Thought for the Day, 14 November 2006

The Rt Rev. Tom Butler

Good morning. A vicar recently told me that when he had been appointed to a parish on a rather tough estate the local police officer told him, "There are three ways that people deal with disputes here. Hitting. Shouting. And hitting and shouting". Indeed that was so much the culture on the estate that when the family later took a holiday in Devon, the vicar's young son asked him, "Why aren't people here shouting at one another?"

We might be forgiven in thinking that hitting, shouting, and hitting and shouting is very much the culture of our Church and State at the present time on some decisive issues. But lest we should think that there was some golden age when things were done differently it's instructive to revisit some Christian history.

The disputes and arguments of early church councils were dramatic. At the Council of Jerusalem at the very start of the church, St. Paul leading the Gentile mission and St. James the leader of the Christian Jewish church in and around Jerusalem almost came to blows about what we might call gospel and culture. Did Gentile Christians have to take on all the norms and cultural practices of the Jewish Christians? James said "Yes", and Paul said, "No". There was no great meeting of minds but something was cobbled together which preserved unity.

So the question, "Do Anglicans on the East coast of America have to adopt the same norms and practices of Anglicans in rural Nigeria and vice versa?", has been around in different forms since the start of the Church, and the best we can hope for is a cobbling together of some common sense solution which recognizes that Christian practice might show up in different ways in different cultures whilst being loyal to its core truths.

At the Council of Constantinople over 300 years later, the church made a valiant attempt to define those core beliefs. The fierce arguments were all centred around the nature of Jesus Christ, both God and man, both man and God. The Council wasn't so much trying to explain this paradox as to define it - to spell it out, to protect it from denial. It was those who were trying to avoid the paradox by making everything clear in one direction or another that came to grief and were denounced as heresies. Then as now it's our certainties which distort the faith rather than our questions.

Later today, for the first time since the reformation there's a twenty-four hour residential meeting when the House of Bishops of the Church of England are meeting in Conference with the Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in England. I'm not expecting much hitting, shouting, or hitting and shouting. We'll be more polite with one another than that, but I do hope that we will be able to discuss some of the differences which have grown through our separate traditions whilst also acknowledging some of the core truths to which all Christians belong. Hopefully, it won't be another five hundred years before we meet again.