Anglican Institute Conference Explores 'Reconstructing a Vital Via media'
Episcopal News Service. December 14, 1994 [94204]
Donald Armstrong
Clergy and laity from five continents gathered in Colorado Springs October 26-29 to explore the topic, "Reconstructing a vital via media."
Included among major speakers were the 102nd archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Robert Runcie; Bishop Michael Marshall, Episcopal director of the Anglican Institute; Bishop Edward L. Salmon of South Carolina, who chairs the institute's board; Bishop Alpha Mohammed of the Rift Valley, Tanzania and scholars Timothy Sedgwick of Seabury-Western Seminary, Alister McGrath of Wycliff Hall, Oxford and Julia Gatta of St. Paul's, Windham, Connecticut.
Bishop Marshall, began the conference by dispelling the idea that via media was about a compromise between extremes. "Anglicans seek to be comprehensive for the sake of truth which is not the same thing as a compromise for the sake of peace," he said. "The via media is not a position which you are called to hold, it's a way, a true via, a road, a yet more excellent way. It is the way through the cloud of unknowing to meet the Lord of faith."
Alister McGrath developed this line of thinking by suggesting that there is no place for a church which is simply concerned with surviving, of staggering from one issue to the next. "We need to be a church that has a vision of why we are here. We need a vision that is able to raise our eyes from the rut, fires us up, gives us a reason to hope, to live, to be in this world. It is this via media which can help us to capture that sense of vision, purpose and power."
McGrath argued that the via media is not about mediocrity, compromise or lukewarmness, an effort to be so unenthusiastic about everything that no one is offended. "It is about a willingness to take what is rich and what is right from wherever it may come in our church and use it for the proclamation of the Gospel and the sustenance of God's people," she contended. "It is to steer the way between a necessity for reform and the essential requirement to retain continuity with the roots of our faith in the apostolic period and the New testament witness."
According to McGrath via media reminds us that the Christian church came into being in response to the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. "It is about the rediscovery for ourselves of the excitement of this essential Christian faith so that we may fulfill our responsibility to present it to others," she said. "Via media in these days is not about the polarization between Catholicism and Protestantism, but about avoiding a fundamentalism which retreats from the world, having nothing to do with it and avoiding a liberalism which simply collapses into the world, becoming indistinguishable from it. Avoiding these extremes allows us to be the salt of the earth, in the culture but different from it, maintaining a distinctive identity and voice in the culture."
Bishop Marshall pointed out that along the way the one thing we should expect as frail human beings is that there will always be conflict this side of heaven. Conflict of ideals. Conflict between good men and women. If we can not contain conflict within the church then we have nothing to say of the Gospel to the world which is full of conflict."
Lord Runcie suggested that such tension and conflict are at the heart of real strength: "As you enter a cathedral, your eyes are caught by its massive pillars, in their strength they seem to stand on their own feet, symbols of strong foundations and sturdy independence. Yet their strength is an illusion. Look up and you see the pillars converting into arches which are upheld not by independence but rough interdependence. 'An arch,' wrote Leonardo De Vinci, 'is nothing more than a strength caused by two weaknesses...as one withstands the downfall of the other the two weaknesses are converted into a single strength.' We are not here to avoid conflict but to redeem it. At the heart of our faith is a cross, not an eternal calm."
Timothy Sedgwick said that via media mediates Christian faith. It mediates between Christian roots and the present situation to form a vital Christian people. He went on to develop the different worlds of Richard Hooker and Kenneth Kirk to show how this via media was able to steer a course between the historic faith and their life situations. "To reconstruct how you form people in the faith, make faith alive, provide the disciplines of faith and live that faith out is the real genius of the via media," he said.
Bishop Alpha Mohammed witnessed to just such a lively faith in action in East Africa. He said that the overwhelming response of the people is to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, the authority of scripture and the life of prayer. When asked how you teach the authority of scripture, Bishop Alpha responded: "Well I do rather than teach. You allow the people to read, and you preach it. Then you trust the Holy Spirit and leave the results in God's hands. That way works best."
In addressing structures for via media in the American Church, Bishop Salmon asked rhetorically "How do you build a new boat while you're riding in the current?" he asked. "That is stressful however you look at it. But the thing that excites me about this time is that it offers the possibility of really getting back in touch with who we are as Anglicans."
Bishop Salmon said that systems produce what they are designed to produce. Very often our tacit systems are producing something both nationally and in the diocese that is different from what we intend. The emerging system in the Diocese of South Carolina, for example, is based on the understanding that the diocese is the basic unit. This "means that the well-being of one congregation effects the well-being of all congregations, because the basic body is the diocese and the congregations are its cells. The health and the care of every cell is the business of everybody, including the Bishop. So the diocese has a fundamental responsibility for the well-being of every congregation in the diocese. Therefore, the well-being of every congregation is fundamentally at the heart of the way the diocesan system is formed."
The Rev. Dr. Julia Gatta said "we must find the disciplines which open to us the vision of God and provides a means whereby our whole life can become an expression of worship, the offering of our entire selves to God. Such disciplines must be concrete and specific if they are not to evaporate into the most of unrealized good intentions. Now the Anglican tradition contains a specific yet spacious discipline that her members have been fruitfully practicing for centuries. It is that three-fold rule of prayer that provides for the renewal of Anglicanism through the renewal of Anglicans," she said.
"The discipline of first, the Eucharist, second, the daily office and third, personal prayer is a discipline which is characteristic of Anglican spirituality, and it inevitably plunges those who use it into the living stream of Christian tradition," she added. "We are not left on our own to figure out who God is, to commune with an impersonal and hopefully benign force beyond or beneath the Universe. The Eucharist and daily office lectionaries bring us into contact with a specific community of faith stretching back almost 2,000 years and which finds its center in Jesus Christ. The Eucharist and daily office lectionary rehearses the essential story week after week. Personal prayer as a Christian tradition continues and more deeply interiorized that communion with God initiated by baptism, strengthened by Eucharist and lived from within the people of God."
Such a discipline is essential, for prayer is the heart of the church because it is prayer that unites us to heart of God and forms in us the mind of Christ, she concluded.
Alister McGrath best summarized the work of the conference: "The via media allows us to confirm our historical continuity as believers in the past. To draw inspiration from their example and be challenged by them as we ask whether we in our own generation are doing what they did in theirs. The via media allows us to identify ways of relating to our culture which are not going to work and allowing us to rediscover physical images like the light of the world, like the salt of the earth, which allow us to be in the culture yet be distinguishable from it. Having something distinctive to say to that culture without being imprisoned by it or modernized by it."