The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice - Fulcrum Lecture by the Revd Professor Oliver O’Donovan at the launch of his book A Conversation Waiting to Begin: The Churches and the Gay Controversy Monday 27 April 2009, 6.00pm St Mary Islington, Upper Street, London N1 2TX
Rumour has it that there is a group that meets in London to read the work of our greatest living Englishman. Email me if you would like to be put in touch with them.
More from the world's greatest living evangelical. If he wasn't so good I wouldn't keep quoting him.
The first action, therefore, is to gather together in the Lord's presence. This is what in former times was called "statio". Let us imagine for a moment that in the whole of Rome there were only this one altar and that all the city's Christians were invited to gather here to celebrate the Saviour who died and was raised. This gives us an idea of what the Eucharistic celebration must have been like at the origins, in Rome and in many other cities that the Gospel message had reached. In every particular Church there was only one Bishop and around him, around the Eucharist that he celebrated, a community was formed, one, because one was the blessed Cup and one was the Bread broken.
The Eucharist is a public devotion that has nothing esoteric or exclusive about it.
The second constitutive aspect is walking with the Lord. This is the reality manifested by the procession that we shall experience together after Holy Mass, almost as if it were naturally prolonged by moving behind the One who is the Way, the Journey. With the gift of himself in the Eucharist the Lord Jesus sets us free from our 'paralyses', he helps us up and enables us to 'proceed'.
"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me" (Ex 20: 2-3). Here we find the meaning of the third constitutive element of Corpus Christi: kneeling in adoration before the Lord. Adoring the God of Jesus Christ, who out of love made himself bread broken, is the most effective and radical remedy against the idolatry of the past and of the present.
Pope Benedict Corpus Christi 28 May 2008 Solid nourishment, these homilies.
The question is how we understand the purity of the Church for which we are bound to strive in prayer, in self-criticism and self-examination, first, before we venture onto critique of actions and structures. I understand the purity of the Church to be a prophetic notion, first of all concerned with the purity of the Church’s speech. It has to do with the Church’s willingness to be a vehicle of the speech of God to all men and women. And the issue of obedience in the realm of pure speech comes down to our willingness to muffle, to compromise, to evade what God may be saying to us because it’s too uncomfortable for ourselves, too uncomfortable for our society, or to speak it would threaten our cause or whatever.
The notion of prophetic purity is explored, it seems to me, in the Scriptures in very classic ways through the great narratives of the prophets that associated with the figures Elisha and Elijah, 1 Kings and 2 Kings, in which the task of the prophet is not in any sense to withdraw. These prophets are deeply interwoven with their society both in its economic day by day aspects and also in political aspects. They have ongoing relations with the kings of Israel, and indeed other kings, the kings of Judah, the kings of Aram, the kings of Syria.
But they exercise the sovereignty of God’s word and will not be compromised, and the nature of prophetic compromise itself is explored in one or two of these stories, for example, the incredibly beautiful story about the prophet who confronted Jeroboam and having carried off his mighty confrontation with wonderful aplomb is then seduced by the urgent desire for fellowship with other prophets into betraying his mission.
Now the question, are we betraying our mission? – how may we avoid betraying our mission – is surely the starting point, and there’s one answer that can be given that seems to me to be essentially a false turn. And that is that we betray our mission because something in our circumstances isn’t right. Something needs adjusting in the set of presuppositions from which we come to it, the social setting from which we come to it and that if we can doctor that, then we can turn from being cowardly, compromised and ineffective, into being effective, brave and spirited. And it seems to me that that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of purity.
The nature of purity is not having no connections, ties, obligations. It doesn’t consist in not having relationships with the world and the Church. It consists in that purity of heart which is to will one thing. Everyone who has dealt with the way the Church interacts with government in this country has at some stage come away grinding their teeth over what look like cowardly, evasive, altogether unsatisfactory postures that the Church is inclined to strike. And it’s very easy in England if we don’t lift our eyes from the local scene, simply to attribute all these to the set of relationships we have with government and law. But as soon as one lives and works in the Church in other countries, one finds one is facing a universal problem. This is a matter of moral and spiritual obedience, not of structure.
Oliver O'Donovan to the Evangelical Alliance Faith and Nation enquiry 2003
Candour is of the greatest importance for the public realm itself. Candour is a simple public duty, often unperformed, or performed badly, out of simple reluctance to take responsibility for the truth on which the community depends. Behind many a story of tyranny lies collusion between oppressor and oppressed, a community that prefers to accept a shrunken public realm rather than pay the price of discerning and articulating complex truths in public.
Oliver O'Donovan has given three lectures at New College, University of New South Wales
Morally awake? Admiration and resolution in the light of Christian faith
For Oâ??Donovan, the extraordinary events of that Pentecost day changed the world forever. Godâ??s people became open to mutual address.
â?¢ It eventually led to the â??conciliar movementâ?? in Christendomâ??a call upon the Pope to take seriously the Christian wisdom of others. â?¢ In turn, there blossomed parliamentary movement in civil societyâ??a call upon the King to take seriously the wisdom, whether Christian or otherwise, of others. â?¢ Threaded into this story is the Reformation, and the â??non-conformistâ?? movement among Christiansâ??a call by Christians upon each other to understand that claims for theological truth must be settled by words, not power, as the Bible is discussed freely among groups who freely meet together.
It comes as quite a surprise for many people to see the central role of Christianity in this historical story. In the popular alternative, secularism invented â??free speechâ??: while Christians were busily killing each other, the â??Enlightenmentâ?? saved the West by inventing free and rational enquiry. But that account is heavily mythological, and simply fails to notice all the developments in medieval Christendom that gave rise to the very possibility of free speech. A seed fell on the day of Pentecost, and sprouted in the soil of Christendom.
There was no political â??free speechâ?? in the Roman empire. But after Pentecost during the centuries that followed, political authority had â??to confront and accommodate the free discourse of a society which has learned to recognise authority also in the word spoken by God by manservants and maidservantsâ?? (Oliver O'Donovan The Desire of the Nations p. 269). If God could use anyone in his church to speak truth, then potentially, any voice could now address the society about the common good.
Andrew Cameron Freeing Speech
If churches do not really need each other or owe each other anything, the Church is a voluntary association, and each congregation just a club of individuals. But this is not how it is. The Church is created by God – baptism is the act of God – and the baptism of each Christian is a gift of God to all of us. Similarly, through the eucharist each church participates in the whole Church. By this baptism into eucharistic participation in the whole Body of Christ, the communion of the church is renewed. This communion is an entity of love, and as such it is a union and a unity. It is love made visible, for the world to see. The faithfulness and mutual subordination of all Christians, and of each congregation to every other, is Christ’s act, sustained so the world can wonder at it.
Each church (and each Christian) participates in the whole Body of Christ by receiving from, and giving to, each other part of the Body of Christ. Each part owes every other part no less than everything. The whole Church, and each part of it, owes all others all the gifts it receives from Christ, whether gifts of instruction, formation and discipline.
If this is so the whole Anglican communion has to ask the innovating churches to help us to show us how to receive what they have proposed. They have to help us see how their act is an act of love. They need to give us the instruction and discipline (and receive from us the instruction and discipline) that makes us one communion.
We can all offer the Church new ways of being Christian, of course. But we have to argue for them and persuade others of their rightness. This involves showing that they are not utterly new, but that they stem from the existing corpus of Christian self-understanding in some way. They are not so much innovations as re-interpretations. The church that is proposing a new interpretation has to argue that it is the proper evangelical interpretation of Christian teaching for the particular circumstances in the particular part of the world to which this particular part of the Church is called to be a witness.
It must be the very basic presumption of all Christians that, because we belong to Christ, we belong to one another and must desire to travel together and stay in step with one another. The Communion must communicate. We owe an account of our action to every part of the Church. We must always explain what we are doing and seek to persuade others of its rightness. But for a part of the Anglican church – the part we may call liberal – this no longer seems obvious. Now this is a problem.
No Lack of Love - the Fulcrum sermons of Oliver O'Donovan
Many months ago I promised you a series on Oliver O'Donovan. At last, here it is. This piece discusses O'Donovan's Fulcrum sermons and offers a little theological context. It starts below, and is linked to the rest of the paper on 'Resources for Christian theology', with links to the sermons themselves. Next is a piece on O'Donovan's 'The Ways of Judgment'.
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Oliver O'Donovan is one of the most exciting theologians in the UK. He writes on current issues, like bioethics, just war, sexuality and the church. But his great strength, and the source of his evangelical authority, is his ability to show us how Christians in different periods of history have dealt with the very same problems that face us now. He is able to summarise the hard-won experience of Christians of different centuries, so we can see the intellectual resources available to us. He has just published a series of seven ‘Sermons on the issues of the day’ on Fulcrum. They are master-classes in Christian discernment. Sexuality and the unity of the church are the issues of the day, and the whole package of Christian wisdom will enable us to tackle these issues together and grow in truth and love as we do so.
O'Donovan tells us that it is an extraordinary privilege to be a Christian disciple, and so to be witnesses of God for the world. All of us are learning what this discipleship means. Discipleship is never likely to be easy, so we will get no glib answers here. What O'Donovan wants us to know is that Christians have met such tough issues many times before, and have developed good practices for thinking them through. To do so we have to explore the whole back catalogue of Christian discipleship. We will have to listen to alternative views, and this demands patience, but confidence in the Christian tradition will give us the patience we need. O'Donovan himself listens very seriously to what the other side is saying. He is a strong advocate of the traditions of the public square which allow a real exchange of views to take place.
Momentous issues of Christian truth and church unity have merged around the single issue of sexuality. In these sermons O'Donovan shows us from the history of ideas of nature on one hand, and of creation and redemption on the other, why this has happened. But these are not the sermons of a heterosexual telling homosexuals what to think: we are not being told that homosexuals are wrong – or right. O'Donovan is inviting us all, regardless of what side of the issue we believe ourselves to be on, to ask what is the distinctive thing about Christians who are also homosexual. What is the particular contribution to the Christian life, and witness to the world, of the struggle of the homosexual Christian? We all have something to learn about being Christian here.
One other thing before we begin. O'Donovan is an evangelical theologian. He says that we have to offer the whole gospel to our contemporaries through preaching and teaching Jesus Christ. Life with Christ and in the communion of his church is better than life without. So Christians do not need to construct their identity from scratch, so there is no reason why they should sound desperate. Christian emphasis on talking straight, in truth and love, is also good for society, because it makes for an open, we could even say, a more reasonable, society. This short-term and medium-term offering of the gospel in word and act results in a healthier society and increased opportunity to discover the huge definition of human being that the gospel sets out. Christian reasoning is evangelical. Disciplined by the gospel, the Church takes responsibility for the society to which it is sent. This witness is not always welcome, of course, but when society seems determined to close down on itself, it is the graciousness of God to a whole society.
If the first good news for the gay Christian, then, is that the "great question" - the question of the self, with all its pain and its hope, can be opened illuminatingly in the light of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, there is also a second good news. There is a neighbour with whom to explore the meaning of the contemporary homosexual situation, a neighbour who also needs, for the sake of his or her own integrity, to reach answers to questions which the gay Christian is especially placed to help search out. There is a neighbour for whom strict equality of regard and open candour - "irresponsibility", in the very best sense of that ambiguous word - makes it a primary obligation to put these questions and search for the answers with a persistent patience not to be cut short by the concerns of purely managerial efficiency. The negotiation of soft and evasive compromises will not appeal to that neighbour, because the gay Christian's true self-understanding and well-founded self-acceptance in the grace of God is a matter to be safeguarded in their relationship as securely as the integrity of the questioning itself. One name for this open and candid neighbourly relation is "friendship".
But always to rigorous judgment and censure freely assenting, man seeks in his manhood not orders, not laws and peremptory dogmas, but counsel from one who is earnest in goodness and faithful in friendship, making man free.vxz
It is this open and candid relation that a liberal Christianity has refused by its managerial juridicalisation of the gay Christian's claim, by its "laws and peremptory dogmas", designed to settle questions without exploring them, to adjust relations without justifying them, to reassure the uncomforted without comforting them, in short, to manage the situation. Liberal Christianity has interpreted the missionary challenge of the gay experience as a summons to emancipate it. Whether gays would have presented themselves as a suppressed social class in need of emancipation if the prevailing narrative fashions had not invited them to do so, is not a fruitful question to ask or a possible one to answer. What is remarkable, however, is the persistent lack of fit between what gays tend to find especially important about themselves and the role they are given to play in the liberal emancipation narrative. The peculiar quality of the gay vision is sectional rather than universal; the specialness of the gay experience is important to them. Liberals are unable to take that specialness seriously, since their starting point is that gays are no different from anyone else save as they have been arbitrarily imposed upon. When the gay experience becomes self-reflective about its own specialness, and invites interrogation in its own right, not merely as another instance of a hard-done-by under-class, its usefulness to the liberal project will be at an end, since that will open up questions that were supposed to have been settled before the campaign began. It will force us to pay attention to the fragmentation of the modern moral world, and to its insufficiency as a measure to judge the performance of the church by.
Oliver O'Donovan Good News for Gay Christians - Fulcrum Sermons on the Subjects of the Day (7)
There is an elementary point about Christian ethics that I have sought to emphasise ever since the opening pages of my Resurrection and Moral Order published twenty years ago: there is no Christian ethics that is not "evangelical", ie good news. There can be no change of voice, no shift of mood, between God's word of forgiveness and his word of demand, no obedience-without-gift, no gift-without-obedience. The gift and the obedience are in fact one and the same. They are the righteousness of Jesus Christ, encompassing and transforming our own lives, past, present and future. To preach the good news, then, is precisely what we do in expounding Christian ethics, if we expound Christian ethics faithfully. Preaching the good news is the only form of address of which the Christian church as such is capable, whether speaking to Christians or to non-Christians. When we use any other form of argument - quoting opinion-poll statistics, for example, or reporting the result of scientific experiments, or suggesting some practical compromise - the relevance of what we say depends on how well it is formed to serve the evangelical message. If the church speaks not as witness to God's saving work but as a pundit or a broker of some deal, it speaks out of character.
Yet to preach the Gospel, whether to Christians or non-Christians, is not a simple matter of offering reassurance and comfort. The Gospel, too, has its "hard words". The righteousness of Jesus Christ is not comfort without demand, any more than it is demand without comfort. It is never less than that demanding comfort by which God makes more of us than we thought it possible to become. And from this there seems to follow an important implication: the Gospel must be preached to the gay Christian on precisely the same terms that it is preached to any other person.
Oliver O'Donovan Good News for Gay Christians Fulcrum Sermons on the Subjects of the Day
It is, of course, right that philosophers should speak as believing Christians. It is right that they should do their philosophising in a conscious openness to theology... But it is not good that they should confuse the philosophical task of understanding the world as it presents itself with elements randomly introduced from Christian proclamation. The result of that will be a deformation both of theology and philosophy. Theology needs the philosopher's reflection on the moral sense of the world, in order to think seriously about the fulfilment of creation. For without the love of what is, the "new creation" is an empty symbol - or is it a clanging cymbal? New creation is creation renewed, a restoration and enhancement, not an abolition. Not everything that can be thought of as future can be thought of as the Kingdom of God. A brave new world of cyborgs is not a Kingdom of God. God has announced his kingdom in a Second Adam, and "Adam" means "Human".
One thing that is at risk in this approach, as in a thousand less articulate and less measured approaches along the same path, is the disappearance of scientific knowledge from the criteria of moral responsibility. We are invited to set the observation of nature aside, to cast ourselves on novelty. It is, indeed, striking how scientific curiosity - inadequate, one-sided and inconclusive as much of it may have been - has come to be banished from the discussion of homosexuality. Adams has done us the service of displaying the intellectual underpinnings of this development: a concept of value that has parted company with a concept of reality, a division between the good and the real. But moral responsibility to the real is precisely what the dialectic of creation and redemption in Christian theology safeguarded.
Oliver O'Donovan Creation, Redemption and Nature
The liberal hermeneutic paradigm, fashioned by the controversy over historical biblical criticism, failed precisely because it thought it could count on there being a concrete moral truth immediately and categorically known to all, a peremptory and unchallengeable moral certainty. In this it failed to allow for danger. Action is always exposed to danger: we may turn out to have acted on false assumptions about the facts, to have misunderstood the situation in which we acted, to have formed an inadequate conception of our task, to have failed to envisage the good to be pursued, etc. etc. Nothing can guarantee us against such failures; nothing except perpetual vigilance can protect us from them. In failing to allow for danger, the liberal hermeneutic failed to pose the questions that engage us supremely in our self-disposal: questions of intelligibility and purpose in the life we live, questions of our responsibility for ourselves. Always pressing forward in pursuit of some speculative truth, it dared to take the answers to all these questions as read; in doing so, it by-passed deliberative reason and short-circuited the role of the intellect in the living of life.
The Word of God... operates to elicit moral decision from us about the kind of life we are to live in faithfulness to its judgment. Its role is to authorise us to live well, not to take authority away from us. So any judgment we make on the authority of that text is, at the same time, a judgment on ourselves, a moment of self-transcendence that it has brought us to achieve.
If only we understood what freedom really meant, and how difficult freedom is to accomplish, we would surely ask that text to give us rivers of living water!
Oliver O'Donovan Scripture and Obedience
The Scripture tells us not to bear false witness against our neighbour. Whether this particular ambiguous statement we have it in mind to make will be false, or merely discreet, is something that the Scripture will not tell us; we must judge that for ourselves with the aid of the Holy Spirit. Yet everything the Scripture does tell us about truth and falsehood will contribute to making that judgment possible. The authority of Scripture is proved, then, precisely as it does, in fact, shed light on the decisions we are faced with, forcing us to re-evaluate our situation and correct our assumptions about what we are going to do....
The most mysterious question anyone has to face is not, what does Scripture mean?, but, what does the situation I am facing mean? If we have even begun to appreciate the nature of this question, and how a false judgment of ourselves can lead us to destruction, we shall be on our guard against any hermeneutic proposal to reverse the sequence of discernments, starting with our own situation and turning back to Scripture to look for something there to fit it. That presupposes that we already know the answer to the one question we dare not presuppose an answer to. Nevertheless, such proposals are common enough in theological discussion, sometimes with a liberal, sometimes with a conservative slant. It hardly matters which, since the two come closest to each other precisely at the point where they are both furthest from the truth. If the conservative thinks that all the Scriptural witness to moral behaviour can and must be honoured somehow, and the liberal that only some of it, or only most of it, must be honoured, what difference does that make if each thinks that conclusion has been reached from some self-evident intuition about what the times require, so that the appeal to the Scripture merely confirms what has already been decided? This is not to take Scripture seriously as an authority. And it is not to take living in the present seriously as a risky business....
Oliver O'Donovan Scripture and Obedience
Giants can still be found in Britain. Well, just the one giant really. He is our theologian, and he is an evangelical theologian.
His name?
Oliver O'Donovan
Author of The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Politcal Theology and most recently The Ways of Judgment, O'Donovan is now Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology in the University of Edinburgh. I have excerpted from O'Donovan’s public lectures, and posted on the significance of his and John Webster’s departure from Oxford. There seem to be just two photographs of him (not much of self-publicist then). This one was taken as O'Donovan was giving the sermon at the enthronement of his colleague Tom Wright as Bishop of Durham.
It’s hard to say what a single word sums up the O'Donovan kerygma, but I’ll go for ‘patience’ in the hope that you’ll hear the passio – listening to the tradition, being discipled by the apostles, serving an apprenticeship with all the doctors of the church, learning to suffer and so become robust enough to outlast the opposition.
We need time to be formed by that whole Christian tradition and to get to know, and know how to use, those many intellectual resources the Church has acquired in the course of the many centuries of its witness to the world. We learn from our predecessors in the faith by reading large numbers of primary texts (his From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought is an introduction to these texts, not an alternative). We may not hurry away from our predecessors with glib statements of what this means for us today.
O'Donovan is scholarly, patrician, awe-inspiring. ‘Evangelical’ is the only other epithet that does not bounce straight off him. Salvation is incorporation into the good company of God, which company and fellowship God has graciously extended to man. We are redeemed from our asocial isolation, and brought into love and life together in the society of man with God. This evangelical communion ecclesiology comes from the Augustinian and in particular the Anglican theological tradition. I think we will prosper as long as we go the way he is pointing. I think we will be stuffed if we go any other way.
If O'Donovan is new to you, Wikipedia has a bibliography and you could try Gilbert Meilaender’s review of The Desire of Nations . There is more critical response to The Desire of the Nations in A Royal Priesthood? – the collection of essays edited by Craig Bartholomew, to which O'Donovan adds responses, by the Scripture and Hermeneutics seminar - though they look like kids throwing stones at a very tall house without once managing to break a window.
O'Donovan is courteous and ready to grant as much as he can to his interlocutors, and to tackle the intractable issues of sexuality and church order and unity. This is what he is doing at the moment in a series of seven web sermons for Fulcrum, the first three of which have appeared: ‘The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm’, ‘The Care of the Churches’, ‘Ethics and Agreement’. Coming up next is ‘Scripture and Obedience’.
In the following posts I will talk about O'Donovan as:
Evangelical theologian Christian ethicist Political theologian Historical theologian Anglican theologian
I will of course make O'Donovan’s thought seem much less nuanced than it is. But I will let the man speak for himself with an excerpt from The Ways of Judgment
The ministries are known by their effects; when we see the effects we may discern that the Spirit is giving the church its authentic shape. What impact, then, will these effects have on the politics society in which the church lives? If a political society has in its midst a church that is taught by the episcopate not to confine its deliberations to the local, national, linguistic, or racial sphere, but to explore contested issues in a catholic manner, not only attending to Christians from every present source, but also from every past age, it must have a profound effect. A society influenced by a such a church will be restrained from universalizing its own local experiences and perspectives. The narrow and culture-bound spirit which expects to exports its local assumptions and values en masse and makes no effort to learn from others, meets a roadblock when it comes face to face with a church support by a functioning episcopal ministry.
An effective church with an effective ministry, in holding out word of life, than which there is no other human good within the world or outside it, will render assistance to the political functions in society by forwarding the social good which they exist to defend… In holding out the word life, an effective church with an effective ministry issued, the call ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand!’ and so in the short, medium and even penultimate term the presence of the church in political society can be a disturbing factor, as those who first thought Christianity worth persecuting understood quite well. It presents a counter-movement in social existence; it restrains the thirst for judgment; it points beyond the boundaries of political ideology; it undermines received traditions of representation; it utters truths that question unchallenged public doctrines’.
Oliver O'Donovan The Ways of Judgment 291-92
…Pluralism is difficult to argue for successfully.
To assert the right of plural moral judgment requires a careful account of the systemic social differences that make that right intelligible. So explanation of difference is the essence of a policy of mutual forbearance. It risks adding insult to injury to demand forbearance while at the same time refusing explanations. The sharp response to the innovations of Western Anglican churches from the churches of the ex-colonial territories owed much to the fact that the innovating churches had no programme of mutual explanation in view. And here, perhaps, the churches of the South and East made a mistake. They attributed the North American uncommunicativeness to racism. It is, on the whole, more likely that the North American churches merely acted, in default of a thorough deliberative process of their own, under the force of strong cultural pressure, the reasons for which they never explained even to themselves, since an ill-conceived doctrine of pluralism persuaded them that thinking was an unnecessary labour. They may have suffered something worse than a bout of racism, if such a thing can be imagined; they may have suffered an implosion of their powers of practical reason, the result of long habits of irresponsibility. And since theology is nothing if not a discipline of common reasoning about God and our life together, unless they recover it, their days of being churches of any kind are numbered.
Oliver O'Donovan Ethics and Agreement - the third Fulcrum web sermon
Fulcrum has published two papers by Oliver O'Donovan. The first shows that contemporary theological liberalism is bankrupt: ‘The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm’ is its obituary. But O'Donovan does so the more effectively because he shows that liberalism wasn’t always bankrupt, and is not bankrupt by necessity.
Contemporary liberalism shows a violent disdain for the past. ‘The present state of liberal Anglican thought [which] appears to be in deep denial: denial about the record of the past ….’. Contemporary liberalism pitches itself against any existing, time-tested formulation of the Christian faith. This is self-contradicting and so self-refuting.
O'Donovan’s faint but real praise of the liberalism of previous generations, shows the more effectively that contemporary liberalism has to be entirely cleared away before a positive way can be set out.
Old-fashioned liberalism once provided the glue that held the different theological emphases of Anglicanism together. It showed a ‘.. respectful attentiveness to the world as it is…’ .
At its best real (old-fashioned) liberalism meant – and here O'Donovan quotes Rowan Williams – ‘cultural sensitivity and intellectual flexibility that does not seek to close down unexpected questions too quickly’.
O'Donovan’s response for this insight, and for Williams himself is …. ‘For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful’.
In other words, O'Donovan fears we may not be thankful enough for our Archbishop. He may be a much greater gift than we appreciate, and whether he is or not, depends on us. This takes us into O'Donovan’s second paper, ‘The Care of the Churches’.
Our appreciation of Archbishop Williams will increase the extent he is able to lead us well through the present crisis. If we allow him to lead us well, the church will positively grow and flourish, not despite the present crisis, but because of it, and he will turn out to have been a great Christian leader. Williams’s old-fashioned liberalism is itself a gift to the Church. Williams never was just a liberal: he is far more complex than that, because he is deeply formed by the whole Christian tradition. liberal, catholic, evangelical instincts are all part of his make-up – as they must be of any Christian leader.
But it is a good thing that we have a liberal at the helm because this liberal is able to make this public turn to the unity of the church, its discipline and its doctrine. The unity that Williams is turning to church to is unity with truth, through discipleship. Then the truth of the gospel is not only not sacrificed, but is the basis on which the more costly unity of the church is won. Alternatively, if we stick with O'Donovan’s generous definition, Williams is restoring something of the liberalism with church discipline that once provided Anglican unity.
O'Donovan’s very under-stated line on Williams is – that Williams is a real disciple. You know that real disciples are rare as ... well, they dont come by too often, you can take it from me. So the obedience of the church and its survival through the present church-dividing crises, does not depend just on Williams. It depends on the extent to which every part of the Anglican church is able to see that this Archbishop is a real disciple, and loses its heart again to Christ – and follows him. We have am unusual Christian leader before us. O'Donovan’s question is then – will we follow him and find that more costly unity that comes with truth and discipline?
A series of conflicts over sectional emancipations and inclusions [meant that] there were some very good stories of emancipation to be told, testimonies to the liberating implications of the Gospel and the pastoral involvement of the church, the enormously influential struggle for civil rights in the USA, for instance, and the Latin American base ecclesial communities that gave new energy to Catholic witness in the face of poverty and economic injustice. These threw a lifeline to a floundering liberal imagination, offering a matrix by which the present could be presented as standing in perpetual judgment on the past, allowing the Western hegemonic tradition of modernity to re-brand its anti-conservative appeal.
In grasping the lifeline, however, Western liberalism paid its price. From that point on, it became identified with one kind of moral cause to the exclusion of others. It became a church-party proper, a specific agenda to pit against other agendas.
The whole storehouse of what gay Christians have felt and thought about their lives should become a matter of wider reflection, reflected on by those who are called to live this experience, by those who are called to accompany them in their living, by all who share their understanding of living as something they owe an account of to God.
The St Andrews Day Statement addressed questions quite specifically to gay Christians, not to liberals, and about the essentials of Christian faith. Its authors thought there was an exploration to be had, which, if undertaken in good faith, might yield a common discussion over what it could mean to be both homosexual and Christian. …Is the gay Christian movement still attached to the wheels of the liberal chariot, content with the victim-mentality that the liberal programme prescribes for it? Or can it present itself as the bearer of an experience of the human that is, at the very least, of irreplaceable importance for our understanding of our own times?
Oliver O'Donovan The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm
Liberalism fails to bring a critical practical reason to bear on the present world. In its pursuit of doctrinal reconstruction it treats the moral questions of the age as moral certainties, it views the indeterminate shapes of the present as sharp outlines. It may even imagine that in the present it can find some kind of speculative counterweight to correct a bias in past and transcendent reality. Instead of looking to the world as a frame within which to serve God and neighbour, it looks to it for a demonstration that in the past reality was misunderstood. Thus is crystallised the "modern world", an artificial entity with no existence in real time, achieving its dominion over thought only as we allow the world of action, for which we should have our loins girded ready for adventure, to be permafrosted into a world of pseudo-fact.
The tragic fault of liberal Christianity was to have no critical purchase on moral intuitions comparable to that which it had on doctrinal judgments. Precisely for that reason liberalism proved vulnerable when twentieth-century society began to be riven through with deep moral fissures. In affirming the world, liberal theology condemned itself to shipwreck on the same rocks where a unified modern civilisation broke up.
Oliver O'Donovan The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm
Fulcrum is running the first of a seven-part series by Oliver O'Donovan, which promises to be a substantial diagnosis of the present environment in which the Church must offer its witness.
In this excerpt, O'Donovan describes the stance that theological liberalism takes towards the witness represented by the teaching of the Church:
'For the theological liberal, on the other hand, the substantive content is indeterminate, and what is wrong with conservatism is precisely that it clings to the past, holding back in reserve from the God-destined character of the present cultural moment. At which point the distinctive character of liberal ecclesiology comes into view; for what can hold us back, if not the stubborn antithesis of church and world? The self-validating ethical convictions of modern civilisation are the final criterion for judging all else; they are the very image of God it bears anonymously as its birthright. Resistance to the image of God may come from any source, but most typically it comes from where the antithesis is most upheld, which is to say, the church. All that is institutional and naturally sluggish about the church is a standing problem, a regressive obstacle in the way of its incarnational mission. Ecclesiology begins and ends with the semper reformanda, the casting off of the fossilised deposit of an outworn past.
There certainly has been strength in the programme of reviewing doctrine critically in the light of ethics. Hopeful attention to the present as the theatre of God's action has proved to be an absorbent and reconciling catalyst. Liberal thought in Anglicanism has woven itself in and through other strands of thought, balancing and qualifying angular postures and attitudes and so negotiating institutional Anglicanism's self-effacing way through the world. When the thread was strong, it knit the church together. Why, then, did it snap?
In the interests of finding the modern world God-enchanted, the liberal tradition closed down on the serious deliberation with which Christians ought to weigh their stance of witness in the world. Potentially world-critical questions were suppressed. Liberal moral commitments, though sometimes urged with a passion verging on outright moralism, were not steered from the helm of discursive enquiry, but set adrift on the moral currents of the day.'
Oliber O'Donovan The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm
If early-modern and mid-modern liberal societies were successful in securing their members' cooperation and participation - and it is hard to deny them a measure of success - this was due to the moment of self-abdication instilled by their monotheistic faith. Through that religious moment they directed their members to become critical moral intelligences, taught them to see themselves as answerable directly to God. Thus they envisaged themselves as open to authoritative criticism and correction, and this lay at the heart of the reconciliation they effected between individual and social identities. In the face of conflicting expectations and hopes, a liberal society could make itself accountable before the throne of God's justice. This opened up a variety of self-understandings for the dissenter, who could assume the role of critic, prophet, even martyr - all roles that could be socially learned and socially respected. It could even move a dissenting member to respond to it not merely with revolt but with compassion.
In abandoning their deference to transcendence, late-liberal societies have followed a perilous course. Losing the conciliatory strength of religious humility, they have gambled on majority support for a narrowly materialist and sensual sphere of public communications, inculcating by all means at their disposal the purely material expectations that conform to them. This strategy of moral under-education presumes as impoverished a view of human nature as classic liberalism presumed a rather exalted one. …The discontent that any human being can feel at being underestimated can, and surely must, undermine this a-moral majority, generating high waves of inarticulate dissatisfaction. …But the warning that needs hearing is even more solemn than that: liberal society, proceeding on its present course, may deserve a reaction, simply because it is incapable of taking the spiritual capacities of its members seriously.
Oliver O'Donovan Freedom and its Loss The Westminster Abbey Gore lecture 2002
It is all the more important to appreciate the liberal insight at this juncture of our civilisation, when our appreciation is inevitably tinged with a sense of loss. A de-natured late-liberalism, shaping itself ideologically even to the point of religious persecution, and indistinguishable in some ways from the Marxism it once combatted, parts company from classical liberalism precisely here. The liberal tradition used to defer to a point of transcendence within the individual, something which social identity could not account for, something which gave the individual an independent view upon society. This was not in fact a view "from nowhere"; it was precisely a view from "the conscience". By instructing the individual that conscience had precedence over every social demand, the liberal tradition did not throw him back upon the chances of an untutored imagination. It presumed that conscience had a source beyond both society and individual, that it was more than an echo of social claims, more than a projection of individual dreams. It presumed this because of its monotheistic faith, which lay at the heart of its logic. Until the early years of the twentieth century Augustine's now controversial thesis, that there can be no "right" in a society which does not acknowledge the right of God, appeared to be the uncontrovertible bedrock of a liberal society. A polytheistic society negotiates multiple claims with no cohesion but what it imposes on them, so that, in effect, it enforces its own sovereignty. Late-liberalism, one may say, in taking up the banner of "pluralism", has made itself self-consciously polytheistic again.
Oliver O'Donovan Freedom and its Loss The Westminster Abbey Gore lecture 2002
Oliver O'Donovan tells us that our leaders have to lead us, form us and allow us to flourish, or even postively to see to it that we flourish. They have to be brave and lead from the front, and make real decisions about what is good for us. They therefore have to have views about what is good, and they have to allow those views to be tested by dialogue with the people they lead. Leaders have to make decisions. They have to exercise practical wisdom, which O'Donovan calls judgment, in order that we are all increasingly able to exercise practical wisdom, and so become mature. Plato represents one major tradition of practical wisdom, but an even more sophisticated tradition of practical wisdom is that of Christian discipleship.
"In Hebrew the most general word for law, torah, meant simply "a decision." It referred to the "ruling" that a priest would give when consulted. In the same way we say that the judge "declares the law" in relation to a case, meaning not that he quotes from law books, but that he announces a decision; "the law of the case" is simply the generic principle applied in the particular judgment. But since each judgment is not separate and discrete but occurs in the context of an institution, the law of each case is discerned in relation to the law of preceding cases; if it is to be justly proportioned, it cannot be wildly out of line with other decisions. No act of judgment, then, simply invents law de novo; that would defeat the purpose of judging, namely, determining what is proportionate to the law of precedent that stands over and behind the present decision and can be appealed to in support or criticism of it. But a law of precedent requires no distinct human legislator. Divine law, natural or revealed, when mediated through traditions of right innate in the society, is sufficient to allow courts to develop a law by way of their own judgments, a conception which our shared English legal tradition names the "common law."
The English parliament began life as a court of common pleas, a means by which the governed spoke to the government about their frustrations, an organic line of communication between the two which served to legitimate government as pursuing the common good. The extension of parliament’s role to a deliberative forum, first for the authorizing of taxation and then for the formation of legislation, recognized the need for government to listen to the vox populi, to respect its deeply held convictions, and to take stock of its anxieties.
By converting parliament into a branch of government, modern constitutional theory lost the sense that the dialogue between government and the governed is at the heart of the legislative process. It became a purely intra-governmental dialogue. The sheer success of parliament in taming the willfulness of the monarchy led to an implosion of government and parliament upon each other, leaving an unhealthy mutual dependence.
When a certain dialogue fails to accompany the formation of law, its enactment simply becomes another form of executive action - it loses its distinctive lawlike character. But what we need is not a dialogue between departments of government, but a dialogue between government and people ."
Oliver O'Donovan Government as Judgment since expanded to become The Ways of Judgment.
The defining role of secular government is to exercise judgment. The court is the central paradigm of government – all government, in all its branches. In Ancient Israel, the simplest model, such as we find in the narratives of David and Solomon and in the Psalms, is that the monarch is a judge who sits in court. "Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land," he declares according to the psalm, in what is probably a kind of oath of office; thus, daily assizes are the proof of a just king. Ancient Israel also knew, however, that the task of judgment required not only that the monarch sit in court but that he also found courts. To provide a court in which a judge sits is no less an act of judgment than to sit in court himself. He considers the situation obtaining, in which those who are wronged lack access to public interest and vindication; he finds it wanting; he redresses it by inaugurating courts. He does not found the judiciary from outside, as it were, like a businessman founding a University chair without himself being a man of learning. The founding of the judiciary is precisely the founding judicial act. It gives judgment in favor of the oppressed.
Oliver O'Donovan Government as Judgment
Oliver O'Donovan's departure from Oxford is an omninous event. I wondered whether John Webster (on the right) was over-reacting when he decamped north, but it is now clear that he was not. If you want to see what is at issue, compare Webster with the man who was put in to replace him. Webster, an evangelical theologian and natural teacher and communicator, has done some great work interpreting Barth and Jüngel, the outstanding evangelical theologians of the twentieth century, and has now started on more constructive and creative theology, to show the relationship of Scripture, doctrine and ethics. Webster promises he is at work on a theological commentary of Ephesians, so this theologian is actually doing some interpretation of Scripture to show us what difference it makes, which is exactly what theologians should do, you might think. See his Holiness – it is a gem, and the kind of thing we all wish we could write. Compare this with the man who replaced him as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, whose latest offering takes up ‘the critique of theology found in the work of Heidegger’, and whose lecture courses seem hardly aware of Christian doctrine or its great exponents. One cares for the Christian theological tradition, the other does not, indeed believes that theology is crisis, and is intent on running it down.
This is one of those moments when the struggle for the Christian faith impacts on lives and careers in the comfortable West. I doubt whether Oxford’s administrators are troubled about losing these two scholars, because it is these administrators in every university in England who are making it so difficult to do any academic theological work. Administrators, and those who sit on appointments panels, are those teachers of humanities subjects who have run out of things to say and given up teaching. If they believe that theology is in crisis, they are wrong. The humanities are in crisis. Theology is the only part of the humanities that is not in crisis. Because theology has a gospel it has something to say. Theology believes in education and passing on a tradition of thought, and it so it has plenty to contribute to the university. The administrators appoint to theological positions people who have never learned, or learned to love, the Christian tradition of doctrine, and whose assumption that the Christian tradition is in crisis is never challenged by serious engagement with that tradition. There is no one more articulate about the crisis of the humanities and its origin than Oliver O'Donovan, see his Ways of Judgment, and Bonds of Imperfection and The Desire of the Nations - though Webster is not far behind. But what makes this so unusual is that O'Donovan and Webster were Canons of Christ Church, senior clergymen of the Church of England, employed by the Cathedral to teach Christian doctrine in the university. In twenty years time, when the university has finally disappeared up its own backside, the Christians will be meeting in the back of cathedrals and re-inventing the university there, just like last time.
