For the glory of God is a human being fully alive, and the glory of humanity is the vision of God (St. Irenaeus).
Fundamentally the Gospel is obsessed with the idea of the unity of human society (Masure).
Amidst the swirling, whirling controversies and contretemps of this present time (so e.g. Trump can hold a rally by virtue of attendees signing that they will not sue him if they get the virus; we have heroes in NZ re the virus who are dramatically cast as zeroes overnight here when a mistake occurs re control of our borders; and, as statues around the world are toppled, even a statue of Gandhi is under threat), what are we to say? There are moods and mood swings in our world which seem impervious to rational discourse. Perhaps we should be silent?
Yet this fractured world of ours is in a terrible situation - noting not just the fractures induced by the Pandemic and police killings in the US, but also Syrian strife continues, North Korean posturing alarms and China v India horrifies. “Black Lives Matters” - whatever we make of this sentence-and-political programme (e.g. Mohler), it is simply not appropriate to be silent in the face of oppression and systemic violence. A ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5) is a ministry - an action, not a slogan - which must work with history and its tale of injustice which is not yet made just.
Look again at the two citations above (copied there from my permanent sidebar of quotations). Both speak to God’s great purpose for his beloved humanity. It is simply not possible to say that God’s purpose for a fully alive, unified humanity is being fulfilled in a divided world. Do we not have everything to say about this situation?
Is not the genius of the Gospel that it is a message of hope, joy and love for each individual and for all of us as humanity? The Gospel is personal and social simultaneously.
Of course often we Christians get the Gospel wrong because we focus on one to the exclusion of the other. (We shouldn’t beat ourselves up about this - it is difficult to keep both foci going at the same time.)
But at times like this in the life of the world, we could and should be clear: there is a lot going on which is simply wrong when measured against the insight of St Irenaeus and Masure.
"...there is a lot going on which is simply wrong when measured against the insight of St Irenaeus and Masure."
ReplyDeleteSometimes simply wrong, more often simply unimaginative. God has begun and still continues the transformation to which St Irenaeus and Masure point but its outworking is normally beyond the scope of the merely ideological mindsets of fighters in the news. They fight because they do not see how they can avoid it.
Those who know the gospel expect, as others hope, that communities can coexist, Himalayan borders can be secure. Public spaces can reflect their publics. Civil power can serve the public interest following evidence and scaling authority to need. But how?
Prayerful, scripture-soaked imaginations per se normally know less than those on the spot about these things. Jesus's neglected comparison of the children of light and darkness certainly sounds like a dissuasive to zealotry. But (1) his preachers can knowledgeably tell their fellow citizens that despair about the human project is irrational. And (s) his Body can nourish the vocations of those children of the light drawn to learning more about borders, public space, etc.
More radically (3), those who love the Lord their God with all their hearts, all their souls, all their minds, and all their strengths, can commit themselves to each other in ways deeper than the cash nexus or the usual identities. In the common life that they shape they may realise the work of God to which St Irenaeus and Masure point in ways unimagined by the children of darkness.
Now when the social and civil order around us is relatively functional, most serious believers will pursue (1) and (2), and neglect (3). They will read Acts ii for sentimental uplift, but as David Bentley Hart was saying last year, they would not on their worst days ever want to actually be one of those people. And so, as I have been saying for the past few days, we have not quite been those people even though we hypothetically takes them as our norm for faith and practice. We just apply their norm in ways that do not interfere with the fullest enjoyment of a flourishing public order. In fact, we adopt much of that order for the Body itself because it seems to work, and we want the best for God.
What is disconcerting to me is that evidence of the decadence of the public order here up yonder is undeniable, even to a thoroughly secular imagination. When I read in the next hour what public figures are doing in this hour, they will remind me not of Livy but of Tacitus. My point is not that they are scoundrels, although some of them are, but that most of them have to rise above norms, practices, and institutions in decay to do their jobs. I am, of course, inspired that some actually do this, and that still more are trying, but the texture of public life is marbled with moral ambiguities unknown here half a century ago.
So then, if we frame things as + Peter's OP does with St Irenaeus and Masure, this disconcert is uncomfortable in three ways.
ReplyDelete(1') Pointing to the story of Jesus remember, preachers must ground confidence in the bare possibility of reasonably just public order.
(2') As the cure of souls varies with the social circles in which they move, a spiritual guide has to speak to the condition of a soul in a world that does not equally support faith and faithlessness.
(3') Most disruptive-- and so hardest to get our heads around-- the rationale for the thin churchmanship to which we are all inured has collapsed. Push back from the Customer Service Department that churchgoers say they like things as they are misses the point that the disaffected do not protest; they leave or quietly let church drop out of family life. And anyway, unless there are few who are unchurched, why would one not pay more attention to the souls still to be won? **
Anglicans, close to the throne since the age of the Venerable Bede, have experienced decadence in a few social orders before this one. But doing so as the established church and doing so in a religious marketplace are very different situations.
** In his immensely influential classic The Innovator's Dilemma, the late Clayton M Christensen explained how just this customer service mindset had corrupted and then obliterated so many of the mighty corporations of the middle C20. What CEO is not pleased to do more to give his best customers the new-fangled features they want? But their point of view is not at all that of the myriad people who are not served by any company at all. A disruptor who sells even flawed goods to those millions can quickly build a business that is finally strong enough to lure even the best customers away. That same dynamic explains why new churches that have grown exponentially where incumbent churches have been too navel-gazing even to hold on to the base that they had.
BW
This, Bowman, might be most important observation re Western Anglicanism re its present and future:
ReplyDelete** In his immensely influential classic The Innovator's Dilemma, the late Clayton M Christensen explained how just this customer service mindset had corrupted and then obliterated so many of the mighty corporations of the middle C20. What CEO is not pleased to do more to give his best customers the new-fangled features they want? But their point of view is not at all that of the myriad people who are not served by any company at all. A disruptor who sells even flawed goods to those millions can quickly build a business that is finally strong enough to lure even the best customers away. That same dynamic explains why new churches that have grown exponentially where incumbent churches have been too navel-gazing even to hold on to the base that they had.
Or, Peter, its past.
ReplyDeleteThe colonial church up here was mainly the responsibility of a commissary for + London who in Williamsburg was also the rector of Bruton Parish, the president of the College of William and Mary, and a member of the upper house of the legislature. This arrangement aimed at a sort of Anglican chaplaincy for those who wanted it, and aspired at times to missionary activity among the aboriginal inhabitants of the land. But the main chance lay beyond chaplaincy and missionary work.
Unnoticed by the Church and Crown, waves of migration were fermenting into new societies on the Atlantic's western shores. If the C17 Church of England had sent bishops to at least the southern colonies, churchmanship would have evolved here in some dialectic with the usual Anglican order. The Methodists would have had no occasion to organise separately, and the Baptists would not have been proselytising in a neglected territory.
Moreover, the lords spiritual-- and temporal too-- would have had eyes on the western frontier, which might then have evolved somewhat differently. And if the new societies in North America had been better understood in London, who knows what would have happened in the crisis 1765-1784?
For Anglicans here up yonder-- and across the pond-- the present might have been very different.
BW
I should have explained this but didn't--
ReplyDeleteIn Christensen's title, who is the Innovator and what is his Dilemma?
One would expect the big to eat the small. That is, one would expect that venerable, well-run corporations with immense resources innovating at the frontier of their industries would be nearly invincible against small start-ups with at most venture capital and a few patents. But again and again we have seen the fast eat the slow. Christensen wanted to know why.
The answer he discovered turns on the difference between mere innovation and disruption. In retrospect, George Land's invention of Polaroid film that could develop itself was merely an innovation. Digital cameras, especially when set in pocket sized mobile phones, were a true disruption.
Could not the renowned laboratories of companies that made cameras have foreseen that scanning technology would someday be marketed as a camera? Generally speaking, they could and they did. But this merely set up the Innovator's Dilemma for their CEOs-- if they waited, their companies could make a lot of money while they waited for the disruptors to attack, and might still think of some way to fend them off; if they introduced the small digital camera themselves, they could beat their competition and defeat their disruptors when they were still quite weak, but they would also destroy their incumbent business in the process. It is whilst the innovators hesitate between the horns of this hard dilemma that the fast devour the slow.
Sir Edward Coke famously defined that "a corporation hath no soule." Nevertheless, like a soul, an enterprise must sometimes lose its life to save it.
BW
Thanks Bowman
ReplyDeleteThere is much to think about re churches ...
- in what sense was Vatican 2 a (lifegiving) disruption within Roman Catholicism life?
- can Anglicanism disrupt its own life in a good way or are disruptions only possible via separations ... Puritans leaving for America ... Methodists reluctantly forming their own church ... while some charismatic have had a good time within Anglican churches, there are Pentecostals who feel their Anglican parishes in which they grew up couldn’t make room for them ... and now,
- is ACNA etc a disruption ... or ...
Interestingly, Peter, Clayton Christensen-- a Mormon deeply respected at HBS for his piety-- said himself that his innovation/ disruption distinction has wide application to religion because so many millions of people are underserved or are altogether unserved. And doubtless those applying the missiological thought of eg Lesslie Newbigin could put it to work.
ReplyDeleteTheir challenge, should they try that in any Communion church that comes to mind, is that, whether edgy or reactionary, synodicalists do not-- constitutively cannot, I often think-- understand that their zeal for innovation (ie new features to keep *best customers* like them happy) is usually also opposition to the disruption that meets wider and deeper needs among people not like them. Every group is challenged to balance familiarity and surprise, stability and adaptation, of course, but where people are zealots for the former they are too hostile to the latter to gain their lives by losing them.
And so far as I can see, non-Communion churches are usually no less squeamish about the trade-off. They develop different features for *best customers* of slightly different tastes, but still lack the seriousness with which the old Baptists and Methodists adapted English Protestantism to the western shore here up yonder. Or better yet, that with which + Graham Kings's heroes planted Anglican churches in Sudan, Iran, China, or India.
++ Robert Duncan challenged the ACNA to plant a thousand churches, which I would dearly love to see them do. Under new episcope, they still have a nascent church-planting movement. But my reluctant suspicion is that his vision of an Anglican church for the poor and the dark and the less educated in America was too disruptive a goal for a church that cannot accept even the mild discomfort of a straightforward Nicene order where anglo-catholics and the reformed alike answer to one bishop in each city. It would be nice to be less suspicious; we will watch Google Maps for reasonable hope.
When CoE evangelicals were heroes in the fiction of George Eliot, their whole point was a willingness to adapt themselves to reach the forgotten for Christ. This was disruptive, as the Wesleys were before them, but the gain for church and realm from such a movement was obvious.
BW
There is a danger that if we do not find our disruptive Anglicanism for the 21st century, we will all “die” in the West, ACNA included (noting some statistical reflections in a recent email circulation from David Virtue).
ReplyDelete"...if we do not find our disruptive Anglicanism for the 21st century, we will all 'die' in the West"
ReplyDeleteYes, Peter, the morbidity of Institutional Protestantism is already far advanced.
A lot could be said, but first here is something profound, far-reaching, and practical: in churches where grandparents or parents themselves see to the spiritual development of their children, the rate of decline is low or negative. In mainstream society here up yonder, this is as apparent in Southern Baptists as in the Russian Orthodox. Alas, it is also apparent in studies showing that the CoE began the glide before its dive in the early 1960s when its mothers decided not to insist that their children be Christians. And it resonates well with the adult testimony of so many who have said that they were inspired to take faith seriously by the example of a grandparent or parent.
Inevitably, a church that is growing exponentially will have better trends than one that is shrinking through attrition. But the trick is to have churchways that support rather than inhibit or disrupt a conscious and intelligent transmission of faith across generations. There is probably no single way of getting this done, but every church stable today has a way, and in every church dying today the way that it once had has unraveled.
The simplicity of this truism is deceptive. Each church has its own *thick* story either of how its families still pass on faith, or how they tacitly decided to stop trying. A comparison of these stories is often more revealing than any one taken on its own. They tend to join together insights that culture warriors cast asunder.
Looking again at the CoE, the best book-length study of its decline ** accounts for that as the result of a crisis of gender and sexuality in the early 1960s. From roughly the Great War on, English laymen stopped caring about religion as their grandfathers had done, and the CoE tacitly gave up on them as tradents of the faith. For a few more decades, their wives still brought up their children in the church their husbands had abandoned. But the raised consciousness of feminism disrupted that practice. Mothers did not leave the CoE, their relationship with it became more fraught, and they ceased to believe in a duty to bring their children up to be Anglicans. When those children came of age far from the church, the statistical dive began.
Meanwhile, across the pond, Southern Baptist parents and Russian Orthodox grandmothers continued to look after the faith of their young, as indeed they still do. Explain it as one will, these churches experienced the C20 generally and the 1960s particularly in ways that did not disrupt the family transmission of faith. Families of both traditions look forward to reunion in the aeon to come, so that the faith of each church plays a part in its own transmission. But the Baptist belief in conversion sets up a conversation between the generations that differs from an Orthodox one about the healing of the passions.
Could Anglicans, either here up yonder or there down under, strengthen the intergenerational transmission of faith in a way that made a measurable difference? I have to think that they could. But the price of doing that would appear to be an ethos that is less about the care and feeding of institutions and their public image, and more about the ways in which layfolk exemplify and transmit the faith across generations in their families.
** I am thinking here of Callum G Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 and Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization. This interview is helpful--
https://tinyurl.com/y8xjscwt
BW