Centre for Anglican History and Theology

5 October 2020

Anglican Identities Rowan Williams (DLT, 2004), Introduction, Chapter 1 and Chapter 6.

Chair: Jeremy Carrette

This collection of lectures and previously published papers by Rowan Williams is framed by the title and the introductory section as ‘Anglican identities’, but – with its acknowledged gaps – this is only a starting point, a selection of readings and some “historical strands”. Unfortunately, the work is failed by its editorial frame, which diminishes the diverse reflections and types of reading in the papers selected. The introduction opens with the question of “what if anything holds together the Anglican Communion”, but the chapters only serve to show how the readings and history of the Church of England hide the richness of the Anglican Communion. This is Church of England-ism rather than Anglicanism, lacking the voices of the global South, of women and of the rich variety of Anglican cultural, racial and ethnic perspectives. The reading group discussion highlighted the “fault” of the introduction and “mismatch” between introduction and the essays. It raises questions about the audience for this work and the aims of gathering these lectures and essays through the specific editorial position.

Each essay is a small vignette, pulling out points that reflect Williams’s theological sensitivities and insights, but these can be frustrating for those who wish for a comprehensive historical reading or find the theological agenda creates selective or bias renderings of the thinker. For example, the first essay on William Tyndale (c.1494-1536) reflects on the theme of the “commonwealth” from The Obedience of a Christian Man, through a reading of The Parable of the Wicked Mammon, on the use of money and possessions. Williams aims to uncover the underlying theological vision and its “continuing value”, stressing “the conviction that the use of wealth is simply bound up with the movement of love and attention between persons”, in and outside the Christian community (18). While the ethical ambition is worthy, it requires a patience with its selective purpose.

Despite the fact that Tyndale is seen to write for “persons with flesh and history” (23), the focus of the work is one of a theologian, rather than an historian. There are concerns around the understanding of “Anglican identity”, which missed the meaning of the stability of the 1660s to the 1840s and, for most parts, the social and lived realities. There is also an odd use of the word “Anglicanism”, whose use before 1662 (at the earliest) misleads the direction of the first four chapters and calls for greater historical context. If historians find the theological selectivity and generalisations frustrating, Williams’s traditional  – some may say ‘radical orthodox’ – theological agenda frames Michael Ramsey (1904-1988) and John Robinson (1919-1983) in an equally frustrating manner, claiming they hold a theological “weakness”. Williams’s wish for a distinct “role of theology” – even its “humiliation” – fails to see the radical value of Ramsey’s wider social ethics and the transformative social value of Robinson’s Honest to God.

The theological struggle in these pages is where the distinctive contribution of the faith community is seen to rest in its relation to the world. We are returned to the diversity of theological engagements across the Niebuhrian spectrum of Christ and culture and perhaps here we see how Williams’s theological desires form one part of the broad community of “Anglican identities”, where differences, limits and weaknesses form part of the richness of community. Williams highlights particular fragments from this history and through them we retrieve the critical engagements that shape the complexity of Anglican identities.

 

2 November 2020

Anglican Women Novelists: From Charlotte Brontë to P.D.James Ed. Judith Maltby (T&T Clark: 2019)

Chair: Declan Kavanagh

On the 2^nd of November 2020, I chaired a session of the ‘Centre for Anglican History and Thought’ (CAHT, Kent), which focused on several Anglican women writers and the idea of the Anglican novel. The discussion was further sharpened by excerpts from a new collection entitled Anglican Women Novelists: Charlotte Brontë to P.D. James edited by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell. In an unexpected turn of events, one of the editors of the collection under discussion, Judith Maltby, very kindly agreed to attend the session. For the first twenty or so minutes, all of the participants got to hear first-hand about the editorial process that underpinned the volume’s journey from idea to tangible printed object. More than questions of editorial steering, Judith very usefully enlarged upon some of the points that feature in the volume’s introduction. The literary heritage of Anglicanism impressively counts authors like T.S. Eliot, as well as novelists like C.S. Lewis. The tradition itself can be traced back to the prose of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, yet, as Maltby pointed out, the position of women within that literary tradition requires some careful thought and re-thinking as women’s writing is ‘rarely mentioned’ in appraisals of Anglican writing (Maltby and Shell, 1). The project aims, as Maltby and Snell outline, to bring female Anglican authors into conversation with one another across time and space:

Our introduction sketches a literary-historical context for this, with a double-aim: of identifying family resemblances between our chosen novelists as they reflect on the implications of Anglican belief and practice; and of tracing common themes across the generations. These writers need, above all, to be read in the light of each other. Together with their male counterparts, and those who fall outside the parameters of our study in other ways, they comprise a continuing tradition of the Anglican novel (Ibid).

The discussion really flowed and Judith very generously shed some light on how the thirteen scholarly chapters on each writer took shape across the course of the publication’s hopeful gestation. It was clear to me as a scholar of literature, although not of Anglican literature per se, that this volume of essays was really making an intervention in a number of ways. What would it mean to think about Charlotte Brontë as an Anglican author? It was apparent that much would be gained by doing so, not least the opening up of a female space within an otherwise androcentric tradition, but also the uncovering of currents of thought that continue to shape Anglican practice and belief. As we learnt from our discussion on Brontë, ‘Brontë not only critiques  the Church’s practices, particularly with respect to missionary work, but also criticizes the clergy. Mr Brocklehurst is a full-blown hypocrite; St John Rivers is a more complex character, partially unaware that his religious vocation serves mainly to satisfy his essentially unspiritual sense of personal ambition’ (Ibid, 23). Thinking through how Anglican female authors shaped literature is also, inevitably, to open up questions of how women continue to shape the life of the Church today. Discussion roamed over the various authors included in the volume, with a particular focus on Irish Murdoch. We ended the session by wondering about the other women authors who might have been included were the volume to have been more expansive. There is always room for more and this session left me with a long reading list and a new frame of reference.

 

7 December 2020

The Mitre & The Crown: A History of the Archbishops of Canterbury by Dominic Aidan Bellenger & Stella Fletcher (Sutton, 2005)

Chair: Kenneth Fincham

To write a short and effective history of the 105 archbishops of Canterbury is nigh impossible. It requires a grasp of the changing landscape of theology, the institutional history of the church, politics, society and culture, an understanding of the office in its English, European and more recently global context, as well some purchase on the character of each incumbent and their circle of associates, fellow bishops, monarchs, peers and others.  It would be too easy, therefore, and hardly profitable, to harp on the deficiencies of this book.  Suffice to say, Bellenger and Fletcher have written an informative and accessible account of archbishops from St Augustine of Canterbury to Rowan Williams, which provided a useful springboard for a wide-ranging discussion about the incumbents, the office and the continuities and change over 1500 years.

The authors picked four themes: the relationship between church and state, the international role of archbishops, their literary and material remains as ‘convenient indices’ of the archbishops’ vision and priorities, and finally the ‘anatomy’ of leadership, in other words the experience that individuals brought to their office. To these we proposed others: the influence of the household of archbishops, including chaplains, lawyers, proteges (Becket serving Theobald is a telling example), advisory groups and, since the Reformation, wives, who could all support and counsel the archbishop.  The role and importance of archiepiscopal wives is a neglected subject, while we still do not have a satisfactory explanation for the unbroken run of eight bachelors as archbishops from 1576 to 1691. A second theme might be the pastoral provision that archbishops might or might not provide to their home diocese of Canterbury.   Was this usually regarded as a second-order priority, and left to suffragan bishops, who were appointed in the sixteenth century and then disappeared, not to re-emerge until 1870, or to the bishop of Rochester?  It is surely significant that no archbishop was buried in Canterbury cathedral between 1558 and 1896 (for a list of tombs and memorials, see pp. 183-92). A third theme opens up how incumbents conceived their office. Was it to speak truth to power? To defend the institutional interests of the clerical estate – lands, income, jurisdictions, privileges?  To be the shepherd of shepherds, by supervising and directing the bench of bishops in both provinces of Canterbury and York? To offer intellectual and practical leadership on social and moral issues such as in modern times divorce, abortion, race relations, nuclear warfare and climate change? Or to hold together an increasingly fragmenting worldwide Anglican communion, a challenge which has absorbed the time and energies of recent incumbents? And what might effective leadership mean in different contexts: Cranmer as a father of the Reformation, Laud remodelling English Protestantism, Carey and others addressing the ordination of women?  Perhaps we should invite Archbishop Justin to join us, one day soon, for a debate on some of these rich themes.

 

1 February 2021

Richard Harries ‘Seven Archbishops: A Personal Memoir’ Theology, 2018, Vol. 121 (1) 3-16; Robin Gill ‘George Carey: The Under-Rated Archbishop’ (forthcoming).

Chair: Robin Gill

This session of the Reading Group focused upon Richard Harries’ Theology article initially before turning to my own draft paper. Harries, a former Bishop of Oxford and now an appointed member of the House of Lords (a rare post-retirement honour usually reserved for a former Archbishop of Canterbury or York) remains an influential figure within Anglicanism. He still writes extensively and chaired the politically influential 2001-2 House of Lords report on embryological stem cell research. Unusually he has personal memories of dealing with seven archbishops of Canterbury from Fisher to Welby. Although his article is tactfully written, it does contain positive and negative critiques of each of the archbishops and acts as useful corrective to the weaknesses of The Mitre & The Crown — not explicitly mentioned by Harries, but detected by the Reading Group in the previous session. My own draft paper focused particularly upon George Carey’s time as Archbishop of Canterbury, since I was one of his theological advisors and chair of his Medical Ethics Advisory Group. In this paper I argued that Carey’s strategic abilities had been seriously under-estimated by commentators (including The Mitre & The Crown and, to a lesser extent, Harries), especially in enabling the ordination of women into the Church of England, in attempting to address institutional church decline in Britain, and in maintaining a (fragile) unity within the wider Anglican Communion. The Reading Group proved to be very helpful to me. Members convinced me that there might be a revisionist book or long article that could be developed on this theme, but they also persuaded me that The Mitre & The Crown was a poor secondary source to use (even as a negative foil). Much better, they argued, would be for me to follow Harries’ example by making this a more personal memoire and, then, analysis of what a theological advisor might hope to achieve (without, of course, breaking confidences). In subsequent conversations with two theological publishing firms it soon became clear that they regard clerical biographies (even of archbishops of Canterbury) to be unsellable. As a result, I turned it into a 9000 word article, which the journal Ecclesiology (https://brill.com/view/journals/ecso/ecso-overview.xml0) has, after peer review, agreed to publish. This is, I believe, a very satisfactory outcome. Members of the Reading Group have also been very helpful with the subsequent drafts of, and academic references for, the article.

 

1 March 2021

Avis & Guyer’s edited collection The Lambeth Conference (T&T Clark, 2017), including the Introduction, Chapter 2 & Chapter 7).

Chair: Stephen Laird

Our discussion was led from the University of Kent at Canterbury, the venue of the Lambeth Conferences of 1978, 1988, 1998 and 2008. It is hoped that a postponed 2020 conference will be held there in summer 2022. Participants, including the Chair, had enjoyed first-hand experiences of recent Lambeth Conferences in various academic and professional capacities.

Extending the theme of the previous session, the decision was taken to focus on two chapters from the chosen book, namely:  ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference’ (2, by Paul Avis); and ‘Episcopal Leadership in Anglicanism, 1800 to the Present: Changing form, Function and Collegiality (7, by Jeremy Morris). Avis’ chapter describes how the characters and capacities of successive Archbishops had shaped past conferences in different ways: ‘the Lambeth Conference has considerable moral, pastoral and spiritual weight and authority …and [that kind of authority] needs to be well stewarded by the Archbishops of Canterbury as they convene and preside …lest it be devalued by poor process leading to rash or unsubtle judgments, particularly ones that are intrinsically or inevitably divisive” (41). Drawing from their own memories, contributors to the discussion were able to compare and contrast aspects of the character of leadership which they had seen exercised by Archbishop Robert Runcie (1988), Archbishop George Carey (1998) and Archbishop Rowan Williams (2008).

The chapter by Morris is wide-ranging in scope, surveying the evolving roles and perceptions of the bishops in English society since 1800. The emergence of an overseas Anglican episcopate, initially from colonial contexts, became an increasing factor from the latter part nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Understandings of episcopacy in the Global South (now fully fledged and generally autonomous), and the challenges faced by Anglicans worldwide, can contribute to a re-shaping, through ‘conciliarity’ (195), of systems and outlooks in the Anglican West. There was some speculation, in discussion, around how the Lambeth Conference itself was perceived by bishops and other delegates from the Global South, as their perspectives are unlikely to have been reflected, to any significant extent, in this edited volume of essays, all written by contributors from the UK, Canada, the USA and Australia.

 

5 March 2021

Global Anglican Communion

Jacob, W.M.  The Making of the Anglican Church Worldwide   (SPCK, 1997). Chapter 4.

Sachs, William  The Transformation of Anglicanism   (CUP, 1993). Latter part of chapter 6.          

Ward, Kevin  A History of Global Anglicanism  (CUP, 2006). Final chapter.

Chair: Tim Naish

 

24 May 2021

Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays, New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.  Ch. 9., ‘The Value of Life’ (written in 1989), pp. 115-24 and Ch. 11, ‘A Reply to Rowan Williams’ (written in 1982), pp. 143-151.

Chair: Chris Deacy

Don Cupitt is an iconoclastic figure and the texts reveal how he might be seen to be quite deliberately setting himself up against the Establishment and, even, positioning himself on the edge of the cliff waiting to be pushed over the side. There is a binary dimension to Cupitt’s thinking, and we covered in our deliberations that there is an analogy with Richard Dawkins in terms of how Cupitt can (even condescendingly) espouse that unless people change their dispositions overnight then they are deluded. He even urges Rowan Williams in one of the texts “to change sides” (Ch. 11, p145). Yet, curiously, Cupitt still chooses to draw on Christian categories, and has a vestigial connection with the (Anglican) Church, only renouncing the cloth in 2008 – two decades since the two articles which we looked at in the reading group were published. Indeed, he was still teaching ordinands in Cambridge as late as 1996, over a decade on from Cupitt’s infamous Sea of Faith TV series and accompanying book.

The readings demarcate a fascinating tension within the Anglican Communion over the way in which religious ideas play out in our lives, with Cupitt claiming that Williams is only holding to realism in order to avoid facing the crisis of the end of theological realism which Cupitt sees himself as (alone) having to deal. Cupitt also suggests that in being allied to traditional norms and structures (‘Cosmological religion’ as he calls it) Williams has put himself on the side not of Christianity but of Christendom. Cupitt is scathing in his understanding of the degree to which “Christianity’s optimism about the possibility of human liberation” (Ch. 11, p149) has been trumped by “Christendom’s will to punish presumption” (ibid.), and it is fascinating as to how Cupitt presents the type of closed, anachronistic cosmological religion that he associates with Williams as something that one may only cling to because we have a nostalgic predilection towards those safe spaces. Nostalgia in this context is, for Cupitt, problematic as it means that we are not sufficiently able to take the brave path into the other side of the unknown, the Nihil.

We also focused on the interdisciplinary angle to Cupitt’s theology whereby the questions that he raises about there being no scope for the supernatural impinge on the way we apprehend Christmas – if we no longer have the capacity to believe in the supernatural, then why is Christmas such a fertile site for playing out myths relating to Santa Claus, angels, elves and Lapland as a functional equivalent of Heaven? Cupitt is resolute that “Knowledge doesn’t drop from Heaven any more” (Ch. 9, p118), and that faith is the antithesis of supernatural-superstition – “an ultimate and creative choice made in a moment of darkness in which all such spurious consolations have been irretrievably lost” (Ch. 11, p146). But, for many people the supernatural and the fantastic play a big role in our lives, as we see from the way we engage with fantasy novels and films and Christmas itself is what we might construe as an oasis of the transcendent within a secular milieu.

Cupitt is thus an enriching figure who is good at trying to provoke us into waking up and recognizing that “moralities are purely human productions” and that “a willed revival of lost belief is even more fictitious than the creation of new values” (Ch. 9, p115). But, Cupitt’s rhetoric tends to get the better of him. He is adept at seeing the big picture, the macro-level, but when it comes to detail there is perhaps a little less scope for the kind of interdisciplinary engagement that Cupitt is seeking. He tends to resort to sweeping rhetoric – “Environmentalism itself must be constructive and not conservative” (ibid., p123), “Values, like truths, need constantly to be refurbished” (ibid.) – at the expense of spelling out what his 1989 paper had set out to do, namely, the establishment of an environmentalist ethic. Cupitt conflates environmental with this-worldly and uses the struggle involved in both Christianity and environmental discourse to “revalue the devalued” (ibid., p124) to suggest that they are two sides of the same coin. As a starting point, Cupitt has done an impressive job of laying the foundations for dialogue – though there is a suspicion that Cupitt is beholden to attacking a ‘straw man’ and that he is better at creating (sometimes contrived) binaries in order to show where he stands in order to emphasize the seismic degree to which he believes himself to be on the right side of history… if not quite on the right side of the Church!

 

7 June 2021

The Church of England and Social Policy 

Jawad, R. (2012) Serving the public or delivering public services? Religion and social welfare in the new British social policy landscape, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice 20(1), 55-68

Wells, S. with Rook, R & Barclay D. (2017) For Good. The Church and the Future of Welfare. (Norwich: Canterbury Press), pp.1-18.

Chair: Stacey Rand

The selection of texts aimed to offer two contrasting perspectives for discussion. First, the text by Rana Jawad (2012) describes and explores the place of religion in British social policy. This offers a broad contextual view from an academic policy perspective. Jawad argues that the contribution of the Church and minority faiths in social policy development and discourse in the mid-to-late 20^th Century has been largely ignored. Since the 1990s, however, there has some interest in the role of religion and faith groups driven by government attempts to facilitate greater involvement and representation in policy-making. This reengagement with faith issues offers a challenge to utilitarian understandings of social welfare, by emphasising aspects of human identity and meaning, like dignity, self-worth and relationships. It also recognises the important role, both historic and ongoing, of faith groups in welfare provision (e.g. foodbanks) and through contributions to public policy debate by religious leaders, like the Archbishop of Canterbury. The second text offered a contrasting view from within the Church of England. Samuel Wells with Russell Rook and David Barclay (2017) offer a vision for the Church in social action based on five goods: relationships, creativity, partnership, compassion and joy. It is argued that the Church’s role in social engagement is to cultivate these goods, rather than address deficits. This approach keeps the Church focussed on what it can do, and do well, as a complement to the state and other agencies, rather than trying to fill the gaps of state welfare provision.

In discussion, we explored a number of themes from the texts, including: the Church in social action as part of its mission and ministry; the tensions between the theologically-informed view of social action as ‘mission’ vs public service provision; the potential tensions between inclusive participation and maintaining a distinctive ethos, with legal, regulatory or ethical frameworks; safeguarding in practice, especially related to organisational ethos and culture; the longer-term sustainability of faith-based social action; the shifting relationship between Church and state; and the ongoing influence of the rhetoric of the ‘Big Society’, despite its subsequent disappearance from policy discourse and rhetoric, in the present landscape of faith-based social action.