Some comments to last week's post about a shattered (?) Communion raised questions about how Anglicans understand "authority" (i.e. authority in relation to what we believe and to what we should not be believing, if we wish to continue to claim to be truly, genuinely Anglican).
This post is not any kind of attempt at a definitive answer to such questions but I offer a few thoughts or three.
1. I am not hugely interested in whether we have a notion of authority which deals to outliers among the bishops and eccentrics among the theologians. Embarrassing and difficult though these Anglican brothers and sisters have been and are, they have never represented some kind of highway to the future and trying to impose an authority-and-discipline structure on them sometimes was, or would have been debilitating. I would rather put my energies into teaching and training and forming spiritual and theological leaders among us who joyfully adhere to the creeds and the proclamation of Scripture.
2. I am hugely interested in what Christians believe "en masse" and what shifts in those beliefs we can discern as time marches on. Put in slightly different words, what use is an authority structure for belief if God's people do not subscribe to it? The "consensus fidelium" matters - what is it that we commonly sense matters or does not matter, should believe and act on or quietly refuse to believe and thus not act on? (I am also less than convinced that if only we in positions to teach the faith did a better job we would arrest all shifts in the consensus fidelium.)
3. I suggest one outstanding modern example of a belief with an authority structure behind it but not much influence on the actual lives of the people of God (i.e. the people of God who identify as Catholic) is Humanae Vitae in respect of use of artificial contraception.
4. I suggest the outstanding, all-time example for Christians of a shift in belief, without the authority of the church driving that shift forward is our attitude to slavery. Once accepted. Then debated. Then abolished. And not to be restored.
5. Anglicans may or may not have enough authority (and, sure, definitely do not, compared with the Roman Catholic church) but we are managing some changes in belief (best example, I think, is ordination of women) which have been and are a lead to other churches (as, indeed, other churches got there first before the first Anglicans did).
6. Where we go with the common sense of the people of God does need to match in some way or another with Scripture (which is a continuing authority in the life of God's people, on any account of authority). Abolishing slavery may not have been driven forward by reading the Bible on slavery, but it is not against the Bible to have done so - it is "with" the Bible on questions of human dignity, justice and mercy.* The ordination of women to be deacons, priests/presbyters and bishops may not square with one particular text, 1 Timothy 2:11-15, but it does square with Jesus' attitude to women, especially in John's Gospel.
7. On the question of women in the church, might we all, across all denominations, acknowledge that the tradition of the church includes the most appalling things the Church Fathers said about women, and if we are not ever again going to subscribe to those deprecations of women, might it be fair to ask whether we need to continue to subscribe to the traditions they fostered about male-only ordination?
Tertullian offers a mild example: "“Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the Devil’s gateway: You are the unsealer of the forbidden tree: You are the first deserter of the divine law: You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert even the Son of God had to die.”"
That is enough for now. Somehow Tertullian escaped censure and so, I hope, will I!
*In the end, if there is change across the church on a wider scale than at present about same sex partnerships, it will involve squaring with Scripture that such change squares with what Scripture says about human dignity, justice and mercy.
3 comments:
Thank you, +Peter. Who would be considered the last, or most recent, of the men referred to as "Church Fathers"?
The Church Fathers were the influential Christian theologians and writers who lived from the late 1st to the 7th centuries AD, broadly categorized into three groups: the Apostolic Fathers, Ante-Nicene Fathers, and Post-Nicene Fathers. Thus the latest would include Leo the Great and Gregory the Great.
It is useful for slow moving church structures, who provide a steady home for those at earlier stages of faith, to have "embarrassing and difficult...outliers and eccentrics" somewhere in the Christian universe/family, even if considered apostates by some, to broach new issues and communicate shifts of consciousness that larger churches largely cannot or often don't.
I think this is Peter's argument, in a way, for the Anglican Church via a vis Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But it goes further than that.
For example, Quakers were able to raise the issue of slavery, and push with a sort of energy and initiative, that others couldn't or wouldn't, taking the lead on antislavery completely out of proportion to their actual numbers.
The same goes for toleration (e.g.. an end to imprisoning and murdering Nonconformists and Catholics in England), refusing to take oaths (as Christ instructed), pacifism, humane treatment of animals, and, more latterly, the modernization of sexual ethics (Quakers in the 1960s...!!!!!....moved to a position of sexual immorality primarily being based on exploitative or non-exploitative relationships, rather than focussing on the gender of bodies or particular sexual techniques).
Of course, these days so-called secular society also often fulfils this prophetic role often abrogated by "mainline Church".
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