Bosco Peters, when kindly referring his readers to my new site, added a gentle criticism of my use of labels such as “liberal” and “evangelical” in my first post and blog header, referring his readers back to a previous post in his own blog in which he had forsworn such labelling of himself or others. I get his main point – that we should all be able to claim some connection with each of these parts of the theological/ecclesiastical spectrum if we see ourselves as authentic Christians, and especially as authentic Anglicans.
However, I do think that in the current climate of controversy such labels can play a useful function in assisting honest debate. As a self-designation rather than as a way of branding others, they can be a way of clarifying some of the characteristic assumptions you bring to a debate, indicating in a general way the sort of positions you expect to be advancing or defending. They also indicate communities of reference that have formed your viewpoints, whose interests you might tend to advocate, and whose approval matters to you: none of us stand alone in the arena. In the task of hermeneutics it is specially important to name and own, as clearly as we are able, the presuppositions and interests we bring to the texts we are reading, and this is a site that will be devoted to hermeneutics above all else. So I have adopted the labels in my byline with all these considerations in mind, to let people know where I am coming from, and to remind myself that by the grace of God I am these things, and more.
Labels, in their simplicity, and in their various connotations for different people, can be misleading unless we define them a little. So here is what each of these terms means to me, and why I think it is important to nail them as colours on my mast as I blithely steer my little sailing dinghy into range of the battleships already engaged in this current battle.
Firstly, I know for sure that within the context of the debate about sexuality I am liberal through and through, in the classic sense of giving freedom a pre-eminent value. My deepest instinct and desire is to create as much space as possible in which others can find their unique identities as God’s children and make their own contributions to our shared life in Christ’s Body. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” resonates with me as a foundational text. It means that concerns for social controls and orderly church structures rank a little lower in my values, and that I believe God expects us to take adult responsibility for our lives rather than hedging us about with inflexible rules. I accept that many Christians see things differently, having different priorities, and that my liberality also demands that I respectfully give them space to differ and to take adult responsibility for their own beliefs even as we work hard to listen to one another and find common ground. Being liberal is not a licence for “anything goes”, but a preference for the freedom that comes from growing up.
At the same time, I want to claim the evangelical label. Negatively, this is to counter more conservative Christians who claim ownership of all the heritage that goes with this venerable tradition. “Evangelical” and “conservative” do not mean the same thing, not where I am coming from. For me, and many others, calling ourselves evangelicals is a way of saying that our spiritual formation is centred on a transforming encounter with God in Christ. “Redeeming love has been my theme, and shall be till I die.” The gospel of Christ is not just words in the holy book, or a system of beliefs to be defended as unchanging truth, but an experience of God’s initiative reaching into the very depths of our being to claim us as his own and to form us as a spiritual community with a mission in the world. We have a gospel to proclaim, it is God’s not ours, and it will transform our world through our witness. I trust that I am liberal because I am evangelical first, living out the powerful values of the gospel that has transformed me, not because I have bought into the false values of a non-Christian world. This means that I expect to argue my case for a liberal policy on sexuality as a matter of gospel imperatives: that we are called by God to make these changes, as an invitation to grow up more fully into Christ and a command to do so.
I am also undeniably an Anglican. This is the church of my birth. Actually that was the diocese of Nelson, to be more specific, and although other dioceses have proven to be more congenial to my liberal bent, I have no non-Anglican place to go for spiritual community, no bolt-hole to which I can withdraw should this debate go against my liking. I did try some other denominational options for a decade or so as a young adult, somewhat disastrously, until I accepted that this is where God has placed me and these are my people. Some things about Anglican institutional culture remain a real worry, and some of the people are hard to identify with, but this is us, we have got one another, and we will have to work things out together as a family. Besides which, I am a priest of this church, which has been gracious enough to nurture my gifts and still invites me to make my contribution to its life, so that keeps me committed to some heavy lifting on its behalf. There is plenty of work to be done, together, for God’s glory and our common good. This website will be part of that hard work…
A New Zealander too. That is important, because it defines so much of my cultural background and the context within which I am called to mission. It also tells me what I don’t have to worry too much about, especially the big fights building overseas within and between other provinces of the Anglican Communion. Here in my native country we Anglicans have developed a peaceable recognition of one another, with a considerable margins for diversity, and mature ways of negotiating our differences. We don’t need to hold ourselves out as a model for other provinces, but we do have good reasons for feeling confident that we can find our own way forward together, whether or not others recognize and approve what we get up to. We are grown ups(see above) , responsible to God and one another in our life and mission in this place.
Finally, when I lay claim to the title biblical scholar I am referring not only to my Otago PhD in biblical exegesis, but to the deeper calling to a life of serious scholarship that lies behind and motivates my academic endeavour. From the time I began to read, in the context of a Christian home where my parents mixed bible readings with family meals, holy scripture has fascinated me, not only as a book that reached out to speak to us across huge distances in time and culture, but also as the book in which I found the living God. Studying scripture has been easy, in the sense that it has never ceased to speak to me, to shine light upon my life, to offer me a way forward in times of perplexity, and to form my identity among the people of God depicted there. It has also been demanding, because many unanswered questions and “difficult” passages challenge me to invest more and more time and energy into the task of interpretation. I have learned the hard way that there are few short-cuts here, that I dare not switch off my mind out of some imagined deference to the authority of the text, and that light breaks forth from these ancient writings in the context of a commitment to using every means of understanding at my disposal, especially in the company of other scholars. I know why some of the old rabbis said that even the Holy One spends a good part of his day studying Torah … that is when they met him, drawing alongside them as they laboured over their sacred texts. Me too.
Setting up this website is the start of a new journey for me. Now that you know something about who I am, please feel free to join me as companions along the way, partners in conversation. You will find unlimited room in the Comments boxes on every post and page, but I will moderate all postings to prevent spam and weed out those whose attitude is destructive to respectful conversation.
Howard Pilgrim