The Decline of Conversation
It may seem paradoxical to a generation like mine brought up under the rule of silence in libraries that the role of the librarian as a trusted intermediary is, like that of the theologian, not only to promote enquiry but also conversation. Nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than by the recent debate over the consecration of women as bishops where the key questions for both sides should have been the procedures for and the limits of organic theological development implicitly accepted by the Medieval Catholic Church and Protestant reformers. The very act of Reformation, although it claimed, like all great reforms, simply to restore what had been the ancient regime, was an organic theological development but there was surely some legitimacy in its claim that the Roman Catholic Church, not least over the presenting issue of Papal indulgences, had gone too far. While Evangelicals claimed in the recent debate that the claim for women in the episcopate had taken that development too far, they never answered the question of what the limits of such development might be. Conversely, on the other side of the argument, there were no processes clearly set out for the legitimacy of evolution. Instead of the adherence to two, fixed, opposing, apparently incompatible propositions, there should have been room for dialogue, again, taking into account the limits of both positions imposed by the nature of theology itself which I mentioned earlier. There was also a third question which commanded insufficient attention, namely, the extent to which the Church of Christ must accept propositions of uniformity and the converse extent to which diversity is viable, not permissible, note, but viable. This particular question was reduced to the far less fruitful question of whether female consecration was a 'first' or 'second order' issue. The inference here is that 'first order' issues were non-negotiable whereas 'second order' issues were negotiable. Saint Paul would not have understood the question because he thought that unity was the predominant issue. This would not have been an issue were it not for the obvious fact that clergy, far from being servants, have evolved over time to hold positions of power. This was, fundamentally, an issue about power not service again, a point which would have left Saint Paul frothing at the mouth.
It is going too far to say that a conversational approach would have resolved the differences; the best it might have done might have been to work out a Modus Vivendi but, time and again, in all Christian denominations, the issue has too often been one of conformity which, in turn, is based on a theory of power. The more respectable way of looking at the disagreement is to say that the issue turned on the question of who has authority to determine the meaning of Scripture. Paradoxically, the Protestant and reformed tradition in the 16th Century began with the proposition that it is for the individual to determine what Scripture means but this proved to be unsustainable in an authoritarian ecology. The notion that the meaning of Scripture was so clear that there could be no disagreement soon broke down but, here, surely, it was a case of not being able to see the wood of love for the doctrinal trees. It could be argued that the rot impregnated into Christianity by its adoption by the Emperor Constantine[i] reached its culmination in the 16th Century when secular princes established erastian settlements under the guise of theocratic piety.
In our society that tendency to withdraw from dialogue into mere assertion is plain for all to see and instead of being counter culturally generous, we have tended to buy into the culture, or lack of culture, of assertion. Nowhere is imagination more in demand than in the discussion of theological issues, not only imagining the position of the other but also in developing positions which have not yet been articulated. The theologian should be like an athlete testing the body to its limits so that if she is not out of breath when the tape is breasted, she hasn't run hard enough. The Greek obsession with dichotomy is strangling us as we struggle and fail to listen. Ultimately, theology is not a set of propositions mathematical, empirical or dogmatic, it is a language, a way of talking about things humbly, constructively and in a knowingly inadequate way. Again, we have been guilty of the sin of pride. Christianity must make room for enquiry but it is not an intellectual pursuit; as you know, it is enquiry in the context of faith which distinguishes theology from the philosophy of religion; and there is some irony, given how his text has been used since, that that formulation came from Saint Anselm of Canterbury.
I might also add here that although there are a mass of fascinating ecclesiological, ethical and systematic theological issues, they all need to be servants of the primary question to which we must always turn back: what must we do to establish the Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven? And, again, I will return to this but I need to make a slight diversion in the meantime.
The reason that the Creeds are, at best, incomplete, is that they were designed to answer questions that presented at the time, sometimes from people within the Church but often from outsiders. If, for example, we compare the key issues in the Creed with the key issues in the teaching of Jesus, we will see that the two hardly correspond. But because of their status, the Creeds have become non negotiable; it would take centuries to amend the Creeds if it could be done at all. What this leads us to, however, is a language of non negotiable proposition, made yet more rigid by the denial of its metaphorical nature. It was this kind of rigidity which caused the Great Schism of 1054[ii] because the Greek Church stuck to the formulation from the Council of Nicea[iii] that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father, whereas the Western Church, almost accidentally, slipped into the procession being from the Father and the Son. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty relaxed about the mode of the 'procession' of the Spirit if, indeed it was a procession at all. I wouldn't have engineered a schism for either position. I have illustrated the metaphor point already but, in this context, what I am arguing for is our ability to create our own propositional language, for ourselves, now, and for enquirers. I frequently wonder what a casual visitor to a Christian church on a Sunday morning would glean from the experience. We have trapped ourselves in an esoteric cocoon.
The proposition that the meaning of Scripture is at least problematic is nowhere better demonstrated than in the realm of Kingdom building where the response ranges from Christian socialism on the one hand to an extreme form of Evangelical economic liberalism on the other; and it is to this I now wish to turn.