Source: Religious Intelligence
By: Andrew Carey
According to Murphy ’s Law the only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire. For the authors of last week’s ‘Covenant’, in which a group of leading evangelicals made a bid for alternative Episcopal oversight, it was relatively easy to duck the shrill rhetoric of Inclusive Church, but less easy to deflect the aggrieved criticisms of fellow evangelicals, including the open evangelical grouping Fulcrum who were armed with a secret weapon – Bishop NT Wright.
The Bishop of Durham was both angry and devastating in an essay which tore into the Covenant line-by-line. In the first place, this wasn’t a Covenant, in a legal sense, which implied an agreement between two sides, nor in a theological sense.
He poured scorn on the idea that consultations had been wide enough and criticised the drafting. The theological sections of the covenant, he suggested, were largely motherhood and apple pie, hiding a real ecclesiology which was essentially congregational.
Bishop Wright’s response to the Covenant is not comfortable reading – it gives the whole episode of the covenant and the reaction to it, the air of a car wreck. Anglicans from outside the evangelical tradition must feel they are intruding on personal family grief when they read his words. “I am bound to see this move as a cynical stab in the side from people I thought were friends and allies – and who, when it suits them, have tried to invoke me as such in return.”
He asks ‘why now, why this?’ Heterodox theology has been a characteristic of the Church of England for generations, and Bishop Wright points back to the days of Maurice Wiles and Denis Nineham, the “all-time low water mark of Anglican ‘thinking’.”
He adds, “That might have been the time to protest – and some of us did, and have continued to do so, not least in the normal Anglican way, by preaching the gospel and out-thinking bad theology with good”. The important thing, he argues, is that the doctrine and teaching of the Church of England has not changed to necessitate the covenant with its demands for alternative Episcopal oversight.
On the specific question of oversight, he notes the irony of the evangelical tradition for much of its history ignoring Bishops, and now demanding only ‘Godly’ ones. “Yes there is a crisis over the fundamentals of revealed truth. Yes, there is a crisis over some pressing moral issues of our day. But the new mood of intolerance, and of crying ‘victim’ just because someone disagrees with you (welcome to postmodern culture, refracted through would-be evangelical pietism!), means that now some ‘justifiably consider that their communion with their bishop is impaired’.”
Bishop Wright pleads for a theology of what it means to be in ‘impaired communion’. “I don’t recall anyone in the classic evangelicalism of even 20 years ago ever using such phrases, though goodness knows there were dodgy bishops around here and there, more so in fact than now.” And so he continues for some 6000 words in passionate, and somewhat intemperate words. My first response on reading his essay was at once, how brilliant, and how sad.
Firstly, brilliance, because he does uncover some uncomfortable truths. Since Robert Runcie in the late 1980s called on evangelicals to develop an ecclesiology the faultlines have been clear. Evangelicals have often had a purely functional view of episcopacy and an essentially congregationalist outlook. The alternative, it seems, has been to adopt a catholic ecclesiology and many evangelicals have done so. But we haven’t moved forward together on this issue and with the Anglican crisis upon us there can be absolutely no basic agreement among evangelicals on the way ahead.
My sadness comes from the fact that the evangelical movement in the Church of England – always fissiparous at the edges – is now probably split irrevocably. Such is the bitterness over the covenant with some evangelicals even likening the so-called ‘Covenant evangelicals’ to Hizbollah that I fear there’s no way back. Bishop Wright will find it hard to take his words back and provide unifying leadership.
Even more depressing is the fact that evangelicals can’t agree on the issues. Fulcrum and Bishop Wright ask, why now? I’m surprised that the answer eludes them. The liberal theologies of the 1960s and 1970s did not become the official teaching of the Church of England, whereas the House of Bishops pastoral advice on civil partnerships effectively accepts and normalises ‘gay marriage’ for Anglican clergy and laity.
As a result a number of evangelical parishes are in dispute with their bishops, and this number is likely to increase. The ‘covenant’, imperfectly named and drafted, acts merely as a temporary solution to the problem – you can believe its authors or not on this point. The misnamed ‘covenant’ is as legitimate an act of protest as any to highlight the fact that the Church of England is in danger of sleep-walking toward liberal oblivion.
Andrew Carey is a columnist on The Church of England Newspaper