Anglican Mainstream

By Chris Sugden
4/26/2008

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8137
 

The following is a presentation to the Anglican Network of Canada, Vancouver

Introduction

It is my privilege to be asked to address you on this historic weekend for Anglican Christian witness in Canada. It has long been my conviction and practice that theology is a team game.

I have greatly benefited from immersion in and fellowship with many theologians from the Global South. My preparation for this morning’s session owes a great deal to the meeting last week of the Theological Resource Group for the Global Anglican Future Pilgrimage which is preparing a theological rationale for the Jerusalem Pilgrimage at the end of June, and especially to its co-ordinator and my colleague, Canon Vinay Samuel.

To begin: Have you ever been driven to think, when you are waiting for a call centre, which assures you endlessly that your call is very important to them but keeps you waiting ten minutes, and when finally you express pathetic gratitude at being connected to one of their consultants, that consultant turns out to know less about the issue you have rung about than you do, have you ever been driven to think that this world is run by machines and idiots? Or to put it more kindly, it is run by machines and people who are not allowed to exercise any judgement. This is no accident: it is a function of modern western secularity.

In talking about evangelism today we are not shifting the focus away from our concerns in meeting this weekend. We do not have two separate activities – one an internal church activity to secure our organisation, our borders and our future so that we may continue to reach out to win others for Christ.

We are engaged in something far more integrated: the very process we are engaged in of affirming our commitment to the truth of the scriptures and the reality of the God who transforms human life itself is the most powerful declaration of the good news of the Gospel in the post-modern secular culture in which we are called to bear witness. Contending for the faith once given to the saints now is part of our witness to our societies.

I hope to explain why.

What religion is: Actions, beliefs and institutions predicated on the assumptions of the existence of supernatural entities with powers of agency or impersonal powers possessed of moral purpose which have the capacity to set the conditions of or intervene in human affairs. What is secularisation? It is the process by which institutions and practices including the state are freed from any connection with God It is the process by which the conditions of belief are changed.

It is a process that tells us we live in a self sufficient immanent order – we do not need God to intervene for us. The focus of life, and of religion as part of life, is on finding fulfilment and authentic human experience. Doubts about religion are encouraged rather than addressed. Religion becomes one thing among others – not the thing that explains everything. Religion is a private matter. Religion is a continual quest for rather than a reception of and obedience to truth. Religious belief and behaviour are separated. Religion becomes a commodity, no longer a moral compass.

The focus of religion itself is no longer on truth, because there is none out there, but on experience and practice. The space allowed for religion. Religion is allowed to operate in a closely regulated space, a space where religion is not allowed to threaten the assumptions of secularity.

The pressure from the institutional church is to accept the terms that it has accepted for its operation. Your stance and challenge in ANiC this weekend questions that concordat. Your witness challenges that deal. A day in the Church of England General Synod last February made all this abundantly clear. Let me take you back to Gay Wednesday. There were two debates before Synod: one was on the welcome to Gay and Lesbian Christians as full members of the Church and the other on Civil Partnerships.

In both debates the continual theme of those proposing a revision to orthodox Christian belief was "This is my experience of God and of love. I am bearing witness to something internal and personal and very important to me. This experience must be given respect, even when it challenges the teachings of the Church and of the Bible. For this experience and my related behaviour, whether of same sex-relations or of living with a man for 6 years before marrying him, represents who I am, it is my fulfilment, it is the way I am. "

Not one bishop stood to question this defiant challenge to Christian teaching – not one. On the contrary some stood to affirm it, and to call on the church to recognise it and accommodate it. The call was to accept these testimonies and manage them within a monogamous same-sex partnership. We see here religion as solely an inner personal experience which cannot be questioned by any outside authority, but which rather challenges those authorities to accommodate to it.

This is the impact of secularisation on religion. God, Gays and the Church: Human Sexuality and Experience in Christian Thinking was produced and published by Latimer Trust a year later to address the challenges of Gay Wednesday. It is available here (www.anglican-mainstream.net)

The biblical gospel stands as a challenge to this approach. The biblical gospel tells us that God is transcendant, and that his word lights up his way for human fulfilment. The biblical gospel tells us that human beings are not just the prisoners of their genes, or their history, or of nature – but are invested with the power of real moral choice, of responding to good and to evil.

The biblical gospel tells us that Jesus brought the kingdom of God, that the one through whom and for whom the universe was created burst through the bonds of death and brought a new creation to birth through the resurrection. The biblical gospel tells us that through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus and by the power of his spirit, we can be changed. We can be conformed to the image of the one who is the true image of God. But this approach is costly. It is costly because it challenges the very heart of the secularity to which our culture is committed.

It challenges the idea that religion can be confined to the space that secularity allows for it. If you challenge the notion that people who live in disobedience to God are anything but loving and normal, then you are branded as intolerant and prejudiced. I do not want to focus on how secularity has created a wasteland in our societies. Rather I want to focus on how it has impacted our churches.

The impact of secularisation on Christian teaching Belief is separated from behaviour. We are told that there are more important and less important beliefs and commands. The notion of adiaphora, things indifferent, does not occur in scripture. It was introduced into Anglican thought as a way of distinguishing essentials such as teaching on truth and morality, from inessentials such as forms of dress for worship. But adiaphora is now extended to cover matters of truth and behaviour. The impact on evangelism – among evangelicals.

The temptation is to present Christian faith such that it relates primarily to experience and practice so that people will listen and accept Christ. e.g Youth Ministry is greatly impacted by the entertainment and music culture. Christian faith becomes an experience and a commodity. Youth leaders involved in young people’s ministry are concerned that what some ministries offer is Christian entertainment which people are asked to receive – this may be Christian bands and good preaching. But the question is where does it challenge young people to befriend, to pastor, to trust God in ventures of faith, to reach out in faith and to teach and lead others?

The problem is that such an "entertainment approach" produces no transformation because it is only designed to provide an experience. So figures show that the incidence of evangelical young people living together without being married is no different from that in the general population. Belief is not related to behaviour. The impact on worship Our worship in the Anglican tradition focuses on the scriptures, and rehearsing the great acts of our redemption in the eucharist, in the shape of Morning and Evening Prayer and in our calendar.

The first thing that Moses did to give the people of Israel on their release from Egypt was to give them a calendar, a way to regulate time in the light of God’s action. This shape of the liturgy has taught people the gospel. It has been my privilege to supervise a doctoral dissertation on the history of the Anglican Church in Myanmar, Burma.

It is instructive to see how, though this approach had its weaknesses, the Anglican missionaries, working among an illiterate people, used the shape of the liturgy to teach repentance, and faith and forgiveness and practice of the presence of the Lord. I often wonder if the ‘free’ approach to worship in liturgy and songs in many evangelical Anglican Churches in England today focus too much on how I feel about God, and fail to take us up into the world that God has welcomed us into of his kingdom and his truth.

The impact on ministry among the poor The Bible tells us that Jesus said that his ministry, his message, and his proclamation and demonstration of the kingdom was good news to the poor. By this he meant the poor as we normally understand the word. When John the Baptist sent messengers to ask Jesus if he was the one to come, as recorded in Luke 7.22, Jesus replied that these messengers should tell John what they had seen and heard. In words recalling the prophet Isaiah, Jesus said the blind see, the lame are healed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news preached to them. Here we have the blind, the lame, the deaf, the dead and the poor: all physical categories.

What Jesus is saying to them is that the meaning of the gospel of the kingdom is to be seen as it is received by the poor. And for the poor, the possibility of a truth that challenges the power of the powerful is liberation indeed. The possibility that the ultimate power in the world was not the power of the Roman occupying army, but the power of the kingdom of God seen in Jesus ministry was liberating. The possibility that there is a truth that can be known is good news for people who want to see change.

In the Bible the Sadducees were the political power brokers. They were the landowners who controlled the Jewish council, and who had done a deal with Rome: do not disturb our local rule and we will not contest your global role. It was the Sadducees who tried to catch Jesus out by reducing belief in the resurrection to an absurdity. Why: because they did not want change in the existing order. And, as NT Wright argues powerfully in his book on The Resurrection of the Son of God, people who believe in the resurrection are unstoppable because not even the threat of death deters them.

By contrast, those who deny that access to the truth is possible define everything in terms of power. They hold the upper hand, and their power is challenged by the very appeal to truth. So in Jesus’ trials he was accused of challenging the power and place of the temple, saying that he would destroy it and rebuild it. And the impact of secularity on ministry among the poor is that the poor are only offered the goods which the rich value – and control: the kingdom of heaven and salvation through Jesus is reduced to the millennium development goals.

So we are engaged on a struggle with secularity in society and in the church. We see how the church has accommodated to the space that secularity has given to religion. How are we to witness in this secular culture? There is a struggle we need to take on about authority. Our witness to a secular culture is that it is possible to recognise and receive God’s revelation, in spite of our human limitations, in spite of the fall. Far from God being like an autistic child who struggles to make herself understood to us, God links his revelation to a text accessible to all which has been breathed by His Holy Spirit.

Our witness is that the Bible has is a transcendental authority, not founded on or limited by human knowledge, and therefore outside it. We do not contradict this belief by agreeing that ultimate authority lies in God alone. The question is how he exercises that authority. He exercises it of course through persons and institutions, the family and the church. But over and above all this lies the authority of his Word written because it was both given by and is now animated by the Holy Spirit who brings it to the human heart.

Recognising the Bible as God’s clear speech to us is not idolatry, because we do not become masters of the word. We are under the authority of the Word and expect it to confront us with new and even strange things. God does not reinforce our prejudices. There is a struggle on the interpretation of scripture. One view says that the scripture’s meaning is so complex and contested that its meaning cannot be fixed. I once heard of a church where a Ph D student doubted whether there should be home bible-studies because in his view they should not be conducted without a theological specialist present. The other view says that the heart of scripture is plain even though not all it says is simple.

But it is plain enough to call forth faith and obedience which is itself the path to further understanding of the Bible’s meaning. One view claims that the church receives new ideas and insights which it accepts in a process of reception. The question is whether such a process is a deeper understanding of what has already been given, or a new revelation.

There is a struggle now over theological diversity in the Church The fundamental question is whether the church is the message or the church has a message. Some want to say that the church can share experience, it can share worship and it can share work. But it cannot share faith because expressions of faith are so personal and diverse. So the message of the church is that its own diversity, and ability to live with plurality and contradiction in its own membership on matters of faith is precisely its witness in a plural society.

This is the stance of those who over the last decades and longer have been unwilling to bind themselves to any confessional formulae, and only recognise that the 39 articles have a historical value in illuminating what we used to believe. Such a liberal stance held the upper hand by defining the space, setting the boundaries and providing legitimacy for all the sections of the church who lived in a creative tension with one another. But the tensions and contradictions have become impossible to maintain together.

So what you are doing here now is saying that you are unwilling for the clarity of the message of the Bible to be clouded by confusion from those who directly contradict its teaching. You are also saying that you do not need the liberal establishment to give you legitimacy as Anglicans. So what is the heart of evangelism in a post-modern secular culture? It is to witness that God is the one we are all accountable to and that his claims cover all of life, our belief and our behaviour. It is to witness that he speaks clearly and authoritatively through his word, and supremely in the Lord Jesus, the word made flesh. It is to witness that the truth of God is accessible.

That God has made enough of himself known to us to be able to respond to him and make truly moral choices of obedience and disobedience. This is critically important for evangelism among the poor. It is to challenge those who would exercise institutional power to suppress the truth, in the name of God’s love and honouring of the dignity and identity of the ordinary person who has access to him through the scripture. It is to have the courage to seek our identity in relation primarily to that truth, rather than by relation to any ecclesiastical centre of power.

That was the heart of the Reformation and it is the heart of the renewal of Anglican identity today. It is to find our brothers and sisters in fellowship with this truth across the boundaries of race and culture and economics. The Christian faith grew by crossing boundaries of race, and tribe and culture and tradition. By claiming that all people were from one source, and all were saved in one new human being, even the Lord Jesus.

The Christian church was the first global community. It cannot be subject to manmade geographical limits of governing authorities, even its own. How do we do it? How we have always done it. By seeking the frontiers where the gospel message affirms or challenges the prevailing mores of society. By spelling out what that challenge was.

This is how Jesus did it. As we read the gospels we see how they describe his encounters with people who were typical of the times. The people of the land where he started, robbed of their Jewish identity as the people of God by those who insisted on over rigorous application of the law: those regarded as outside of God’s concern because they failed to live by these practices by reason of their gender or their race or their trade. With them, or the people who held political or religious power he posed the question in action or speech: what would be the first thing that would change if the kingdom of God came tomorrow in their life, their home and community, as indeed it had in the person of Jesus.

For the sick, it was their sense of fatalism that nothing could change. He challenged them to have faith that God would heal them. For the Pharisees it was their trust in the law, rather than in the one who gave the law. For the tax-gatherers such as Zaccheus it was their greed with the challenge to repay those they defrauded. For the women it was their sense of exclusion as Jesus welcomed them to his feasts and to hear his teaching and to his company. For the children it was just their acceptance of them for who they were, rather than the adults their parents wished them to be.

There were different frontiers with different groups. There were different doors by which people could enter and experience the wholeness of the kingdom he brought and turn and conform their lives to its reality. And that is the challenge to us: to find those points in our society where people are affirmed or challenged by the gospel. The very concept of neighbourhood and seeking to care for the neighbourhood is based on the Christian concept that people are fundamentally neighbours, not members of conflictual tribes.

This concept is being deeply eroded in Britain today with the emergence of no-go areas for some groups of people. One church in an American city has found that people are most open to the reality of religion when bringing up their children, because they want to give them some moral compass. So this church has mapped where families with children live and begun to plan for church related activities that would welcome such families. In a village near where I live a group of expectant mothers has continued to meet to give each other support through the bump to one years.

A Christian mother among them gives encouragement to them and already one or perhaps two mothers have been baptised. It may be that these groups have found an area in very secular societies where people are aware of its weakness – in the whole area of the preservation of childhood and guidance of the young. An area where the good news of Jesus brings challenge and hope: hope that we are not bringing up children to merely act as the operatives of machines or the fillers in of a tick-box approach to life – but to enter into the full stature of personhood as the creatures of God, as people who are challenged with the opportunity to make choices for or against him, for good or bad. And to realise that those are real choices with eternal consequences. Last afternoon, we heard how Ken Moser related what he knew about the kingdom of God to the world of teenagers.

He saw how the life of the kingdom of God engaged with the reality of the world of teenagers – the kingdom of God gives meaning, they look for meaning; the kingdom of God builds relationships between people and they look for community; the kingdom of God challenges people to respond to God in faith and gives them responsibility as stewards. Young people want to run things. These values came not from the culture alone, but from seeing how God’s purposes for people as revealed in the scripture challenge and affirm the situation of young people. And that is what your coming together this weekend is also doing.

You have identified an area of national and church life which is challenged to its heart by the gospel of the Lord Jesus. And you are saying that the truth of God can be known; that it is the gateway to fulfilling and fruitful life as men and women in marriage or celibacy; and that obedience and witness to that truth cannot be confined to the space or the form that is offered you by the powerful. And you are prepared to face the consequences.

This weekend you are engaged in powerful evangelism to western, post-modern secular society in a way you could not do if you all stayed at home and withheld your consent in your hearts. You are giving public and institutional expression to the truth of the gospel in the public ordering of the church. Not an order that accepts unlimited diversity and disobedience to the truth, but one that respects the order God has given for authority in his church and wholesomeness in society. And may God bring rich fruit from the seed you are sowing in Canadian society today.

—The Rev. Dr. Chris Sugden is Executive Secretary of Anglican Mainstream and co-cordinator for the Leadership Team of GAFCON and Pilgrimage in Jerusalem

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