Is God in the Details?

It will not budge the primate of Nigeria, who has warned that if the C of E connives at such partnerships, it risks expulsion from the worldwide church. Meanwhile, 400 Anglican clergy have already left the church over women priests, setting the church back £26 million in hardship payments. And more defections are expected, now that women bishops are in the offing.

With church unity in tatters, and the word implosion in every other headline, it is amazing that Rowan Williams, the 104th archbishop of Canterbury, has managed to sit down and write such an engaging book. Why Study the Past? is a lively summons to both liberals and conservatives to learn from the past and turn their polemical swords into ploughshares. At the very least, it should introduce some civility into their debates.

In his quest for the historical church, Williams leads his readers to the 4th century, when the old Roman world had entered its dotage and a spry new Christian faith was taking its place, and to the Reformation of the 16th century, when reformers charged that the church had become untenably corrupt and a new reformed church was needed. In both periods, the great question was what constituted the church’s true identity. Williams contends that, by looking at how the two periods tried to answer that question, contemporary Anglicans might be able to sort out their differences.

To put his quest in some critical context, readers might wish to get hold of Henry Bettenson’s anthology, The Early Christian Fathers (1956), Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture (1940), one of W.H. Auden’s favorite books, and Christopher Haigh’s English Reformations (1993), all of which are available in paperback. None is cited by Williams, but they complement or challenge what he has to say in many respects.

Apropos the study of history, Williams insists that it is “dangerous and stultifying . . . [to] make any part of the past a mirror for our own preferences and assumptions.” This echoes an instructive aside in Julian Barnes’s witty novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1985), where the narrator observes:

No historians have been guiltier of this sort of self-justifying history than Protestant historians–the Whig historians Macaulay and Froude wrote some of the most biased history ever written–so Williams is right to counsel against it. He takes the case of the Gnostics, a heretical sect of the early Church, to illustrate his point. The Gnostics were against episcopal hierarchy and biblical literalism but they were also for predestination based on class and the evil of women and the flesh. As Williams says, contemporary Anglicans will need to think twice before they present them as “forerunners of a liberal and enlightened faith fitted for the contemporary market.”

It is a mark of Williams’s intellectual probity that he doesn’t sidestep the problems facing his church. Indeed, there is an almost reckless honesty about the book. After conceding that the ordination of women and homosexuals is making mincemeat of Anglican unity, he says that the question Anglicans should ask themselves is not whether such innovations promote inclusion or pluralism but whether they “make sense of the commitments that make sense of martyrdom.”

This is nicely nuanced, but it settles nothing, and the archbishop admits as much when he says, “Perhaps the most uncomfortable suggestion that might arise from these thoughts is that we may not know the answers to some of our contemporary and agonizing dilemmas without some quite specific and concrete challenge that could come from an authority claiming ultimate and sacred authority.” For an archbishop of Canterbury to make such a concession is rather remarkable. The absence of any agreed authority has always haunted the church–whether in its Protestant or its Anglo-Catholic formulation–and Williams deserves credit for looking at how that exacerbates current controversy.

When it comes to the Bible, to “the touchstone of authoritative teaching,” as he calls it, he denies his flock their accustomed assurances. “All serious study,” he says, “is a kind of dispossession; difficulty is a moral matter, something that refuses us the comfort we crave.” Accordingly, the authority of the Bible “cannot be taken to mean that all we need to do in order to arrive at orthodox faith is to reconstruct what was going on in the minds of the human authors of Scripture.”

Indeed, Williams goes further: Even if one knows how to read one’s Bible, and takes from it nothing other than what one can defend as true, still one may be mistaken, for “the powerful idea has been introduced that the past might be a source of deception; that there has been a primitive disaster in which truth has been lost or overlaid.” One can only imagine how that would have gone down in the 19th century, when most Anglicans still believed with the 17th-century divine William Chillingworth that “the Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants.”

As Williams shows, authority is a thorny matter, but it is nothing as thorny as the chaos that follows its rejection. Chaos, however, doesn’t daunt the archbishop. In some respects, he embraces it as a token of Christian authenticity. It is at the heart of his discussion of the Church and its identity. The patristic Church defined itself in terms of discipline and doctrinal precision, by showing heresy the door and making orthodoxy at home. The apostolic was–and still is, for the Roman Catholic Church–the safeguard of tradition. As Tertullian put it, “If you care to exercise your curiosity in the business of your salvation, make a tour of the apostolic churches, in which to this day, the actual thrones of the apostles preside . . . where their authentic writings are read.”

Go to Corinth, Philippi, Ephesus, Rome. The reformers of the 16th century rejected any suggestion that the true church could be a matter of human merit or achievement: It was the gratuitous gift of God. This followed from Luther’s contention that there could only be justification by faith. But if one does away with authority and hierarchy, what becomes of Church identity, let alone Church order?

“There is something inescapably precarious about any Protestant resolution of these tensions,” Archbishop Williams responds, “but a good Lutheran or Reformed Christian would have to say that such precariousness is appropriate to a life grounded in something other than worldly security.” In other words, it might be a Christian’s duty to abide a certain amount of doctrinal chaos, if orthodoxy can be shown to be delusive.

For some, this may seem disheartening reasoning. Has God really denied us the means of discovering what is true and what is false about Him? Isn’t Christianity a revealed religion? Williams is afraid that definitive answers may not be forthcoming:

That demotic whatever doesn’t inspire confidence. Yet, on a fundamental level, Williams is skeptical of any definitions of orthodoxy or authority.

Here it may seem that the Welshman in Williams is getting the better of him. But he fully realizes how radical he is being: “To say that this is a high-risk step in the intellectual life of the Western Christian world is an understatement.” The apparent moral here seems to be that if Anglicans, of whatever stripe, are bound to be equally wrong about what constitutes their true identity, they might cut each other a little slack when it comes to trying to define the indefinable.

The salient point for Williams is that Protestants (very broadly defined) have never properly heeded the challenge of their Lutheran founder: this is why their Church identity remains the same pressing problem now that it was in the 16th century. Roman Catholics may have opted for a robustly conservative, centralized church after the Council of Trent (1563)–the Counter Reformation’s Congress of Vienna, as it were–but Protestants fared far worse in cobbling together their reformed Church.

“Historic Protestantism, in Britain, Germany, and elsewhere,” Williams writes, echoing Kierkegaard at his most excoriating,

Some of this is unanswerable, but we need to qualify. The swipe at Anglican priests during World War I doesn’t seem quite fair: What about the Anglican chaplains who followed their brave young sheep into the trenches? They certainly hadn’t time for “anti-German rabble-rousing.” About the willingness of the Anglican Church to march in step with “narrow class-dominated attitudes,” that may be true to some extent, but there were lively exceptions. The popular English historian and Anglican curate J.R. Green, author of the Short History of England (1874), which sold in the millions in both Britain and America, spent years attending to the spiritual and material needs of the poorest of the poor in London’s East End before the plague of the place, tuberculosis, carried him off at 46. He certainly wasn’t your typical two-bottle man. And the Anglican clergy were interested in the Empire for their missions–on the whole, admirable missions–not because they supported Disraeli’s vague imperial designs.

If one despairs of orthodoxy, of the sort of doctrinal definition that culminated in the Nicene Creed (325), it is perhaps inevitable that clamor for social justice should assume undue importance. One sees this in the Catholic Church in the misguided Marxism of liberation theology. Williams does not question the dubious idea of justice exercising many women and homosexuals in his fold, but he is adamant that his Church must oppose state evil. He applauds the German Confessing Church for opposing the anti-Semitic legislation of the Third Reich in 1936, and the South African church for opposing apartheid in the 1980s. But he hastens to remind his coreligionists that “the Church is not society’s policeman; the law of the state is not by definition the pattern of Christlikeness which constitutes the community of believers.”

Where this puts the individual believer is a nice question. Williams claims that the world is often governed by nothing more than “tragic pragmatism.” Some, however, might not see this pragmatism as altogether tragic when compared with the often-appalling political naiveté of the Anglican Church–or, for that matter, of the Catholic Church. Consider the support that both gave to nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. Or the involvement of Vatican officials in the Oil-for-Food scandal. Or the support that the Anglican Church is currently giving to divestment from companies doing business with Israel.

Or what Williams has to say on the threat that radical Islam poses the West: “Confronted with Islam,” he says, “Western modernity has yet to find a mode of engagement that allows for real self-criticism.” That is an astounding statement from anyone who has spent as much time as Williams has in Western universities. Nevertheless, for the archbishop, “it seems almost impossible to grant that the new universal story of globalized communication and economic control and interaction does not inevitably lead to accepting the story of Western modernity’s rational and universal triumph.”

Here, presumably, is what constitutes “real self-criticism.” Europe has problems getting along with its Islamic neighbors not because so many of them foment or support Islamic terrorism, but because Europe is economically controlling and triumphalist. Given a choice between that invidious sanctimony and state pragmatism, most sensible people would not hesitate to go with the latter.

Yet Williams is right to insist on what he calls the “alien citizenship” of Christians. By arguing that lay rulers had a distinct religious vocation, Luther and Calvin opened the door to an altogether too cozy relationship between Protestant believers and the Protestant state. “The result,” as Williams observes, “was often a politically subservient Church and a bourgeois, undemanding piety.” This Erastian marriage of convenience was what inspired John Henry Newman and his friends to form the Oxford Movement.

Towards the end of his life, after he had converted, Newman would tell the Catholic Union of Great Britain: “I think the best favor which sovereigns, parliaments, municipalities, and other political powers can do us is to let us alone.” With these views, he would have been surprised by the archbishop’s characterization of the Catholic Church’s current approach to the state as tribal, resentful, and competitive. (Tribal is a pet term of opprobrium for the archbishop.) We shall have to wait and see how Benedict XVI engages not only Europe but the other states of the world.

In the meantime, no one interested in the fortunes of the Church of England, or its unflappable leader, will want to pass up this exuberant book. As Archbishop Williams says himself, “If it can contribute to a certain conversational humility . . . to a better awareness of the labor involved in historical understanding, it will have opened up a few windows in what can be a dangerously stifling environment.”

The view from Lambeth Palace is a view of embattled hope.

Edward Short is at work on a study of John Henry Newman and his contemporaries.