ON ANGLICAN IDENTITY: A RESPONSE TO BEN CROSBY

When I composed my initial essay I had no idea that it might spark a permanent feature of such a fine publication as Earth & Altar; and I would not have predicted that I would be lucky enough to be challenged by my friend and peer, Ben Crosby. So I am grateful for the chance to continue the conversation over what is a deeply pressing issue for many.

One major point can be addressed straightaway. I do not posit a common realm of competitive action between the Divine and the human. On the contrary, I take the ontological gap between God - upon whom all things depend - and all dependent things to be utterly absolute, crossed only in the unrepeatable person of Jesus Christ. I did not place God’s justifying action over against, say, baptism. I simply assumed the sacramental life of the church as a baseline. I fully affirm the words of that most learned and judicious divine, Richard Hooker: “We know Him not as indeed he is, neither can know him...his greatness above our capacity and reach.” Laws I.ii 

Which brings us to my “selective use” of Richard Hooker. In a brief essay one simply must be selective. Moreover, I was not so much suggesting that Hooker could be marshalled to my cause as I was showing how Williams explores Hooker on the matter of the true ground of ecclesial unity and made my own suggestion on that basis. A subtle distinction, but a real one. Of course, Hooker famously defended the right of the English church to determine for itself matters of secondary form with respect to its structure and worship. Yet it is precisely this local freedom to dictate the shape of public worship that would make space for Anglican churches to periodically update their rites for the “ghostly benefit” of their members, without thereby losing ecclesial continuity. Hooker, discussing this very matter, goes so far as to say: 

“All things cannot be of ancient continuance, which are expedient and needful for the ordering of spiritual affairs : but the Church being a body which dieth not hath always power, as occasion requireth, no less to ordain that which never was, than to ratify what hath been before.” Laws V.viii (all of V.v-ix is relevant. Emphasis added)

So Crosby alluding to V.x as a critique is odd to me, since what I am defending is the freedom of Anglicans not to concern themselves with proving their bona fides, and the acceptability of Anglican churches to adopt new expressions that are not simply 17th century standards with some updated syntax.

But my essay was only in a limited sense about Richard Hooker. Primarily it was about Rowan Williams, and it is on this matter that I’m afraid Crosby is the one who reads Williams quite selectively. The quote that Crosby uses to suggest Williams would disagree with my view is set at the beginning of an introduction in the immediate context of an attempt to explain Williams’ essay on Tyndale, who lived before the full break between the English church and the papacy. Since it is common usage to associate the word “Anglican” specifically with the post-Reformation church, Williams was suggesting that on account of Tyndale’s themes and perspectives, he still fits with the English reformed tradition as Williams describes it. And it is a description rather than prescription, as the introduction itself makes explicit: “There is little here [in Williams’ introduction] that can quickly be summarised as utterly and uniquely Anglican.” (7)  Instead, Williams suggests, it is the English church’s history that gives it its distinction. “[This introduction] is not a formula for being Anglican; simply a description of how and where some kind of recognisable historical identity came to exist.” (emphasis added)

But there is a great deal of Williams’ larger oeuvre that is relevant here as well. One could reasonably suggest that the issue of making corporate and ecclesial sense is one of the most persistent themes Williams has explored throughout his career. One could start with his work in the late 80s, in particular his massively insightful Arius: Heresy and Tradition. As Williams describes it, the Christological crisis of that era demonstrated that theological consensus - indeed “orthodoxy” itself - is achieved, not merely inherited. The creative aspect of theology is “not only legitimate, but necessary.” In periods of acute distress, “the loyal and uncritical repetition of formulae is seen to be inadequate as a means of securing continuity at anything more than the formal level.” (236) In the moment, there are no immediate resources available to determine which view or views the church will be willing to retain (or create). Ecclesial “continuity” cannot mean a permanent reiteration of fixed patterns of speech. Rather continuity “was something that had to be re-imagined and recreated at each point of crisis.” (237) That is to say that the common identity of the church is something that can only be asserted retroactively. We are perhaps a bit far here from secondary, local forms of Anglican identity - neither Ben nor I are talking about big-o “Orthodoxy” - but I think the connection holds. The “appropriate” bounds of continuity within change are not given in advance, and cannot be sustained as loyalty to a primitive insight without loss. 

Of his more recent work I would turn to his magnum opus, The Edge of Words, originally given as the Gifford Lectures. The entire work is relevant, but one essay in particular has a great deal of resonance with our discussion. In the third chapter, “Speech and Time: The Unfinished Business of Language,” Williams demonstrates how understanding occurs through the social practice of language as time-bound, bodily persons learn how to continue a discourse. Attempts to secure an end to new speech through a resolution of difference work by “the cessation of the labour and difficulty of representation.”(67) As persons navigate their environment, they perceive how a mode of representation can be extended, enlarged, or challenged. It is a communal process wherein no one gets “the last word.” We are always working with what has been said. But when one’s self-identity is fixed in a way that doesn’t allow for new insight or expression, such a person is cut off to the perspective of the other. “We are always catching up with a reality never seen as standing still enough to be absorbed or fully embraced or mastered.”(93) Corporate identity, like personal identity, emerges from a process of representing ourselves in shared speech and action; as an invitation to be comprehended by another. But our understanding is never complete. What we know of ourselves will necessarily be expanded through the creative agency of others yet to speak, and yet to come.

Whether we’re talking about how the church determines the boundaries of its public speech, or how the nature of language indicates that identity is an endless, shared discovery of new ways to understand ourselves and our environment, Williams cannot be enlisted to a cause that would seek to prescribe a program for Anglican identity.

I hope this discussion will show a bit more clearly what I was drawing on in my essay. And it should put to rest the idea that I have snuck in an “unfussy Anglican ‘comprehensive’ latitudinarianism” through the back door. I have no particular love for diversity of opinions as such. But I take traditions to be marked by an historical process of negotiating boundaries around internal disputes. They are irreducibly complex and sometimes necessarily in conflict, as arguments are extended over time. In fact I believe that we must take the risk of staking a position on theological matters, so that we might be recognized and understood. I don’t consider “the discussion of Anglican identity out of bounds,” rather I actively resist attempts to fix it permanently or distill its essence. I therefore have no problem affirming that “Anglicanism has and should have something to do with the classical prayer book tradition or the Articles.” But “having something to do” with them is different than recreating an idealized past expression, or deploying a strategy of prescribed identity. I don’t actually take Crosby to be promoting something quite so extreme as rote repetition; but what it might mean to “relate to” the 1662 can legitimately be contested without anyone sacrificing their authentic Anglican character. 

I suppose I should admit, though, despite what I have said so far, there remains some extent to which I do consider it a problem to enquire constantly about our own distinctiveness. Especially when the Anglican identity discourse has become so popular within schismatic groups who often use the question of “historic Anglicanism” as a tool to discredit ECUSA and justify their continued exclusion of LGBTQ Christians from the full sacramental life of the church. I am not suggesting, of course, that this is what Crosby is doing. There is no question of that. But to my mind the strategies do remarkably similar work. 

I close with a final quotation from Williams, who neatly sums up what I hope is at the heart of my original piece: 

“A church that is concerned about its internal politics will not transform the political in the way that is in fact made possible by Jesus. The desire to secure purity and control in the Church...looks to a territory in which believers may see in one another a reassuring sameness; and when believers are looking at one another to test that assurance, they are less likely to be attending to the foundational absence on which the life of the community rests.” (God, 88-89)