Abstract
Reviewed by : Duncan Reid, Trinity College Theological School, Melbourne
It is very often the ‘slim volumes’ that most daringly and effectively carry the charge of provocative new ideas. This new book, barely 110 pages of text, but supported by a prodigious weight of critical apparatus in the form of endnotes (which themselves deserve careful reading) and chapter bibliographies, both promises and threatens to fill just this role. It is a serious and carefully thought out critique of the culture of the Anglican Church of Australia and its agencies. It is a culture that the author, who is a former Dean of St Peter’s Cathedral in Adelaide and Principal of St Francis Theological College in Brisbane, knows from the inside, and knows well enough to pinpoint with impressive accuracy.
We live in a time in which the church is under attack from various quarters, but very often these attacks seem blunted by generalisations or the application of critical methodologies that don’t quite get the institutions under consideration. There is no such bluntness here, and Ogden’s acuity cannot be ignored by anyone who has either benefitted from or suffered under the particular pathologies that tend to characterise church institutions. Some people will love this book, others will hate it. One thing, however, that Ogden points out from the outset is that this book is not anti-church or even against structured leadership in the church. Rather it is about transforming the leadership culture of the church and church agencies, of liberating the church, including its own leadership, from a ‘sovereign power’ model, with all the assumptions that go with it. Sovereign power entails the notion of ‘the exception’ first explored by Carl Schmitt, the presumption of superior knowledge (epistemic hubris), the sacralisation of obedience and the exclusion of those who do not conform. In place of all this, Ogden proposes a model of leadership based on proper authority, which is implicit in the church’s own true vocation. This would in turn transform the church from an institution in thrall to a polity of monarchy, to its true vocation to be an ‘open space of freedom’.
Ogden draws heavily of the work of Michel Foucault, but also on Hannah Arendt and Karl Rahner, for the theoretical underpinnings of his critique of present practice and his road map of how this transformation might be achieved. Significant concepts in this process are those of ‘space’ and ‘imagination’. The process Ogden proposes will go further and deeper than mere structural change in institutions: it will involve a renewed formation of the subjectivity of potential leaders. It is, in other words, a shift in leadership paradigm that will take time to bear fruit; it is hard to see it coming to fulfilment under leaders formed in the old (or indeed current) model. It will require a type of long-term planning unfashionable in an age of quick fixes.
Readers of this book may find themselves faced with several questions. First, are the scenarios (pp. 59 ff.) of current practice – so vividly depicted that anyone familiar with ecclesiastical processes can easily imagine them happening – actual or hypothetical? Second, why is the inherent ambiguity of some terminology not always acknowledged; for example, the possibility that terms like ‘imagination’ or ‘gaze’ may carry negative as well as positive connotations either in the tradition or in current discourse? Also unacknowledged is the possibility that the critique of ecclesiastical monarchy (the ‘at least since Constantine’ argument, p. 4) may no longer be quite so uncritically accepted as it once was. Third, is it inherently problematic to introduce a new model of leadership just as the Anglican Church is finding itself blessed with the ministry of women bishops? Fourth, is the notion of monarchy just so deeply engrained within the Anglican psyche – even after 160 years of synodical governance – that a renewed church would no longer be recognisable as ‘Anglican’? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, why is this very systematically structured argument so highly condensed? There are moments when readers may find themselves wishing the author had unpacked some of his ideas in more detail; e.g. could we hear a little more on Foucault’s notion of space? Despite these problems, perhaps the biggest of which is the book’s conciseness, it is a very important book for Australian Anglicans to read. The extent to which it has implications for other churches I leave for others to decide. It certainly places its author among the most exciting and perceptive current thinkers within the Anglican Church in Australia, and beyond.