In a post we published a few days ago ( Orthodoxy and Me ), Pradusz wrote among other things:
I wish that we were able, like we sometimes (perhaps also too rarely?) are able to confront Roman Catholicism with another model – “the reformed Catholicism”, to say also that we have our own Anglican model of orthodoxy, our own vision of what orthodoxy can and should be.
Even though not much time passed since we wrote that post, we were asked a few times what actually is that “Anglican model of orthodoxy”. Instead of trying to describe it on our own, we decided to quote an author to whom we already have referred on the blog a few times, the Very Rev. Dr. Alan Jones . The below fragment comes from his excellent book Common Prayer on Common Ground. A Vision of Anglican Orthodoxy .
Our orthodoxy cannot do without language but language alone is inadequate, so when we speak of God we should speak humbly and haltingly, for the God who is revealed in Christ is still a mystery. But, let’s be clear: Anglican orthodox theology is not without content. It insists that this transcendent God is real. God is not simply an idea – not even a good one. Belief isn’t something made up from our heads. Because words are inadequate doesn’t mean that there is no objective reality or that we have nothing to say.
Instead, Anglican orthodoxy holds two truths before us in tension and insists that these truths are held together. It is not a matter of either-or but of both-and. Gregory Palamas, the fourteenth-century monk and theologian, wrote that “the most venerable theologians – Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Maximus – teach us two things. First they tell us that the divine essence is incommunicable; then, that it is in some way communicable: they tell us that we participate in the nature of God, and that we do not participate in it at all. We must, therefore, hold both assertions, and set them together as the rule of the true faith.” Two truths are the very backbone of our orthodoxy: one, God is inexhaustible and unknowable; and two, this inexhaustible and unknowable God has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. According to Gregory, even though we cannot “know” God, we can experience the divine through sacraments and mystical prayer.
The late Henri de Lubac , S.J., wrote of the same fundamental paradox when it comes to our self-understanding. Human nature has an unstable
“‘ontological constitution’ which makes it at once something greater and something less than itself. Hence that kind of dislocation, that mysterious lameness, due not merely to sin, but primarily and more fundamentally to be a creature made out of nothing which, astoundingly, touches God … At once, and inextricably both “nothing” and “image”; fundamentally nothing, yet nonetheless substantially image.”
For de Lubac, Catholicism is social at the very heart of its mystery and dogma. But it is Trinitarian. There is an equal emphasis on solitude and solidarity, mysticism and community. There are solitary and social dimensions to being human. The source of both is God. The crucial place of solitude is in the emergence of selfhood.
The trouble is that in times of stress and controversy we cannot bear the paradox at the heart of our faith. We become impatient with the mystery at its heart. We are intolerant of contradiction. Henri de Lubac’s classic text “The Mystery of the Supernatural” is one for our times. He calls us to struggle to hold the contradictions – authority and freedom, Bible and church, the Word eternal yet begotten, a finality that has no end—together. “A synthesis indeed; but for our natural intellect, it is a synthesis of paradox before being one of enlightenment.”
We are at each other’s throats when we should be on our knees before the Christian mystery. We see something of the theological intelligence and spiritual depth of a de Lubac in the Anglican tradition in, for example, someone like John Donne, who understood our unstable ontological constitution, the dislocation, the mysterious lameness, what it was to be at once both nothing and image. It is impossible for those of us for whom paradox is a fire that burns within us to slip into an easy conceptualizing of reality, to transmute faith into a few propositions. The temptation is to come to an easy solution by coming down on one side of the mystery or the other: A human being is either nothing or image; we can’t be both. Orthodoxy demands we hold both in tension. That’s why orthodoxy, properly understood, is an open and dynamic way of believing—a spiritual adventure.
Dr. Alan Jones
John Donne’s Anglicanism exhibited a compassionate detachment to “see all things despoyl’d of fallacies.” This involved hard intellectual discipline. Since intellect and emotion, in Donne, were so contracted that one infused and informed the other, the discipline of the intellect involved the stripping of the self. Stripping the intellect of pedantry and mere cleverness could be done only by a spirit that was recollected in meditation, in prayer, in spiritual discipline. Without that stripping down, the theologian becomes a “spungie slacke Divine,” an intellectual and spiritual parasite, a plagiarist of the soul, living vicariously off the hard-won scholarship and the soul’s anguish of others.
Anglican orthodoxy, therefore, begins and ends in prayer, in silence before the mystery. It is not anti-intellectual but insists on the joining of intellect with emotion, of praying, as the Eastern tradition has it, with the mind in the heart.
True orthodoxy requires freedom. Belief cannot be coerced. My first test of anyone’s orthodoxy is a question: “If you were in charge, would l be safe? Would there be room for me?” If the answer is yes, we can argue with love in our eyes. John Henry Newman wrote, “it was absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.” Newman is an important figure for us because he champions for both Anglicans and Roman Catholics a view of doctrine that is always mysterious because our information is incomplete. Doctrine is the first word, not the last word, about the mystery. It is a platform from which we can leap into it. For Newman, mystery was the badge and emblem of orthodoxy. “No revelation can be complete and systematic . . . Religious Truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together.” Revelation is the disclosure of mystery. This is the key. Again, this isn’t reveling in ambiguity but rather has practical implications. We cannot, from this, build a theological system as an instrument of power with which to bully and bludgeon others.
We are, if you will, Erasmian Catholics. In a letter to Cardinal Campegio early in 1529, Erasmus wrote:
“Every definition is a misfortune …True religion is peace, and we cannot have peace unless we leave the conscience unshackled on obscure points – If we want the truth, every man ought to be free to say what he thinks without fear. If the advocates of one side are to be rewarded with mitres and the advocates of the other with rope or stakes truth will not be heard.”
Having said that, I am conservative in that I am committed to the fundamental tenets of the catholic and apostolic faith of the undivided Christian Church. I’m not free to make it up as I go along. As Peter Carnley insists, “[Orthodoxy] has nothing to do with the liberalism of the post-Enlightenment Western world which would leave all matters of belief and value to be decided by the autonomous individual. [We are] suspicious of the overconfident use of reason that characterizes liberalism in its quest to accommodate faith to the wisdom of the world.” St. Gregory of Nyssa, like Gregory Palamas, reminds us that “we know that He is, but deny not that we are ignorant of the definition of His essence.”
With this as the foundation of our orthodoxy, we shouldn’t be surprised that Anglicans don’t take to infallibility very well – whether it be that of the pope or the Bible. The Bible is very much a polarizing agent in this current climate. There are Bible-believing Christians and the rest of us. This doesn’t get us very far, because it begs the question of interpretation. Archbishop Carnley puts it bluntly:
“To claim that only those who promiscuously skate over differences and discrepancies in the texts can really be regarded as ‘Bible-believing’ is offensive to those who believe that the true message of the Bible can only be discerned, not by following the letter, but with the help of the Spirit, as the Word of God is discerned in and through the diversity of faith perspectives found within the canon of scripture.”
The sad state of affairs now is that those who think that they are the only ones who take the Bible seriously as the literal Word of God dump the rest of us in the “liberal” camp.
Archbishop Peter F. Carnley
We must never forget that for Anglicans, theology always gives way to the impulse to worship. We move into prayer and into silence. It’s no wonder that we’ve spent more time producing prayer books than defining doctrines. Mystery, silence, conversation, freedom leads us to worship. Theology can be done only on our knees.
There is yet another characteristic of Anglican orthodoxy. We believe that we don’t stand before the world as if we have nothing to learn. We do not have the answer to every conceivable question. We feel no pressure to keep on correcting others. As Peter Carnley eloquently puts it:
“We can live comfortably with diversity because we acknowledge that all attempts to express the divine will in some way fall short of absolute truth. We do not approach the practice of religion, therefore, as though it involved having all the answers, because we do not see life primarily as a problem to be solved. Rather we see ourselves as being on an open-ended journey into a future to which we are called by God, a journey of faith and hope, in which there is always something new to learn, a mind-set to be expanded, a perception of things to be stretched, a deeper wisdom to be discerned.
This is progressive and dynamic orthodoxy.”
Source : Alan Jones, “Common Prayer on Common Ground”, 2006, p. 76-79.
