WHY I SHALL STAY AN ANGLICAN
A. N. Wilson prefers the
advantages of truth to those of authority
IT IS hard to write about bishops these days without being offensive. And I fear I will not be taken seriously if I say that I would far rather belong to a church which contained the Bishop of Durham than one which contained the Bishop of Rome. Never having met either prelate, let me hasten to say that I believe all that their friends and supporters say about them as individuals. Pope John Paul, I readily accept, is an admirable versifier, skier and leader of community singsongs and, by the standards of other Polish bishops, he is probably a giant intellect. Bishop Jenkins is a merry Welsh wit, a kindly family man, and a much more brilliant academic than his ill-phrased and worse-pronounced pub- lic broadcasts might suggest. But I hope that both men will forgive me if for the purposes of argument I use them as exem- pla of all that is most repulsive in their respective churches. One represents the ultimate fatuity of the liberal protestant tradition in which 'anything goes': you can believe 'in a very real sense' in Christ's Resurrection, for example, while being able to accept that the disciples might well have 'pinched the body'. Your own paltry judgment in these matters counts for as much as the tradition of 2,000 years of Christianity. The other bishop represents the extreme which has made truth the possession of the Church rather than its arbiter. In many of the pronouncements of John Paul II we hear again those unmistak- able tones in which Pius X condemned the Modernists. The words he speaks are true, it would seem, not because they are intel- lectually plausible, but because he is the Pope. Hence his harrying of Hans Kung, his cult of the more superstitious Marian shrines, his love of Opus Dei etc.
Now, given the present state of the Church of England, it is not in the least surprising that many of its members should be leaving. Lately there have been the Vicar of St Mary's, Oxford, and the Cha- plain of Lincoln College. Those who set off with such heartbreaking optimism for Rome or Byzantium often confess to hav- ing lived in an extraordinary cloud-cuckoo vision of what the Church of England is, and always has been, since its evolution under the Tudor despots. Such people tend to dub everyone who disagrees with them
as 'heretics' and expect the Church of England to provide a brand of orthodoxy which it has never believed or asserted. They also tend to overlook the most obvious historical facts. Those whose con- sciences are troubled by the sight of poor old Jenkins with a mitre on his head can apparently live with the much more shock- ing sight, to my mind, of Rievaulx and Fountains and countless other abbeys in ruins. That is, they can overlook the fact that Anglicanism began with one of the foulest coups d'etat in the history of Christ- endom, with the wholesale destruction of the monastic life, the torture and imprison- ment of those who clung to the Catholic faith. Those who look to a church with such origins and expect it to be a bastion of Catholic orthodoxy would be like some bewildered lunatic joining the Communist Party because of the Marxist love of private capital and international finance. It is true that in the brief decades of its blood-guilt the Church of England was not itself the instrument of its crimes, which were perpetrated by officers of the state. It did not, like the Russian Orthodox Church of pre-revolutionary days, force heretics to receive communion at gun-point. It has had no Albigensian Crusade. (There was the Bishops' War against the Scots, but it was what the French call a coup de Trafalgar.)
During the two centuries which fol- lowed, the Church of England, as befitted a national church, contained theologians of almost every shade of opinion, including those who thought it ought not to exist. But there was never a suggestion that the Monarch, or the Archbishop of Canter- bury, or the General Synod were 'Guar- dians of the Faith' in the sense that bishops of other churches would claim such a privilege. Putting it crudely, Anglicans have never been taught that there is a special hotline between Lambeth Palace and God. The fact that during the last century the Traetarians revived a devotion to the Catholic origins of Christendom did not alter the fundamental nature of the Church of England, which is a national and a protestant church. This does not mean that it does not contain, and should not contain, men and women who believe the Catholic creeds. But it does mean that it claims no authority of the kind claimed for the Papacy and other patriarchates. The disadvantages of this series of facts are obvious. Where there is no spiritual autocracy there must be muddle. Does the Archbishop of York believe in the Virgin Birth or not? When he was asked this question on the radio there was a pause so long that everyone in England started to twiddle the knobs and 'adjust their sets'. If you belong to a church like that of Dr Jenkins and Dr Habgood you have to accept that you will kneel at the altar rails surrounded by people whose individual theological opinions are wildly different from your own. And you will also have to accept that sometimes they are right and that you are wrong. That is a painful fact to face. Wouldn't it be nice if we all believed a bit more or if we held more in common? In an ideal world, the answer might be yes. In the real world, consider the alternatives. You could be- come an RC. Then, as you kneel or stand at the altar steps, your fellow- communicants will probably not be short of beliefs. Some of them probably think that the Virgin Mary appeared to some children in Fatima to inform their young minds that the merciful Lord was roasting the lustful in Perpetual flames, and that He was looking forward to chucking down the communists to join them. The miracles of Fatima are not of course articles of faith for the RC church any more than Dr Jenkins's view of the miners' strike is binding on the Anglicans. They are, however, actively proclaimed by the present Pope. It is, however, binding on RCs to believe that Our Lady did not have a normal death (as all ancient traditions in the Church say that she did) but was taken up into the skies body and soul. It is, moreover, binding on the faithful to believe that the Church, and in particular the Vicar of Christ, has been given almost magical gifts of know- ledge about such unknowables as the Fu- ture Life. How else could they have arrived at their elaborate knowledge of Limbo, Purgatory and the rest? How else could it have been established that a man who knowingly misses Sunday Mass and dies without repenting will perish everlastingly, or that an unbaptised baby will be sepa- rated through all eternity from its baptised mother? Equally esoteric, to the non- Catholic mind, is the process by which the Church decides that certain marriages, often marriages which have lasted some time and produced children, can be 'nulli- fied' as if by magic, thus permitting the remarriage of Catholics in church. These things are part of the RC package, and those outside the Roman Church often wonder how their sincere, good and truth- laving RC friends feel about them. In my experience their attitudes fall into two categories. Sometimes RC friends whom I have questioned say that they have no difficulty in believing these things. They point out quite correctly that I completely fail to understand the nature of divine authority in the Church. It isn't a question of swallowing individual points of difficul- ty. It is a matter of accepting that the RC church is guided into all truth by the Holy Spirit. If to one's unregenerate mind it looks as though they are also guided into quite a lot of falsehood, there is nothing to do except to agree to differ. But other RC friends of mine privately concede that there are lots of things in their catechism which they don't believe. If they admit it privately, they feel hypocrites. If they do so publicly, they receive the sort of treat- ment meted out by the present Pope to Hans Kung. I am sure that the RC Church will continue to attract more and more mem- bers, not in spite of its high claims and dubious doctrines but because of them. John Paul II's pontificate has been more autocratic than any since that of Pius X, and this will be reassuring to many Christ- ian believers. Were there not those at the time of the First Vatican Council who believed in the threefold Incarnation of Christ? First in the stable at Bethlehem, second on the eucharistic altar and third in the old man of the Vatican who was the Word made flesh! For myself, even to approach this view would be a sort of intellectual suicide. The Bishop of Durham might have gone to an opposite extreme and shown too little regard for the weight of Christian tradition, too little loyalty to the faith once delivered to the saints. But he is obviously a man who is trying to tell the truth. We can go on asserting theolo- gical orthodoxies until we die. But it is simply dishonest to pretend that our under- standing of the universe has not been altered by science; that our understanding of scripture has not been changed by textual scholarship. These alterations in knowledge are irrevocable and we must try to live with the consequences with as much honesty as is faithful and as much faith as is honest.
Mr Ledwich, the Anglican clergyman who left the Church of England upon Dr Jenlcins's consecration, does not agree with me. Acknowledging the difficulty of be- lieving in the infallibility of the Pope, he has become a member of the Greek Ortho- dox church. 'In Orthodoxy alone can it be said that all her members, from her Pat- riarchs to her humblest communicants, share one faith.' An uncharitable explana- tion for this enviable state of affairs might be that all her members, from greasiest bearded bishop to sleaziest Cypriot waiter, were pig-ignorant. It is is not a view which I would wish to advance myself, for I know little of the Orthodox tradition, beyond thinking that their highly euphonious ser- vices go on somewhat long. In such areas as biblical scholarship, they are infinitely more obscurantist than the most old- fashioned RCs. In liturgy, outlook, lan- guage, mystical tradition and in almost every other way, they are admirable, but utterly alien. Chacun a son eglise and I wish Mr Ledwich every joy of his impecc- ably unheretical co-religionists. But I am unconvinced by his little book, just pub- lished, called The Durham Affair (Stylite Publishing, £4.95). It seems that until last summer he believed, or almost believed, that the bishops of the Church of England were the guardians of a sort of orthodoxy which has hardly been current since the Council of Chalcedon. He is appallingly shocked by some questionnaire to which a number of them were foolish enough to reply, revealing uncertainty about the ancient orthodoxies. And having set him- self up as their judge, he naturally enough finds them woefully inadequate.
It would be impertinent to inquire what he finds so admirable about the eastern sages to whom he has fled for refuge. But what he has not done is to provide an answer to some of the very difficult ques- tions to which the Bishop of Durham has devoted what, for the sake of politeness, we must call his mind. Many people do find it extremely difficult to believe in God, and to believe in the faith once delivered. The Anglican bishops, with inevitable lack of success, have tried to give plausible reli- gious answers to devastatingly difficult, and at times destructive, questions. We want better answers than poor old Jenkins and his like have been able to provide. We are not convinced that the 'Resurrection faith' which Dr Jenkins shares with St Paul could have glowed with such unquenchable fire had the tomb not been empty, and the body been 'pinched'. We ask, and ask. We do not always expect answers. But I am certainly not convinced that the best way of escaping the difficulties which confront the Church of England is to embrace the errors of older and more alien traditions. The sort of balance which we want, between the requirements of orthodoxy and the need for intellectual freedom, has been more and more apparent in the recent pro- nouncements of Dr Runcie. Many Angli- cans have said to me that they are glad of the 'Durham affair' because the implausi- ble nature of Dr Jenkins's doubts has led them to a renewed trust in the old faith. I hear something of this in the Archbishop of Canterbury, who wobbled a little in the early years of his pontificate but who now emerges as a leader of real spiritual sta- ture. If there was a Durham affair (and I suspect it was the invention of journalists) I am glad to number myself among the wishy-washies who, neither in Jerusalem nor on 'this mountain', are attempting to worship in spirit and in truth.
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