The Rev’d David Curry delivered this address to the Open Door Conference (organised by Anglican Essentials Canada), Toronto, in June 2005.
The Primacy of Doctrine
“How came we ashore”, asks Miranda in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, having heard the litany of betrayal and deceit that exiled her and her father from Milan. “By Providence divine”, replies Prospero, himself the victim of the machinations of others but also aware of his own neglect of what belonged to his ducal office. Well, we have just heard powerfully and prophetically from David Short about the litany of betrayal and deceit, confusion and disarray, that brings us to this conference and this moment.
But I want to suggest that there is a wonderful providence, too, that brings us ashore, that brings us to this moment, a wonderful providence that is at work in the Anglican Communion. And it is not about who shouts the loudest, not about who holds the power cards, not about who has title and who has not. No. It is about the recovery of the doctrinal mind of the Anglican Communion. And if we are not part of that, make no mistake, we are nothing and nothing worth.
Doctrine, not praxis, though doctrine should shape and measure our actions. Doctrine, not process thinking, though doctrine should guide and direct our thinking. Doctrine, yeah! Just what you came to hear about, right? “These are a few of your favourite things” (I’ve always wanted to sing in Roy Thompson Hall!) But whether this is something which is your favourite thing or not, doctrine is the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary, without which we are nothing and nothing worth. The wonderful providence at work in the Anglican Communion is about the possibility of thinking again what belongs to our true and collective identity in the body of Christ. But we have to think it.
If we do not keep before us, front and centre, the teaching of the Church, the teaching which we have received through the witness of the Scriptures faithfully transmitted down through the centuries by the power of the Spirit in the ordered life of the Church, then we are nothing. If we do not hold ourselves accountable to the doctrines that define us, then we become the betrayers of Christ and his Church.
Betrayals, of course, are everywhere. They are built into the witness and the wonder of the Christian Faith. Yet, more than anything else, perhaps, we resist the spectacle of our own betrayals. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven”, as was proclaimed for centuries as the lesson on Trinity Sunday. In so many ways, we have tried to close that door, the door that opens us out to the wonder and the mystery of the triune God and to the vision of our humanity restored, redeemed and sanctified. Like Nicodemus, we have to be born again, born literally from above; in short, to be thinking upwards. “If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?”, Jesus says, pointing suggestively to a twofold problem.
For in our refusal to attend to the “heavenly things”, revealed in the witness of the Scriptures, our perspective and understanding of “earthly things” is distorted, too. We are closed to the pageant of redemption, to the gathering of all things back to God in prayer and praise.
We have to live the vision. It means thinking upwards. The work of gathering all things back to God in prayer and praise is a work of intellection, an activity of the understanding. It means thinking the doctrines of the Faith and the way in which we have received them authoritatively in our own Anglican tradition. These are the things that bind us to the Church Universal, the things of orthodoxy, meaning right belief or right worship, without which there can be no mission, no life, no church.
In many ways, we have got it all backwards and we have for quite some time. If we have been thinking at all, and there seems to be some suspicion about thinking at all, then we have been thinking downwards. The right impulse to engage the world and the culture in which we find ourselves has often resulted in collapsing the Gospel into the world, making it conform to the categories of expression and experience belonging to the social and political agendas of the day. The drive to engage has meant accommodations to the culture that have emptied the doctrines of the Faith of their distinctive meaning and robbed them of their vital force.
Just recently, an American theologian, Philip Turner, has observed that the doctrine of redemption has been supplanted by what is really a false doctrine, the doctrine of acceptance. Accepting one another (quote-unquote) “for who you are” indiscriminately is not only cynical and patronizing but often overlooks what belongs to the truth and dignity of our common humanity. More importantly, it ignores what belongs to the redemption of our humanity, to that great something more which Christ reveals to us through the witness of the Scriptures, namely that we have an end with God.
The purpose of our being is our being with Christ and that means the upward call of our humanity to be what we behold in him. God reaches down to us, to be sure, but only so as to lift us up to him. It signals the necessity of transformation and change, the call to holiness of life. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
“God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” We have our abiding in the abiding love of the God who is Trinity. This passage is the recurring refrain of the Trinity season. You have probably heard it a thousand times. It is about our Trinitarian identity, our life in the communion of God. The phrase “God is love” does not mean “Gentle-Jesus-Come-and-Squeeze-Us-Where-and-When-It-Pleases”!
The consequences are profound. When our hearts and minds are not in sync – not connected – to the essential doctrines of the Faith as we have received them, then there is a shipwreck of the body.
I have mentioned the doctrine of the Trinity. It is the great and distinctive doctrine of the Christian Faith which gives coherence and meaning to all other doctrines. It is not about some arid abstract speculation by a bunch of ecclesiastical eggheads with long-beards (or not) from some by-gone era. It is about nothing less than the reality of the living God. It is about nothing less than the living, vital and even practical reality of our life together in the body of Christ. It is the Mystery which we cannot exhaust, the Mystery which we cannot take captive to our finite minds and imprison by our ingenuity. To the contrary, it is the Mystery which takes our minds captive to itself. We cannot not think it.
“He therefore that would be saved let him thus think of the Trinity” – think of it in this way. What way is that? It is the way of negative theology (apophatic), on the one hand, how God is utterly unlike everything in the world, and the way of positive or affirmative theology (cataphatic), on the other hand, how God is related to everything in the world as its cause and principle but without being collapsed into the world. This, my friends, is to think upwards. It is to think the doctrine that gives cogency and coherence to the various images of God in the witness of the Scriptures. “No one has ever seen God. The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known”, literally exegeted him. It is the only time that exegesis is used in reference to God.
Now, I don’t really want to know and I am afraid to ask how many of you have ever read The Creed of St. Athanasius (so-called), let alone recited it liturgically even once in your lives. And I know, pastorally speaking, it is pretty challenging and yet there it is as one of the three great Catholic Creeds of the Western Church of which we are a part and to which we are committed by the formularies which constitute the doctrinal magisterium for Anglicans: The Book of Common Prayer, The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, The Ordinal, and for us in Canada and by way of deference to those things, The Solemn Declaration of 1893. We neglect these things at our peril.
And for years, these things that constitute the doctrinal magisterium for Anglican Christians have been dismissed, derided and denied. But without them, we cannot be a full and integral part of the One, Holy, and Apostolic Church. Without them we cannot speak of the Scriptures as Holy Writ. Without them, we cannot make sense of what is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures.
Without them, we have no mission. Without them, we are a shipwreck. Whether it is as the Network or the Federation or as priests and people struggling to be faithful wherever God in his Providence has been pleased to place us, our task is to reclaim the doctrinal magisterium of our Anglican tradition, for it is through such things and not otherwise, that the Orthodox Christian Faith has been mediated to us.
Orthodoxy is not about pat answers glibly trucked out in a patter of pious talk. It is about a firm and genuine way of thinking the questions of our day by gathering them into the Revelation of God. And in our Anglican heritage, too, it is about a gracious way of living out the Christian Faith in lives of service and sacrifice, in lives of prayer and praise, in lives of study and devotion that bear witness to the transforming, redeeming and sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit. But it cannot be assumed. It cannot be taken for granted. We have to be constantly thinking upon the doctrines of the Faith. If we don’t, then we are thinking away from them.
There is importantly a hierarchy of doctrine: three areas that are inter-related and distinct. There are matters of essential doctrine; there are matters of order and polity; there are matters of moral order.
With respect to the first, there are the governing principles that define the orthodox Faith. There is the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the Incarnation, the doctrine of Creation, Redemption and Sanctification, all wonderfully, concisely and coherently expressed in the Creeds and embodied authoritatively in a vital and living way in the liturgy that is The Book of Common Prayer to which all “alternative” liturgies are properly subject, and further attested to in The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion.
The Creeds, of course, are the distillation (like good Scotch) of what the Scriptures teach, and provide, in turn, a way of thinking the Scriptures. In other words, they come out of the Scriptures and return us to them in a pattern of thinking and living.
With respect to the second, matters of order and polity, there are governing principles that guide and direct the order and life of the Church, for the fellowship of the faithful. The Church, in fact, is a Trinitarian fellowship and here we see, yet again, the formative nature of doctrine. The Church is “the family of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit” (Supplementary Instruction, The Catechism, BCP, p. 552). As Anglicans, moreover, we are committed to a three-fold order of ministry, the ministry of deacons, priests and bishops, and to a ministry that exists to hand on faithfully the Apostolic Faith and that commits itself to the Universal Church. The doctrine of orders and the polity of the Church is expressed most authoritatively in The Ordinal and The Thirty-nine Articles and these principles are further underscored by The Solemn Declaration of 1893 which commits the Canadian Church to being an integral portion of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church by being “in full communion with the Church of England throughout the world”. This expresses clearly and unambiguously the constitutional limits to episcopal and synodical authority.
The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, which the Canadian House of Bishops seems to want to hide behind, is something else. Its purpose was to establish the doctrinal principles by which the Anglican Churches of the Communion would undertake to relate ecumenically with other non-Anglican Churches. It is a curious irony that it should be invoked to justify the autonomy of certain Anglican Churches within the Communion! Autonomy, by the way, as The Windsor Report acknowledges, properly refers to the independence of the Church from the State in certain civil and political situations. The autonomy of the various churches of the Communion does not and cannot extend to matters of doctrine as was implicitly recognized by the question raised at General Synod about the doctrinal status of the blessing of same-sex couples.
With respect to the third area of doctrine, the matter of moral order, there are the teachings that define and order our lives in Faith, among which is the doctrine of marriage. Once again, we may note the formative qualities of the principle or essential doctrines of the Faith expressed in the Creed which govern how and in what way we think about our lives morally. There is the doctrine of the Trinity for we are called to life with God. There are the doctrines of Creation, Redemption and Sanctification which provide the primary categories for the understanding of our humanity and above all else, there is the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins which is the main avenue of approach to all matters of morality for Christians.
When we compromise any of these teachings in any of these areas, there is a shipwreck of the body. With respect to the presenting issue before the Anglican Communion of the blessing of same-sex couples, it suffices to say that there is a clear and distinct doctrine of marriage which we have received. The three reasons for marriage as something divinely instituted “in the time of man’s innocency” as the Canadian Book of Common Prayer puts it, are essential to its character and in no way optional.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy and even the greatest betrayal in our current situation is the betrayal of friendship – our friendship with Christ and with one another, the blessings of friendship and fellowship in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Our tragedy is the inability to think the distinction between the doctrine of marriage, on the one hand, and the blessing of friendships, on the other hand, without collapsing them into one another. Friendships are betrayed when they are made equivalent to something which they are not and marriage, too, is betrayed when it is reduced to friendship. We can only begin to think through these questions by way of the doctrines which we have received.
What is God doing? He is calling us to account, to repentance and to renewal. It means that we have to confront our betrayals, our betrayals of Christ and one another.
I end, even as I began, with The Tempest. In the play, the betrayers of Prospero are convicted of their betrayals by means of a play – like the liturgy, we might say. “Ye are three men of sin”, Ariel announces. In the play, there is another play, like the liturgy again, we might say, that instructs Ferdinand and Miranda about the nature and the fruitfulness of marriage. And in the play, again like the liturgy, there is the most wonderful restoration of friendship and fellowship through the power and grace of forgiveness. And finally, there is a growing up into thought. “I’ll be wise hereafter”, says Caliban, “and seek for grace”. May it be so with us, for only through such a growing up into grace and thought can there be “a sea-change into something rich and strange”, into the wonder and the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
“How came we ashore?…By Providence divine”, for “grace”, indeed, “is everywhere” (Bernanos).
Fr. David Curry
The Open Door Conference
Toronto, ON
June 16th, 2005