9 October 2014 A.D. Anglicans Need to Start Doing Theology
9
October 2014 A.D. Anglicans
Need to Start Doing Theology
Belder, Jake.
“Anglicans need to start doing theology.” Jake
Belder. 9 Oct 2014. http://blog.jakebelder.com/post/anglicans-need-to-start-doing-theology. Accessed 11 Oct 2014.
Oct 9, 2014
I have just finished reading The
Integrity of Anglicanism, a book by the late Bishop Stephen Sykes, which is a fascinating and
incisive work aimed at addressing the question of whether or not Anglicanism –
and more specifically, the Church of England – has a distinct
theological standpoint.
The book is in part a sustained critique of the
idea of 'comprehensiveness', the notion that the Anglican Church should be a place
where (in some cases, radically) different theological perspectives can exist
in unity. Sykes essentially concludes that as attractive as this idea is in
theory, it is simply incapable of working in practice, and undermines
Anglicanism's integrity.
As popular as the idea of comprehensiveness is,
Sykes ends up arguing that Anglicanism actually does have a shared theological
standpoint, 'whether or not its theologians are aware of it and are prepared to
think carefully and critically about it’ (74). He suggests that this standpoint
is most evident in its liturgies and canon law.1 If this is true,
though, Sykes wonders, why then is there no ‘genre of Anglican theological
literature corresponding to Roman Catholic systematic theology’ (74)? He
continues,
I can only imagine three
explanations; it may be that Anglicans have special insight into why the whole
enterprise of systematic theology is a waste of time… But so far from this
being the case, we would more easily be able to show how pathetically grateful
Anglicans are to have some writing on which to cut their theological teeth and
how parasitic Anglican theological education is on the existence of such
literature. Or secondly, it may be that my argument about the existence of an
Anglican standpoint is fallacious. And in this case I hope it will not be long
before its errors have been exposed. Or, thirdly, and I can see no further
possibilities, it may be that the contemporary Anglican communion is in gross
dereliction of its duty to foster the critical study of its own standpoint as a
church participating in the universal Church of Christ, to its own
impoverishment and to the impoverishment of its contribution to the cause of
Christian unity (74-75).
These are strong words, but an important challenge.
I find myself sympathetic to much of Sykes' critique of comprehensiveness and
the need to articulate a distinctive Anglican theological standpoint. This is
not to diminish the way in which Anglicanism has always sought to
make room for theological exploration, but a recognition that this process should not
result in what can end up looking a lot like relativism. When it does, it
fosters a unity that is only institutional, and in many ways illusory. This, I
think, is the situation we find ourselves in today. And we are left, as Sykes
says, impoverished.
True unity is rooted in shared belief. To be sure,
Anglicanism has never been a confessional Church in the sense of the Reformed
and Lutheran Churches, and has always been characterised by a degree of
diversity, largely owing to its nature as a national Church. Nor should it
necessarily be. However, as Paul Avis demonstrates in his book, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, early post-Reformation
Anglicanism did have greater commonality in its theological foundation, but
this has eroded over time as different movements and traditions, particularly
those influenced by liberalism, have become more prominent. Sykes' call, then,
is to recapture a shared foundation – not that we try to recapture the 16th-
and 17th-centuries as a sort of 'golden age', or that we become a confessional
Church, but simply that Anglicans take up the task of doing
theology, to work out and express our theological standpoint, and from there to
draw all the traditions of the Church into the process of discernment and
refinement so that we will come to build our unity on a common faith. Sykes is
happy to affirm that Anglicanism by nature has always been a broad Church, but
he also recognises that we need to draw boundaries and establish foundations if
our unity is going to be real and lasting.
Sykes wrote these words in 1978, but as far as I
know, his call has yet to be answered, at least within the Church of England.
And certainly, with all that's going on today and the way the fractures in the
Church are growing, it is more urgent than ever that we seek unity in the way
Sykes calls us to – indeed, in the way Jesus calls us to.
1 There is an intriguing tension that
emerges when a Church that prizes diversity of theological perspectives and
traditions claims to hold a 'common' form of worship. Sykes is right to note
that our liturgy embraces a particular theology, as you cannot say something
that means more than one thing at the same time. This results in different
traditions either attempting to interpret the liturgy to fit within their
tradition's theological framework, or to simply ignore the tension, such that
only keen observers will note the dichotomy between the theology professed in
the liturgy and the theology articulated by the church/tradition.
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