of influence and a monastic presence

b.   the Roman invasion, or mission, of Augustine, marking out a conception of territory and organisation

c.   the Norman conquest, marking out a pattern of control and, for the church, legal separation and some institutional independence

d.   the Tudor triumph, marking out a tradition of nationalism and statutory control which went along with a religious revival

e.   and the imperial colonial phase, marking a tradition taken to foreign parts in the clothes of empire, redolent of the domestic imperial conceptions of Tudor nationalism.

All of these moments have carried with them cultural influences which have shaped the particular presentations of the tradition and provided the opening point for subsequent generations. They have contributed to the accumulation of memory, of the furniture our predecessors lived with and which now occupies various rooms in the house of Anglican community memory. The earlier moments are mentioned here by way of illustration. The last two will be more fully dealt with in the course of this discussion.

3.   The current situation is marked by two predecessor paradigms:

a.   Domestic national imperialism. The Reformation monuments are cast in the language and institutional assumptions of Tudor imperialism, and these distort the religious perception.

b.   Colonial imperialism. Here institutionalities in the church such as law, property and the means and power to decide are influenced by the assumptions of overseas imperialism.

4.   To imagine what Anglicanism might be like in the future requires not just re-conceptualising but also gaining some critical distance from these predecessor paradigms. This is in fact a classic example of contextualised theology. The reinvention has to struggle with mental and institutional paradigms inherited from variations of English imperial notions going back to the sixteenth century. That struggle is complicated by the widespread attachment in Anglicanism to the sixteenth-century Reformation legislative monuments, which are clothed in Tudor political conceptions.

5.   The underlying key issues in such a reinvention of Anglicanism are confidence to act in environments which are not always sympathetic, the nature of ecclesial community life in a voluntarist situation, and the pattern of engagement with the host society. These three issues constitute the key challenges in the reinventing of Anglicanism.

This book therefore begins with a brief account of the journey of Anglicanism and an interpretation of the Australian situation. The three central chapters are concerned with confidence, community and engagements with others. I argue that Anglicans should seek a confidence appropriate to an attempt at persuasive resonance with what God is doing in the creation, that Anglicans should be nurturing a community of interdependent diversity and that their engagement with their fellows should be that of respectful visionaries. The final chapter takes up some suggestions about imagination and change in the reinvention of Anglicanism.

The substance of the manuscript was completed in 2002, but events since then have only confirmed in my mind the relevance of the thesis argued here. September 11 and its associated uncovering of conflict and instability in our world, and the challenge to international institutions like the United Nations by the actions of so-called coalitions of the willing, are mirrored in the international politics of the Anglican Communion. We truly continue to live in interesting times, and in such times we do well to go back to our roots and discover how we might reinvent ourselves in ways which are at once creative and faithful.

Some authors are able to write in relative isolation. I am not one of those. This book represents a vast array of information and insights which I have learned from others over the years. Indeed, the exploration of the deeper roots of the Anglican tradition has been and continues to be a fascinating journey of learning and appreciation of the vast richness of the work of specialist scholars, especially in such areas as medieval and early modern history and social and political theory. In writing this book I have had numerous discussions with a number of people from which I have learned an enormous amount. My friends, particularly Keith Mason and Hugh Mackay, have heard the ideas in this book in a variety of forms over recent years. I have benefited greatly from their conversation. Stanley Hauerwas has also been a friend and conversationalist over many years, and I constantly find myself in his debt in that conversation. Phillip Browning has maintained a continuous stream of stimulation and encouragement, which I acknowledge. I hope that he will take that acknowledgment as encouragement for his own pilgrimage in the church. This book has gone through a number of gestations, and parts of the text at various stages have been read by a number of friends and colleagues. I am grateful to them all for their comments and only wish that I had the wisdom and courage to accept all their advice. I am grateful to Chris Pfeiffer of Openbook Publishers for wise strategic advice and encouragement and to John Pfitzner and the staff at Openbook. Being a publisher of theology in Australia is a daunting task, and I salute the courage and determination of Openbook in sustaining that role. The community of St Michael’s, Vaucluse, has heard a number of the themes in this book in the form of sermons. They are an infinitely patient community, which is just as well probably. My best thanks go to my wife Louise for her support. She has listened to her husband’s ramblings, put up with his late nights and early mornings in the study with patience and interest, and experienced the occasional burst of excitement when she thought he had got something right.

Especially with a book such as this I want to express my thanks to that extraordinarily resilient community of people across the length and breadth of Australia who call themselves Anglicans. It has been my privilege to serve this community for the past nine years. Beyond them is that galaxy of God’s people who for a millennium and a half have constituted the living members of the Anglican tradition and without whose faith and testimony we could not even begin to think about such a thing as reinventing Anglicanism.

CHAPTER ONE

THE JOURNEY OF ANGLICANISM

It was in going out to a place that he did not know that Abraham acted by faith, according to the writer to the Hebrews. ‘By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going’ (Hebrews 11:8). That journey motif has been used throughout Christian history to describe not only the lives of individuals but also the life of the people of God as the pilgrim church, the people of God following the call of God. That journey motif implies that this people know the God whom they serve and to whose call they respond, but it also implies that they are learning and discovering in the course of that journey. That truth is relevant not only to individuals and the whole Christian community but also to the groups and traditions which go to make up the whole. It is a model which applies to Anglicans and their tradition of faith.

Where that journey becomes distinctive and how its distinctiveness is to the be characterised are matters which we will explore during the course of this book. For the present, however, we need to clarify a little the nature of this journey and how it has been understood. It is not just an interesting story to be told while enjoying a cool drink under a gum tree; it is a life-changing question for Anglican communities and their friends, because in the present generation Anglicanism faces one of the most important interpretative questions in its history. As a tradition of Christianity formed and nurtured in the particularities of England’s social and cultural experiences, Anglicanism now finds the centre of its numerical growth in the southern hemisphere. At the start of the third millennium more than half of all the people who go to Anglican churches in any given week do so on the continent of Africa. This numerical change and the different circumstances faced by Anglicans, together with new liaisons between different parts of the Anglican Communion, lay behind the notorious conflict at the 1998 Lambeth Conference over issues of sexuality.⁴

How are we to account for this tradition of Christianity? How can we characterise types of Christian faith as they develop over centuries of time? In this book I want to argue that Anglicanism is a discrete and particular tradition within Christianity and that it is best understood by looking first at its history and location. Such an approach enables us to mark out some of the leading characteristics of this tradition, and that will enable Anglicans to deal creatively and faithfully with the transition in which they are currently involved and in that process more faithfully reinvent themselves, their practices and understandings.

The first task, then, is to identify the journey of Anglicanism, and the first and contested interpretative question is when that journey should be reckoned to have started.

The beginnings of the journey

Anglican churches around the world claim to take their heritage back to the apostles and to Jesus himself. The constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia makes it an unchangeable part of its identity. The claim is that this church is the recipient and custodian of genuine apostolic Christianity. Those same churches also claim that they look to the Church of England as the particular line of heritage to which they belong within the broader compass of Christianity. Many again take the further step of identifying the monuments of the sixteenth-century Reformation as the particular expression of English Christianity to which they look. These monuments are the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal and the Thirty-nine Articles. In appealing to these Reformation monuments as ‘classic texts’, it is easy to forget that they were created in a very specific context and are particular kinds of documents. These monuments of the English Reformation were legal documents enacted by the king’s parliament. That legal garb was itself not neutral on the political question of the relation between the Christian ‘empire’ of England and the ‘imperium’ of the bishop of Rome.

The English reformers of the sixteenth century appealed to the early church, and in particular to the first four centuries, against what they described as the innovations of the bishop of Rome. In doing so, they located the origins of their own ecclesial tradition in the earliest phase of Christianity. That claim is another side of their appeal to Scripture, which took the appeal back from the early church to the apostles and to Jesus himself as the historic incarnate Son of God. In making these claims, they knew clearly what was at stake: it was the identity of their own form of Christianity.

In their disputes with the Romans, the English reformers quite understandably sought to appeal to this longer and broader tradition stretching back to the apostles in order to secure their theological point against the bishop of Rome. Cranmer’s essay on the doctrine of the Lord’s supper is presented as the ‘Catholic Doctrine’. He appeals to the New Testament and then, on a continuous line, to the early fathers of Christianity. He wished to show that his doctrine has a better and more apostolic pedigree than the innovations of his opponents.⁵

When the journey of Anglicanism began is thus a contentious issue. To claim, let alone simply to assume, that it dates from the sixteenth century calls for as much justification as any other proposed point of commencement. Space does not allow in this book for a comprehensive treatment of this matter, and therefore I can only point to the lines of an argument for my claim that the story must be construed as originating from the very early centuries of British Christianity. Given the privileged place in much contemporary Anglicanism of the sixteenth-century monuments, that argument would begin with the understanding of the English reformers themselves that they were not innovators but reformers.

In their appeal to the past, priority was given to the apostolic past as contained in Scripture. Indeed Scripture is made the touchstone for knowing those things which it is necessary to believe in order to be saved. The appeal to Scripture is the core of the appeal to the apostolic past, and its authority for the Reformers reflects their instinct to be faithful in their tradition to the apostolic faith. It is in that faithfulness that they will be connected to the historic Christ and the incarnation of the Son of God. That framework of appeal to the past meant that these reformers saw Scripture as not alone but as pre-eminent and, in that pre-eminence therefore, always necessary and unique. The instinct to defend a practice by appeal to the ancient past and the pattern of development between that past and the present can be seen in the preface to the Ordinal. It makes the historically dubious claim that there had always been a threefold order of bishops, priests and deacons since the time of the apostles. That the accuracy of this appeal is not now accepted by historians does not remove the point that these reformers wanted to be able to locate their practice in a tradition which could claim a lineage back to the apostles.⁶

The English reformers were not uncritical of the recent past in England. The Preface to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer speaks of the ‘late unhappy confusions’. The introduction ‘Of ceremonies’ deplores the diversity of the liturgical use of Salisbury, York, Bangor or Lincoln and decrees that henceforth in the nation there will be but one use. The political agenda and its assumptions which lay behind the various Acts of Uniformity and their significance in the journey of Anglicans will occupy us later, but it is clear that the appeal to the past by the English reformers served a rhetorical purpose and also at the same time revealed something of the traditional nature of the their faith.

The claim of the principle English reformers that they were the representatives of historic Christianity and that the pope was an innovator has been largely sidelined in recent centuries. In particular it has failed to hold ground in the public argument about the identity of Anglicanism. On the contrary, the Roman rhetoric that this was a church brought forth late in time and occasioned by the marital difficulties of Henry has won wide acceptance. This reading of Anglicanism has been part of and has served some interests in various Anglican ecumenical dialogues. Even Anglican theologians have come to accept central elements of this claim. It is, of course, much simpler to construe Anglicanism as existing within a horizon which reaches only to the sixteenth century. There can be no doubt that at the Reformation a fundamental break with Rome occurred and that the English church claimed to be able to sustain itself from within its own resources. The point is also underlined by the defining presence given to the formularies of the English Reformation in many Anglican constitutions around the world. The Roman Catholic author Aidan Nichols has recently taken this as the basis for a sustained critique of the Church of England.⁷ Even recent Anglican reports have given voice to this interpretation of Anglicanism, looking only as far as the sixteenth-century horizon.⁸

It is therefore apparent that the claim that Anglicanism can only properly be understood in the light of its long history back to the early centuries of British Christianity is actually highly contentious. For many it