Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXIX

George Cornelius Gorham

Well, back to the Anglicans for a posting or two.  I had mentioned that the Oxford Movement did not begin about liturgical practices but about a return to patristic theology and doctrinal orthodoxy as opposed to the influences of 19^th century skepticism and liberalism which were threatening the Church.  Gregory XVI and Pius IX were able to control these threats by decree (and vindictive punishment) in the Catholic Church, but the Church of England had only the Sovereign (and, for practical purposes, that meant Parliament, a religiously heterogeneous assortment of miscreants at best) to preserve its doctrinal integrity.  The voices of Oxford were an internal “from the grass-roots up” reform of the Church and it was, overall, quite successful when you consider the odds it was facing.  As a result of the Oxford push for a High Church polity that went far beyond where Laud would have ever dared, the Church of England polarized a bit between the High Church patristic theologians and the Low Church Evangelical theologians, but liberalism (the nasty sort represented by the Earl of Shaftsbury and the rationalists) was effectively purged from the Church for almost a century and a half. 

An interesting occurrence in the Church of England at this time gives us a glimpse of the theological liberalism from which the Oxford Movement was able to preserve the Church of England. 

George Cornelius Gorham was a priest of the Church of England.  He had graduated from Queen’s College, Cambridge, with honors in Mathematics in 1805 and was ordained priest for the Church of England in 1811 despite the Bishop’s (Thomas Dampier of Ely) concern for his orthodoxy.  In particular Gorham denied the doctrine of Baptismal regeneration—that the newly baptized, by virtue of the Sacrament, was “reborn” and incorporated into the Body of Christ, the Church.  Gorham’s objections were based on a curious mixture of Calvinism and rationalism.  The theological implication of his view is that sacraments are only what we make of them and are not God’s promise and deliverance of grace.  This is the problem with the ambiguities of the Anglican tradition—the pacific avoidance of clear doctrinal stands leaves open the possibilities of un-orthodox interpretations.  Gorham didn’t have a particularly successful career in the Church, he was almost 60 years old when he was finally given a parish of his own, St. Just in Penwith and that was in Cornwall.  Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts (of whom we heard in the surplice riots) seemed to have no reason to refuse him a pulpit despite his liberal theology.  However, only a year later when Gorham was presented for the living of Saint Peter’s Church, Bramford Speke, Phillpotts refused to institute him parish on account of Gorham’s theological stance.  Gorham appealed to an ecclesiastical court which upheld Bishop Phillpott’s decision. Gorham then appealed over the Church to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.  This was a dramatic move because it took a matter of doctrine from the jurisdiction of the Church and appealed to a governmental body for a decision.  Gorham was vindicated by the Privy Council but almost a score of prominent Anglicans left the Church of England—mostly for the Catholic Church—as a result, rejecting the idea that the temporal power had authority in matters spiritual.  Bishop Phillpott was so incensed that he threated to excommunicate any bishop—including the Archbishop of Canterbury—who might come to institute Gorham in his new living.  Instituted or not Gorham took up the living and remained there the remaining nine years or so of his life.  He carried out considerable restoration work in the Church, a project for which “no hard feelings” Phillpott contributed. 

The Gorham case gives us insight into various issues that troubled—and some which continue to trouble—the Church of England.  As a State Church the Government has immense influence over the Church—appointing bishops and, at least in the past, needing to approve changes in the Liturgy.  Given that all members of the Cabinet, much less Parliament, are not required to be Anglicans this becomes rather bizarre.  

Amoris Laetita: Opening An Even Bigger Door?

Well, Amoris Laetitia is out and krazies are spattered with the fecal matter they have thrown into the fan.   Everyone is reacting to it—progressives and conservatives.  After Mass yesterday it was the only subject of conversation during the coffee hour.  The pastor and the parochial vicar have some very different thoughts on it, though I would label neither of them “conservative.” One little old lady couldn’t stop crying as she told us how she had gone forty years without Holy Communion—“every Sunday having my heart pulled out of my chest and crushed,” because she had left an abusive husband and civilly married a man—who could provide for her five girls.  She loved her second husband and she found graces every day in their relationship; she had grown deep in prayer and grace throughout the years, but her hunger for the Eucharist had to go unsatisfied.  Finally able to have her marriage in the Church blessed (the abusive husband has died), she is at Mass every morning and says she never takes the sacraments for granted.   Another woman told us “I am in an invalid marriage and I can go to Holy Communion every day.  O, we were married by a priest—at Mass even—but we have always planned, because of a gene that runs in my family for dwarfism—not to have children.  That renders my marriage invalid.  But I know that before God Bob and I stand in his grace.  And nothing keeps me away from the Christ in the Eucharist.”

I want to look at Amoris Laetitia not as a pastoral document about the remarried but from a different perspective, a sign of greater things to come in the Church.  For almost five centuries Catholic theology, like its Liturgy, had been frozen and not allowed to develop.  This was due primarily as a reaction to the Protestant Reformations and the challenges to our traditional faith.  Through those Middle Ages where the Church was so strong, the universities were the center of theological debate.  A particular subject of debate was whether the Blessed Virgin had been conceived with or without Original Sin.  The Dominicans, ironically, opposed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the Franciscans and Carmelites supported it.  But all matter of theological topics were up for argument and it was from the give-and-take, in the arguments pro and con, that the magisterium was able to formulate doctrines.  The Reformation put an end to all that.  Martin Luther posted his list of 95 theses he wanted to debate at the University Church of Wittenberg and suddenly the Church said: no more debate.  We will define our doctrines sitting here in our Roman ivory towers.  Students for priesthood were pulled from the universities and locked into closed seminaries where ideas could be controlled.  Catechisms for the laity and manuals for the seminarians appeared: here are the questions: here are the answers.  Memorize the answers.  It was a time of doctrinal retrenchment.  And it only got worse.  In the nineteenth century as Protestant scholars begin looking at the scriptures from historical, linguistic, and structural perspectives and new insights began to emerge: there are four sources for the Book of Genesis not a single author; Paul did not write Hebrews (among other books attributed to him); there are inconsistencies in the Resurrection narrative, etc.   And then scholars—both Catholic and Protestant—got into the Church Fathers and found some wide discrepancies both among the Fathers and between the Fathers and contemporary Catholicism.  Rome totally freaked and the papacies of Leo XIII and Pius X built a strong firewall against “modernism.”  The walls did not last.  In the years after WWI, Catholic scholars surreptitiously began working again in the forbidden fields.  Some were caught and silenced—Congar, Chenu, deLubac—but the tide was overwhelming.  In 1943 Pius XII sanctioned biblical studies with the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. The work of the historians and patristic scholars came out into the light again as well.   Little by little the Catholic intellectual world began to open up again.

The one area that has remained shut—indeed padlocked—is the sexual moral theology.  When it comes to morality of economics, politics, immigration, human rights—no problem.  The Church has made huge strides.   But don’t dare say a word about human sexuality.  Any number have tried—including Charles Curran—and the axe always falls.  Hopefully Amoris Laetitia is the unchaining of a much-needed theological investigation into contemporary issues for which the old sixteenth-century answers no longer seem to work.

No intellectual discipline stands in a vacuum and especially today there is an appreciation for the interdisciplinary nature of sound scholarship.  Theology always stood on the shoulders of Philosophy.  Today—if it is to have credibility—the Church also needs both to dialogue with and to draw on the sciences: the behavioral sciences, the social sciences, and the physical sciences.  This does not mean “surrendering” to the surrounding culture—far from it.  In the spinning whirl of contemporary culture the Church needs to keep its compass pointed to the Truth but it does not do this by burying its head in the sands of the answers of simpler days.    Today we face not only divorce and remarriage, but same-sex attraction, gender identity, artificial conception, genetic engineering, stem-cell research, embryology, various forms of contraception, abortion, surrogacy, and even potential cloning of human persons.  We have a lot of work to do to catch up on our scientific knowledge and bring it into dialogue with our theology if we are to have anything credible to say—or be listened to—in the world in which we live.  To quote a famous moral theologian: If the Church does not listen to the world, then the world will never listen to the Church.   

Finally, one more note about Amoris Laetitia.  In the years before, during, and for sometime after Vatican II there was an outstanding moral theologian teaching in Rome: Father Bernard Häring, CSsR.  Häring taught moral theology in Rome from 1949 until 1987.  He had a very different approach than other theologians, declaring that moral action was not about following a set of external rules, but fundamentally a dialogue between the soul and God with the soul desiring to root itself in God’s will.  I think Amoris Laetitia calls us all—not only the divorced and remarried—to do just that: with rigorously honest hearts to conform our actions to the will of God as best as we can discern, and leave the laws and prescripts to the scribes and the Pharisees who choose to live by law rather than by grace. Häring was pushed into a gentle exile by Cardinal Ratzinger in the John Paul years.  His methodology was seen as too dangerous to the sort of authority Rome wanted to exercise.  I think that in many ways, Amoris Laetitia is a vindication of the contribution of Bernard Häring and a signal we are back on track. 

What In The World Will Be Postmodern Catholicism?

Tibetan monks with their 

dunchen or Dharma trumpet; 

now that guitar Masses are 

passé, can we look forward 

to hearing these in church?

One of my former students came by to visit a few weeks ago.  Tran is now ordained and has been sent to Rome to the Pontifical Gregorian University to earn a Doctorate in Systematic (Dogmatic) Theology.  It was great to catch up and I was fascinated by what he had to say about his studies.  He was all afire about the problem of God in Postmodern thought. 

Now, Postmodernism is something that has always baffled me.  As a medieval historian, I never really understood Modernism, much less Postmodernism.  Modernism is a school of thought, prevalent in the second half of the 19^th century and into the 20^th, that like so many of the intellectual movements before it, rejected the received tradition and insisted on radically new interpretations of whatever phenomena it was considering.  In theology then Modernism questioned the received tradition of the faith and its doctrines.  Modernist thinkers discarded central ideas of the Christian faith such as the Divinity of Christ, the immortality of the soul, the Divine Source of Scriptural Revelation, and even the relevance of any idea of God. They attempted to reduce the faith to Myth without understanding the function of Myth to encapsulate levels of Truth that transcend articulation.  Unfortunately the Catholic Church was no better at appreciating the superior levels of Truth contained in Myth and in reaction to Modernism encouraged not only a retreat into re-constructed thought processes of the past (e.g. Neo-Scholasticism) but even an abandonment of serious intellectual fields such as Scriptural Criticism to a morbid anti-intellectualism, even a rabid fundamentalism that it took the Church decades to reverse. 

In theology, as in other fields such as architecture or literature, Postmodernism is a reaction to Modernism.  Unlike the intellectual freeze imposed by Leo XIII and Pius X, however, Postmodernism does not retreat into the embalmed remains of the past but seeks to find ways to express the essence of our faith in modalities that speak intelligibly to our contemporaries.   

Maybe we can look at it more concretely.  The familiar concept of “heaven” has lost any credibility for thinking men and women today.  When we were children heaven was “up there”; hell was “down there.”  That—and especially regarding heaven—was pretty much a literal conception.  But within my lifetime (I am in my mid-sixties) our understanding of the “up there” has shifted radically and allows no place for heaven. While we have known for several centuries that space is a vast and almost limitless entity, over the last five decades it has sunk into our consciousness that there really is no “up there”; only an “out there” that could not be transversed in a hundred million lifetimes.  And not only is heaven a spatial improbability, but reflection on Sartre’s play No Exit has confronted us with how much a hell it would in fact be with a relentlessly eternal existence from which we could never find an end.  (Sartre’s play is set in hell but the problem of a relentless eternity transcends the particularities.) The sort of a nightlessly eternal picnic in the park afterlife, an unending family reunion as it were, becomes not only improbable but terrifying.  So what do we do about an afterlife?  How do we make sense of it?  And would it really be blissful without Häagen Daz Vanilla Swiss Almond?  And Fido.  What about Fido?  I can’t leave Fido behind.  I would only suffer an eternal melancholy without Fido.  We need to find new ways to talk about our conviction that life transcends this mortal coil and when we shed it there is a life in God. 

It is not only Heaven and Hell but a huge range of religious symbols that need to be rethought and re-expressed in ways that make sense to people of the 21^st century.  Indeed, as Tran pointed out to me, even God needs some new clothes if s/he is not to appear dated.  But the task is not to invent faith new from whole cloth—though some have tried to do this with rather bizarre results—but to retrieve and reinterpret the essence of what has always been at the core.  We need to look at the past and realize that the doctrines and dogmas and even the biblical text with which the Truth has been revealed are all simply the reliquaries or ostensoria that permit us to see the Truth and are not themselves the Truth.  (Go and look up ostensorium—the singular of ostensoria—and you might be surprised.  I chose to use the fancier term so as to avoid the connotations the more normal word would convey.)  We do not necessarily abandon or reform those doctrines and we cannot abandon or change the scriptural text but we can seek new interpretations and historically contextualize them in an effort to separate the wheat of the impermeable Truth from the chaff of variable intellectual constructs. 

This cannot be done lightly.  In my series on the History of Anglicanism I have “taken some shots” at what I think has been some very sloppy abuses of sound Theological discipline, not only by those in the Episcopal and Anglican Churches, but by liberal Protestantism in general.  On the other hand when I look at our Catholic Church confronted by the challenge of a world in which, for example, gender roles and an understanding of human sexuality has so rapidly changed, I see our theologians stunned like deer in the headlights or a rat caught in the stare of a cobra, transfixed and unable to move for fear. 

I had coffee yesterday morning with the son of a friend of mine; an interesting man not much younger than myself. He is a hospice nurse but also produces video documentaries, only one of which I have yet seen.  That particular documentary is on the collaboration of religious leaders from various traditions—Buddhist, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant—in their neighborhood on the lower East Side of Manhattan.  It was a very interesting documentary and it revealed much about the religious perspective of its producer.  I might say more about the video on another occasion but I spoke with him—I was already contemplating this posting—on how an educated and fairly sophisticated man of middle years views religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular.  He spoke about his own spiritual journey.  He was raised in the Catholic Church with a devout mother and a father who had been somewhat rigidly Catholic until the late ‘60’s and then went overboard in the other direction.  He had gone to Catholic schools but in his late 20’s drifted away from the faith.  His father had introduced him to Eastern Meditation and that gave him a spiritual foundation as he was on somewhat of a seeker’s pilgrimage (my term, not his) but ended coming back into the Catholic Church but in a very new way.  He said he was drawn back to the Church by just finding churches or other religious spaces to be places where he could sit away from the hubbub of Manhattan.  In particular he said that the vastness of space in churches and synagogues appealed to him as a respite from the city.  But he also uncovered in religion tremendous energy for building a better world.  He is comfortable again with his Catholicism but it is not a Catholicism of doctrine or of rules.  And he also finds himself at home in the various other faith communities around him and with which he has ties.  A Sabbath service in the Synagogue or Vespers in a Russian Orthodox Church or listening to a Tibetan monk sound his dungchen (or dharma trumpet, the long deep bass trumpet used in Tibetan worship) all speak deeply to him of the same Divine Mystery he finds at Mass.  I think he reflects the next generation of Catholics, people for whom religion is more about a spiritual journey than about doctrine, more about experience than intellectualization.  The Dalai Lama speaks to this when he writes: 

“The aim and purpose of religion is to cure the pains and unhappiness of the human mind. …. I would like to point out that the purpose of religion is not to build beautiful churches or temples; it is to cultivate positive human qualities such as tolerance, generosity, and love.  Fundamental to Buddhism and Christianity, indeed to every major world religion, is the belief that we must reduce our selfishness and save others.” 

It should not surprise us that the Dalai Lama speaks more effectively to contemporary Americans 60 and under than any Christian leader, including the Pope.  The sad thing is that with all due respect to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the Gospel offers us the same insight in even more concrete and (I believe) more profound ways, but so much of our leadership and so many of our co-religionists have forsaken the invitation of Christ to let our hearts of stone become furnaces of the Divine Compassion and focused instead on rituals and ceremonies and are hell-bent on emarginating those who don’t measure up to the Pharisee standards.  It is not that I think we have to abandon the key doctrines of the faith: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and it is certainly not to give carte blanche for any arbitrary morality: but I believe those in Church leadership who have shifted their emphasis from theological abstractions to applied Christianity are breaking through a moribund “faith” into a credible Christianity.  The Franklin Grahams and the Archbishop Chaputs or the Cardinal Burkes and the Pat Robertsons are not the effective evangelizers in this Post Modern World.  You don’t have to preach a loosey-goosey Gospel to be effective: look at Mother Teresa or Archbishop Tutu, but you do have to be a witness to the mercy and compassion of God and not to the severity of dogmatic and judgmental religion.