Rowan Williams on Community

Recently Rowan Williams gave a lecture in Wales on the common good and turning a society into a community. I'll simplify it and then comment from my perspective.

Rowan Williams has a good view of community. He first uses negatives as to what holds community back.

Too much income inequality pushes against community by generating discontent. Managerial and functionalist approaches to organising society - e.g. reducing education to being about skills alone - takes from the three dimensional nature of individuals and the community life that results. Education should promote self understanding (I would add it should promote learning for its own sake and towards criticism). Such functionalism includes commodification, of buying your inequalities, and it reduces human diversity. Later he mentions the public goods of sport and the arts (neglected in education as training). The next negative is the downgrading of public benefit - I'd put it as that which comes from public squalor or the notion that the public sphere is unproductive. He says leaving things to the market undermines the full sense of mutual responsibility. But he also criticises a passive welfarism, of leaving things to the State, where you get dependency as it undermines the responsible, active and creative.

Later he calls much of this economism: The British right (he ought to mean New Right) have been found lacking and economism is reductionist of the person. The Fabians, however, were too top down and non-local.

He states that:

The values of community challenge inequality; they challenge managerialism, they challenge the unbridled market of public goods, and they challenge passivity and dependence.

Later he sees these values in a potential broad educational framework. He finds it in the broadest and best sense of the Welsh co-operative movement. Being a blood donor is a case where supply meets demand on a purely non-economic but communitarian basis.

He prefers economists like Michael Sandel and especially Partha Dasgupta, who attempts to include environmental cost and cost to corporate wellbeing. You have to first have a belief about human beings, and you can get this from some economists and theologians. He adds Robert Skidelsky, Philip Blond of the Red Tories and John Millbank of radical Orthodoxy, and at least the title's insight of One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse (if not his solutions). As a theologian he produces an anthropology, or as such a doctrine of human nature.

The Church might be a friend of government that promotes community. Community involves responsibility for one another, and a very strong moral sense the human being.

This is joined with the practice of citizenship that involves responsibility of one for another. He finds this in his scriptures, as in Hebrew society or Paul's organism of interacting parts.

He thinks the doctrine of a three dimensional human being and citizenship can be promoted by the Welsh Assembly.

So that was his lecture, simplified.

I come at this remembering what it was like to live in a community. This was a village of 900 people where everyone knew of everyone else. There were rotten families and good families. Knowing who were the local bad youth might suppress some of their activity, but only with police involvement (in the end) and there were fault lines of disputes running for years, legal actions and personal animosities. Gossip both oiled the works and was destructive.

My point is, before people start to claim community is a good thing, with a moral tone and reciprocal solidarity (and action), as Rowan Williams does, they ought to think further about how human tribes form.

The fact is that there is a freedom in at least some anonymity. People like suburbs.

His lecture is also in some contrast from his previous consideration of Sharia Law. That was about community too, but a separated out multiculturalism of communities. This law applies to you, but not to you, and such was seen as oppressive upon those who would have to make a special attempt to escape such additional law.

My point is that individuals need protection against communities, and that this is also a doctrine of the human. We have, at times, a right to remain silent. Human rights are right too - and right to focus on the centres of consciousness and sentience (extend this beyond humans).

My doctrine of humanity starts not as a given - that is what doctrine is (like in the zap of revelation) - but as a phenomenology. The phenomenology, the irreducible, is consciousness, and that I am that can say I am, my knowing that I know. That is where the pain is felt and where the pleasure is felt, and knowing it. Animals have a more limited sense of knowing what they know (doesn't make pain any less felt, but they can't build a library from it).

Community no doubt enhances the richness of the I am and knowing I am, as it reminds each that he is and she is what I am too. It is through community that you get the broader and non-economic riches. Communities build collective libraries of memory and the imaginative. It is through others that you express responsibilities but you also have rights, and your rights are as much away from other people as in amongst them.

Humans are tribal, and that's our sociolbiology. But tribes create divisions, and the religious aim is not so much enhancing the tribe, which is easy, but protecting the individual from the oppressive tribe and in creating bridges across tribes that can all too easily separate and go to war.

Thus at one and the same time, I promote the individual and the interfaith. The community all too easily reverts to the bureaucratic. Weber's dead hand isn't just about a narrow view of people: he was well aware that we added more into social life than some narrow Marxist causality or purest economic liberalism. We have to guard against pure rationality too. That's why my tradition, as well as promoting the individual, and the bridge-building, also came to question religious rationality and jumped upon the riches of the transcendental and romantic too (at least to some degree - there are dangers in too much that is imaginary and then delusional).

Rowan Williams does not tackle the dangers of the collective; perhaps, today, the issue is the insufficient collective. Maybe. But I'd beware.

My Coming Ordination

Obviously I've been blogging away on the Anglican Communion Covenant, and that's been my public focus while this has come to a climax and to its rejection that, to be honest, I didn't think we'd see. But, as this has been happening, privately I have been in negotiation with some interesting folks in the Liberal Catholic field and I can announce that I am going to be ordained. The process will be accelerated through some minor orders and then rapidly through the major orders.

As many people interested might be aware, some of the Liberal Catholic groups have been going through some trauma of bishops suddenly leaving and clergy not being as loyal to their ecclesiastical groupings as they perhaps should be. We live and learn, and indeed must learn.

So a group of us in online contact got together, including meeting physically, and decided to extract and rearrange some of the best parts of these independent Churches to make them attractive to liberals who enjoy symbolism but not creeds. So long as we could attract friendly bishops, all with well-attested ordinations, we will be able to claim full apostolic integration with broader Catholicism on the Old Catholic/ Liberal Catholic model. Yes, so the announcement is that I will be one of its bishops, indeed the initial bishop directly concerned with the development of our new specific movement. Others either are ordained or will be, and we look forward to friendly relationships throughout the Liberal Catholic, Old Catholic and Unitarian movements.

Given the English Presbyterian background of the Unitarians, the kind of Catholicism we seek, and the important difference between unity and uniformity, we are going to form the Free Union of the Catholic Kirk where I will be that initial bishop in situ and then subsequently I could stand down (still a bishop, though, by proper ordination!) and we will elect bishops to be ordained and to actually meet as an active college. The college will be joined by an ordained ministerial College (priests and deacons) and a Lay College too - and these will make the decisions. There will be a maximum of nine places in each college.

Surely recent Anglican experience of being out of touch demands that bishops are elected, but we want all the tricameral Colleges elected.

We are going to create a society for overt educational purposes - our Seminary, in other words. We will call this the Apostolic Reformed Society for Education Services. We really must promote the importance of theology and the social sciences in developing our Church movement. We will have continuous religious education at all levels. We are going to base this on the discussion model we used in the embryonic South Humberside Institute for Theology (before I moved north of the Humber).

Let's be clear, This will be Unitarian in precisely the sense of having an open, evolving, creedless basis of belief. Our liturgies will be creative and changing. We will be wanting a worldwide element of informal fellowship for bishops, priests, deacons and lay leaders beyond the colleges, and including outside our movement (in association), and they will be gathered in a fellowship called the Reformed Unitarian Ministries Project where matters confidential and pressing for all can be exchanged. This will be a little like a Grand Presbytery but informal, and we will use the Indaba idea ourselves in this structure. The Grand Presbytery will make recommendations to the Colleges that take decisions.

The experience of small Churches has been to register themselves in several different island nations. We won't do that except for necessary institutional and financial arrangements, and so there will be various Catholic Unitarian National Trusts and these funds will be co-ordinated by and through the educational society - its other principal activity.

For the purposes of protecting the core institution, the Free Union of the Catholic Kirk, there will be specific privately owned and necessarily ideologically identified bodies across different these legal territories, as in a dispersed trustee, called collectively the Broad Association of Societies of the Transparent Apostolic and Reformed Deist Socinians, also with co-ordination functions via the Apostolic Reformed Society for Education Services. Above that will be a Presidium of the Institute for Socinian Societies, which is the office (the bureaucracy) based in the UK and will be a non-profit company itself.

There will be a kind of evangelistic arm in terms of those having difficulty in the mainstream Churches: I suggested we start with an Ordinariate that would be liberal and welcoming: a Trinity Ordinariate of the Socinian Societies Ecclesia Reformed (Sectional). This would be liturgically conservative; the naming conflict in the title deliberate.

For a spiritual society, leading to a badge that we can all wear, and robes for special gatherings, we will establish the Brethren Oratory of the Liberal Lay and Ordained in the Catholic Kirk Societies.

Last but definitely not least is the charity arm. No Church should exist for itself. To keep things as open and general as possible, with hopefully many participants, we decided to set up the ecumenically intended Charity Organisation of the Catholic Kirk. We are sure that it will develop a number of interests, but starting at a managable level we are going to concentrate on some of our own interests, and following one of our group member's own concerns we will begin with a focus on and ministry for people with Tourette Syndrome.

Do look out for the website that will go up after today: URL details soon.

Yorkie Gets a Supporter...

There's a letter from the Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, to the Church of England's very own Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, banging away for the Covenant.

You're a bit late mate, unless it is to produce a pro-Covenant Yorkie horse for the up and coming race with the finishing line in Kent. The letter says:

But thanks be to God, who calls us together, not through binding legal processes (for the Covenant does not provide for these, whatever some critics may claim), but rather through ‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ (Rom 8:2).

Well why have it then?

Reversing the Church

I watched two interesting programmes about religion on Friday and today, Saturday.

Friday's was Reverse Missionaries featuring Kshama Jayaraj from Mumbai who went to Belfast and modelled herself a little on Amy Carmichael, who went from Belfast to India over fifty years. Well I had no sympathy for Kshama Jayarajfor the simple reason that religion in Northern Ireland is part of its problem and not part of its solution, and certainly not with her evangelical narrow outlook. Yes, she did a little in attracting over some from the Catholic side and that was significant, but religion will only ever become a focus for any unity from a position of weakness.

I recall when at Unitarian College and going to the General Assembly, and being descended upon by members of the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, a Christian for sure cousin of the Unitarians in Ireland. I was always critical of those ministers who went to Northern Ireland either as a means to shore up their Christianity or to get the bigger congregations. So when they came looking for recruits, I gave them my approving thoughts of Don Cupitt and non-realism. That was enough to get them off my back - they were so down the narrow path that all I had to do was mention this Anglican to throw them off.

Tonight it was the turn of Diarmaid MacCulloch and the concluding part of How God Made the English. It included an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. MacCulloch has opposed Williams on the Covenant, but here they were in agreement (and highlights Williams's inconsistency - how he treats his own Church and Communion far more narrowly and bureaucratically than he treats relationships with people of other faiths and narratives including in the English context). Both approve of the idea of the Church of England - epitomised by its cathedrals - as places that can broker the diversity of faith in England rather than being defensive about a particular view of Christianity and Church. Instead of a secular state of toleration, that worries about tolerating the intolerant, the Church becomes a kind of centre for a huge ethnic and religious diversity and a creator of shared values. (Sociologists call this civic religion.)

Oh if it was true within the liturgical services themselves! The Puritan Presbyterians (who never set up Presbyterianism) wanted to get back into the Church of England, but could not. When Unitarianism was no longer dominated by its ideologues, the high command of the Unitarian movement had good relationships with liberal and broad Anglicans, but notions of a broad Church that could include Unitarians were rejected as impractical (by Anglicans, and even friendly ones).

Diarmaid MacCulloch (who, I understand, has Anglican Deacon orders) has indicated on a previous television series that he does not accept the Bible as regulative, and his 'love' for the Church of England is a kind of cultural Christianity. We see exactly the same with the motivation of John Rutter, who is not a believing Christian but wishes to preserve the cultural forms of Anglicanism and produces much of its better contemporary music.

Well I am quite favourable to these broader ideas, but in the end the Church of England is not a pot into which any ingredient can be thrown. The Archbishop's own belief pattern is a strongly detailed narrative of Christianity; he seems to be well capable of being on the inside, and indeed has made himself so ecclesiastical that he has dumped ethical features of his former broader (somewhat postmodern) theology. There are boundaries and I would suggest that they are:

• The regulative nature of the Bible, even when subject to biblical criticism
• Liturgical conservation around the detail of Christian beliefs (Reformed, some Catholic)
• Beliefs held in the Incarnation in general and Resurrection in general of Jesus as the Christ.

I do not hold to these. I do not believe the Bible should be regulative, but that all scriptures are open to critical review and use, and much more besides. I think we should be liturgically creative including insights from faiths and philosophies, and I do not believe in a unique Incarnation nor in Resurrection and indeed Jesus is but a man of his time.

It is possible for the Church of England to hold services that others can give their input, but its input will always be doctrinal to the extent of the guidelines above. The reason I am now Unitarian again is because I am a broader pluralist than possible in the Church of England, and because I am not a Christian.

I also think that the Church of England is still going to trim itself inwards. Certainly the defeat of the Covenant, of which Diarmaid MacCulloch was a part, will delay that process, but the intended work of GAFCON as entryists, the loss of Catholic traditionalists, the bureaucrats of evangelical Fulcrum at the cutting off point between being evangelical and being open, and shrinking of mythic liberality and the loss of open non-realism as an active potential part of the Church of England, means it will not spread as far and wide as it did.

For Diarmaid MacCulloch to be right, and for his view to be sustained, the Church of England has to spread further and wider, and its cathedrals have to become vessels for a variety of religious expressions wider than Christianity itself. I doubt they can achieve this, and they may be dragged back by a shrinking Church of England in terms of its outlook.

Add Manchester

Manchester said no too, in all three houses. So there is no doubt at all about the general view of the Church of England as constituted through its decision making system. Now we have to wait until nearly mid-April for Southwell and Nottingham, then just over a week after that for Chichester, then Newcastle and York near the end of the month bring up the rear. It is now 25 to 15 noes.

With the exception of Truro, you can walk from one end of the noes to the other in England without ever having to enter yes territory! And even the yesses were rather forced (and one is in Europe, not within England itself).

London Calling

The Covenant: even London voted against it! Only the bishops were in favour, 2-1, and as we know, any dissent among the bishops and the rest feel freer to vote it down. No sympathy presents, no bending to the still 'don't get it' bureaucrats.

ACI Somewhat Skewed

The Anglican Communion Institute thinks that the failure of Rowan Williams in the Church of England to persuade it to join the Covenant and in the broader Communion in terms of follow-through of discipline is a positive opportunity for future the Covenant!

They accuse him of losing interest, and focussing on other things; but they also accuse him (before he lost interest) of irritating both sides at Lambeth 2008 and the 2009 ACC meeting was institutionally dysfunctional and the very opposite of what a Covenant would achieve. In other words, he did not do what the ACI would have wanted in a period of discussion amongst the purple and setting up a section 4 that he thought might bridge the gap.

Basically, now the Western Churches would seem to be outside the Covenant, those that are inside will get the opportunity to reform it. The ACI dreams of The Episcopal Church going bankrupt while this process of change takes place, and regards vital parts of Anglicanism as only in Asia and Africa. Only those inside the Covenant can reform it, and indeed the connection of the Archbishop, the Church of England and the Instruments needs some untangling if the Covenant is to work. For example, the ACC is an English company where membership for the purposes of English law is the Standing Committee, of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is an ex-officio member.

So the insiders make amendments and the Covenant becomes workable, and then they might even invite dioceses as members of it where the Churches they are in do not Covenant. Yes - imagine that in the Church of England. The dioceses as a whole process rejected the Covenant, the General Synod collectively is unable to consider the legislation, and yet dioceses go and join the Covenant? On what legal basis exactly? Some bishops might declare they are 'Windsor compliant' but it will have no more than the force of a slogan, and probably a redundant one.

All this forgets that a body of Covenanters might want to retain real relationships with Western Churches that do not sign up to the Covenant. It assumes African Churches will sign up, but signing up that would limit the freedom of movement to compete. To assume, as the ACI does, that the Covenant now represents the opportunity to do reverse mission into the West is in fact not the assumption of the Covenant, nor those that have signed it, but the GAFCON competitors. The Covenant would only be the basis of the reverse mission if there was a complete and final break into two Anglicanisms where one part, Covenanting on a revised basis, did not recognise the other part, the non-Covenanting.

This is so far down the road and not likely to be the outcome. The Covenant has been weakened, not strengthened, by the rejection of the Church of England. It has been weakened because Churches signed up to it already and would have done on the basis that a number of Western Churches including the English would have signed up too. There might still be such a conserving group of Covenanters, but they are not minded to be competitive - the rules of geographical monopoly still apply for them.

The ACI is allowing its hatred of the policies of The Episcopal Church and much of Canada to cloud its insight as to the purposes of altering the Covenant by its insiders. There is likely to be a competitive group of reverse mission, that of GAFCON and its forms, but we have yet to see how it will organise itself in terms of entryism regarding other Churches and what the targeted Churches will then do in response.