A Word about Rome, Keele, and Nottingham

Reluctantly I take on two subjects this time, conscious that I will deal adequately with neither. I hope that the lack of profundity and the need for condensation will be offset by what Jerome K. Jerome would call “sheer hopeless veracity.”

The Roman Catholic-Anglican Theological Commission has been working away quietly for some years, and unobtrusively has produced reports that indicated how much the two communions have in common. Now, however, the eighteen members (nine from each side) have published a document that expresses qualified agreement on authority, and the hope that the pope will at some future point be acknowledged as the universal primate.

Reaction in Britain has been mixed, and mostly runs along predictable lines. Bishop Kemp of Chichester, an Anglican high churchman who has just launched an attack on the Good News Bible, has welcomed the suggestion. So too has Dean Singer of Glasgow and Galloway (Scottish Episcopal Church), though he did emphasize that it would be a primacy based not on infallibility but on consensus with the pope and the bishops.

Bishop Wood of Norwich, a leader of the Church of England’s evangelical wing, wrote to the Times of London, criticizing “these rigid papalistic terms of centralized authority,” and stressing the Protestant view that “Christ himself, and no earthly Vicar, is the living and eternal Head of the Church.”

The moderately high Church Times, giving its imprimatur to the pope’s primacy “in the context of the collegiality of all the bishops,” has raised the question of the present pope’s retiring on his eightieth birthday in September this year, presumably on the grounds that it would be a helpful clean break (or, as we Presbyterians would say, “in the interests of union”).

A former moderator of the Church of Scotland general assembly, Dr. Andrew Herron, was not enthusiastic: “This is hardly the road to union, but the road to Rome.… This may be easy on the part of the Anglican Church because it is not a reformed church.” This sly dig went beyond Spurgeon’s, who did suggest the status of “demi-semi-reformed.”

The more Calvinistic Free Kirk did not waste time scoring points. Said the Reverend Fergus Macdonald, its public-questions convener, “The issues still to be resolved are crucial.” Two of them he identified: infallibility, and immediate universal jurisdiction.

And there’s the rub: the pope (especially Paul VI) would never be content with being primus inter pares, for Roman doctrine holds him to be the Vicar of Christ, speaking with unique authority on matters of faith and morals. One need think only of Rome’s attitude also on such things as education, marriage, contraception, and abortion, to see how great is the gulf between Rome and Canterbury. The Church of England general synod has been asked at its next meeting merely to welcome publication of the report, and to commend it for study and discussion at the diocesan level. To do anything more at this stage would precipitate serious dissension in the church.

Many Anglicans would be prepared to consider only the more modest goal of mutual recognition—acknowledging the validity of the other communion’s belief and practice. Rome may have become more liberal since Pius XII died (1958), but so too has the Church of England. Some fences are being demolished, but others are being erected or fortified. One need think only how most Catholics recoil from the prospect of women priests.

A reminder this week of the National Evangelical Anglican Congress to be held this spring at Nottingham evoked memories of the first such occasion, at Keele in 1967. Hailed as a landmark by my Church of England friends, it had lighter moments. Who else but Philip Hughes, for example, would have dared correct John Stott’s Latin in public? And who but John Stott, when another delegate expressed a preference for English, would excuse himself engagingly with “I only relapse into Latin when I’m tired”?

For half a century before Keele, according to Jim Packer, Anglican evangelicalism had “acquired a public image in which intense devotion and missionary zeal were linked with archaic theology, spiritual conceit, ecclesiastical isolationism, social unconcern, pessimism about both the world and the Church, an old-fashioned life-style, and cultural philistinism only too keen to plead guilty to G. K. Chesterton’s indictment of Protestantism as “Manichean to the core.”

The Keele congress statement dealt with areas in which the evangelical voice had all too seldom been heard. The Church, it affirmed, “should be a caring community welcoming in Christ’s name addicts, criminals, the hungry, the homeless and all in need.” More important, the statement saw the need “to recover a vision of the Church involved prayerfully and sacrificially in all the problems raised by an affluent, leisured but bewildered society.” Those who imagine that a proper social concern must necessarily be at odds with the biblical and reformed position (how has this heresy grown up among us?) will find no support in this document. Christians were learning the folly of (in Norman Anderson’s words) trying “to be the light of the world from a rather remote lighthouse.”

And now we have Nottingham 1977. The archbishops of Canterbury and York are among the speakers, John Stott will be chairman, and the theme is “Obeying Christ in a changing world.” The intention is to assess what has happened in the decade since Keele, to study some major contemporary problems, and to face the future realistically and faithfully. “Nottingham 77,” says Dr. Stott, “will be an occasion not for triumphalist trumpet-blowing, but rather for the humble and honest probing of questions. Nor will it be an exercise in party propaganda, but rather an attempt to follow our time-honored evangelical principle of seeking the will of God through submission to Christ and to Scripture.” The 2,000-or-so participants are being asked to prepare themselves by reading three paperback symposia: “The Lord Christ,” “The People of God,” and “The Changing World.” One carping note. Nottingham is a domestic Anglican occasion, but its policy toward the press is curious. Those from Anglican publications can come free, and this is probably fair enough. But national papers and the broadcasting networks are also invited to come without charge, while the non-Anglican religious press has to pay. I hope that the congress organizers will think again about this discriminatory and appallingly unecumenical arrangement. It looks too much as though they will look kindly on our being non-Anglican so long as we are non-religious too.

Note: The author subsequently reported that his personal grievance in the last matter had been removed.—ED.

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