REFORMED AND ANGLO-CATHOLIC EPISCOPALIANS TOGETHER IN WITNESS
Editor’s Note: This article is the first half of a two-part series. You can read the second part of this post here.
Sometimes God decides that the time is right for a particular topic, and by the power of the Holy Spirit it starts to bubble up everywhere you look. For several months now, I have been thinking about how Anglo-Catholics and Reformed Episcopalians can begin to dismantle the demilitarized zone that for too long has kept us peering at each other suspiciously from a distance. Over at The Hour, Tony Hunt has been writing about the same question. In this condensation of what was a longer lecture at the Society of Catholic Priests conference this year, I’d like to discuss why contemporary Episcopalians of Catholic and Reformed sensibilities are called to stand together, in witness to the world and to our own Church, as people who are not ashamed of the Gospel.
There is a qualitative difference between receiving our differences in theological emphasis and liturgical style as gift and eliminating all difference to create a via media of the lowest common denominator. The latter is in no one’s interest, even though it may be all too common in our church. The former, I believe, is a Gospel imperative.
The differences are real. We can have interesting and important conversations about nature and grace, word and sacrament, or natural theology. We can disagree about Eucharistic adoration or the fitness of Morning Prayer on Sundays. Indeed, we can even argue about whether or not the music of Hillsong is good. Unfortunately, too much time and energy continues to be spent on what can only be described as matters of aesthetic preference. Liturgy matters. The details of the liturgy and the theology that those details communicate matter. The beauty of holiness matters, but it is a pernicious trap to confect a love of liturgy into a belief that the heart of catholicity is found in bells, smells, or vestments. The heart of catholicity is Jesus Christ.
This piece will not present a laundry list of complaints about the contemporary church. Instead, it will present two historical examples that might help to illumine our present. One is Charles Kingsley, the Victorian Darwinist clergyman who was one of the key figures in the “muscular Christianity” tendency of the 19th century that was a key opposing party to the Oxford Movement. The other is Karl Reiland, an Episcopal priest who found himself at the center of both the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 20th century and the American eugenics movement.
The cases of Kingsley and Reiland illustrate what happens when Christians, and Anglicans in particular, replace the particularity of Scripture and Christian theological grammar with something else. Since the 19th century, that "something else" has often fallen under the category of scientifically-informed reason, and it has been portrayed as the necessary and inevitable next step in an inexorable trajectory of religious and social progress. That "something else" has often endorsed a utopian political agenda that aspires to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth through human effort. Tragically, it has also baptized what historian Jenny Reardon names as a key feature of modernity: the “entanglement of rules that govern what can count as knowledge with rules that determine which human lives can be lived,” and which are treated as collateral damage on the way to a better world. (1)
Theologically, a few things tend to get muddled in the process of this turn to the "something else." I believe that the foundation of our call to witness together is to be confidently, winsomely, joyfully, un-muddled about a few very basic questions. Who needs to be saved, and from what? Who saves, by what means, and when? The most important question of all, the question about which we are called to remain absolutely clear, is Jesus’s question to Peter: Who do you say that I am?
Charles Kingsley: A Universal Law of Living Things
Why did the Oxford Movement happen? I would like to suggest along with John Shelton Reed that at least in part, it happened as a generational movement. (2) Young Anglicans rebelled against the ways that they saw the church of their elders going astray, excluding their sensibilities from the life of the Church and making easy accommodations to prevailing sentiment and to power. The 19th century was the age of empire, and Anglo-Catholics reacted against a state-subservient Church that had made its bed with Empire. The ‘national apostasy’ Keble preached against in 1833 wasn’t in the first instance a matter of candles on the altar, or vestments, or the role of Mary, or of Eucharistic adoration. It was a matter of the Church being made subservient to the state in its own affairs, by a Whig government, marching under the banner of progress. Anglo-Catholicism was denounced in part because it was un-English, foreign, and suspect. Crucially, it was also denounced because it was seen as unmanly (see Figure 1, below).
Figure 1: Height of Fashion (3)
When we think about the origins of the Oxford movement and ritualism, we can never forget that on a very visceral level, it began as a rebellion against the entanglement of the Church with very particular, idealized, visions of citizenship, masculinity, and national destiny.
In 1871, the Rev. Canon Charles Kingsley delivered a lecture entitled “The Natural Theology of the Future” at Sion College in London. Kingsley, the Canon of Westminster and chaplain to Queen Victoria that science historian P. J. Hale calls “Darwin’s Other Bulldog,” based his remarks on the premise that “theologians [should] accommodate the latest findings of natural science with Scripture even if this ultimately meant revising traditional exegesis.” (4) For Kingsley, the imperatives of progress meant that Anglican theology should adapt itself to the latest developments of scientific thought, lest it become unattractive to an informed, modern populace - lest it become irrelevant. He writes,
The God who satisfies our conscience ought more or less to satisfy our reason also. To teach that was [Joseph] Butler’s mission, and he fulfilled it well. But it is a mission which has to be re-filled again and again, as human thought changes and human science develops; for if in any age or any country the God who seems to be revealed by Nature seems different from the God who is revealed by the then popular religion, then that God, and the religion which tells of that God, will gradually cease to be believed in. (5)
In other words, if we don’t water it down, our faith will be too strange to be believed.
Kingsley describes the theology espoused by revivalists like Wesley and Whitfield as superstitious, contrasting it with its suitably progressive alternative and noting that “there lingers about them a savor of the old monastic theory, that this earth is the devil’s planet, fallen, accursed, goblin haunted, needing to be exorcised at every turn before it is useful or even safe for man.” (6) For Kingsley, even these, the greatest Anglican evangelicals of the previous century, are no longer fit for the purpose. Note carefully the language he uses. Both Arminian and Calvinist Methodists are described as retrograde, superstitious, backward, fearful, and apparently closet Romish sympathizers to boot – all because they believe that sin is pervasively real. (7)
Kingsley writes about the planet being made “useful”, but he is very clear that the world isn’t meant to be universally useful for everyone. There are the users, and then there are the used. He writes:
Physical science is proving more and more the immense importance of Race; the importance of hereditary powers, hereditary organs, hereditary habits, in all organized beings . . . She is proving more and more the omnipresent action of the differences between races, how the more favored race…exterminates the less favored, or at least expels it…and, in a word, that competition between every race and every individual of that race, and reward according to deserts is (as far as we can see) a universal law of living things. (8)
Kingsley's words fit all too neatly into the Victorian colonial project, and his “Natural Theology of the Future” worked to legitimate the domination and exploitation of both colonized lands and their inhabitants. While he admits that “it may be said [that] these notions are contrary to Scripture,” he gives himself a convenient escape clause. “Scripture says that God created,” he writes, “But it nowhere defines that term.” (9) He continues, “I think it a most important rule in Scriptural exegesis, to be most cautious in limiting the meaning of any term which Scripture itself has not limited.” (10) We might hear something similar to the latter taught in many churches today, but in this case Kingsley takes his own ideas to their horrifying but logical conclusion: God creates continuously through natural selection, which operates through the expulsion or extermination of “the less favored race.”
This essay is a redacted version of work first published in Theologies of Failure, ed. Roberto Sirvent and Duncan Reyburn, and that will appear in an expanded form in The Fullness of Time: Jesus Christ, Science, and Modernity, forthcoming from Cascade Press.
Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 5.
See John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996).
“Height of Fashion,” Punch, December 22, 1886, p. 258.
P. J. Hale, “Darwin’s Other Bulldog: Charles Kingsley and the Popularization of Evolution in Victorian England,” Science & Education 21.7, pp. 977-1013.
Charles Kingsley, “The Natural Theology of the Future,” http://www.online-literature.com/charles-kingsley/scientific/7/.
Ibid.
I am grateful to Amy Laura Hall for pointing me to this text.
Charles Kingsley, “The Natural Theology of the Future,” http://www.online-literature.com/charles-kingsley/scientific/7/.
Ibid.
Ibid.
