Anglican Ecclesiology, and mine

I suspect I'm fast heading away from the dominant note in tomorrow's Anglican ecclesiology.

I think this note is: the higher up the hierarchy the closer to divine authority.

On the contrary, I believe in the people of God - the ordinary people in the pew, the not sure and the over-definite, the tired and enthusiastic, and especially in the patient, quiet seeker after God. In the people I know and the millions I don't.

What we believe matters vitally. But the credal what of what we believe is only part of faith. Faith is living as though we believe the creed - the unqualified throwing of ourselves into living in the truth of the Christian faith. Our relationship with God is in its making, in its realising, not in disembodied statements. Our discipleship lies in living out credal faith as though it were true; and in doing so we realise its truth.

Which means such faith is always (this side of death) provisional: it is constrained by our limited vision, our limited capacity to act as though God were God and all creation were God's, our frail faith. It is limited too by logic: no human act (or statement) can ever be complete - it's meaning is only knowable in retrospect and can only be known in the web of all knowledge (speech) and always retains ambiguity, its causes and consequences can only be partially assessed.

This is a picture of Christian life in which the given data of faith (Creeds, traditions, patterns of worship, customs of prayer, moral standards) meet the transitory, wobbly, ambiguous mess of daily life of ordinary believers. It is in this process that the Christian faith is given life and, like all life, inevitably grows and changes.

And I think that apprehension of God is not focused in the few but is distributed amongst the many, and therefore so too is authority in faith. I entirely accept the need for a structure of ministers (and I think what they do and how they do it is more important than names and labels) and I would argue that they, and academics of all relevant flavours, should have weight in the continuous discernment of what is appropriate in Christian living. Ultimately, however, judgement should - I think - rest with the whole Church, not with slices of it. We need to re-vitalise (or re-invent) the doctrine and practice of reception.

Therefore I wish to assert an ecclesiology grounded in God's faithful people, not in Primates, Instruments of Unity, Bishops or Covenants. Authority is distributed, and so too is wisdom, discernment, knowledge, and faith. I wish to assert an ecclesiology of pluralism, of the recognition of internal conflict as normal, of complexity, uncertainty and provisionality, and of ordinary living faith in an intimate as transcendent God.

Which scarcely fits the desire of parts of the Anglican Communion to simplify, to demand immediate conformity to certain ways of doing things, to agree common global standards of behaviour, to set out a contract by which we can all be Anglicans (as if we weren't already).

And anyway, a hierarchy which leaves its followers behind is somewhat risible.