This week, rather than write an article, I am sending out the text of a letter to the Church of England Newspaper (CEN) which has been published today.
It is a response to an article by regular columnist Bishop Paul Richardson, assistant Bishop of Newcastle, (which can be accessed as a free download at http://www.churchnewspaper.com/Get-CEN-Online.aspxhe) rebuking what he sees as Bishop Michael Nazir Ali’s preference for confrontation.
He also questions Nazir Ali’s recent claim in Standpoint magazine that Archbishop Rowan Williams’ criticism of those who uphold marriage as intrinsically and necessarily heterosexual has contributed to the breakdown of the family unit (for comment on the Standpoint article see http://www.anglicanspread.org/?p=209).
To have published this rather negative assessment last weekend as Michael Nazir Ali gave up the See of Rochester to pursue God’s continued call on his life seems ill judged. It reflects a chronic failure among much of the Church of England’s leadership to recognise the extent to which the ‘Christian mind’ of their Church has itself been softened by accommodation with secular values.
They are likely to find that the faithful will look increasingly to the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans for effective spiritual leadership in England and the British Isles. Sir, Paul Richardson’s portrayal of Bishop Michael Nazir–Ali as confrontational (Defending our Values Today, September 11) in contrast to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ more constructive preference for dialogue betrays a misunderstanding of both.
The real issue is not about a choice between dialogue and confrontation, but discernment, exercising the Christian mind in an aggressively secular society. Concluding his July/August Standpoint article, Michael Nazir Ali actually calls for a ‘grand assembly’ in the hope that ‘a national consensus may emerge’ on how to respond to the collapse of Judaeo-Christian values.
This call to dialogue flows from a strong grasp of the apostolic Christian faith rooted in the biblical revelation to which he has demonstrated a courageous commitment. The kind of dialogue favoured by Rowan Williams is much more slippery.
His writings, such as ‘The Body’s Grace’ and ‘Is there a Christian sexual ethic?’ in ‘Open to Judgement’ have done much to provide theological respectability for the dissolution of the fundamental Judaeo-Christian concept of marriage as exclusively heterosexual over the past twenty years, yet last month he was willing to affirm orthodox teaching on same sex unions, completely contrary to his personal views, in order to maintain some semblance of unity through a ‘two track’ Communion.
It would be easy to conclude that the Archbishop was simply being pragmatic, or worse, but his willingness to split his personal judgements from the views required by office points to a deeper difficulty.
Paul Richardson observes, as an example of the merits of dialogue, that Christians have learnt from Marxism about structural injustice, while rejecting much else, including the ‘dialectical process’ of class warfare. Unfortunately, our Archbishop has not rejected Hegel’s underlying dialectic. He is strongly attracted to the idea that the best protection against self serving theology is to allow it to emerge tentatively through the holding together of opposing ideas in what he sometimes refers to as the ‘hermeneutical spiral’.
Faced with the current concerted assault upon Christian faith in the public square, this approach to dialogue, for all its sophistication, is dangerous because it dulls the sensitivity of the Christian mind to the authority of Scripture.
Michael Nazir Ali has repeatedly spoken of the need to ‘go against the grain’, at significant personal cost. For the future perhaps he will be able to help develop a greater sense of partnership with our brother and sister Anglicans of the Global South.
This would no doubt be a much better guard against self-serving interpretations of Scripture than the interminable conversations which the Archbishop still seems to hope will put his own house in order.
Rev’d Charles Raven
Bewdley, Worcestershire.
