Festival of the Cathedral Friends
Evensong, 19th September 2004
Readings: Ezra 1
Jn. 7: 14 – 36
You cannot live in the United States of America for long without coming up against a phenomenon that the non-U.S. citizen finds it very difficult to get inside. I refer to the Civil War, which tore through the sovereign states of the North and South, tragically ranged against each other, for four years, between 1861 and 1865. Americans keep revisiting ‘the War’, as they call it, as we discovered for ourselves when we lived as a family in the mid-West for five months in 1983. The spate of recent films, like Cold Mountain, Gods and Generals, and Gettysburg (which is about the decisive battle fought there in 1863), reinforces this apparent need to pick away at the causes and consequences of the conflict. On the surface, it was all about slavery, but it wasn’t: President Abraham Lincoln was for a time wobbly and condoned it, and there were many southerners, too, who were against it. A more accurate analysis must include factors such as the wealthy cultured south, and the industrial north. The alleged rights and wrongs apart, the Civil War, and the need to heal hurt memories, look set fair to be ripe for more history writing – and more films – for a long time to come.
Civil war is, essentially, about different groups fighting for supremacy within a nation. But it can be usefully extended to other organisations as well – the Church included. We have known countless civil wars of a theological kind. Every time I recite the words ‘one in being with the Father’ in the Creed, I am reminded of the rivers of ink and acres of misunderstanding (sometimes two growth industries in the Christian community!) that led to the formulation and the agreement through the fourth and fifth centuries of how to express the way in which Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. The practical ‘down to earth’ instinctively anti-intellectual Anglican, who is not too interested in theology, and wants a faith that somehow ‘works’, simply cannot dodge the fact that Christians do disagree, and disagree over important matters; and need to work away at those disagreements – unless, that is, another theological civil war is to break out.
September 19th is the Feast of St. Theodore of Canterbury – who found himself, by a total surprise, made Archbishop of Canterbury in 666. The times, as they say, were difficult – even bad. St. Augustine had established his base at Canterbury, the capital of the east Saxons, in 597; and Birinus was one of a number of missionaries who had arrived on the south coast in the intervening time. But there were real problems facing the Church – as there always are. In 666, it was a theological civil war between Irish Celtic Christians and those of a Roman disposition. There were real differences between them about many of things, from the way Easter was calculated, to the role of the monastery in Christian mission. Each side was as fervent as the other; and the Synod of Whitby in 664 had only settled some of these matters on paper, in the context of theoretical agreement. Much more local power-brokering had yet to be done.
So who should take over at Canterbury? Had there been journalists at the time, ready bets would have been placed on familiar candidates. In Rome, however, careful advice was taken, particularly as the candidate favoured by the kings of Northumbria and Kent had just died. In the end, the job went to a complete outsider. His name was Theodore, who came from Tarsus, St. Paul’s birthplace, in Cilicia in the East. He was already 65 years old, and not yet even a priest. After being ordained and consecrated, he left Rome with his entourage, and on arrival at Canterbury, set about the quiet re-organisation of the English Church. What was his secret? Being a good pastor and good scholar, he set up a school at Canterbury, which from the start was open to Irish Celtic students as well as those in the south and east attuned to Roman ways. He founded new dioceses, and went out of his way not to side with Roman missionary bishops when they were in dispute with Celts; St. Wilfrid, no less, was a casualty of that policy. Most interestingly of all, Theodore brought something of the flavour of Eastern Christianity to England, which for obvious geographical reasons could easily have been cut off from the mainland of Europe. This should be no surprise, because Theodore found himself in Rome in the first place as a refugee from Arab invasions, along with many others, who brought their books and learning along with them. Theodore was in every sense a cosmopolitan foreigner, and the school he founded at Canterbury, in effect a mixture of an FE college and a faculty of theology, was imbued with the atmosphere of this much travelled man of learning. There can be little doubt that this was a factor in gaining the confidence of the two main facets of English Christianity, the Celtic and the Roman-British for that remarkable man who managed to survive at Canterbury from his 65th until his 88th year, in a climate both meteorologically and theologically quite different from his native Tarsus.
What do we learn from putting the American Civil War alongside Theodore? There are, indeed, tensions in the world-wide Anglican Communion, just as there are in the Roman Catholic Church, though they are more carefully concealed. From what one reads in the newspapers, it’s all about sex; but it is about far more, and includes money and power, as well as historic rivalries between different parts of the world, for example, Africa and America. How I wish it took as long today for news to travel from one part of the world to another as it did in the seventh century, because it would enable us to cool down a bit! But the clock, as they say, cannot be turned back. As I put these two different scenarios together, America from 1861 – 1865, and England from 666 – 690, three observations come to mind.
First, conflict has been part of the life of the Church from the very beginning – as witness the rows the first Christians had over circumcision at the time of St. Peter and St. Paul, which is recounted in the Acts of the Apostles. We should not be surprised at these rows – the trouble is that we invariably are. If we were less surprised, we might take heart from some of our forebears in the faith, and spend more time and energy locating exactly where the disagreements lie.
Secondly, we need to be far more ready to recognise where differences are more cultural than theological. I recall a meeting of my Bible Study Group at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, when the dozen or so bishops from all over the world I was with began to be rather more frank with each other. In the face of some, shall we say, cultural ecclesiastical assertiveness from Nigeria, one of us said something along the following lines: ‘we in Europe are tired of being told we are being unfaithful to the gospel. Of course, we wouldn’t last five minutes in Nigeria, but nor would you if you came to work here.’
Thirdly, there is the question of the role of bishops. Theodore came as a total outsider to an inflamed atmosphere, and somehow managed to get different groups to work together, without them spending every moment of every day having to talk about their disagreements. In our own day, we are in danger of turning the office of bishop, which is about representing the wider Church in the local context, into a leader with whom we have always to agree on every single point of detail; and if we don’t agree formally with them, we have to find another. In that whole area of diversity, historic Christianity has always held a special place for the bishop and his Cathedral, a focal place for a focal ministry, where diversity can gather for worship and prayer, and preaching, in the atmosphere of honest enquiry.
Let me conclude with a brief comment on tonight’s two readings. First, we have King Cyrus of Persia allowing the Israelites to return home, to Jerusalem; and then we have Jesus teaching in the holiest place in Jerusalem, the Temple. Perhaps we in our generation are being called to return to base, not as aimless exiles, but as pilgrims, a ‘leaner, fitter Church’, as KAIROS tries to describe us. That way, we may be enabled to turn down the volume of distracting counter-claims on our attention, those voices that are too nostalgic to bear the marks of faith, in order to listen to the challenging words of the Master – in a school of discipleship where there is always more to learn and more to digest, and where all our theological civil wars can be faced down, and in time healed.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
