Let Anglicanism be Anglicanism: Armistice Day thoughts on being establishment
The photograph also captured an aspect of the Anglican experience that too often provokes embarrassment amongst or downright rejection by contemporary Anglicans. Here was Westminster Abbey, a royal church dedicated prayer at the heart of national life. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a honoured focal point for the national memory. Her Majesty herself is an anointed monarch and a faithful Anglican, whose messages at Christmas (and Easter Day past) almost certainly do more to commend the Faith than numerous episcopal statements. The military officer accompanying her has sworn by Almighty God allegiance to her, and is ministered to padres, the majority of whom are Church of England clergy.
The photograph, then, captures something of what it is to be a national Church. A national Church not merely in the sense of being a self-governing, particular Church, but also a Church which seeks to gather up the nation - the commonwealth - in prayer, recognising in public life and service vocation and gifts bestowed by God, to be oriented towards God, and for which prayer and thanksgiving is to be offered.
The particular constitutional and ecclesial form this takes in England is beside the point. This is an ethos, an understanding of the relationship between Church and civil society, a pastoral relationship which Anglicanism has often embodied in rather different constitutional contexts. It finds expression in state prayers, chaplaincy, the national flag in the parish church, memorials in cathedral and ordinary parish churches to those who have offered public service or died in the service of their country.
For some contemporary Anglicans, usually in the Hauerwasian mode, it is all rather too comfortable. The call of demanding discipleship seems to be absent. There is too much nature, too little grace. Surely, we are told, the Church should be at the edge not the centre, courageous and prophetic. Two things happen when this exhortation is heeded and Anglicanism in a particular polity abandons its vocation to be a national Church. Firstly, it tends to disappear into sectarian irrelevance: the staggering collapse in TEC's infant Baptism figures provide a rather painful example of this process. Secondly, others fill the void. Watching Mainliners in the United States bewail the recent antics of President Trump's spiritual adviser Paula White was a rather frustrating experience precisely because the Mainline's abandonment of its historic role helped create the circumstances which gave influence to White and those like her.
A problem with contemporary Anglicanism in North Atlantic societies is not that we are too establishment, or that we are too committed to being civil society churches: it is that we are not establishment enough, that we are not committed civil society churches. To be establishment is to be embedded in the institutions which shape a society. To be a civil society church is to be rooted in the communities and relationships which give meaning and purpose to our common life. Historically, this is how Anglicanism has flourished. The sectarian, 'prophetic' alternatives (whether from theological Left or Right) only offer Anglicanism ecclesial and cultural irrelevance.
Reformed theologian and philosopher James K.A. Smith recently highlighted an aspect of the theological dynamic at work in this vocation. He refers to an article by Jessica Hooten Wilson, which critiqued the theological underpinning of Marilynne Robinson's novels for being too much nature and not enough grace:
This is the kind of thing that Jessica Hooten Wilson dislikes in Robinson's novels, but I think she's wrong. She simply can't imagine how mainline Protestantism is its own outworking of grace. What looks to Wilson like soppy accommodation is actually the outworking of an incarnational logic. Like the Father who is willing to sacrifice everything for wayward humanity, so this father, Rev. Boughton, is willing to sacrifice his theological system and certainties, give up the comfort of his convictions, in order to live into the one overriding conviction of his life: that the God who marked Jack in baptism will never let him go.
It is not, of course, a developed theological account of the historic vocation of Anglicanism (or other Mainline traditions), but it does hint at the understanding of grace which has been embodied in the generosity of Anglican pastoral practices, what John Hughes described as the "very concrete material practices such as our policy of baptizing any children ... or marrying or burying anyone". It is these practices, said Hughes, which proclaim life as "flowing from and to him, who is the Alpha and Omega of all things".
Related to this, is Hooker's vision of the diverse ways through which divine Wisdom is mediated to us:
As her ways are of sundry kinds, so her manner of teaching is not merely one and the same. Some things she openeth by the sacred books of Scripture; some thing by the glorious works of nature; with some things she inspireth them from above by spiritual influence, in some things she leadeth and traineth them only by worldly experience and practice. We may not so in any one special kind admire her that we disgrace her in any other, but let all her ways be according unto their place and degree adored - LEP II.I.4.
A narrow focus on the ecclesial, with a disregard for commonwealth and community; a narrow focus on the theological, with a disregard for the commercial, the political, or the educational: such sectarianism is indeed an impoverished understanding of Wisdom's "sundry kinds" and "manner[s] of teaching". It suggests not a world sustained by God's grace, suffused by God's glory, and ordered by God's providence, but a world from which God is absent, in which God is not be encountered.
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