Book Review:

The Challenge of Tradition

Discerning the Future of Anglicanism

John Simons, ed.

Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1997

Cost: $18.50 (CDN).

Reviewed by David Curry, September 1997

The Challenge of Tradition: Discerning the Future of Anglicanism" (ed. John Simons) represents an effort to engage a phenomenon which has disquieted some in the church. There is nothing so remarkable about this collection of essays as the collective sense of unease about the Essentials Conference of 1994 and the Montreal Declaration of Anglican Essentials. "The Challenge of Tradition" is really a reaction to Essentials, both the phenomenon and the idea.

That there is even a response at all is surely a good thing. That there is at least a willingness to intend to engage "those in the Essentials movement and in the Church as a whole", respectfully and charitably, an even better thing. Such intentions are to be honoured in the fullest way possible.

A feature of The Challenge of Tradition is that it deals primarily with the Essentials Declaration itself. The context of the Essentials Conference and the papers presented at it receive hardly any notice. This could be a good thing, though I wonder whether the Declaration really warrants much in the way of heavy-duty theological explication. It does not, after all, claim the same status as the things to which it both defers and refers as embodying the essentials of the faith as they have been classically received by Anglicans. Consequently, the essays have something of the sense of over-kill about them, and often, it seems to me, miss the mark. They are really responding to more than the Declaration.

The Challenge of Tradition fails to engage the Essentials Declaration because, for the most part, the book is coloured by a hermeneutic of suspicion. They are responding more to their perceptions of who produced it than to what was produced.

There are a cluster of concerns for these writers which the Essentials Declaration seems to challenge: namely, the re-imaging of God, the ordination of women, and the marriage of same-sex couples. The Declaration says nothing about the second. The first and the third it opposes. Sometimes it seems that all there is in our church is debate about the "theology" of sexual intercourse. But at issue, really, is a theology of revelation, both with respect to God's revelation of himself and with respect to a revealed morality.

John Simons' essay is perhaps the most theological and the most intriguing. It highlights, however, an ambiguity which runs throughout. There is the affirmation of the self-communication of God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in the strongest possible terms at the same time as there is the affirmation of the re-imaging of God in various ways. The premise which seeks to hold together these apparently opposed positions is a wonderful confidence in the philosophical content of the images of revelation; the danger is that it is at the expense of the images themselves through which one can arrive at this understanding. At issue is the connection between the images of God's relation to us, drawn from Scripture, tradition and experience and God's own self-communication, derived from the witness of Scripture and our engagement with what has been revealed.

His argument takes an ecclesial turn which has the net result of collapsing God's self-communication into the community which by virtue of this identity seems free to do whatever it wills. But is the community then freed from the continuing rule and measure of Scripture or does it remain under the Word which shapes its life? It seems that there is no clear subordination of the community to the divine life which by grace it is privileged to participate through Word and Sacrament. In the ecclesial turn a freedom is claimed for the community which removes it from any measure or judgment of Scripture.

Simons wants to uphold the necessity of baptism in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost - indeed he accuses Essentials of neglect in this regard, which is a bit much. Yet it is hard to see upon what basis he can demand this of the community in its freedom. I am reminded of a story about a theology student from California at Oxford who affirmed that she was indeed baptised in the name of the Trinity but went on to add, and in the name of the great earth mother, the sky, the sea, the grasshopper and the bee. The divines of Oxford determined that such additional affirmations really amounted to a denial of the sufficiency and completeness of the Trinity and so she was baptised again in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost alone. We are, after all, named in God's own naming of himself.

The great variety of images for God's relationship with us have their force and significance only as the modifiers of the divine names and not as substitutes or add-ons to the divine self-communication. Without the acknowledgement of the primacy of the Trinity - God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost - we are left with the idolatry of "the imaginations of our hearts". The ecclesial community finds its freedom not from but in a living engagement with the primacy of Scripture and Doctrine.

This occasions great unease for a number of the writers in this book. They chafe against a paragraph in the Declaration. "The church may not judge the Scriptures, selecting and discarding from among their teachings. But Scripture under Christ judges the church for its faithfulness to his revealed truth." It is the burden of Stephen Reynolds' paper, a concern for Simons, for Jennings, and by implication for Storey and for Scully.

What is the problem? Basically this. There is the fear that one group will thump the Bible against another group within the ecclesial community. There is the fear of fundamentalism, and so on.

But there is something else, too, I think. It is really a lack of confidence in the doctrinal understanding of Scripture, a kind of despair of revelation. This clashes with one of the great glories of our tradition - the opening out of the Scriptures to everyone in the confidence that the essentials of salvation revealed in the witness of the Scripture are, in principle, accessible to everyone, that, indeed, "every plough boy... should be as well versed in the Scriptures as the most learned cleric"(Latimer). The Scriptures at one time were chained to the lecterns, not just so that no-one could run off with the books, but also in the sense that we should not run off with them in the vain imaginations of our hearts. I suspect (my hermeneutic of suspicion?) that there is the view that really only academics and synods can tell us what to think about the Scriptures. What is forgotten, it seems to me, is that we all stand under the Word of God. Only so can we begin to understand what it means to be the church.

There is one egregious error repeated throughout the book, namely, that Essentials holds the church to "an unrevised prayer book". What the Declaration actually says is that the Book of Common Prayer "should not be revised in the theologically divided climate of the contemporary church". Certainly this book, especially as a "companion" to the book "Anglican Essentials", gives ample evidence to the wisdom of such restraint. The Prayer Book (1962) is itself a revised Prayer Book according to the principles of revision belonging to the Common Prayer tradition. At issue liturgically is the respect for the integrity of those principles. Terry Brown's suspicion that Essentials recalls "sixteenth century Anglican fundamentalism" is simply tendentious.

On the subject of feminism, Essentials is chastised for not taking seriously enough this essential concern of our day. Susan Storey's essay attempts to give an overview of the feminist concerns which she thinks can be easily accommodated by the church, particularly in her liturgy. The argument is naive and does not engage, in my view, the far more interesting debates within feminism between the gender feminists and the equity feminists which, among other things, disclose the inadequacy of the categories of patriarchy, androcentrism and even sexism for the understanding of ourselves. Her essay supposes that there are simple practical solutions to these questions, such as soft-sell inclusivism in matters of liturgical language. I fear it isn't so.

I am reminded of the post-Christian feminist Daphne Hampson's riposte to the story of Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to his teaching, namely, that only a role reversal would do. Perhaps that says it all. How can we listen to the voices of one another if we cannot listen to the voice of Jesus? The positive of "The Challenge of Tradition" is that, at the very least, it intends to listen. Perhaps, together we can discern something of the future of Anglicanism.