Diocesan Synod Presidential Address - June 2004
'One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church'
Much of the buzz around Portsmouth over the past few months has concerned the 60th Anniversary Commemoration of D-Day. I was privileged to take part in a number of events in Normandy just two weeks ago, and they brought home to me just how important these occasions are. But 2004 also marks a number of other anniversaries, and it is to four of these that I want to turn this morning, and to identify them with the ‘four marks’ of the Church as they are described in the Creed – One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic.
1. The Church is One.
This year is the 400th Anniversary of the Hampton Court Conference, which was the decisive moment at the start of the reign of King James I in developing the ethos of the Church of England. In the face of some pressure from the more Puritan wing for radical changes, the new King summoned a group of ‘divers bishops’ and other ‘learned men’ to meet in January 1604. Although there were disappointments on both sides in the debate, the upshot of the Conference was to establish a constructive middle ground, so that very few clergy indeed left the church. The result allowed honest and sincere disagreement within a shared religious settlement. This vision lay behind the Conference’s greatest legacy, the Authorised – or King James – Version of the Bible (1611). For not only was this a fine scholarly achievement in its day, but its compilation by 54 translators, working in a number of syndicates, illustrated the King’s determination to include as wide a range of theological opinion as possible within the Church of England. Perhaps this vision, and the traditional Anglican ability to play host to theological strangers and friends, is one we would do well to remember. The Kairos project, in particular, asks us to look across parish and other boundaries, for the greater good of our common mission and ministry, and not to turn inwards and away from one another. We may choose to identify ourselves with one or other parish or church-party. But God in Christ identifies himself with the whole of the human race. Whether we like it or not, we are baptised into one body, and not just into the bit of the body we find most congenial. That is the true basis of our unity in the gospel, a unity which has an inbuilt diversity – in Anglican terms made up of clusters of parishes forming a diocese, with the unity expressed both personally and symbolically in the Bishop.
2. The Church is Holy
This year is the centenary of the birth of Michael Ramsey, who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 until 1974. Around the time of Ramsey’s birth, there was a religious revival, mainly in the U.S.A., which was called the ‘Holiness Movement’. It centred on a belief that perfect sanctification takes place in a moment of spiritual crisis, a kind of purifying conversion experience. But unlike this rather dramatic and immediate approach to holiness, Ramsey knew that becoming holy – becoming like God – was a life’s work, which needed to be nurtured in prayer. One common definition of holiness is being set apart for God. In Ramsey’s life and work, this didn’t mean starting extreme sects or indeed setting up any individual as some kind of spiritual hero. Instead, it meant the simple, regular act of setting aside time to be with God, as he explained in an address to ordinands: ‘there is no by-passing the Psalmist’s wisdom, “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10) and there is no by-passing the example of our Lord … praying alone in a desert place a great while before day’. If the Church is holy, then it is holy only insofar as it reflects God’s beauty and perfection. That is why the Kairos project must be built on a firm foundation of prayer. Its success is not going to be measured according to the number of people in our pews, or the dazzling new – or not so new – services that we offer. It is about how transparent we have become to the love of God, as he reaches through us into the communities in which we live and work; and it doesn’t require some kind of pseudo-religiosity, which can be seen through in an instant. Rowan Williams often uses the word, ‘interiority’, by which he means a palpable sense that we are not in control of our lives, and shouldn’t try to be – because only God is.
3. The Church is Catholic
The same year and month as the D-Day landings, the German Lutheran Pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, kept up a regular correspondence with his friend Eberhard Bethge from the prison where the Nazis had placed him because of his opposition to the Third Reich. In a letter written on 27th June 1944, Bonhoeffer reflects on the Christian message of redemption and its relation to other religions and cultures. Unlike these others, Bonhoeffer argues, the Christian faith does not lift us out of the pain and suffering of this world, but plunges us ever more deeply into it. In dramatic style he declares, ‘This world must not be prematurely written off’. This means that while the call to be holy sets us apart from the selfish destructiveness of the world, the call to be Catholic – which means ‘universal’ - opens us up to all people and all places and all situations, in a fallen world. This is a paradox that Christians have struggled with from the time of the New Testament; it consists of a passionate attentiveness to what the beautiful Compline prayer calls the ‘changes and chances of this fleeting world’. That is why the Kairos project has a dual aspect. On the one hand, we have rooted Kairos in prayer and worship; on the other, we are going out into our communities to listen to their needs. Only when the two are held together will the mission of the Incarnate Christ be fulfilled in both Church and world. The Church ceases to be Catholic, not when the number of candles lit at services reaches an all time low, but when we cease to take the world seriously.
4. The Church is apostolic
Now to the fourth of this year’s anniversaries, which takes us all the way back to the year 404AD, when St Jerome first began the task of producing an accurate Latin translation of the Old Testament. Some years ago, a great theological buzzword was ‘resourcement’, a French term roughly translated as ‘returning to the sources’. The idea of ‘resourcement’ is that the Church is renewed by being in touch with its roots – roots embedded in the earliest witness to the risen Christ. For eleven centuries, the Western Church heard this apostolic witness in St Jerome’s Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, the ‘common edition’ written in the common language of commerce and academe, which was Latin. In its time, like anything new, it was highly controversial – Jerome’s knowledge of biblical sources included Hebrew, which meant putting right some faulty versions, particularly of the Psalms, that were in circulation at the time. In our Post-Enlightenment, Post-Modern world, it is to the biblical witness that all Christians turn. Through all the ups and downs of Christian history, it has been through returning to the sources that the Church has been strengthened and renewed. For this reason, Kairos involves taking us to essentials, and asking how what we believe about God affects what we think the Church should be doing, both now and in the future. The apostles were ‘sent’ – the meaning of ‘apostle’ - with a mission from God. So Kairos will help us – together, and not in isolation - to remain faithful to that ‘apostolic’ witness by recalling us to our spiritual roots, in order to learn what is really important, and what is not.
The Church is one, in spite of all our diversity. The Church is holy, because it is Christ’s body, and not our own, and holiness cannot be faked. The Church is Catholic, because it seeks a reconciliation in all that exists, and refuses to write off human experience. And the Church is apostolic, because it is sent by God, and being sent means having to learn again and again that we can’t – and shouldn’t – carry absolutely everything around with us all the time. Each of these ‘four marks’ of the Church is vital. If we think unity is everything, we become exclusive. If we think holiness is everything, we drift away from the world. If we think catholicity is everything, we lose ourselves in our own activity. And if we think being apostolic is everything, we will never take any risks, on the specious grounds that nothing must ever be done for the first time, unless it’s spelt out to the letter in those sources.
In every age, we are called to rediscover what all this means. Kairos is not just another campaign. It is a way for all of us, in our different ways, to do that rediscovering – a process that has never been easy, but has always proved in the end to be truly worthwhile.
KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
