This is not the easiest book to read. Adapted, one assumes, from her doctoral thesis, the message could be put more directly and succinctly. The language of contemplative theology is, by its very nature, not always easy to understand. But it would be sad if these things, or the cover price, prevented it having the impact on the Anglican Communion which it deserves. For, as Rowan Williams says in his preface, it is groundbreaking work which seeks to go beneath the ecclesiastical politics and recall us all, conservatives and liberals, to the God who has called our Church into being.
Her starting point is Richard Hooker’s theology of ‘participation’ in understanding salvation and the life of the Church. Hooker saw the Church as participation in the life of God and within the dynamic of God’s ongoing purpose. It is God who gives it coherence and meaning. God’s reconciliation of us with himself at a spiritual level is shown to the world by our desire to be reconciled with each other as ‘a continual receiving of one another from within the love of God’.
She contrasts this with the more general trend in Reformation thought which saw moral values as autonomous virtues, apart from the spiritual character of holiness which reflects the justice and mercy of God. Then, as now, it led to a non-dynamic and divisive understanding of who God is and the kind of Church he wants.
It also led to relationships being based on Purity rather than holiness. She says that the life and death of Jesus show how defining holiness on the basis of purity stifles compassion, creates division, causes backward-looking and non-dynamic Christian life, and generates fear and distrust.
So she moves on from Hooker to F.D. Maurice and to the Trinitarian emphases of the Virginia Report, concluding: ‘Anglican disunity reveals the way in which non-dynamic thinking generates fixed beliefs in allowing doctrine and polity to become separated from the movement or dynamic of God’s life in the Church as this proceeds from the dynamic of love within the Godhead’.
She wants to replace the resulting dislocation of the practical and the worshipping life of the Communion from its meaning in God with Anglican hospitality — ‘receiving one another unconditionally from within a shared love of God’, thereby reflecting that hospitality of God which marks all Salvation history. We need to honour each other’s integrity because we trust in God and our covenantal relationship with him. All this finds expression in the Eucharist, and the way we find truth in Scripture.
This naturally leads to consideration of the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant. It must not be a quick fix solution, to preserve the status quo, or about procedural methods for conflict resolution, but rather a commitment which leads to transformation and reconciliation. It needs to reaffirm our passion for Jesus Christ and our need for one another if that passion is to yield the fruit we have been promised.
I was left with three questions. First, she is (rightly) critical of both ‘traditionalists’ and ‘inclusivists’ who refuse to listen to each other or to enter into each other’s feelings of pain and rejection, yet all the time claiming victimhood. But will her call to move away from ‘doctrine-laden morality’ be seen as addressed more to Scriptural literalists than to those who seek a more inclusive church? Indeed, the latter may well feel that what she says about purity, and about justice and mercy belonging together, puts her much more on their side.
Second, is there enough here about world? While she recognizes both the historical contingencies which have created our current problems, and the need for the Church to show to the world the God in whom we live, her response is very much focused on finding meaning in the spiritual life of the individual and the Church. But for many of us such meaning is also to be found in the daily struggle to be human in the (very different) contexts where God has called us to live and where God is also to be found.
Third, is all this too idealistic? At one point she talks of our need for a life in the Spirit which will embrace unity and produce theologies true to orthodox belief and the realities of the modern world. If only it were that simple! And yet, in the end, is not this what we are really all about? Faced with what Archbishop Rowan in his preface calls ‘bland and essentially secular inclusivity’ and ‘frozen traditionalism’ — neither of them exercising discernment or expecting transformation — this book pleads for a different starting point, the one where God begins with us. If we could only agree a Covenant which enables us to live out this ‘hospitality of Christ crucified’, what a different Communion we would be!
