"Let's call the Spirit she for a change": Bishop of Sherborne (elect)

Er, we'll get back to you on this, bishop.

Personally, if he did this in a service while I was there, I'd walk out.

John Richardson
16 June 2009

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What the ...?

I was just reading Tim Goodbody's apologia pro vita sua, "Why I am still an Anglican" on the Fulcrum website when I was pulled up short by this bit:

I am a Canon A5 evangelical, which means I took my ordination vows very seriously; when I was ordained I had to prostrate myself before a bishop; I felt very uncomfortable about this, but when my friend (also an evangelical) standing next to me on the platform said “I will do whatever it takes to follow my vocation”, I saw her point and assented to the ritual. I was glad I did because at that point (during the singing of the Veni Creator) the Holy Spirit came upon me (indeed us) in an immensely powerful way.

I'm not sure which bit of this has my gob most smacked as it were: prostration before a bishop? had to? also an evangelical? whatever it takes to follow my vocation? the Holy Spirit came on us (implicitly because)?

The only bit I felt comfortable about was the bit that said, "I felt very uncomfortable about this."

I do not post at Fulcrum -and it might fairly be asked why I read (probably for the same reason that some people read this blog) -but I offer it to other readers for their consideration.

I am stunned - and I didn't think I could be by anything that still went on in the Church of England.

John Richardson
10 June 2009

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Overcoming schism - the nettle Protestantism must grasp

Recently I spent an hour looking at (as it happens) the Ship of Fools discussion forums —but the same would be true of numerous Protestant blogs and websites —and I have come to the conclusion that what we see represented there is not Christianity, in the strict sense, at all. Rather, what Cardinal Newman said in the 19^th century is undoubtedly true of many modern believers who think of themselves as Christian:

“Protestants, generally speaking, have not faith, in the primitive meaning of that word ...”

The problem is, we do not see ‘faith’ as trusting in a received tradition passed on to us through others, as it originally was. Instead, ‘faith’ has come to mean a completely individualistic, ‘pick and mix’, self-made religion. It is ‘my faith’, not ‘the Church’s faith’, around which I organize my life. Pretending to be disciples —learners —of Christ, we have enthroned ourselves as the final aribiters of what is true.

The result is chaos, at the individual and corporate level. The present-day struggles of Anglicanism are simply the logical outcome of allowing everyone, doctrinally, to do ‘what is right in his or her own eyes’.

In this post I’m going to try to sum up my thoughts about the causes, and possible cure, of this disunity within Protestantism. Here are the key points so far:

1. The gospel demands unity. There is ‘one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all.’

2. Christian unity is, however, ‘unity in the truth’, not in ‘structures’. It is possible to be baptized and enjoying fellowship in the Lord’s supper, yet outside the truth (1 Cor 10:1-6).

3. Historically, Protestantism is inherently divisive. This is clear evidence that something is wrong, since the gospel is inherently unifying.

4. This divisiveness is due not to the principle of sola scriptura, as some have suggested, but to an overestimation of ‘private judgement’.

5. The individual is not the author of doctrine.

6. The Christian is, first and foremost a learner.

7. Christ himself instituted the office of teachers in the Church, from whom Christians should learn the faith.

8. The task of the teacher is faithfully to hand on, and defend, the Apostolic tradition.

9. Teachers therefore need to be as fully aware as possible of the history of the Church and its established doctrines.

10. Theological history helps us discern ‘dead ends’ and ‘positive trends’ (the ‘Gamaliel’ principle). Theological history favours contemporary conservatism.

11. Creeds and confessions represent the past work of the Church in attempting to establish sound doctrine in accordance with the Apostolic tradition.

12. Churches may rightly expect their members to have due regard to their own formularies.

13. A Church (denomination) which does not have proper regard for its formularies will become authoritarian since, in the face of doctrinal division, it will use its disciplinary measures to enforce structural unity.

These things are true, I would suggest, for most Protestant churches, but from here on I’m going to be very ‘Anglican’ in suggesting how things might be improved.

Since the unity of the gospel is ‘unity in the truth’, and since the truth of the gospel is, by Christ’s own devising, entrusted to and imparted by the teaching ministry of the Church, the Church which wishes to prevent internal disunity must look first to the quality of its teaching ministers. In the case of the Church of England, this should mean looking to the bishops, above all, as the ‘gate keepers’ of the ordained ministry.

Unfortunately, the bishops have largely bought into the idea that their role is not to define and defend doctrine, but to ‘referee’ the various doctrinal positions within their dioceses. In others words, they are actually upholding Protestantism’s divisiveness. Far from making things better, they are, in most cases, actively making them worse.

This is not, I must emphasise, because they are bad people. For the most part, they are good people and well-intentioned. But the well-intentioned maintenance of structures which are antithetical to the unity of the gospel is not a Christian action. Nor can it be depicted as the fulfilment of episcopal ministry.

Now this is not to introduce some alien notion into Anglicanism. Rather it is to recall the Church to its founding principles. It is well known that in the Ordinal which forms part of the Church’s formularies, both bishops and priests are required to teach sound doctrine and contradict error. The bishop or the priest who therefore takes a laissez faire attitude at this point is the true ‘alien’ to the Church of England.

Moreover, the parameters of true doctrine are also clearly established within the formularies. The Thirty-nine Articles and the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer include some doctrines and exclude others. And whilst it is undoubtedly true that this is widely disregarded in the Church, that does not make such disregard ‘Anglican’ —rather, it is itself a disregard of Anglicanism.

There would, moreover, be little that could stand in a bishop’s way should he decide to urge both his ministers and the people in his diocese to take these doctrinal boundaries more seriously. There is surely no-one who could claim he was exceeding his episcopal prerogatives by doing so!

It would thus, for example, be entirely appropriate for the bishop to demand from potential candidates for ordination some demonstration of an awareness of, and engagement with, the Anglican theological heritage. At present, many such candidates are required to write an essay on their understanding of the priesthood. It might be rather more challenging to them, and more useful to both them and the Church in the long term, if they were required to write a similar essay on their responses to the Thirty-nine Articles. Certainly, every training course ought to include a section devoted to their consideration.

Similarly, it would be extremely valuable if the standard liturgy at theological colleges, on training courses, and for Continuing Ministerial Education events were the Book of Common Prayer. The reason is simple: on the one hand, there are many parishes where the BCP is hardly used (sometimes for good, missiological, reasons), and yet, on the other hand, the BCP enshrines (in a way that later liturgies often deliberately do not) the fundamental reformed Anglican understanding of divine service.

Many ordination candidates have almost no experience of this. It is not in their bloodstream, nor will it ever be through their normal liturgical usage. Therefore the college or course ought to make up for this deficit by giving them as much exposure as possible to this heritage.

These three suggestions —that bishops should call their clergy and people back to the Anglican heritage, that ministerial candidates should have engaged with the theology of the Articles, and that those candidates should also be made practically familiar with the Prayer Book —would go some considerable way to establishing that Anglicanism is a confessional faith. The denial of this is surely one of the great myths of our time. Indeed, the suggestion that Anglicanism is not a confessional faith, and specifically a Protestant confession, would have come as a surprise to the compilers of the Articles and the Prayer Book, the Marian martyrs and, not least, to John Henry Newman, who once wrote,

... it is notorious that the Articles were drawn up by Protestants and intended for the establishment of Protestantism ...

This is why the establishment of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans is so important. It is not just about ‘politics’, it is about theology —or rather two theologies, one that sees the individual as the final judge in matters of faith and doctrine, to be decided privately between himself and God, the other that sees the individual as the recipient of both faith and doctrine through means instituted by Christ, but reliant on others.

This, I suggest, is the nettle Protestantism needs to grasp if it is to overcome its schismatic nature and regain one of the true marks of the Church —that we are united in the truth of God’s holy Word.

Revd John P Richardson
1 June 2009

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Unity, schism and private judgement

I’ve not touched the blog for the past couple of weeks as, between other commitments, I’ve been preparing a paper for the Oak Hill School of Theology, which this year was on the subject of ‘Truth, Unity and Schism’.

My brief was to look at some of the practical issues from a ‘grass-roots’ level. What I presented in the end was an attempt to look at the issue of unity and schism from an ecclesiological perspective. How we live the life of the Church, I suggested, affects fundamentally how we handle and, if possible prevent, division.

My starting point, however, was an acknowledgement of the divided nature of Protestantism, observed by my old friend Robbie Low in an article he wrote for New Directions, back in 2004. “The curse of Protestantism,” he declared then, “is division.” And this is because, according to him,

The very nature of [Protestantism’s] origins, self-understanding and approach to the Word of God are inherently schismatic.

And this he blamed on Protestantism’s problem with authority:

In rejecting the authority of the Pope the Western reformers did not abolish autocracy but rather set in train a process the logical end of which is that every man is a pope in his own parish or in his own front room.

The chaos resulting from this is familiar to many:

The upshot is hundreds of ‘churches’, most of them with their own bizarre subdivisions (low, strict and particular, Southern, open etc, etc). In addition, there are thousands upon thousands of one-man band conventicles brought about by the falling out of Brother Smith with Pastor Jones. Pastor Smith, as he has now appointed himself, has the ‘real’ truth and hopes shortly to be needing to rent a bigger Scout Hut than the gravely misled Pastor Jones, his former guru.

Robbie blamed this on the principle of ‘sola scriptura’ —the Bible alone as the Church’s authority. I’m sure this is one reason why he and his wife Sara have now become Roman Catholics. Whilst his criticisms are fair, however, I find myself disagreeing with this part of his analysis. I am sure the problem has to do with our understanding of the truth. However, I find myself rather more drawn at this point to the critique of another Anglican turned Roman, namely John Henry Newman.

In 1849 Newman had published a collection of Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations (‘mixed’, in this context, meaning ‘made up of Catholics and Protestants’). In one of these, ‘Faith and Private Judgement’, he made this stark assessment:

Protestants, generally speaking, have not faith, in the primitive meaning of that word ... and here is a confirmation of it. If men believed now as they did in the times of the Apostles, they could not doubt or change.

But, as Newman observed, people (or at least Protestants) undoubtedly do change their beliefs, and this he attributed directly to the combination of Scripture and private judgement:

Since men now-a-days deduce from Scripture, instead of believing a teacher, you may expect to see them waver about; they will feel the force of their own deductions more strongly at one time than at another, they will change their minds about them, or perhaps deny them altogether; whereas this cannot be, while a man has faith, that is, belief that what a preacher says to him comes from God.

Once again, the criticism seems fair enough —and not least when it comes to evangelical Protestants, who fancy themselves to be completely committed to the ‘authority’ of Scripture, but who seem to be rather prone to change their minds about what Scripture ‘authoritatively’ says. Now it teaches penal substitution, now it doesn’t. Now it is anti-homosexuality, now it isn’t, and so on.

By contrast, according to Newman, the primitive Apostolic preaching called for obedient faith:

Immediate, implicit submission of the mind was, in the lifetime of the Apostles, the only, the necessary token of faith; then there was no room whatever for what is now called private judgement.

Compare this, Newman argues, with the person who goes by their own estimation of the Bible:

Now, my dear brethren, consider, are not these two states or acts of mind quite distinct from each other; —to believe simply what a living authority tells you, and to take a book such as Scripture, and to use it as you please, to master it, that is, to make yourself the master of it, to interpret it for yourself, and to admit just what you choose to see in it, and nothing more?

Is this not exactly what we see in many Protestant churches and amongst many evangelical individuals? Previously ‘received truths’ about what Scripture says have been in overturned as a person has ‘seen the (new) light’ and decides they can no longer believe as they once did.

There is much about Newman’s approach which may be criticized, but there is something in it, and particularly in what he wrote about the attitude of new converts and the rôle of the Church in relation to them:

... when they entered the Church, they entered it in order to learn. The Church was their teacher; they did not come to argue, to examine, to pick and choose, but to accept whatever was put before them.

This is not, frankly, an attitude much in evidence today. Instead, we have taken as our guiding principle that advocated by J C Ryle, writing at almost the same time as Newman:

Reader, this is private judgment. This is the right you are to exercise if you love your soul. You are not to believe things in religion merely because they are said by Popes or Cardinals, —by Bishops or Priests, —by Presbyters or Deacons, —by Churches, Councils, or Synods, —by Fathers, Puritans, or Reformers. You are not to argue, “Such and such things must be true, because these men say so.” You are not to do so. You are to prove all things by the Word of God.

Now I am much more a fan (and a reader) of Ryle than Newman, but I think Ryle is mistaken. It is true that we mustn’t believe something just because someone ‘in authority’ says so —the Apostle Paul gives the same caution in Galatians 1. And it is also true that we must “prove all things by the Word of God.” But we cannot always and invariably look, finally, to our own private judgement for a verdict.

On the contrary, as Gerald Bray has recently written,

What is easy to overlook in the history of Christian doctrine, though it becomes clear once it is pointed out, is that no individual has ever been given the authority to determine what orthodoxy is.

That being the case, we must surely check our private judgement against the authority of the wider Church, rather than the other way round.

Our problem, in other words, is not that we give too much credence to the Bible, nor is it (as Newman and Low both suggest) that we don’t give enough to the Pope. It is rather that we give too much to our own opinions. After all, if not just those naughty popes and cardinals, but bishops, priests, presbyters, deacons, churches, councils, synods, the Fathers, the Puritans and the Reformers all come down one way, and I come down another, where does the balance of probability lie?

I hope to post later on what I went on to say this means in practice.

John Richardson
21 May 2009

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