The place of the church and the agony of Anglicanism by Stanley Hauerwas

ABC RELIGION AND ETHICS 27 SEP 2012

The rhetoric of Constantinianism and anti-Constantinianism, with which I am often associated, can be quite misleading just to the extent that it can suggest a far too clear alternative.

John Howard Yoder sometimes sounded as if the choice between those alternatives was and is clear. In fact, however, he recognized that even when Rome made Christianity the only legal faith of the Empire there were faithful forms of life that continued to shape the life of the church. Indeed, Yoder observes:

"The medieval church remained largely pacifist. The peace concern of the medieval church was institutionalized by the designation of holy times and places, which were to be completely exempt from the pressure of war."

Yoder understood well, therefore, that you do not free yourself of Constinianism by becoming anti-Constantinian. For him the alternative to Constantinianism was not anti-Constantin-ianism, but locality and place.

According to Yoder, locality and place are the forms of communal life necessary to express the particularity of Jesus through the visibility of the church. Only at the local level is the church able to engage in the discernment necessary to be prophetic. The temptation is to denounce "paganism" in general or to decry the "secularization" of culture as an inevitable process without doing the work necessary to specify what pagan or secular might mean in the concrete. The church's prophetic role in Yoder's words must always be in the "language as local and as timely as the abuses it critiques."

Rowan Williams, I think, has suggested something quite similar to Yoder's understanding of Christology and place. Williams observes that the New Testament testifies to the creation of a pathway between earth and heaven that nothing can ever again close. A place has been cleared in which God and human reality can belong together without rivalry or fear. That place is Jesus. It is a place where a love abides that is at once vulnerable and without protection. It is a place in which human competition does not count:

"a place where the desperate anxiety to please God means nothing; a place where the admission of failure is not the end but the beginning; a place from which no one is excluded in advance."

According to Williams, the role of church is to take up space in the world, to inhabit a place where Jesus's priesthood can be exercised. Such a place unavoidably must be able to be located on a social map so that it does not have to be constantly reinvented. Williams even suggests that the Church of England, a church after having lost much of its substance and which now occupies the shell of national political significance, "is peculiarly well placed to communicate something of the central vision of an undefended territory created by God's displacement of divine power from heaven to earth."

That Williams provides a Christological understanding of place is extremely important if we are to avoid turning the local into an abstraction. Appeals to locality and/or place can be every bit as destructive as the steam roller of universality that flattens all difference. The local cannot only be parochial, but the local can also be demonic.

I am a Texan, which has its own problems, but it is the South which has left its mark on me. I am all too well aware of the perversities of the so-called "local church." But you do not avoid the perversities of place by escaping to some alleged universal. You can only avoid the perversities of place by being the church of Jesus Christ which, as I now hope to show, the Church of England has by God's good grace done.

In Conflict and the Practice of Christian Faith: The Anglican Experiment, Bruce Kaye provides a fascinating account of Anglicanism that puts flesh on Williams's suggestive comments about the relation of Christology and locality by focusing on the Anglican Communion. Kaye's title rightly suggests that he does not mean to restrict his analysis only to the Anglican Communion, but rather he uses the Anglican Communion to illumine what he takes to be the essential character of the church catholic. That character is determined by our belief that Jesus of Nazareth is the incarnate Son of God making possible and necessary the invitation to all humanity, without distinction of race or circumstance, to respond to the gospel.

Those who respond to this invitation do so, according to Kaye, "in the particularities of their personal circumstance." The challenge, therefore, becomes how the personal response to the gospel, responses unavoidably determined by place, can be credited without threatening the church's unity. Kaye develops his account of the place of the Church of England with the current controversies in the Anglican Communion clearly in mind. He explores how a "globalized" form of Anglicanism has emerged from a local form, by which he means England, with the result of deep divisions and conflicts dominating the common life of Anglicanism. He does not think, however, that this is a development unique to the Anglican Communion.

According to Kaye, patterns of life that now characterize Anglican life were present in the New Testament. By fulfilling the hopes of Israel through a crucifixion of universal significance, as well as the call of the disciples, Jesus laid the foundation for a profusion of local diversity and cosmic belonging. Kaye quotes the second century writer Diognetus to give evidence to the necessary relation between Christ's cosmic and universal reality as the background to make locality, not only possible, but necessary. Diognetus puts it this way:

"For Christians are no different from other people in terms of their country, language, or customs. Nowhere do they inhabit cities of their own, use a strange dialect, or live life out of the ordinary. They have not discovered this teaching of theirs through reflection or through the thought of meddlesome people, nor do they set forth any human doctrine, as do some. They inhabit both Greek and barbarian cities, according to the lot assigned to each. And they show forth the character of their own citizenship in a marvellous and admittedly paradoxical way by following local customs in what they wear and what they eat and in the rest of their lives."

It is important to attend to the language Kaye uses to characterize Diognetus's description of Christians. Kaye refuses the contrast between the universal and particular and instead resorts of the language of the personal as a contrast to the universal to suggest why the gospel can only be received in context. To be sure, the gospel is for prisoners, jailers, magistrates, philosophers, masters, slaves, men and women, but that it is so requires that each person must respond by making the whole of their life subject to the everyday interactions of the community of the church.

From the beginning, Christianity has struggled to sustain the creative tension between the personal appropriation of the gospel and the gospel's universal reach. The result has been the creation of a politics that sought not to overthrow the old political order, but to build a new order manifest in each church's peculiar circumstance.

The current divisions and controversies arising from locality that beset Anglicanism, from Kaye's perspective, are nothing new. Local diversity has always characterized Christianity and conflict is thereby inevitable. Kaye, for example, reminds us that Western Christianity is a local tradition within which other local traditions developed creating continuing disputes. That Western Christianity names a "locality" is a nice reminder that all claims to place depend on contrast with another place.

Kaye, therefore, suggests that Anglicanism became identifiable as a place with a distinct history because Bede wrote his ecclesiastical history. For it was Bede's history that created what would become the idea known as England. Kaye contends that Anglicanism is best understood as a regional form of Christianity not unlike the church in Gall.

Without becoming any less insistent on the cosmic lordship of Christ, the church in England developed a distinctive way to be church by maintaining a resilient call to personal discipleship to Jesus. From Kaye's perspective, Henry VIII is but a later expression of the resistance of Anglicanism to the attempt of Rome to develop an imperial conception of catholicity. Kaye identifies Anglicanism, therefore, as the attempt to maintain catholicity without Leviathan.

The fundamental character of our faith means an extensive diversity is required not only within local community, but between communities. Each person and community must respond faithfully to the particularities of their situation; yet they must seek, if they are faithfully to be Christ's body, to remain interconnected. The necessity of such interconnectedness is called "catholicity." To be "catholic" is to recognize that my particularity must serve to build up the whole.

Such building up has always been a challenge. Kaye, in particular, calls attention to the ambiguity created by the attempt to impose order on the Anglican reality through the 1662 Act of Uniformity. From Kaye's perspective, the Act of Uniformity was an attempt to impose conformity on the church without respecting the diversity of gifts found in the parishes of England.

"the Act of Uniformity did not serve well the tradition of Anglican Christianity. It narrowed the focus and failed to move the ecclesiastical structures in a direction that served the new social and political realities of the Christian citizens of England."

Some seem to think that something like an Act of Uniformity is required in response to the current controversies in the Anglican Communion. Kaye thinks such a response would be ill advised. It is ill advised because it would deny the Anglican commitment to live faithfully in their local circumstance even though doing so creates diversity that creates difficulties for those in other places.

Kaye is not suggesting that truth does not matter, but that truth demands that those whom we do not understand not be cast beyond the pale of fellowship. Anglicans have been committed to the local expression of the faith, which means that the challenge confronting its reality as an international fellowship of churches should not be how we can enforce uniformity, but rather how we can be known through our love of one another.

Catholicity is, therefore, that name we give to the priority of the local for the determination of faithfulness that can only be sustained by engagement with other local expressions of the faith, as well as engagement with the whole. As Rowan Williams reminded us at the 2008 Lambeth Conference:

"The entire Church is present in every local church assembled around the Lord's Table. Yet the local church alone is never the entire Church. We are called to see this not as a circle to be squared but as an invitation to be more and more lovingly engaged with one another."

Such engagement, moreover, is crucial if the church is to be an alternative to the forces that threaten to destroy locality in the name of peace. We are in danger of confusing the universality of the cross with the allegedly inevitable process of globalization. We are in the odd situation of needing one another in our diverse localities in order not to be subject to the power of false universals.

Kaye calls attention to Rowan Williams's claim in the final address at the 2008 Lambeth Conference as an expression of this understanding of catholicity. Williams said:

"The global horizon of the Church matters because churches without this are always in danger of slowly surrendering to the culture around them and losing sight of their calling to challenge that culture."

The culture that inhabits us - and by us, I mean Christians - is a subtle and seductive one. It tempts us to believe we are free of place. It tempts us to believe that we do not have the time to do what needs to be done, so we must constantly hurry. These temptations are often assumed to be congruent with the gospel imperatives to have no permanent home. But in the process we lose the visibility necessary to be witnesses to the One who made it possible to be Christians.

Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University. His most recent book is War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity. You can hear Hauerwas on the two-part Encounter series, God, Good and Evil and Saints, Stranger and Enemies.