BISHOP OF CHESTER:
OUR ANGLICAN FUTURE
An address by the Bishop of Chester, the Rt Revd Dr Peter Forster, to the Chester Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship, given in Chester on Wednesday, 23 February, 2005.
I VERY much welcome the opportunity to address the Diocesan Evangelical Fellowship, at what is recognised to be a particularly significant time in the life of the Church of England, and the wider Anglican Communion. I also think it is a very important juncture in the relationship between Europe, and the European nations, and all the Churches.
This said, I am often struck by a relative calm, a relative sense of peace, in the day to day life of the Diocese. Most clergy and parishes focus purposefully upon the task in hand, in a positive and usually cheerful way, aware no doubt of large and looming issues, but not distracted unduly by them. We can all take heart that whatever readjustments may, or may not, take place in particular institutional arrangements within or between denominations, as far as the Church is the Body of Christ it is entirely secure against even the gates of hell. All that we do in our ministries, and work, we do for Jesus Christ, and only subsequently or secondarily for the Church of England, the Diocese of Chester, or our own parish and PCC.
That said, I am an Anglican, a member of the Church of England, Bishop of this Diocese. I love this Church : not, I hope, more than I love the Lord my God, but I am very attached to it. The Church of England was the place of my conversion, the Church which has largely nurtured my faith. I owe it a very great deal indeed. I don’t want to be drawn into the all too fashionable trend today for folk to sit loose to the communities, or institutions, which have nurtured them, and to which they belong. Ours is the age of the individual, with his or her choices, rights, preferences and needs. At worst, and not uncommonly, it degenerates into the narcissism of ‘believe what you like and it’s true for you’, an idolatry of oneself.
We certainly stand as individuals before the God who knocks personally at the door of our lives. We enter through the narrow gate, or not at all. Indeed, it can be claimed that the modern emphasis upon the individual is derived from the Judaeo-Christian understanding of creation. We are uniquely drawn from the dust of the earth, and our bodies give us clearly distinguishable, separate existences. We are not at heart a pre-existent soul, which has separated off from an original spiritual conglomerate, and which perhaps has already indwelt numerous other bodies. We are irreducibly who we are, individual persons.
Yet precisely as such, the biblical accounts of creation relate us intimately both to God and to our fellow human beings. It is by God’s Spirit that the breath of life is breathed into us : Eve is taken from Adam’s ribs. And so, as Christians, we cannot imagine, or understand ourselves, apart from being members of Christ’s Body here on earth. Our independence and our interdependence are intrinsic to each other, just as in creation at large. God both gives creation its own proper separate and independent existence, yet also each moment upholds the universe by his Word of Power.
I think we need to acknowledge that Protestants have tended to rest too easily in an over-spiritualised view of the Church, pushing too far the proper Reformation distinction between the visible and invisible Church. In the Bible the Spirit of God likes bodies : our bodies, the national community of Israel, the Temple at Jerusalem, above all the incarnate Christ, then the Church, and indeed the body, the ‘corpus’, of Holy Scripture.
There are always two sides: the physical and the spiritual, and it is all too easy to distort the proper balance and relationship between them. Solomon’s prayer of dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem well expresses both the promise that ‘God’s name shall be there’, and the necessary qualification ‘But will God indeed dwell on earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built’.
The Protestant tendency to emphasise the spiritual aspect of the Church was partly encouraged by a certain reliance upon Platonic categories of thought in the Reformed tradition. In the modern age it has been powerfully reinforced by contemporary individualism, and the result has been a considerable neglect of the doctrine of the Church, in both the broader Protestant tradition, and also to a significant degree in evangelicalism.
Many others have commented in similar terms in recent years, and the point was memorably made by Archbishop Robert Runcie when he addressed NEAC in 1987. More recently, and from a very different quarter, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the head of the Roman Catholic Congregation for Christian Unity, has shrewdly remarked that the Protestant tradition has tended to see Jesus Christ too much as simply Head of the Church, and insufficiently as present in it.
It is against the background of these considerations that I want to make some suggestions about the underlying issues which currently face the Church of England and the Anglican Communion. I would like to group my comments under the four headings which are provided by the classic statement of Anglican identity, the Lambeth Quadrilateral of Scripture, the historic creeds, the sacraments, and the historic ministry.
I regard the existence of the Bible as a fundamental bulwark against error and false teaching. It has a wonderful givenness in the place of the Church. For all that Holy Scripture has been dissected, criticised, analysed, torn to pieces, portrayed as muddled, contradictory, or plain wrong; for all that it has been practically ignored to the point that many Christians no longer read it; for all that many clever attempts are made to turn its teaching upside down or inside out, the text remains, and confronts the Church. There is no serious attempt to revise its content: to add this book, to subtract that one. For essential purposes the body of Holy Scripture is ecumenically agreed. Some may make rather snide comments about St Paul, or whoever, but these books and writings, gathered together in the Christian Bible, retain an objective pole position.
Recent significant Anglican documents make this quite clear. The contemporary Windsor Report states:
The Windsor Report continues:
‘The current crisis thus constitutes a call to the whole Anglican Communion to re-evaluate the ways in which we have read, heard, studied and digested scripture’. (p.42)
These statements are heartening, although we need to acknowledge a considerable gulf between such aspirations and the reality of wide stretches of church life. As I go around the Diocese, spending each Sunday in one or more of its 360+ centres of worship, I am often saddened by the inattention with which the Bible is read in worship. Only rarely, I am tempted to say, do I gain the impression that the person reading the Scriptures actually believes that what is being read means something. Perhaps that’s a bid hard, but we urgently need to recover for the Bible a true place of honour in the life of the Church. We have become so used to treating it more or less like any other book, not least in the way it is printed and bound, so used to hearing about its human dimension, that we have lost sight of the way it acts as a primary and unique witness to God’s definitive revelation of himself. Yes, revelation: actual, real, down-to-earth revelation. The light shone in the darkness 2000 years ago, and it only enlightens every person who has come and comes into the world because it shone there and then.
The primacy of Scripture rests upon an acknowledgement that God chose to reveal himself through his dealings with the people of Israel, culminating in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah. As Christians we are grafted into that vine, into that story, we acknowledge and embrace that revelation. God may continue to reveal himself to our conscience, and in history, in a myriad of ways, but we will only distinguish God’s voice from other, false voices if our ears are first tuned into the Scriptural witness to God’s revelation.
So the first foundation for the future of Anglicanism will need to be a more serious attention to the authoritative place of Holy Scripture. At key moments in the life of the Church, it has been a renewed hearing of the Holy Scripture which has been crucial. It will surely be so again.
Let me develop this theme by looking at the second leg upon which the Lambeth Quadrilateral stands, the historic, or catholic, creeds.
I note that the number of occasions upon which I recite the Nicene or Apostles Creeds in Church has much diminished since the advent of Common Worship. I’m not necessarily opposed to the use of shorter and simpler statements of faith, but I do fear that if their use becomes too widespread then this will simply become another example of the dumbing down of Christian expression and belief.
The Anglican Reformation set out primarily to restore the ancient catholic face of the Church, to recover the vitality and authenticity of the life of the Church in the early centuries. But when studying the Church in the patristic period one is soon aware that these were centuries when the life of the Church was substantially devoted to hammering out the details of the Nicene and Apostles Creeds in particular. The theology of the foundational centuries of the life of the Church is fundamentally the theology of those creeds. We may wish to approach this through later reflection, and in particular the theology of the Anglican or Reformed tradition, but the later theology is intrinsically grounded in the theology of the patristic period. That becomes very obvious when we read such classic texts as Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, or Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.
So I pose the question: what is the state of the study of classical Christian doctrine in today’s Church? I’m afraid that only a rather pessimistic reply is possible. University courses in theology typically spend much less time upon classic Christian doctrine, and it is often taught in a manner which is somewhat detached from the worshipping life of the Church which formed the actual context of patristic theology. For all the valiant efforts which are made by those who teach on our ordination training courses and in our theological colleges, I do not gain the impression that sufficiently detailed attention is usually paid to fundamental doctrinal theology.
Again, without wishing to make cheap criticisms, I often have a rather dilettante impression of much contemporary theological education. This was brought home to me when organising a book group for curates. I chose a collection of Charles Cranfield’s essays on the Epistle to the Romans, some of which included reference to what I foolishly thought were well-known Greek words such as Logos, Nomos, Pistis. When the group of around 10 curates met with me I discovered that most of them had never encountered a Greek word in their theological training. I had assumed that anyone spending two or three years on a regional Course, or two years at a residential College, would at least have been taught how to recognise simple Greek words, and to use a commentary which referred to transliterated Greek words.
Now, I recognise the dangers in making theological training too academic, and I am an advocate (and practitioner) of flexible approaches to theological training for older NSM candidates in particular. But that flexibility in relation to older candidates, which I believe the contemporary missionary needs of the Church requires, does rely upon the foundation of a more rigorous and in depth training for those who enter full-time ministry. Christian ministry needs firm and secure theological foundations.
Our Anglican future, whatever form or forms it might take, must be a future which recaptures a theological seriousness which I judge to have been significantly lost. It needs to be a future which concentrates more on the substance and content of the Christian faith, and is less obsessed with the questions of theological method which have so dominated twentieth-century theology. The central message from the African Church to the Western Churches at the present time is that we are accommodating too much to an increasingly secular culture. But how will we resist this, without a clear and widely held appreciation of the distinct teaching of the Gospel?
The collapse of the Anglican catechetical tradition illustrates what I have been saying. The BCP included a Catechism which was described as ‘An Instruction to be learned of every person before he be brought to be confirmed by the Bishop’. It included the Apostles Creed, which was to be learnt by heart. Have we not drifted much too far from such requirements?
Let me conclude this section by suggesting that the contemporary ignorance of the Bible and the Creeds in the Church go together. It is no accident that the process by which the Creeds and Canon were agreed took approximately the same length of time until their more-or-less final determinations in the fourth century. The formation of the Canon took a certain lead, when we compare stages of development by the late second century, but the process was symbiotic. The Church needed the Rule of Faith in order to provide wisdom and guidance in the reading of the Scriptures, just as much later Calvin was to offer his Institutes in the service of the interpretation of the Bible in the Church.
In short, we won’t recover a proper dignity for the Bible apart from the parallel recovery of the proper dignity of the Creeds, and the classical Christian theology for which they stand.
I turn to the third leg of the quadrilateral, the sacraments of baptism and holy communion. Why was their inclusion regarded as important in the recognition of Anglican identity?
It has often been remarked that Anglicans have given a particular prominence to our public worship in our self-understanding. Provided that is not used as a pretext, inadvertent or otherwise, for a neglect of the proper study of the Bible and the Creeds, I am happy with an understanding of Anglican identity which is firmly rooted in its worship.
For very many years, I have been a member of the Prayer Book Society, mainly because of a sense of regret, perhaps grief, at the widespread neglect of the BCP in the contemporary Church of England. I have never argued for the essential superiority of the BCP over newer forms of service, and I am happy to embrace both with an open mind concerning which form of service might be right for a particular service or occasion. However, I have been surprised at the number of parishes in the Diocese which make no use of the BCP, and I wonder about the wisdom in this. Just recently an incumbent who had been appointed to a parish in the Diocese told me that (s)he had reintroduced an 8am Sunday Communion using the BCP, and a new congregation of around a dozen people had appeared: a fresh expression of being Church, to use the jargon. I recall from my days at Beverley Minster inheriting an 8am said Communion, which alternated between the modern language ASB and the BCP. Between 20 and 25 people were there each week, drawn from a pool of around 40. After two or three years I surveyed their opinion: would they prefer more BCP or ASB, or perhaps the traditional language of Rite B but in a modern shape? The response was that 90% of folk wanted the BCP each week! They had accepted the ASB under sufferance, at the insistence of a previous Vicar. I was able to put them out of their misery.
Similarly with weddings, I inherited a policy of only giving couples the ASB service, but I decided to offer a choice. I read the vows etc in both old and new language, and left the couple to choose the language in which they would express their life commitment. After all, they would be the prime participants in the service; they would actually marry each other, and my role was to solemnise their marriage in Church. About half chose the old, and half the new language. I was, of course, offering the Series I / 1928 version, rather than the less satisfactory 1662.
How many clergy today offer couples the same choice, offered neutrally as their choice?
The neglect of the BCP in the Church of England today can be illustrated by cross-referencing the membership of General Synod with that of the Prayer Book Society. Only 17 out of more than 500 members of General Synod are members of the Prayer Book Society. Well, perhaps one shouldn’t make too much of that, because there shouldn’t really be a need for a Prayer Book Society in a Church which originally was a Prayer Book Society.
I recognise that there are complex questions about worship, mission and culture, and I have no desire to see an inappropriate return to the BCP itself. But I do think that the neglect of the Prayer Book has gone hand in hand with a certain neglect of the seriousness and dignity of our worship. Do we prepare ourselves for worship as we should, and as previous generations often did? I recently visited someone who for 50 years had read on Saturday evening the BCP readings for the following morning’s service. This had been dislocated by a decision (without consultation) to replace the BCP readings with those from a modern lectionary. As I go around the Diocese I am usually struck by a rather inattentive hubbub before a service begins. Do we lead our folk to expect a special encounter with God in our corporate worship? Do we expect that for ourselves?
Why does the Lambeth Quadrilateral refer specifically to the sacraments, rather than also to the preaching of the Word, or more generally to the worship of the Church? I suspect this is because the sacraments portray visibly the real presence of God to and in his Church. We are baptised into the death and resurrection of Christ; we are invited to eat his body and drink his blood. Of course there is a theological nuancing required, as we seek to understand the nature of our participation in Christ, but there is a pretty down-to-earth realism across a range of New Testament statements, from the language of participation in Christ in St John’s Gospel to such Pauline statements as ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me’.
The mystery of our life is that we are invited to be part of God’s life, while remaining rooted in his distinct creation. The Christian life is an invitation to participate in God’s life, as sons and daughters of God by adoption. Just as human parents who adopt make it a first rule to treat all their children the same, whether they are natural by birth or adopted, should we doubt that God values us, as his adopted children, as much as he values Jesus Christ his eternal Son? That may sound a startling claim, and clearly in some respects there is a clear distinction between the uniquely incarnate Son of God and us, but have we allowed that proper distinction to obscure the vivid NT language of our participation in Christ? Beyond St John and St Paul, the Second Epistle of Peter speaks of the promise that we might become ‘partakers of the divine nature’.
In our Anglican future I believe we need to rediscover in renewed ways what it means to live a Christian life, perhaps I should say the Christian life. We have become deeply secularised in modern European Christianity: that, I believe, is one lesson which we should draw from the current debates over human sexuality. It is certainly the lesson which the African Church has drawn.
So, my challenge, and hope, would be that we would learn much better to live by God’s grace, to know that we live intimately in his presence as indeed he lives in us. We could start by taking with much deeper seriousness the symbolism and meaning of Baptism and the Holy Communion, and preparation for their administration. Both deserve much greater reverence than is often found in today’s Church; they are places where, as with Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the Temple, God promises to be present. They should be treated as royal occasions indeed, just as Calvin and Cranmer taught and practised. Let the preaching and teaching of the Church come from a general renewal of its prayer and worship.
I shall add a footnote for this season of Lent. Where is the practice and reality of penitence in today’s Church? Is it not one consequence of a certain loss of the sense of God’s personal presence that both personal and corporate penitential activity has become largely perfunctory, if not completely absent. I seem to attend more and more services which lack a general confession, and curiously this includes both the modern confirmation and ordination services. I am as guilty as anyone in this neglect, but will the Church have a vibrant future without its recovery?
This final leg of the quadrilateral represents the whole ordained ministry in its threefold order, gathered under an episcopate which traces its existence, and in some senses its authority, to the establishment of the first local churches by the Apostles. Hence the traditional term, the historic or apostolic ministry. Richard Hooker, in the classical phase of Anglican theology, very clearly saw bishops as successors of the Apostles, and charged with local oversight of the Churches.
Much ink, and not a little blood, has been spilt over the understanding and place of the ordained ministry in the Church. I would not wish to underestimate the complexity of the issues, which present themselves in new forms in the Anglican Communion at the present time, in relation to the acceptability of ordained ministers who are either female, or have been involved in the ordination of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire.
Perhaps the first and most obvious, though easily overlooked, thing to say is that the fact that so much controversy has attended the theology of the ordained ministry is an indirect testimony to its significance. (Perhaps the same can be said about the theology of the sacraments, which likewise was a cause of so much contention and bloodshed at the time of the Reformation). It has often been a temptation for evangelicals, and those in the Protestant tradition generally, to regard the existence and character of the ordained ministry as essentially a second order issue. In some respects perhaps it is, but the controversies return to haunt us, and at the present time in a particularly sharp way. Yes, the priesthood of the whole Church expressed through baptism must be the primary and controlling reality, but just as we have too quickly lapsed into a mainly spiritual conception of the Church, so we have too readily sat loose to the responsibilities which the Lord gives to his Church. ‘He who hears you, hears me’. (Luke 10 v 16). ‘If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’. (John 20 v 23). Such are the consequences of the Church’s participation by grace in the life and work of God.
Such sayings can be related fundamentally to the whole Church, although in their original settings they are directed to the apostolic group, and in Matthew 16 to St Peter alone. But even if they are related to the whole Church, a particular responsibility falls upon those who have special responsibility for guarding and guiding the life of the Church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic, that is, the ordained ministry.
Paradoxically, I think it is the very invisibility of God which heightens the significance of the particular instruments and institutions through which he chooses to work. Precisely because we have an essential freedom before God we are given the responsibilities which we cannot evade, as his ‘co-workers’ (1 Cor 3 v 9). In their own day, and in their own more limited way, they are the modern equivalents of the responsibilities which St Paul and the other apostles acknowledge on the pages of the New Testament. Recall how St Paul repeatedly stresses the divine call of his apostleship, ‘by the will of God’ – not ‘from men nor through man’. It is this sense of a special call which is at the heart of the ordained ministry, and which can so often be experienced as a burden – who is sufficient for these things?
I often think of the passage from 2 Corinthians, when St Paul rehearses a litany of his trials and tribulations, from beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks, hunger and thirst, and multitude dangers of persecution unto death, and then adds ‘apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of anxiety for all the churches’ (2 Cor 11 v 28).
It is against the background of this high calling of the ordained ministry that we must set current discussions over the standards of life which are to be expected of ordained clergy, and whether and when the orders of ministry should be opened to women. We should not be in the least surprised if they turn out to be highly contentious issues, where compromise seems all but impossible.
Let me comment briefly upon both issues, although they are not the prime focus of my address this evening.
In relation to the on-going reception of women as priests or presbyters, and the possibility of their ordination as bishops, the keynote for me needs to be patience. Although I did not have a vote in 1992, I would have voted for the measure which permitted the ordination of women as priests/presbyters. Over the past 10 years or so I have seen a substantial release of gifts in the life of the Church, and I see little sign of a discernment that it was all a mistake. But 10 years is not long, and there is the major ecumenical aspect given the reluctance of the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Churches even to discuss the matter. It does not help the situation that the running in this matter has been made by Churches which are generally associated with the decadent West, and with a society which exhibits a widespread sexual chaos.
To ordain women as bishops would, in my present view, be to make a statement about the reception of women in the ordained ministry which cannot yet be made. When the question of the ordination of women as priests was decided, I judged that if a two-thirds majority could be achieved in each House of the General Synod, it would indicate an underlying acceptance in the Church of around 75%. If and when we face the same question over the ordination of women as bishops, although the legally required majorities will also be two-thirds in each House, overall I would look for around a 90% level of acceptance in the Church, which I do not believe yet exists. I think we need to be patient, to listen carefully and prayerfully to what God is saying to the Church in this matter.
The Windsor Report addresses the question of whether and in what sense the Anglican Communion wishes to be a Church, rather than an increasingly loose federation of individual churches. It has become clear that while we have often proceeded on the basis that the Anglican Communion was a world wide Church, it has not established that as a reality. If we wish to establish a more real ecclesial coherence to Anglicanism as a whole, some hard thinking, and difficult decisions lie before us, and not least in relation to the future role of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The presenting issue has been the ordination of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, and the authorisation of formal ecclesial services of blessing of same-sex relationships in the North American Church. The key question for me concerns the status of these issues: why are they perceived to be of such significance? My own answer to that question relates to the special place of marriage, both as the generally best context for the raising of children and as a Scriptural model of God’s relationship to the world. In that light I am as cautious about a reinterpretation of Christian norms in relation to heterosexual relationships outside marriage as I am to sexually active same-sex relationships. I regret that the spotlight so often falls upon the homosexual dimension, which I believe is a form of corporate scape-goating by the heterosexual community. While I regard the Windsor Report as in many respects an admirable document, within its scope, I like least the singling out of Gene Robinson. Why should he be barred from the next Lambeth Conference while those bishops who consecrated him are to be invited?
I could have said more about the issue of women in the ordained ministry, the controversy over human sexuality, and the wider reflections in the Windsor Report. Perhaps we shall return to these matters in the question time. In their different ways each issue, or set of issues, points up the high place of the ordained ministry in the life of the Church. This has often been obscured amid a false clericalism which still afflicts the Church in the West, but the answer will not be to sit loose to the pivotal role which the ordained ministry will play in whatever Anglican future awaits us. On the contrary, we have to learn anew and afresh what its true role is in the life of the Church.
Let me try to sum up what I have been saying across the four aspects of the Lambeth Quadrilateral: the future of Anglicanism must surely lie in digging deeper into the foundations upon which the Church of England, and the Anglican tradition, has been built. We need, in a proper sense, to become more Anglican, by more effectively rediscovering the ancient catholic face of the Church. I very much hope that the future will bring a deepening ecumenical rapprochement, and indeed full visible unity with other denominations, but the only route to that is the same journey deeper into our heritage in Scripture, the creeds, the worship of the Church, and a common, universal ministry.
I sometimes liken the four legs of the Lambeth Quadrilateral to four corner flags of a sports pitch. They set out the boundaries and the rules which are intended to allow the game to proceed with fluency, skill, creativity, and spontaneity. That is my vision for the future. There are lots of questions which will arise as the Church continues its journey through history to the revelation of God’s ultimate plans and purposes, questions around the shape of Church life and much more. I firmly believe that God will give us the resources to answer all those questions, provided we keep the play on the pitch itself. The pillars of our Anglican tradition are there that we might indeed ‘seek first the Kingdom of God’, that all other things should be added unto us.
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