Anglicans, Everyone Else Is Making You Look Bad

**OK, I know it's been forever since I've blogged, so the next few blogs are going to alternate between finishing up my thoughts on South Africa and ruminations on the last year at Harvard. By the way, my housemate doesn't believe in using the heater, so I'm wearing sweatpants over flannel pajamas with an electric blanket. And still the mornings are painful.

Anyway, this blog post reflects on a project I was working on in June and July, viewing a major anti-apartheid march from 1989 through a theological lens.
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I love Reformed theology and thought. And I am not one who is usually enthralled by theology. I have little interest in debating the finer points of TULIP or whether Jesus became Christ before or after His crucifixion and resurrection; they can be interesting intellectual challenges, but in general, they are things we will not know the full answers to while we are yet on this side of life. I have come to the point where if a certain precept doesn’t help me in my basic mission to follow Jesus and not hurt other people—a mission that keeps me fairly well occupied most of the time, because sometimes it feels like I look up and totally unintentionally I have left mass carnage in my wake and I think, hmmm; that did not work out as well as I’d hoped—then it’s going to have to take a back seat to those things that do.

But spend a little bit of time with Anglicans and you’ll come to have a whole new respect for a robust and vigorously articulated theology, because it’s so sorely lacking in some of their circles. (I don’t say all, because they still have N.T. Wright, and that counts for something.) Even if you disagree with it, at least it gives you something of substance to actually disagree with.

As part of a project I was working on, I interviewed two former Anglican priests, both of whom served in fairly high positions in Cape Town’s diocese. One of them, when asked about the theological themes that drove church resistance to apartheid, said dreamily, “Faith.” Errrr….what? What did that even mean? Is that seriously all he’s going to give me? Not even a verse of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” which would be more profound than anything I’d hitherto heard from him?

Unfortunately, no.

Then he launched into an explanation of how we were all energy moving at different frequencies and when we come together all that energy…blah blah blah my ears are bleeding…something about E=mc^2…and he rambles on and I think, do I still remember the Nicene Creed? Or the lyrics to “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam”? Because I think he is actually sucking the faith right out of my spirit. Along with my will to live.

Then I talked to another Anglican who freely said, “I don’t really do theology, it was never my thing. It used to worry Tutu, he was always asking me when my next retreat was.” But, he continued, he just really wasn’t into the whole spirituality and theology part of being a priest.

Huh. I'm thinking the spirituality-and-faith part of being a priest is, I don't know, A MAJOR PART OF THE JOB. Who was in charge of ordination during these years? Because someone seriously fell down on the job, and apparently poor Tutu was trying to hold it together with string and duct tape. Anglicans, you should be pissed. This doesn’t show well.

So you can only imagine how I felt when I interviewed Allan Boesak a couple of weeks later. Boesak is one of the anti-apartheid luminaries, a founder of the United Democratic Front, fiery speaker, and a pastor in the Coloured branch of the Dutch Reformed Church. He did his Ph.D in the Netherlands and has done some great research on Bonhoeffer.

What I am telling you is, Allan Boesak has some theology.

He immediately started talking about Calvin and Kuyper and Bonhoeffer and about how the Reformed understanding of Christ’s Lordship of all things is the paradigm under which he operated. There is no private zone for the church separate from society, because society is also under the Lordship of Christ, whether it recognizes it or not. And Christ is steering things to His desired end. (A little bit of Calvinist predestination kicks in here.) I wasn’t sure if I should clap or kiss his ring.

And we were mutually smug about the nebulousness of much of Anglican theology.

I'm reading his memoir now which reflects on a major public scandal in which he was involved, so I don't want to comment on that until I've read his defense. But Boesak-Part II is coming soon.