Fr Thomas Sharp is Succentor at Southwark Cathedral, and Parish Priest at St Hugh’s Bermondsey. He is Coordinator of the Young Anglican Theology Project, a Third Order Franciscan, and a member of the Provincial Council of the Society of Catholic Priests.
When I was at University, one of our lecturers tried to impress on us just how chaotic and disputatious was the early Church. He had us gather in a seminar room, and argue about anything we could think of, so long as it generated plenty of theological insults. It was great fun, if rather a culture shock from the polite University discourse in which we were trained.
My favourite ‘Christian insult’ was ‘How dare you forsake your Baptism?’ Screamed at the top of one’s lungs. The charge is weighty, vital. And it helps that ‘forsake’ and ‘baptism’ are immensely satisfying words to spit at a colleague in the classroom.
The patristic tendency of Christians to levy the charge that opponents have forsaken their baptism has given way in recent years to the charge that they have forsaken communion. Breaking or impairing communion is the ecclesiological offence-du-jour on a range of issues. It remains the great obstacle of ecumenism.
But the two charges amount to the same thing. Communion flows from our baptism. We are in communion with one another by virtue of the fact that we are baptised into one body. To declare then that communion is broken is, simply, to make a fundamental statement too about baptism, that the sacrament, too, has in some way been broken.
I have not always agreed with my bishops. Very occasionally, I have thought it might be easier if I could perhaps put myself under a different bishop more closely aligned with my views.
Feelings of alienation, frustration, and misunderstanding within the Church are not, however, a consequence of broken communion, or a cause of it. They are fundamentally a consequence of our common fallenness – and so point to the grace by which they and we must all be saved.
The doctrine of salvation by faith and not works renders communion an objective reality: it gives us confidence. In the darkest days of the Reformation, when it seemed that the Church really thought communion was simply about assenting to the decrees of councils and authorities, their blasphemy was to render salvation subjective. They made it seem that salvation rested on nothing firmer than whatever the latest power bloc or prelate thought I should be burned over should I disagree. Under such rule, communion depends on whatever is going on in head of the one who sits in judgment. And hell’s maw yawns open – apparently, not for forsaking God, but for standing up to an earthly ruler, whose mind might change tomorrow. What sinking sand on which to build one’s faith.
This is a caricature of pre-Reformation thought, of course, but salvation by grace is our safeguard against that caricature becoming real. It defends us against the temptation to put our faith not in God but in earthly councils and secular alliances. Salvation by works says that there’s something you can do to be in with the right crowd or in the right place to earn the mercy of God. But salvation by faith proclaims healthily and firmly our sinfulness, our inability to save ourselves. It plants our trust firmly on the ground of God’s grace.
No human being can be righteous enough to earn salvation: it is given through the grace of faith. No human can earn what God gives them – either through ‘right-thinking’ or ‘lifestyle’ -for God gives it freely, as unmerited gift. No human can be good and wholesome enough to merit the blood of Christ: it is medicine shed for the sick.
My point is this: no Christian minister, no bishop or priest can be stainless enough to earn the pastoral ministry. It is given through the grace of faith. No bishop, no pastor, can teach infallibly (at least, I hold this as an Anglican): each is fallen and saved by grace. No communion with a bishop is so subjective as to depend on what they think about any number of things, or even what they teach or do. If they claim the blood of Christ and confess the Triune God, if they call upon God in their distress for the mercy revealed on the cross, then they are Christians and we are in communion. I do not choose them: Christ died for them.
When the Bishop of London declared in her speech to General Synod that all members of the Church would be welcome at her table, one might be tempted to see it as a statement of flagrant liberalism, theologically lax if well-intentioned. But I took it as a clear and conservative planting of episcopal feet on a firm foundation: the communion of the baptised which is God’s graceful gift to the Body of Christ.
My own diocesan Bishop urges us ‘to continue to speak well of each other,’ and again some might be tempted to dismiss this as a well-meaning aspiration. But to speak well of one another, even when we disagree, is to resolve defiantly and determinedly (and against the odds) not to impugn the blood of Christ by which we and they (whoever ‘they’ may be for us) have been saved. By baptism we have been incorporated into one body. If we insult or injure one another, it is that one body – the body of Christ – which we are injuring.
I did not choose my fellow Christians, those who are called with me to the supper of the Lamb.
I have not chosen my Bishops, and they have not chosen me. We have been gifted to one another by divine providence and God’s mercy.
I did not choose the body of which they and I are a part, and I have not built it – for it is God who builds it and elects members to it and feeds it.
I am tempted, when I disagree with them and any number of my fellow members of the Church, to declare us ‘out of communion’, to insult and write them off.
But then the Spirit’s voice accuses me: ‘How dare you forsake your baptism?’
Any thoughts?