The Rock, August 2000
Cutting Down to Size
Let's go back to the ending of my last Rock article. I said:
Like most other sins, Synodthink stems from pride. It has its origin in the wholly-misguided belief that somehow a revealed-by-God faith must necessarily be inferior to one which we have discovered for ourselves.
Once that dogma (for that is what it is) has gained a hold in people's minds then it begins to colonize them to the extent that anything which runs contrary to it must be wrong. Once the peacock spreads his tail it's only a short step to his imagining that God is saying "Who's a pretty boy, then!" to him all the time.
What the Church of England (and by association the whole Anglican Communion) needs more than anything else is a good dose of humility. In a later article I hope to be able to describe some of the ways in which that is already coming to pass.
The first step towards inculcating humility, whether in ourselves or others, it cutting down to size. St Paul in numerous places in his letters warns his readers against thinking too highly of themselves and their opinions, and in The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot, the psychiatrist, Harcourt-Reilly says that more than half this world's problems are caused by people “wanting to feel important”?, and nothing is more conducive to feeling important than to hold views or opinions that one supposes to be unassailable.
Well, quite a good way of cutting SynodThinkers down to size is to prove that there is a substantial body of rationally-based, responsible opinion which simply believes that they've got it wrong – and since my last article a remarkable event has taken place in London which has shattered a good many of their illusions.
That event was Christ Our Future – a Mass in celebration of the Millennium, which took place on 10 June in the London Arena. It was attended by a congregation of ten thousand including eight hundred concelebrating priests, by bishops from all over the world, and as its Presiding Concelebrant had the Archbishop of York, and the Bishop of London as preacher.
It's most important to stress, as it was at the event by more than one speaker, that this was in no sense a Protest Meeting. Those reluctant journalists who were sent along by their Editors on a brilliantly sunny, boiling hot Saturday afternoon in the hope that they would return with stories of Rebels and Splits and Breakaways went away empty-handed. As one of them said at the time “My editor sent me to get a story about rebel priests having a demo – but that was all about Jesus. I don't think he'll print that" – and he didn't!
What it did demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt was that the idea, given much air-space in the run-up to the Ordination of Women Priests synodical debate in 1992, that all opposition to this novelty would inevitably “melt away”, was wholly wide of the mark. There's simply no need any longer, if ever there was a need, to mount demonstrations, or rebellions or break-aways to prove its falsehood. The fact that so many like-minded Christians came willingly together, at considerable personal expense to themselves (admission cost £10, and then there was the cost of getting there), was “demonstration” enough that any melting that was going on in the Arena had a meteorological, not a spiritual cause.
Christ Our Future, which was planned and organized by Forward in Faith was generously supported by organisations such as the Guild of the Servers of the Sanctuary, the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament and the Church Union (to name but three). Consisting of people who are committed to safeguarding the “faith once delivered to the saints” – the very purpose which was in the mind of their founders – their support made it possible to lay on a supremely dignified, but at the same time essentially simple act of Eucharistic worship of almighty God in thanksgiving for his Incarnation some two thousand-odd years ago.
Christ Our Future was an unmistakable sign of the remarkable unity which has been carefully maintained between Forward in Faith and these older guilds and fraternities since its foundation in 1992: and such unity is the second tool which is most useful in cutting SynodSpeakers down to size. The raft of the liberal agenda, of which the women-priest/bishop issue became the masthead, was only able to float at all in the first place because of the divisions of those opposed to it. “Divide and Rule” is a policy that they have often adopted, with devastating success from the earliest days in Sweden, Norway, USA, Canada and elsewhere. It's so much easier to succeed by getting your opponents to auto-destruct than it is to make out a compelling rational case to persuade people to change their minds.
The strategy is a beautifully simple. First of all you find a concept which sounds good: Justice, Love, Tolerance, Forgiveness are all front-runners. Then do something really outrageous in the name of one or more of them: ordain women as priests; marry those of the same sex; ordain practising homosexuals; take no action against heresy. Thirdly, suggest, in the midst of all the confusion and acrimony that your action has generated that we all need time to “explore, study and discuss the issue more closely” or some other eirenic-sounding concept. That ensures three bridgeheads: firstly that your opponents can't very easily say that they're opposed to Justice or Tolerance or whatever soundbyte you have chosen to adopt; secondly it results in nothing happening for several years which gives everyone time to forget what they are really disagreeing about; and thirdly, if something does happen as a result of that study/exploration/discussion-period, that there's little likelihood of it having any effect since in the meanwhile you have quietly gone on doing (illegally, if need be) whatever practice you chose to make the frontispiece of your campaign.
Finally you play the Unity card and you're home and dry. Just point out that there are now so many women priests/homosexual vicars/heretical bishops that in practice it would be impossible to do anything effective about it without (horror of horrors!) “splitting the Church”. Anyway, you point out, hasn't the whole argument become deeply tedious and boring and haven't we got much better things to do (Evangelism is always a sure-fire joker-in-the-pack here) than go on fighting against each other when the world, by and large, is turning its back upon the Gospel. (I wonder why, don't you?)
There are, I can assure you, well-tested and effective counterstrategies to this sort of SynodSpeak, just as there are to the Melt-away falsehood, as Christ our Future proved only too well. There's not enough space here to describe these strategies. Perhaps I shall cover some of them in a future article.
However, before we start talking about counterstrategies, it is essential that we nail the lie that something which seems “tedious and boring” is ipso facto unimportant or not worth considering. Let me end with a section which I will call Isn't Oncology Boring!
---ooOoo---
ISN'T ONCOLOGY BORING!
Why Growth Areas aren't always Good News
When otherwise intelligent people start describing a serious topic as "boring" then it's time for the rest of us to sit up and take notice.
"Boring", of course, is a highly subjective term. We apply it freely to those subjects which for any reason fail to engage our interest. But that says more about ourselves than the subject to which we appear to be applying the word "boring".
So, for instance, if someone exclaims "Isn't geography (or history or art) boring" there is, behind that remark, something quite distinct from the discipline itself, namely the speaker's own subjective disposition towards it.
In my case it was biology that was “boring”. I was and am still incapable of making even the simplest drawing, and consequently found everything about biology deeply unattractive. From trying to draw the reproduction of the amoeba (two blobs with dots in the middle) to the dissection of the dogfish (which even Leonardo da Vinci might find a challenge) it was all one huge bore. But that was neither the fault of biology, the amoeba nor the dogfish; the bore lay in my inability to draw what I was looking at.
Imagine next someone exclaiming "isn't oncology boring": it would probably be because the speaker is faced with the unattractive prospect of having to undergo a prolonged course of chemo- or radiotherapy. By labelling oncology “a bore” they are not saying anything about the science of lumps and bumps, but about their own feelings.
In either case, biology or oncology, what has been said turns out to mean something different from what it appeared to. We should be thankful that at least the oncologist didn't find the subject boring: such is the nature of the subjective thought that any "bore" which results in our being restored to health comes to be seen as a bore to be welcomed rather than despised.
Dealing with theological heresy, falsehood, unorthodoxy, has more in common with oncology than most people realise. Which is why, almost certainly, all these subjects today are portrayed as being "boring" by those who know little or nothing about them.
Oncology has to contend with a slow, unperceived growth of tissue, fabricated by the body itself, which little by little starts to take over the whole cellular reproductive system. The first sign of it may be no more than a mild discomfort; this may be followed by some slight bodily dysfunctions – an excessive tiredness or listlessness or tendency to find everyday thing "a bore". Then comes the tell-tale lump, often itself quite painless. That's the first sign which people take seriously.
But that is just what happens when theology, christology, ecclesiology or morality start malfunctioning and growing tumours.
We begin to feel that all isn't well when we hear some fellow-Christians saying some rather strange things. Most people, very understandably, choose to ignore this symptom because if we pay too much attention at an early stage to what turns out to be of little consequence we know that our contemporaries will accuse us of having a phobia, a bee in our bonnet, of being obsessed with minutiae – like the person who imagines that every swelling is bound to be cancerous – or that we are being "bigoted and intolerant". Heresy-hunting comes a close second to fox-hunting in popular disapproval!
However if we do hold our tongue, keep our place and do nothing we shall find that other things are becoming dysfunctional too. A Province, a Diocese, or a particular bishop or group of bishops, or some pressure group within the church will start courting and attracting a disproportionate amount of attention.
Again, we may try to tell ourselves that it's really none of our business: that what they get up to in Barchester Diocese, or if the Bishop of Omnium gets married for the third time with two wives still alive, or when the Province of the Bachelorland Islands decides, unilaterally, to discontinue the practice of infant baptism it's no concern of ours.
It's all happening too far away. It's all too much of a bore. We don't know enough about it to do anything effective. There are so many other important things (like Mission, for example) which demand our attention that we really don't have the time or the inclination to go into the boring minutiae of the filioque clause or the consequences of an extra iota in the homoousion.
The trouble, as with other cancers, is that the longer one delays in dealing with heresies the more difficult and painful the cure becomes, and the less likely the chances of a total recovery.
No doubt theological oncology seems to the outsider to be a deeply boring subject. It requires clear, disciplined, objective thought – the very things that the popular mind finds so difficult in a world of spin-doctors and opinion-formers. To those who are unused, or unable, to follow articulate thought, it is a subject as unattractive as biology to the person who can't draw. Even those whose health and life is threatened by spiritual tumours find the whole idea of having them treated deeply unattractive.
But what is the alternative? To do nothing and hope for the best? Surely all of us know that that is a council of despair. To wait till the symptoms become so strident that they can no longer be ignored? Deep down we know that such a course of action (or rather inaction) is not in our best interests. To submit ourselves to the necessary treatment? Well, that's certainly more sensible than either of the two previous policies. But it is a widely accepted medical belief that the chances of recovery are considerably enhanced if the patient takes an intelligent interest in what others are doing for him. "Submission" on its own is, it would seem, less effective than seeing ourselves as part of a team fighting a common enemy. So if we're wise we won't simply leave the treatment to the Experts (even if they exist!); We shall all play our part in the accurate detection and effective elimination of spiritual cancer wherever it is growing.
It's not, in fact all that difficult. After all, the most common heresies are easy recognize because they've been around for such an awful long time. There's Gnosticism, for example, which imagines that knowing about God is more important than knowing him; there's Arianism which holds that Jesus Christ was no more than semi-divine human being; there's the very fashionable Subjectivism which says that truth is something which we discern with our feelings; and then there's the ever-popular Universalism which says that everyone is bound to be saved in the end, anyway, so what does it matter whether what we believe is true or not.
All these tumours are alive and well today. Those of us whose mission in life it is to diagnose spiritual cancers are no more popular than oncologists, and our discipline is seen to be deeply boring.
Nevertheless one has only to look at what has happened in those parts of the world where the majority of the faithful have consistently chosen to ignore the symptoms of spiritual tumours which were growing up all around them. Little by little they have been gulled into accepting the growth of these tumours because it would have been too boring to do anything about them.
Over the course of time people come to accept malignant growths, like they do weeds, as part of the natural scene. They forget what things were like before they weeds (or the cancers) took over.
But unless we are prepared to give potentially “boring” subjects, things like heresy, falsehood and immorality, the attention they deserve in the early stages – to cut them down to size in other words – then we shall find ourselves, like many of our fellow-Anglicans, in a terminal condition.
Postscript: News from Norway
As I was finishing this article the news broke that in Oslo on Sunday August 13th, Bishop Teplovski the Polish National Catholic Church of America ordained five members of the Church of Norway and one former Anglican bishop, Arne Rudvin, from Pakistan as deacons and priests, after which he confirmed and chrismated thirty eight laypeople at the same service.
This is really splendid news for all of us. A number of priests in the (Lutheran) Church of Norway have remained faithful in spite of all the persecutions to which they have been subjected over many years by their own bishops (and matters have been much worse since a woman bishop was appointed recently).
Now at last they have found a way of continuing their ministry without compromising their beliefs or moving away from Norway. We can be quite sure that every possible brickbat will be hurled at them once the full significance of what has happened dawns on people. But why worry? At least here is a group of people who, after much thought, have decided that the cancer of heterodoxy had to be treated, and the treatment, it would appear, has been wholly successful!