The Rock, June 1998
"Up and Down in Adria"
by Francis Gardom
Those of you who have a good memory will recall a book of this name written by Dr Eric Mascall in the 1960s.
It looked at that time as though Anglicanism was drifting helplessly "tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of vain doctrine" (Ephesians 4:14) and about to hit the rocks and disintegrate at any moment.
Books like Bishop John Robinson's Honest to God seemed to question if not undermine most of what people had been taught to believe was the Christian Faith and despite valiant attempts at refutation like Fielding Clarke's For Christ's Sake and Four Anchors from the Stern as well as Dr Mascall's contribution there was a feeling abroad amongst the faithful that we simply didn't know what would happen next.
Dr Mascall's title was taken, of course, from the description of St Paul's shipwreck in Acts 27:27 when the ship carrying St Paul and St Luke to Rome was in a similar predicament. It's worth recalling, however, that although the ship was wrecked beyond repair in their case, nevertheless, St Luke tells us "we all came safely to shore".
Now most of the readers of The Rock will be well aware that the Anglican ship is in a similar predicament today. For this is the year of the so-called Lambeth Conference when bishops from all over the world will be converging on England during July and August to see whether any way can be found to avert their impending shipwreck, which is largely, it must be said, of their own contriving.
The immediate cause of their concern is, of course, bishops like Jack Spong of New Jersey and Richard Holloway of Edinburgh, both of whom seem intent upon rewriting the entire Christian Faith from scratch in order to make it compatible with what "ordinary people believe nowadays"
Of that, more in a moment But it helps to understand just what the Lambeth Conference can and cannot hope to do if we go back to its inception in 1868 and the circumstances under which, for the first time in history, Anglican bishops from all over the world were called together.
What brought this about was the following.
Bishop Colenso of Natal in South Africa and his Metropolitan, Gray of Cape Town, fell out over the (supposedly) heretical book which Colenso had written.
In his book Colenso proved (to his own satisfaction at least) that the words of Scripture could not always be taken as literal history. One simple example will suffice. Colenso was a mathematician, and he calculated that, allowing so much space per man, woman and child, the number of people said to have assembled in the Temple in Jerusalem far exceeded the Temple's capacity to contain them. Therefore (Colenso concluded) either the Temple was larger than the Bible says, or the number of people said to have foregathered there must have been smaller.
It's difficult today, except for those of us who believe in the verbal inerrancy of Scripture as an article of faith, to understand just how devastating such an assertion as Colenso's was to those who had never given such matters serious thought, but had assumed that "the Bible is True" without troubling to ask themselves what "true" might mean in this context.
However, worse was still to come. Having decided amongst themselves that "Colenso Must Go", the bishops discovered that they didn't have the legal authority to do anything about it. For the Law of England – which might be used to deal with such matters at home, was found to be of no validity in South Africa. In other words, what had started as a crisis of doctrine very soon began to turn, slowly and inexorably, into a crisis of authority.
So the first Lambeth Conference was called to try and deal with this desperately unsatisfactory situation: unsatisfactory, that is, from everyone's point of view except Colenso and the considerable body of local support which he enjoyed.
After much searching of heart the bishops at Lambeth decided to resolve their predicament by consecrating a second, non-legal, bishop of Natal (Macrory) in the hope that eventually he and not Colenso, would prove to be the more popular.
In the event, that was what happened. Order was restored – but restored at a great price.
Firstly because it involved going against precisely that principle upon which the English bishops at any rate supposed their authority to rest – they were "by law established". The beliefs and practices of the Church of England were guaranteed by the Monarch in Parliament.. By extension, and this was another very tenuous assumption, this situation could be held to be true of the whole "Anglican Communion" (a term, by the way which had not been invented by that date, and which has since proved to be a dubious abstraction with very little foundation in reality and even less in law).
Secondly because it raised in an acute form the question of where Anglicanism does derive its authority from.
If it's not from the Crown then perhaps it's from the Bible? But Colenso had just demonstrated that the inerrancy of the Bible could not be assumed.
Or was it from the Ecumenical Councils of the Church? But the Thirty-nine Articles, that other supposed pillar of orthodoxy, had specifically stated that such Councils had erred and might presumably continue to do so. Besides, people like Newman and Ward had demonstrated that these same articles, with a bit of judicious massaging, could be reconciled with the whole teaching of the Roman Catholic Church against whose errors and excesses they had hitherto been thought an unshakeable bastion.
So in the end the time-worn English principle of "We'll muddle through somehow" was applied to the situation with the result that from that day forward it became the leitmotif of Anglicanism and Anglican bishops worldwide. There are still two legal Anglican bodies in South Africa (Macrory's position was secured under South African law beside Colenso's). The bodies are called respectively the Church of the Province of South Africa and the Church of England in South Africa – and most people have remained blissfully ignorant of the whole Colenso saga. Macrory's position was deemed legal precisely for the reason that Colenso's could not be declared illegal – namely that the writ of the English Parliament did not hold sway in South Africa.
Against this backdrop we can now pass quickly via the Dark Days of the '60s and Robinson's Honest to God where I began, through the women-priest and women-bishop events, each of which posed in yet another form the unanswered question "by what authority does a particular province of the Anglican Communion (sic!), or an individual within that body, decide that he or she or it can innovate in matters of faith and order"; and we find ourselves emerging at the other end of the tunnel at Lambeth 1998 face to face with, guess what, all those unanswered questions, and a great many more which have sprouted, fungus-wise, from them.
For instance there is Bishop Jack Spong of Newark, New Jersey in the USA. He has done everyone a service in this respect. For besides setting himself up as a champion of women priests, gay marriages and ordaining practising homosexuals he has provided everyone, through his diocesan newspaper and the Internet to name but two channels, a detailed summary of his beliefs.
Spong's beliefs, if they can be called that, differ, irreconcilably from what the Church Catholic, let alone the Anglican part of it, has believed and taught during the past two thousand years. In fact judging by what he says below his beliefs consist entirely in denials of what other people believe and profess.
Anyone wishing to understand what the bishops at Lambeth are up against this time should study Spong's article Towards a New Reformation carefully. Here are the twelve conclusions, or "theses" as he terms them, which he offers for our approval:
1. Theism, as a way of defining God is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination. So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium.
The importance of Spong's article lies not so much in the absurdity of much that he says (that would take a whole separate article to deal with) but in the fact that an Anglican bishop such as Spong can, with total impunity, deny every tenet of the Catholic Faith and continue as a bishop, someone who committed himself at his consecration to "driving out strange and erroneous doctrines" as the formularies put it.
In other words, there is no legal authority in the world that can remove him, or his imitators, from their post – any more than those who wished to do so could remove Bishop Colenso.
Set alongside Colenso's and Robinson's errors (the latter of whom effectively recanted from all of them before his early death) Spong's offerings are a veritable enormity. But, and here's the catch, Spong is only putting into words and taking to its logical conclusion what a large section of ECUSA, most of its bishops included, have been tacitly approving, practising and preaching for several years.
So, unlike Colenso, Spong is not just one eccentric, wayward bishop (whose ideas, incidentally, were largely, though not entirely, vindicated by biblical scholars over the course of time) finding himself ranged against the near-unanimous views of the Anglican Communion.
On the contrary, Spong and his fellow Americans, together with a number of bishops from this side of the Pond (Holloway of Edinburgh, for example) are busy deconstructing the Faith as hard as they can.
Opposing them is a much smaller, if better informed, opposition than there was in 1858 in the form of Moses Tay of Singapore, Sinclair of the Southern Cone of South America, many Central and West African bishops and, of course, those like the Flying bishops in England whose very existence is due to the fact that the teachings and practices of Anglicanism have gone so far astray from "the faith once delivered to the saints".
So what will happen at Lambeth '98?
The short answer is "God alone knows". Strenuous efforts are being, and will continue to be, made in order to preserve some semblance of unity.
For example, Bishop Spong himself has proposed that the whole issue of homosexual practices should be wiped off the agenda. Naturally, it would be convenient for him if it could be, since it would enable those who so wish to continue doing with impunity what they've already started doing clandestinely. The announcement that "a Commission has been appointed to look into the whole matter" (their preferred outcome) is only another way of saying that nothing effective is going to, or indeed can, be done to stop them.
We may also confidently predict that the bishops will wish to draw as much of the media's attention as possible towards issues like Third World Debt. Now there's a nice, non-controversial topic for you. What Christian in his right mind could be opposed to its alleviation? Small matter that the subject has already been discussed and decided upon politically a few weeks ago in Birmingham. Here's a chance for the bishops of the Anglican Communion to give an earth-shattering demonstration both of their unity and the fact that they are nobody's political lackeys.
What really gives the show away in this case is the discussion paper Towards a Full Humanity written by the Bishop of Cape Town (also downloadable from the Internet)
This document comes in several sections. However the really remarkable thing about it is this: those sections which are largely non-controversial, which deal with such things as human dignity and the rights of minorities and Third World Debt are positively larded with scriptural quotations.
By contrast the sections which deal with such thorny matters as Polygamy, Sexual Deviation, Divorce and the like contain hardly a single biblical reference between them. Why not? one asks.
Well, readers of The Rock may have their own answers to such a question, but my guess as to why Scripture gets such little attention on these matters is that it's virtually impossible to justify from scripture what some of the bishops are advocating and condoning if not actively encouraging.
If this is true, then it also provides us with a clue as to how those of us who wish to escape from the Anglican shipwreck should proceed without, so to say, missing the boat altogether.
The clue resides in the word Authority, and it was another Lambeth Conference some thirty years after the first one which suggested a way of avoiding our going down with all hands on board.
The formula, which came to be called the Lambeth Quadrilateral consists of four distinctive tests against which any novel doctrine or practice should be measured in the future. These are the following
The Old and New Testaments
The Apostles, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds
The Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion
The threefold Ministry of Bishops, Priests and Deacons.
Remember, these are tests and not thoroughgoing diagnostic tools. They won't necessarily tell you why women-priests or lay-celebration are unsound developments – only a warning-signal that something is wrong; they wont tell you precisely the relationship which should exist between the respective orders within the three-fold ministry – only that such a three-fold ministry has existed since the time of the Apostles; the tests won't tell you how many people actually fitted into the Temple, but they will tell you that nothing may be taught as necessary for salvation save what withstands the test of scriptural authority.
Which means, of course that it is now the vocation of the Faithful Remnant – Continuers, Traditionalists, ESA, Forward in Faith, Cost of Conscience and suchlike – to come together in showing those heading for the rocks of error and heterodoxy the way back to the Truth as it has been finally revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
Lambeth 1998 may provide us with the opportunity so many of us have been waiting for. Whether its official outcome turns out to be yet another almighty fudge or almighty fiasco (and it could easily be either) there will still be a massive task in front of the sort of people for whom The Rock is such a blessing.
Our task will consist in getting people safely to shore and embarked again on their journey in a more seaworthy vessel, whose officers and crew have lost neither their bearings nor their marbles.