Charles Gore: Radical Anglican: Charles Gore and his writings

By Peter Waddell

Charles Gore (1853-1932) is a towering figure in Anglicanism whose writings and lectures shaped theological discussion for decades. They still offer a comprehensive vision of the Christian faith and provide a platform for exploring key issues in social and economic justice. This collection of his writings draws on published and unpublished works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Release date: Sep 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848256569

Book preview

Introduction

Who was Charles Gore?

Charles Gore (1853–1932) was a towering figure in the late Victorian and Edwardian Church of England. A great theologian, he was once identified with scandalous radicalism in connection with biblical criticism and christological dogma. Later, however, he was the strong defender of orthodoxy and the scourge of those whose theological speculations he judged to deviate from the required standard of belief. He was a bishop, successively of Worcester, Birmingham and Oxford. He was a Christian Socialist, who thought the British economy and society worked in a way diametrically opposite to that required by the gospel. He was a disciple of Jesus, who longed for a simpler, purer and more radical Church: a vision which found expression in his founding of the Society, later the Community, of the Resurrection.

Just one hundred years ago, Gore was a spiritual force in both church and nation in ways barely conceivable for most bishops today. Yet few today, even among the theologically inclined, are familiar with his name or his significance. Michael Ramsey’s words have come true:

it will be a tragedy if men are ordained to the ministry of the Church of England in a state of ignorance of Gore’s greatest writings, and of unawareness of his impact as prophet and divine. The clamour of our false prophets that we should be obsessed with the contemporary in our theology may lead us to overlook the timeless giants of the past.¹

This book is intended as a small step towards putting that right.

Charles Gore was born in 1853, the fourth child of senior civil servant Charles Alexander Gore, from an aristocratic Irish background, and Augusta Ponsonby, second daughter of the Earl of Bessborough. He seems to have been much loved. He was raised Christian, and never seems to have found faith anything other than natural. However, his later Anglo-Catholicism was not his parents’ doing: the Gores’ Christianity was of a fairly conventional Low Church style. Later in life, Gore recalled that when eight or nine he read

a book by a Protestant author – a Presbyterian, I think – entitled Father Clement, about the conversion of a Catholic priest to Protestantism . . . I knew nothing about Catholicism, except as a strange superstition, called Popery. But the book described confession and absolution, fasting, the Real Presence, the devotion of the Three Hours, the use of incense, etc., and I felt instinctively and at once that this sort of sacramental religion was the religion for me.²

In 1866, this impressionable, Catholic-minded teenager went to Harrow, where he encountered the deeply formative influence of B. F. Westcott. A sermon preached by Westcott on ‘The Disciplined Life’ touched a deep chord in Gore’s soul with its appeal to his young hearers to risk all, abandoning comfort and privilege to follow Jesus like a new Francis or Benedict.³ Gore’s life, not least the founding of the Community of the Resurrection, can be read as an answer to that call. The same note would sound repeatedly in his own teaching and preaching.

It soon became apparent that Gore was intellectually brilliant. In 1871, he was elected a scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he obtained Firsts in the Classics Moderations of 1872 and then in the Greats of 1875. He was then promptly elected a Fellow of Trinity College. Of even greater significance to Gore, 1875 also saw the first meeting of what came to be known as the ‘Holy Party’. This was a group of close friends, Anglo-Catholic, academic and idealist – both in the technical sense of being deeply influenced by the Idealist philosophy then current in Oxford, and in the straightforward sense of being fired with enthusiasm and hope for the Church and society. Gore, Holland, Talbot, Illingworth, Paget . . . these are some of the most brilliant and influential theologians and pastors of the years to come. They would meet once a year, for a week, till 1914, taking over a country rectory to relax, study, pray and plan. One thing planned was the volume which in 1889 propelled Gore to national fame, or notoriety: Lux Mundi, of which more anon.

Gore was ordained deacon in 1876 and priest in 1878. A curacy of sorts was served over a few months in 1879 at Christ Church, Bootle, and St Margaret’s, Toxteth – but with much time spent commuting between Oxford and Liverpool! This, together with a brief and miserable stint (largely spent on sick leave through depression and exhaustion) as Vicar of Radley, Oxford, marked the sum total of Gore’s parochial ministry until retirement. Within a year of priestly ordination he was off to train clergy as Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon Theological College. Shortly thereafter, his reputation as a brilliant, up-and-coming young priest was confirmed when in 1883 he was invited to become the first Principal of Pusey House.

Pusey House had been established to promote the legacy of E. B. Pusey (1800–82), one of the leaders of the Catholic Revival. It was to be a lively centre of Anglo-Catholic worship, theology and mission at the heart of Oxford University. Gore seemed the natural choice as Principal, and the vision flourished. Then, by most Puseyite lights, disaster struck. In 1889 Lux Mundi appeared, edited by Gore, promising to ‘put the Catholic faith into its right relation to modern intellectual and moral problems’.⁴ One such problem was posed by biblical criticism, which had undermined confidence in traditional conceptions of the authority of the Old Testament. In his essay on ‘Inspiration’, Gore put the Catholic faith in right relation to that problem by accepting large swathes of the critics’ work, and denying that it in any way undermined Christianity. Not even the apparent endorsement of Davidic authorship of a psalm by Jesus should trouble those who accepted the critics’ view that it was not the king’s work. Jesus had been simply engaging his interlocutors on their own terms, without meaning to pronounce upon the critical question. Indeed he did not know the answer to that question. The incarnation of the Son of God involved a real self-emptying of all that would make truly human existence impossible – one such thing being divine omniscience.

The ensuing bitterness was intense. Gore was denounced as a destroyer of simple faith, and of capitulation to the enemies of the Church. Many have speculated that the experience scarred him for life, and explains his unbending conservatism with regard to New Testament criticism and his later episcopal stance as the jealous guardian of orthodoxy. The second element in that speculation is unfair: already in an 1887 booklet (The Clergy and the Creeds) Gore had indicated the limits of acceptable doctrinal diversity, and never wavered in that judgement thereafter. The first is fairer. Unquestionably, the pain of the crisis was among the sharpest of Gore’s life. Equally clear is that when the dust had settled, the Church of England had taken a great step towards meeting what had seemed a great intellectual threat.

Apologetics, though, was never enough for Gore. What mattered at least as much in those Pusey House days for him was the beginning of the Community of the Resurrection. Gore believed, says one founding member, ‘that the greatest need of the Church was a band of priests, pledged to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience,’ steeped in the classic traditions of the religious life, immersed in theological study and social action.⁵ The seed planted by Westcott’s sermon was germinating: Gore wanted a Church that was not just intellectually credible but that looked like its Lord – simple, free and radical. Gore was elected first Superior of the Community in 1892, and remained so until consecrated Bishop of Worcester in 1902. Thereafter he remained a Prelate Brother, paying annual visits to Mirfield (where the community had moved in 1899) and remaining deeply engaged with its work.

The Community clearly held an enduring place in Gore’s heart. However, as Alan Wilkinson notes, it is striking that Gore only actually lived with the brothers continuously for 14 months, and upon reflection declined to live at Mirfield after retirement.⁶ Perhaps community proved more attractive in the ideal than in reality. Certainly Walter Frere, Gore’s successor as Superior, doubted how suited to communal life Gore really was, and whether his dominant personality could ever truly be subordinated to the community. The sad coda comes in 1948/49 when an insecure Superior, annoyed at the continuing spell of the long-dead founder, ordered the destruction of some of Gore’s personal papers held at Mirfield. It remains unclear just how much precious material was lost.⁷

The Community mattered to Gore because Christianity was for him above all ‘the Way’: a practical life, a calling to be as salt and light in the world. The weakness of the Church could only partially be explained by the intellectual difficulties of faith. These mattered, but what really sapped Christianity’s power was her defeat – her surrender – in the political and economic arena. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, our national life ‘had been built up on the basis of profound revolt against the central law of Christian morality, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There are few things in history more astonishing than the silent acquiescence of the Christian world in the radical betrayal of its ethical foundation.’⁸ The Church would only recover when it remembered its social vision: when it preached and practised and effected the inalienable dignity of each human person, made in the image of God but now trampled by capitalism. This is why Gore was a Christian Socialist, and why at Pusey House in 1889 he became a founding member of the Christian Social Union (first as Vice-President under Westcott, and then as President between 1901 and 1911).

Gore was not a doctrinaire socialist, and occasionally declined the term. He was suspicious of overweaning state power, and far too convinced of personal and original sin to be seduced by revolutionary fantasies. He was committed not so much to a specific set of policies (though he had ideas), as to the basic principle that the law of the gospel – love, service, co-operation, personal dignity and duty – must order economic and political life. Clearly establish that, and the right policies would follow. Policies alone, however, would end in the same selfish, sinful mess they sought to remedy. He was always the preacher then, but this should not prevent us from recognizing that some of his political analysis – for example, on the ‘rights’ of private property (see p. 147) was extremely acute. On his death the New Statesman observed, ‘Charles Gore did more than any one man, except perhaps Westcott, to change the official attitude of the Church towards Labour; it is due to him, and to men like [him] . . . that the assumption usually made on the Continent that Christianity and Socialism are incompatible has never been accepted in England.’⁹

After Pusey House, and the miserable interlude at Radley, came the happiest days of Gore’s ministry. In 1894, he was appointed a Canon of Westminster Abbey, where he quickly established a reputation as a ‘star-turn’ in the pulpit. It was an intellectually fertile period as he turned out his most technical theological book, Dissertations on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation, along with a work of classic Anglican Eucharistic theology, The Body of Christ, and three popular biblical commentaries. He was not to enjoy himself so much again until retirement (again, in London): but 17 years of episcopacy intervened. Gore was appointed to Worcester in 1902, Birmingham in 1905 and Oxford in 1911.

Four features of Gore’s episcopal ministry stand out. First, for a man who had not flourished in parish ministry, he was a good pastor to the pastors. This does not mean he was lax: lazy or scandalous clergy got very short shrift. His biographer notes, however, that ‘his own infinite capacity for depression enlarged his powers of strength and consolation to others in their suffering’.¹⁰ He was generous with his money, with many impoverished clergy families grateful for books, Christmas presents, school fees and holidays. He also knew how to preach: his confirmation addresses, for instance, are a model of simplicity and depth.

Second, there is the bishop as builder. Scholar bishops sometimes lack the entrepreneurial vision, talents or the patience required to build or manage the structures that allow the Church to flourish. Not so Gore. In 1902, the sprawling city of Birmingham was part of Worcester Diocese, just as it had been when an insignificant settlement. Others had seen the need for change, but failed to effect it. Gore drove the new diocese project forwards, giving large amounts of his own money, and the new diocese was founded within three years. Equally vital, if less spectacular, work was done in Oxford where he set diocesan finances on a sound footing and established the Board of Finance.

The third feature of Gore’s episcopacy sometimes eclipses the others: the bishop as guardian of faith and minister of discipline. He believed that the Church of England was imperilled by three distinct tendencies. There were Modernists, who questioned the creedal miracles and affirmed the right of clergy to remain in office despite such disbelief. There were Evangelicals ready to affirm other Protestant bodies as fully ‘church’ even though they lacked, and did not care to recover, the historic episcopate (I use ‘historic episcopate’ as Gore would have done: to indicate bishops who are believed to stand in a direct line of episcopal succession, through the laying on of hands, with the Apostles). There were Anglo-Catholics apeing Roman liturgy and doctrine, disregarding the authority of their bishops and their ordination vows. Gore opened fire on all fronts. His discipline was firm – perhaps even harsh. A Worcestershire incumbent who questioned miracles found himself effectively driven from his living; the Benedictines of Caldey Island found their Visitor so unsympathetic that they fled to Rome.

In personal correspondence some years later, Gore defended his rigour:

I want to say a word about what you call ‘Rigidity’ and ‘drawing lines’. Surely one real function of the Church is to draw lines . . . if the Church is wisely liberal, it will draw lines as seldom as possible. But if it is at all true to its traditions and apostolic precedents, it must always appear as a body knowing it has an essential programme to preserve and therefore ‘drawing lines’ where this treasure is in danger of being invaded.¹¹

Yet for many, especially in recent times, the Church of England is – or should be – largely defined by its reluctance to exclude people or positions. When we ask what the merit of reading Gore today is, much will depend on how willing we are to hear a less accommodating voice.

Which brings us to our fourth observation: on Gore’s relations with his fellow bishops, whom he felt often did not want to hear him. It all seems reminiscent of another aristocratic radical, Tony Benn, and his membership of the Labour Cabinet in the late 1970s. Like Benn, Gore’s abilities and charisma were evident: he was always going to be a star. Like Benn, he was not a good team player. Both men could easily be accused (with partial justice) of striking radical poses, succumbing to the temptation of romantic self-dramatization as lonely crusaders for true Christianity or socialism. Both made life difficult for their poor prime ministers or archbishops. Both used the threat of resignation to get their way. Both seemed not to mind that their radicalism might deter potential followers. Gore would have appreciated the spirit of Benn’s verdict on Labour’s crushing 1983 defeat – not all bad, because it represented 8 million votes for socialism. Jesus, after all, ‘had a profound contempt for majorities’.¹²

Such men irritate their colleagues. Gore’s episcopate certainly did: by turns he would insist that the bishops establish and enforce clear lines of policy, and then would launch out in remarkably independent directions on very important issues. On creedal orthodoxy or the regulation of public worship, he brooked no dissent; on the disestablishment of the Welsh Church he thought nothing of publicly arguing against the position of all (save one) of his colleagues. Prestige judges: ‘he certainly overestimated his own isolation and the antagonism of his fellow bishops; they were always ready to hear his views. But the fact remains that his uncompromising character did in a measure repel them, and his hold upon their mind and policy was correspondingly diminished.’¹³ Given that one of his greatest battles had been to prevent one colleague (Henson of Hereford, subsequently Durham) from being consecrated at all, as unorthodox, that judgement seems very plausible.

Benn famously resigned from the Commons to ‘spend more time on politics’. Gore resigned as bishop in 1919 ‘to do serious study and to write something better than little books . . . to have the opportunity of more continuous preaching and speaking than my present position makes possible’.¹⁴ Just one more comparison is instructive. The Labour Party of the 1980s was fratricidal, and for years Benn did not enjoy easy relations with many former Government colleagues. Gore, by contrast, after his resignation was a weekly guest at Archbishop Davidson’s table and remained extensively involved with church life, often in a representative capacity (as at the Malines conversations with Roman Catholics, and the Anglican-Orthodox dialogues of the 1920s). The Church is no less a potential bearpit than political parties, but Gore, Davidson and others made great efforts to behave as Christians to one another, even in the heat of conflict.

Gore’s ‘retirement’ is a misnomer: as well as ecclesiastical commitments, he served for some years as Dean of the Theology Faculty in the University of London. The promised big books came: his ‘Reconstruction of Belief’ trilogy (Belief in God, Belief in Christ, and The Holy Spirit in the Church), the edited New Commentary on Holy Scripture, and what many consider his finest work, the 1929–30 Gifford Lectures, The Philosophy of the Good Life. His last book was a little one, Reflections on the Litany, published on 18 January 1932. The day before, after a short illness, Charles Gore had entered into the glory for which he longed.

Gore’s theological concerns

It would be hopeless to attempt here an exhaustive survey of all Gore’s concerns. We shall do little more than indicate some of the most prominent, worked out in detail in the chapters that follow.

Few of Gore’s statements illustrate the difference between his context and ours quite as much as this in 1926: ‘almost all men in some sense believe in God . . .’¹⁵ A lot, however, rides on that qualifying phrase ‘in some sense’. Foremost among Gore’s theological concerns was to proclaim the Christian understanding of God, which stood for him in stark contrast to much contemporary thought. He was no Barthian: there is genuine knowledge of God apart from revelation, and reflection upon ordinary human experience can furnish insight into the divine. But by itself, this gives a catastrophically inadequate doctrine of God: a vague, pantheistic sense of the unity and wonder of things, lacking in moral rigour. Gore loved Wordsworth, but the natural piety of the poet could only be a prelude to hearing the Word spoken – through the prophets of Israel and supremely in Jesus Christ. Through God’s self-revelation alone do we learn what the deepest heart and power of reality is really like, of its infinite demand for righteousness, and its passion to make us like itself. Indeed, through revelation alone do we learn how inadequate a pronoun ‘it’ is in this context. God, contrary to the immanentism of contemporary philosophy or romantic poetry, is personal: free to love and act. He confronts us as Judge and Saviour.

This is why Gore was so insistent on the possibility of miracles, and the actual occurrence of those reported in the Creeds. Christians must believe these not just on the grounds of authority and tradition. The question is more fundamental. Miracle means the ability of God to act freely and creatively: it is the difference between immanentism (where God is really identical with the world), deism (where God is apart from the world but unconcerned with it), and Christianity, where God is radically distinct from the world, but creatively at work within it, in real relationship with his creatures. Relationship means the possibility of change, spontaneity, innovation: in our terms, miracle. To deny the possibility of miracle is to deny what Christianity claims is the fundamental character of the God–world relationship.

The supreme miracle is the incarnation. Deeply sympathetic to evolutionary thought, Gore taught that the incarnation represented the fulfilment and perfection of all that had gone before. Yet it was also really new. In Jesus, human beings could recognize themselves, yes – but themselves as raised to a new, unpredictable and (as far as the world-process is concerned) impossible level of existence. Jesus is really human, but without sin and full of glory. No wonder his life was marked by the miraculous, perhaps especially at its very beginning. In this life, miracles are perfectly natural.

For Gore, Jesus of Nazareth was the eternal Son of God incarnate – not just a prophet, or a perfect human being co-operating with the Spirit. So far, so orthodox: but Gore’s special emphasis was upon the fact that Jesus was truly human. This, of course, was also orthodox: but Gore believed that in one regard it had been effectively denied by ‘much of the patristic, and all the medieval theology’.¹⁶ Out of respect for Christ’s divinity, there had been a tendency to deny that Jesus’ human knowledge was limited: that there were things he might not have known, or might have had to learn. Gore believed this not only contradicted the testimony of Scripture (especially Mark 13.32 and parallels), but what reason tells us is necessary for a truly human life. What kind of human being never learns anything?

Gore’s (not wholly original) remedy is perhaps the best known aspect of his theological legacy: the doctrine of the kenosis, or self-emptying. In the incarnation the eternal Son of God voluntarily laid aside all that would make a truly human life impossible. As Gore admits, there is no way of stating it without paradox: but it seems that for a while, the eternal Son was able to be, as man, what he was not as God – limited, ignorant – without ceasing to be truly God. On the whole, this doctrine has not commanded widespread support: criticized by some as ‘Apollinarianism in reverse’ (referring to the ancient heresy that obliterated Christ’s true humanity), others have judged it an immodest and inappropriate attempt to pry into the mystery of the incarnation.¹⁷ Yet surely something like it is required of any who want to say that Jesus was the eternal Son of God, and that he was truly human. No better suggestion has been forthcoming.

Gore’s Christology flows naturally into ecclesiology. The incarnation happened so that human beings could come to share in the relationship of the Son to the Father. Jesus was not an isolated exemplar of moral brilliance, or one whose death served simply as an external transaction freeing us from punishment. Jesus lived and died to share his life, to bring our lives within his. That incorporation, that communion of transformed lives in Christ, is what we call the Church. It happens supremely through the sacraments: through bodily, social rituals in which God reaches out to claim our bodily and social life. For Gore, the sacramental and the political were as one: to speak of lives transformed in Christ through the Eucharist meant, precisely, speaking of a renewed society in which human beings encountered each other as brothers and sisters. The Eucharist was to be the end of exploitation.

Christianity was not then first and foremost an idea, or a set of doctrines. It was a community, existing as salt and light in the world. When a stranger asks, ‘What is the Church?’ the answer should be to show the questioner people living transformed lives. Thus it made sense that the unity of the Church should be made visible, first and foremost, in relationship to certain people. It is not primarily (though it does involve) adherence to certain doctrines, or performing certain rituals, or sharing certain experiences, that makes someone a Christian: it is belonging to the communion of transformed people. This was why Jesus left his Church with an apostolic ministry – with men charged by him with preaching the Word, administering the sacraments, shepherding the new society, making provision for successors to do likewise. This, whatever degradation the idea had fallen into, was the point of the historic episcopate and why the Church of England insisted upon it. Bishops and priests are not quasi-magical figures, or better Christians than anyone else. But Jesus had given his Church a ministry, through which he willed to work and to bind it together. The form of the Church was not extricable from its faith.

So far, so Catholic: but emphatically not Roman. To Gore, the evidence for Jesus intending the papal ministry is non-existent, and the papal development has distorted the idea of the Church. He robustly challenges Roman Catholicism’s assertion as dogma propositions for which the historical evidence is slender, and while affirming the real presence in the Eucharist sharply rejects transubstantiation. There is no inferiority complex in Gore’s Anglo-Catholicism. Anglicans may have much to repent of; but in essence, with its maintenance of the ancient church order and creeds and sacraments, and its acknowledgement of Scripture’s authority to check tradition, Anglicanism’s ‘Liberal Catholicism’ is what God intended for the Church.

Scriptural authority is the final aspect of Gore’s theology to be looked at here. The Lux Mundi controversy saw Gore labelled as ‘that awful Canon Gore, who doesn’t believe the Bible’.¹⁸ The truth is very different. Gore in fact reached remarkably conservative conclusions on many critical questions. The Old Testament record ‘from Abraham downward is in substance in the strict sense historical’.¹⁹ The Gospel miracles happened, and all four Evangelists offered substantially accurate eyewitness testimony. The second letter of Peter was the only canonical text to which the Church had mistakenly attributed apostolic authorship. Some claim that he was unwilling to apply to the New Testament canon the same critical edge he brought to the Old. Gore would vigorously refute the charge. For him, the point was that the best criticism vindicated the historicity of the New Testament record in all essentials. These are not the views of one opposed to all criticism – though they might be wishful thinking.

More fundamentally, Gore would respond to the charge of disbelief in the Bible by interrogating the sense in which belief was asked for. True, he did not think Scripture was infallible. However, though such a belief might be popular, the Church had never formally taught it and many of her greatest teachers had not held it. There were inconsistencies in the Bible. There were things presented as historical fact which were not. There were even claims about God, such as that he commanded genocide, which were untrue. We know them to be untrue in the light of the central thrust of the Bible: the prophetic teaching about God and the world which found its fulfilment in Jesus Christ. That central thrust, proclaimed by the Church, is the Word of God. Though Gore occasionally used that tremendous phrase to describe the whole Bible, this does not really reflect his view. The Bible witnessed to the Word of God, yes. The Church’s proclamation must be