Rendering under Caesar

21 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Church/State, Faith

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One of the few things of which Bishops and Archbishops can be sure in this fleeting and fitful world is that if they comment on its affairs they will be criticised, and if they don’t, they will also be criticised. Thus, when the Archbishop of Canterbury intervened in the ongoing Brexit saga to protest against the idea that the Government was willing to abrogate international law, there were the usual cries for the Church to stay out of politics, intermingled with the usual “whabouttery” to the effect that how could a church where a recent investigation into child abuse had revealed real failures, comment on politics. The latter reaction, which we get in the Catholic Church too, would puzzle me if it were not so obviously the product of an inability to think. People who engage in that line of casuistry are best left to wallow in their own vomit.

The first cry, “stay out of politics” is odd in a country with an Established Church where the Archbishops and some Bishops have seats in the House of Lord. The Archbishop has responded with robustness: “Christians and people of all faiths take part in the national debate. This is democracy and freedom. I have seen the opposite. Treasure what we have.” He spoke a truth of which we stand in sore need of hearing on both sides of the Atlantic:

Politics, if it is to draw out the best of us, must be more than just the exercise of binaries, of raw majority power unleashed. It exists to seek truth, to bring diverse peoples together in healthy relationships.

If anyone is authorised to speak about morality in politics it is an Archbishop. The binary approach to politics which we have seen growing across the past decade is destructive of the body politic itself. If we cannot disagree civilly with those who have views different from our own then democracy is going to die. In this country at the last general election we had a choice between a communist and a clown, whilst the USA has one between an egotistical braggart and a man slipping into dementia, and neither of their financial affairs bears close scrutiny. Where a system offers people this sort of “choice” whilst failing to deliver on the first duty of government – public safety – then that system is on borrowed time.

We have already seen, with the growth of populist movements, where this could lead, and it is to be hoped that one of the few positives of the current debacle in the UK is that it will provide an object lesson in the consequences of entrusting government to those who make promises which they knew they cannot not keep. The Archbishop is right, if a government admits that it is willing to break international agreements in order to get its way, that needs calling out and condemning, and if it takes a Church to do it, so be it. Sometimes what Caesar needs is reminding that morality plays a part in his world too.

We have created an economic system which lacks any sense of an objective moral order – what Aquinas called natural law. We are stewards of this earth, not its owners. Our leaders are stewards, not absolute monarchs. When they, or we, put power, technology or money above the health and welfare of people, we makes them idols, and we frustrate God’s purpose for mankind. We cannot serve God and Mammon, and it is the duty of Church leaders to call our leaders to account.

*And to help those who wonder why the ABC does not talk about other things, he does, as with this about the situation in Nigeria.

White Jesus?

26 Friday Jun 2020

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Faith, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Archbishop of Canterbury, Black Lives Matter

Justin Welby

In an interview on Friday, the head of the Church of England said the west in general needed to question the prevailing mindset that depicted Christ as a white man in traditional Christian imagery.

Asked if there had to be rethink on the white image of Jesus, Welby said: “Yes of course it does, this sense that God was white … You go into churches [around the world] and you don’t see a white Jesus.

Thus the Archbishop of Canterbury. The second paragraph is in a sense a non sequitur because if, as he rightly says:

“You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle-Eastern Jesus – which is of course the most accurate – you see a Fijian Jesus.”

what on earth could be wrong with seeing a white one in a country where the majority population is white? Still, in the current climate, it is no wonder his words have been seen by some as virtue-signalling to the BLM trend. This interpretation is all the more plausible in the light of his comment about statues and imagery in chg

“Some names will have to change. I mean, the church, goodness me, you know, you just go around Canterbury Cathedral, there’s monuments everywhere, or Westminster Abbey, and we’re looking at all that, and some will have to come down. But yes, there can be forgiveness, I hope and pray as we come together, but only if there’s justice.”

Of course, real cultural sensitivity might have cautioned the Archbishop of a Church which broke up much of the stauary and art inherited from the Middle Ages, against mentioning that subject, but maybe it’s an example of that “white privilege” we hear so much about that he failed to virtue signal here; a rare missed opportunity, perhaps?

In fact, he specifically did not say that statues in Canterbury Cathedral would be taken down, and he avoided any reference to the way in which the Church might have benefitted from the money of slave-traders and owners in the past; one would like to think that was because of the self-evident absurdity of the idea. Fortunately, in these ecumenical times, the Catholic Church will not be asking for its property back.

Reading the Archbishop’s words, as opposed to the selective use of them by the media and his critics, he’s stating what, in other contexts would be called “the bleeding obvious.” Jesus comes in all colours because all of us tend to visualise Him as one of us, and He is, of course, one of us. Most people know this, and it fails to exercise most of us most of the time; which invites the question of whether the Archbishop was well-advised to stray into this area?

Jesus was incarnate, died and rose again to save all who will receive Him. We are incarnational creatures and we imagine in colour, even in white. It would be wiser to concentrate on this truth.

Saturday Jess: in defence of the Anglican Communion

16 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by Neo in Anglicanism, Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Anglican Communion, Anglicanism, Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England, England, God, United Kingdom

This has been a week when most of the news in Christianity has been by the Anglican Communion. Jess has ably (as always) defended her church, and its very unwieldy mandate as the Church of England. In a very diverse country, such as England, that’s a recipe for a continuous uproar, made worse by parts of the communion being apt, in her memorable term, “to throw their toys from the pram”.

I’m always sympathetic because I was brought up in the American form of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia that hot mess that Kaiser Frederick William III of Prussia made when he force brigaded the Lutheran and Reformed churches together after the Napoleonic Wars. It too had the uneasy mission of both serving God, and being all thing to all (Protestant) people. It actually fared much the same with the same forces tearing it apart, until the second world war pretty much killed it. Remember much of Prussia is now Poland. In Germany it is now part of the Union of Evangelical Churches, and in America part of the steeply declining United Church of Christ, an even worse product of the go-go sixties.

But the CofE soldiers on, and the baton is increasingly passing to the much more orthodox African-led GAFCON, which includes the breakaway Anglican Church in North America, which is small but growing.

But this is about Jess’ continued and continuing defense of her church, which puts her amongst probably the majority of her sensible and tolerant co-religionists. She started early as this post from 2012 shows

Anglicanism

English: Flag of the Anglican Communion (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Church of England seems to attract few defenders. Some from the Catholic wing have crossed the Tiber to the Ordinariate; others on the liberal wing seem indistinguishable from secular liberals; and there is always the Archbishop of Canterbury to criticise when all other news fails. Sometimes it seems as though ‘the centre cannot hold’; and yet it does.

The Church of England is a compromise. It is not the hard-line Protestantism of Edward VI, neither is it the return to Catholicism of Mary I. To those who like firm lines of definition, this looks like a fault; to those of us who wish for a degree of comprehensiveness, it is a virtue. It reminds me of the definition of Christ’s two natures agreed at Chalcedon. The ancestors of the Copts found it too Nestorian, whilst the Nestorians found it made insufficient concessions to their position. Any such comparison should not be pressed too hard; but the point is that any widely accepted set of formulae will have within them things which those who want sharp definitions won’t like – and that in dealing with the Infinite Mystery of the Economy of our salvation, we should beware of thinking that granularity is necessarily to be had.

Newman may have abandoned his idea of the C of E as the via media, but that does not mean he was wrong to have formulated it. Much as I admire the Roman Catholic Church, there is something in it unduly attached to legalisms and definitions, or at least that is my impression. From experience, at least at secondhand, its approach to divorced people taking communion seems to fall into that category. Annulments are a long and complex process, and whilst clearly designed to help deal with the tension between what Our Lord said and pastoral needs, they seem at once cumbersome and lacking in appreciation of the needs of the repentant sinner; the C of E’s approach recognises the latter and lacks the former.

Of course to those convinced that the Catholic Church is the Church founded by Christ, these things are, rightly, secondary, but to those of us still of the view that the C of E is the branch of Catholicism practised in these islands, they give cause for hesitation.

My Orthodox acquaintances push their argument about legalism far too far in my view, almost to the point of it becoming their version of anti-Catholicism. There is much wisdom to be gained from studying the Orthodox tradition, as there is from really knowing the Catholic one. For me, one of the virtues of where I am is that I do not have to choose between them, or reject men like Wesley, who I also regard with veneration. A typical muddled Anglican? Perhaps, but a position shared by many. That does not make it right to those for whom it seems like persistence in error; but it allows me to persist in my journey, and the Anglican Church which formed me, offers me a way of love which seeks to comprehend all who will take it.

A Lutheran’s View on the Anglican Meeting

12 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by Neo in Abortion, Consequences, Faith

≈ 17 Comments

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Alfred the Great, Anglican Communion, Anglicanism, Archbishop of Canterbury, Christianity, Church of England, Justin Welby

Shore Chapel I found Jessica’s post on the Anglican conference to be very fair, and to make the salient points.

I also thought Francis encapsulated my views exceptionally well when she said this:

One should always apologise if one’s behaviour towards others is uncharitable. But this is different from, pointing out, in truth as well as love, that we all sin (including in the sexual sphere) and that this sin separates us from God. What is problematic today is that you can’t state this in public without being called “homophobic”. One might coin the word “Christophobic” to describe people who can’t bear the toughness of the Christian faith and hate those who try to live it. We are all called to sexual restraint outside marriage between a man and a woman. This can be very hard – but part of being a Christian is “carrying one’s cross”. Today, the “Cross” is a scandal to our hedonistic society that refuses to allow any restraint on any kind of sexual behaviour. Sadly this has infected the Anglican Church in the West – but not in Africa where the bulk of Anglicans live.

Very true, and very well stated.

But as I read through the comments, something else struck me. Our churches have come very close to condoning all of the sexual sins, homosexuality, yes; but also adultery, fornication, and occasionally lately paedophilia as well. And always abortion. But there is more than sex concerned here.

All of these sins (and most are either, or lately were, crimes, as well) have one thing in common. Like strongarm robbery, they are crimes of the strong against the weak. To Francis’ point on the differences between Christianity, one needs to look no further than last New Years Eve in Germany, for the difference between Christianity and Islam, and how our secular governments cower before Islam. And that is something we are increasingly seeing as the tide of Christianity rolls back in the west. The protection for the weakest amongst us is leaving with it.

That shouldn’t surprise anybody, really. The protection of the individual (and the organic family) is a key feature of Christianity, based on Judaism. All other systems have elevated the ‘collective’ over the individual. Only in Christian Western Europe and places it has reached in the world, like North America, has the individual been exalted over the group. Remember, in Christianity, many may believe but we are judged, and saved, individually.

This is the centerpiece of our faith, He came down from heaven to save us, each of us, an individual sinner, not the nation, or the tribe, or the congregation, but me. The protection of the weak against the strong, and we can tie that back into our secular history just as easily. What else is King Arthur, the Once and Future King, but the end of the rule of ‘Might is Right’. And that is the entire thrust of Anglo-American legal history as well. The protection of the individual citizen against the all powerful, and uncaring state, whether King, Parliament, President, or Congress, the objective law is the weak individual’s bulwark against the state. All the way from King Alfred the Great, through Magna Charta, and the Cousin’s Wars to the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution, and beyond.

And that is what I see in where many of our churches are going, and undoing, not only of the Faith, as it has always been taught, everywhere, but and undoing of the very rights that we believe God himself gave to us, in favor of bullies and slavemasters.

The Great Archbishops

25 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by Neo in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith

≈ 24 Comments

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Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry II of England, John, King of England, Magna Carta, Stephen Langton, Thomas Becket

This post is more of a question than anything else. There are three really celebrated Archbishops of Canterbury from before the Reformation, and for us Protestants, a few since.

First, of course, was Augustine who started the whole thing (restarted really, but you get my drift). He was of course sent by Pope Gregory the Great to head a mission to England, and he became known as “The Apostle to the English”. He was very successful after he converted King Æthelbert of Kent, who was already married to a Christian Princess, Bertha the daughter of Charibert I the King of Paris, which no doubt helped, and in fact Æthelbert was quite receptive giving him permission to hold services and convert people readily, which wasn’t always the case in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Bede says the mission was mounted because Gregory had seen fair-haired British slaves in the Roman slave market and was inspired to try to convert their people. Likely there were other reasons as well, although not likely as selfless.

Thomas Elmham gives the date of King Æthelbert’s conversion as Whit Sunday in 597, although there is no other evidence one way or the other, but it seems correct. Augustine established his episcopal see at Canterbury, and founded the monastery of Sts. Peter and Paul there as well. It later became the monastery of St. Augustine.

it is interesting to note that almost simultaneously with the conversion to Christianity, for the first time the laws of an English principality were written down. This is known as Æthelberht’s Law, and some sources attribute a goodly share of the credit to St. Augustine. Bede says this:

Among the other benefits which he thoughtfully conferred on his people, he also established enacted judgments for them, following the examples of the Romans, with the council of his wise men. These were written in English speech, and are held and observed by them to this day.

Alfred the Great states that he consulted the Laws of Æthelberht in compiling his law code. Æthelberht’s law was the first codification of the law in English, and, in fact, the first law code in any Germanic language. Like most at the time, and as the common law still is, it was a compilation of customary law built up over time and (to that point) transmitted orally. This is where the Common Law starts.

Quite a record St. Augustine of Canterbury compiled, and it will be built on later. The other two are better known so we’ll deal with them more lightly.

Second was Thomas Becket, whose was martyred in Canterbury Cathedral by the King’s suggestion if not order. “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest.” Of which the accuracy may be questioned but not likely the sentiment. He really was a thorn in the side of the king, and some recent research shows they may not have been as good buddies as we’ve heard. But he came up from pretty far down the social order, sort of an early Horatio Alger story, and they may have not really gotten along that well.

The third was St. Thomas More, who was executed for treason by Henry VIII, for failing to recognize the king as head of the church in England. Given the law, he was no doubt guilty since he was loyal to the Pope, neither the first nor the last to have to make that choice.

That’s mostly who we hear about as the great Archbishops, and all three were, without question.

But there is another, and I’m not sure that he isn’t the greatest of all if we look where his work ended up taking the English speaking people. And yet, we never hear much about him. He died in his bed, honored and old but so did Augustine, martyrdom isn’t a requirement for greatness, in my mind, anyway.

So why don’t we hear much about Stephen Langton?

The Great Watershed

15 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by Neo in Anglicanism, Church/State, Faith, Politics

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury, Christianity, Decline of the west, Episcopal Church (United States), Great War

In his post What has gone Wrong?, Chalcedon told us that the Bishop of Durham noted in 1928 that

I was reading (as one does) some addresses given by the Bishop of Durham in 1928 to his diocese. In it he laments the way in which cries of ‘equality’ are leading some to try to force the issue of women’s ordination on the Church. Foreseeing the day in which women will take on a more active political role, he makes two points: the first is that such women will not be much interested in being wives and mothers, which would mean that ‘the feminine influence which will be brought into English public life will not be the best’; and that it will lead to a ‘collapse of elementary morality’. How, he wondered, in a public disengaging from Christian knowledge, would it be possible for people to understand the real, theological objections, to the idea?

His second worry was the declining number of vocations. In 1914 Durham had had 238 assistant curate; by 1928 it had 96. During that period the number of working clergy had fallen by 142. The old ways in which the Church had kept in touch with the people, through house to house visits, was declining and must, he thought, decline further; and Church Schools, the other main point of contact, were also ceasing to be informed by a Christian ethos. Parson were, he lamented, becoming merely minister of a congregation, not of their parishes.

That certainly rings bells with us doesn’t it, Catholic or Protestant? it’s pretty much what we’ve been saying for the last sixty years.(seems like forever though. doesn’t it?) Chalcedon’s point, and mine as well, is that these problems aren’t the result of Vatican II (although it may have exacerbated them) or even Lambeth, which overturned the traditional Protestant teaching on contraception and such.

Historically the Protestant churches were much more pro-family than the Roman church ever was, that was one of the reasons for the (near) end of monasticism in our churches. An easy example, more than ten per cent of the women getting married in pre-revolution New England were already pregnant. Yep. Right there in the heart of Puritan-land.

Writing in The Guardian on 14 April 2015 Andrew Brown says this:

The British have lost faith in religion much faster and more completely than they have lost faith in God. The most recent survey to show this comes from Win/Gallup, which found that Britain appeared one of the most irreligious countries on earth, with only 30% calling themselves “religious”. On the other hand, only 13% said they were atheist – compare this with the Chinese figure of around 60%. It may be that the English, especially, regard atheism as a kind of religion, or at least a manifestation of an unhealthy interest in religious questions. But I think that the explanation is more complex. British Christianity is in trouble because Britain itself is disappearing.

Immigrant religion is still thriving here, whether it is Christian or Muslim. But that is because it has an entirely different relationship to the surrounding culture.

The second sort is not about conscious belief at all, but about assumptions: the things that everybody knows are true without ever needing to think about them. […]

For the past two or three hundred years, at least since the civil war, most British Christianity has been like that. Then, in the last 50 years, it fell off a cliff. In the last 30 years alone attendance at mainstream churches has just about halved. The way this has happened is also important: adults did not stop going to church, but they failed to transmit the habit to their children and now they are dying out. The culture has changed and the Christianity which was so deeply rooted in the old culture has had its roots torn up.

Without disputing his facts, because I think they’re likely close to correct, I think his analysis superficial; this came from somewhere.

I suspect some came from the heated dispute between the Protestant and the Anglo-Catholic branches of the Anglican communion, particularly around the turn of the twentieth century when the Protestant branch tried to use political power to suppress the Anglo-Catholics. in many ways it sounds more like a loss of faith in the Established Church than anything else. But it’s more than that as well, because it is affecting all Europe and to a somewhat lesser extent the United States as well.

So what did it? On Jess’ post Epithets and Wars, Francis made the comment:

[…]It has long been my opinion that Western society and culture suffered a collective nervous breakdown when faced, in 1914–1918, with the hideous reality of what its much-vaunted civilised values had led it to. And while the worst of that breakdown was to be played out in the political sphere, it was artists (in every field) who most clearly reflected it. Dadaism and Surrealism may seem to have little in common with Kipling, but (in the pieces you have quoted) there is the same fundamental loss of faith in everything which had been an unquestioned reference point in the pre-WWI world.

And we are still living with that cultural/ideological nervous breakdown. Western Christianity survived that breakdown longer than most other elements of the culture, but is now in headlong collapse as the consequences of that breakdown catch up with it. Those of us who reject the new value system which is our society’s misguided attempt at a coping mechanism are in for a rough ride.

If she’s right, and I think it a fairly strong possibility, what we are seeing is not some crisis of faith in God or even the churches, as it is simply a loss of confidence in ourselves, our societies, and especially our so-called leaders.

That it would happen about a generation after our societies tore themselves apart for the second time in thirty years is not really all that surprising, is it?

So maybe we again come back to Yeats’ and The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

Perhaps Churchill’s “small men and great events” did more damage than we could perceive.