The End of Establishment: Reflections on the Church of Ireland's 'Disestablishment 150 project'. Part II

In Part I, I questioned the all-too evident assumption in 'Disestablishment 150' that the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland was an act of rupture, empowering the Church of Ireland to be "free to shape our own future".  In fact, continuity with the establishment profoundly characterised the Church of Ireland post-1870, both in terms of its identity as a "free national church" and in its Formularies.

'Disestablisment 150' thus regards disestablishment as - in the words of 1066 And All That - 'A Good Thing'.  It is hailed as "the great gift to the Church of Ireland".  By contrast, entirely missing from the project is any recognition of the positive significance of establishment. 

This is despite the profound theological rationale for establishment being deeply embedded within the Anglican experience.  To give the most obvious example: Hooker's Lawes, that foundational work of Anglican theology, is primarily, as Torrance Kirby has brilliantly demonstrated, "a defence of the union of Church and Commonwealth in one 'politique societie'".  This vision, moreover, has a value and coherence that should receive greater respect than the "enormous condescension of posterity", not least from a posterity which offers the thin gruel of a state and culture dominated by the market, celebrity, and rootless, empty secularism.  As Charles Miller says of Hooker's exposition of "the tradition of Christian Aristotelianism as developed by Aquinas":

The 'good life' in a Christian society, therefore, involves the provision first of material needs, then of means of formation in natural moral and civic goods, and finally the means to access supernatural, engraced virtues tending toward the summum bonum, of highest good, participation in God - a 'triple perfection' that is by necessity a social endeavour and experience.

To this we might also add the voice of a great Irish Anglican, Edmund Burke, and what J.C.D. Clark describes as his "Anglican defence of the State". In Burke's words:

I beg leave to speak of our church establishment, which is the first of our prejudices, not a prejudice destitute of reason, but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom ... It nourishes the public hope.

To simply disregard that "profound and extenstive wisdom" is symptomatic of  the approach of 'Disestablishment 150', viewing the Irish Church Act 1869 as a moment of enlightenment and liberation.  What is at work here, it might be suggested, is a theological and cultural agenda which welcomes secularization, using the commemoration of disestablishment to promote an understanding of the Church being on the margins of culture and society (and see Sam Brewitt-Taylor for an account of this theology in the 20th century Church of England), rather than embedded within culture and society, a means of orienting cultural and social life towards the City of God. 

This is the gift bequeathed by establishment to a disestablished church: the call not to be a marginalised, culturally ineffective and inconsequential church, but rather - through historic presence, pastoral rites and ethos, and gathering up of national identity in prayer and worship - sanctifying the common, shared life. 

Establishment was a historically appropriate means to this end.  When a changed political context rendered the mechanism inappropriate, this did not alter the mission of the Church of Ireland, which continued through its historic presence, pastoral rites and ethos, and gathering up of national identity in prayer and worship, to seek the sanctification of the common, shared life.  To have done otherwise would have been to abandon something inherent to the Church's mission.  As John Milbank has stated:

Christianity is Christendom, as the older history of the coinciding usage of these words suggests, else it is disincarnate and so not really the religion of the Incarnation at all.

Similarly, Oliver O'Donovan:

the Christendom idea has to be located correctly as an aspect of the church's understanding of mission.

Here are two of the most significant voices within contemporary Anglican theology, reminding us that establishment should not be a cause of embarrassment, a hindrance from which to be 'liberated', but rather an expression of the Church's enduring mission.  Against this, the celebration of disestablishment sounds like an echo of the tired old theology of the 60s and 70s: the banal theology which welcomed and celebrated the secular city.

Disestablishment did not marginalise the Church of Ireland, precisely because the end of establishment was retained in the ethos, ministry, worship and life of this Church.  Embedded in civic life, culture, and landscape, the disestablished Church of Ireland was, and is, profoundly shaped in its mission by the experience of establishment.  This is establishment's "great gift" to the Church of Ireland.

(The picture is of the President of Ireland attending the Remembrance Day service in St Patricks's National Cathedral, Dublin, in 2017.)