The Church hesitant
Andrew Gimson sympathises with the bishops struggling with the question of Gene Robinson. Confusion is normal in a Christian, he says The Anglican Church is much stronger than one would imagine from reading about it in the press, and can be expected to surmount its present difficulties within a century or two. Its spiritual life, in which the greater part of its strength resides, is dismissed as entirely un-newsworthy, a judgment made easier by the modest and unfashionable demeanour of so many of its members. The Church is instead treated by the media as a political story, with a battle for control reported to be raging between 'conservatives' and 'liberals', who may soon split into completely separate factions. This would still, admittedly, be rather arid material, but for the emergence of a sexual angle. A hitherto obscure clergyman called Canon Gene Robinson has sprung to wider attention because after divorcing his wife, with whom he had two daughters, and living for the last 13 years with another man, he has had the temerity to be elected bishop of New Hampshire, where he is expected to be consecrated on 2 November. The question we Anglicans are supposed to answer is whether we approve of a practising homosexual becoming a bishop.
It is an immensely tiresome question, but one to which in the course of this article I intend to offer some sort of answer. First, however, let me observe that an answer can only be attempted if one understands something of the Anglican tradition. No one knows that tradition better than Dr Rowan Williams, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, which is one reason why he is outstandingly well-suited to cope with the present difficulties. My own knowledge of the tradition is pitiful by comparison, an eclectic and eccentric mixture of half-remembered phrases. I love Sir Thomas Browne: 'Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.' Certainly the election of Canon Robinson would have seemed until the last few years an utter impossibility.
I also draw consolation — the feebler and lazier kind of Anglican, like myself, does not deny his longing for consolation — from the Thirty-Nine Articles, printed at the back of the Book of Common Prayer, and particularly from Article XXVI, headed 'Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacrament'. It begins:
Although in the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ's, and do minister by his commission and authority, we may use their Ministry, both in hearing the Word of God, and in the receiving of the Sacraments.
It is not my intention to imply that Canon Robinson is 'evil', but these words offer some comfort to any Anglican who detects something less than perfection in his clergy. Yet the end of Article XXVI is less accommodating to such ministers:
Nevertheless, it appertaineth to the discipline of the Church, that enquiry be made of evil Ministers, and that they be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences; and finally being found guilty, by just judgment he deposed.
We are at once reminded that the Anglican tradition often encompasses elements which a simple logic-chopper might find hard to reconcile. We are also reminded that the Anglican Church has often been divided by questions which, like the present one, take on an unpleasantly political character. The Thirty-Nine Articles date from the mid-16th century, but were reprinted in the 1662 Prayer Book with a preface by Charles I, who saw it as part of his duty as Supreme Governor of the Church 'not to suffer unnecessary Disputations, Altercations, or Questions to be raised, which may nourish Faction both in the Church and Commonwealth'.
Charles J failed so lamentably to quell the growth of faction that he had his head chopped off. It is hard to imagine Dr Williams failing to quite the same extent, though I suppose we should rule nothing out and the unfortunate Canon Robinson is reported to be under police protection after receiving death threats, while some Anglicans in predominantly Muslim countries are said to be in danger of their lives if the Church gives its blessing to homosexuality. But Dr Williams has the advantage of playing a much weaker hand than Charles I, which makes his scope for error considerably smaller. It is rightly assumed that the Anglican Church will have to cope with the homosexuality issue on its own, without significant help from outside.
The 37 Anglican primates who met last week at Lambeth issued a statement that cannot be commended as a piece of English prose, but which nevertheless contains a number of very reasonable sentiments. They point out that 'what we hold in common is much greater than that which divides us', and acknowledge that the unity of the Church is threatened 'in a world already confused in areas of sexuality, morality and theology'. They go on to reaffirm the resolution made at the Lambeth Conference in 1998, especially its emphasis on the need 'to listen to the experience of homosexual persons and . . . to assure them that they are loved by God and that all baptised, believing and faithful persons, regardless of sexual orientation, are full members of the Body of Christ'; and they acknowledge the need for 'further study on questions of human sexuality'.
But then they come to the nub of their statement, which is to reproach the Diocese of New Westminster. in Canada, which in May this year sanctioned samesex unions, and the Episcopal Church of the United States, which has backed Canon Robinson's forthcoming consecration, for attempting 'to alter unilaterally the teaching of the Anglican Communion'. The primates further observe that in most provinces of the Church 'the election of Canon Gene Robinson would not have been possible since his chosen lifestyle would give rise to a canonical impediment to his consecration as bishop'.
This is the best answer the leaders of the Anglican communion can give at present to the question of whether they approve of a practising homosexual becoming a bishop, and is surely the answer which anyone who sets an overriding value on the unity of the Church must give. But as the bishops themselves recognise, they are not able to give a final answer. The world — particularly, one may say, the Western world — is very confused about sex, and one can hardly blame the Church for being confused and uncertain too. Confusion is a normal Christian frame of mind: as Dr Williams has himself observed, in the first centuries after Christ doctrine did not emerge in a vacuum but was 'learned, negotiated, betrayed, inched forward, discerned and risked'. Not until the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD did the Church settle its incarnational doctrine, and as Rupert Shortt points out (in Rowan Williams — An Introduction, published this year by Darton, Longman & Todd), `for Williams, a crucial insight is that those termed heretics at this gathering [i.e., Nicaea] were essentially conservative in outlook (and arguably more faithful to the letter of Scripture) while greater originality and daring was displayed by those we call orthodox'.
Orthodoxy is not as safe as we might assume. It can lead to surprising and novel conclusions. But the second, wider point is that failure can be valuable: mistakes can be far more instructive than an effortless series of 'correct' answers.
Here we have one of the great strengths of the Anglican Church, though it is almost invariably seen as a weakness, The Church is able — indeed is obliged — to make its own mind up. It is subject to all sorts of influences, spiritual and temporal, it generally sees itself as part of a much larger whole and it does not wish to ruin its relations either with the rest of Christendom or with other faiths, but it possesses a kind of independence. Since the 16th century, Anglicans have conducted a conversation which springs from Roman Catholic roots, but which is independent of Rome. This is a more dangerous, more undisciplined, but perhaps also more fruitful way of proceeding. Having protested against couching religious arguments in political terms, I cannot resist doing the same myself. The value of sovereignty, whether for a nation or a Church, is that it leaves you free to make your own mistakes, and to learn from them. The setting up of a new legal framework, giving the Anglican communion greater power to uphold decisions made at Lambeth, may, incidentally, be one of the rather unsettling lessons drawn by the primates from the go-it-alone behaviour of the American liberals.
My liberal Anglican friends are convinced that Canon Robinson is showing us the way forward, and that in time the Church will bless same-sex unions. I am not so sure, but then I am a conservative of a very timid disposition and am generally disconcerted by almost any change. I accept that the Church's teaching on questions like usury, slavery and women priests has changed in ways which earlier generations would have found very strange. But I cannot help admiring the much-maligned Nigerian Anglicans for their conservative outlook. There is something so staunch and, in Western terms, so unfashionable about them, and to dismiss them all as homophobes is evasive and unkind.
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