The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, has just delivered a strong address to Gafcon where he managed to shift the focus of the conference from defensiveness one of a positive and combative engagement with 'militant secularism'. He was surprisingly moderate in talking about how doctrine should develop in terms of the local culture. Gafcon, he said, was a miracle. 'And if you are anything gathered here together, you are the beginnings, the miraculous beginnings we can even say, of an ecclesial movement for the sake of the Gospel and for the renewal of Christ's church.' He did not speak from a text. Gafcon say the transcript will be available shortly but meanwhile, here are some extracts from my own recording.
He said: 'The future of the Anglican Communion lies in its authentic nature, not recently invented innovations and explanations but what actually belongs to the Church as we have always known it.'
He spoke of the Church of the Household, as described in the New Testament and the worldwide Church of God. But what did this have to do with Anglicanism?
'At the Anglican Reformation, the Church was expressed in two main ways,' he said. There was the Church which had the resonsibility for everyone in the community. 'Then there was the idea of the national church. At that time Western Europe was coming to a sense of people in nation states so it was natural that the life of the Church should be expressed in that way, as a national Church.'
The Church of the Household survived in the family. The decline of the Church could be traced from the time that it ceased to be passed on in the family. 'It is the parents. Don't blame anyone else.'
He said: 'The universal idea of the Church as being a universal reality certainly suffered at the Reformation. We have to be frank about this and admit it. But it survived I believe in three main ways. Firstly in the appeal to Scripture, that is to say that every church to derive its authenticity needs to appeal to Scripture as the final authority. Secondly it survived in the universal appeal to antiquity, that the Church of England was not doing anything new but was simply continuing with the ancient church of the Fathers and the councils. Thirdly it survived in the hope of a general council that might gather together to settle differences among Christians.'
He continued: 'We are faced in a changing situation where people want to be church with people who are like them. We find this in Africa with people wanting to be church in the context of their own tribes. We find it in Asia and now we find it with the affinity model churches, the network churches for instance, or the virtual churches in the North. That will no doubt spread to the South as well.
'I used to be quite hostile to people wanting to be church with others who were like them because it could encourage class-based churches, it could encourage people from one religious background who want to become Christian to stick with one another. But having looked at the church of the household and the idea that it is possible for people who are like one another to be church has led me to modify my views a little and I now feel it is permissible for people to be church in this sort of way, networked in terms of their leisure or their profession or where they live or whatever else you can think of, their expertise in IT for instance.
'But there is one condition and that is that it is not the only way of being church. If you want to be church with those who are like you, you also have to be church with those who are unlike you. You have to maintain that tension which is found in the New Testament.
'The emergence under God of the Anglican Communion as a fellowship of churches has raised again for us, and now in a very sharp way, the question of universality: how do we make the universal church an effective fellowship of believers and of churches. Historically the various instruments have developed to do this, the Lambeth Confernce, the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates' Meeting and the Anglican Consultative Council.
'But in the crisis that is facing us now big time we have found these not to be enough because in the end they were based on English good manners and we have found that in our world, English good manners are simply not enough. So we have to find another way, while of cours respecting the need for good manners.'
Secondly, he said, communication and culture. He referred to the world's greatest expert on culture and the gospel, Professor Lamin Sanneh, professor of mission and world Christianith at Yale and a Muslim convert, who is at Gafcon. He praised his work in Bible translation, and discussed how translation related to the nature of Christianity. 'The good news of Jesus Christ is intrinsically translatable from one culture to another.' Even the fact that the NT was first written in Greek and not in Aramaic or Hebrew is itself a fact of translation. 'It was not for another hundred years or so that the NT was translated back into Syriac or Aramaic.'
He continued: 'This is on contrast therefore compared with another worldwide religion like Islam. Now Islam is also universal of course.You find it in many different parts of the world. But wherever you go and whatever the local manifestations there is a certain Arabicness about the Koran, about the prayer, about the call to prayer, which cannot be translated. But the Gospel can be and has been throughout the ages.
'Pope Benedict in his very important address at Regensberg which of course drew attention because of what he had said about the relationships between Christians and Muslims, also in this lecture he addressed the question of the relationship between gospel and culture, perhaps the more important aspect of the lecture. In this lecture, Pope Benedict tells us that there was a providential encounter between the Gospel and Hellenistic culture which provided the church with a vocabulary to engage with the Hellenistic world. And he refers to the vision that St Paul received of people calling him to Macedonia of the vocation to Europe therefore as one aspect of this providential encounter.'
It was important to ask what lessons Anglicans could learn from these encounters.
'When we consider the Anglican situation, the translation of the Bible by William Tyndale into English is a landmark not only in the story of the English church but of the English nation and of the English language. It is impossible to think of a Shakespeare or a Donne without a Tyndale. And the translation the rendering into the vernacular of the liturgy of the BCP of worship in a language understood by the people is all part of this process of translation. This is wealth that we cannot easily give up. Translatability belongs to the very nature of Anglicanism. In the preface of the BCP and the Articles of Religion, every church has a responsibility to render the good news in terms of its culture.
'There is of course a downside to this and that is that it is possible for the gospel to become so identified with a particular culture and become captive to it. And Anglicanism has been exposed to this danger of capitulation to culture from the very beginning. And wherever we are in whatever culture we find ourselves we must be aware of this danger of captivity and inculturation. The other thing to note is that while foundational documents may speak of relating the gospel to culture, in fact we have often failed to do so and so Anglican Christian churches have not been able to look African or Asian or South American in the way that they should.'
That brought him to the question of constancy and change. What is it, he asked, in this situation of flux that must remain constant?
'It is to my mind the passing on and the receiving and the passing on again of the Apostolic teaching. That is how the church lives, that is how the church derives its strength, that is how the church grows. Of course in every culture, in every age, people notice things in that Apostolic teaching which others have not noticed, or which we have forgotten or neglected and so that aspect of the Apostolic teaching can be recovered... It is also true that the Church is faced with new knowledge and how do we relate this unchanging Apostolic teaching to new knowledge. We now know far more about the human embryo than people did even 50 years ago or even 30 years ago. And so we must have a healthy view of relating this Apostolic teaching to change. There must be the possibility of development in terms of our doctrine.
'However, what I would want to say is that this development has to be principled. As John Henry Newman pointed out in his thinking on this issue, any development of this kind must have a conservative action on the past. It must conserve the vigour of the gospel. It must represent continuity of principle. It must provide a basis for change that is not simply laxity and giving in. When any question arises as to whether something is an authentic expression of the Apostolic teaching or not, then we have to test it against the Bible. Because the Bible is the norm by which we appreciate what is authentically apostolic. That is the reason for the Bible being the ultimate the final authority for us in our faith and life and this is of course the reason why Anglicans have taken the study of the Bible so very seriously. You study something because you regard it as important, not because you regard it as unimportant.
'In the study, again, there are a number of aspects to it. The first is the study of what lies behind the text. Why was a particular text put together? What were the purposes of those who were writing it? What were the oral traditions that lay behind it? We are all used to studying the Bible in that way. What is behind the text, what is in the text? A careful study of the grammar of the literary value of the books of the Bible. And then of course what is in front of the text, how we relate the Bible to our circumstances, our culture, our context, our situation. This process of inculturation must go on of course. But there are two important things to be said about it. First of all there are limits to this process. It can't just take place anyhow.And the limits have to do first of all with the nature of the Gospel itself. Whatever the process of inculturation does or does not do, it cannot compromise how God has revealed his purposes to us, how Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, what he has done, who he is, all of that cannot be obscured by the process of inculturation.
'Secondly the process should not in any way impair the fellowship that there is between Christians so my inculturation where I am cannot be impaired because you fail to recognise the authentic gospel in my church, and vica versa. We can talk about inculturation in terms of rendering the mind of Christ or the mind of Scriptures in terms of a particular culture or people, to make something intelligible for people, inspiring for them, so they can live their lives by it.
'And so we come to the question of how fellowship is maintained, how it is enhanced and not impaired, and to the question of communion and conflict. Unity is a very precious thing indeed. What a good and joyful thing it is when brothers and sisters live together in unit. And we must seek to maintain that unity and that peace which builds unity. And there must be unity in diversity. We are not all the same, we are not all the same, we are not all the same. We are all different.'
He told the story of Selby Taylor, the great Archbishop of CapeTown, who was a single man and extremely shy. 'He was asked to address the Mothers' Union. So when he got up to speak he wanted to put the Mothers' Union at ease and also himself. He said, Ladies I would like you to know that underneath this cassock, you and I are exactly the same.' But it is not like that, is it. We are all different and this unity is a unity in diversity. But it has to be, and this is something that is a matter for discussion, it has to be legitimate diversity, not just any kind of diversity.'