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Tag: Thomas Aquinas

  • A Response to “The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God: a Report of the Faith and Order Commission” (GS Misc 1429)

    Fr Thomas Sharp is a priest theologian based in the South East of England and is also Provincial Secretary of the Society of Catholic Priests

    We can now see the legal advice and theological briefing which the House of Bishops was given before making their October decisions on Living in Love and Faith (LLF). One of these, the report of the Faith and Order Commission entitled The Nature of Doctrine and the Living God (GS Misc 1429), surveys Anglican understandings of the development of doctrine and the role theology has to play in the life of the Church. Putting it succinctly, the report makes it pretty clear that support for the Prayers of Love and Faith (not even for equal marriage) would probably constitute a “change” of doctrine which would also constitute an unacceptable change in our understanding of what scripture is, who God is, and who we are as created beings.

    Church reports are never as satisfying in theological terms as a good academic paper or book. They have different purposes and different standards for the arguments they make. And we also do not know which members of the Faith and Order Commission really contributed to it, and how, and to what extent its membership would agree with all the arguments made. I suspect that they don’t all feel excellent about this report. But we do not know any of this any more than we know whether any of the bishops have dissented from recent decisions and why. So we are left to evaluate the Report on its own terms, and to ask generous questions of those who may or may not have written the arguments it makes.

    It must be said from the outset that it is a strange document. It does have a few bloopers, as all reports do. The comment in §4 of the extended summary that ‘As the greatest of the medieval scholastics, Aquinas is representative of the thinking of the church catholic’ is certainly entertaining. It presents Aquinas’ thought as settled and established, ignoring the fact that the turmoil in the Roman Catholic church over the past 200 years has largely been caused by fundamental disagreement about what Thomas Aquinas meant, and whether the Aquinas we are talking about is his direct writings or the tens of generations of his interpreters who came after.

    As a scholar of catholic theology, a blooper like this does make my eyes roll involuntarily. But more problematically, it represents an attempt in this Report to present doctrine as something generally static, generally serene, a quiet lake in which even its dynamism is limited to the occasional wave breaking on the shoreline of its boundaries.

    But this is theological and historical make-believe. The theology of Paul was a seismic shock to the world. The emergence of the urban episcopate had monks and citizens rioting in the streets of the Mediterranean. The theology of Augustine was a genuine shock to the Church. Even the theology of Thomas Aquinas, with his startling new Aristotelian approach, was shocking and new, and was not and is not uncritically accepted in the church catholic.

    The doctrine of the church has never been worked out calmly and quietly. That isn’t how people work, especially not when we believe things dearly and love fervently the God about whom we are trying to speak and teach. Any portrayal of doctrine as settled and serene is fantasy. Well argued fantasy. But fantasy nevertheless.

    Section III of the report attempts to construct an Anglican sense of what doctrine is and where its limits are. It does this with a very eminent group of white theologians from the UK and North America, 22% of which are women. But it seems to pretend that the rest of the Anglican Communion and humanity has nothing to offer. They are or were all (John Henry Newman probably aside) either straight or in heterosexual marriages. Apparently nobody who would be directly affected by the Prayers of Love and Faith has ever thought about doctrine. Certainly never in the global south. There are people, even LGBTQIA+ people, South of the equator and East of Suffolk.

    In section III a degree of complexity is dealt with. But this is jettisoned in its summary synthesis §139-146 where a seductively unclear conclusion is presented:

    The nature of doctrine might be summarised as true knowledge about God that is communally authorised by warrant in the Holy Scriptures and is, therefore, communally regulative. (§146)

    What does “Communally Regulative” actually mean? Does it have a conservative meaning of establishing the bare minimum of precepts which a person must accept in order to be confident of their salvation, in the sense of Article VI of the Articles of Religion? Or does it have a broader, more liberal application, in the sense that ‘those things a Christian is required to know, believe, and observe are available to all in their reading of Scripture’ (§172) and that whatever lies outside this is not to be permitted. The Report acknowledges that the latter approach ‘is not expressed in the Church of England’s historical formularies per se’ (fn. 154).

    The former, more conservative approach, might fit better the doctrine of the scriptures found in the Book of Common Prayer and the historic formularies of the Church of England. English Anglicanism, at least in its formularies, is conservative about what it considers to be a “first order” issue. If anything ever mentioned in scripture becomes a “first order” issue, simply by virtue of the fact that it is mentioned in scripture, doctrine will simply cease to function as a useful means by which the Church teaches God’s people what their salvation is, and where their hope should be. Just because we feel very strongly about something at the moment, on either side, does not make it a first order issue.

    The knots a more liberal and expansive approach to what is a “first order” issue can get us into are clear in §171 of the conclusion. To pull at one thread of the great edifice of “first order” doctrine which has been built up seems to threaten to unravel the whole.

    For many, the doctrine of marriage as it has been articulated historically foregrounds a clearly defined set of biblical texts. Furthermore, those advancing that argument maintain those texts are decisive in their teaching that only relationship between one man and one woman may be offered a form of divine authorisation in a marriage service, blessing, or prayer. To argue otherwise – as those in support of the PLF do – appears to constitute a simultaneous challenge to the doctrine of marriage, the doctrines that marriage refers to (such as creation and redemption), and also the doctrine of Scripture. (§171)

    The illusion of a near eternally settled body of doctrine which peacefully and unchangeably has taught and guided God’s people is both a historical fantasy, and also dangerous, as our theology becomes so simply overconnected that everything is raised to being a “first order” issue. Such theology is not strong. It is brittle. It is magisterial. It is expansive, regulatory and tends towards the authoritarian. It moves us ever closer to the next divisive issue and the next schism. It makes “windows into men’s souls” beyond what is necessary to assure them of their salvation. In that sense, it is deeply un-anglican.

  • Freedom of Conscience: Sauce for the Gander?

    Questions of Conscience (1):

    opening a new series of posts offering reflections on this theme

    by Canon Giles Goddard, Vicar of St John’s, Waterloo and a consultant to the LLF Implementation Pastoral Reassurance Working Group

    We are hearing a lot about freedom of conscience at the moment. Some who oppose the introduction of Prayers for Love and Faith (PLF) are seeking assurances that they will be free to act according to their conscience, or that they will not be required to act against their conscience. In an open letter on 10th Feb 2023 the Archbishop asked the forbearance of the Diocese of York “as the work is done to ensure that freedom of conscience is properly respected.”

    The appeal to conscience is often seen as an ultimate moral arbiter, particularly among those who would resist what they see as innovations. Readers of this blog may remember ‘Cost of Conscience,’ an organisation which was vocal in the earlier years of this century in opposition to the ordination of women. Conscience is much cited amongst those opposed to abortion.

    I was glad to be asked to write something for Via Media on the subject, not least because I have been drawn back into the Living in Love and Faith process as a consultant to the Pastoral Reassurance Working Group. So I have been reflecting on and reading around the nature of conscience, and what status it might have in current discussions about ethical and liturgical practice within the Church of England.

    The word ‘conscience’ is an elision of two Latin roots; con and scio: meaning something like ‘knowing with’ or ‘knowing alongside.’ Conscience tends to be focused inwards, towards the actions of the self. According to philosopher Alberto Giubilini, there are in the history of philosophy four predominant understandings of conscience: it can be seen as a faculty for self-knowledge and self-assessment, or as having an epistemic function in the sphere of morality, or as a motivational force, or as a set of self-identifying moral beliefs. Within the Anglican tradition it is, according to this very helpful lecture by Revd Dr. Michael Hull of the Scottish Episcopal Church, “that God-given capacity that allows us to adjudicate the rightness of our action and also to show, fully, our integrity to God.”

    In other words, conscience is not the absolute arbiter of what is right and what is wrong. It is the human capacity to identify, to ourselves, what we understand to be the right course of action in an ethical context. Thomas Aquinas recognised that conscience may err. John Calvin saw conscience as a battleground: “the enemies who rise up in our conscience against his Kingdom and hinder his decrees prove that God’s throne is not firmly established therein.”   The dictate of conscience is based on a number of factors: for Christians, on the Word of God, yes – but also on reason, experience and the culture and communities within which we live.

    Thus conclusions reached according to conscience can be diametrically different. Those who are willing to carry out abortions would often appeal to their consciences in so doing, taking into account their duty as medical professionals and their responsibilities to their patients. Others will not carry out abortions, citing conscientious objection as sufficient ground for refusal.

    Similarly, in relation to PLF, radically different conclusions are supported by appeals to conscience. Many who have or who would wish to offer prayers of blessing for same sex couples would be clear that they are acting in accordance with their conscience. My own reading of scripture, reason and tradition, as well as experience, leads me to the clear conclusion that I would be acting against my conscience in refusing to seek God’s blessing on a same-sex relationship.  Others, notably conservative evangelicals, appeal to conscience in rejecting PLF, reading the same scriptures I read but drawing very different conclusions.

    Conscience can also confuse. Huckleberry Finn famously feels that he has acted against his conscience when he helps slave Jim to escape from his aunt:

    The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last … it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven.

    The appeal to conscience by conservatives seems to me in any event to be a distraction from the core discussion, for at no point during the entire LLF process has any suggestion been made that anyone opposed would be required to offer prayers of blessing. Nor has any suggestion been made that their position in the Church of England would be in any way compromised by a refusal to offer PLF.

    What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, though. It is very possible to imagine a situation where a priest and a PCC may wish to offer Prayers of Love and Faith within a Diocese or Area where the bishop is opposed. What then? Do we need safeguards in place to ensure that the freedom of conscience exercised by a progressive priest does not undermine their place in the Church of England? Alternative episcopal oversight?

    This from Alberto Giubilini:

    Far from being a conversation-stopper, conscience can only find its proper place in philosophical and in public discussion if its philosophical and psychological aspects are teased out, defined and assessed. Appeals to conscience can only be part of philosophical, political, and legal discussion if they are seen as the start, not the end of discussions.

    As we move forward in the conversations about pastoral reassurance, perhaps an initial step will be to note that conscience is not, of itself, an arbiter of right thinking. The Living in Love and Faith process has, over six years, carefully unpicked the theological, scriptural, experiential and historical complexities of human relationships, sexuality and God’s love.

    It’s quite clear that it is not going to be easy to square the circle, but I hope that we can recognise that the appeal to conscience is no less straightforward than anything else in this process.