Figured Out (Chapter 5)
by Chris Seitz (Dec 8, 2004)
INTRODUCTION
In many ways, the struggle with globalization, and with the tension between diversity and uniformity in doctrine and practice, is widespread in the Christian churches. This essay deals with an Anglican form of this struggle, but it is assumed that Anglicanism's struggle is not without a wider relevance and purpose.
Because of the international character of the Anglican communion, certain problems become apparent when the various members of the Anglican family gather together. This happens formally every ten years at the Lambeth Conference, called by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Decisions are often made to refer certain issues to committees for further study and for possible recommendations. The Virginia Report contains the deliberations of one such committee, which was charged with comprehending the challenges of diversity in the face of the Christian gospel. For convenience, an appendix to the chapter contains the Preface and Origins and Mandate of the Virginia Report. An Internet link shows where the report, which is not long, can be read in detail. This chapter challenges several of the governing conceptions of the Virginia Report, especially concerning the role and authority of scripture and the appeal to the Trinity for models of diversity in the church.
From the Reformation Anglicans endeavoured to hold together people of different temperaments, convictions and insights: the puritans who wanted more radical reform and the conservatives who emphasized their continuity with the pre-reformation Church. Today,for example, evangelicals, catholics, liberals, and charismatics bring a diversity of insights and perspectives as Anglicans struggle to respond to the contemporary challenges to faith, order and moral teaching. Bound up with these groupings are the differences -which arise from a critical study of the Bible, particular cultural contexts, different schools of philosophical thought and scientific theory. ("The Virginia Report," 31)
The Virginia Report (TVR) correctly notes that at the time of the Anglican Reformation, it became necessary for the church to contain several diverse groupings. The diversity, however, is not sufficiently explained. Far more misleading is the effort to draw an analogy between the diversity of sixteenth-century Anglicanism and the diversity of modern Anglicans, which the report judges is "bound up with" the rise of modern historical-critical methods.
The reason for concern is wide-ranging. First, historical-critical methods were introduced to Anglican Christianity only in the nineteenth century-that is, several centuries after the Reformation, during which long period of time whatever theological or ecclesial diversity existed had nothing to do with a modern diversity occasioned by historical-critical methods' Second, these critical methods were met, initially, with extreme resistance.' So it would be quite wrong to view the diversity occasioned by critical method as a natural evolution from a kindred sort of diversity from the sixteenth century. Third, as scholars of intellectual history have noted, the change wrought by the Enlightenment and the rise of critical methods is virtually epochal. This renders any description of continuity intellectual, ecclesial, exegetical) impossible. The Virginia Report analogizes two periods of time (the diversity of Reformation Anglicanism; the diversity of modernity) in the space of several sentences. The analogy is false and intellectually misleading.
The present chapter begins with this root problem for a reason. There was a diversity at the time of the Reformation, and it had to do, fundamentally, with the role of the Bible in the light of the continental Reformation and its attendant handling of sacred texts, within a changed climate of ecclesiology, authority, and exegesis. What was at stake was the perspicuity of Holy Scripture. Could the scriptures speak a direct, inspired word to the individual and the church? Or was it necessary for the scriptures to be handled from within an ecclesial framework wherein the work of the Holy Spirit, in sacrament, preaching, and teaching, was already attested and certified as present (and in other places, as absent) by the Roman church's teaching authority?'3 When TVR speaks about continuity and discontinuity with the pre-Reformation church as that which parses diversity in the period of the Anglican Reformation, presumably it has this sort of diversity in view.
The irony is that scripture plays a role, as perspicuous testimony to God's self, will, and purpose, in this document only in the mcl'nmr that occasioned the Reformation itself, that is, scripture has become but a small piece of furniture in a room whose architecture, decoration, and inhabitants have already been determined. This is true of scripture itself, and it spills into the way the document handles the Trinity in its opening chapters. In both cases, a prior, second-order metaphysic displaces the actual sentences and paragraphs of holy scripture, in such a crafted and self-contained way that the scriptures' plain sense is obscured, in precisely the manner the Reformers argued had been the fault of medieval scholasticism and/or Roman appeals to tradition alongside (or inclusive of) the canon of holy scripture.
It would be churlish to point out what TVR has not done, if its authors could only reply that they had an altogether different agenda before them. But this is precisely what is at issue. We learn as much from the decisions that have been made in this report as from those we judge to be preferable, which we can only sketch out here. Nothing less is at issue than the relationship between the doctrine of God (the Triune God, to use the language of TVR) and the holy scriptures. This report makes high theological claims for the church on the basis of a doctrine of God and the Trinity, and it does so within the context of a discussion of unity and diversity in the communion. Within this context, the exact character of the relationship between the authority of holy scripture and the person of the Godhead is never worked out but only assumed.
However, given the frank admission that Anglican diversity is itself derivative of different attitudes toward modern critical (post-eighteenth-century) approaches to the Bible, how could we hope that a doctrine of God, based on a scriptural witness to him said to be generating diversity, might be immune from the same engines of diversity and disagreement noted as alive among modern Anglican Christians? As it stands, there is every reason to suspect that the very diversity the report notes, and which is the subject of its analysis, will be projected onto God himself (see the quote later in the section "The Trinity, Koinonia, and Ecclesia Anglicana"). This is true because of the report's failure to relate its statements about God to an adequate doctrine of holy scripture, on the one hand, and because there is a tendency to valorize diversity as a good unto itself and to conflate such diversity with traditional doctrines of the Trinity that are under modern examination and popularization.
The first part of this analysis will focus on the problematical use of scripture in TVR. The second part will briefly examine the use made by the authors of recent trinitarian theological literature, often with a decided drop in the exchange rate as this literature is brought to bear on modern Anglican problems in ecclesiology.
ON HOLY SCRIPTURE: THE LOGIC OF THE FORM OF THE REPORT
Speech-act theory has taught us that communication occurs in locutions (the words on the page; the words spoken), illocution (the intention of the author or speaker), and perlocution (the goal or longer-range concern to persuade and convince).4 In grammatical terms, the analogy is: the words, sentences, and paragraphs or chapters of written or spoken discourse. So, in understanding TVR's use of scripture, we must attend not only to what it says but also to how what it says fits into the logic of its total speech act.
The actual treatment of scripture as an authority for Anglican Christianity comes only in chapter 3 of TVR. Scripture, we must assume, undergirds or informs what is said in the first chapters about the Trinity and koinonia, but the fact that this is not stated as a matter of formal principle (as in chapter 3) is surely relevant. Lacking is explicit and extended exegetical defense for statements such as Christian baptism is "into the life of the Triune God" (p. 23), (2) the Holy Spirit "lift(s) the community into the very life of God" (p. 26), Christians as "participants in the divine nature" (p. 29), or (3) "God invites his people to enjoy diversity" (p. 30). What we have is an abstracted appeal to the prayer of Jesus in John 17, which is of course a prayer and not a template confirmable by observing the present life of the church, which life is marked by empirical division, human sin and rebellion, and oppression in the world.
The more worrisome example of scriptures' attenuation comes in the chapter where it is explicitly referenced ("Belonging Together in the Anglican Communion"). The perlocutionary act of this chapter is reasonably clear: we have an acknowledgment of (varieties of) diversity present in the communion, with theological reflections on this, concern for the limits of this, with special attention to the office of bishop.
Why, it might reasonably be asked, is it more critical at this point than earlier to speak about the authority of scripture? Why hold up, at this juncture, the 1988 statement from Lambeth:
Anglicans affirm the sovereign authority of the Holy Scriptures as the medium through which God by the Spirit communicates his word to the Church. . . . The Scriptures are the "uniquely inspired witness to divine revelation, " and "the primary norm for Christian faith and life. " (p. 32)
This 1988 Lambeth statement is, it should be underscored, full of promise. Upon it should be built all that precedes regarding koinonia, the Triune God, diversity, and the like. This is so because matters so central as the Trinity, the doctrine of the church, the work of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the character of baptism, the gifting by the Holy Spirit in the church, the office of bishop, and the nature of unity (in the Godhead and in the body of Christ) are not peripheral issues (adiaphora) but are intimately tied up with the plain-sense presentation of "the uniquely inspired witness to divine revelation."
However, the 1988 Lambeth statement is not linked to this particular concern-namely, defense of the statements regarding the Trinity and the church as derived from "the sovereign authority of the Holy Scriptures" bound up, as such authority is, with the character and will of the Living God who gives himself to be known through them. Rather, appeal is made to scripture so as to make two things clear.
First, scripture is said to function in a special way for Anglicans, and this requires its authority to be coordinated with what is called "reason" and "tradition" (these being, "since the seventeenth century," "fundamental to the Anglican way of living and responding to diversity," pp. 32, 33). Second, by introducing a considerably robust understanding of scripture in the 1988 Lambeth document, the way is then clear to correlate this with a very different, diffuse, complex understanding of authority and then to claim that it constitutes an Anglican distinctive. What is then to be required, is that this Anglican distinctive (so claimed) become the governing authority; that is, by enclosing the 1988 Lambeth statement on the authority of scripture within the authority of an Anglican distinctive, scripture becomes, not one of three authorities, nor even (as with Hooker) the prime norm, but a piece of a larger principle, which now has the right to be labeled "tradition" on the logic of its own conceptuality. With this, we are fully back to the issue joined at the Reformation. Can scripture be said to have an authority that rises out of the church, on the one hand, and that addresses the church competently, clearly, and uniquely, on the other?
The Lambeth 1988 statement clearly says, "Yes." Richard Hooker, like his Anglican contemporaries, also would have said, "Yes." So, in fact, we read in Laws of Ecclesiastical Policy:
What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto, is what any man can necessarily conclude by force of Reason; after this, the voice of the church succeeded. (vol. 5, p. 8)
But this report is telling us that scripture is part of an interpretative "Anglican distinctive" and that scripture's existence and unique capacity is to be understood only from the standpoint of a tradition of "Anglican distinctives" (which itself must be defended as true to Hooker, as well as the ensuing centuries). To then try to relate this "Anglican Tradition," as chapter 3 does, to a diversity brought about by the rise of historical-critical methods (fully unanticipated by and without genuine intellectual analogy for, the seventeenth-century doctors of the Anglican church) is misleading and inaccurate.
Two problems require further attention. The authority of Scripture is bound up with its subject matter: God in Christ. The authority of the Bible within Anglicanism is not in the first instance a matter of getting one's hermeneutical or material principle in place (e.g., a "scripture, tradition, reason" hermeneutic) and claiming for this something distinctive. Why would Anglican Christians wish to be "distinctive" from other Christians when it comes to the authority of scripture, particularly in a report in which lavish and optimistic claims are made for the empirical church simplicities.
But there is a deeper problem, and it surfaces in the presentation of chapters I and 2. Their statements about the life of God, wherein Jesus has ascended to enjoy a certain particular life with the Father and the Spirit, is conflated with the life of the church. Baptism becomes a sort of ecclesial ascension. Missing is any sense of the scriptural logic of Nicaea, "And He shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end." That is, missing is some urgent dis-analogy between the life of the church on earth and the life of God in se. The immanent and the economic life of God have been conflated (in a manner John Zizioulas has decried),6 but then to this has been added a doctrine of the church, and individual believers, who by baptism become participants in the divine nature, empirically and presently, on analogy with the Son's present and empirical (so we hold by faith) life with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
I say this with all respect to the drafters of the report. But what is at issue is decidedly not an Anglican principle of authority, said to be a "distinctive" and urged upon the present church as somehow consistent with Richard Hooker. What is at stake is an adequate doctrine of God. This includes, as fundamental to any even attenuated appeal to scripture, how this God makes himself known through the witness of the apostles and prophets, reliably and sufficiently. It stands to reason that a document that has not worked this out formally may well feel free to put its explicit theology forward in chapters I and 2, with very high-sounding claims for the relationship between the church on earth and the Triune God, his "diversity" and our own, and then, only secondarily, introduce an account of the role of scripture for making this God known, which immediately is enclosed in something argued to be an Anglican distinctive. Yet this is precisely what is at issue in Anglican Christianity, in any day: the unique authority of the holy scriptures as bound up with the trustworthy and holy God who inspires the words, sentences, and paragraphs (the mind, the scope, the "whole story") of the two-testament canon of holy scripture. This is why the 1988 Lambeth statement speaks of the "uniquely inspired witness to divine revelation." The Bible is the only means by which the economic life of God can be known and then correlated, theologically, with statements having to do with God unto himself, in his trinitarian immanence.
"TRADITION" AND "REASON" AND THE LOGIC OF THEIR INTRODUCTION IN TVR
It would be possible to engage in an extended critique of the definitions provided for "tradition" and "reason" in TVR. Indeed, it is arguable that such critique would be helpful and clarifying.
But also at issue is the logic of their introduction in a document involving instruments of unity in the Anglican communion and their relationship one to another.
Several criticisms can be conveniently filed by title. First, Hooker spoke of the primary authority of the scriptures, before the reason of the individual, and before the voice of the church, and he did not refer to tradition in any way that imitates or anticipates what is said here by TVR about tradition (more on this later). Second, it is clear that for Hooker, authority is graded. Only when the scriptures are silent or unclear do secondary authorities X or Y come into play. Third, one suspects that his interest in the individual is not primarily to do with an investment in reason as such, and certainly not in reason as Hume or Locke meant this (an objective rationality riveted to unaided human reason, universal natural truths, and the like). Rather, he believed that the scriptures can be apprehended in their truthfulness by individual men and women and obeyed, reasonably. The church does not bestow an authority on scripture that it cannot exercise on its own, by God's own sovereign deployment, for the edification of sinful human beings grasped by the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ; that is, the emphasis of Hooker is not on establishing three individual authorities, less still on establishing a "distinctive." Rather, he is setting the primary authority of scripture within a context of a proper understanding of the relationship between the authority of the church and the individual Christian. In TVR, this subtle ecology has been disturbed. "The voice of the church" (which has meaningfulness where scripture has not said everything, for Hooker, as in vestments, frequency of communion, etc.) has become tradition in TVR and has been ranged before reason. More of concern, however, is that tradition is said to be something going on in scripture itself.
Now this is true enough, as historical criticism has sought to show, most deftly, perhaps, in the work of Gerhard von Rad and "tradition-history." But this tradition-history is not what sixteenth-century Anglicans meant by "the voice of the church."~ Moreover, recent canonical approaches are at pains to demonstrate that at some juncture it is meaningful to speak of tradition having become scripturalized and stabilized, with an authority over ensuing generations (see Zech. 1:6; Isa. 55:11). In the New Testament, reference to "the law and the prophets" is reference to scripture, which is different than (not to mention, set over against) traditions (Mark 7:3 ft.). The Virginia Report makes tradition into a principle of dynamic interpretation, at work first within and behind the stable scriptural word and then, on direct analogy and by extension, in the church. On this reading, tradition is not just found in the Bible, it is the Bible, and in this sense, a distinction between scripture and the history of its interpretation is destroyed. Augustine, on the one side, and the scriptural witness he regarded as authoritative, on the other (in a way he did not accept for himself or his own thoughts), have been effectively leveled, thus producing one continuous, dynamic tradition-process. The "mind of God has constantly to be discerned afresh" (p. 33), we are told. There is no stable deposit of faith ("the primary norm for Christian life," so Lambeth 1988) unless one differentiates it from a process of discernment, which must be directed toward an apprehension of its plain sense, to which "both credit and obedience are due" (in the language of Hooker).
We return to the point, introduced by TVR itself, regarding the Anglican Reformation and its diverse groupings. The Reformation was contesting the very way of thinking about the authority and perspicuity of holy scripture TVR is setting forth and attributing to Hooker. Hooker could well have agreed that "the mind of the Church carried by worship, teaching, and the Spirit-filled life" (p. 32) had a certain reality and weight of consideration. But he would never have regarded scripture as capable of conflation with tradition. Then TVR goes on to define "reason" as the capacity to symbolize. Hooker believed in reason in the sense that Aquinas or Calvin believed in reason: as a moral earnest, whereby God had ordered creation toward certain ends, such that grace and nature could speak to one another when God so urged. In TVR, it is as difficult to disentangle reason from tradition as tradition from scripture, in that all three are parts of one dynamic, natural process of "interpreting afresh" (p. 32) and exercising "common sense" (p. 32).
It must now be asked what the logic of this section on scripture is, given the thrust of the entire document, which has to do with diversity in the Anglican communion and instruments of unity. The answer is given on page 33:
The characteristic Anglican way of living with a constant dynamic interplay of Scripture, tradition and reason means that the mind of God has constant}' to be discerned afresh, not only in every age, but in each and every context. . . In order to keel) the Anglican Communion living as a dynamic community of faith, exploring and making relevant the understanding of faith, structures for taking counsel and deciding are an essential part of the life of the Communion.
In other words, the discussion of scripture (enclosed within an alleged Anglican distinctive) has essentially to do with leading into an accounting of diversity in the communion, wherein the mind of God is constantly being discerned, in different contexts and cultures, and in ways that require difference and diversity in the nature of the undertaking. In other words, the point of discussing scripture at this juncture is to open it to tradition processes and the differences produced by reason in culturally different contexts. The point of discussing scripture at all is to the degree that it serves to illustrate a reality in the church the report knows about and seeks to find confirmation for. Once that is done, we are back to strategies for getting along and making things relevant within the constraints and realities of a worldwide communion. To attribute this sort of rationality or horizon of concern to Hooker and a unique Anglican distinctiveness is a misreading of historical fact (as the report later suggests when it points to problems of universalizing an Elizabethan Anglican ecclesiology; see p. 49).
THE TRINITY, KOINONLE, AND ECCLESIA ANGLICANA
Through the power of the Holy Spirit we are drawn into a divine fellowship of love and unity. Further, it is because the Holy Trinity is a unique unity of purpose, and at the same time a diversity of ways of being and function, that the Church is called to express diversity in its own life, a diversity held together in God's unity and love. (p. 26)
Even surrounded as this last sentence is by less severe extrapolation of scriptural statements into theological high notes, it is still unmistakably loud. The church's empirical diversity (however one might wish to describe that) is held to be a derivative of something going on in God's own self, and indeed its very expression is willed or necessitated by the ontological reality of God as God. Here is a place where second-order reflection has simply become detached from the sentences and paragraphs of scripture, instancing exactly what I have argued earlier is the danger of failing to correlate theological talk with an account of scripture's living authority for the church.
If one were to try to connect this theologumenon to its closest potential biblical match, where would one go? First Corinthians 12 speaks of varieties of gifts, services, and workings, but the clear rhetorical force of the statement is to do with God's unitary and singular purpose. It is a conviction about such a unitary purpose that drives the later church to speak of perichoresis-that is, the total overlap among the persons of the Trinity when it comes to the thought and will and activity of any single member. At this point, it must simply be insisted that there is no adequate human analogy for such talk." It must also be insisted that the report has turned human analogies for the church (in some eschatologically realized form) into direct theological talk about God himself. It is here that the caution of Zizioulas (otherwise problematical) becomes relevant. The immanent Trinity is a transcendent and free reality, for which human analogies will fail. This is so, moreover, because the economic Trinity has been revealed-not in what we might imagine the greatest human example of diversity might be, in the body of Christ, but in the sentences and paragraphs of sacred scripture, sufficiently and reliably, because this Triune God therein makes himself known.
What is said about diversity in the church and its correlatability with scriptural revelation about God holds true as well for much else that is said about the church on earth. We have noted several problems in this regard in previous sections.
In much recent work on the Trinity, the discussions have focused on several key matters that fail to appear in TVR. When, for example, James Torrance speaks about the Trinity and the church, he does so from the governing perspective of the sole priesthood of Christ, who is Lord and High Priest, without analogy in the church on earth. 10 When Zizioulas speaks of participation in the life of God, one cannot imagine more concern for the absolute transcendence of the Father. I I When Hart explores the Trinity and pluralism, or when he carefully assesses the contributions of Moltmann, Earth, and Rahner within a similar climate of concerns, he rightly cautions:
At the heart of the difficulty of trmitarian reflection lies the truth that there is no created vestigium with which to compare or illuminate this paradoxical Dreieinigkeit (three-in-one-ness). Neither the three persons of social analogies nor the one person in self-revelation will suffice. We are dealing with a permanent antimony rather than a dialectic to be resolved in a higher synthesis, and we must therefore continue to speak and think on two distinct levels: now referring to the mutual interpenetration in which Father, Son, and Spirit can be named together as he, and now of them severally in their unique hypostatic distinction in which they may legitimately be set alongside and even over against one another. 2
The point at issue is only in part the careful sorting out of a Moltmann- Barth distinction over person and being. Hart's larger point, applied to the language of TVR, would be that human language becomes inadequate unless it is explicating something given to it, from outside the natural analogies of human expression, and that something is the gospel of Jesus Christ. One cannot "speak up" the Trinity through human ingenuity; one can only seek to comprehend and then articulate what the scriptures uniquely declare in the gospel.
A yet greater caution would apply to analogies for the church. As Barth would insist, the Trinity is a gift to the language of the church's life. It cannot be read off religions or nature. But because this is so, the church has a greater responsibility to steward this language appropriately, which would rule out am conflation of what it means to say that God is three and one, and the church' diversity models something in God. Diversity can just as easily be a matter o human pride and sinful resistance to the truth of the triune life. The logic of I Corinthians 12 is running in the opposite direction to that of TVR, I fear.
CONCLUSION
What must be remembered is that the church of which TVR speaks is not self-evidently Anglican Christianity, on its best three-in-one day. The church of Jesus Christ is, since the Reformation most famously, a divided reality, seeking to see unity beyond those divisions, which seeing and which living is a gift of God the Holy Spirit himself.
This conforms to the reality that the life of God, as the obedient and loving life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, is not the life of the church, but involves the present work of Christ, God's bringing all things unto subjection unto him, and "Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God" (I Cor. 15:24).
At the moment the gospel reveals the depths to which God has gone to redeem a fallen humanity, in the sending of his only Son, we see the inappropriateness of forming analogies for the church's diversity that are said to be appropriate to the eternal life of God himself. The Virginia Report never speaks of "the urgent dis-analogy," and so, too, it does not speak of the church as displaying a diversity that could, quite really, put itself outside the life of God. Not surprisingly, failure to give serious expression to this dis-analogy means failure to define the terms by which the church might need to place itself under discipline, when those in its blessed midst perceive, tragically, that the life of God in Christ has been forfeited and one of the many idols of human engineering put in its place. That the New Testament speaks frequently and soberly of this reality is conspicuous by its absence in TVR.
