ECCLESIAL EXISTENCE TODAY

By Douglas Farrow

"For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many 'gods' and many 'lords'), yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things come and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. But not everyone knows this."

What is the Church?

The crisis in the Anglican Church of Canada does not concern the word Anglican -- at least not in the first instance -- much less the word Canada. It concerns the word Church.

What is the church? Whatever else may be said in answer to that question, and whatever may be disputed between the churches, we must surely say at least this: The church is the community of the new covenant between God and humanity that is grounded in the self-offering of Jesus Christ and confesses him as Lord. What is happening in the Anglican Church of Canada today, as epitomized by resolution A-134, is a crisis for the faithful precisely because it reveals a different and contrary premise.

I want to reiterate here the key point in my response to General Synod in the article "Different Gods," which leaned especially on a statement found in the Barmen Declaration: "We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords -- areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him." This statement of denial, of repudiation of other would-be lords, is founded on an evangelical affirmation, as all good confessional theology should be.

Here is the gospel with which the church has been entrusted, the gospel by which the Holy Spirit enables it to be the church, and to serve the world as only the church can. It is a gospel of deliverance and of allegiance -- of total deliverance, hence of unqualified allegiance.

The church is the community of the new or renewed covenant between God and humanity that is grounded in the self-offering of Jesus Christ, the one offering that is truly acceptable to God. It is a community that owes to him its unqualified allegiance. There is no sphere of life or of death in or from which it has not been delivered by him, or in which it may own some other lord in preference to him.

The Loss of Evangelical Insight

Let me say at once that it is incidental that the creatures immediately at issue in our church crisis happen to be homosexuals. It is incidental, that is, to the gospel; for God loves all his creatures, including those of homosexual inclination, with perfect consistency and the mission of Jesus Christ is a mission to homosexuals and heterosexuals alike.

Now it disturbs me greatly that love for our neighbours, which to be authentic must flow from love for God, has fallen so low that we have become almost incapable even of that rational concern that still marks thoughtful non-Christians. One often looks in vain, in our internal debates about homosexuality, for patient and careful questioning of popular assumptions about human psychology and biology, equality rights, the rights and welfare and education of children, the contraceptive mentality, etc., or for serious analysis of public policy questions related to the enormous cultural disaster that is same-sex marriage.

Unity is Impossible

To the extent that this is true, unity in the Anglican Church of Canada has become impossible. The only possible response to this sort of heresy, and to the program of moral corruption that must necessarily follow from it, is rejection root and branch. For the church that follows this path is no longer the church.

We need not marvel at those plaintive voices that profess their inability to understand why unity is impossible. "We see no reason why Anglicanism should not remain united while disagreeing about the ethics of homosexuality," they say. And indeed they do not see, for their understanding of church unity, like their understanding of the church itself, is not rooted in the gospel. Unity for them is not a function of the common life in Christ, but of a conservative decision-making process which they more or less equate with the common life in Christ.

What is to be Done?

When Moses returned from the mountain he was instructed by the Lord to put swords in the hands of the faithful and to set them against their brothers. Woe to those who think that this is what must be done today, however figuratively -- whether externally through courts of law or internally through parish putsches. When Jesus came to fulfill the law of Moses, and to make effective the gospel of Moses, he established a new economic and strategic order.

Our task is to discern together what the gospel requires of us in order to affirm ecclesial existence today, for ourselves and for the sake of our neighbours, in the face of the growing apostasy of the Anglican Church of Canada, an apostasy formalized at General Synod 2004.

I venture three suggestions. First, it is right that we should offer repentance on behalf of ourselves and our churches. We are all complicit, we are all responsible for the present church crisis, in so far as we have failed fully to proclaim and to live the gospel.

Second, it is right that we should be prepared to give up property and security in pursuit of "free and grateful" service to the Lord of the church. When leaders of the synagogue in Ephesus became obstinate and refused the gospel, Paul and the other believers went out to the lecture hall of Tyrannus.

Third, it is right that we should renew our own devotion to Christian unity. Ecclesial existence today, in the face of local and even national apostasy, may indeed mean to become more authentically Anglican than we have been hitherto, through greater faithfulness both to the scriptures and to the Book of Common Prayer.

Karl Barth wrote his famous Theological Existence Today! on the occasion of the imposition by the Nazis, in June 1933, of a new set of authority structures and authority figures in the German protestant church. But he did not write it simply to protest that imposition or to support the New Reformation movement that had arisen in defence of the church's formal independence from the state.

What is at stake in our own church crisis is not mere formal independence from a body we regard as having lost the authority of the gospel, or from bishops who no longer proclaim the gospel. What is at stake is material dependence on "the one Word of God whom we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey, in life and in death" (Barmen).

Douglas Farrow is Associate Professor of Christian Thought, Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University.

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