Anglican Political Theology

Abstract

This essay develops a constructive account of the ways Anglicans have addressed political questions. The first section outlines the characteristic political rationality of Anglican political theology (APT). This provides a backdrop to a consideration of the relationship between three distinct yet interrelated phenomena—church, nation, and state—and how they were understood as together constituting a polity. The second half situates APT in the context of how Anglicanism, from its origins, is in part a response to processes of modernization, particularly as these emerged in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century onwards. It then outlines how key concerns of APT emphasize a way of imagining the role of church and nation within history, with providence as an important doctrinal point of reference. The essay closes with some critical reflections on how APT can and should develop going forward.

Introduction

Anglican political theology (APT) is an umbrella term for a diffuse, multifaceted, and interrelated body of reflection on the nature and purpose political life contained within Anglicanism as an ecclesial tradition. ¹ Sketched here is a constructive account of the characteristic ways Anglicans have addressed political questions. This account recognizes points of divergence and convergence while also drawing on a deliberately eclectic range of sources to illustrate the full scope of APT. What connects the different strands of political theology discussed here is a shared history and ecclesial tradition of belief and practice. Embedded as they are within Anglicanism, the different, often contradictory voices I foreground also share a common purpose: they seek to answer the question “how should we live together?” and in doing so, they testify to a shared set of beliefs about the nature of the world as it is and a set of commitments to a vision of the world as it should be. As a form of shared if fractious testimony, APT is neither an academic discourse nor a coherent intellectual tradition. It is a therapy for the ways we live.

A central premise of this essay is that all political theologies, either explicitly or implicitly, work with a determinate conception of how to situate humans in time and space. This premise provides the central thread in my account of the historical development of APT. The first section outlines APT’s characteristic political rationality. This provides a backdrop to a consideration of the relationship between three distinct yet interrelated phenomena—church, nation, and state—and how they were understood as together constituting a polity. Thus, a central theme of this essay is how APT sought to coordinate these different elements within a coherent vision of good order and how that order was understood to be related to and a vehicle for the work of God in history. The focus on the right ordering of church, nation, and state generates an absent presence in APT: it tends to avoid any explicit discussion of power as, in contrast to something like Black liberation theology, it assumes the possession of power. Given this assumption, the primary focus is the right ordering of power rather than the problem of how to get power, thereby muting the need to ask questions about who has power and why.

The second half situates APT in the context of how Anglicanism, from its origins, is in part a response to processes of modernization, particularly as these emerged in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century onwards. It then outlines how key concerns of APT emphasize a way of imagining the role of church and nation within history, with providence as an important doctrinal point of reference. It should be noted that, given its historical provenance, there is an unavoidable emphasis on the Church of England. That said, the Church of England serves as a case study of dynamics shared by all parts of the Communion.

What it is not

APT is not a defined system of thought. Unlike Catholic social teaching, Anglicanism has no formal body of encyclicals. Nor does it refer to a distinct confession or creed: the Thirty-Nine Articles rarely, if ever, appears as a reference point in APT. ² In contrast to Lutheran and Calvinist traditions of moral and political thought, there is no single, foundational figure whose body of work serves as a constant reference point for further reflection. And unlike those churches emerging from the radical reformation, such as the Mennonites, there are no distinctive practices—for example, adult baptism and pacifism—that undergird a correlative set of political commitments (such as freedom of conscience, church-state separation, and nonviolence). APT’s characteristic thinkers are essayists and writers of ad hoc treatises, rather than creators of formal, internally consistent systems of thought. Reflecting its dual nature as Catholic and Reformed, Anglicanism draws on numerous traditions and approaches to social and political reflection. But for all its ecumenical and philosophical bricolage, APT tends to favor practical over theoretical forms of rationality and is orientated to questions of political order in a distinctive way: it is situated within and emerges out of a church for a particular place and history rather than for a gathered people. Anglican churches envisage themselves as serving a place (parish, diocese, and nation-state) and the people who happen to live there, whoever they may be and whatever their commitments. This contrasts with congregational and movement-based ecclesial polities within Protestantism. Exemplified in Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, and nondenominational Evangelical churches, the emphasis in these traditions is serving those who gather in the congregation rather than those who live in that place. As marked through the constitution of the ecclesial polity of the Anglican Communion, a contrast can also be made with Roman Catholicism where there is less focus on serving a specific nation.

A note on terminology is needed at this point. I use “political theology” as a generic term for theological insights generated at the intersection of reflection on God and reflection on political life. So situated, political theology is bifocal. As one modality of Christian testimony, political theology articulates the nature, form, and purpose of political life in the light of the revelation of God given in Jesus Christ. At the same time, it attends to the historical realities in which that life is lived. Political theology discerns the consonance and dissonance between the way of life and form of rule incarnated and inaugurated by Jesus Christ and the social formations and authorities shaping this age between Christ’s ascension and return. At times, it identifies how penultimate authorities and ways of life participate in Christ’s way of being, while at other times it detects how they are anti-Christic. Political theology as a form of Christian testimony is thus a way of discerning how to act or conduct oneself appropriately in this time, in both its historical and eschatological registers. Its full realization is not therefore in a set of academic discourses but in a changed way of life. Other terms that can be used for this kind of theological reflection are Anglican social theology, Anglican public theology, and Anglican social thought. Each of these has a particular signification and history of adoption, but I take them to be synonyms for what I am calling Anglican political theology. ³

Contemplative pragmatism

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) exemplifies an emphasis on practical reason as the basis of political judgments in APT as well as a focus on history and forms of life as the primary loci of inquiry. In doing so, he draws on and echoes a position developed by theologian Richard Hooker (1554–1600)—a key figure in the development of APT. ⁴ Natural law, doctrine, Scripture, or philosophy may well be vital elements in the subsequent development of a moral or political position, but attention to ways of imagining life together is what initiates and provides an essential reference point for Coleridge, and by extension, APT. Later in the nineteenth century, the educator and historian, Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), the theologian and one of the founders of Christian socialism, F. D. Maurice (1805‒72), and liberal politician and prime minister, William Gladstone (1809–1898), further developed Coleridge’s ideas, and they, in turn, influenced Christian socialists and liberals. In the contemporary context, we can discern the watermark of Coleridge’s concerns, particularly the emphasis on the role of culture, history, and the imagination in shaping the good life, in figures such as Desmond Tutu, Sarah Coakley, Kathryn Tanner, Graham Ward, and Elaine Graham. Even Oliver O’Donovan, for whom Scripture and doctrine are central to the articulation of his political theology, still makes history (notably, intellectual history) and contextually situated prudential judgments a constitutive feature of his methodology. Indeed, O’Donovan’s understanding of creation in many ways echoes that developed by Coleridge. ⁵

In a gesture that has since become characteristic of Anglican theology, Coleridge rejected a notion of natural law as that which can be excavated by reason alone. Instead, he saw creation as an open yet unfinished cosmos, the value of which is not objectively given but depends on the human capacity to participate in it via symbolic processes of meaning-making. That is to say, the human self stands in an interpretative and constantly evolving relationship to creation. ⁶ Thus, overly abstract kinds of reasoning render humans not only mere spectators but also spectral beings alienated from any concrete form of life. By contrast, close attention to, participation in, and open-hearted wonder about the world around us can generate imaginative and regenerative proposals for inhabiting creation. The world as it is can then be brought into conversation with and re-imagined through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as narrated in Scripture.

On this approach, it is neither reason nor nature, but culture and history that connects and divides humans from each other and it is not simply better ideas or principles that are needed but a conversion of our imagination and a change of practice. Coleridge, abhorring Jacobin and anti-Jacobin tendencies alike, held that a humane culture must have an interplay between “permanence”—the tending of our inherited customs and traditions—and “progression”—innovation and development of new approaches. ⁷ And specifically echoing the Richard Hooker, Coleridge sees custom as able to embody reason, leading to a preference for what is already established as that which is reasonable rather than for innovation, which must be carefully scrutinized and tested. However, Coleridge was alive to how we are always caught between continuity and change so must learn to live and act as frail, time-bound creatures in need of shared forms of life that can adapt and innovate. As will be seen, however, APT consistently struggles to hold the creative and necessary tension Coleridge established between continuity and change.

Echoing Coleridge, APT does not posit a nature/culture binary. Rather, in contrast to natural law approaches to moral and political theology, it recognizes that a specific cultural-historical form of life is the beginning point and primary focus for political reflection. Thus, for example, Desmond Tutu’s homiletic reflections on South Africa are informed by the need to evaluate a particular context within its cultural-historical situation as well as in relation to its conformity to Christ. ⁸ Instead of focusing on nature, which tends to de-historicize and mystify what is contingent and fallen, APT’s focus on culture, history, and place recognizes that contingency, and thence revisability, is a constitutive feature of all forms of life. Such a view is not against a notion of nature per se; rather it recognizes that our experience of nature is always already historical and cultural and thereby fallen and finite. To name nature requires poetic, historical, and cultural insight, along with forms of practical reasoning, not adherence to formal laws or speculative and abstract rationalizations. ⁹ Rowan Williams calls such an approach “contemplative pragmatism” and sees it as a hallmark of Anglican thought. He traces it back to Hooker, of whom he states:

He is pragmatist to the degree that the accumulation of historical precedent has real intellectual weight, in the light of our ineradicable folly, selfishness and slowness as human thinkers, and he is contemplative to the degree that his guiding principles are seen by him as received, not invented, as the uncovering of a pattern of “wisdom” in the universe, focused in and through the Word incarnate. ¹⁰

APT’s political rationality is focused not on blueprints for how to live but on proposing settlements for how the church, nation, and state might be properly related within and through existing historical conditions.

Sociality and plurality

Hooker developed an early and influential view of the church–nation relationship, and how to articulate it within state structures. He assumed that the populace of the commonwealth and the laity were one and the same, with Parliament being a synod of the laity. ¹¹ In Hooker, this paradigm is aligned with a conception of the ideal polity as being modeled on the “Hebrew Commonwealth” and constituted by one people, one religion, and one law under God. ¹² This is a form of integralism. The danger with it is that it converts a contingent relation into a providential necessity by presuming there should be an organic unity between the people of God and the English people. Yet when the ecclesia and the ethnos are so closely identified, then dissent from what is considered orthodoxy is heard as sedition, rebellion as a form of blasphemy. Jews, Catholics, Dissenters, and atheists are not merely non-conformists who contest the status of ecclesial authority and the normativity of certain beliefs, they are potential enemies of the people whose very existence calls into question the basis of the political order. Crises in the body politic are not mere signs of decrepitude within the earthly city, they are keenly felt as wounds in the body of Christ. A muted version of integralism was revived with Tractarian ideas about the “confessional state” in the nineteenth century, leading John Keble (1792–1866) to preach that failure to uphold the integral union of church and state was a form of “national apostasy.” ¹³ Within an integralist configuration, what is secular is that which is not directly ecclesial, but the nation is normatively understood as Christian even if non-Christian others are tolerated as part of it.

One alternative to integralist visions of the interrelationship between church, nation, and state is a comprehensive view in which the church should care for the nation as a whole but does not claim to be coterminous with the whole. This account was partly inspired by Coleridge but developed most fully by F. D. Maurice. Within this framework, the church is the bearer of the nation’s traditions and upholder of a truly national faith, but this does not require uniformity of confession in public life. Neither does the church have a merely contractual relationship with the state as William Warburton (1698–1779) argued in The Alliance Between Church and State (1736). Rather, there is a covenant between the Established Church and the nation that gives historical expression to the nation’s underlying spiritual unity in Christ.

Colonial developments, notably the creation of the Episcopal Church in the United States as an independent church in 1789, instigated the need to re-imagine plurality and commonality in the public sphere. The Episcopal Church became one denomination among many, and unlike the Church of England, could not look to state structures as a point of connection between church and nation. While the nation remained the fundamental unit of political and ecclesial order, the Episcopal Church and then subsequent Anglican Churches had to imagine different, less state-centric kinds of relationship to the nations they served. For some, such as the Kenyan bishop, David Gitari (1937–2013), and the South African bishop, Desmond Tutu, this could take an oppositional stance toward state officials in defense of the integrity of the nation. ¹⁴ For others, such as the black Episcopal abolitionist Peter Williams Jr., this could mean a call to transcend the nation in the name of humanity while pointing to the barbarity of Europeans involved in the slave trade, with their “adamantine heart of avarice, dead to every sensation of pity.” ¹⁵ Contrary to British strands of APT, many non-European strands had to confront situations of systemic oppression and powerlessness (e.g., apartheid in South Africa). Therefore, rather than focus on the question of how best to order existent forms of power, they have had to make explicit questions about the conditions of agency (and thus, how the powerless can get power) and the justice of the political system as such. More recently, internal debates within the Anglican Communion over issues such as same-sex marriage have generated questions about the constitution and distribution of power within the Communion. In terms of ecclesial polity, the rootedness of Anglican churches in national contexts means the Communion as it has emerged is consociational in structure: it is a communion of communions rather than an indivisible whole directed from a single, monarchical center.

Post-Holocaust and with the rapid loss of empire after 1945, there was a move away from a providential view of the relationship between church and nation in Britain. This shift, combined with an intensification of ethnic and religious diversity due to inward migration from former colonies, pressed the question of what it means for the church to negotiate a common life with various Christian and non-Christian others, while negotiating a constructive but critical relationship to the state and the market. ¹⁶ Should the state still be the point of unity with the nation? And what makes a nation? These questions came to be aligned with a critique of secularism. Rather than accepting a determination of the secular as that-which-is-not-religious, a more theological and historically attuned one emerged. ¹⁷ This defined the secular as that-which-is-not-eschatological. The secular thereby becomes identified as an ambivalent space and time constructed through the interaction of multiple forms of belief and unbelief. The church is neither for nor against what is secular (understood as that-which-is-not-eschatological), neither is the church reducible to a separate (and private) “religious” sphere. ¹⁸ Rather, state and nation should be “faithfully secular,” such that theological beliefs and ecclesial practices co-construct and are interwoven with other patterns of belief and practice so as to constitute a common life through genuine plurality, albeit one bounded by the conditions and possibilities of life in the earthly city. ¹⁹

Lastly, there is a consociational position. This framework is built on the work of John Neville Figgis (1866–1919). It represents an alternative to an integralist and comprehensive view. ²⁰ Such a position draws on early modern “ancient constitutionalism” exemplified in a figure such as Robert Molesworth (1656–1725) and represents an alternative to the social contract tradition represented by John Locke (1632–1704). ²¹ Following Augustine, Figgis posits a disjuncture between the church and broader social realities and does not view the nation in organic terms as an expression of some pre-political ethnos or ideal: the nation is a historically constructed and irreducibly plural body politic. Christianity neither has to be nor should be the foundation of political order, but neither should Christians exclude themselves from contributing to national life. National life itself is more than just the sum of individual choices or the outcome of conflicting group interests: it is a common life constituted by multiple forms of overlapping association. The interaction of these associations, the ad hoc commensurability between their different visions of the good, and the common objects of love they discover together generate the contingent moral consensus on which a common life is based. The role of the state is to uphold a rule-bound, accountable, and equitable arena of earthly peace that enables the negotiation of a just and merciful common life between diverse communities. The primary good the state itself seeks is the good of political association/commonwealth/common life and the structures and programs that uphold this good. Pursuing the good of association sustains the concrete conditions of freedom, as freedom is in great measure dependent on participation in both proximate and broader forms of association. Without being embedded in some form of group or institution, the individual citizen is naked before the power of either the market or the state and lacks a vital means for his or her own self-cultivation. For freedom to be possible and an associational life to flourish, a plural and “complex” political space, one with myriad institutional configurations is needed to preserve the space of negotiation and interaction. ²²

On this consociational account there can be a mutually disciplining, yet critically constructive relationship between the church and the broader body politic/nation. The church is distinct from yet also a constituent element of the consociational body politic. In joint action in pursuit of common goods, the church has to listen to and learn from its neighbors (and perhaps, thereby, encounter a fresh work of the Spirit). Conversely, Anglicanism, as a moral tradition with an eschatological vision of the good, brings a wider horizon of reference and relationship to bear upon the immediate needs and demands of the body politic. This mutual disciplining helps ensure that when it comes to earthly politics, both state and body politic remain directed toward penultimate ends while still being open to recognizing that humans don’t live by bread alone (i.e., there are purposes, meanings, and loyalties beyond the realm of politics and economics which must be given space and time). ²³

Williams calls this approach “interactive pluralism” and grounds it Christologically. Contrary to Coleridge and Maurice, for Williams, the incarnation is not brought to expression through culture and history. Rather, the incarnation of Jesus Christ challenges and contests any culture’s own most sense of itself. At the same time, humans can only know the truth about God and what it means to be a creature through finitude and risking negotiated historical relations with others (including non-human others). Through participation in the world around us, humans may discover and then make sense of who we are in relation to God and others. For this to occur, it requires attentiveness to and reception of a world we did not make and others we do not control yet with whom we must order our social, economic, and political relationships. Attentiveness and reception—characterized by a posture of listening or contemplation—is the precursor of shared speech and action and thence the coming into being of a common life.

Following Coleridge (and Hooker), APT cannot be divorced from history and the concrete particulars of life. Therefore, any understanding of APT today necessitates an understanding of the ways in which the Church of England was never hermetically sealed within the bell jar of the British Isles and then, at a certain point, exported elsewhere. It came to be within the interactions shaping the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century onwards. This was the beginning of a world that saw the creation, destruction, and re-formation of whole cultures across the Atlantic basin.

Anglicanism as a modern social imaginary

An early instantiation of how the nation is imagined in the context of the emerging Atlantic world is the “Ditchley portrait” of Elizabeth 1 (1592). The painting shows Elizabeth standing on a map of England with her feet in Oxfordshire, physically facing the Atlantic and continental Europe. Ships come to and fro from the four corners of the earth. Behind her are dark stormy skies and before her, the clouds are clearing to reveal sunshine. ²⁴ It is a piece of political theology that inscribes English royal rule in cosmic terms. The picture depicts a correspondence between the cosmic order, Elizabeth’s sovereignty, and her possession of land, trade, and sea power. From Elizabeth’s reign onwards, development of English and then British commercial and naval pre-eminence became seen as providential for the worldwide spread of the Gospel.

The life and writings of John Locke exemplify the connection between APT, the Atlantic world, and colonial rule. As secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations (1673–74) and later a member of the Board of Trade (1696–1700), Locke was a well-informed observer of the interactions shaping the Atlantic world of the late seventeenth century. And as a shareholder in the Royal African Company, a key catalyst in the formation of the Atlantic slave trade, he actively invested in this world. Intellectually, Locke’s defense of individual rights and liberties is correctly hailed as a fountainhead of liberalism. Yet, as exemplified in the Fundamental Constitutions of the Carolinas, adopted in 1669, he was part of a milieu that sought to legitimize, philosophically and in practice, patrician rule throughout the emerging colonies. And, as James Tully argues, Locke’s work came to serve as an ideological justification for the expropriation of lands from America’s indigenous peoples. ²⁵

The work of many subsequent Anglican figures wrestled with the worldwide mission of the church, the civic responsibilities of Christians within that mission, and the role of political authorities not just within a national context but also in a capitalist, colonial, and then postcolonial one. By the time the British Empire covered its greatest landmass in 1922, this consciousness of a broader responsibility to the world at large had reached a similarly expansive scope. As symbolically represented by Greenwich Mean Time, Britain had come to stand at the center of the world with everything else classified and ordered in relation to this center. The ambiguities and tensions of this self-consciousness are symbolized in such illustrative moments as the missionary J. H. Oldham’s (1874–1969) role in labor and education issues in Kenya and India through the 1920s and 1930s and his critique of what he called “white settler civilization” in his 1924 book Christianity and the Race Problem. It can be overheard in William Temple’s (1881–1944) declaration two years later that in the British Empire “we cannot doubt that we have found something fashioned in the providence of God for the fulfillment of his purpose,” ²⁶ while in the same year opining that God is Father to

the unemployed at home, to the refugees from oppression in the near East, to the “untouchable” outcasts of India . . . [and so i]f we are to say “Our Father” with full right, it must be in union with all these; it must be for the satisfaction of their needs as truly as our own that we pray. ²⁷

Evangelical strands of Anglicanism also display this consciousness of a global responsibility. John Stott’s (1921–2011) role in evangelicalism worldwide exemplifies this, and in particular his involvement in drafting the 1974 Lausanne Covenant. The Covenant directed evangelicals to affirm that: “The message of salvation implies also a message of judgment upon every form of alienation, oppression and discrimination, and we should not be afraid to denounce evil and injustice wherever they exist.” ²⁸ All these moments suggest a certain orientation to history, an unquestioned assumption that one possesses power to change things, and a sense that the church has a responsibility to stabilize and improve the world as it is.

Throughout the history of Anglicanism, and in the various places where it took root around the globe, debates about the proper shape and character of political order were at the same time debates about the role of the churches within it and the theological basis of that order. Contrary to a secularization narrative of a fall from medieval sacrality to a modern, religionless form of secularity, these theological debates helped birth crucial elements of what we recognize as distinctly modern social, political, and economic institutions. These include limited government, universal suffrage, parliamentary democracy, the nation-state, capitalism, publicly funded welfare structures, national educational and health systems, international humanitarian movements, and a morally and religiously plural public life. Imbricated in each of these institutional configurations, and the debates and movements that shaped them, were constructive theopolitical responses to modern processes such as industrialization and urbanization, and the disruptions that came in their wake. Temple’s role in conceptualizing and legitimizing the British welfare state serves as a case in point. ²⁹ It is not hyperbolic to say that Anglicanism, from its very origins, has been a pathway into imagining what it means to be modern, but one that does not require rupture with or a disavowal of the past as a criterion for being modern. Indeed, an emphasis on tradition and history is one of the hallmarks of Anglican theology.

Providence and history

An understanding of God’s action in history is foundational to any theological account of the legitimacy of a political order. Questions about what God has done in the past, what God is doing for us now, what we should do in response, and how the last things affect the present age are the backdrop against which to make judgments about the role of church, nation, and state in human life. They are also questions about where to invest hope. In APT, nation, church, state, and universal ideals each at times provided more viscerally satisfying vehicles of hope than Christ and the work of the Spirit.

In imagining church and nation as having a role upon the stage of world history, Anglicans have leaned toward providential rather than apocalyptic readings of their historical situation. Apocalyptic readings of history emphasize that the world does not have to be as it is and envisage a fundamental division between church and world. They can also assume a certain powerlessness to control events. In providential theologies of history, however, wisdom may be found in the world so that Christians should examine the status quo and existing institutional configurations sympathetically. The emphasis on history and culture seen in Coleridge was part of this providential orientation, although such an orientation generated two contradictory readings of history—one conservative and the other progressive.

A dominant strand in the eighteenth century was conservative providentialism. Hannah More’s Village Politics (1792), written as a counter to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791‒1792), exemplifies this. The example of More (1745–1833), and the “Clapham Sect” generally, demonstrates that a conservative view can foster a commitment to social reform and generate conservative critiques of slavery and empire. More’s 1788 poem Slavery declares that its participation in the slave trade shamed Britain, and it challenged the nation to abandon its hypocrisy: “Shall Britain, where the soul of Freedom reigns / Forge chains for others she herself disdains?” For More and others, failure to fulfill Britain’s providential role in history would bring God’s wrath down upon it in the form of pestilence, plague, and disorder. ³⁰

A further example of a conservative critique of empire is Edmund Burke’s (1729–1797) repeated stress on the need to counteract imperial power’s tendency to abuse by having in place structures of accountability, legal protections of subjects, and restraint in the exercise of power. Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990), following in the footsteps of Burke, argued a conservative approach is more reliably humane, for conservatives “prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” ³¹ Yet conservativism is also slower to acknowledge the arbitrariness and injustice of who does and who does not have power, and quicker to conflate penultimate and prudential ends with providential ones.

For the likes of More and Wilberforce, humanitarian grounds were the basis for legitimizing imperial rule. Slavery undermined this legitimacy and corrupted the nation. By the end of the nineteenth century, this same humanitarian logic came to justify the expansion of empire: Britain was fulfilling its providential calling of extending liberty and civilization to the unfortunate of the world. The social vision of conservative providentialism can caustically—but not inaccurately—be summarized thus: the rich should set a good example and act benevolently to those less fortunate than themselves, while the poor (whether at home or abroad) “should remain poor, but suffer less, worship more, and behave better.” ³² That said, its paternalist interventionism contrasts with those who, following the lead of William Paley (1743–1805) and Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), aligned Christian notions of providence with laissez-faire economics and held that only the “deserving poor” should receive charity.

The conservative providentialist view entails the interdependence of a good society with “vital religion.” William Wilberforce’s A Practical View (1797) forcefully expresses this idea. For Wilberforce, church and nation stand or fall together and both are under the judgment of God. In his view, Christianity was the essential basis for social harmony and good government. By contrast, the loss of “vital religion” leads to loss of respect for authority and chaos. This is a common trope in conservative providentialist views: the abandonment of Christianity leads to immorality, nihilism, the collapse of the social order, and brings God’s judgment on the nation for failing to fulfill its vocation. At such a time what is required are well-educated, faithful men of character—and it is gendered—who are called by God to take up positions of authority and lead the country back to holiness. This kind of approach is alive and well in conservative evangelical streams of Anglicanism.

If a providentialist view can sacralize the status quo, it can equally sacralize a view of progress. Progressive providentialism comes to prominence under the influence of Idealism in the nineteenth century. As with the conservative Wilberforce, progressive providentialists were equally concerned about the moral development of individuals and social harmony. However, in contrast to Wilberforce and the evangelicals who followed in his wake, they emphasized the need for structural reform to enable these goods to emerge. Yet structural changes were only ever secondary to a primary ideal of spiritual fellowship. A more fundamental point of contrast with Wilberforce and his ilk was an emphasis on the immanent work of God through social life rather than through individual conversion and responsibility. The individual is envisaged as part of a larger whole, with freedom being attained through social cooperation, which in turn embodied the divine purpose in history. Theologically, a strong emphasis on the Incarnation undergirded their Idealism. As Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918) put it in his 1911 Christian Social Union pamphlet Our Neighbors: “If we believe in the Incarnation, then we certainly believe in the entry of God into the very thick of human affairs. That is just what our faith means. It is, itself, the assertion that God and man cannot be kept apart in separate compartments.” ³³ As exemplified in the work of Charles Gore (1853‒1932) in Britain and Vida Scudder (1861–1954) in the United States, Christian socialism is a primary expression of this approach. ³⁴ Although initially skeptical, Christian socialists came to support such things as trade unions, unemployment benefits, and a welfare state as a means to enable full participation in society so that individuals can realize their freedom; that is, fellowship with and service of others through shared social, economic, and political enterprises. This linkage is laid out by Temple in 1934 as follows:

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the help for the unemployed which has proved really redemptive and recreative of character is that which has enabled them to realize themselves and fulfil their function as members of the community, of whom the community has need. The greatest evil and bitterest injury of their state is not the animal grievance of hunger or discomfort, nor even the mental grievance of vacuity and boredom; it is the spiritual grievance of being allowed no opportunity of contributing to the general life and welfare of the community. All efforts for their assistance should therefore look towards the provision of that opportunity. ³⁵

An influential philosophical current for this view came from T. H. Green (1836‒1882) who saw progress toward the ideal of a universal harmonious fellowship as an inevitable corollary of the progressive evolution of the divine in history.

The danger with this kind of account is that salvation becomes merely a historical process and there is a loss of tension between being a Christian and being a citizen of an earthly polity. The church may function at times as an institution of critique, but this is in service of its role as handmaiden to the unfolding of a progressive society, with the nation and statecraft the primary vehicles for the realization of freedom in history. As exemplified by Samuel Barnett (1844–1913), a founder of the Settlement House movement, this view easily slipped into Erastianism, whereby the church was subordinated to the state. Barnett saw the church as a department of the state that existed to serve the interests of the nation. The purpose of the church was “to make men friends, to unite all classes in common aims, to give them open minds.” ³⁶ Contemporary Episcopalians often echo Barnett but rather than the state, it is progressive social movements that the church is to serve and subordinate itself to.

In parallel with conservatives, progressives saw a nation and state without the leaven of the church as quickly losing its way. Yet, the threat to the cohesion of society came not from personal immorality but atomistic and mechanistic social forces unleashed by the malign influence of laissez-faire economics that defined society as nothing more than an aggregation of self-interested choices.

An alternative position to conservative and progressive approaches emerged through a turn to Augustine’s amillennial theology of history. Figgis’s work exemplifies this turn. One of his key concerns was the question of how to maintain the freedom, specificity, and self-development of all forms of association, particularly churches and trade unions. In contrast to the progressive providentialists, he rejected an over-reliance on the reforming powers of the centralized state. And in contrast to conservatives, he argued for a pluralistic conception of sovereignty.

Contrary to the political theology of the Ditchley portrait, Augustine’s amillennialism renders political and institutional arrangements as historical achievements rather than direct reflections of the cosmic order. For Augustine, political authority is not neutral (it is either directed toward or away from God); rather, in this age before Christ’s return, it is ambivalent. There can be neither an expectation of progress, nor is history orientated toward regress or a movement away from God. Within Augustine’s framework, human history is secular (rather than neutral): that is, it neither promises nor sets at risk the kingdom of God. The church can reside in this age regarding its structures and patterns of life as relativized and rendered contingent by what is to come.

For Augustine, politics in this age is about enabling a limited peace. On the one hand, the peace is shorn of messianic pretensions but, on the other hand, it is not given over to despair that nothing can change. Humans can and should act in such a way to ensure a tolerable civic peace exists within which to preach the Gospel and that the city of God can make use of for a time. Conversely, any project of salvation or human fulfillment through an earthly order is to be condemned. Given conditions of finitude and fallenness, all political formations are provisional and tend toward oppression. At the same time, whether it be a democracy or a monarchy, any polity may display just judgments and enable the limited good of an earthly peace through the pursuit of common objects of love. Parallel to Catholic social teaching, this framework generates an “accidentalist” view that Christianity is compatible with any number of political regimes. As T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) put it, “To identify any particular form of government with Christianity is a dangerous error for it confounds the permanent with the transitory, the absolute with the contingent.” ³⁷

Building on Augustine, Figgis and others envisaged the role of political institutions as being to serve and defend prior and more basic forms of associational life from the overweening power of either the market or the state. C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) captures the spirit of this approach, observing:

The state exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—that is what the state is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics etc. are simply a waste of time. ³⁸

Yet the way Anglicans continued to imagine the church and the nation as having a world-historical role stood in tension with Augustine’s emphasis on the inscrutability of Divine action in history. And as with conservative and progressive providentialists, English Pluralists like Figgis continued to see Christianity as the necessary basis of civilization.

From Figgis on there is a consistent move to pose an Augustinian moral and political vision as the last redoubt against a Nietzschean future of domination and depravity. ³⁹ John Milbank is but one example of such a stance. ⁴⁰ For Figgis (and Milbank), modernity is not a problem because it produces this or that instance of injustice, it is a problem because it inverts the moral order and makes the libido dominandi a point of virtue. However, the modernity-critical stream of Augustinianism Figgis helps initiate contradicts Augustine, for whom this non-eschatological age was a field of wheat and tares. It works with and reifies an epochal division between modernity and prior ages, and through this division introduces a dangerous nostalgia that sacralizes the past (often an idealized medieval era) and demonizes the present. On this kind of account, Christianity either becomes an endangered species to be protected on special reservations (a kind of “Benedict option” approach) or weaponized to defend Western culture from internal collapse and external attack (various strands of Christian nationalism). At the same time, it forgets that the Spirit makes Christ present in modernity, just as Christ was made present to other times and places.

A turn to Augustine does not necessitate making Christianity a defensive civilizational project. Combining Augustine with contemplative pragmatism emphasizes that just and loving forms of life in the earthly city are still discoverable in the modern world. And of necessity, if this process of discovery is to be faithful, it entails rendering ourselves vulnerable to God and neighbor. Approaches that pre-determine what is to be discovered by over-identifying Christianity with either a prior cultural-historical form or a fixed set of ideals is a refusal to inductively discover and bear witness to what Christ and the Spirit are doing among these people in this place. Such a move also denies how loss, vulnerability, and lack of control are central to the experience of acting faithfully, lovingly, and hopefully with and for others. Indeed, as Rowan Williams argues, the most intense moment of divine presence and agency in human history is one in which

the sheer historical vulnerability of the human is most starkly shown, where unfinishedness, tension, the rejection of meaning and community are displayed in the figure of a man simultaneously denied voice and identity by the religious and political rationalities of his day. ⁴¹

The life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, rather than culture or history per se, are the condition for the possibility of movement into new kinds of relationship with God and neighbor. Any such journey of conversion demands that as humans we orientate ourselves in specific ways to living in time and the experience of flux and transition that is constitutive of being temporal creatures. The emphasis on culture and history in APT is right, but only in so far as it enables a reckoning with human frailty, finitude, and fallenness. Becoming church is about discovering—with these people, in this place, at this time—how unity in Christ amid and through our differences might be experienced and lived into through reception of the gifts of the Spirit. It should rule out a nostalgic division that poses the past as good and the present as intrinsically bad, as well as making judgments about who is and who is not on the “right side of history.” Rather, ways must be found to identify with Christ and thereby dis-identify with the historical idols and cultural systems of domination within which human life is always and already entangled. Understood as action in time through which to cultivate forms of peaceable common life, politics is a necessary part of any such process of discovery. However, as Donald MacKinnon (1913‒1994) cautions, the tragic dimensions of social and political life cannot be avoided, and failure is often the result. ⁴² Yet faith, hope, and love demand the risk still be taken.

The temptation of a providential reading of history is to make either the nation or the institutions of the church the center and subject of history rather than Jesus Christ. It is then what serves the nation or church rather than what witnesses to Jesus Christ that becomes the locus of judgments about what and who is true, good, and beautiful. The antidote to a top-down reading is to interpret history from a Christological center outward, and, at the same time, to exegete it from the bottom up, giving priority to the testimony of those on the underside of history. Some evangelicals did try to listen to the cries of those on the underside of history, notably the enslaved, but, perhaps counter-intuitively, made either themselves or the nation rather than Christ the subject of history. Conversely, Christian socialists, with the emphasis on the Incarnation, put Christ at the center of history, but did not start from the actual experiences of the poor when generating social and political programs. Rather, they pursued universalized ideals of fellowship through patrician and then technocratic means that generated action for rather than with the poor. The top-down programs of Toynbee Hall are but one example of this process. In the latter half of the twentieth century, through the influence of Karl Barth and other theologians, Christ displaces the nation as the subject of history. And through the impact of liberation theologies, APT is beginning to place much greater emphasis on learning from the marginalized. In relation to the latter, a vital means of its ressourcement is attending to voices such as those of Peter Williams Jr (1786‒1840), Anna Julia Cooper (1858‒1964), and Pauli Murray (1910‒1985) within the Anglican tradition. ⁴³ Finally, the influence of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement on Anglicanism worldwide calls for attention to the pneumatological dimensions of political theology. ⁴⁴ Connecting Christology, pneumatology and a preferential option for the poor are questions related to power: namely, who has it? What is its character? How is it constituted? And when, where, and for whom is it used? Going forward, these questions must be central to the development of APT.

Conclusion

The pragmatic political settlements that APT reflected on and sought to interpret contain numerous contradictions and unresolved conflicts of theory and practice. What they point to is how Christians necessarily begin in via, responding to an already and a not yet. Learning to live betwixt and between different ages, rather than at the center or end of history, enables political engagement that is open to being both a guest, ready to listen and learn, and a host, ready to shelter and share. Such a guest/host orientation enables Anglicans around the world, working alongside others, to figure out what kind of life together is possible here and now in which the flourishing of each, including the least, the lost, and the last, is recognized as dependent on the flourishing of all, while we wait for the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, who alone is the first and the last word.