Tag: Andrew Atherstone

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51ka0d0GNNLI am continuing with my chapter-by-chapter, essay-by-essay review of Good Disagreement?  Previously:

This chapter is the first in this book to exceed my expectations.  The focus is less on the division and more on the possible ways forward.  It is not prescriptive, it simply gives a potted history of ecumenical movements, and the descriptions are insightful for the present concerns.

The helpfulness of this chapter shouldn’t be a surprise.  I observed earlier that there are many ways in which the Church of England appears to act as a conglomerate of churches already.  It’s not absolute of course, there are many things in common particularly at the episcopal level, but it is not a stretch for the dynamics to apply.  It is interesting, for instance, that the authors see fit to put constructive “liberal-evangelical” dialogue, such as that between David Edwards and John Stott who are both Anglicans, within the scope of ecumenism (see p115).

Three observations:

1) The most helpful characteristic of ecumenical interactions is that of honesty.

Good ecumenical interactions do not presume full agreement, and dialogue often serves to “bring areas of disagreement into sharper focus in order to clarify the real sticking points.” (p117)

This is good disagreement in the sense that it is actually disagreement.  It is honest and does not demand a pretence.  A holding together of both unity and truth is the right aspiration, but unity is not constructed of it’s own bricks.  Unity’s material comes from discussions on truth:

The result of honest conversations between divided churches may be that different positions are shown to be incompatible and contradictory, and therefore the divisions must remain. This does not make the conversations fruitless but, on the contrary, pinpoints where change is necessary for unity to proceed. (p117)

Of course, avoiding a pretence is easier when it’s different churches talking.  But between Anglicans, who share, for instance, a common language of prayer, it’s a lot harder.  Some collective honesty about differing semantics would bring us closer to the more constructive dynamic described here.

To this end, confessionalism can be significantly helpful.  When done well (a big caveat), it clarifies meaning, it removes pretence, it allows conversation.  I was told once of an Australian Bishop of a non-conservative variety who, to the surprise of some, welcomed the Jerusalem Declaration that arose from GAFCON.  His response was, without any hint of disparagement, of this kind: “Now we know where you stand and we know where you’re coming from.  That is helpful.”  Irrespective of whether this anecdote is true or not, that’s the sort of attitude that advances things.  Confessionalism risks clarifying the divide (which may be fearful to some), it may even risk the “split” (whatever that means), but without it we have an inhibiting lack of clarity.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from my own experience, if an honest appraisal of difference is not achieved, and if possible separation is not acknowledged, or even embraced, there is likely no room for reconciliation at all.

2) Separation doesn’t preclude all forms of unity.

I was struck by the reference to Francis Schaeffer’s idea of “co-belligerence”, “that churches can go into battle together on specific issues of social concern, without the need for doctrinal agreement.” (p114)

I like the term “co-belligerence” and have seen it in action.  In my time in Tasmania I was involved in the response of churches to what became known as the “social tsunami” of 2013 in which a radical socially revisionist state government attempted to impose a whole swathe of divisive legislative changes.  It was a most ecumenical experience – I met with everyone from across the entire range of Christian expressions, from Roman Catholics to Quakers, from Pentecostals to Presbyterians.  Someone expressed it this way: “I thought we’d be in this corner fighting by ourselves, and then I turned around and there were all these others with us!”  We were being co-belligerent.  The doctrinal common ground was thin, to say the least, probably limited to the very basics of what the WCC of churches provides (see p24) and yet there was a substantial form of unity.

Similarly, I count as dear friends many who differ from me on points of theology.  There are many things about which I think they are incorrect, and, in some circumstances, worthy of being opposed.  Yet, despite this, I am convinced of a shared spirituality.  We pray to the same God.  We trust in the same Christ.  There are times when we are separate, and firmly so!  Yet we can bless each other, even if we cannot bless each other’s position.  (Of course, the flip side is there are people who are correct doctrinally, but not right in spirit, but that’s for another time).

There are many things where Anglicans truly do act as one.  Advocacy for refugees is a near and present example.  This sort of unity is not necessarily at risk of honesty about differences being embraced and explored.

3) Even minimalist common ground can still quake.

The ambitions of ecumenism are described in this chapter.  The “organic unity” of sweeping reunion across the board, particularly in terms of shared modality is one of them (p120).  The other form of ambition is “reconciled diversity” (p122) in which certain expressions of unity cohere to a minimalist fundamental common ground, and all other things are held separate.

I am pondering how these apply to the Anglican concerns.  Ostensibly the Church of England is an “organic unity”, yet beyond the structural necessities, doesn’t appear to be behaving so.  But I am an Anglican from further afield, ordained in the Anglican Church of Australia.  There Anglicanism is a federalised arrangement of dioceses in which even General Synod canons can be ignored in each local place.  The wider perspective is that of independent national provinces.

It is a clearer perspective of a diversity with minimalist common ground.  That ground is, in history, that of the so-called Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral.  These are the four (only four!) things that are fundamentally necessary to being Anglican.  They arose during colonial times, and have more recently been wrestled with by fresh expressions and church plants working out their ecclesial identity.  They are, to quote:

1. the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the rule and ultimate standard of faith.
2. the Nicene Creed as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith
3. the two sacraments ordained by Christ himself: baptism and the Lord’s Supper
4. the historic episcopate, locally adapted.
(p127)

It’s tight enough to define something real, but it’s still very loose.  It is as minimal a base of fellowship as ecumenical movements such as the WCC.  It should be robust.  As the story goes, when someone episcopal was once asked about the Anglican “split”, the response was “how do you split blancmange?”  Anglicanism, historically, has not been brittle.

Yet now, even the Quadrilateral, raises the problematic questions.  Number 3) is pretty safe.  Number 4) has been changed in its character through the provision of alternative oversight and mutually exclusive network of episcopal “recognitions.”  Number 2) is far from guaranteed.  And Number 1) is the crux of the issue: differing epistemologies no longer able to cushion themselves from each other by ambiguities.

Is the Anglican common ground shifting?  We need to be honest about that.

Next: Part 8, Good Disagreement Between Religons by Toby Howarth

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51ka0d0GNNLI am continuing with my chapter-by-chapter, essay-by-essay review of Good Disagreement?  Previously:

In this first chapter the book’s editors, Andrew Atherstone and Andrew Goddard, outline something of the programme.  They look to the Scriptures at the (many) times disagreement occurred amongst God’s people.  They raise the question of what “good disagreement” might look like and, indeed, whether it is actually possible.

Atherstone’s and Goddard’s contribution is substantial necessary work, but contains nothing that is stunningly insightful.  As with many theological “problems” two aspects are presented in tension:

The first is the importance of defending the truth:

…gospel truth matters and is a blessing to the world, so should be defended against errors that obscure the gospel and can be seriously detrimental for people’s spiritual health.  Error is dangerous and needs to be strenuously resisted and named for what it is – a powerful force that opposes the God of truth and threatens to damage the life and mission of the church. (p5)

There is no doubt about this.  Indeed there are times when Scripture literally anathematises falsehood.  Unity and agreement is not for it’s own sake; the people of Babel were united!  So-called “mis-unity” is just as deleterious to the gospel as disunity.

The second aspect is the importance of relationship. Referring to Paul:

He is clear that there are ways of disagreeing and patterns of conflict which, although they rise among believers, have no place in the Christian community. (p6)

It’s been an adage of mine to aspire to being not only correct (propositionally) but right (relationally).  All of us who have passed through the zeal of theological formation know the mishaps of sometimes being correct but also terribly wrong.

Nevertheless, a truths-in-tension framework here is fraught; because the two sides are not independent.  In reality, you can’t balance “defending the truth” with “relating well” because if you don’t relate well you can’t defend the truth, and if you won’t defend the truth you can’t relate well.  They are subtractively connected (the absence of one reduces the other), not additively combined (the presence of one augments the other towards something new).

Which is why, on the things that matter, as Atherstone and Goddard point out, “agreeing to disagree” is not the answer.  At the end of that path both the defence of truth and the depth of relationship are reduced to nothing.  The foundations of “Good Disagreement” are therefore not relational but epistemological.  It must ask and answer, “What are the things that matter?”  With the answer to that question both the defence of the truth and right-relationship can be built, without answering that question neither can find grounding.

The crucial task is to identify those foundational truths.  If all views are embraced within the church, then it has ceased to take seriously its calling to be a witness to truth and righteousness and to have a distinct identity as the body of Christ in the world. (p9)

This epistemological necessity is woven throughout Atherstone and Goddard’s treatise, but usually only implicitly. “Controversy and disagreement in the church is not simply a curse” they say on page 13, and “It can be a blessing in disguise because it forces us to go back to the Bible with renewed diligence and prayer, to clarify the issues at stake.”  Which is to say, disagreement becomes an epistemological exercise, a return to Scripture.

Similarly, they critique the ad clerum of October 2014 in the Diocese of Oxford.  The statement from Oxford aspires to believe that those with differing views “are bearing witness to different aspects of the truth that lies in Christ alone,” and asserts that “not only is all truth God’s truth, but God’s truth is ultimately bound to be beyond our grasp because our minds are but miniscule receptors before the great and beautiful Mystery of God.”  This is clearly an epistemological statement and Atherstone and Goddard appear to have issue with it:

It argues that we should “respect” and “honour” not only the other person but also their views.  This fails to make a key distinction – that not every view held by a Christian is necessarily a legitimate Christian view: some of our opinions may be sub-Christian, or even anti-Christian, and in need of correction.  Furthermore the statement presumes that all these views bear witness in some sense to the truth found in Christ, without any reference to their content. (p18)

This chapter scopes what “good disagreement” might look like.  Atherstone and Goddard, like good facilitators, leave the question open.  But it seems to me that the trajectory of their discourse is this: that the question is not “what is the truth?” but “what is actually core and common to us?” and the manner is gracious, freedom-offering relationship.

There are two observations I would make:

Firstly, the other question inevitably involves relational wounds, irrespective of the gentleness of the parties.  On the issue of sexual ethics, for instance, we could ask “what is the Christian view on sexual identity and activity?”  Ask this question and the held-truths of one side inevitably hurt the other.  From either side, no matter how well it is phrased, or how gently it is expressed, the actual position of the other side is “you do not adequately know or appreciate the love of God, you have embraced a cognitive dissonance by which you justify a refusal to submit to His life-giving ways in Christ.”  I haven’t picked sides here – this is what either side inevitably hears from the other.

If an attempt to answer that question is what is meant by good disagreement then what we are being asked to embrace is ongoing mutual wounding, an ecclesial life of pain.  That is not necessarily a bad thing – after all it wasn’t just Westley-the-farm-boy who noted that “Life is pain” and life does not flourish in avoiding it, as the way of Christ does surely show us.

Nevertheless, the church is called not only to the birth pains, but to the new life of the covenant, in which the fractures of human brokenness are identified and resolved, not incarnated.  And so the more basic question is required, i.e. “is our belief and practice on sexual identity and activity something that must be core and common to us?”  It’s a less wounding question, but one that presupposes an existing, and entrenched, separation.

Secondly, it is telling that in many of Atherstone’s and Goddard’s examples of “agreeing to disagree” – I’m thinking particularly of their reference to Wesley and “in essentials unity, on doubtful matters freedom, in all things love” (p10) – the application of that good disagreement is not to koinonia (within the fellowship) but ecumenism (with others of a different fellowship).

It struck me that this is an implied admission that we are already talking as if this is a problem between churches (plural) rather than within the Church.  It struck me particularly as my observation of the Church of England slowly grows.  There is a sense in which the Church already operates as different churches.  For instance, in Australia, there are annual Diocesan Synods in which there is a clear ongoing expression (for better or worse) of all clergy and many laity gathered around their Bishop.  There is less of that in England.  Collegiality is expressed more through ecclesial societies and relational networks.  Episcopal leadership appears to operate in a slightly different mode – more of a “I’ll help you be who God is calling you to be” rather than “come with me, where God is leading us.”  This is observation, not value judgement!

But the point is, unlike in Australia, I can see room to conceive of the Church of England as two or three geographically intermingled ecclesial communities, that are, outside of administrative, historical, and legal realities, effectively separate in relational and theological terms.

I could be wrong.  In fact, I’m likely to be!  These are initial observations only and still very much from an “outsider’s” perspective.  But if this is the case, then honesty about this is necessary for any good disagreement.  After all, the goal of unity in diversity can only find it’s equilibrium when the diversity is given its fullest freedom, including the freedom to change name and walk apart.  Whatever the outcome of the current disagreements, which I have every hope will be done well, it must be gracious honesty and reality that ground the way forward, not well-meaning pretence.

Next: Part 3: Reconciliation in the New Testament by Ian Paul

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