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This little scenario faces me with a reality about my responsibility
for all whose lives touch mine. I am responsible for their flourishing. In the
case of the dog, I can decide whether to make the bone experience good and
pleasant, as it was intended to be, or I can simply not care. I can tell myself
that as long as she has the bone, she should be happy. She is only a dog, after
all.
Last week’s Oxford Faith Debate on unity, diversity and the future of the Church of England comes
to mind as I ponder the bone situation, and its implications for taking responsibility
for one another’s flourishing. In the life of the Church, we are responsible
before God for the fullest possible flourishing of all its members. This begins
with taking responsibility for the one we perceive as ‘other’ or, even if we
don’t care to admit it to ourselves, as ‘deviant’. The two most contentious
areas of debate which dominate the life of the Church of England at present
concern otherness.
In this respect, two things came through very clearly
during Thursday’s debate. The first was that being polite and nice to each
other in public does not exonerate us from the harm we do to each other in
private or, for that matter, through the internet. The second, a variant on the
first, is the mistaken idea that acknowledging the other is all that we
need to do in order to convince ourselves and the world that we are truly the
body of Christ. But to merely acknowledge the other is not enough to sustain
the life and unity of the Church, because acknowledging is not the same as
embracing that person as one who is absolutely vital to the flourishing of the
body.
Embracing the other involves honesty, accountability and
transparency, leading inevitably to mercy and love. Mercy and love are the
product of truth. They come when truth has been told and heard, and its
effects healed, by all the parties involved. They do not come with punishment or
exclusion. So if diversity is to enrich the life of the Church and lead to a
new and vital unity, we need to embrace one another’s full humanity, so that it
can flourish as it is and we can live in truth. In other words, we need to be
human together, because if we are not human together we are not the body of
Christ.
This is where talk of acknowledging another’s position is
distracting to the point of irrelevance. Talk of acknowledgment affords a
loophole for avoiding our responsibility before God to embrace one another in
our full humanity. It is not honest. It is a relational fudge. Acknowledgment
is not the same thing as touching the one who is ‘other’, as seeing their face
and experiencing their need and pain.
All of us, wherever we stand on any one issue, are in the
habit of ignoring the pain of the minority. On Thursday the minority was the
Executive Secretary of Anglican Mainstream, the only person on the panel publicly
representing that particular theological position. Whether we agreed with him
or not (and most clearly did not) does not ultimately matter very much. What
matters, and what mattered in the context of the debate, was our failure to
take responsibility for that person’s pain which, though specifically his, was
also ours. It was human pain and we shall all be held accountable by God for
his human pain, just as he will for ours.
Perhaps this is why we did not really resolve any of the
disputes touched on in the debate, or reach anything beyond what one
contributor rightly called ‘subjective unity’. Subjective unity, he said, is
provisional and to this one might add that it is provisional because it is not
strong enough to bear the load of diversity and difference. This is because, as
another contributor put it, we define our identity on the basis of who we are
not. It is our insecurity which ultimately defines us and becomes the
collective ‘driver’ of any one group. In other words, we are driven by fear
rather than by the will to love.
Our collective identity as Church derives from the fact
that we are given to each other, and to God, in Christ. Our true identity is therefore
only to be found through creative interchange in Christ. Creative interchange means that Christ becomes as we are
in order that we might become as he is, both in the fullness of our individual
humanity and in our diversity as Church. These two aspects of our identity, the
individual and the collective, are what ought to make the Church a sign of hope
for the world.