The Church's abdication
C. H. Sisson
Having now pushed aside the Book of Common Prayer, the Synod of the Church of England, in its session last week, turned its attention to less important matters.For, although the full consequences are yet to appear, nothing could be more important, to the Church's continuing identity, than the Prayer Book. In their passion for style — a modern style, they were ill-informed enough to say — the authorities seem to have forgotten that for the Church to lose her corsets was to lose her shape. I dare say, however, that with their other ruling passion for a hasty ecumenicism, they welcomed this inelegance. The truth none the less is that the Prayer Book contains a whole system for living in the world — in this realm of England for which it is designed — and if one does not have that system one has to have another, and that other has not yet been adumbrated. No wonder so many ordinary Anglicans, men of no vision, are . puzzled.
The meetings of Synod throw into uneasy prominence the ordinary corporate problems of the Church – the problems of politics and polity which the Prayer Book, put together under real pressures and not in the frivolous spirit of so many current reforms, solved so deftly that the business of re-defining them in the contemporary context has been funked or perhapg merely ignored. Of course the loosening of ties with the state has long been gleefully welcomed by those who see in the growing dissociation a mark of sanctity as well as of liberty, but the giggling should be suppressed for things are not as simple as that. This church is still called the Church of England and one might have some reservations about the exuberance of the Bishop of Guildford, for whom 'what is becoming important on the world scene is also appropriate in England: A little more admission of myopia might bring discussions nearer the ground.
The political fallacy which rages most strongly in this recently-liberated — or recently disoriented – Church of England is that there is or might be such a thing as a church without political trammels. One might say, with all deference to Thomas a Becket, that this notion of a possible independence of the church is but a version, writ horribly large, of the extreme liberal fallacy that individualopinion is always right and the state is always wrong. The most ineluctable of political trammels, however, are not those laid upon churches by the state but those they are subject to merely because of their nature as institutions. There is no acting as a body without acting politically. There are the horrors of internal government, exemplified in the Synod itself, and one need do no more than point to a remark of the Bishop of Truro – certainly oneof the most clear-headed of the bench of bishops – in the course of the present session: 'The matter before us cannot be settled by the counting of heads.' The counting of heads must always threaten to drive the Church to compromise – a situation which may be well enough for a lay government, which tries merely to get by, but which must raise rather fundamental questions about the real nature of a body which has more august pretensions.
Of course, difficulties of this kind are not peculiar to the Church of England or its Synod, but these institutions are peculiarly vulnerable because they have committed themselves to the absurdity of a largely democratic assembly giving itself the airs of a government – rather as if the House of Commons tried to function without Crown or Ministers or government departments. That such a body is more or less at the mercy of the bureaucrats and committee-men operating in the neighbourhood must be obvious, and no doubt a little plotting with Chufch House helps on causes whether good or bad. There are also inescapable external complications about the Church of England's position as a political body, and these show up comically in relation to our Big Brother the Pope. For while the Church of England has been busy demoting itself to the status of a sect, the Pope has been exploiting the possibilities the media offer to his far-flung empire in order to strengthen his political impact to a point which would have been sharply contested in the days when there were Catholic monarchies to recognise the power struggle for what it is. Well might The Times, a paper not notoriously critical of papal manoeuvres, report that 'there was general agreement' in Synod that the Pope's visit 'was an occasion for warmth rather than for euphoria.' Of the subjects which engaged the Synod at this session, the most important was, unquestionably, that of the proposals for a covenant with the Methodist, United Reformed and Moravian churches. The Synod's characteristic conclusion was to authorise a further step in the direction proposed, but not by a majority which would have left the final outcome beyond reasonable doubt. An interesting feature of this debate was the appeal by the Bishop of Guildford, in a speech which apparently did not mention the Prayer Book, to the authority of the Alternative Service Book – that mistress who has been introduced into the house doing the honours while the lawful wife was locked in her private sitting-room. The outsider could only gather that the Church of England has abandoned its claim to be the historic Church in this kingdom, and that the social separatism of the Reformed and Methodist bodies has with the passage of time given them a theological justification which would have surprised the Wesleys. It is rather as if the Church of England itself claimed no historical lineage further back than the administrative separation from Rome in the 16th century, or as if it were determined in the interests of equality and fraternity to make nothing of it. It all seems very odd, and the scheme bears the marks of opportunist botching, even if that botching now has quite a history of its own. Perhaps at the back of some of the protagonists' minds is a dubious identification of 'visible' with administrative unity, and surely it is strange that, at a time when the Church of England is further than it ever was from making plain to its ordinarY members what it believes, it should propose the assimilation of greater uneertainties. The mirage of '1,000 million people of many different races and cultures' said to be 'baptised members of the body of Christ' is perhaps distracting to those engaged in local business. Still, the question of what people here and now actually know and believe is of some importance, if a church is a congregation of faithful people. One cannot but have sympathy for the minoritY in Synod who cannot accept the separation of questions of order and arrangement froin matters of faith. Apart from the proposals for a covenant with Protestant dissenters, the main sub' jects discussed at this session of Synod were some matters of ecclesiastical discipline in relation to marriage, and a report of the Church's Board on Homosexual Relations. That neither subject was regarded as readY for definitive treatment need surprise no one. A cynic might say that what the Church is asking itself, in a, complicated way, i5 whether it should follow the drift of the times, and if so how fast. Every precaution is required, for these are concerns in which people are most ready to prefer themselves to the Church. It is not so much what people do, as what they say about it, that has, changed with the century. The standard °' acceptability in the past could seem t° emanate from the Church, but it is now clear to everyone that the real determinant is social practice. Where does that leave the Church? No polite person now refers to extra-marital relations of any stability as fornication, but what exactly is one to make \ of a service of blessing – as talked of and to some extent actually used – for what must be ranked ecclesiastically as second class cohabitations? It is just kindness, perhaps, and that is something, as those outside the Church would be the first to admit, in their Pelagian way, So conscious of fashion has. the Church become, in sexual as in other matters, that many are left wondering whether it is not so much set against the world as following the world's teaching, but at a respectful distance.
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