Apprehending the Truth:
A Conservative Perspective
Ephraim Radner
The current struggle for ECUSA’s future, and indeed for the whole Anglican Communion’s, offers a wonderful opportunity to clarify what we understand the Church’s character in history to be, how we think it faithful and reasonable as a church to orient our decision-making process within time, and what we apprehend as being the ties linking God’s creatures – including ourselves as ecclesial creatures in this whole mix – to God’s unfolding providential actions within the world.
In what follows, I do not wish to mount a defense of one political group over another within the present conflicts of our church. Rather, I want to explore these questions of apprehending the truth within time that so perplex us. And I will do so by taking up the debate over whether it makes logical sense for traditionally-minded Christians – represented by groups like the Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes, the American Anglican Council, the Anglican Communion Institute, or by individuals who belong to no particular group at all -- to claim a position of resistance in their relationship of participation within the Episcopal Church, given that such groups and persons have often staked out attitudes towards “traditional” elements of the faith that simply do not gel amongst themselves. (My use of the term “traditionally-minded” at this point is deliberately vague, given some of the matters that I will discuss at length below.) My own sense of what is reasonable in all of this will become clear; but I am more interested in uncovering differences than in actually arguing for the rational superiority of one vision over another.
Most of what seems to unite these traditionally-minded Episcopalians in the public’s eye, after all, is a single issue: the shared commitment, on the basis of Scripture’s and the Church’s long-standing teaching, to resisting recent General Convention decisions legitimating same-sex partnerships. In so resisting, these Episcopalians, organized or not, are generally also committed to remaining, with whatever tensions this might entail, “within” ECUSA (they believe, in fact, that they legitimately embody ECUSA), rather than setting up another structurally and authoritatively distinct church.
But a number of very harsh criticisms have been leveled at such traditionally-minded Episcopalians, over just these basic commitments in their limited and potentially incoherent arrangement. Some have taken aim at traditionalists’ avowed insistence onnot separating from ECUSA. In refusing to leave, the argument goes, such persons maintain formal associations with heresy and error that are scandalous and corrupting. Others have accused Episcopalian traditionalists of a weak commitment to “orthodoxy” proper, because of their willingness to have among their numbers (and to tolerate among others) ordained women clergy, remarried persons who have been previously divorced, and (according to e.g. Peter Toon) untethered revision of the Book of Common Prayer. The fact that the traditionalists have “drawn the line” over homosexuality strikes all these critics as both too little and too late. Finally and related to this from another side of the theological spectrum, certain liberal “Conventioneers” who themselves uphold the acceptance of same-sex partnerships within the church, have charged that traditionalists are simply inconsistent about doctrinal and disciplinary “change” altogether, because they have accepted e.g. women’s ordination – which is contrary to venerable “orthodox” teachings over time and place – while arbitrarily rejecting changes in attitudes towards homosexuals. A prominent journal devoted to cross-denominational “orthodoxy” has spoken of people like the Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes, for example, as “really” being a group of “liberals from 30 years ago” – willing to change church doctrine all over the place, but not quite in step yet with the current alterations on sexuality. The Network, so the argument goes, is not really “orthodox”; rather, it is precisely and negatively “traditionalist” in the sense of hanging on to compatible habits of practice without much theological ballast beneath them.
My hope in the following reflections is to explain why these criticisms miss some important points regarding not just a venerable means of grasping and witnessing to the Christian truth that I believe some of the so-called “traditionalist” groups named above are using, but also, in the current context, a more adequate means of such understanding and testimony, adequate, that is, to the Gospel we have inherited. My reflections will move within the realm of some rather abstracted historical categories, making use of political science as much as theology. But these categories, I believe, are illuminating of some of the choices that lie before us, choices that are often decided in a destructive manner because made without clear understanding.
What is orthodoxy?
One of the great knots in this debate is the meaning of “orthodoxy”. My own view, up front, is that the term is in fact not appropriately used to qualify the attitudes of the traditionalists I have been discussing. But that is not because they are “unorthodox” so much as it is because the term itself is used with great doubt and some suspicion even within the current historical condition of Anglicanism and indeed many other Christian churches of the present. To be sure, the term has been loosely cast about by leaders of all kinds of traditionalist groups, and I have used it myself in a generalized, and therefore potentially inaccurate, way. But what does it really refer to, especially within an “Anglican context”?
The criterion of “orthodoxy” is not so much a wax-nose in itself, as it is bound to plural sources of meaning that are hard to apply universally, especially in the midst of dispute. In some sort of basic etymological sense, the word refers to a measure for articulated belief in and praise for God, rightly ordered for human life in a divine relationship. But what is the traction such a sense holds for Christians in the world? Semantically, “orthodoxy”’s “measured” content is given by particular communities or recognized authorities, or – most powerfully – by the lived conjunction of both community and authority together. Whether or not one would accept the particulars of the Eastern Church’s definition of “orthodoxy” as embracing the “Councils of the Holy Fathers and their traditions which are agreeable to divine revelation” (from the Liturgy for Orthodoxy Sunday), this conjunction of community and authority is exactly what makes possible such a general concept.
This is the case even when the term moved from its Eastern locale and became useful to 17th-century Lutheranism in the West. But as a general synonym for “Christian truth”, which is how the word “orthodoxy” is now often loosely applied, the concept has lost its edge. Even as a contrastive category to “heresy” – which its Eastern usage often entailed – modern Protestant Christianity, in its multiplied voluntaristic self-definition has blurred the New Testament linkage between the personal “choice” of the “heretical” teaching and the communal or ecclesial doctrinal “trust”, apostolic in its origins, from which such a choice separates itself. (Hence, in the New Testament, “heresy” and “schism” or “faction” represent English translations of the same Greek word.) The point is, it is not really helpful to reduce “orthodoxy” and “heresy” simply to what is true and false, when in fact the terms’ purchase is given in the communally authoritative context – the apostolic Church that is the living Body of Christ – in which truth and falsehood are given articulate shape. When the identity of this Church is in dispute, the very character of truth and falsehood will likely be thrown into question.
In situations, such as today, where multiple or overlapping Christian communities exist in some kind of relationship, or where diverse centers of authority hold sway, or where community life and articulate authorities do not mesh, it is extremely hard to apply criteria of “orthodoxy” in a clarifying manner. One might speak meaningfully of “orthodoxy” in a Roman Catholic context, or in a Mormon context, or in some small branch of a defined Reformed denomination, or even within the context of a given Eastern church. But these are by no means the same “orthodoxies”, nor do they all cohere even within themselves to the same degree.
Furthermore, to use the term “orthodoxy” to refer to certain inter-communal (or even intra-communal) commonalities of belief is probably misleading. As theologians like Stephen Sykes have indicated, the search for Christian “fundamentals” or “essentials” or what has recently been called (following C.S. Lewis, who borrowed the phrase of the mild Puritan Richard Baxter) “mere Christianity” is precisely that – a search among separated or confused communities.[1] And the “essentials” articulated in this search were destined to be a tool for reconciliation or cooperation or mutual understanding on the part of individuals or groups explicitly aware that “orthodoxy”, as understood by this or that group, is not in fact adequate to the task of forming or maintaining Christian community. Christian “fundamentals” have been proposed precisely as alternatives to orthodoxies no longer or not yet established, and are therefore hopes rather than working criteria.[2] This is true no matter how these hopes are described – the “Great Tradition”, or “Paleo-Christianity” or whatever, each of which designates some tactical or reactive alliance of those who hopes are forged in the face of a sense of general Christian beleagueredness.
The term “biblical orthodoxy” is similarly unhelpful if, in fact, it does not arise from within an already established larger communal or authoritative orthodoxy of Christian belief itself. Clearly there is no common biblical orthodoxy, if this means some criteria of Scriptural interpretation, application, or authoritatively defined Scriptural teaching content, shared by, for instance, Calvinist groups and Eastern or Oriental churches together (even when creedally organized, as most famously disputes about the filioquedemonstrate). There are, to be sure, certain shared elements of such interpretative content, but they do not and cannot constitute an “orthodoxy” precisely because they have no basis in a communal or authorized Christian life shared among such groups. They represent descriptions of overlap in teaching and no more. (Although such overlaps are not without significance for discerning the truth.) This is especially true with respect to Scriptural ethics, where there is no orthodoxy tied independently to Scriptural moral teachings that is somehow embracing of diverse Christian communities in some defining and self-conscious fashion. No such common Scriptural orthodoxy exists that constrains and forms Christians across denominations even, in a recognizable and common way in areas of e.g. the use of wealth, war and peace, disciplines of worship and work, and sexual behavior.
None of this is meant to be an argument for the relativization of the reality of truth, including truth that is Scripturally located. Rather, I simply want to stress that appeals to orthodoxy or the application of the claim to orthodoxy within conflicts like those within ECUSA now are semantically imprecise and probably confusing (as many people in fact intuit). The shape of God’s truth, the search for this truth, and the application of what is true to the life of the Christian Church cannot simply be resolved by an appeal to “orthodox belief” unless we are speaking within an already authoritatively ordered community. Otherwise, we must approach the matter of divine truth within a disputed context in some other fashion. We might therefore ask the question: is Anglicanism, or even ECUSA, such an authoritatively ordered community and has it ever been one?
On the face of it, the present dispute and the nature of the questions involved in it, would seem to offer a preliminary and emphatic negative response. And this response itself indicates the breadth of the challenge before us. But without yet ceding this point, it is possible to answer “yes” to this question by initially referring only to the Church of England in particular and at some particular time, pointing perhaps to the Book of Common Prayer (of some specific edition) and to the Articles of Religion, for instance, conjoined to and upheld by Synods and Convocations, which together act(ed) as defining contours to such an authoritatively ordered community.
Still, even this is disputed and has been disputed since at least the late 16th century, by e.g. Puritans, Latitudinarians, Evangelicals, Tractarians, and others (and in different ways). So that it is hard to make the “orthodox” case for Anglicanism even before the present time, including particular churches that are a part of this phenomenon (like [P]ECUSA), as well as including relationships between these churches. For the reality of a defined communal life and constraining authority either has been attenuated in practice (e.g. in America since the 18th century) or simply has existed without formal and clear articulate expression (as is the case with “Anglicanism” itself). In each case, the recent search for uniting essentials or fundamentals or “core doctrine” testifies to the actual lack of community and authority by which meaningful orthodoxy might be articulated.
In the course of this search, to be sure, appeals have been made to proposedorthodoxies, especially ones founded on purported historical communities from previous generations: the “primitive” or “undivided Church”, the “first five centuries”, the congruence of Reformed formularies with these previous entities or with other acknowledged “confessions”, the 16th century English formularies themselves within or without canonical orderings, the Caroline Divines, and so on. Any of these proposals may or may not once have had a lived integrity. What characterizes them all, however, is that such integrity is in each case historical: each represents, for contemporary Anglicanism as a whole and for ECUSA in particular a “propositional community of the past”, and each can therefore only be an imaginary community of the present, one that acts as a touchstone for something not yet established. (It should be noted that a similar and uncertain appeal to imaginary communities, although with very different contours, is at work within the struggles of the American Roman Catholic Church of the present.)
Apprehension of the truth in time: the nature of “catalepsis”
The “not yet” here is critical with respect to the notion of an “Anglican orthodoxy”. Something is happening within particular Anglican churches and among them that has made the “search for orthodoxy” more than an intellectual conundrum or endeavor. What has happened is the confluence of a set of events and hopes within churches, societies, and cultures that many Christians believe to be of divine ordering and demand. These events are calling, in a truly vocational sense, for the formation of a Christian community (and for an authoritative character within it) that in fact can sustain and express an orthodoxy of witness and teaching that reflects the Holy Spirit’s witness to the Son’s sending by the Father of all before the eyes of the world (cf. John 17:20-26). Is this not the calling of the Anglican “Communion” within a fractured human and ecclesial landscape? Is this not what we see as a kind of “groping after” in the slow and uneven and joyful evolution of Anglican plurality and common life within the world over the past two centuries?
Again, I want to emphasize that there is a measure of teaching about and praise for God rightly ordered for human life as God’s creatures. But the measure can be articulated only as it is lived and embodied within a human society, only, that is, as it takes shape within an ordered life itself, gifted with common instruments for measuring. It is that life, with these instruments, that alone can frame what is “orthodox” in any meaningful (because commonly understood and enacted) sense; and it is this life, the life of Christ’s own body formed and growing (cf. Ephesians 4) to which we must be attuned if we are to grasp what is orthodox itself. Is it possible, then, that the “not yet” of Anglicanism’s orthodoxy is what we are suffering, simply because we are being pressed into apprehending; and that we are therefore not engaged in a conflict of propositions in the first place – propositions whose rootedness lies in the past, indeed in various pasts and not in the present – but that we are in the midst of a struggle overapprehension’s present form?
The character of “apprehension” in this case is not merely an ecclesiological detail, but rather it is bound up with the shape of Christian living itself. “Apprehension”, in this sense, is an evangelical act, the original catalepsis (to use the transliteration of Paul’s Greek) by which the active love of Christ works within a person or a community, transforming its lived contours into an image of the divine Son himself, the “outer” Man making the “inner” man conform. (Cf. Phi.. 3:12f., where “apprehending” Christ Jesus enacts the prior “apprehension” by Christ of Paul’s own being; or Eph. 3:18, where the indwelling Spirit of Christ so strengthens the Christian church that she is able, “rooted” in love, to “apprehend the breadth, length, height, and depth” of Christ’s love “along with all the saints”.) Indeed, the significance of the distinction between historical propositions that may only wishfully define an orthodoxy of the present based on past propositional artifacts, and the shape of orthodoxy’s present catalepsis or apprehension comes clear when we return to the current question of sexuality. In this context, the “rubicon” that has been crossed with the affirmation of same-sexual relations and unions is hard to explain purely in terms of some “orthodox” propositions now violated since – as many have pointed out – we have managed for some time now, with whatever easy or uneasy consciences, to violate many another proposition with a certain communal impunity (viz. divorce and remarriage). And it is it not at all clear that homosexuality, as a topic, has sat at the top of anybody’s list of Christian “essentials” until quite recently. Although one might mount an argument that sexuality looms large in a special way because of critically fundamental theological reasons and truths – creation and grace, providence and eschatology – it is hard to find their “orthodox” propositional contours prior to the reflection and argument itself (see below).
I myself would wish to pursue and affirm just such an argument; in fact, it is one that has been made with stunning persuasiveness and breadth by John Paul II in the discourses collected under the title “Theology of the Body”. But just this example – papal talks, over a long period, with all their environing authoritative qualities, and that draw on an astonishingly rich exegetical and homiletic Scriptural context that is informed by Patristic, scholastic, and modern philosophical tools – points to the way that the seriousness of the sexuality dispute within this or that denomination, including Anglicanism, cannot be tidily understood as to its inescapability or its import through the single lens of a set of simply ordered and prioritized propositions. It can be grasped only as part of a lived act of apprehension engaging a range of communal gifts and temporal extensions.
Rather, the “rubicon” of the current debate and actions by ECUSA is given force, not by the application of such propositional hierarchies, but by an emerging and variously vocalized common sense within the Anglican Communion (and the larger Christian cultures of the nation and world) that this matter is Church-defining and touches upon the core of Christian identity. The Communion itself is realizing that this is a rubicon, and this realization is a part of the “not yet” of the Communion’s own common authority in witness and speech that is in the process of apprehension, that is, in New Testament terms, cataleptic. After all, on other matters like women’s ordination, and to some extent divorce and remarriage, or even Prayer Book revision, all of which have been at the center of disagreements and even divergent practices, this communal awakening to the fact that a critical passage in the Church’s teaching and witness is being pursued has not yet been noted and articulated. The only reason there is a “rubicon” is because something called the Anglican Communion has perceived it as such through a range of conciliar instruments; and the Communion has perceived it as such because, as an evolving Communion, the process of apprehension of orthodoxy’s contours has seen this emerging element rise up from the depths of its historical life.
The liberal argument that Anglican doctrinal instability, historically speaking, somehow justifies the kinds of changes in the teaching of sexual ethics we have been seeing, therefore completely misses the point here. We are now talking, after all, about orthodoxy’s apprehension by a Communion in search of its own common measure of belief and praise of God, and not about the application of a completed set of historical propositions from the past that (as we know) have in fact had varied commitments over time. We are talking, that is, of the connection between this particularly apprehended reality, vitally bound, to the actual molding of Christ’s body. and it is just because of this that we cannot simply relativize the content at issue according to historicized schemes. We approach the present dispute – or ought to – with a humble awe.
The matter of orthodoxy’s apprehension, of catalepsis in its evangelical sense and not of orthodoxy itself, is what is at stake in the first instance in this dispute. And the differences in understanding the shape and character of such apprehension of orthodoxy is in part what distinguishes some of the major players within the current debate, not least the traditionalists’ roundly assailed and purportedly compromised attitudes. Does apprehension itself have a set of distinct possible frameworks that, unlike the sets of doctrinal propositions specific to plural orthodoxies, can nonetheless illumine the alternative ways forward within a debate over truth, even over divine truth? If we are not simply to lapse back into vying orthodoxies of the past – imaginary communities that we would have invade the present from some distant temporal hills – we need to search elsewhere for help with this. And I suggest that, precisely because we are talking about the formation of communal authorities when we are speaking of apprehending orthodoxy, we are right to look for analogies within the specificallypolitical realm. This, in itself, may be a peculiarly Anglican move.
A typology of conservatism
The typology I would like to try out is exactly the one many commentators have claimed is theologically crude and unhelpful in the present debate, even though it is in fact the most frequently applied in common speech regarding our disputes; and that is the typology of “liberal” and “conservative”. Although here, I would like to add to the dichotomy a third group, comprising the “radical conservatives”. In each case, a particular stance is taken in relationship to the apprehension of “orthodoxy” itself. The critical bases for this typology, politically speaking, can be found in the work of Jerry Z. Muller[3] and in literary commentators like Lionel Trilling, as they have wrestled with the evolution of liberalism as an intellectual style.
Muller carefully distinguishes “conservatism” from “orthodoxy”, and does so primarily on the basis of the former’s engagement with “history” as an inescapably informing reality for discernment and decision-making. While orthodoxy, whatever its religious or philosophical location, is defined by a commitment to a given “metaphysical truth”, conservatism’s posture represents less an affirmation of some truth (which various conservatives may or may not themselves hold among themselves) than a pragmatic fashion of making one’s way within a world where truths – whatever they may be -- assert themselves most potently through temporal expressions and embodiments. Thus, whatever the “truth” may be for a conservative, it is grasped – apprehended – primarily through instruments that take historical reality and experience seriously and carefully. The paradox of this engagement with historical discernment, if such it is, is that discernment becomes tied to a valuation of time itself, of “taking time”, of the landscapes of time, its institutions and traditions, its peoples; that is, the discernment of truth through time, for conservatives, becomes itself truth’s self-assertion. Put in Christian terms, the “way” of orthodoxy’s apprehension becomes the form of truth.
Just as orthodoxy reflects its own multiple authoritative communities, so too does conservatism tie itself to various temporal instruments. But Muller believes there is a broad and stable constellation of conservative “assumptions, predispositions, arguments, themes, images, and metaphors” that are shared among conservatives of a wide spectrum of commitments, whether political, religious, or philosophical. Most of these are tied to the historicist pragmatism of their common outlook. They include: a presumption of human imperfection – biological, cognitive, moral – as fundamental to individual and social existence (something borne out by simple historical experience and observation); “epistemological modesty” in the face of unavoidable limits in human knowledge regarding self, society, and the world; a presumption for “institutions”, customs, and social prejudices as normed and ordered vehicles for a stable civic life within an otherwise generalized uncertainty of existence; the usefulness of “particularistic” (as opposed to universally organized or justified) social or religious realities, perhaps culturally specific and unique but also rooted historically for a given people, as a framework for conveying social goods; suspicion of theory or of over-riding principle in favor of pragmatic prudence; mistrust of functionalist or idealistic reform, as prone to the likelihood of unintended and negative consequences; the “veiled” character of human knowledge and experience, that both limits certainties of action, but that also provides a set of virtues conducive to moral life within such limited and limiting contexts.
Muller’s conservative constellation of historical continuities, particular traditions, and general modesties stands in contrast to a “liberalism” that stakes its own discerning vision to the side of temporally-rooted experience and reality. This is important to note, because we are used to hearing liberals either affirm or be characterized by a kind of attunement to temporality in the specific form of “change” or even “progress”. Conservatives do not deny the forces of change or even the eventualities of mutation; they simply do not view them as defined by an a priori virtue, of either direction or value. And here lies a significant distinction between conservatism and liberalism: not in the recognition of historical variation or evolution itself, but in its evaluation according to a rule. For conservatives, there is no such “rule” for the future or for the transformation of the present, and therefore we are constrained by simple humility to cling to what little we know, what little we are given, what little we have learned to manage. Whereas for liberals, time is governed by a rule, and furthermore a rule that is knowable and applicable to the decisions we make; therefore we are justified in creating and recreating institutions, social orderings, practical moral frameworks for the sake and in confidence of an historically embedded truth. Liberalism is fundamentally “principled” because governed by a sense of overriding direction; conservatism “unprincipled” because accepting of the limits of our internal and external controls and knowledge about the world and our very selves.
Thus, Trilling’s observation that the liberalism of the 19th-century that was defined by a commitment to “continuity and justice” developed into an increasingly dedicated adherence to the second element as itself the definer of the first: history in its continuities is about the assertion of justice, increasingly and necessarily, within the experience of human society, and moral life is hitched to the momentum of this temporal truth. In a sense, for liberalism “orthodoxy” as a metaphysical “truth” is something that bypasses historical apprehension altogether, and rather determines historical choices from the start at any given moment.
It should be obvious, however, that this transformation of the historical process itself into a “principle” is and has been amenable to a variety of particular definitions within the liberal framework, to the point that one can properly speak of a dilution of liberalism into almost wholly transmuted forms. It might appear that there is little that holds in common the moral concerns of Matthew Arnold’s battle against cultural “anarchism”, for instance, and the almost nihilistic “post-modern” moral relativism of, say, “queer” philosophy. Yet both do share a conviction that time itself functions as the outworking of a kind of human “pleasure” – understood in almost contradictory ways, of course – and that the pursuit of this pleasure defines the political discernments, choices, and decisions a society ought to embrace in ways that span particular cultures and traditions. The distance from Arnold to Jeffrey Weeks is vast, obviously, but the migration of “justice” into the realm of malleable rights and finally to the assertion of subversive individual indulgences follows just the kinds of peregrinations that social discernment will make when riding through time upon the back of “principle”.[4]
It is just this kind of mutation that conservatives would warn against and retreat from in their suspicion of principled history: when a principle, any principle, becomes the tool by which historical experiences and choices are hopefully and demandingly molded, the principle can only find itself warped by its unwilling subjection to the stranger and more mysterious forces of the human heart lurking within time. (Even if “conservatism” is not necessarily tied to Christian belief, its presuppositional sense of human perversity has clear Christian resonances.) This is why the third element in Muller’s typology, “radical conservatism”, has far less to do with conservatism itself that with the abduction of conservative predilections by the almost liberal-minded servility to principle – an often lethal combination. The radical conservative, according to Muller, is one who “believes that the processes characteristic of modernity have destroyed the valuable legacy of the past for the present, so that a restoration of the purported virtues of the past demands radical and revolutionary action”.[5] This represents the decision, born of some sense of commitment or desperation, to turn history’s unfolding into the image of whatever custom, habit, or prejudice a conservative outlook at a given time might valorize in the process of moral apprehension, and to do this by “radical” means, if necessary rupturing the very continuities that seem to be under threat or perhaps already destroyed. Thus, Moeller van den Bruck writes (from a radical conservative perspective) that “conservative means creating things that are worth conserving” [emphasis added]). But the result of this kind of “taking the kingdom of God by violence” can develop into exactly the forms of fascistic coercion that seem to mirror the devouring historical principles that liberalism, generally although not always with less disjunctive demands, promotes.
It should be obvious, however, that orthodoxy as a vital reality stands in a diverse relationship to liberalism and radical conservatism, despite each of these outlook’s common reliance on “principle” as human history’s determinant. On the one hand, liberalism’s principle (whatever it might be at a given moment) is itself the orthodox truth that drives its historical projects. But it is a truth that, as we said, bypasses the communal struggle for apprehension by constantly adjusting itself to the various and specific needs of the one apprehending. In other words, orthodoxy really has no intrinsic communal force within liberalism, but is something redefined by the plethora of experiences brought to bear upon the very shifting and self-orienting plural groups that liberalism’s concerns tend to uphold and continually create. Whereas for radical conservatives, orthodoxy (in ways we have stated above) represents the character of an imaginary community, one already assaulted and probably past, that therefore requiresre—creation. In this sense too, the radical conservatives’ orthodoxy bypasses its own communal apprehension, by obligating a new community’s invention – it stands outside both community and authority, and hence the effective character of orthodoxy’s “measure”, its comprehended articulation, and its ordering qualities are all absent. Radical conservatives, therefore, have historically slipped quite easily from principled action into forms of behavior that are simply overwhelmed by human instinct unmoored from communal and communally authoritative constraints altogether.
The nature of Christian conservatism and its alternatives
The religious and specifically Christian application of this typology may or may not be immediately illuminating. But we must not suppose that the typology is itself extraneous to our ecclesial lives. Indeed, the particularly political shapes used to explicate its order are in fact of recent notice: late 18th-century pre-Revolutionary and early 19th-century post-Revolutionary reflection in England and France (e.g. Burke, de Bonald, Chateaubriand), within which the terms themselves were invented. Nonetheless, the historical exemplars from before this time are more appropriately located within the internal ecclesial struggles of the 16th and 17th centuries of Europe, and already in the late 18th-century conservatives like de Maistre were able to perceive this pedigree. The specific application of each term to this or that group – who exactly represented “conservatives”, “liberals”, and “radical conservatives” among the players of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and post-Reformation – is perhaps less interesting to our present purposes than being able to sense the vital and varying place of orthodoxy in the contexts in which various groups arose and flourished.
Within Roman Catholic contexts, for instance, liberal and radically conservative forces grappled differently with the same “orthodox” deposit: one need only observe the debates between Jesuits and Dominicans, not to mention the practical theology deriving from the culturally different areas of central Italy or Parisian France. The question of the relationship between orthodoxy and its apprehension or application is both pertinent and complex in these kinds of examples. More to the point of our own moment is the way that these and other varying forces have contributed to a currently conservative Roman Catholic Church (as I view it) that has managed somehow to appropriate institutionally liberal and radical aspects together of the 18th century as these impulses themselves have adapted slowly to a variety of historical evolutions. The character of contemporary Roman Catholicism as a world church is neither liberal nor radically conservative; but if neither of these, how are we to view its lived sense of orthodoxy? The answer to this is perhaps less obvious than some might think (except perhaps certain Eastern Orthodox theologians still instinctively critical of Rome).
With respect to Protestantism, I believe that Paul Tillich’s argument regarding its “principledness” rightly places much of the initial Reformation’s thrust within a liberalistic dynamic of bypassing historical catalepsis in favor of a culturally malleable principle, in this case, of Scriptural critique and/or Gospel justification.[6] Within Anglicanism (and parts of Lutheranism to a lesser degree) this initial tendency was quickly constrained by a prior conservative outlook.[7] The English church remained, indeed until quite recently, a formative ecclesial vehicle for conservative values (more on this below), bound to a Scriptural “principle” that was liberal in its continuous encouragement of critical inquiry. The amalgam of these two elements has represented a peculiar attitude to the truth’s apprehension within the modesties of communal constraint.
Within other spheres of Protestant life, however, the lack of this conservative container that gave a constricting set of forms to the Scriptural principle permitted only direct confrontation between other alternative principles of e.g. interpretation, and the reactive responses to untethered liberal adjustments took the shape of what would later be called, in political terms, “radically” conservative attitudes. These were based on the embrace of one or another moment within the liberal continuum of change, each inventing its own communal vigor as an image of the past and insisting upon its necessary reestablishment. The separatist instincts of some forms of Protestantism, therefore, derive in part from the unequal paces and patterns with which ecclesial liberalism’s inexorable dynamic of constant change have been accepted. As many contemporary observers have noted, the irreconcilably divisive contentions between parties in the Western Church today, when they arise, are not between genealogically unrelated groups, but between religious liberalism’s generations and siblings. The radical conservative’s rallying cry of “renewal by division” is a proverb proclaimed withinliberalism’s family, not from outside its fold.[8]
But is there not in fact a Christianly faithful evaluation that we can make of the terms of this fundamentally religious modern typology? Perhaps. And some would point to just those Christian communities where “orthodoxy” appears less disputed as appropriate lenses through which to make such an evaluation. Still, it is not clear that the vital and authoritative communal characters of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches are particularly stable, and to them, just as to various well-defined Protestant groups, the question of cataleptic attitudes and their alternatives towards orthodoxy remain open, or are opening in new ways. How then might we assess the resolution to these questions on the basis of the Christian identity itself?
Israel’s relation to the Law provides a potentially classic example. In a foundational sense, the Law is presented as an immovable and defining deposit to which every aspect and moment of Israel’s life is asked continually to conform and return. In light of this, the radical conservative’s pattern of repeated ruptures for the sake of an arrested principle would seem in a way to describe Israel’s prophetic vocation, consistently “called back” to an obedience previously compromised or abandoned.
However, the Scriptures also describe the pragmatic failure of this radical demand. The attempt – as with Jeroboam or with Josiah’s “reform” – to reestablish a fixed appropriation of the Law, however necessary in terms of divine pressure, turns out to have been itself a moment in God’s own refashioning of Israel in judgment and mercy. Jeroboam fails in faith and Josiah’s people (with him as their representative) requires a fall and penitence that only death and resurrection at God’s hands – through destruction, exile, and return -- can sustain. In this very process, the “Law” as an “orthodox system” of behavioral propositions is itself transposed into apocalyptic promise and divine incarnation. This historical transposition becomes the theological basis for the Gospel’s “fulfillment” of the Law. On the one hand, certain providential constraints require the failure of the Law’s radically and continually reasserted form; on the other hand, this providential ordering of Israel’s life – which the Scriptures as a whole are now seen as actually embodying, and no longer acting merely as a commentary on the Law – becomes the very object of faith’s (and God’s people’s) apprehension as “truth”.
The Christian approach to Scripture has, in fact, never been primarily one of radical conservatism until recent times, even among those with the highest and most inerrantist view of its inspiration, as among the Fathers. This is so largely because the Scripture has never, until the post-Reformation, been understood as a fixed or in itself systematized body of propositions capable of being simply reasserted at times of perceived assault. Indeed, the early Church’s “assimilative” dynamic of cultural appropriation, to use Ramsay MacMullen’s description of the expanding Christian community’s relationship with a range of pagan customs and outlooks during its first centuries, stands in some tension with more modern forms of propositional orthodoxy.[9] Sociological descriptions of conversion have been helpful in sorting some of this out from a modern perspective, identifying the various ways in which individuals and groups are able to maintain frameworks of practice and attitude that have divergent religious origins, for the sake of an integrated and dynamically-oriented assimilation within new communities of belief. The ways even that Paul sought to make sense of continuities between Old and New Testaments, or between Law and Gospel, including the application of categories like natural law, for the sake of “building up” his new charges demonstrate how he too operated with a kind of cataleptic approach to the truth that stands to the side of subsequent (real or imagined) stable orthodoxies.
It would certainly not do to call Paul a “conservative”. (Nor, for that matter, to assign to him any other station within the typology we have been exploring.) But the question is whether aspects of his approach to the truth are more or less amenable to conservative attitudes towards the truth’s apprehension. Paul made use of a range of exegetical tools and philosophical appropriations and he offered a number of different exemplary postures from his own adjustments to a disciplined but supple mission among Jews and Gentiles. Together they witnessed to a Messiah of Israel’s “flesh”, all the while also opening Israel to the mysterious providence of God’s purposes for the whole of creation, revealed through an incarnate Son. In bequeathing to his followers a church whose shape reflected these realities, Paul gave them a “tradition”, to be sure, but one tied as much to the character of his own life and sufferings bound to God’s revealed purposes as to some single body of doctrines. (Cf. 1 Thess. 1:6ff.; 1 Cor. 11:1; 2 Tim. 1:8-14. Not surprisingly, people like Athanasius still would refer to Paul’s example more readily than to Jesus’ own as a concrete determinant of behavior for the church.) Yet more importantly, he offered to the young church a rich and variegated engagement with the Scriptures whose authority was tied less to specific rules of exegesis and their defined outcomes than to an historical molding by the forms of the tradition and by bodily examples themselves to which Scripture’s hearing was to be bound (Romans 9-11 being a stunning model).[10]
When churches of more deliberately and openly “conservative” habits developed, like the Church of England, it was just in this area of Scriptural engagement that some of the most peculiar and telling aspects of their conservatism were manifested: by binding Scriptural hearing within the communal appropriations of traditions – both devotional and intellective – these churches thereby subjected the hearing both to the pressures of history undergone by resilient and inherently prudent social forces and to the incrementally and cumulatively adaptive capacities of gathered spirits oriented towards God’s purposes in Christ. The somatic character of the truth’s apprehension within this context was one governed by the dynamics of members being constrained by and relating and accountable to each other in ways responsive to larger needs and callings of peoples over time. And this character itself bears a close relationship to the exampled traditionalism and reiterated self-implications in Scripture that Paul commended.
It is in the light of this understanding that I consider myself a Christian conservative with respect to orthodoxy, rather than an orthodox Christian tout court, the latter designation one I believe too unstable to pin down usefully.
Conservative “catalepsis” and the challenges of the Anglican moment
Of course, we can and perhaps must continue to use the term “orthodox” to designate the cataleptic hope and commitment and even tools used for attaining the full measure of our ordered speech and praise. We can use it, too, as a sign against the disdain many liberals feel towards such hope. And we can encourage the term’s use by those who would maintain together such hopefulness. But we must take care that we are not seduced by the term’s concreteness to cast aside the hopeful work of apprehension that is not, and cannot yet be, finished.
For within the American religious context, much of the cataleptic character of Christian understanding is difficult to makes sense of, in large part because America has never had a rooted conservative culture in the particular fashion we have been using the term: ours is a history of discontinuities rather than of continuities, and the religious landscape of the nation has been sown with variations of radical conservative experiments or liberal self-reconstructions from the beginning. The notion of “history” itself has always been problematic for Americans – it was hardly cherished or taught, well into the end of the 19th century, and remains the least grounded academic discipline to this day among American students. It is fair to say, I believe, that the implosion of American Anglicanism that we are seeing is a symptom of this experienced incoherence as Episcopalian liberalism simply morphs into its radically conservative counterpart of revolutionary imaginings, and the resultant and intractable struggles dismantle the church.
The catalyst for this reaction, for which the dispute over sexuality is in fact a Rubicon, is the specific awakening at this time, with this issue, of American experience to its location within a context far larger than its previously limited self-image. Whether or not sexuality is a more “essential” doctrine for the church than, for instance, the eucharistic presence is thus not really the point. The point is that it is at this time and with thismatter that American Episcopalians are realizing that they do not live – or pray – within an independent arena, but are now part of a network of continuities within world Anglicanism and Christianity. Liberalism has no means of clipping its principles to the reality of these emerged continuities, invisible until now to the conscience of self-referring cultural powers like the United States, but with the appearance of an astonishingly expansive church in non-Western and younger nations, no longer avoidable. Reactive liberalisms that take the shape of radical conservative movements of protest, seek to fabricate new entities that can somehow justify a continuity that has never in fact been experienced in America, as much because it never existed here as because it does not really describe the vital experienced grasp of truth within the new churches of the younger nations themselves.
The few conservatives that exist within the American Episcopal Church have been tentative in the face of the moment. We too have awakened to this new network of connection in ways that perhaps were previously only theoretically considered, hoped for because of a general sense of our boundedness within to the larger Church’s often misapprehended traditions, but never truly lived until recently. We are scrambling to maintain the lines of modest engagement that were always understood to underlie the life of the church, but were never really seen for what they were or might become. But far from undermining the sense of purpose that has driven us, we are seeing this crisis is a kind of cataleptic moment par excellence, although just because of that, one that requires an almost heroic effort at resisting overthrow and engaging the gifts of what is presently “at hand” through the life of the historic church of which we are a part. As I have emphasized earlier, it is the historical character of our apprehension that conservatives insist must govern our discernments and decisions.
A whole set of matters of lived faithfulness has been brought up anew in the midst of this awakening. This has happened, though not in a way that raises the suspicion of some orthodoxy abandoned in the past that now requires reassertion. Rather, these matters have come to the fore again with a realization that traditions are rightly reexamined in light of Scripture and of God’s judgment of the church through the working out in time of our condition. This is the place, now, to restate some of the issues used by critics of Episcopalian conservatives, and to attempt some distinguishing of the varying ways we must approach these matters given our particular outlooks.
Let us first take the question of divorce. One of the concerns expressed with regard to conservatives on the matter is, as I noted earlier, that there a hypocrisy at work among us, one that has led us to permit and perhaps embrace divorce and remarriage, in a way contrary to Scripture and “orthodox” Christian teaching, even while bristling at changes in same-sex practices. The charge, as I have tried to indicate, can only be assessed honestly by conservatives within the context of the “continuities” given in our church’s historical life and now within the awakened apprehension of our common life in Communion, as each set is clarified, challenged, and judged within a Scriptural framework. I am not myself sure where this might lead, since it requires more than a perfunctory and immediate attempt. But here are some initial thoughts on the matter from this “conservative” vantage point.
As to the primary Scriptural demand, there has been a long-standing debate about exegesis here: the Old Testament permits divorce and remarriage under certain circumstances. Jesus calls this permission by “Moses” something based on a certain accession to human “hard-heartedness” (the text in Mark 10 is the classic one), something which he then states as ultimately contrary to God’s creative will “from the beginning”. Elsewhere, Jesus equates remarriage after divorce to a form of “adultery”. The problem that exegetes have found in all this, however, is that a.) Jesus gives an “exception” -- Matt. 19:9/5:32 – for a wife’s “sexual immorality” (the meaning is debated); and b.) Moses’ leniency (for “hard-heartedness) is not explicitly condemned or ruled out by Jesus, and may or may not still be an acceptable element of divine mercy in certain cases.
The historical continuities by which the church is bound, within this framework, have a certain kind of ramified focus. Thus, while divorce and remarriage has always been discouraged and usually forbidden outright in the Christian Church, this has never been universally so in either time or ecclesial geography, there being many permitted divorces and remarriages in the Middle Ages and (as well we know in Anglicanism!) within Reformation/Protestant churches (not to mention Eastern Orthodoxy) – although always within strict bounds and with nothing like the laissez-faire attitude of the present society and Episcopal Church in particular.
It is this history, bound up with not always universally accepted Scriptural exegesis, that perhaps lies behind the differing attitudes conservatives have held with respect to divorce and remarriage, on the one hand, and same-sex partnerships on the other. The very fact that Scripture does not prohibit divorce and remarriage in an absolute way (as it does, say, adultery itself), and that the Church universal has had a long history of varied and more nuanced interpretation and practice on the matter, distinguishes divorce and remarriage from same-sex blessings. For the teaching of Scripture and the Church’s reading of this teaching on the latter topic – homosexual physical expression – has been universally consistent and, as we know, consistently negative. (This is accepted by all historians and today by most biblical scholars.) It is, in this light, not an insignificant measure of our ecclesial apprehensions of the truth that the Anglican Communion – via Lambeth, the ACC, studies, commissions, resolutions, and individual synodical actions around the provinces – has, since the 1950’s, variously accepted divorce and remarriage (of priests and others) as a matter in which a variety of practices within the Communion would be tolerated. Yet it is also a fact that the Communion has, by contrast, steadfastly refused to accept such a variety of practices and attitudes with respect to the acceptance and affirmation of homosexual physical expression. The contrast between how our larger Church has responded to these two matters is telling.
But what conservatives – indeed not only they, but all of us – are being called to through the present moment is a reflection on the way our attitudes and practices, in this case of divorce and remarriage, are part of other webs of continuity, often destructive and deforming of the Gospel. Varying practices and limited permissions and the rest are not unimportant; but they cannot exhaust, or even come close to explicating, the full meaning of the ethical significance of the questions of marital and sexual practice. We are awakening now to the “fruit” of practices and the tendencies of permissions that indeed throw us back upon the molding powers of the Scriptural witness to the larger human destiny and creative purposes of God. In this sense, the “rubicon” of sexuality is a gift for a larger catalepsis.
The question, then, is perhaps less rightly posed in terms of “hypocrisy” as it is in terms of “attention”: what are we being asked to see in the midst of these changes, asked, that is, by God’s own providential calling? And my own sense is that we are indeed being asked to deepen and elevate our concern about the church’s permission of divorce and remarriage. The number of divorced and remarried Christians and even clergy is, as some have noted, “shocking”. If permission for all this were ever itself “permissible”, we can surely say – we are awakened to this affirmation -- that this permission has now gone too far, “too far” in terms of the negative social effects on children and families, and “too far” in terms of undermining the calling clearly laid out for men and women in their created and creative purposes by and for and with God.
Events alone have proved the “permission” to be a mistake in its extensive application. Standing Committees, Commissions on Ministry, and Bishops should re-think their policies with respect to ordination of divorced (and divorced/remarried) persons, and bishops should re-think the circumstances in which they give permission for individuals to remarry. Clergy and lay leaders must pause and step back and reexamine their own teaching and example. How drastically this re-thinking should be and on what time-table its force should be implemented is a matter, obviously, for careful discernment. Reversing policies of permission, of any kind, is always pastorally tricky and requires great prudence. But a conservative approach would, I think, rightly seek a re-introduction of discipline on a staged and gradual basis.
I would stress, furthermore, that this call to reverse is probably necessary, quite apart from any final adjudication on the Scriptural question of divorce and remarriage itself in absolute terms. That is, even if one thought that Scripture somehow allowed for divorce and remarriage under certain circumstances, it seems clear that such allowance in our day has been abused and needs at the least to be curtailed. And I bring this up in part to underline how the Scriptural demand, from a more strictly conservative perspective, is less one that is sown up in advance – in the kind of propositional form that authoritative or imagined communities often take them – but that asserts itself in renewed and renewing ways in the course of an historical apprehension of God’s truth which the Scriptures, in a lively way, would sow within us. It is not so much that such an approach can make vanish the “clash of orthodoxies” that liberal and radically conservative commitments must engage on these questions; it is simply a matter of engaging another way altogether – if one, however, that seems to have less attraction to people of our day.
On the matter of women’s ordination, I think the pattern of a conservative approach now appears more predictable. We are to ask questions regarding continuities, both entrenched and emerging, both limiting and gradually transforming , and all within the framework of the Scriptural press. In this case, Episcopalian conservatives in particular are left with varying illuminations. The Scriptural framework of discernment and formation is, pragmatically and theologically, far less clear-cut with respect to women’s ordination than is the case with same-sex relations, certainly, but even than is the case with divorce and remarriage – which, as we know, provides several pungent teachings of Jesus, and a few by Paul. The Anglican Communion’s own practice and discernment have proven highly diverse around these Scriptural realities with respect to women’s ordination, and along different lines than simple assignments of “orthodox” systems of doctrinal enunciation. This is so especially among the younger churches. These practices and discernments, furthermore, have followed lines of Communion-wide decision-making that, for all their bumps and lacunae, have nonetheless achieved a certain acceptance by the majority of the Communion’s members as legitimate. (This is not, of course, true in the minds of certain minorities, both liberal and traditional in certain senses.)
The generally accepted legitimacy of the Communion’s manner for permitting or for not accepting the ordination of women in this or that province lies, however, in some tension with other historic continuities within Christian churches and through the binding (by hope at least) of Christian churches together. It is fair to say that a conservative approach that takes seriously these limiting ecumenical and historic continuities, but that also takes its place within the more flexible ordering of the Communion, and finally that would be attuned to some “awakening” to the world’s varying concerns about women’s leadership roles, politically and ecclesially, would find itself reduced to a kind of humbled openness to the “not yet” of this apprehension – a place of modest freedom of conscience and dignity of diverse witness. And this has generally proved the case among Anglican conservatives (including many women conservatives, some ordained and some lay), not all of whom share the same practical commitments in their own ministry in this matter, but who have found a common space for respectful disagreement and cooperation together.
On a matter like this, conservative self-limitation in both claims and insistences, appears irritating to those with more principled agenda and objections. By comparison, it is therefore important to note that conservatives are willing to make distinctions among matters of crucial discernment, and to apply critical tools of inquiry, ordering, prioritizing, and moral adjudication among doctrinal matters. Not all analogies and parallels are valid, Scripturally, theologically, or historically, and it behooves the Christian – from this perspective – to exercise “reason” in clarifying the relationships between and the differences among issues like divorce, women’s ordination, and same-sex partnerships. This willingness and obligation to distinguish properly ties conservative thinking with the kinds of creative inquiry identified variously with Patristic speculation, scholastic comparative investigation, and Enlightenment critical discipline --- rather than with a single and integral body of dogmatic definition or “principled” commitment. And it is precisely a concern for the historical demands of varying continuities of witness and example, enmeshed in the Scriptural net, that makes for such conservative reflection and distinctions.
Finally, the matter of the Book of Common Prayer and its revision would seem to be an issue precisely of conservative concern, rather than of a strict and given orthodox complaint. That is, parsing most current revisions – and let us take the 1979 American Prayer Book as the main example – according to a variety of doctrinal standards does not, in fact, yield clear areas of transgression, in large measure because most of the worries expressed through the application of versions of orthodox criteria rely mostly on arguments from silence and arrangement.
For instance, one might worry about the dilution of penitential character in the newer revisions, or of the clear affirmation of sacrificial atonement in this or that eucharistic prayer. It is not that the worries are baseless – surely they are not! -- but rather that they are difficult to mount into a compelling picture of error given that the revisions themselves articulate other Scripturally-based assertions of some kind, in however bland or dispassionate a manner. (The Scriptural base is a critical standard that can, at least in theory, be applied and tested; it can properly evaluate, often negatively, some of the more radical revisions and “alternatives” available in the Epsicopal Church, although not, I believe, the 1979 Prayer Book itself.) Indeed, so long as the liturgy is in fact Scripturally-founded, arguments about its theological justification or lack thereof must rely on systemic standards of doctrinal proposition that do not, in fact, enjoy a common application in the church or churches at large. Indeed, the problem with theological exegesis of the liturgy is that, after having noted matters of bare conceptual articulation, one is forced to engage in a kind of rhetorical formalism, akin to aesthetic criticism, whereby the weight and significance of order, arrangement, and coordinated meaning among the phrases and parts of the prayers will be instrinsically contested.
By contrast, however, the kinds of objections to Prayer Book revision that take account of consistency with historic forms of prayer, formulary, and communal focus demand our attention in ways that go beyond contested orthodoxies. Here is where critics like Toon have strong arguments in conservative eyes. The fact that the 1979 Prayer Book (not to mention more radical revisions or alternative liturgies) breaks lines of liturgical genealogy in stark ways, that it imposed upon the people’s worship new doctrinal foci, that it complicated and multiplied prayers and eucharists, and so diluted “common” Scriptural formation, dislocating liturgy from the Anglican Communion’s practice as a whole – all this and more represents a serious disordering, some of it ongoing, of the “measure” of articulated belief and praise of God that has had serious consequences, especially in terms of the larger Communion’s capacity to engage coherently in the apprehensive vocation of catalepsis itself. The major question is raised of whether these negative consequences of revision have outweighed the gains in ecumenical coordination that, at least superficially, the 1979 revision achieved. In retrospect, and given the “bomb” dropped in the midst of the Communion’s and the ecumenical community’s common life by the 2003 General Convention (the characterization is by Bp. Peter Lee of South Africa), the answer is clearly that the revision’s evangelical task has been desperately foiled.
As with the matter of divorce and remarriage, however, the issue is how to live with the realities of an already re-formed common life. It is difficult – and not necessarily wise – simply to call for an abandonment of current liturgical life. Continuities and common ordering require some coherence between recent and historic lines of influence and adherence. Personally, I believe that a conservative approach to the matter would aim at something like Toon’s own suggestion that some version of the historic Prayer Book’s form – whether 1928 or another – be recognized as authoritative in terms of communion-wide connection – “Common Prayer” -- and that more recent revisions be given a permitted “alternative” status. But this should be done, in a sense, only within a conciliar discussion and coordinated set of decisions involving the Communion as a whole.
Conservatism and the Rubicon of sexuality
In light of these kinds of particular challenges as confronted with a conservative posture, the basis upon which sexuality itself has acted as a “rubicon” of concern for conservatives is perhaps now more obvious. The “awakening” to the new web of Anglicanism’s geographical and cultural continuities around the world has brought into inescapable view the fact that local worries over disciplinary and doctrinal changes with regard to same-sex partnerships represent a connective reality that goes far deeper and moves far more broadly than a particular communal orthodoxy. Here is where, among other realities, the “overlap” of ethical and Scriptural teaching by diverse Christian communities becomes vitally important. The debate over sexuality has exploded within the secular and political realm independent of either ECUSA and Anglicanism itself; and the character and extent of the dispute has unveiled the roots of concern as reaching across cultures and denominations and even religions to the degree that the fundamental continuities of natural law and the Scriptural disclosures of God’s very purposes for humanity – the intersection between divine creation and human culture itself – have been placed in question. In other words, the present crisis has thrust conservatives against one of the most basic and historically integral realities their pragmatic modesties are driven to conserve. And it is just this that drives the conservative theological program of reflection and commitment to take a stand at this point, even as they must revisit and reclaim and perhaps reorder the breadth of continuities that move out from this created reality into current relational life (e.g. divorce and remarriage).
To make a stand at this point, while working responsibly within this breadth in ways noted above, is a theologically coherent procedure, however difficult it may seem and despite the criticisms of liberals and radicals. Theologians, after all, have long distinguished the two “orders” of creation and redemption. And while each must ultimately be coherent with the other – God’s created and creative purposes in nature are finally “at one” with His purposes and means for nature’s redemption – there is a kind of historical as well as conceptual distinction between the two that is both helpful to make and to allow to order the practical expectations of our commitments in the world. Here is where conservative theologians would perhaps attempt to explicate their fundamental resistance on this score.
The “creation of male and female” -- for companionship and procreation -- is bound to the natural purposes of the created order (and Paul affirms this explicitly in e.g. Romans 1), which witnesses to the sovereign goodness of God and to a basic means by which humanity is to live fully with God. This is the main and basic purpose (and thus created “icon” of God within the world) that same-sex behavior obscures, and it is this that Christian conservatives rightly now recognize as informing one of the basic continuities that bind their focus of the truth’s apprehension within the world of ordered human relationships before God (a fundamental character of orthodoxy itself).
This created order is, furthermore, foundational to the understanding and embodiment of the shape of “redemption’s order”: the self-giving by the Father of the Son, in love, for the salvation of humankind. This latter reality is “figured” in the life and virtues of the married state (cf. Eph. 5:21ff.), and is grasped through the historical process by which men and women grow into the sanctified reality of marriage and chastity. The vocation to exclusive “indissolubility” of marriage, and celibacy outside of it, is tied to this order of redemption, in a similar way to which the “life of the Cross” and “prayer” and so on are tied to it. The vocation itself cannot be in question, from a conservative perspective; nor can be its ultimate calling and demand. But, as with all matters of transformation and sanctification, it is temporally imperfect in its fulfillment within our lives here and now; we grow into it, even as we are judged by it. The cautious approach to the historical embodiments of this process within churches that conservatives follow ultimately constitutes no more than the kinds of pastoral wisdom that, as we now realize, can never be freed from the critical constraints of perceived failures. Hence the need to reassess.
In some sense, the present crisis has thrust conservatives to the very threshold whereon the work of apprehension – at least on this matter -- finds its goal, whereon grasping merges into the fullness of being grasped. The male/female/marriage reality within creation’s order is the basis upon which the male/female/marriage/indissolubility life of Christian discipleship is built and pursued within the temporal order of redemption. Although there is, within both orders, much latitude for mercy, the frontier has been reached from which it is now clear that there is no room for the denial of the created forms by and in which mercy is sought and received; there is no room for them simply to be contradicted or rendered of an optional character. For to do the latter is to obscure the very redemptive calling that is given by God in Christ, which the exclusive and self-giving form of marriage – now tied to the Incarnate form of Christ – is molded by God to represent.
From a conservative point of view, we have reached an epochal moment. And how we have reached it is significant: borne down by the weight and constraints of peoples, whose ties to us – in creation and in Christ! – we have somehow misunderstood or simply ignored before now; pressed by the cries of martyrs and saints, whose form we had been accustomed for too long to miss. Their bodies, from Africa and Asia and Latin America, and from within the corners of American churches too – not the liberal or radical principles embodied in an elite class of scribes and agitators -- represent the ballast, the drag, and the momentum of history itself. To this we bow, as to the Author of time.
It is important to reemphasize that Christian conservatism is not a doctrinal party, in itself. It is a pragmatic stance, oriented towards discernment and decision-making in time, not a statement of the truth. And this pragmatic cast does not represent “all there is”; in William Witt’s phrase, it is engaged with penultimates, though for the sake of what is ultimate.[11] It is concerned with maintaining the practice of receiving and ordering a collective and ecclesial space for such receipt – the receipt of One who is the gift itself, the One whom we cannot give to ourselves or conjure up for ourselves, the One whom, rising up we cannot “bring down from heaven”, and whom, descending we cannot “bring up from the dead” (cf. Rom. 10:6f.), but who can only give Himself.
Jesus Christ is not a liberal, a conservative, or a radical conservative. He is neither a principle nor a system of propositions. He is neither orthodox nor heretical. He is not the Scriptures themselves but has fulfilled them all in Himself (Rom. 10:4). For He alone has founded the community and embodied the authority through which we might know and praise God; and He did not so much “order” its relatedness to God according to a measure, as measure all by His own being (cf. Job 38:5ff.).
Yet in His work of “giving gifts”, He has “led a host of captives” (Eph. 4:8) and moved forward “with the children God had given” Him (Heb. 2:13), bringing “many to glory” (Heb. 2:10). This freeing and leading, this pioneering and herding and gathering – of Scriptures, of principles, of passions and thoughts (2 Cor. 10:5), of created persons – is the basis for the continuities of life and constraint of love and meaning that set the current of our catalepsis in the truth.
“For His sake I have suffered the loss of all things… that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection of the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature be thus minded; and if in anything you are otherwise minded, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained” (Phil. 3:8, 10-16).
[1] Cf. his well-known chapter on “The Fundamentals of Christianity”, in John Booty and Stephen Sykes (eds.), The Study of Anglicanism (London: SPCK, 1989), pp. 231-245. Sykes’ essay demonstrates the difficulty of this search, although with a more sanguine sense of its usefulness than my own estimation affords.
[2] What is called “Fundamentalism”, in its technical sense of referring to the early 20th-century movement of reasserting a set of defined (Reformed) “fundamentals” of the Christian faith, belongs both to this mindset and to another, more radically conservative outlook described below.
[3] Cf. his wonderful introductory chapter to his volume Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 3-31).
[4] Arnold is sometimes classified with conservatives in the lineage of Burke (e.g. by Muller himself). But I tend to take his own self-description as a liberal more seriously, precisely because his argument seems far more deliberately “principled” than anything Burke would countenance. On Arnold’s “liberal humanism”, a principle that indeed saw him dispense with traditional Christianity for the sake of some deeper “core” in typical liberal fashion, see Trilling’s Introduction to the Portable Matthew Arnold(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980 [1949]), pp. 3-10.
[5] Muller, pp. 27f..
[6] Tillich’s classic arguments can be found in his collection of essays The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), esp. chapters 11-15 (pp. 161-233).
[7] Hooker’s “providential” argument regarding the Reformation in England at the end of Book IV of the Laws (IV:xiv) offers a crystalline exposition of an historical outlook that, once buttressed by the kinds of epistemological modesties provided by the 18th-century, would inform Burke’s own reading of English experience.
[8] Tocqueville’s notion that “ces sont les nuances qui querrellent, pas les couleurs” – the shades clash, not the colors themselves – fits, in different ways, the antagonisms between radicals and liberals, and radical conservatives and conservatives – although the difference between the latter two is, as I have been suggesting, greater than between the former pair. See Alexis de Tocqueville, The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau (Garden City: Doubleday/Anchor, 1959), p. 21, in John Lukacs’ excellent introduction dealing with Tocqueville’s peculiar brand of “Christian conservatism”.
[9] See Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 103-149.
[10] St. Augustine’s On the Morals of the Catholic Church (see esp. cc. 29-35), provide a rich vision of the interaction of these means of learning and growing in the truth, a kind of cataleptic primer for the period.
[11] See the recent paper by William Witt, “Reflections on non-theological interpretations of General Convention and a theological alternative”. Witt is not satisfied with the “conservative-liberal” dichotomy as a useful template for understanding what happened at General Convention, although his concerns lie chiefly with the way the terms have been applied to reduce the debate to a more limited politico-cultural struggle, rather than illumine its more theological concerns. With this I whole-heartedly agree; although it is unlikely that Witt would feel wholly comfortable with my own typology.
