The Bishop of Beverley - Sermon for the Northern Provincial Festival

From Insularity to Catholicity

An address to the Northern Church Leaders’ Retreat

29th March 2007, Hinsley Hall, Leeds

Some of you, like me, will probably have read Sebastian Faulks’ recent novel Human Traces. Towards the beginning of the book Faulks writes of a young curé who had once been a medical student. He describes to a teenage lad who has a mentally ill brother the experience of visiting a lunatic asylum in mid Nineteenth Century France. Remember, this was before any of the significant advances in mental health care that we enjoy today. The curé tells the boy what he thinks is the strangest thing about the experience.

“You would think these places could only exist after death – in hell, or in another world. Yet when you leave them, you rejoin the ordinary life of the town with its streets. It doesn’t seem right that you walk from one to the other. It doesn’t feel like a short journey you make with your feet. It feels as though you’ve passed into a different existence.”

Each of us could probably offer his or her equivalent experience to that of the curé . One former priest colleague of mine has had the awful experience of gathering up and burying the shattered bodies of savagely disfigured soldiers after the Battle of Goose Green. Another has found himself ministering in a part of the West Indies where capital punishment is still enacted and so being called away from his more usual parish duties to attend a prisoner mounting the scaffold. In a less immediate way many of us were shaken to find the final moments of Saddam Hussein’s life being shown on our television screens. We discovered we could choose to be witnesses to an execution some one hundred and fifty years after public hangings were discontinued in our land. Modern communications, especially television, seem to give to all of us that same experience of moving, within moments, from a hellish experience into the everyday comforts of our daily existence. And, like the cure in Faulks’ novel, we experience disconnection. It feels as if we, too, have passed into a different existence.

Whatever other explanations we might choose to offer for understanding the practice of Christian Baptism, the rite at least offers us the very antithesis to that splitting where by some people and situations are seen to be completely unrelated to our own. Both the curé in Faulks’ novel and my former colleagues describe their experiencing an extreme feeling of apparent non-continuity as they seemingly pass from one world to another. They feel as they do, paradoxically, because they know that the human beings whom they have encountered in those seemingly hellish worlds, are of as equal value in God’s eyes as they believe themselves to be.

At almost the same time as the period in which Sebastian Faulks chooses to set the start of his novel, the great Anglican theologian, FD Maurice, was setting out his views on Christian Baptism. What Maurice had to say was to cause him to fall foul of his fellow Anglicans, both Evangelical and Tractarian. Interestingly, many of us would now regard much of Maurice’s insights, though admittedly not all, as anticipating some of the distinctive teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

Maurice places great emphasis on the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Ascension. For Maurice, the heart of the Gospel is found in the belief that Jesus Christ has taken humanity into communion with Himself. Every person has become related to Christ, our elder brother. That is true for all of us whether or not we are conscious of or admit to that relationship. So it is, according to Maurice, that humanity which God intends to be a Church is turned into a world. Human beings refuse to accept that they share communion with the Divine. They will not act on such an understanding and seek to set themselves up independently of the purpose for which they have been made. By contrast, for Maurice, the Church is the place where the gifts of God’s covenant are gratefully received, lived out and proclaimed to others. Maurice, perhaps overwhelmed by his concept of the Church as an expression of humanity as God intends it to be, comes to speak of the Church as being God’s Kingdom on earth and not just the means of bringing that kingdom about, or even the sign or foretaste of it.

Whatever else might be the purpose of Baptism, for Maurice it is first and foremost the assurance to every person that receives it that he or she is a member of Christ, a child of God and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven. Baptism brings men and women into the new covenant. It is the assertion that what is ultimately true for every person is now true for the one who has been baptised. For Maurice, as Alec Vidler puts it, Baptism interprets to a man his true state, the true law of his being. Baptism brings human beings into relationship and declares that to be the case. The curé and the acutely insane, the priest and the men whose bodies lie on the battlefields of the Falklands, the watchers and the man on the scaffold, share a common humanity. Baptism breaks down insularity and brings us into relationship with the creator and his creatures. Baptism brings us from insularity to catholicity.

Forgive this gross over-simplification. In the New Testament we have understandings of Baptism offered to us that could be simply classified as relating to an individual’s experience. We have, too, accounts of Baptism where the emphasis is more on a person’s new relationship to a community and of the Christian community’s relationship to an individual. Thus there are occasions when the emphasis is on someone experiencing the forgiveness of sin (I Cor 6) or on showing solidarity with Christ’s Baptism (Mark 10 v 38-39). As I said, this is to over-simplify. After all, in the Christian tradition, people do not baptise themselves. The community always has its part, not least in expressing faith in the actions that are performed in its name. Furthermore, whatever different viewpoints we might take in this room about the rightness or otherwise of infant baptism, we would all recognise the fact that parents who sought this for their children believed the latter to be being brought into a covenantal relationship. Parents and, indeed, the Christian community seek to bring their youngsters into a relationship that God establishes with a whole people. Infant baptism has never correctly been envisaged as being solely a private and individual act relating only to a small baby. Certainly, within the New Testament, the explicit corporate nature of Christian Baptism appears time and time again. The newly baptised are viewed as becoming the sons and daughters of God (Rom 8 v12-13 or 1 Peter 1 v1-5). Baptism is seen as being an incorporation into the Body of Christ and inclusion into the community of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12 v12-13). In a nutshell one of the great emphases of the New Testament understanding of Baptism is the latter’s portrayal as being the rite of admission into the Church. Baptism is about bringing people into organic relationship with the Triune God and with the community of salvation.

Once we begin to speak of Baptism as a rite of initiation into the Church you and I have to come to terms with the fact that our Baptismal theology and our ecclesiology are so bound up with one another as to be inseparable. For Cyprian of Carthage the Church entered by Baptism is to be regarded as nothing less than the ark of salvation. On that view, any celebration of Baptism outside the closely defined boundaries of the true Church must be judged as being utterly null and void. After all, if other folk, claiming to be Christians but clearly outside the boundaries of the Church, can celebrate Christian Baptism then it would have to follow logically that the boundaries have been erected in the wrong place. At the very least, we must have misunderstood where such boundaries have been planted. Some Eastern Churches, together with a number of what might be called stricter Protestant bodies, would seem still to come close to endorsing such an approach today.

As we know, however, Augustine of Hyppo saw the snags in Cyprian’s argument and modified the teaching. Augustine comes to view even the baptisms celebrated by schismatics as being valid. Augustine protects his understanding of what for him constitutes the true Church by insisting that schismatic baptisms are valid but that, nevertheless, they do not become fruitful until those baptised in such a context come to be within the one true Church. Others here will be greater experts than I but I think it would be fair to say that this view, no doubt subject to much more nuancing than with which I am able to present it today, largely dominated the approach of the Roman Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council.

Meanwhile, of course, another kind of ecclesiology has long been on the scene. It is one embraced by most of the Churches of the Reformation, but arguably with strands of such a thinking predating them. This kind of ecclesiology sees schism as something internal to the Church. The Church is in part fragmented and, within that fragmentation, every baptism is to be recognised as being validly performed and equally efficacious. This view would appear to share some common threads with the understanding of both Church and Baptism that was to emerge in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, not least in the document De Ecclesia.

Here, following on from the earlier tradition, there is a clear understanding of the one true Church and of that Church subsisting in the Roman Catholic Church. What is especially exciting for someone like me, not yet in communion with that Church, and I guess for many Christians of other traditions, is the way in which De Ecclesia then seeks to explore the way in which other Christians are in some real sense members of the Church. To quote some of what De Ecclesia says of other Christians: They are marked by baptism and thereby joined to Christ. Indeed, De Ecclesia is, to my mind, one of the most inclusive theological statements I have ever read with its enthusiasm to embrace the Jewish People as well as Moslems, together with all other people of faith, as genuine searchers for God. They, I quote: …do so under the influence of divine grace; they can attain salvation. De Ecclesia even goes further than that and seeks to include genuine agnostics and atheists. It boldly states: Nor does divine Providence deny the necessary helps to salvation to men who through no fault of their own, have not yet reached an express acknowledgement of God, yet strive with the help of divine grace to attain an upright life.

If my understanding of this approach to Baptism is correct then we are presented with a view that seeks to be as inclusive as possible. There is an urgent willingness to see where God’s Spirit is at work bringing all men and women into the unity that He wills for them. Baptism is the key way by which God effects and demonstrates that unity for which many seek and strive. I might add, in passing, that it is a view of Baptism, as I have already more than hinted, that would have been in deep accord with the thinking of FD Maurice.

Yet, if we recognise each other’s Baptism as being efficacious and fruitful even within our divided Christian allegiances, whether from a post-Vatican Two theology or from a theology of schism being internal to the Church, there are some potentially uncomfortable consequences.

A little while back I found myself one of the Church of England delegates at an annual theological consultation with representatives from the Church of Scotland. The theme for our meeting on that occasion was The Church as Communion. I had been asked to give a paper on the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission’s statement bearing that title. One of the criticisms made by my Reformed friends was that ARCIC document fails to give sufficient attention to Baptism and, instead, over-concentrates on issues of eucharistic communion. I was told the Roman Catholic – Reformed Conversations, by contrast, had spent much more time in developing a mutual understanding of Baptism. One delegate from Scotland went so far as to say that he thought the mutual recognition of Baptism, particularly between Catholics and Protestants had the potential of dynamite. We should, therefore, push it all we could. My Reformed colleague argued, I think correctly, that Baptism results in what he liked to call bondedness. If we share a common Baptism then we are bonded together. That applies equally as much to Christian churches and communities as it does to individuals. We are utterly incapable of shaking off each other because Baptism establishes an unbreakable link between Christians. We are bonded. A recent conversation between Roman Catholics and Presbyterians in Scotland found value in revisiting the concept in Catholic theology of Baptism bestowing character. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, Incorporated into Christ by Baptism, the person baptised is configured to Christ. Baptism seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark (character) of his belonging to Christ….Given once for all, baptism cannot be repeated (CCC 1272, 1272-1274). By the same light, therefore, might we not argue that the relationship which Baptism brings about between the recipient and every other baptised person is equally secure can also never be undone?

That discovery of bondedness is something that needs pushing at every opportunity. My brother Anglican Bishop, Colin Buchanan, who stands within the Evangelical tradition of the Church of England, writes in his recent book of how, as an undergraduate, he had difficulty recognising the marks of a Christian Church in Roman Catholicism. Fifty years on, not even such a trenchant critic of the ARCIC process as Colin has become, would want any more to express that kind of hesitation. Recognise a common Baptism and we are challenged by our bondedness. We just cannot shake off the Christian authenticity of one another. Whatever any of us might make of the conclusions at which it arrives, a document like One Bread, One Body, from our Roman Catholic colleagues, struggles to see what are the implications of a common Baptism for eucharistic sharing. For inter-Church families, of course, that issue will always be near the top of the agenda and they, at least, will ensure that, until the day of full reconciliation, none of us in this room will ever be able to hide away from the demands of our 'bondedness'.

One of the themes that much impressed me in reading that account of recent discussions on the meaning of Baptism between Scottish Roman Catholics and representatives of the Church of Scotland was their recognition that each of us is largely what we are because of the other. It is our very bondedness that has caused us to over-define ourselves against each other, to inflict harm on each other and to make the pain of being hurt by the other so particularly acute. The cry of the Psalmist, It was even you, my own particular friend, is an especially poignant prayer as we look back on the harm that we have done to each other across the centuries. As I have heard said at this retreat, several times across the years, the mutual owning of each other’s martyrs is going to be an essential part of our being reconciled. We recognise the righteousness of Christ in the ones we have slain. The bondedness that Baptism imparts demands it of us. An important strand in the New Testament doctrine of Baptism is that in it each of us becomes more conformed to Christ. Conformity to Christ must, of course, also mean conformity to His death, a key element in the New Testament’s understanding of Baptism. Dying to ourselves is the pathway to living for Christ, not least as He is present in others, not least our fellow Christians who are also seeking to be conformed to Him. Being made more Christlike must be an increasingly recognisable quality that we perceive in each other and is one particularly focused in our saints. Wilfrid Owen’s moving war poem Strange Meeting tells of a dreamlike experience when the poet seems to escape from the battlefield into a dark tunnel. There he comes face to face with the German soldier he has recently killed. In that strange meeting the two soldiers discover their common humanity. Whatever hope is yours, was my life also, the slain German tells Owen. The bondedness given to us by Baptism is Christ’s gift to us that ensures that you and make that statement about each other.

That illustration from Wilfrid Owen takes us back to my starting point. Owen sees that common humanity so treasured by FD Maurice as well as the seeming awareness of its absence so strongly felt by Sebastian Faulk’s curé. Baptism, whatever else it might be, is the Sacrament of initiation that bonds us together in Christ’s Body. Baptism is the entry into a community that is to stand as a Sacrament to the world of what that world is destined to be. Baptism is an instrument for building up the Kingdom of God in which the whole creation is one day destined to find its fulfilment. Baptism both expresses and brings about that belonging to the true humanity for which all honest seekers after truth continue to long even if, as yet, they do not entirely appreciate that for which they now are seeking. Christ takes hold of us in Baptism and binds us into the life of the Triune God. Bonded to God, bonded to each other, the claims brother and sister Christians can make upon one another know no limit save that of love. Love, as you and I know, is costly. Love pays the price on Calvary. The call to Baptism is a continual challenge to us to live by that costly love, not least as we die in response to that same love and so engage ever more fully within the life of Christ's Body. You and I are called continually to challenge and to be challenged as to how we might further restore and advance the common life. Christianity does not allow insularity whether by individuals or by would be exclusive communities. The call to Baptism is always to be one from insularity to catholicity.