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After Dromantine
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Sumner, George
What Would an Answer to Relativism Look Like?
From the perspective of the modern Christian community, relativism is inevitable: there is an enduring plurality of points of view, each dependent on its own premises. Furthermore, reductive critiques are in effect relativizing moves: reducing all argument to their underlying exterior causes levels them all and limits them to their causal contexts. Relativism-the surrender of claims to ultimate truth-cannot find its antidote through philosophical arguments abstracted from specifically Christian claims, though such arguments must at times be deployed. It requires a response grounded in the specific claims Christians make.
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In On Thinking the Human,5 systematic theologian Robert Jenson poses perennial philosophical questions, showing that we know less about each question than we supposed. He then argues that the real answer lies in a Christian doctrine. For example, the conundrums of human freedom lead to the following conclusion: "first, that the church is the polity in which freedom is native, and second, that the freedom spoken of and practiced by the polities of this world is but aspiration to the church's freedom."6 The question is familiar but the answer would surely bring a philosopher up short, as if there had been a category confusion. Something similar is true in the case before us: the answer to the modern problem of relativism is the church catholic. By this I mean the gestalt of a working theological tradition, the virtues and sensibilities that allow one to think with that tradition, its sacramental life with its round of listening to the canon of Scripture, and its communion of churches throughout the world in different cultures and climes. The church catholic acknowledges and sublimates cultural locality into a larger collective truth claim.
What's at Stake
The 1866 call by Canadian Bishop John Strachan for a worldwide synod of Anglican bishops-a prequel to the current crisis of Anglican authority-was squelched, due in no small measure to anxiety on the part of the evangelical wing about too much prelatical power in what seemed to them the Romish model. The irony here is that today the theologically traditional wing of the international communion, spearheaded by the evangelical Anglicans of sub-Saharan Africa, is in the forefront of advocating some kind of means for international judgments about the limits of diversity.
Today what is at issue is, quite simply, the catholicity of Anglicanism. Are we to he part of the church catholic, or are we to devolve in North America into two more sects, only with vestments? sect status is the sociological correlate of relativism. So, the second irony is that the leadership in both ECUSA and the Anglican Church of Canada think of themselves as liberal catholics, and yet are now putting that very mark of the church in jeopardy. One key question is whether they can come to see protecting catholicity as more important than promoting this particular cause.
In response, liberal catholic leaders might insist on the autonomy of the national church as an essential feature of Anglicanism (while not addressing the limits of that autonomy). They might underline the legal right of national churches to make their own decisions. They would perhaps claim that the worldwide church is already deeply divided, and so a few more fragments will hardly matter (though this is a counsel of despair, a close spiritual cousin of moral relativism). They might suggest that the real catholic unity of the church is in a broader sense of identity overarching actual divisions. Each of these arguments tracks closely the justifications of Protestant denominationalism, confirming the sectarianism of their stance. Finally, they might suggest that their position is aligned with cultural progress, a view at odds with a perspective of cultural relativism. But this last argument is a throwback to nineteenth-century liberalism, and it degenerates, eventually, into the Troeltschian end point of its intellectual forebear.
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