Cold Snap

First light and three young ponies are testing the ice that overnight has rinked their paddock. These fields along the River Kennet are often overwhelmed in winter and animals pastured either side retreat into soggy clusters, as if facilitated into awkward conference. One pony breaks out and taps a playful morse on the surface before tottering forth, drawn by the irresistible fractures.

Back at my desk, and conscious of a tightness about the chest, I’m processing recent weeks in which bishops’ conclusions on love and marriage have finally been served from their slow cooker and set before General Synod. As someone whose theological home isn’t biblical studies, I have been pondering among other things the heightened language around the doctrine of marriage that has come to the fore. It’s a word (along with orthodox, lately annexed by evangelicals) I hear being used more polemically than dogmatically: to bolster a rhetorical position rather than commend any obviously credal theme. Indeed, the historic creeds and classical doctrines have barely surfaced in this debate, which is notable.

Because the scriptural texts explicitly referring to what their authors would never have called sexuality (even my late and sainted aunt, a sister with the Convent of the Holy Name in Derby, said to me in her nineties, ‘my dear, in my day we simply didn’t have a sexuality’) appear so vexing, Anglican discussion has become mired in their stickiness, rather than move to the broader ground that has hitherto been its natural habitat. There is a palpable nervousness around doctrinal conversation, especially among senior clergy – perhaps because each of us feels that we ought to know more than we do. I fear a loss of method – which is more truly a loss of memory – and wonder whether I’m the only one missing those sure-footed reports of the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission from the Eighties and Nineties, like Believing in the Church (1981), curated by the peerless John V. Taylor. In the present mood, it makes one positively nostalgic to read (in the useful fifth chapter ‘Where shall doctrine be found?’) an affirmation of the ‘implicit’ and ‘diffuse’ nature of teaching in a church that takes seriously its responsibility to the nation: doctrine not confined to the ‘self-conscious core’ of believers but measured to some extent by its implications for society. 

But while the accusation from some quarters that bishops are doing their theology on the hoof is well-aimed, it ultimately misses the mark because that is precisely where God’s guidance takes place. It’s worthwhile remembering that the Elizabethan Settlement (like the preceding Henrician Reformation) was firstly an act of the realm: a political intervention or solution that subsequently required doctrinal apology. The Book of Common Prayer was refined not ahead, but in the heat of more than a hundred years of violent public controversy, and all the classic expositions of Anglicanism from Jewel onwards were an a posteriori rationalising of what had already occurred. Doctrine, in other words, is done in reverse: as in the first centuries after Christ and surely as grammar follows speech. The prophetic word arises from tradition, yet arrives from the future, in judgement and hope. After every genuine epiphany, the making sense can take centuries. 

Homing in on the Church of England’s recently-expressed aim to be ‘Jesus Christ centred and shaped’ affirms that its decision-making is a Christological pursuit. So we are bound to ask what understanding of Christ is being expressed in, for example, the acknowledged hardening of the boundary between holy matrimony and civil marriage since the 2013 Same Sex Couples Act. Personally, I’m uneasy with such an accrual of sanctity (‘matrimony’ adding an artificial yard or two to their separation) as it appears to deny both the worldliness of church weddings and the holiness of their non-church counterparts. However necessary legally or politically, this evacuation from the world suggest to me the sort of Nestorian distinction of divine and human natures that can only bring pastoral alienation – for the plain outworking of poor Christology is that more people do not encounter Jesus. 

Sensitivity to the historic polarities of doctrine is, therefore, of far more than academic concern. To relocate true north, I invariably end up outside the English church in my well-pencilled pages of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics,whose words remain a reliable compass for our present disorientation:

“The Christian … is an undivided whole. His worldliness does not divide him from Christ, and his Christianity does not divide him from the world. Belonging wholly to Christ, he stands at the same time wholly in the world.”

It is entirely fitting for the church to be interrogated by culture, and to hear in that interrogation echoes of a kingdom beyond the acceptable bounds of righteousness or religious authority. These bounds the Church must perpetually keep under review if it is truly to pursue its Lord, including those set by our pastoral offices, which meet and serve the world at those points where his kingdom is discerned drawing near, not least in that school for loving which is our intimate relationships. 

Recapitulating the doctrine of marriage as the Church of England has received it is a vital exercise along this difficult path, though not as an act of entrenchment: a liturgical Rourke’s Drift. For every day in our parishes, clergy reach across history’s ditch to pitch their office hours in contemporary relationships that are far remote from the household codes of Ephesians chapter five. They do so because they believe, rightly, that this is what Jesus Christ does: the living word, who defies every gulf with the vaulting grace of God. If we make this hermeneutic connection for some, we should by no means lack the ambition or imagination to do the same for others. By continuing to demur, the Church perpetuates a stance towards same-sex couples which admits their sin yet dismisses both their faithfulness and their love. I am of the view that we should do this no longer.

And so, after all our nervous rehearsals I give thanks for last week’s landmark decision in General Synod, even if I hope this will come to be seen more in the way of marriage preparation. For marriage, I believe, would be fairer, clearer, and truer to what Anglicans have taught about the place of sexual union, offering (as the preface to the 1662 Prayer Book marriage service puts it) both ‘mutual society’ and a ‘remedy against sin’. It would also be a fuller assertion of the Church of England’s peculiarly secular ecclesiology, which (as suggested in my previous post) may be seen as an outworking of its high Christology. This is where attention must now turn, for beneath our ethical or exegetical differences is the real contested territory: our doctrine of the church. Divisive calls for ‘alternative structures’ from the Church of England Evangelical Council and others this week underline the need to seek Godly resolution for these fissures of men. 

So it bears repeating that if the Church is wedded to Christ, it must recognise how this union likewise finds us betrothed to particular places through the Incarnation which ‘gathered into one things earthly and things heavenly’, as the festive blessing puts it. Forty years ago, the reactionary poet and Prayer Book firebrand C.H. Sisson wrote a wonderfully spiky series of Anglican Essays that are well worth recovering, along with his other works. In one of these he called for a ‘doctrine of England’ to arrest the drift towards sectarianism he already detected in the national church. We should be wary of stacking doctrines like sandbags (and alert to the ease with which nationalism can purport to be one) but Sisson was right, I believe, to see in this inability to speak of the country in Christian terms a theological and not merely sociological or institutional failure. The Church of England, he felt, was too geographical a concept for the modern world, an indictment that still rings true. We find it far easier to imagine God as the ground of our being than his being on our ground. 

It hardly needs adding that, in the present controversy around sexuality and marriage, this vocation is complicated by the present configuration of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s national and international roles. The decision by General Synod last July to increase the number of Anglican Communion representatives on the Crown Nominations Commission for the See of Canterbury from one to five was questionable, I think. Not because I don’t wish to see a more diverse and representative global leadership of the Communion (I do) but because this move risks compounding an already costly conflict of interest for the archbishop as Primate of All England and head of the Communion, a combination that arguably constrains the liberties of both. It is testament to the present archbishop’s extraordinary political agility that he has manoeuvred so deftly between these responsibilities but tethering them more closely still could be untenable at home. Observing this precarious past year, I can’t help concluding that the office of Archbishop of Canterbury should eventually be loosened either from one role or the other.

Our current agonising over church unity highlights the plain fact that the Church of England’s polity differs from the rest of the Communion in fairly substantial ways. Simply put, the Church of England cannot choose church unity over the nation (as Archbishop Justin’s dilemma was recently caricatured in The Guardian) because we don’t conceive of ourselves independently of the country & communities we serve. This isn’t so for other provinces, none of which is wedded to the state like this. Through the Elizabethan Settlement and the train of doctrinal apologia that proceeded, England itself was imagined as a kind of church: an essential key to unlocking the residual hallowing of our constitution we find less in the high ceremonial shortly to be witnessed at the Coronation (which has more ancient origins) than the enduring commitment to local welfare in every parish since the Reformation. 

Recent intervention by MPs into our marriage debates is a vital sign of that compact, which shouldn’t be resented for safeguarding the essential political component of religious life – albeit in one, representative, tradition. The latter privilege has long made Establishment offensively anachronistic to some, although there is a strong case to be made for anachronism and its resistance of hubristic progress, especially in modern politics. It all depends, I suspect, on whether and to whom the stubborn past proves a blessing or a curse in the present day. For while it’s an inescapable (indeed, scriptural) fact that grace, nature and liberty will privilege certain traditions over others, a society is civilised only to the extent that each privilege retains an equivalent duty of self-sacrifice on behalf of the powerless. To whom much is given, much will be required. For episcopal colleagues in House of Lords, this moral imperative arises from a distinctive local inheritance, rooted once more in questions about Christ: not so much ‘what would Jesus do?’ as ‘where would Jesus be – and with whom?’ Advocacy is their currency and hopefully preserves their red-robed presence from being mere vested interest.

The built environment around Parliament Square always brings home this increasingly unfamiliar neighbourhood of church and state, though lately we’ve felt an estrangement. The moon at dawn a lowering host, on Tuesday last the fog closed in on Westminster Bridge: unusually, gothically thick. It was an oddly mystic moment: the pavement, greasy with frost; Palace, Abbey (and, behind them, Synod) equally lost, as if in unknowing or theophany. St Peter with an iPhone, I snapped away – then, in minutes, the transfiguring mist thinned under the sun’s heat, and I watched its last coils evaporate over Victoria Tower, as if there had been no such scene.