Current Editorial
PAST EDITORIAL I
"The Centre cannot hold..." - Spring 1998
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold".Such was the opinion recently echoed by the Dean of Fredericton, the Very Rev'd William Hockin, in an article in the Anglican Journal. Formerly the incumbent of St. Paul's Bloor Street, Toronto, one of the great establishment evangelical parishes in the Anglican Church of Canada, Dean Hockin is one of the leaders of Canadian Evangelicalism's liberal wing. His article contains both a lament and a plea: "...the centre has gone...the old middle way. It was that brand of Anglicanism that you could count on. It was the old via media--it is where most of us used to be".
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. He detects a polarization between left and right within the Church, a polarization in which the middle ground of moderation has been torn between the left's social justice agenda and the right's loyalty to the Anglican theological, liturgical, and moral tradition. And he is not content to live either on right or on left (one faintly hears him saying, "a pox on both their houses!") - he wants "both/and" not "either/or": "Where can I find common ground, where orthodoxy, compassion, and an open mind are at home? ...Cannot justice and truth lie together?"
Dean Hockin is of course quite right: the Church of Christ must find indeed a middle way, a place where the lion of orthodoxy and the lamb of compassion may lie down together: For in the kingdom of Christ, "mercy and truth are met together: righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth springeth out of the earth; and righteousness hath looked down from heaven." [Psalm 85.10, 11 Book of Common Prayer]. And he is quite right, the church has indeed lost its centre.
Anglicans have had their dangerous and unhappy divisions before, of course, but the current situation is widely regarded as the worst in a very long time. The idea of a centre to which all sides might appeal has vanished. Between prayer book traditionalists, and antiquarian liturgical experimenters, Anglo-Catholics opposed to the Ordination of Women, and feminists seeking a new language for God, Evangelicals opposed to the affirmation of homosexual lifestyles, and homosexual activists seeking sexual liberation; between those who have been "born again" in the Spirit and those who think being born once is quite enough, between bureaucrats wedded to the institution and congregations going their own way, things indeed have fallen apart, the centre has not held against the fragmentation of worship styles, moral disciplines, and even belief.
And Dean Hockin is surely right in his instinct that each of these fragments has something of the truth in it, which must be integrated into any way that professes to hold the centre.
The question must be whether Dean Hockin's prescription will provide the cure he seeks, whether it is indeed a new way out of our bitter divisions. "I am one who wants to reclaim the centre" he announces: "I want to experience the Holy Spirit without having to fall down. I want the language of the liturgy to be inclusive, without having to call God 'Mother'". I want to believe in the uniqueness of Jesus' claim to be Saviour for every person without being arrogant towards other faiths. I want to be involved in issues of peace and justice without apologizing for my need to pray. I want a liturgy to include the best of both books, music, ancient and modern. I want to honour the past without finding myself fused in a Gothic arch. I want the spirit of Wesley and the reverence of Keble. I want a balance of word and sacrament" and so on.
Much of what he wants is unexceptionable, and indeed necessary--who could possibly disagree with it? We all want motherhood and apple-pie. But merely expressing such desires will not make them materialize; if unity were to be had for the asking, we should have found a comfortable middle way of living together without strife long ago. One looks for some hard thinking about how this middle way is to be reconstructed--even some hard thinking about why it has slipped away--and Hockin provides few hints.
If the centre is to hold, and gather together what so has fallen apart, then it must have some gravitational pull of its own: there must be an inherent logic to its own position sufficient for all the fragments to cohere around it. If its position is found simply by a calculation of the mean between all the other positions (left and right/trad and rad/high and low/cold versus hot), then all it will be is a kind of middle muddle, a muddy mix of every other position around, in accord with their institutional weights.
Such a centre has nothing to contribute itself, and no power to draw the other positions together. In fact, it really does not exist. It is just an institutional abstraction produced by the political trade-offs and compromises calculated by the institution's managerial class, and moved by purely institutional loyalty--a desire to keep this show on the road. In that case, of course the centre cannot hold, because there is no centre to do the holding--for the position of the centre then depends on the position of the extremes. As the institutional weights of various factions change, so the centre changes; as the agenda of each faction changes, so the centre changes too. And as other positions grow in weight or move in position, so the centre will move.
If the liberal wing of the Church migrates radically to the left in conformity to wider cultural change (as it has in the last thirty years) then the centre will be move as well. Indeed, what Hockin identifies as one "extreme" is in fact the old centre, now generally abandoned by the leadership of the church, and dismissed as fuddy-duddy conservatism, or even "Anglican fundamentalism". The other extreme is a new, rival centre (characterized by an agenda for liberation from traditional dogmas, moral teachings, forms of worship and so on) which seeks to supplant the old. In the resulting struggle ("polarization") in the church, the general policy of the church's leadership has been to do just what Hockin perhaps has in mind--to calculate an arbitrary middle position, which has no strong inherent logic of its own, but simply arises as the abstract mid-point between two "extremes".
One often gets the impression that the bishops and bureaucratic leadership of the Church see the church as a collection of bad-tempered factions in need of deft management, by the judicious application of carrots and sticks, and a policy of "managing change" through the chivvying of the reluctant and the restraint of the radicals. When Dean Hockin writes "I want the language of the liturgy to be inclusive, without having to call God 'Mother'", he attempts to construct a new centre between these two rival centres--but does it really have any inner coherence of its own, any reason to be where it is except as the mid-point between two other unrelated positions? Is the logic which drives "inclusive" language for humanity compatible with "sexist" language for God? And in an era of constant cultural change, how does he propose to fix Anglicanism at this point? After all, what looks moderate today will probably look "conservative", perhaps even "fundamentalist" tomorrow.
And it is interesting, too, that he mentions nothing about sexual morality--the "hot-button" divisive issue of the day. What median position can he offer there? Between the demands of social justice as defined by the left (the blessing of same sex unions and affirmation of active homosexuality) and orthodox moral teaching as understood by the right (centred on marriage as union of one male and one female), what common ground is to be found?
Dean Hockin's position is not one to be despised utterly: the ability of an institution to muddle through can buy it valuable time, time in which a process of reconstruction can take place, in which the fragmentation may be overcome. But institutional muddling by itself is not a reconstructive process. It cannot itself provide a centre to hold the fragments together as complementary aspects of the whole. The centre itself must be found elsewhere.
Here at The Anglican Free Press, of course, we think that the Church and Christ would best be served by a rediscovery and recovery of a centre in the generous but uncompromising orthodoxy of the Prayer Book tradition (with its evangelical, catholic, and broad-church/low-church variations). The other, rival possibilities include the charismatic/evangelical movement (as that has moved away from its Prayer Book roots), or in the party of radical change, or in the Affirming (liberal) Catholics, or in some other as yet undeveloped position (perhaps a synthesis of some of these). One of these in the end will become the centre, and all the other tendencies will either be integrated (though perhaps not assimilated) to it, or excluded by it. Until that happens, we shall have to live with the tension of rival centres. In that situation, some bishops will seek to suppress the differences, in an institutional muddle, or in favour of one centre; others will seek to govern with genuine tolerance for difference. +
A note on our Editor:
The Rev'd Gavin Dunbar was Rector of the Parish of Ecum Secum, Nova Scotia, and now serves as an associate priest in the parish of St. John's, Savannah, Georgia.
He is the editor of the Anglican Free Press, and past Vice-President of the Nova Scotia / PEI branch of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, and a former instructor at the Atlantic St. Michael's Youth Conference. He has written and lectured extensively on a range of topics, and has many god-children.