Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (171 page)

One of the most notorious and complicated stories has been the series of running battles within the Anglican Communion. Often these have been simplistically presented as a fight between a compromised and compromising liberal affluent West and a global alliance of developing countries devoted to defending old certainties. Such a narrative suits one side of the contest, but as always in Anglicanism, matters are not that simple. Much of the rhetoric and the financial muscle backing conservative self-assertions come from Evangelicals who feel that they have lost the cultural battle in the USA, Europe and anglophone ex-British dominions, but who are prepared to direct their resources elsewhere. One major powerhouse of this movement is the Australian Anglican Diocese of Sydney, heir to most of the historic endowments from the early days of Australia, when the Church of England seemed set fair for established status in the new land. Two successive (bloodless) coups d'etat in the diocese created a stronghold not just of Low Church Anglicanism, but eventually of a particular variety of Reformed Protestant Evangelicalism. First of all, a good deal of hard work and attention to key committees produced the election as Archbishop of Sydney in 1933 of Howard Mowll, a Church leader of outstanding gifts, still open to mainstream ecumenism despite his steady attention to expanding Evangelical influence in East Asia. He set the tone for the future of Sydney diocese to the end of the 1990s.
¹⁰⁰

In that decade, a group around two brothers called Jensen set out to harness this Sydney Evangelicalism towards a much more aggressive agenda. This was no less than altering the direction of worldwide Anglicanism towards what it might have become in a more radical sixteenth-century English Reformation, combined somewhat anachronistically with a campaigning style of evangelism borrowed from American revivalism. Though their hopes were balked in one archiepiscopal election, much lobbying secured the succession for Peter Jensen in 2001; there followed appointments of members of the Jensen family to key roles in the diocese. Despite the new archbishop's Oxford doctoral work on the Elizabethan Reformation, the Jensen circle proved as unsympathetic to the
Book of Common Prayer
as it was to Anglo-Catholicism, so Sydney's elegant St Andrew's Cathedral under Dean Phillip Jensen now shelters the minimal possible lip service to its long-standing Anglican choral tradition. Sydney stands at the centre of a worldwide campaigning network throughout Anglicanism which has made no secret of its inclination to end the role of Lambeth Palace at the centre of the Anglican Communion.
¹⁰¹

The weapon of choice in this Anglican contest, as in so many others within Christianity since the 1960s, has been sexuality, and homosexuality in particular. The causes celebres uniting Anglican conservatives around the world have been two choices of openly gay men as bishops. One failed in England through a maladroit use of the Church of England's secretive appointments system; the other, of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire, USA, was duly completed by popular open election in 2003. Sexual morality has been a good issue for conservatives to rally round, since it is about the only thing on which all can agree - not just Christians, but Muslim conservatives too. One favourite argument of that section of African Anglicanism which denounces Western attitudes to sexuality is that African Christians are ridiculed or worse by African Muslims because of their association with a Church which condones homosexuality. South African Anglicans, who are more sensitive to Western concerns through their history of liberation struggle, have taken a very different line, particularly in vehement statements from Archbishop Desmond Tutu that the acceptance of the moral integrity of same-sex relationships is 'a matter of ordinary justice'.
¹⁰²

Behind the passing conflicts of the moment lies a debate throughout Christianity about whether the Bible and Christian tradition can be wrong and can be changed. It is also a debate about whether God's plan for the world centres on the supremacy of heterosexual men. 'Male headship' is one of the overriding concerns of the Sydney variant on Anglicanism, and worldwide, those Anglicans opposed to any change on attitudes to same-sex relationships overlap fairly snugly with those opposed to the ordination of women to the priesthood or consecration to the episcopate, who use the same sort of arguments. Because of the fundamental nature of this debate, conservative Christians who look coldly on the style of ecumenism parented by twentieth-century liberal Protestantism, and who are frequently deeply suspicious of the World Council of Churches, will make some religious alliances which a century ago would have been unthinkable. So Moscow and Rome are at one in their attitudes to such questions as homosexuality and the ordination of women. Equally, when conservative Episcopalians met in a Dallas hotel conference centre to discuss their future after the Robinson consecration in 2003, these members of a heretical Protestant sect, the Episcopal Church, were electrified to receive a message of encouragement from no less a figure than the head of the (renamed) Roman Inquisition, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger. It assured them of his 'heartfelt prayers for all those taking part in this convocation. The significance of your meeting is sensed far beyond [Dallas] and even in this city, from which St Augustine of Canterbury was sent to confirm and strengthen the preaching of Christ's Gospel in England.'
¹⁰³
A year later, a survey on approval ratings among American Evangelicals showed that Pope John Paul II, who would have represented Antichrist to an earlier Evangelical generation, outpolled assorted spokesmen of the Religious Right such as Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson.
¹⁰⁴

In other circumstances, this ecumenical front falters. The chief fault line is in those areas of the world where American Protestantism is in direct competition with Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Among the many annoyances for the Moscow Patriarchate in Russia's crisis years in the 1990s was the arrival through the newly open borders of a vast number of American evangelists, thirsting to spread Evangelical Christianity with the same enthusiasm that other Americans brought venture capitalism at the same time. Nowhere has the tension been greater than in the huge expansion of Pentecostalism in Latin America. Pentecostalism has generally arrived with an American rhetorical style and an identification with American cultural attitudes. In the most discreditable cases, as in the Guatemalan civil war in the 1990s, Pentecostal missionary work became a parallel American cultural war on older cultures in the Maya indigenous population. In Guatemala, that agenda chimed in with simultaneous political and military campaigns against these peoples by the government of the born-again Pentecostal Christian Rios Montt and a succession of similar generals which some have described as tantamount to genocide. Conversion to Pentecostalism for many of the victims was similar in nature to mass American conversions to Catholicism in the sixteenth century: a society in crisis turned to those offering prosperity and power. Catholic reaction to Pentecostalism has been divided, because Catholicism itself is divided between traditionalist elite religion and those affected by liberation theology. Perhaps the most effective potential response to Pentecostalism here and elsewhere in Latin America might have been from the popular, non-hierarchical Catholicism of liberationist 'base communities', but the Vatican was giving no support to these.
¹⁰⁵

Equally significant is the way in which 'old-time' religion is not quite as old-time as it seems. It is not simply that Evangelicals or Pentecostals remain as adept as ever at adapting modernity to their work of evangelization, showing, for instance, impressive mastery of the Inter-net. The alliance of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, which was extremely shaky from the first days of Pentecostalism until the 1940s (see pp. 960-61), may not be a permanent one. There is no special reason why a form of Christianity which emphasizes the renewal brought by the gifts of the Spirit should be allied to Evangelical Fundamentalism, which demands adherence to a particular set of intellectual or doctrinal propositions or a particular way of understanding texts from the past. There has indeed been a considerable 'Charismatic' movement within a very different variety of Western Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church. Pentecostalism might grow into an alliance with other forms of Christianity which have seen the Bible in more flexible and arguably more creative ways - as stories whose truth is not that of the Highway Code or a car maintenance guide. It was certainly the experience of the Quakers, from their first extrovert demonstrations in the seventeenth century, that Evangelical Christianity was a very inexact fit for their exploration of the spiritual; so it may prove with Pentecostalism.

The Ghanaian historian Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu describes a telling incident which he witnessed in a Ghanaian indigenous Pentecostal Church. The choir, primed to sing a chorus in preparation for the sermon, simply could not stop singing. Some of them began shaking, screaming, jumping, blessing the name of the Lord; the congregation followed suit. It lasted for an hour, and the preacher decided that there was no need for a sermon: it was sufficient blessing. This is an interesting victory of liturgy - albeit not a style of liturgy traditionally familiar in the West - over the preached word. Nor need Pentecostalism's frequent alliance with American cultural forms be more than a product of its origins: much of it has other sources, and is evolving a new politics just as it takes up new modes of expression.
¹⁰⁶

It is observable that certain aspects of the Christian past are being jettisoned without fuss even within self-consciously traditional religion. The most notable casualty of the past century has been Hell. It has dropped out of Christian preaching or much popular concern, first among Protestants, then later among Catholics, who have also ceased to pay much attention to that aspect of Western doctrine which seemed all-consuming in the Latin Church on the eve of the Reformation, Purgatory.
¹⁰⁷
One might see this merely as a result of European secularization: does this continent, arguably so far the world's most successfully balanced consumer society, need a Christian Heaven and Hell? It has lived through its own self-made hells in two world wars, seen the folly of blindly dogmatic belief, and now it has tried to build something less ambitious than paradise on earth, without the aid of sacred stories or absolutist ideologies.

Yet the phenomenon is wider than secular Europe. It penetrates deep into conservative as well as liberal Christianity worldwide. The disappearance of Hell represents a quiet Christian acceptance of propositions whose first prominent appearance was in nineteenth-century English Protestantism. Famously, the generous-minded theologian F. D. Maurice, a convert from Unitarianism to Anglicanism, lost his professorial chair at King's College, London, in 1853 for a series of theological essays which suggested that the notion of eternal punishment was a misunderstanding of the biblical message. Rather more unexpected was the near-contemporary appearance of similar ideas in premillennial Evangelicalism, in the fertile mind of Edward Irving and English disciples of his who managed to stay within the established Church, like Thomas Rawson Birks and Edward H. Bickersteth. Through these theologians, who managed to convince sympathizers of their rather implausible claim that they had not abandoned Calvinism, came the gradual lowering of temperature in the fires of Hell. They hardly flicker at all now in worldwide televangelism.
¹⁰⁸

A particularly surprising development in Christianity, admittedly so far noticeable mainly in the West, is the abandonment of a key aspect of Christian practice since its early days, inhumation of corpses. As hellfire receded, there advanced the literal fires of the crematorium; such fire, previously reserved by Christians for heretics, now routinely forms the liturgical climax to encomia of the good things in the life of the deceased. It will be remembered that one of the earliest public manifestations of the Christian Church was as a burial club (see p. 160), and universally archaeologists are able to detect the spread of Christian culture through the ancient and early medieval world by the excavation of corpse burials oriented east-west. The traditionalist case seems unanswerable, and was well expressed by Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, in a sermon in Westminster Abbey on 5 July 1874:

Brethren, more than fourteen hundred years have now passed away, since the flames of funeral piles [
sic
], which once blazed in all parts of the Roman Empire, have been extinguished by Christianity . . . The substitution of burning for Burial would be a falling back from Christianity to Heathenism, even as Paganism itself was a lapse from primitive religion.

Cremation's earliest champions were in fact Italian liberal nationalists, who were on occasion forbidden burial in graveyards controlled by the Church, and so cremation became an anticlerical gesture in Italy.
¹⁰⁹

Now Bishop Wordsworth would be astonished by the victory of cremation in the face of the universal vehemence of early denunciations such as his. In 2000 cremations formed more than 70 per cent of British funerals and 25 per cent of those in the United States, starting from a basis of nil in the Christian world in the 1860s. The arguments are not so much theological as practical considerations for public health and space - particularly in crowded societies like Britain. Yet the liturgical transformation involved is huge, not least the removal of a corpse's final parting from the church, which is a community place of worship, a setting for all aspects of Christian life, to the crematorium, a specialized and often rather depressingly clinical office room for dealing with death. There are indeed signs that the disposal of ashes is creating a variety of inventive new personalized ritual, including the use of Roman candles to send the ashes of one Florida fireworks enthusiast into the heavens, and an unmanned satellite to speed various others still further from the earth. The theological implications are also profound. Death is not so much distanced as sanitized or domesticated, made part of the spectrum of consumer choice in a consumer society. The Church is robbed of what was once one of its strongest cards, its power to pronounce and give public liturgical shape to loss and bewilderment at the apparent lack of pattern in the brief span of human life.
¹¹⁰