01.06.03 Michael Easter 7 And now I am no longer in the world
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And
now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am
coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have
given to me, so that may be one, as we are one. John 17. 11
Ever since the appointment of Rowan Williams as the Archbishop of Canterbury ‘Reform’ minded evangelicals have been suggesting that his appointment is against the will of God, that he is too liberal to be a public guardian of the faith, and that he is opposed to the unity and truthfulness of the Church, all because of his views on sexuality. Many are proposing to stay away from the 2003 National Evangelical Congress in protest at the invitation to Rowan Williams to be present and offer a prayer at the meeting, although he has not even been invited to address the congress. The issue which sets Reform against Rowan Williams concerns the place of homosexuals in the Church and in particular in the ministry. Bishops and Archbishops who have knowingly ordained priests who are in long term, stable and faithful homosexual relationships are said to be heretics because they are in disagreement with the official Anglican position, as affirmed at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, that such ordinations, and such relationships are wrong and against the historic traditions of the church. In reported comments in The Times last week the private view of Rowan Williams is said to remain ‘that an adjustment of teaching on sexuality would not be different from the kind of flexibility now being shown to divorcees who wish to remarry, or the softening in the 16th century of the Church’s once total opposition to borrowing with interest or the 19th and 20th century shifts of view on subjects like slavery and eternal hellfire.” (CT 30 May 2003) But alongside this statement of his privately held view, the Archbishop has also formally declared his intention to uphold the official position of the Church at Lambeth in 1998 that same-sex unions are opposed to Biblical teaching and that the Church cannot publicly approve such unions either by ordaining those in such unions, or by the use of public rites of blessing on them.
Some will of course accuse the Archbishop not only of heresy at this point but also of hypocrisy – how can he think one think privately and uphold another position in his official statements and practices?
In today’s Ascension-tide gospel we find Jesus in contemplative mode reflecting on the implications of his coming bodily absence from the disciples for their future as public witnesses to the divine truth of his Sonship and redemption of the world. His prayer for the disciples, repeated a number of times is ‘that they may be one, even as we are one’. And the basis of that unity is the mystical relationship between the disciples and God which is analogous to the relations of the Father to the Son: ‘as you Father are in me and I am in you may they also be in us’ (John 17. 21) and again ‘the glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ (John 17. 22 – 23).
The means of the oneness of the body of Christians is the same means by which the Son is one with the Father and this according to the Gospel of John is the relationship between the Jesus and the Spirit whom the Father gifts to Jesus, the Spirit who John the Baptist saw ‘descending from heaven like a dove’ and remaining on Jesus. And John the Evangelist leaves us in no doubt that it is this same Spirit who is given in turn by Jesus to the disciples after the Resurrection of Jesus for even before the Ascension, and before the Day of Pentecost, we read that in the second resurrection appearance of Jesus – he had earlier appeared to the women in the garden but not to Peter or the others who came to be called Apostles – after saying ‘peace be with you’ and ‘as the Father sent me so I send you’ he then ‘breathed on them and said to them “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven and if you retain the sins of any they are retained’ (John 20. 21 – 2). So if we ask how were the disciples to know what to believe and how to live after Jesus had been taken from them, the answer according to John is quite plain – it is through their relationship with God the Spirit. Just as the ‘Spirit of truth’ gave authority to the words and works of Jesus so the same Spirit will ‘lead the disciples into all truth’.
Now this is all a bit confusing for of course the tradition which we celebrate in these days of waiting between the Ascension and the day of Pentecost is that Jesus went up to heaven to be seated on the right hand of God and only some days later did the disciples receive the gift of the Holy Spirit in the upper room in Jerusalem. Who is right? The Gospel of John who puts the gift of the Spirit into the midst of the Resurrection appearances, or the writer of Luke-Acts who puts it after the Ascension of the Risen Lord on the day of Pentecost?
What we are faced with here is ambiguity, and accounts of events which varied between the different churches to which John and Luke – the Gospel writers – themselves belonged and in which the stories of Jesus and the first disciples had circulated for at least thirty years in oral form before being consigned to the authoritative written texts of the Gospels. And this is not the only aspect of the life and ministry of our Lord on which the Gospel writers disagree. John has the scourging of the temple at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry while the other evangelists put it at the end. Even the Synoptic writers disagree on significant details such as the content of the famous Sermon on the Mount, and the wording of Jesus’ reinterpretation of the Jewish law, or the events around the passion, death and Resurrection of Jesus. These disagreements have led modern scholars to argue that John is not as ‘historically accurate’ as the other evangelists, and to argue that there may even be a more authoritative and ancient gospel account – sometimes called ‘Q’ – behind the Synoptic Gospels if only we could find it (and some have suggested it is underneath the altar at Rosslyn Chapel!)
Our forbears though do not seem to have been troubled as modern scholars are about the differences in emphasis and narrative between the different Gospels. Similarly there seems in the early church, and right through to the middle ages, to have been a greater latitude of belief and practice on a whole range of issues – including sex before marriage and same-sex unions – than the churches of the post-Reformation, or what we now call the modern era, have tended to allow.
Modernity is simply a word for newness but it has come to be taken to represent that period of the rise of natural science and of the domination of reason – rather than religion – in human affairs which took its rise from the Renaissance and reached its finest flowering in the Scottish, French and German Enlightenments. One of the most prominent features of the modern cult of reason was a quest for certainty and unanimity in human affairs from ethics and the law to medicine and physics which was never sought by the medieval philosophers or theologians. Whereas theologians in the middle ages had relied on case law as a means of discerning the moral and legal rectitude in particular situations by the eighteenth century casuistry had fallen into disrepute and first the Pope, and then in the nineteenth century fundamentalist theologians, sought to claim inerrancy for their particular formulations of the word of God, as though particular written formulae were universally transparent to all people everywhere whatever their particular cultural circumstances. One famous example of this tendency was the imposition of monogamy on many colonised peoples by nineteenth century missionaries who had little sensitivity to local custom and as a consequence turned many women out of their own homes and forced them into prostitution.
Where did this quest for certainty come from? Well according to Stephen Toulmin it seems to have originated in the wars of religion of the sixteenth century which issued out of the struggles between Protestants and Catholics right across Europe and produced a political situation in which kings were assassinated and individuals or whole churches declared heretical, or even burnt at the stake, for holding to one or other doctrinal and liturgical confession; the most common cause of disagreement concerned the precise manner in which Christ could be said to be present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Catholics and Protestants alike sought to lay down the law on exactly how Christ’s words ‘this is my body broken for you’ were to be understood.
The struggles over doctrine and liturgy of the sixteenth century led many in seventeenth century Europe to seek to reduce the influence of religion over human affairs. But they led at the same time to a new quest for certainty, a desire for unambiguous foundations for truth, both in natural science and in moral and political and social matters, which earlier generations had never desired or expected to attain. The outcome was the sovereignty of reason and the birth of nation states said to be governed by universal values, such as those of liberty, equality, fraternity as announced in the French revolution. The newly published constitution of the European Union similarly excludes any reference to a spiritual or divine foundation for the values which the Union seeks to uphold.
We however live in what some call a postmodern age in which the sovereignty of reason seems to be in doubt. Fewer of us now believe that science and reason can automatically deliver the gradual improvements in human welfare and happiness than those of previous generations. And yet the quest for certainty remains. David Blunkett as Home Secretary – to give one example – has announced his intention to impose a tariff of a life sentence, and even of a particular length of years by which life is to be understood, upon a sentence of murder. But the English legal tradition has retained, against this laying down of a precise number of years for a particular crime, a premodern respect for casuistry and context and character which the modern quest for certainty has largely erased from public and political life and so Blunkett stands in opposition not just to the chairman of the Bar Council but to a whole historical tradition of interpretation of human rights and wrongs on a case by case basis. And this reflects a larger problem with ambiguity in modern British political life – it is as if everyone has to sing from the same hymn sheet the whole time and there can be no room for disagreement and rational debate within a Cabinet or a government or even a political party without undermining its putative authority or strength or power. And so we have strong-arm political leaders in both Washington and London who impose with pagers their own particular views on the world which they express with absolute certainty and require their ministers and MPs to adopt with equal certainty even when these views rest upon highly ambiguous evidence – the case of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is just one particularly prominent recent example of this tendency.
The quest for certainty, whether in sexual morality or ecclesiastical or civil law, or political judgement, remains a feature of our age but it is becoming clearer and clearer that this quest is at odds with the ways in which people, and Christians, through the ages, have in fact managed to live with ambiguity and diversity and disagreement without resorting to heresy trials, threats of schism or war. Far from appealing to one line of dogmatic pronouncement, one universally received theory, in the past clerics and philosophers discussed particular moral cases in the light of a range of traditions and in the light of particular contexts and cultural circumstances. The unity of Christendom was maintained ‘from Scotland to Sicily, from Poland to Portugal’ not by an inerrant and domineering Papal authority imposed willy nilly on every circumstance but by argument and discussion about cases and character and culture and circumstances. And it was precisely the increasing speed of communication, and the growing power and capacity of the Papacy to impose its increasingly corrupt practices and views on Christendom from one end to the other which eventually led to the Reformation and the break-up of the one united Europe, which we are now in the process of trying to reinvent again in secular guise.
What I am saying then is that for a very long time the prayer of Jesus for his disciples – that they might be one even as he was one with the father - did indeed find an answer but it was not the kind of oneness that the modern sovereignty of reason, and the quest for certitude, have led us to expect. The point was not that Christians in different places and from different cultures did not do things differently – there is plenty of evidence of such differences, as say between Jewish and Gentile Christians even in the New Testament. The point was that they ‘agreed to differ’ in the time honoured phrase. They remained in relationship, they belonged to one body, one social organisation, even when they differed over certain matters of beliefs and practice.
And this means that for Christians truth and knowledge do not mean that we have access to moral or doctrinal theory which is on every point unarguable and universally applicable. The point rather is that how we know the truth, and how the truth sets us free is through the Spirit, through our relation to God and through the relations of love which God the Spirit makes it possible for us to enjoy with one another. Love and knowledge are for Augustine as for St Paul and St John intimately related. It is not possible to know the truth, let alone to do the truth, unless we are already loved by the Father and indwelt by the Spirit. As the epistle of John puts it ‘those who believe in the testimony of the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts’. Truth and emotion, theoretical knowledge and practical experience, are not in separate compartments for John. They belong together. And this is precisely the meaning of the spiritual character of truth for John – it is only through loving God that we have true knowledge of God. There is no formula, no four spiritual laws or Papal encyclical or statement of evangelical fundamentals which can guarantee that we are lovers of God, or that God loves us. We can only know this in the particulars of our bodies, emotions, experiences, relationships, and thoughts. But this does not mean that we are alone with the truth. On the contrary if truth is only knowable through relationships then it is in relationship with one another that we come to be able to reason our way toward truthful living and truthful believing.
The idea that Rowan Williams to be a good Archbishop has to agree with every jot and title of the Church’s official position on sexuality, both publicly and privately, or else he cannot be a true Archbishop, cannot be a site of unity for the Anglican communion is itself not a truly conservative notion but quite the opposite a highly modern one. It is redolent of the quest for certainty, of the sovereignty of reason, and the desire for knowledge without spiritual relations, without love, a desire which in the context of the wars of religion of the sixteenth century may be quite understandable, but which nonetheless is not in accord with traditional Christian, and scriptural accounts of how we know and live the truth of God. If there is no discernment required in particular cases, if we dare not argue for fear of falling out, then why do we need the Spirit to lead us into the truth, and to make us one? We just need to write down a list of instructions about morality and doctrine and sign on the dotted line. This is not the protection which Jesus prays for God to give to his disciples. But it is strangely reminiscent of the kind of thought control that modern totalitarian states have tried to exercise over their citizens, and there is plenty of evidence that the neo-conservatives of the United States are pushing academics and clerics and citizens in general in the same direction – books are being banned from public libraries, academics and journalists silenced and real argument, real dissent not tolerated. This is not the unity we seek as Christians - it is on the contrary precisely this kind of thought control which has been the source of war and conflict, and yes of religious war, through Christian history. Let us pray God that Jesus’ prayer for his disciples is once again owned by Christians today in the Anglican Communion, among evangelicals both here and in the United States and throughout the Christian church – and the promise of this prayer was not demeaning conformity or suppression of liberty and dissent but rather ‘that they might have joy made complete in themselves’.