On the Thirty-Nine Articles. Oliver O'Donovan

church that can sometimes err, that the gates of Hell will not prevail against it and that Christ is in its midst. I can relate to its consenting bishops and pseudo-bishops as to partners in the Gospel who have overreached themselves in their zeal, not as to those who have fallen away from Christ. I shall refuse to receive communion when a woman celebrates — for though these are not the only defective eucharists to be found, these are the ones that demand a public witness from me. But I need not withdraw from receiving communion with the consenting bishops and pseudo-bishops, for they are Christians heeding the Lord’s invitation. I need not refuse the ministry of a male priest who has received ordination in good faith from a woman bishop, though, if he asks it, I should confer conditional ordination on him for his conscience’s sake. I bitterly regret the breaches in church-order which demand these compromises, but a broken church-order must be helped to grow whole again, not broken further. Unity remains the overarching imperative in church order, even in a débacle such as this. My colleagues do not see how their acts damage the unity of the church. Would that excuse me, who do see it, if I damaged it further?’

      How, on the other hand, might a woman member of the House of Bishops view her position beside those who disbelieve the reality of her consecration? ‘The Holy Spirit led the Church to take this step, and in accepting consecration I have declared it a true discernment of God’s will. I cannot allow that conviction constantly to be brought into question. But that is what I would allow if I were constantly put out of countenance by those who doubt it. I was asked for a courageous discernment to match the courageous discernment of the church. What would my response be worth if it could not cope with the ambiguities? I acted in full knowledge that there were bishops who conscientiously opposed the step, and I said that I respected their position. Now I must prove as much by showing cheerful patience. If I fail at this point, I show that I acted without due consideration. Continual wrong-footing of opponents and demands to exercise my rightful powers would simply confirm that I did not believe that my calling was from God. Those in my diocese who cannot bring themselves to receive the sacraments from me have a harder part than I do, since the Church has judged them mistaken. They will need all the sympathy that I and my male assistants can give them in coming to terms with their position. I can prove my episcopal authority only as Jesus proved his, by care and oversight courageously and sacrificially expressed, wherever and in whatever ways are opened to me. If I look for opportunities to be the bishop that I am, I shall not find myself without work. I will know frustrations, as have those male bishops who participated in the ordination of women as priests. In accepting these graciously, they have not lost authority, and neither shall I. We all need time and experience, for the process of reception will only be complete when we turn round and look at one another and wonder what the fuss was about. The best way to help it forward is not to be fretful.’

      With this modest proposal I must leave the Anglican churches to the future God holds for them and this book to the readers it may find on its new excursion. I hope I may be forgiven one personal remark. My satisfaction that this book continues to be asked for is enhanced by the memory of Fr. George Schner SJ of Toronto, whose role in its genesis I noted in my 1985 Introduction. When in 2000 he died suddenly at the age of 50, Canada lost its finest theological teacher and Anglicans a sincere friend. Those who were never in a classroom with him will scarcely understand the impact he made on his generation, which derived from an extraordinary capacity to read and to teach others to read. (I like to boast that I learned to read Karl Barth from a Jesuit.) He had other rarely combined talents, those of a fine organist, a gourmet cook and a skilled psychotherapist, all mediated through a personality of endearing eccentricity. When he died, I wrote: ‘Feeling around the interstices of one’s life in search of the missing friend, like a tongue feeling around the mouth for a missing tooth, we have known just how much we received from the friendship. Even as we cry, “The Lord is taking from Jerusalem both stay and staff!” (Isa. 3.1), we realize that a stay and a staff is precisely what we have had .... Good people contribute to our becoming good. What we take from them becomes ourselves. Not to have known and loved them would be like not having been.’

      New College, Edinburgh

      Epiphany 2011

      Introduction

      What excuses can I make to the reader of theological books for asking him to entertain, in this ‘conversation’ with Tudor Christianity, a rather self-indulgent undertaking? It is evident to myself, and will be more so to others, that I have no qualifications to write a historical work about the sixteenth century church; while such credit as I might have as a theologian will quickly be dispelled, it must seem, by my grave lack of seriousness — I having it in mind neither to raise disturbing questions about faith for someone else to answer, nor to reflect inconclusively on a multitude of theological methodologies, nor even to ‘reconstruct’ theology by way of a new synthesis with the social sciences! I am driven back upon the lame defence that this is the kind of enterprise which theologians ought from time to time to set their hands to.

      It is intended as a conversation with a Christian text from the past, the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England. It is not a study of that text, for that would imply that the text itself had become the sole objection of attention. In conducting a study the scholar puts his intellectual powers completely at the service of the text, and makes it his only business to enable the text to speak clearly. It is a weakness in his work if his own concerns and the fashions of his time intrude. What I propose in this case, however, is not to talk solely about the Articles, but the talk about God, mankind and redemption, the central matters of the Christian faith, and to take the Tudor authors with me as companions in discussion. Two voices will be speaking, a late modern and an early modern one, discussing (as equal partners, we shall hope) matters of concern to both, each raising the questions that Christian faith in his time forces upon him.

      Surprisingly enough, this is a type of discussion which is not too frequently undertaken. Surprisingly, because it is the paradigm of what our theologians of the late twentieth century, who are not lacking in a sense of their duty to ‘the tradition’, most commonly see themselves as doing. And it would be hard to devise a better discipline for them than such a conversation affords: to develop their thoughts in sustained response to the thinkers of another age, accepting the others’ priorities and answering their questions, interpreting the others’ views and developing the modern perspective in counterpoint to them, all the time restraining themselves, as good conversationalists, from haranguing God and man with the urgent preoccupations of their own day. Yet it has its disadvantages too. Tact forbids the participant in such a dialogue to develop the modern questions as extensively as they demand; nor is he free to turn away from his chosen companions to take up points of interest with his coevals. It is best undertaken, then, as a propaedeutic exercise, a preliminary to the more elevated and demanding tasks of theology. And it is best approached in a comparatively relaxed way, not in the academical full dress of the Schools but informally beside the fireplace — yet never forgetting that if (as we are told) evil conversation corrupteth good manners, so bad academic manners can also corrupt good conversation.

      We have taken for our partner in this conversation the kind of theological text that is most suited for it, a church document intended to exercise a normative role as a standard of belief in its community. The very features which make such a text less interesting to read than the work of a maj or individual thinker, make it more rewarding to have a discussion with. It is brief. It invites elaboration, providing a skeletal structure which its readers may cover with the flesh and blood of their own argumentation. It purports to speak for a whole community, and to say only that which the community can and must say together. It intends to confine itself to the most important things. A conversation with Tudor Christianity requires a text that is, in a strong sense, representative. When we engage with the Articles we engage with a whole community, and not with an individual genius (for even Cranmer does not speak simply for himself), the peculiarities of whose outlook, the waywardness or compellingness of whose arguments, the distinctiveness of whose position vis a vis his contemporaries, may quite possibly leave us absorbed in the sheer task of exegesis and put to silence in respectful admiration. This is not to doubt that we may learn infinitely more by waiting upon the great thinkers; but we develop ourselves in certain ways by venturing upon discussion with the church document that speaks for the whole age.

      But we must acknowledge