A New Reformation? Not likely, if the decision to restore Christchurch’s medieval cathedral is any guide, says Ian Harris.
For much of the past century talk has wafted in the ecclesiastical air about a "New Reformation". Over the past year, churches around the world variously noted, celebrated or ignored the 500th anniversary of the old Reformation that rocked Christendom after the Catholic monk Martin Luther proposed to debate troubling aspects of his church’s teaching.
The ensuing convulsion reshaped Europe politically, and in church life produced new emphases and practices. But as English Anglican Bishop John Robinson observes, the institutions that emerged were ‘‘a cluster of little catholicisms, each reproducing the characteristics of the parent, with its own ministry and sacraments, its own buildings and budgets’’.
More importantly, the basic affirmations of the medieval church — a supernatural reality, a theistic God, a divine Jesus who died to appease that God’s wrath at human sinfulness — flowed through into the Reformation churches. The Reformation transposed the Christian symphony into another key, but it was essentially the same symphony.
Closer to our own time, some hailed the movement towards unifying five major New Zealand denominations in the 1950s and 1960s as a new reformation. In hindsight, it is more likely to have entrenched those traditional doctrinal emphases further. Powerfully appropriate as those doctrines were to people’s understanding in the 1500s, in today’s world they are past their use-by date. A living religion must be free to evolve and find new expressions within contemporary realities, or it will wash up on the shores of irrelevance. Any new reformation will have to cut much deeper than the old.
For the church, ideally, does not exist for itself. It exists for the world in which it is set — and for most New Zealanders, that world is secular. A New Reformation would be worth little unless it truly became leaven in this new cultural environment, rethinking its theology so as to offer above all the prospect of a more humble, more compassionate humanity.
Robinson is clear that in such a reformation the church must abandon metaphysical and supernatural thought-forms that have become meaningless in the modern world. American Episcopalian Bishop John Spong fleshes that out in the first of 12 theses for a New Reformation: "Theism as a way of defining God is dead . . . A new way to speak of God must be found."
The only reformation that will serve the world, Spong says, "will not be concerned with authority, ecclesiastical polity, valid ordinations and valid sacraments ... but rather will examine the very nature of the Christian faith itself".
A New Reformation, if it happens, will be as divisive for the institutional churches as was the old. They will, as Robinson urges, sit down with community groups to hear the real questions of life and meaning people in society are facing and then shape their liturgies accordingly, for Christianity still has a life-enhancing perspective to offer.
Congregations will need to muscle up to expand beyond residential chaplaincies for the few, and become creative life centres, accepting all-comers, sharing but never imposing. They will add depth and breadth to their communities through tapping into the vital core of their Christian heritage, drawing inspiration from the in-dwelling Christ as archetype of love, grace and transformation.
I’m not holding my breath. Two months ago, Christchurch’s Anglican Synod had a golden opportunity to blaze a new trail by saying goodbye to its medieval Gothic cathedral in order to risk a 21st-century architectural statement of faith in the heart of the city. It voted to gaze firmly backwards.
Nothing significant will come from painstakingly preserving an obsolescent past. In today’s world, even a New Reformation would be inadequate. What’s required is a Transformation.
For Christianity the choice is stark: transform or perish.
- Ian Harris is a journalist and commentator.
