My Journey : Faith Markers

Two friends and early readers of this Anthology hinted that it would help them if there were to be some personal story at the start to illumine the compiler’s perspective, and to set the scene for this particular selection of texts from a period of more than six hundred years of church history (1375 to the present day). Somewhat reluctantly I begin by telling the story from my point of view. I have been persuaded to do this because along with other wayfarers I know how ‘Biblical personalism’ and ‘individual testimony’ are two essential characteristics of the evangelical Anglican way. For me, it began in the late summer of 1940, and I go on to reflect, in presenting Faith Markers and Faith Shapers, the way evangelical Anglican spirituality has adapted, developed, and repositioned itself over the years in relation to its surrounding culture and contemporary context.

As a six year old I was evacuated from London to relatives in rural Perthshire in Scotland to escape the Blitz which began in the Autumn of 1940. Soon after, I was resident in Comrie at a Girls’ School that had itself been evacuated from Edinburgh to escape a possible fate similar to that of London. I date the start of my somewhat lonely spiritual journey to the gift I received there, a pocket New Testament from the wife of a serving military officer that I then treasured, but never read.

When the blanket bombing of the city was over in 1942, returning to England and two further conventional boarding schools, my Christian pilgrimage continued in mostly un-empathetic surroundings, but with the support of a ‘Crusader’ Bible class and the counsel of a good and slightly older mentor. The period included two highly significant moments. The first experience was a meeting with my Saviour, Jesus Christ, who I can still say, ‘stepped out’ of the pages of the New Testament to ‘convert’ me. That is the right word to use.^[1] Young as I was at the time and having since learned the contexts in which the word has been used and misused over the years, it still describes a meeting, a decision and a turning point: important dimensions in a journey of discipleship which continues today. Each day is God’s day of new beginnings or, as Gregory of Nyssa (c.330-c.395) put it, ‘from beginning to beginning towards beginnings that have no end.’^[2]  The second moment occurred two or three years later, when I retreated to the school library to read my Bible. It was the summons to experimental discipleship and amounted to a call to ‘try God out’ in Christian mission abroad or at home, rather than settle for a more conventional white middle-class career acceptable within my family circle, perhaps as a solicitor. What transpired thereafter was a series of important formational but unexceptional steps that led to more than sixty years of ordained ministry in the Church of England (1960 to the present day). Thankfully, in all those years I have never rejected the implications of those two early momentous life-changing encounters. Nevertheless, my understanding of the evangelical Anglican tradition in which I was nurtured has developed, adapted and become more discriminating.

When I was eighteen, my father’s best friend gave me the present of A Diary of Private Prayer by John Baillie (1886-1960), first published in 1936, a book which has helped to shape me as a Christian.^[3] I could not help noticing at the time that the dedication of the book is ‘for IAN’, actually the author’s son. To this day, I still use the book (having worn out three previous copies) as the companion of my daily ‘Quiet Time’, which is the way evangelicals used to describe their regular daily devotions. Those, mostly older folk, who have read or used John Baillie’s book may not have noted that the author and his brother, Donald Baillie (1887-1954), were both distinguished scholars in the Scottish spiritual and theological tradition. Readers of  Faith Markers,  a collection of  ‘statements’ which preceded Faith Shapers  which is mainly a collection poetry, may not therefore be too surprised to find, in Faith Markers for instance, contributions from a wide diversity of sources. These include unlikely figures such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who actually moved on from his earlier more sceptical logical positivism, Basil Atkinson (1875-1971), the almost fundamentalist librarian of Cambridge University, Henry de Candole (1895-1971), the High Church Anglican and passionate liturgist, Sydney Smith (1771-1836), the anti-evangelical Anglican, and Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), the staunch feminist. Certainly not all the individual authors in the two companion collections,  Faith Markers and Faith Shapers,  could be described as ‘evangelical’ or ‘Anglican’ under any restricted definition of those question-begging adjectives. Nevertheless, they all said and wrote words that were compatible with, or cuttingly pertinent to, the evangelical Anglican outlook that has been the focus of this particular undertaking.

The reader may ask, ’How far has the selection of contributors to these two works derived from the editor’s personal predilection?’ The answer may be quickly detected if not by this story then by noting the twelve Faith Markers below: the headline to each section, the footnotes, and by a glance at the ‘Index of Authors’ at the end of that particular compilation.[4] Several personal life-choices have also played a part. A brief period of post-graduate research in America brought two insights. First, my academic study was on the nature of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the Zürich agreement on the subject in 1549, signed off by Calvinists, Lutherans and Zwinglians and warmly welcomed in England: a highly unlikely outcome at that moment in the Reformation. It was in fact a considerable ecumenical success story, at least among widely differing Protestants.[5] Second, in 1959, at the end of my stay in the United States, I met my wife-to-be, Mair Ivemey (1931-2018). Four years later, the son of a strongly Scottish Presbyterian family married a Welsh dyed-in-the-wool nonconformist from North Pembrokeshire, with Baptist convictions. One of the outcomes of 54 years of wedlock was to be an increased appreciation of all the priorities that the people of Wales inherited from the first translation of the whole Bible into the Welsh language in 1588.

The first sermon I ever remember hearing, along with the Scottish ‘pan drops’ (slightly larger imperial mints) pressed into my hand before the service began to keep me quiet, was in 1940 and in Auchterarder Parish Church. It was a morality tale: Robert the Bruce’s story of the persistent spider and how he told his disheartened troops in 1306, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again.’ I have no memory of any other sermon or lesson before my conversion (1945) and call (1948) mentioned above. But following those momentous decisions, the messages I do remember were radically different from that first moral instruction. If it is not too pompous to say so, a self-consciously selfish boy that early school reports described as ‘careless’, had been humiliated by a gospel of repentance and faith, that led him to embark on a voyage of discipleship with Jesus Christ as his Saviour and Lord. Still young, mine had nevertheless been a classic ‘conversion experience’, and in the aftermath I was carefully nurtured by older ‘Bible-believing’ Christians. Of course some of them had add-on convictions which as I matured I began to examine, and sometimes to shed. Perhaps born with a healthy Scottish hermeneutic of suspicion, I learned to remain agnostic about the apparently firm evangelical convictions of some, for example about the timing and programme for the second coming of Christ. Also, as a teenager having embraced the early twentieth century evangelical focus on ‘separation’ from the surrounding culture as the litmus test of personal sanctification, that lesson was to prove both a blessing and a burden. Sooner or later I had to catch a fuller vision of the Kingdom of God as the ultimate goal of Jesus Christ, rather than the penultimate and provisional ‘church’ that emerged. Necessarily, it required a broader commitment to serve the common good, ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ So for me, the faith-identity that came with the willingness to be ‘different’ had to be enlarged through a bigger world view, gained first in the context of military national service, secondly through a ‘liberal’ university theological degree, and thirdly, perhaps more richly, while working for the best part of a year in 1957 as a plumber’s mate repairing merchant ships on Liverpool Docks.

Of course the 1960s and 1970s were years of transition for both the nation and the churches after a post-World War economic recovery following the Suez crisis in 1957 and the resignation of Prime Minister Anthony Eden (1897-1977). Six months later we heard his successor, Harold Macmillan (1894-1986), tell us, ‘Most of our people have never had it so good.’^[6] Not so in Liverpool! There, the problems of homelessness, unemployment and urban deprivation highlighted for the churches the call of Christ to a discipleship beyond charitable giving and ‘ambulance’ work. The anti-authoritarian mood among young people questioned the standards and values of institutions such as the monarchy, parliament and the churches, and found expression, for example in the songs of the Beatles. At the same time, belief in an authoritative Bible, in Jesus Christ as the Godhead in person, and in traditional sexual morality was called into question, even by some Christians who went so far as to  suggest that ‘God is dead’.^[7]

In Liverpool as elsewhere the churches, and the clergy of whom I was now one, responded in five ways. First, we ran stewardship campaigns to replenish funds depleted since the war. We promoted the Diocesan ‘Call to Build’, to replace dockside churches destroyed by bombing, but also to provide churches on the new post-war housing estates. Second, hard as it is now to believe, for the first time ‘evangelism’ appeared as a debatable item in the Diocesan Budget, and we began to support Billy Graham Crusades in Manchester. Third, and again for the first time, I found myself speaking in public in favour of the ordination of women to the priesthood. Fourth, and more remarkable still in the light of ongoing sectarian disagreement and occasional violence in the city, Liverpool churches began to bridge the gap between Catholics and Protestants with a national ecumenical study course called ‘The People Next Door’ (1966/67). Fifth, some of the churches, of all denominations and none, began to welcome and explore the ‘renewal movement’ that had spilled across the Atlantic from its Anglican beginnings in California (1960), with its twin emphases on ‘Baptism in the Spirit’ and ‘Speaking in tongues’. All five of these initiatives challenged not only the received faith and practice of local churches, but also presuppositions of the clergy. For me, it was the point at which the main focus of my concern turned from ‘systematic theology’, in my case a study of the contribution of John Calvin, to the theology of practice, ‘practical theology’, interrelating what the Church does on the ground with what Christians believe about the timeless good news of Jesus Christ and his desire to see the Kingdom of God established on earth as it is in heaven.

Much later, in the 1990s, another unlikely factor in shaping this anthology was my recognition of the Biblical insights and warm devotion of some of the medieval English mystics. For instance, I was by then in the East Midlands and discovered that the once nearby Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle (c.1300-49) believed the contemplative Christian life begins with the heart-warming ‘opening of Heaven’s door’.[8] Moreover, of a local mystic from Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire, Walter Hilton (c.1343-96), the influential Roman Catholic historian Adrian Hastings (1929-2001) said that he was, ‘almost Wycliffite’ in his use of the Bible.^[9] However, most readers will naturally associate the majority of the twelve Markers below, and the Shapers in this collection, with the evangelical Anglican tradition which has informed their selection.

Some thirty papers before this one, posted on the Academia platform, fall under the general heading, ‘Finding the Evangelical Anglican Way: 1375 to the present day’. They all approach the subject from an historical perspective, starting from John Wyclif (c.1329-84) and his works on Dominium (lordship) that envisioned the radical transformation of the Church, with revolutionary implications for the nation and church, as well as individual Christians.^[10] Most of the figureheads whose names appear in these papers emerged from the Protestant, Puritan, Pietist and Pentecostalist streams which, surprisingly but with care and discernment, are discoverable and recurring at different times within the histories of all the churches. In the evangelical Anglican way, along with headline leaders and their fundamental beliefs and signature doctrines, different streams have emerged and made their mark. Within the last few years, Andrew Atherstone and John Maiden have summarised the significance given to those doctrines and interpretations, signalling the generally agreed meaning of an ‘evangelical’ identity during the twentieth century.^[11] This compiler has identified such distinctive evangelical Anglican characteristics in terms of twelve Faith Markers  each one of which is succinctly emphasised in the carefully worded ‘room’ titles of Faith Shapers listed below. These give clues as to what is important if one is to understand what lies at the heart of a faith that can be described as authentically ‘evangelical’ and ‘Anglican’. This anthology, mainly of verse, therefore is not simply a ‘gallery’ or ‘collage’ of engaging quotations from a number of people who happen to be of historic personal interest to one writer. The ‘Evangelical Anglican Way’ is an ongoing stream within the wider Church, and continues to be so. The characteristic priorities do not change, but stand within a wider narrative of constantly shifting cultural goals, expectations and circumstances.

The first essential in being both ‘evangelical’ and ‘Anglican’ is to be Biblical. The invention of printing, the Scriptural perception of the earliest reformers and the lived out experience of believers have all worked together to ensure that Bible reading lies at the heart of Christian faith and practice in the Church of England. Yes, there have been recurring debates about how to interpret the Bible in ages very different both from that in which it was first written and from the world into which it has now to be translated. But it is an ‘open’ book for all who can read. For Anglicans before and since the days of one of their most influential leaders, Richard Hooker (1554-1625), it has been the ‘first place both of credit and obedience is due.’^[12] For evangelical Anglicans certainly, the Scriptures are self-authenticating. Rowan Williams (1951- ), former Archbishop of Canterbury, described the Bible ‘as a world into which they enter, so that God may meet them.’^[13] In short, the Bible is a book to be ‘inhabited’ and, perhaps, in which to be ‘marinated.’

The second essential is to hold a view of the world that is Christ-centred. Within an orthodox appreciation of the doctrine of the Trinity, the person and work of Jesus Christ is pivotal. Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), first interpreter of the Great Awakening in America in the eighteenth century and enthralled as he was by the ‘beauty’ of God in the orders of both creation and redemption, fastened on the full expression of a Christian’s response: ‘Sincerity in religion… consists in setting God’s highest in the heart, in choosing him before all things, in having a heart to sell all for Christ.’^[14] Not for him could it be the popular Christ of much twentieth century Christianity which, in the opinion of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), purveyed the false truth that, ‘a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.’^[15] The evangelical Anglican gift to the church, as John Stott (1921-2011) described it in words here rendered inclusive, is the message of the cross, God’s self-substitution, the crucified God. ‘The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is humankind substituting itself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for humankind. Human beings assert themselves against God and put themselves where only God deserves to be. God sacrifices himself for human beings and puts himself where only humans deserve to be. Humans claim prerogatives which belong to God alone. God accepts penalties which belong to human beings alone.’^[16]

However, the death of Jesus Christ was not his end. David Jenkins (1925-2006), a controversial Bishop of Durham when I was Rector of Chester-le-Street (1978-87), had to correct the impression he gave early in his episcopate that he doubted the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ. Famous for his one-liners, he said, ‘God is as he is in Jesus, therefore there is hope.’  And outside the Cathedral on his retirement in 1994, school children released hundreds of helium-filled balloons printed with another of his memorable faith markers: ‘You can’t keep a good God down’: to which he added for good measure, not even the church!^[17]

In the same year (1994) the so-called Toronto blessing, or ‘third wave of Pentecostalism’, reached Britain with its emphasis on a third evangelical essential ‘Faith Marker’, the person and work of the Holy Spirit. In the previous thirty years the theological focus for many Anglicans, if not on ‘God is dead’, had been on God as the ‘Ground of our Being.’ The ‘renewal movement’, later named the ‘charismatic movement’, succeeded  in shifting many from such a metaphysical speculation to the nature of the Church in the New Testament as the Body of the living Christ, with Spirit-filled believers meeting in communities of faith, freely expressing their mutual interdependence, and using their gifts of the Spirit in fruitful Christian service. Not from an Anglican stable, the Toronto blessing made its impact as a climactic high point of the ‘charismatic movement’.

Later in the twentieth century the charismatic movement, which had become increasingly domesticated in some Anglican congregations, proved revolutionary in others. For the latter, it resonated with stories of what had happened in the early church at Pentecost and in eighteenth and nineteenth century revivals in Britain. One of the popular outcomes was a tendency to sit light to the traditional liturgy, often exchanging it for a different sort of ‘liturgy’, more informal and ‘celebratory’ while retaining a recognisably Anglican shape. This was expressed not only in words and music but also in the style, form and ordering of church life in many evangelical Anglican congregations.^[18] Whatever one’s opinion of such changes, the evidence clearly shows that whereas the number of worshipers in denominational churches was in steep decline, it was much less so in the ‘new’, ‘liquid’ or ‘emerging’ churches which, as Densil Morgan put  it, ‘have been developed specifically by younger Christians for whom globalization, pluralism and a visual-based multi-media are the unquestioned norms.’^[19]

A fourth evangelical essential derives from the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith and the priesthood of all believers. Over the years this has led to the pyramidal structure of Protestant churches being deconstructed and even upended, at least reconfigured in the light of a recovered emphasis on the laity and everyday believers. The inevitable outcome has been an increasing freedom of choice for individual Christians. In the rapid escalation of ‘modernity’, and even in what some consider its demise together with the so-called death of culture, the canon of human rights and rampant consumerism have gained increasing prominence in the public’s aspiration and agenda. A dangerous temptation for the churches has been not only to capitalise on these trends, but also to embrace the spirit of this present age. Those that do so are always likely to splinter the churches.

The last highly significant date in my personal journey, because it prefigures the end of the world as did the story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-4) in the Bible, was the destruction of the twin towers in New York on 11^th September 2001. It seemed to illustrate the destructiveness of all the Christ-less ‘religions’ in our world, the fragility of Christ-less human achievements, and the tragedy of Christ-less ambitions. It was the very antithesis of the vision Jesus shared in the prayer to his Father, which he bequeathed to his followers: ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’

In brief, the selection of ‘rooms’ in Faith Shapers  was  determined by the chapter titles in Faith Markers.

Faith Markers and  Shapers:

Our Father: Hallowed on Earth as in Heaven

  The Bible: Bestowed Word of God

Jesus Christ: Crucified God in Person

Humankind: Sinful, Rebellious and Faithless

Grace of God: Justifying and Converting

Christ-likeness: Progressive Christian living

Holy Spirit: in Christian Experience

Believers: Assured, Called and Prayerful

Church: Provisional but Necessary

The Mission of God

Moral Justice: A Vision of God’s Kingdom

Glory: Now and Then, Here and There

 

Footnotes:

[1] At the time of conversion, I was encouraged to add to the name in my first Bible, ‘BA’ (Born Again).

[2] Homilies on the Song of Songs 8, in Enzo Bianchi, God, where are you? (2008), London, SPCK, 2014, p. 7.

[3] John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1936.

[4] www.academia.edu/45174291/Faith_Markers_on_the_Evangelical_Anglican_Way_1375_to_the_present_day

[5] The Zurich Agreement 1549. Johannis Calvini, opera selecta, Petrus Barth (ed.), Vol. II, München Chr. Kaiser, 1952, pp. 241-258. ‘The Consensus Tigurinus’ – Ian Bunting, (Translation and Commentary), Journal of Presbyterian History, Philadelphia, March, 1966, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 45-61. https://www.creeds.net/reformed/Tigurinus/tigur-bunt.htm [19th August 2020]

[6] Bedford, 20^th July 1957.

[7] Paul van Buren (1924-98), The Secular Meaning of the Gospel: Based on an Analysis of Its Language, Macmillan, 1963. Although in fact rejecting the suggestion, van Buren was considered a leader of the ‘God is Dead’ Movement.

[8] ‘I cannot tell you how surprised I was the first time I felt my heart begin to warm. It was real warmth too, not imaginary, and it felt as if it were actually on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it.’ The Fire of Love, Clifton Wolters (translator), London, Penguin, 1972, ‘Prologue’. Cited in Kenneth Leech, (1939-2015), True God: An Exploration in Spiritual Theology, London, Sheldon Press, 1985, p. 217.

[9] Walter Hilton, 8^th Southwell Lecture, 17^th October 1996, Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, NG25 0JL, 1996, p. 9.

[10] De Civili Dominio (1375),  De Ecclesiai (1378). De Poteste Pape (1379) and De Officio Regis (1379).

[11] Andrew Atherstone & John Maiden, ‘Identities and Contexts’,  Anglican Evangelicalism in the Church of England in the Twentieth Century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2014, pp. 3-47.

[12] Lawes, Book V.viii.2, Folger Edition, II:39, 8-14.

[13] God with Us: The Meaning of the Cross and Resurrection: Then and Now, London, SPCK, 2017, p. 87.

[14] ‘Of Religious Affections’, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, London, Bell, Arnold and Co., Vol. I, Part III, Section XIV, p. 326.

[15] The Kingdom of God in America (1937), New York, Harper & Row, 1959, p 193.

[16] The Cross of Christ, Leicester, Inter-Varsity Press, 2006, p. 160.

[17] ‘Another statement of his personal faith’: https://www.leeds.anglican.org/news/bishop-ripon-pays-tribute-bishop-david-jenkins-friend-and-colleague [21st October 2020]

[18] For a brief description of Toronto-style practice and worship see William K. Kay, Apostolic Networks in Britain: New Ways of Being Church, Milton Keynes, Paternoster, 2007, p. 203.

[19] D. Densil Morgan, The Span of the Cross: Religion and Society in Wales 1914-2000, (1999), Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2011, p. xv.