The Church of England and the love of learning

No historian will be surprised by the suggestion that the Church absorbs habits of thinking and working from the culture that surrounds it, so that a later generation looks back across the centuries and asks, ‘How can they possibly have thought that that was an expression of the gospel, or that that was what the Church needed in its leadership?’ In eighteenth-century France, aristocratic birth was a prerequisite for the holding of episcopal office in the Church of the ancien régime: how far from the gospel, we think. The great bishop-theologians who shaped classical Christian doctrine took slavery for granted; it was so rooted in the practice and assumptions of their age that they struggled, even with the gospel, to achieve a critical distance. Gregory of Nazianzus’ secretary was a slave, rewarded with freedom in his master’s will. When future historians look back across the centuries at the Church of England of our present day, what will puzzle them most about our habits of thinking and working? Our apparent loss of confidence in the value of learning might be one thing that strikes them.

We look back in puzzlement at the high value that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European education placed on Greek and Latin composition. It is not self-evident that a trained ability to compose Greek iambics is a good preparation to govern India, or to have oversight of an English diocese. It could, though, work surprisingly well. Charles James Blomfield became famous for his brilliance in diagnosing and correcting faults in the transmission of the text of the Greek tragedians. As bishop first of Chester and then London, he went on to become the great administrator-bishop of his day. Working on the manuscripts of Aeschylus, he had acquired habits of attention to detail, of disentangling complicated relationships between things, of persistent hard work, which proved surprisingly useful when it came to disentangling the historic endowments of cathedrals and parishes into a new financial structure for the whole Church of England which is still with us. ¹

The Church may, then, be able to turn the prevailing habits of thought and action in the world around it to good Christian account, but the basic question still imposes itself: why (if at all) is it important that there should be learning in the Church? Why does the Common Worship ordinal, like its Tudor predecessor, insist on the need for clergy to study? ‘Will you’, the bishop asks the candidate, ‘be diligent in prayer, in reading Holy Scripture, and in all studies that will deepen your faith and fit you to bear witness to the truth of the gospel?’ ² Three motives can be suggested.

The first is apologetic. Historically, a primary motive in the development of Anglican scholarship was the need to offer a coherent defence of Anglican polity and practice against papist critics, on the one hand, and Genevan ones, on the other. Hence the patristic and ecclesiological studies, the apologiae of the Church of England, which made its clergy famous for their learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ³ This tradition continued in the same form at least to the end of the nineteenth century. When Leo XIII published his condemnation of Anglican orders in Apostolicae curae (1896), the Archbishops responded a few months later with a tightly drafted document of their own, Saepius officio (Rome is supposed to have been impressed, especially by the quality of its Latin). Ecclesiological arguments are still to be had, though now at least as much within the Church of England or within the Anglican Communion as between Anglicans and non-Anglicans, but other apologetic tasks have since come to the fore: the defence of Christian belief and practice as intellectually credible and morally positive, in the face of ‘the new atheism’ and attacks on religion itself as inimical to human flourishing, or the defence of the idea of God’s self-disclosure in Christ to which Scripture bears witness, and the consequent working out of a properly Christian doctrine of revelation in a faith-plural world – to name but two areas of particular urgency, in which the apologetic task turns out to be not just a defensive strategy but also the construction of a positive theology in the service of the Church’s mission.

The second is to make possible the exercise of independent Christian judgement. It is a cliché that Anglicans arrive at their understandings by the use of Scripture, tradition and reason: the cliché becomes misleading when the three are held separately from one another. ‘Scripture’ does not exist separately from the processes of its genesis, transmission and reception; ‘reason’ is not a Cartesian mind-on-its-own but a mind shaped by prayer and in pursuit of God. But the classical formula’s insistence on ‘reason’ or ‘conscience’ suggests the importance to the Anglican Christian of the exercise of the believer’s own judgement on the materials of the faith. The study of Scripture, so much emphasized in the ordinals, is an important case. Different translations of the Bible may all be good, perhaps differently good for different purposes and in different contexts, but each of them is only a version of the original Greek, or Hebrew, or Aramaic. The translations have had to make decisions about text and meaning which the original leaves open. A reader who has no knowledge of the original languages is at the mercy of the translators of the version that he or she is using. To compare different English versions is only to escape partially from this tie. It was to emancipate clergy that the English Reformers encouraged so strongly the study of biblical languages. The intention lives on in the insistence that at least some ordinands learn at least some Greek (though fewer, and less, in each succeeding decade).

The ordinal implies a third purpose of study – to teach. Clergy are to be ‘formed by the word’, so that they may help those they serve to be ‘formed by the word’: to make sense of their lives and their relationships in the light of the Father’s disclosure of himself in the Son, of Christ’s death and Resurrection, of the gift of the Holy Spirit. This kind of teaching is not the imparting of information, or the transmission of particular skills, but the shaping of growth – training, one might say, like the training of a rose or a vine. It immediately makes clear the deep connection that must exist between Christian study and prayer. ‘A theologian is one who prays.’ Gregory of Nazianzus’ dictum is often misquoted, as if it means ‘Anyone who says their prayers can call themselves a theologian’, when it really means, ‘No-one can call themselves a theologian whose theology does not grow out of prayer.’ Simone Weil suggested that study encouraged habits of close and loving attention, and so was a training ground for prayer. These habits of attention are equally a preparation for pastoral encounter, and the acquisition of them is part of what it is to be ‘formed by the word’.

These are three strong grounds for maintaining that learning is as much worth having in the Church of England as ever. Where might it then flourish? A welcome difference in the context in which that question is put today is that we no longer assume that scholarship in and for the Church is only, or even primarily, to be done by the ordained; if I concentrate on clergy here, it is not to undervalue the contribution of lay scholars to the Church of England’s intellectual life, but because the primary institutional challenge to that Church is to make it more possible for its clergy to make a matching contribution. The Church has tended to assume that it can look to university departments for the learning that it needs to sustain its own life, and that it need do nothing itself to resource that learning, other than (a welcome development in itself) fund doctorates for some ordination candidates in training. In fact, the Church is probably unwise to delegate its responsibilities to universities in this way – for reasons that are structural and general, and no reflection on those who work in universities. Bureaucratization, the detailed management of outputs to achieve previously determined targets, the emphasis on measurable outcomes (with a simultaneous failure to realize that the way in which the measurable is being measured distorts the output) have been characteristic of all large organizations in the UK since the 1980s. So the shape and pace of research are driven by five-yearly cycles of assessment (even if there is now more allowance for longer term projects); too many people have to publish too much work, often prematurely; and their choice of work can be constrained by departmental priorities rather than the Church’s needs or their own primary interests. At the same time, state-funded universities are required to be faith-neutral environments, however strong the faith commitments of those who teach in them; and chairs attached to canonries become harder to defend each time there is a vacancy (and not only because of the Church’s lack of a strategy to ensure that there is a supply of credible candidates). The Church, in short, should no longer outsource to university departments its own responsibility for the encouragement of scholarship, important as the universities’ continuing contribution will be. Where, then, does it look?

Parish ministry is, structurally, that part of the Church of England that is proving most resilient in the face of the culture of managerialism, and it should still be possible to imagine it as a place in which, as in earlier generations, serious scholarship is undertaken – a scholarship rooted in a commitment to daily prayer and pastoral encounter, and done in and for the Church. The same can be said of cathedrals. Scholarship needs time, and (because it is no longer the activity of the isolated scholar) it needs sustained and structured conversation; the practical questions become, how to make time, and how to create conversation. Conversation is more easily found, through networks and societies of which clergy are easily members. Time, in the sense of substantial intervals of freedom from the ordinary activity of ministry in order to undertake significant writing, needs to be negotiated and funded; it is not something that individual clergy can simply be left to tackle, as best as they each may in the circumstances of their own ministries and their own relationships with their churchwardens and PCCs. And so we need something like a Church-wide scheme of postdoctoral fellowships (perhaps attached to cathedrals), to allow those recently ordained and newly minted PhDs to return, after a curacy, to the development and publication of their research on a larger scale; or a scheme for extended study leave, in which a serving priest might have leave of absence for a whole six months or a year to complete a book, while an interim vicar was funded to serve the parish.

There is another reason to study, not among those listed above, but more fundamental in the inner experience of those who study, and the presence or absence of practical encouragement affects it surprisingly little. It is, simply, the love of learning. To see a familiar subject cast in a new light, to watch apparently stale evidence yield fresh insight under the pressure of new and imaginative questioning, to see a difficult text illuminated as if the light had been turned on in a darkened room are intellectual pleasures vivid to those who experience them. There are those who cannot cease to study, because it is their way of delighting before the Lord. It is a vocation, even a way of loving. Wisdom probably has more such sons and daughters in the Church of England than we commonly realize. Historians of the future may look back at us, and wonder that we did not make more use of the gift.