A Conversation with Bishop Allison on the Church
Ephraim Radner
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20040220061323/http://anglicancommunioninstitute.org:80/rad2fitz.htm
Bishop FitzSimons Allison has done me the honor and blessing of addressing serious questions to me about the church’s history and calling. It is an honor, because his own witness to the Christian faith and on behalf of our church’s faithfulness is one of such substance and informed care that any public disagreement on his part with me represents the offer to become a part of a conversation colored by evangelical integrity. It is a blessing, because the character of clarity his own questions to me advance and the grace with which they are raised can only elevate the quality of my reply and, I would guess, of the thinking of those listening in.
Bishop Allison was responding, in part, to a lecture I gave several weeks ago at an Anglican Communion Institute conference in Charleston. In general it seems that Bp. Allison is concerned that I am promoting a kind of weak resistance to heresy in our church, because I have called such resistance to be accountable to strict standards of humility, order, and – as far as possible! – unity. This has led him to label my position “pacifistic” in a negative sense, because it is fraught with a lack of realism and perhaps even of sturdiness. (As with pacifists, he seems glad I am alive and kicking, but equally grateful that I have not been cloned!) There are times, the Bishop insists, when faithful “disobedience” and “separation” are called for in defense of the Gospel – the times of the Reformation, for instance, of the English Civil War, and even today within the Episcopal Church and other parts of the Anglican Communion. If the proponents of truthful Christian teaching were to follow, or to have followed in the past, my lead (or at least my argument), Bp. Allison suggests, the Church and the world would be a far less happy and Christianity truthful place – mired in political absolutism and ecclesial sin – and we would have little hope of maintaining the Gospel’s faithful preaching within Anglicanism today.
On one level, it is hard for me to refute this argument: after all, what “might” have been the case (say, if the Reformation or the Civil War in England had happened differently if at all) and what “will” be the case (that is, what Anglicanism will become if we do this or that), are both unknowns in an almost complete sense. I can only respond on the basis of both my reading of the Gospel itself in the divine Scriptures, and on an analysis of the present as it has been birthed from the past. On both counts, I must state as strongly as possible my disagreement with Bishop Allison’ basic objection, that is, that humility, order, and the presumption of unity are and have been subversive of the honest defense of the faith against heresy. Indeed, I can think of no other basis for the Gospel’s effective preaching than humility, order, and the presumption and pursuit of unity as they form the vessel of the truth’s enunciation. So it does appear that we see things very differently!
And the difference touches upon realities that impinge immediately upon our common and individual life with God: how we are to witness to the Gospel entrusted to us; where and how and with whom we are to resist contradictions to that Gospel, made even in the midst of our ecclesial family and by our highest leaders; how congregations and their members (the wise and foolish, the great and the small) are to be cared for and led; how clergy are to keep their vows made before God and man; what mission we are to pursue and how offer Good News in Christ within the context of publicly compromised church structures; how maintain our hope and the godly docility of our souls when mired in endless controversy. The stakes are awfully high for us all.
There is no secret that groups with which we are engaged in these matters – like the Anglican Communion Institute (ACI) or the Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes with which I am associated, and the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) which Bishop Allison helped found (as he did ACI’s original work!) -- have given different answers to these questions, sometimes in ways that were critical of each other (certainly I have been critical of the AMiA, for instance). In this case, the critique offered by Bishop Allison of my own practical outlook in the midst of the present crisis represents an opportunity to bring clarity to each of our respective sets of responses, in a way that takes seriously the challenges with which we are faced.
I will reply to the bishop in three stages (and all very incompletely). First, and within the context of the lecture to which he refers, I will try to reiterate the notion of “ad hocresistance”, and its appropriate limits. Second, and more generally, I will outline my sense of what is meant by being “a church under God’s judgment”, including the example of Cromwell Bishop Allison raises for our edification. Finally, I want to return briefly to the practical realities of our calling in the present.
Varieties of resistance and their limits
So let me first address the actual matter of the lecture to which Bishop Allison refers. It seems, in reading his otherwise generous summary, that I either did not make my points clear enough, or that he has perhaps missed some of them along the way. In any case, I must emphasize that the purpose of my extended example of the experience of the “refractory” Catholic church during the time of the French Revolution was certainly not to argue that our calling as Christians in the face of heresy and persecution for the truth’s sake is to submit to uselessness. Rather, the purpose of my outline, within the context of the more scriptural aspects of the lecture, was to emphasize how we are called in such circumstances to submit to God’s ordering of effect (and effectiveness), by maintaining the integrity of our witness through a variety of ad hoc embodiments that we understand and accept to be limited by our own responsibilities for the church’s low estate.
Indeed, the character of divine judgment (as many see it) constituted by the whole-scale assault upon the Christian truth represented by Revolutionary policies and practices at that time made any notion of a well-organized strategy of resistance, focused upon a specific practical outcome of victory for the forces of orthodoxy, impossible and probably stubborn (and there were some such strategies held by émigré groups in England and elsewhere). There were, of course, many heroically faithful Christians who resisted the Revolution’s anti-Christian assaults. But they were and had been part of a church which for a long time had so opposed God’s will through its hypocrisies and oppressions and even outright denials of the Gospel, that the Revolution’s eventual attempt to destroy her, driven at the beginning by many justified concerns, necessarily spilt blood upon the hands even of her lately-come defenders as they rose up to resist. (The analogy with the present state of the Episcopal Church and of Western Christianity is one I drew directly.)
I listed a number of these ad hoc forms of resistance, from open rebellion against the government (e.g. in the Vendée and elsewhere) to hiding, from flight and exile to clandestine preaching and pamphleteering, from silent martyrdom to vociferous denunciation. To the degree that none of these actions took upon itself the mantle of divine destiny, and to the degree that their outcomes – in every case minimal in effect as it turned out – were pursued and received with a kind of limited demand, they were, in a religious sense, practicable options, faithfully chosen according to the needs and capacities of the fractured and disorganized forces of orthodoxy that were available.
One of these options certainly included agitation, and clearly involved an array of “disobediences”. Bishop Allison does indeed misunderstand me if he thinks I believe that “disobedience” is somehow without compelling purpose in times like these. Moving from the example of the Revolution, let me turn to another, embodied in an organization with which he is personally involved, the AMiA: their own practices of leaving churches, of setting up sometimes competing missions, of overstepping accepted episcopal and jurisdictional boundaries within and outside the U.S., of moving forward without carefully calibrated consents – all of theseactions have a certain plausibility as forms of resistance in a kind of Saul Alinksy-esque way: subverting expectations, unsettling normal means of doing business, bringing to the surface hypocrisies and incongruities within the church’s political structures, kindling public awareness and focusing it upon matters of import, and so on. Épater la bourgeoisie, when in fact the bourgeois power of the church in ECUSA is destroying its evangelical trust. It is both plausible, and to some extent it has “worked”, by marshalling lay energies, gaining publicity, exposing the duplicities of Presiding Bishops and the rest. Although I am not sure this would be the AMiA’s self-characterization.
But having used this example, I want to be clear at the same time that none of this, nor any other ad hoc practice of resistance in such times, can represent a divine “strategy”. Indeed, once one assumes such divine purpose and imprimatur to these personally chosen acts, they themselves become tools of destruction. They do so because, if the church is in fact being judged by God, once one tries to escape such judgment personally – by fortifying a particular tactic as a kind of “ark” against the flood – one moves from resisting evil to resisting the divine judgment against human pride itself, in the midst of which judgment one ought to be content, in a sense, to abide.
As a secular philosophy of political change, I do not believe that “civil disobedience” represents a particularly helpful tool for the analysis of Christian vocation. Indeed, because its purpose is explicitly to achieve certain results of political reorganization, ones that (from a Christian perspective ) cannot by definition be possessed by human means within the context of a divine ordering of events (such as God’s judgment), such a philosophy is ripe for misuse and frequently feeds into, however unintentionally, the bottomless well of human self-assertion. But as a simple form of Christian testimony, that has no ulterior motive other than to speak clearly in the face of what is evil or wrong, “disobedience” for the sake of conscience is not only acceptable, it is often a grace. Nonetheless, I would insist that we must take deliberate action in order to remain free from the deforming power of ulterior motives in such disobedience. And a crucial part of such action must be our submission to disobedience’s effects within the ordering the church in which one lives and witnesses, that is, within the ordering of the structures and events that have called forth such disobedience in the first place and whose judgment one is both embodying and receiving. Christian disobedience should not entail our own extrication from the structures against which we are protesting – unless we assume that we ourselves have no dirty hands, something divine judgment does not permit. I have, in the past, for instance, encouraged those – including bishops -- wishing to disobey diocesan boundaries for the sake of faithful preaching and pastoral care, to do so beneath the weight of current canon law, and to accept the consequences as they are so ordered within the life of the church against and within which one is witnessing. I continue to feel that this is the appropriate way to disobey, one that takes the order bequeathed as a gift that properly goads even in our necessary kicking. “Conscientious objection” has a cost to be openly and explicitly borne.
It is true that the “straight-ahead” theology and practice I advocated in my lecture, with the example of Paul in the Pastoral Epistles as a key and using the historical examples I did, is indeed willing to be “defeated”, as Christian disobedience must be willing. But that is hardly “defeatist” let alone the “acquiescence” Bishop Allison seems to hear in my remarks, and I am mystified that he should attribute such an attitude to me, of all people. If defeated, then only in the process of resisting in word and in deed, and in many and various ways. And if defeated, never silenced. And again, if defeated, only in terms of some organized strategy for prevailing whose shape simply could never in any case be upheld in human terms, given that the events in which we are engaged are driven both by human sin and divine response. God’s victory is always assured, a conviction that is only a platitude for those whose fear of losing leads them into the closet (a place designed for prayer, rather than refuge).
Within this context – one of a church under judgment – I am not sure where the concern with “pacifism” comes from. I know that our own secular age is deeply suspicious of “passivity”, and all my talk of “humiliation” and “submission” and “acceptance” grates with a culture that cannot stomach the attitudes enjoined in, say 1 Peter or Ephesians 5. Still, these are words that have their root within the soil of Scripture, whose fertility is nourished by the blood of our Lord. His figure, towering over the landscape of the Church, ours included, is not one that is easily subsumed into the categories of either pacifism or of armed resistance, as well we know(e.g. Matt. 10:34 and 26:52). And if not, we need to be challenged by something other – deeper, more complex in its spiritual gifts -- than these two contrasting modes of political manipulation.
An ecclesiology of divine judgment
Of course, much depends in my lecture on the rather simple question of whether God is in fact judging the church of which we are a part, and on what is constituted, humanly speaking, by the reality of such a judgment. This brings me to my second point. The case of Cromwell, which Bishop Allison raises as an alternative to my own example of the French Revolution, is instructive in this regard. The issue here – as with the broader one he touches upon when he worries about my dismissal of the Reformation – is not whether Cranmer or Cromwell “should” have done what they did. They did. The Reformation, as well as Cromwell and the English Revolution of the mid-17th –century, are facts of our life, and part of the patrimony we have received. They constitute my “family history” as much as others’, and I have no desire to disassociate myself from them. Further, the Reformation and the Civil War are parts of a large web of moral and religious responsibility, a web that ensnares the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglicanism of which I am an heir. In light of this web of responsibility, the issue is not my likes or dislikes about historical realities, but what we can learn from them, divinely and practically. With the Reformation and with Cromwell, then, what are we to apprehend?
My consistent argument over these past years has been that we discern the divine reality of these events – and others like them today such as we are now going through – through the lens of the Scriptural figures that embody them from within God’s historical grammar: that is, from Israel herself. And sinful, rebellious, and finally “divided” Israel opens up to us, in a real way, the secret purposes of God at work in the world, in this particular context of apostasy and response. What we see in the figure of these purposes, I would argue, is the process of divine judgment by which the sinfulness of Israel is compounded by a cascading blindness and stubbornness, and by which responsibility is shared across leaders and peoples, prophets, priests, and kings, who are all given over to a process of truth-denying and truth-speaking the persuasiveness of which is instrinsically compromised. And to what end does this history unfold? For the refashioning of a people’s heart and thereby of their ears; and through their refashioning, for a rediscovery of the oneness that reconciliation, given as a gift by God, entails.
The Old Testament lectionary reading of this past Sunday (Epiphany 3), from Nehemiah 8, represents the end point of this figural revelation that is given “for us” today (1 Cor. 10:11): after 500 years of division and demise, Israel learns as a people to confess and repent, and in this, to be reconciled to God as a single people and witness. It is that simple. And this confession and repentance gathers up a scattered heart, the heart of people and leaders together, into a spirit of humbled recommitment that provides the frame by which the Law is read anew to Israel by Ezra. Their sorrow, their remorse, their sense of responsibility acknowledged and accepted and uttered – it leads the people to tears, but also it opens the people’s ear to the Law itself, and allows for its reception finally with a joy not previously known for half a millennium.
The reality of this work of God in judging Israel – and the Church! – does not preclude, over 500 years, prophecy; it does not preclude righteous castigation; it does not preclude the imposition of discipline; it does not preclude rebuke; it does not preclude at times the testimony of resistance to powers – all things Bishop Allison mistakenly seems to think I have ruled out from the start. But because God’s judgment – and all our actions within it -- aims most especially at repentance of heart by a people (that must, perforce, include myself), it cannot seek some new division any more than it can seek a novel escape; and within division, however it may have come (for it will come, though woe to the one by whom it comes), it finds its rest only in the search for a conversion of the self to a truth we know ourselves, on some level, still to be blinded towards. Whatever the ad hoc varieties of resisting strategies we adopt, we know that in God’s judgment we must, in a real way, “die”, die to our “old nature” and our “old man”, that we may, buried with Him, become made new in Christ Jesus.
Does all this somehow smell too much of “death” and the “masochistic” love of death? Or might it not be the “aroma of Christ” (2 Cor. 2:15), a “sweet smelling sacrifice” of self-giving (Eph. 5:2)?
Thus, the example of Cromwell that Bishop Allison raises is a provocative one, given the Protector’s anti-Anglicanism. Still, I accept in part the point being made: the benefits to our political life that arose from the events surrounding the 17th-century Commonwealth are enormous, and they pass indirectly to the blessings of the American Constitution. But so too was the retrieval of the Law by the exiled Israelites a blessing. For God’s judgment is merciful, always and in every way. (So too with Cranmer and the Reformation, something I am grateful to acknowledge: I am blessed by the rod of His chastisement even here, one that has bloomed with all the blossoms Bishop Allison enumerates!) But it was judgment, nonetheless, that Cromwell’s armies enacted – and it is not clear that God’s providential judgments are to be the models for our Christian callings, however flowered they may appear from a distance! God forbid! In any case, it was a judgment made, so it appears in retrospect, on Anglican and Non-comformist religion together. And this last point needs emphasis.
We are in the realm of disputed historical criticism, I grant, but I would venture to say that the experience of Civil War – including its prelude and denouement, whose responsibilities are well-distributed – so tainted the reputation of religious commitment in England that it marked the evisceration of Protestantism’s vitality in Britain until the present (with some obvious and time-limited exceptions). We are all Cromwell’s children today; but our elder sibling in this genealogy from the Commonwealth is less the courageous Christian confessor in the face of religious tyranny, than it is Adam Smith, both commercially and theologically, a fact that explains the long process of defanging Christian belief that has now embraced America with such vigor. A religiously vapid society, deliberately domesticated through a plethora of sapped sects (something Smith envisioned with thanksgiving) is a safer place to live when in the shadow of religious fanatics – Anglican and Non-Conformist together! This is the gift of the 17th-century we also labor to enjoy. (Michael Winship’s 1996 Seers of God provides a fascinating account of how Restoration religion in England – reacting to the Civil War and Commonwealth – worked to de-divinize a world proven violent and dangerous because of religion, and how English co-religionists shared this secularizing reaction with American Puritanism.)
Some practical considerations
Perhaps all of this is too historically abstruse and theologically abstract. Both Bishop Allison and I – and many others, as he knows – are engaged in practical responses to our church’s disarray and failures. This is the basis on which he criticizes my lecture: my admonitions are impractical because they somehow forego praxis for the sake of vague theological reasons. But I want to stress that it is just because we lack a sufficiently vital theological framework – such as an ecclesiology of divine judgment! – that our practical efforts will themselves become instruments of further judgment. Our souls are at stake in the way that we decide how to act in the face of, in this case, ECUSA’s rampant apostasy. Chuck Murphy, in a published interview with David Virtue, accused me of somehow advocating and pursuing a “tactic without a theology”. I would place that charge back in his lap. For this is precisely what I am afraid we will all end up doing, if the theology we adopt as the template for our practical discernment does not begin fundamentally with a Scriptural framework that can unveil the postures of our own demanded ecclesial penitence: all of our tactics, whether agitation or quiescence, disobedience or conformity, will become the idols of a magnified hubris if we refuse to hold ourselves accountable, through all the various orders and structures in which we live and against which we must now protest actively, to the humbling hand of God aimed even at ourselves. Do we not already see an expansion of human pride taking place among us? And if we do not, many outside the church most certainly do.
In any case, I do not believe that the activism implied by humility, order, and the presumption of unity denies the truth of God in Christ Jesus, or of the Scriptures of Christ, or of the Church of Christ, now lying in a state of ruin. It calls for repentance, surely, but also truth-speaking. It calls for subjection to the power of the world, even while contending with their pretense. It calls finally, for the seeking of a unitive way of making decisions – what has been called “conciliarity” as far as possible given the broken and divided character of the Christian Church – which in Anglicanism thrusts us over into the realms of Lambeth, Primates, and other instruments of unity that have stood as a constraint upon and now a positive alternative to the autonomous character deeply rooted within rebellious Christianity in every age. This conciliar seeking is a way of living in hope; it is strong in faith, and supple in charity. Finally, the kind of activism I would encourage is grounded in what some have called an attitude of “exposure”: risking disdain, misunderstanding, punishment, and apparent defeat, not out of cowardice surely, nor out of some misplaced idealism, but because “he has left us an example” (1 Peter 2:21), by which we too might learn to “trust in him who judges justly” (v.23).
Groups like the Anglican Communion Institute (ACI), which I am grateful to represent, have tried (with whatever imperfect results) to hold together some of these callings: we are trying to be held accountable for our own failures; we are working for the international discipline of wayward leaders in ECUSA and the internal reordering of pastoral care and oversight where needed; we are steadfastly seeking a conciliar means of discerning and implementing these actions; we are trying to act transparently and without erecting structures of self-protection within the orders of our various churches around the world. People like Prof. Christopher Seitz, Dean Philip Turner, and Kendall Harmon have indeed been models of this vocation, if burdened at times by my own and others’ missteps. There is no grand ecclesiology behind this, according to which the sheep and the goats can be separated easily in fact, even though sheepliness and goatishness are realities that haunt and inform our self-awareness, as they must for all of us. I am grateful the Bishop Allison recognizes some of this; but I regret that he does not share in our sense of the calling’s inescapable joy.
For in the end, there is something perverse in labeling as “masochistic” the desire to seek after a resistance that is humble, ordered, and presumptive of unity (to whatever extent and with whatever shortcomings). We are not jumping off cliffs or burning down our homes like the Dukhobors; we are not wallowing in the filth of our opponents’ corruptions and scraping our scabs. (My own personal models are, pragmatically, Edumund Burke and theologically, Antoine Arnauld, neither of whom took things lying down, even if the latter ended his days in exile.) We are protesting, pastoring, engaging, organizing, pleading, rebuking and being rebuked, encouraging and becoming at times discouraged ourselves, wrestling and writing, praying and discerning, worshiping and crying out. There is no extraordinary virtue in this, nor perhaps any vast horizon drawn upon which to rebuild the church. But we do act in a way that is willing, in this small compass, to claim the promise of our hopes’ redemption. Our God reigns! Yea, from a Cross, and even with the pledge of a resurrection to be shared with us “as we become like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10).
Let me close with an observation. There has been some concern expressed that conservatives are wearying themselves with internal arguments among themselves, thereby both squandering the force of their own witness and sullying their reputation in a time of crisis. There is some basis for this concern, and for reasons connected to matters I have spoken of above. But there is another, more positive side to this reality as well: in our discussions and even mutual criticisms, we are at least trying to hold ourselves accountable to one another, to think through and be corrected, to be challenged and theologically expanded. Would that the revisionist leaders of our tottering church could be immersed in the same bracing call to responsible thought and its often unsettling context of conversation! I am indeed grateful that Bishop Allison can help keep me honest, hard though the task is for each of us.
