One moment is particularly telling. Henry is in Parliament, asking that the Lords Spiritual acknowledge him as Supreme Head of the Church in England. They agree with the rider, "as far as the Law of Christ allows," or in the mind of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, not one whit.
Christopher* reminded the Episcopal Church in the Internet assembled
once and
again today that titles like that of Henry are blasphemous or at least hubristic. As we proclaim in one of the Eucharistic Prayers, Jesus Christ alone is the Head of the Church, the Author of our salvation. His daughter, Elizabeth, initiated the trend toward decentralized power in our church by taking the title of Supreme Governor (I doubt it was just because she was a woman as some say) and empowering Parliament to provide lay oversight of the church in consultation with the clergy. In other words, as England's civil polity evolved to concentrate less power in the person of the Crown, its spiritual polity would evolve in the same way. Her father's homicidal manias had motivated closer attention to the problems of power in general.
The Church of England is thus the fruit of a poisoned tree. It arises from the particular difficulties of an island on the edge of the known world in the wake of the Great Famine and Black Death of the fourteenth century. The combined effects of these crises was to eviscerate the deep relations between lord and peasant as a familial and feudal bond. With labor so scarce, individual peasants worked on the land of those who would pay in cash, destroying their attachment to the land. At the same time, a paid labor force was disposable and evictable. It was soon realized that strip-based cultivation was inefficient at point of sale. Beneath the wars with France over the remaining Angevin possessions and the English civil war that followed, the land was gradually enclosed in favor of monocultures, particularly the monoculture of sheep. Early in his reign, Henry (or really his minister Cardinal Wolsey) himself introduced stern legislation to restrain enclosure, but more and more of the agricultural laborers of England were dispossessed of their land and even work. It's the tendency of Marxist historians to see the seeds of the English Reformation in the struggles over enclosure. But opposition to enclosure did not always correlate with opinions on the religious questions.
Instead, the English Reformation is like the Continental Reformation. They originate from ecclesiastical dissent that found both secular ears willing to listen to it and support it and no fair hearing from a restored, centralized, and increasingly absolutist papacy. Dissent was common enough during the High Middle Ages. The Cathars, the spiritual Franciscans and like movements, the Western Schism, and conciliarism. This dissent could be suppressed with more or less difficulty, often by feeding the lusts of secular rulers for mastery over the temporalities of the dissenters. In that sense, the Church of England was poisoned by some of the very same venom that fed the Church of Rome.
In that light, the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon at a ecumenical service in commemoration of the Carthusian Martyrs is a corrective to our discourses about ecclesiastical power. One passage is particularly beautiful:
We treasure with perhaps a particular intensity the martyrdom of the contemplative, because the contemplative who knows how to enter into the silence and stillness of things is, above all, the one who knows how to resist to resist fashion and power, to stand in God while the world turns. In that discovery of stillness lies all our hope of reconciliation, the reconciliation of which John Houghton spoke in this place, this place where we are met to worship, before the community gave its answer to the King's agents. A reconciliation of which he spoke (as do so many martyrs) on the scaffold, a reconciliation which is not vanquished, defeated, or rendered meaningless by any level of suffering or death. If Henry VIII is saved (an open question perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Houghton. If any persecutor is saved it is at the prayers of their victim. If humanity is saved, it is by the grace of the cross of Jesus Christ and all those martyrs who have followed in his path.
The power of the Church is ultimately held not by those who hold some office or pre-eminence by canon law, whether Pope, or Primate, or General Convention or Synod but by those who regard the still, small silence of God as a form of residence not to be snatched at and enter into the same kenosis as the Lord. Only by a witness and death like Him can they enter into the government that is His alone. That's not to say that we don't need an org chart on this side of the veil, but we should remember that it's not really the org chart.
3 comments:
Blogger Note: Anne Boleyn apparently was created Marquess of Pembroke suo jure .
How is The Tudors? I've been wanting to check out that show.
I would say that part of the poisoned tree is that the Church(es) have so often been structured in such ways that we did not take seriously the power of Sin to bend our own life together.
Henry VIII is a good example of authority usurped and power abused, and precisely of the type that raises concern, especially in his claim for supreme headship. Poor Cranmer had a time of it trying to argue around that at his own end when his interlocutors were, in my opinion, right to point out he had traded one claimant, the papacy, for another, the crown. No matter how he wiggled, it's hard to deny that whatever Cranmer may have interpreted that claim, Henry did indeed see himself as acting in Christ's stead rather than living out of Christ's call on our lives together.
It took Elizabeth I and settlement to revisit this. Her title is far more modest in turn, supreme governor, and her giving over of authority to Parliament, in essence a lay body, was an act of referring us to one another as a vital way of presenting Christ when seeking to discern Christ's will for all.
Some of the working out in our own Church is the result of non-establishment, slavery, Civil Rights, and the like. We are shaped particularly and peculiarly by our own Episcopal history in ways that must ask, what happens when authorities civil or ecclesial seem to be at odds with Christ?
It is these questions of misuse of authority and abuse of power that motivate my concern that we be clear about Christ's headship as much for our own spiritual health as for others. After all, any and all of us are prone to misuse of authority and abuse of power. It is when we forget this that we are most likely to do so. We are wise to keep this before us and to desire structuring in our life together that multiply checks that possibility by asking to be held accountable.
The claim of Christ's headship leaves open always, in the words of Bishop Sykes, the possibility of challenge. Bishop Sykes observed, as you do of our polity and governance, that synodical bodies and dispersed authority builds challengeability (Sykes' term) into the Anglican system and by that same token provides possibility for correction not only by other public, authorized authorities, but by the prophet, the contemplative, whomever God raises up at a particular time to address a concern. In other words, authorized authority in our own tradition is also provisional and contingent as much as is the prophetic and contemplative witness.
In preparing further thoughts as response to wanting "leaders with skins on," which I understand perfectly and do not deny, I would raise up the other side of our christological tendency: Christ incorporates us into his Body, giving us to one another each with gifts for building up the Body. Authority (and hierarchy) in the Body must be understood and used in light of those gifts, power must be exercised in light of Christ's cross--limited, compassionate, accountable.
This makes of our life together one that is consultative, collaborative, communal, and checked across orders and subsidiaries, something I think our life models well in its multiple authorities and dispersed authority.
The Tudors is graphic, often not quite faithful to history, and suggests that Anne Boleyn wasn't entirely railroaded. On the other hand, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is Henry VIII: smart, arrogant, and deadly. The acting generally is spectacular. I'll be curious to see how Cranmer evolves.
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