by Prof Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University and member of General Synod
I’m honoured to have been asked to take over Via Media for a couple of months and, like my predecessors as guest editors, Rosie Harper and Alan Wilson, I’ve invited a range of people, the majority of them new voices here.
Among them, I’ve made a point of inviting some people from the academic world, including some who have recently finished, or who are working towards, higher degrees which involve researching the Church of England with the skills of different disciplines. Why? Because I’m interested in how we work with both experience and reason in making decisions in the church. Can we use our reason to think through a situation rather than giving a knee-jerk reaction? Can we appreciate that some of our key documents and some of our practices are the object of academic study – academic study which can teach us about ourselves?
Sometimes, in church circles, I get the impression that being an academic makes me ‘a bit dodgy’. My BA was partly in Social Anthropology and my PhD applied its methodology to the ancient Greeks. Social Anthropology started out trying to understand what looked like ‘strange practices’ in non-Western societies: rituals, kinship arrangements, political systems. At University College London, one of the books in the Anthropology library was Fortescue’s The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described (1918). As a student, after spending many of my teenage years in a gathered evangelical church, I was exploring Anglo-Catholic sacramentalism in my own life, so I read Fortescue with interest. If you ever need to find out what to do at a ‘High Mass before a Bishop not in his own Diocese’, this is the book for you! But what was that book doing in the Anthropology section? It was there because the way sacred space is defined and used, and ceremonies are constructed, is the concern of anthropology, in our own culture as much as in others.
Historically, understanding ‘strange practices’ often came with a colonial motive; to rule other people you needed to work out how to integrate their system with yours. I wonder if we do that in the church too; is our motive in trying to understand each other really to try to take each other over? Back in 2015, I took part in the Diocesan Shared Conversations. It was gruelling, not least because of the tension between hearing views which – despite my own broad church background – I found extraordinary, and meeting people with whom I profoundly disagreed but for whom I felt love and concern.
Anthropology’s curious eye needs to be turned to what we think is entirely normal, taken-for-granted, in the Church of England. After a brief phase of ‘armchair anthropology’, where researchers sat at home and read about the people they were studying, anthropology has worked by ‘participant observation’; by living with the people you study. There’s a whole literature around whether you can do the anthropology of the people with whom you’ve grown up.
Within the church, I suspect, we just don’t see how very weird we look. Maybe we should. Doesn’t this matter to mission? At the most basic level, our language is often opaque: even a church announcement of ‘Choral Evensong’ can confuse the congregation, because if the service is called Evensong and there’s a choir, isn’t it always Choral Evensong? At the November 2021 General Synod, the Archbishop of York responded to a question about churchy language by arguing that it should not be simplified, but rather explained. But … how long have you got?
In his introduction to Ceremonies, Fortescue pronounced that there was rather too much genuflection around; that’s a churchy gesture involving kneeling on one knee and then standing, not to be confused with taking the knee, which is the same gesture in support of Black Lives Matter. Fortescue noted that “to a bishop – would not a low bow be more in accordance with the natural sentiment of modern people?” In the past, kneeling before rulers was normal, and if the bishop “reigns in the place of Christ” then bowing to him made sense: but this was 1918, and “now, in the world, such signs are dying out. To modern people they begin to seem a little Byzantine”.
I’m an academic: I know that calling things ‘Byzantine’ or ‘medieval’ often shows a serious misunderstanding of history! But the point stands: how do others perceive what we do, as the world within which we are living continues to change? When do we change, and when do we not?
In my twenties, my favourite hymn included “We pray thee too for wanderers from thy fold/O bring them back, good Shepherd of the sheep!” Back then, I knew who these wanderers were: campaigners for women priests. After hearing a talk by Dr Mary Tanner, I changed my position on this literally overnight, joining the Movement for the Ordination of Women the following morning. But I still remember the emotional appeal of being one of the pure ‘remnant’, the only ones who keep God’s commandments (Revelation 12:17). Although it’s the Seventh-Day Adventist Church who most focus on this verse, it’s quoted in Church of England contexts; we should “not be conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2). I often hear Christians today proudly asserting how ‘counter-cultural’ they are, but this usually means counter to a very limited set of aspects of contemporary culture.
But our faith is based on God becoming flesh in a particular time and place, and in a particular person: Jesus. The incarnation calls us not to shun the world, but to engage with it; indeed, to love it. We are part of God’s world: we don’t stand outside it. God goes ahead of us and doesn’t wait for us to catch up with what the Spirit is doing.
Any thoughts?