I have written two posts about the parlous state of the Church of England. The first, Any future for the Church of England, Part I, looked at the diagnosis given in the recent book That Was The Church That Was. It considered a set of recommendations made by the book’s authors that might help to put things right, if the will exists to do so. The second post, Any Future for the Church of England, Part II, told of a not dissimilar set of recommendations made, as long ago as 1962, by J. A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, and some associates, in their symposium Layman’s Church.
That Was The Church That Was begins its story in 1986, when the church was still being run by pipe-smoking liberal bishops with a laid-back sense of entitlement to lead. They were aware of an impending conflict with the new Thatcherite establishment, but nothing like ready enough for the Kulturkampf that was to follow over women priests and gay clergy. Just as England was waking up to the destruction of the post-war political consensus, so the Church was about to undergo the dissolution of that broad consensus across the spectrum of churchmanship that the Church of England was the church for the whole nation.
I am wondering what went wrong between 1962, when the Robinsonites were so optimistic and buoyant, and 1986, when Robert Runcie, in mid-career at Canterbury, was falling out with the Government over the Faith in the City report.
I suppose you could argue that Robinson and people like him were contributors to the disaster. Having posed constructive challenges to the Church to recover its true nature as a body of lay people, assisted and represented by clergy, why did Robinson have to go on and write Honest to God in 1963? Wasn’t that a really destructive blow to people’s faith and to the authority and unity of the Church?
I don’t think so. Some of the clerical establishment and their clericalized associates may have been upset by it. But lay Christians in their hundreds wrote to Robinson to thank him for recognizing and validating the doubts and difficulties that undermined their allegiance to the Church but which they had felt unable to admit to. Robinson said that the book was written in order to make the thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich available to ordinary people. It was treating lay Christians as adults, able to think sensibly about theology, rather than as children whose thinking must be directed by the clergy. So Robinson’s book was quite in keeping with the principles of Layman’s Church: it crossed the so-called ‘clergy line’, putting power into the hands of the laity. Doubt about doctrine was already there; Robinson merely brought it into the open and allowed people to be ‘honest to God’.
Robinson died in 1983, just before the fateful year when That Was The Church That Was begins its story. Towards the end of his life, in 1977, a collection of his essays called On Being The Church In The World was reissued for the third time. These had been written in the 1950s and first published in 1960. In the Preface to the second edition, published in 1970, he quoted from the 1960 Preface, and surveyed what had happened in the intervening decade. This preface was reprinted in the 1977 edition with a further look backwards in the Preface and Epilogue. Piecing these fragments together we get some clues to the way things developed in those years before the 1980s.
The 1960 preface expresses both Robinson’s characteristic optimism and a significant warning in a pair of sentences:
The conception of ‘being the Church’, as opposed simply to ‘going to Church’, is one that has brought new vision and vitality to many a congregation in recent years. But the rallying cry ‘let the Church be the Church!’ can be perilous if it turns the Church in upon itself and allows it to forget that it exists always and only as an instrument of the Kingdom.
We’ll come back to this shortly.
In the 1970 preface Robinson can be almost heard gasping. He quotes himself predicting, in a 1959 Confirmation sermon, great things about to happen: ‘we may be at the turning of the tide’, but goes on
How wrong can one be? The tide was indeed imperceptibly on the turn. But 1960 was to represent the high-water mark not the low-water mark!
The C of E in the fifties had been putting its house in order: but, as he says
This can be an inward-looking preoccupation. It can allow us to evade the question whether what we live in is the right or relevant house or indeed whether we should be living in a house of our own at all. For if the first task of the Church is, like its Master, to be the servant of the world, then the first mark of a servant is that he lives in the house of another.
Then, in the Epilogue to the 1977 edition he looks back over twenty-five years and sees a very mixed picture; one or two points stand out.
Talking about the ‘new morality’ and the radical publications of the 1960s like Honest to God he says ‘the opportunity was largely lost. Overall there has been no “new reformation”.’ Surveying changes in patterns of ministry he says ‘I observe that the radicals of the ’60s have not become the leaders of the ’70s.’ But, he adds
The vital question, I believe, is whether this [change] will mean further clericalization of laity (male or female) or a declericalization of the priesthood of the whole people of God.
And in the Preface to this edition he speaks of ‘that travelling light with which the Church must be prepared to face the ’80s’.
Robinson’s first warning about inward-looking church activity would seem to me to have been prophetic. All branches of the church by concentrating mainly on their core values have effectively lost touch with the world they are meant to be part of. His cri de coeur about the failure of radicalism may be a clue to how and why this has happened. His second warning, about clericalization, has also come to pass with a vengeance. The most important change, namely the ordination of women (which he over-optimistically expected to happen by 1987), vital though it was, only served to clericalize more of the laity instead of declericalizing the Church. And ‘travelling light’, whatever exactly he meant by it, does not seem in any significant way to have been the flavour of the 1980s.
But he had already said it all in Honest to God, six paragraphs from the end (pp. 139–140).
Anything that helps to keep [the Church of England’s] frontiers open to the world as the Church of the nation should be strengthened and reformed: anything that turns it in upon itself as a religious organization or episcopalian sect I suspect and deplore. For the true radical is not the man [sic] who wants to root out the tares from the wheat so as to make the Church perfect: it is only too easy to reform the Church into a walled garden. The true radical is the man who continually subjects the Church to the judgement of the Kingdom, to the claims of God in the increasingly non-religious world which the Church exists to serve.
Certainly the first two of these three sentences chime very closely with the message of That Was The Church That Was.
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