I’m staggered by Keith Ward’s suggestion in a recent article that the Church of England should ‘modify it’s traditional basis’ so that ‘it becomes the guardian and tutor of our natural religious instincts’. His vision for the Church of England has hardly any room for revelation, truth, authority, scripture or the supernatural.
St Paul's Cathedral, London
The Christian community becomes a place where people can express themselves, their aspirations, their questions, their explorations, and their tentative answers; Jesus hardly gets a mention; and even when Ward proposes, as an alternative to ‘the acceptance of some formal creed’, a basic commitment to ‘an objective morality, and loyalty to a God believed to be revealed in and through Jesus’, he qualifies this by stating that ‘many interpretations of that revelation’ will be possible.
It’s a fairly hollow version of Christianity. Or, to be less judgemental and more theological, it’s a presentation of Anglicanism in this country as a purely natural religion, a holding place for all our human religious and quasi-religious longings and instincts, but nothing more.
You probably think I’m exaggerating, but just read a few paragraphs here:
The opportunity for the C of E today is so to modify its traditional basis that it becomes the guardian and tutor of our natural religious instincts.
The Protestant heritage can best be expressed today as the encouragement of freedom of thought and rational criticism of all authority. The church should raise the big questions about human meaning, purpose and value, and encourage their exploration, without pretending it has the final answers.
The national basis of the church must today take fully into account the diversity of modern England, and aim to be fully inclusive — open to all without exception, but not seeking to decry alternative options of thought and belief where they are conducive to human well-being. It will never be, and never has been, the church of all English people. But it can be a national church, in expressing the moral and spiritual ideals of our society and aiming to promote compassion and spirituality throughout society.
Establishment in its present form may not remain. But the church can continue to reflect and help to shape the moral and spiritual values upon which our society at its best is founded — freedom, democracy, justice, a concern for the flourishing of all persons, and a concern for the weak and disadvantaged. All religious and humanist groups can co-operate in this, but it is beneficial to have a national institution formally committed to promoting those values.
This requires a liberal and humane approach to the Christian faith, a commitment which is not narrowly restrictive and doctrinally inflexible, but which preserves a distinctive vision of God as morally demanding, unrestrictedly loving and personally enabling. That vision is seen in many different ways in the person of Jesus and the inner power of the Spirit which filled his life and is present in human hearts. There is no thought here that God is not seen in other ways, too. But this is a way that should attract by a desire to love the good for its own sake, not by a fear of punishment by a basically vindictive God.
Many — I hope, most — Anglicans in England already believe this. But there can be a certain timidity about making senior appointments in the church which, afraid of the anger of those who want a much more exclusive and doctrinally divisive church, and who seem obsessed with gender and sexuality, will opt for a safe and therefore insipid archbishop. What the Church of England needs is an uncompromisingly liberal archbishop, who can lead a Protestant (which must now mean critical and questioning), national (which must now mean inclusive and tolerant) and established (which must now mean committed to the promotion of broad humane and spiritual values) church in an age of rapid scientific advance and moral change.
There is a mistrust of certainty that makes it impossible to believe or propose anything as being true, and Ward states this quite clearly:
[This new Church of England] would have to stop any ordained ministers from pretending that they alone are ‘true’ Christians, and get them to accept, as a condition of ordination, that they are part of one inclusive church with many diverse interpretations of Scripture and tradition, none of them certain and unchangeable.
Has this version of Anglicanism got legs?
I think he hits the nail on the the head when he says the Church of England is a church established by law. The Catholic church on the other hand was established by Christ and is sustained by “God alone who does so more in spite of men than through them” as Pope Benedict puts it!
I think this brand of Anglicanism has more in common with humanism than it does with Catholicism.
Is this not simply where Anglicanism was heading all along from its inception in the Elizabethan Settlement? The rule of the political establishment and, beyond that, concensus at any price. As Pilate said, “Truth! What is that?”
I have always believed that the work of the Catholic Church is to help men to make the best of their conditions in this world and colonise heaven in the next. One of the many problems with protestantism is their preoccupation with bettering the conditions and hoping for a new race of men.
The conflict of the future (probably) lies between Catholicism and some form of humanitarianism (eugenics, education/indoctrination, and legal coercion). ‘Men’s loyalties fluctuate between supernaturalism and materialism; the less definite Christianities are moulds in which they settle, but do not set’ (R. Knox)
‘But you, beloved, building yourselves upon your most Holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost,keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto life everlasting.’ St Jude.
‘The Protestant heritage can best be expressed today as the encouragement of freedom of thought and rational criticism of all authority.’
Ward seems to want to turn the Church into a university philosophy seminar -which is fine except actual universities will do this better. In purely human terms, churches have the structures they have to deliver authoritative traditions and to exercise a discipline. If you reject the tradition and the discipline, then you don’t need a church but a debating club of some sort.
It seems to me that Keith Ward is seeking an Anglican Church that really is broad enough to contain its own heretics. A very frightening prospect!
[...] loosely basing our lives on a man-made moral code (see Fr Stephen Wang’s post on this here), but the mystical body of Christ, living and witnessing to his truth in a world where man-made [...]
Plus ca change …
“freedom, democracy, justice, a concern for the flourishing of all persons, and a concern for the weak and disadvantaged. All religious and humanist groups can co-operate in this, but it is beneficial to have a national institution formally committed to promoting those values.”
I thought this was called the Government. Maybe he wants the Church to run the country?
Interesting, too, that he insists he church MUST be tolerant. We will not tolerate those who aren’t…
Rowan Williams is not the ally Ward believes him to be – he believes in the objective Incarnation of God, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. That is the foundation and inspiration for his decisive criticism of both this and the previous Governments. What forms the ground for Keith’s position? It just sounds like the tired old religion of the Protestant 19th Century, Schweitzer et al.. And look where that ended up – two world wars. At least Karl Barth saw through it in the end. And Bonhoeffer. And Bulgakov.