Why Study the Past? : The Quest for the Historical Church

Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, is clearly at the center of the current crisis facing the Anglican Communion. Accordingly, he is savaged from all sides. One group, known as the Society for the Propagation of Reformed Evangelical Doctrine, recently released a 140-page document claiming that Williams has worked for many years to replace the Anglican Faith and "adheres to the sovereign authority of man's reason, intelligence, experience, and promotes a new moral code." At the other end of the spectrum, the Bishop of Washington expresses dismay, "in this holy season of Lent, to see the Archbishop of Canterbury succumb to the Archbishop of Nigeria and call upon us to remain in our sins."

Some have argued that Williams has expediently foresworn his earlier views on sexuality and is merely trying to keep the Communion from falling apart on his watch. No doubt the Archbishop indeed finds virtue in maintaining the unity of Communion, but Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church demonstrates that more is involved than maintaining unity for unity's sake.

Based on a series of lectures given in Salisbury Cathedral in May 2003, the book is not an easy read, but it is a thoughtful reflection on church history and the ways decisions have been made about what is and what is not tenable for Christian people.

Williams looks at periods in church history when there is a major rupture imposed by outside pressures. The early Christians had to establish their identity in a Roman Empire in which the official cults were part of citizenship. The threat of persecution by the state and the temptation to backslide led to distinct lines of belief and practice considered necessary to hold the Christian community together.

Eventually the medieval church, in providing the sinews of governance, became very much a part of earthly society in the process. As nation states developed, protestant reformers attacked the Church's worldly preoccupations. Ultimately, the churches of the Reformation as well as reformed Catholicism both established Christian identities distinctly different from the medieval church and separated from civil authorities. Williams cites more contemporary examples, the Confessing Church in 1930s Germany and the Dutch Reformed Church in the 1980s South Africa where hard lines were drawn between acceptable and non-acceptable belief.

Williams suggests that the proper approach to determining the response to new developments or threats is the study of Church history. For the Christian, the essence of the Church is that it reflects the divine interference in human history. "Church history, like all good history, invites us into a process of questioning and being questioned by the past; the difference is that the Christian past is unavoidably part of the Christian present in such a way that we have to be extra careful not to dismiss, caricature or give up the attempt to listen. What we are attending to is the record of encounter with God in Christ." "There is a sameness in the work of God which can only be fully understood as we trace the differences in the process by which one age leads to another."

Therefore, "the challenge to a programme of innovation is to show that a desired change, in subordinating one aspect of the biblical text to another, or arguing for a re-evaluation of a whole complex of texts, is not weakening the fundamental commitment to the Church's foundation in initiative and gift from elsewhere."

We learn (often not easily) from the Church's prior efforts because we can perceive analogies in how Christian responded to the divine initiatives under other circumstances that we can never fully comprehend. "Behind the details of controversy the same concern is regularly to be heard: in what sense is this a supernatural society, one whose justification is provided by God alone." of controversy the same concern is regularly to be heard: in what sense is this a supernatural society, one whose justification is provided by God alone."

There is evidence that we are now facing a rupture as serious as those Williams describes in this book. Whether welcomed or detested, contemporary secular thinking, in Britain as much as in the U.S., is presenting challenges to the Church's under-standing of how society should be organized. The institution of marriage is currently the focal point. Divorce and remarriage are widely practiced; the case for same-sex marriage is forcefully argued and gaining widespread acceptance. Americans and Britons routinely live together for years "without benefit of clergy," to use the quaint phrase of earlier generations. The percentage of children born to single mothers is growing and families with two parents living together are in the minority in many places.

Some Christians, moreover, wholeheartedly accept these developments and have worked energetically to see the Church endorse contemporary senses of justice. Others resist these trends altogether, relying on the plain language of Scripture and traditional teaching. In this impasse, it has become clear that fundamental issues are at stake for the future of the Church and that the effort to reach any kind of consensus will be difficult and drawn out.

The Archbishop can only argue: ". . accepting the labour of having to live with a history that insists upon our involvement is one of the challenges of believing not only in a revealed religion but in one that sees each of us as indebted to all. If it isn't an option simply to discard our history, we are bound to this demanding conversation, this mutual questioning of past and present, in which we discover more fully what we are as a community and who we are as baptized Christians. Out of this, we hope, comes a more mature skill in listening and conversing now."