by The Revd Prof Daniel W Hardy
a sermon preached at Great St Mary's Church, Cambridge
2 October 2005
Readings: Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, Philippians 3:4-14, Matthew 21:12-16
The danger which confronts Anglicanism today seems to be twofold. On the one hand, there is a laudable attempt to appeal to everyone in a world which often knows and cares little about Christian faith and church. But the danger lies in how that is done: it is easy to become more and more vague about what Christian faith and church are and what they stand for. It is possible to generalize faith and church so much that they become simply a 'covering' for every belief and practice. If that is the strategy, more definite notions of what they are will appear as contentious and harmful. On the other hand, there is an equally praise-worthy attempt to testify to the truth of Christian faith and church in a world that has forgotten or resisted them. The danger here lies in how it is done: it is easy to point to what are thought to be 'true' characteristics and require all who would call themselves 'Christian' to agree. If that is the strategy, the best way forward seems to be to draw sharp lines, enclosing 'true believers' and excluding others whose belief is not so clear. In that case, faith and church are identified by their distinctiveness, and much is made of the contrasts of 'true' belief and practice with 'false'. The polarization between the two grows steadily deeper, until they divide.
These two options appear in many disguises; and they are often expressed in political, legal or financial ways. Let me give an example. The one option is seen in what happened nearly 3 years ago in the USA. Through its accepted political process, one diocese appointed a man as its bishop who had divorced his wife to live with his male partner; through its usual political process the US church as a whole sanctioned the consecration; it took place - with a very large number of American bishops involved - despite the expressed opposition of all the provincial archbishops of the Anglican Communion. The other option is seen in the actions of opponents afterward. Some people held their bishops responsible for approving and sharing in this consecration, withdrew their political and financial support for their bishop and diocese, and have since joined together in a variety of networks actively looking for support. And most recently, the very large and dynamic Church of Nigeria has distanced itself from the Anglican Communion, on the grounds that the whole Communion has been contaminated by unacceptable practices, and that others - including the CofE because of the House of Bishops' response to the Civil Partnership Act scheduled to come into force on 5 December 2005 - are sliding into the same position as the American Church.
Both options - what might unkindly be called the wide and fuzzy and the narrow and dogmatic - are actively pursued amongst Anglicans. As I come and go in different churches on two continents, however, what impresses me is how rarely these extreme views are present amongst ordinary Anglicans. Most of the people I know in these places - and this is backed up by statistics that they are at least 60% of Anglicans (it might be 80% if the criteria were more clear; this is part of the problem) - are decent, thoughtful and serious about Christian faith and church, and want to live more deeply as faithful Christians. Sometimes their leaders are firebrands actively promoting one option or the other, but they would rather not be. Their care is for something much more profound. The only problem is that such people are not heard in debates dominated by forceful party-line speakers. We need to listen to them.
We need to see that the two-way struggle is actually held within something else, a third option which is even more interesting to pursue. Just what is that third option? How do we sustain and feed it?
These are people - including most of us here, I think - who are ready to face the tension of being fully Christian in today's world, and who are ready to build a church which can be engaged with life today and yet constructively Christian. It is not an easy vocation, and we do need help, and to help each other, in fulfilling it.
The two aspects - engaged yet constructively Christian - are difficult to live with. If we are engaged with life today, we will recognize that we - and most people like us - are bewildered by what is going on. The business of grasping and living in a world in which we are surrounded with ever-new fascinations which we are encouraged to admire and want is a challenge which outstrips concern for more ultimate or primary matters. And in time people taken up by this kind of life lose any taste for more primary questions; and such things are increasingly meaningless to them. This is easily enough to keep people away from church. The dangers of living in what I call unrestricted extensity are huge; but they are unavoidable: we have to confront them every day and in everything we do. They form what would in other times have been called an 'abyss of meaninglessness', but even such an expression makes no sense to people who are carried away by the unrestricted extensity of modern life.
That is one 'end' of the tension in which we find ourselves. And how can we even express what it is like? How can we find meaning in this life? We do make some sense of it, of course, simply by living life as best we can, but that is a very mundane kind of meaning, hardly capable of finding what life and death mean. I have to say that a 'wide and fuzzy' faith and church doesn't go far in helping us with these more ultimate matters. That, I suppose, is why 'wide and fuzzy' churches tend to lose ground: their virtue is that they do face this unrestricted extensity, with all its uncertainties, and do try to meet people where they are. But they end up not doing much to help with the dilemmas, for they themselves - it seems - have lost the intensity of faith. The intensity of faith is challenged, and it seems undermined, by the unrestricted hustle and bustle of life, to such an extent that people give up on it. But what else is there to do?
The other 'end' of the tension in which we live is a serious concern to live as Christians: to be engaged but constructively Christian. How do we do that? What is chiefly offered these days is a straightforward reassertion of the intensity of faith. It takes different forms. I recall one thoughtful American Episcopalian who tried at first to live in the 'ruins' (as he called them) of Anglicanism there, and then left to become Roman Catholic. When asked 'what did it feel like to become Catholic?' he said, 'It felt like being submerged into the ocean', an ocean that needed no justification, no support, nothing from him. Many others within Anglicanism find such security in positive faith itself, or a 'personal relationship with Christ'.
Typically, however, these ways bring strong demands as to what in present-day life can be allowed. And we quickly see why such believers are so unremittingly opposed to modern practices as to find it necessary to abandon others and other churches, even - in the case of the Church of Nigeria - the Anglican Communion and the Church of England. Just as the extensity of modern life threatens the intensity of faith, so the intensity of faith can threaten the extensity of modern life. It is less well recognized that, as extensity makes for an abyss of meaninglessness, so intensity has its own abyss of meaningfulness: it is the home of overstatement.
It is also the home of self-righteousness. Some appeal to a new form of what used to be called the 'orders of creation' argument: referring to the Book of Genesis, they argue that God made all creation in a certain fixed pattern. No longer do people use this - as they did in Nazi Germany or under Apartheid in South Africa - to claim that there is a pure race, with all others inferior, but they do now use it to claim that God created male and female, condemning all other kinds of sexual allegiance as unnatural. And that strident claim is countered by those who consider gays to be oppressed, who therefore claim that the ordination of gays is 'Gospel truth'. And we are back in a polarized argument.
It is not that these two sympathies - engagement with the extensity of modern life, or advocating the intensity of positive Christian truth - have no value: they are important markers for Christian faith and church. But now is the time when that 60-80% or so of Anglicans like us need to reach beyond these extremes to new awareness of the reach and depth of God's purposes for us all. What that means is that full Christian faith and church lie beyond what we now know. Important as we might think them, these are only first approximations to the fuller faith and church which we need to reach for. I am convinced that the significance of Christian faith and church is infinite, and if we stop at our present finite level of understanding and behaviour we are - at best - adolescent in faith, or - at worst - idolatrous.
From this point of view, we have much to learn from the readings this morning, but especially from Paul in Philippians 3. We hear him there giving a thorough list of what made him an authentic Jew. He had all the outward marks of that: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews. He all the behavioral characteristics, too: as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. If ever there was a fixed set of marks of Jewishness, he had them, but had now gone beyond them, not to a new fixed set of marks of Christianity but something much more. The implication is that Christian faith is not a matter of social identity, whether national or tribal, and not a matter of particular kinds of behavior, but something much more.
It is not even that these forms of identity or achievement get you anywhere: Paul speaks of them as 'loss because of Christ'.
More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.
What he has found is not some condition of 'being Christian', which brings with it certain items of belief, social standing and moral behavior, without which you are not Christian. He has instead found that the wisdom of Christ Jesus has reached into the length and breadth, the depth and height of life, its suffering and death and also their transformation through resurrection. In the language used earlier, the wisdom of Christ Jesus has permeated the full extensity of life as its fullest intensity. By comparison, everything else in life is 'loss'.
This wisdom of Christ Jesus has opened Paul to a new kind of goodness, the infinite righteousness found in him. And it has begun to transform Paul, placing within him an immense desire:
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.
If anyone had asked Paul, 'Are you Christian?', he would have responded, 'Jesus Christ has made me his own' and 'I have not yet made it my own'.
Here we get a real glimpse of the full possibility laid before us by God in Christ Jesus. It is to be opened by the wisdom of Christ - a wisdom which reaches into the whole scope of life in this world - and it is to be called to an infinite faith and goodness. To engage with the extensity of the world today, or to claim truth of belief or full goodness, are hollow until they are carried into this infinite faith and goodness. That infinite faith and goodness are the goal for which the publicly-forgotten 60-80% of Anglicans should strive.
Amen.
The Revd Professor Daniel W. Hardy, a member of the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, was formerly Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton and Van Mildert Professor of Theology at the University of Durham and Canon of Durham Cathedral.
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum