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Crisis of Authority
By F. W. Dillistone

ON the morning of last February 23, I opened three documents in succession, all of which bore directly or indirectly on the same subject. First, the leading editorial of the London Times was entitled "The Challenge to the Churches." It constituted the most weighty article on the general condition of the Christian churches to have appeared in the English secular press for a very long time. Secondly, the New Christian periodical of the same date entitled its front page article, "Freedom in the Church." This in effect was a warning to all the churches in Britain that they were in danger of stifling criticism and thereby denying a fundamental freedom which should belong to the Christian community at all times. Thirdly, there was a letter from the editor of THEOLOGY TODAY inviting me to comment on the recent stir which has been caused by the withdrawal of Charles Davis from the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church.

I

Events have moved fast since the end of February. The Charles Davis sensation was almost overshadowed by the Herbert McCabe affair. Davis, though involved in a good deal of publicity through the press and television, succeeded in creating the impression that what had happened was very much an individual and personal matter. He did indeed criticize certain aspects of papal authority and

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used strong words about the state of the church. But he made no attempt to launch a crusade for reform. He wished to withdraw from his priesthood, to marry the woman of his choice, and to continue his Christian allegiance within some framework yet to be determined.

What followed is vividly and trenchantly described by a Roman Catholic layman, Neil Middleton, writing in the issue of the New Christian to which I have already referred. He shows how, rather naturally, reactions to Charles Davis' renunciation tended to be sharply divided within the Roman communion. But the interesting thing to the outsider is the strength of general sympathy and support that he received. And, writes Middleton, the finest expression of this was the editorial in the February edition of New Blackfriars written by Father McCabe. Having spoken with great frankness about what he described as "corruption," McCabe went on to plead for a fuller understanding of the responsibility for reform lying upon the whole church (not simply the hierarchy) and to disclaim any advocacy of breakaway or withdrawal from the institution to which he and most of his readers belong.

The immediate consequences of this outspoken article are well-known. First, severe judgment on McCabe; then, partial reinstatement; then, a smoldering controversy about the issues involved. Neil Middleton sums up the general position by saying: "The Roman Catholic Christians of this country are tired of being treated like imbeciles or infants. If Rome, or the authorities in England, do not make amends for this action, and that very quickly, they are likely to find that they have totally lost the sympathy of the people they seek to lead. There will be nothing dramatic like a mass exodus. All that will happen is that more and more Christians will feel that their Church is merely a fringe organization in life, and is largely irrelevant."

This was written before the Pope made his pronouncement through a letter to the bishops of his communion on February 22nd. This letter, attacking new opinions which questioned or distorted objective truths of the church and borrowed new interpretations of Christianity from "bold but blind secular philosophers," sparked off the leading article in the Times. Pointing out that the Second Vatican Council had introduced a welcome movement in thought and life where previously there had seemed to be immobility, the

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editorial went on to say that there is now a growing momentum which it will be difficult to govern. And this is characteristic of all institutional forms of Christianity at the present time, not of the Roman Church alone.

Many of the difficulties which confront institutional religion can be traced to a certain incompatibility between the nature of a church and the prevailing temper of thought. A church in one of its aspects is the recipient, guardian and mediator of an abiding truth. . . . This fact about what a church is, or what it claims to be, naturally inclines it towards continuity, tradition and authority. In other ages those were attributes which commanded respect. The present day is less respectful of them. . . . Mankind, obedient to theories of evolution and progress, looks to the present for its examples and to the future for its ideals.

II

Writing now towards the end of April, I look back upon two months in which almost every day has brought some new contribution to what might be called the crisis of authority in institutional religion. Early in March, Charles Davis wrote in a review:

What has been happening over a long period, but has now become dramatically evident, is the failure of the papacy to provide the spiritual leadership it claims for itself. The general doctrinal impoverishment in Rome was revealed by the Second Vatican Council. There it became clear how far the thinking of official circles in Rome lagged behind the rest of the Church. And now the failure of Rome has become manifest to ordinary people over birth control. It matters little now which decision the Pope makes; the Holy See will not recover its lost authority. What is happening is the breakdown of an authoritarian system, incapable of a sufficiently rapid adaptation to social change. Probably it is too late now to create a new form of authority within the present structure of the Roman Church, an authority that would be based on good communications, opportunity for discussion and a respect for personal freedom. There are signs that the Roman curia, pervaded by the primitive conservatism of the Italians and with a hatred of reform going back centuries, is taking another road to survival: stricter discipline and the suppression of the freedom gained through the Council. Fortunately, however, this road is now blocked for the Roman Church by the spread of education and the experience of freedom enjoyed by Catholics in the modern secular community.

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Davis' forecast of the possibilities of stricter discipline seemed to be confirmed when in April the Pope, as reported in the press, gave warning that an increasing lack of discipline in the religious community had aroused his apprehension. He was deeply concerned about tendencies to remove the sacred character of the liturgy, a phenomenon which could have fatal consequences for Christianity. This "new mentality," the Pope declared, "is based on the demolition of the authentic Catholic religion and doctrinal, disciplinary and pastoral subversion." It could only lead to religious disintegration.

In spite of this warning, however, it was only a few days later that the National Catholic Reporter of Kansas City "leaked" the substance of the report presented by the Papal Commission on Birth Control. In the section of the majority report on the church's authority these striking words occur:

In fulfillment of its mission, the Church must propose obligatory norms of human and Christian life from the deposit of faith in an open dialogue with the world. But since moral obligations can never be detailed in all their concrete particularities, the personal responsibility of each individual must always be called into play. This is even clearer today because of the complexity of modern life: the concrete moral norms to be followed must not be pushed to an extreme.

So radical are the implications of the total report that the outspoken editor of the New Statesman was inspired to comment in the issue of April 28:

The report adopts the common-sense line that granted parents have a responsible attitude towards marriage, the way they plan their families should be left to them. To my mind, however, it goes very much further and says that it's not the church's business to lay down detailed guides for living the Christian life, but merely to state general moral principles and leave the Test to the individual's conscience. This was precisely the central issue of the Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church has finally turned Protestant.

III

When all allowance has been made for possible misunderstandings and misinterpretations, for premature and biased judgments, it still remains evident that what is happening in the Roman Church can justly be described as a crisis of authority. It is also clear that what-

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ever may be the precise nature of the forces at work, they are not restricting their influence to the Roman Church only.

Recently two eminent philosophers of religion in England have addressed themselves to the question of authority, particularly as seen within the context of the Anglican Church. In February, the sermon preached by Dr. Ian Ramsey at his inthronement in Durham Cathedral was published. Few offices in English life have earned a greater weight of authority over the centuries than that of the Prince-Bishop of Durham. The castle, the noble Cathedral, the patronage, the wealth, the tradition-all served to emphasize the powers vested in the holder of the office. Yet on this occasion the newly installed Bishop chose to speak of the centurion who was essentially a man under authority-only bearing authority by virtue of his capacity to recognize what was authoritative. Not authoritarianism but true authority. And wherein does the difference lie? "Words, persons, institutions possess genuine authority as and when they are vehicles of a vision, as and when they disclose that which they are meant to symbolize; and in responding to such an authority as this, men find their freedom and life. But when the words, persons, institutions lose their capacity to evoke a vision, when they cease to have disclosure possibilities, then we have the authoritarianism which is bogus, oppressive and destructive of personality."

This is finely said. But one reader at least cannot help feeling that words, persons, and institutions cannot quite so easily be linked together. Words are more flexible than institutions; persons are more flexible than words. Institutions are least able to be vehicles-the image used by Dr. Ramsey is surely significant. A vehicle is essentially designed for movement. All too often institutions are designed for fixity, stability, security rather than as vehicles for vision. And if authority today depends upon the disclosure of vision, it is open to question how far the institution helps and how far it hinders the exercise of true authority amongst men.

In March, an important broadcast by Professor Donald MacKinnon of Cambridge dealt with the same problem of authority and freedom in the church-what he called "the theological and ethical problems raised by churches as institutions." He sharply criticized all reliance by institutional Christianity upon "laws more or less clearly formulated" or upon "a position constitutionally assured" or upon "a particular cultural and political stabilization of human

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forces." Further he deprecated any "readiness to accept the historical experience of the church as self-justifying" or to rely upon an "ecclesiological fundamentalism." Authority, he claimed, is associated in the Christian view not with triumphalism (interestingly a striking article in the Times late in April was entitled "Three pointers to the end of triumphalism"; written by a Jesuit, Father Peter Hebblethwaite, it saw in the Vatican Council's references to the church as a pilgrim church, to revelation as a personal encounter, and to the church's duty to learn from the world indications of the end of triumphalism and of the emergence of a new willingness to wait in humility upon the living Holy Spirit). Authority is rather associated today with the humility of a living presence in the world, with the recovery of the sense and inwardness of Christ's own apostolate amongst men. He concluded: "If we are told that the state of the evidence makes such recovery impossible, and that we are left with the institution or nothing, then some of us, if we are honest, will say that we must content ourselves with that nothing and admit that faith, always precarious, is no longer a way that we can follow. . . . To say these things openly is not to court the easy rewards of a masquerade boldness, but rather to suggest that authority in the present is only effectively exercised in a setting of acknowledged doubt-a doubt to which it may be we are commanded by the imperative of faith itself."

IV

Consider the contrasts: authority conceived as resting upon the past; the present generation interested in the present and the future. The authority of institutions depending upon continuity and tradition; the temper of thought which prevails today being concerned with creative action and change. Authority mediated through the pronouncements of an official hierarchy; the contemporary conviction that authoritative truth can only be mediated through informed dialogue and personal communication. These are some of the contrasts which emerge out of the debates and exchanges of the past few weeks, and it is not easy to get one's bearings as one looks to the future.

One or two things, however, can be affirmed with some confidence. The first is that this is no time for attempting to set up, over against the papacy or the institutional church, some rival authority whose

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structure is equally rigid and inflexible. At the time of the Reformation, the authority of the Bible and its interpreters was set over against that of the established church and its hierarchy. In the historical circumstances of the sixteenth century this was a way of release. The word was more flexible than the ecclesiastical system; the preacher was less hidebound than the priest. But history has revealed that the system governed by biblical authority easily takes on the characteristics belonging to the system governed by the hierarchy. The sixteenth century formulation of authority will not serve for the twentieth.

Nor will the nineteenth century conception of the authority of historical development find ready acceptance in the twentieth. The fact that a building has stood for 700 years or that an order of ecclesiastical ministry has continued for 1800 years or that a book has survived through more than 2000 years-all this is undoubtedly impressive. But continuity over a long period can no longer be regarded as conferring authority automatically. Particularly is this the case when the questions under debate concern the moral duties of the individual. The crisis of authority today has been brought about not primarily through uncertainties about what a man should think but through perplexities about what a man should do. Actions in the realms of sex relations, race relations, economic relations-these are the pressing problems, and no counsel or direction will carry the weight of authority if it is derived from a context in which these problems simply did not exist. Any one who speaks to them must at least reveal that he is living in the present context of the issues which have arisen through social and technological change and that he is prepared to approach them in empirical and open-minded fashion.

In the last resort, if we believe that Ultimate Reality is personal in character, then it follows that true authority can only be exercised by a living personal agent. In its most primitive form, authority was established by the manifestation of sheer physical power-the stronger ruled the weaker, normally by the use of the hands-hence the word "manipulation." But at a very early stage, perhaps contemporaneously, authority was also established by the use of the voice. He who could speak loudly, forcefully, imperiously, gained authority amongst his fellows. The personal act and the personal word became the essential symbols of personal authority.

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But such direct communications of authority are only feasible within a group of limited size. Man had to find ways of extending has authority over wider ranges, and so the struggle to develop manual techniques and to construct language-media became a regular concomitant of human existence. The most obvious method of extending authority was through decentralization or delegation-choosing strong men to act as deputies in manual action, men of commanding voice to communicate verbal orders. So a graded institution gradually developed with the strong man of authority at the summit and lesser authorities acting and speaking as his media on lower levels.

Pressures brought about by expansion in time and space stimulated the invention of less personal extensions of man-tools and more abstract forms of language-and whenever a new extension was invented, a certain threat was presented to the already existing institution. If a more immediately efficient tool, whether for construction or destruction, became available, then the accepted institutional structure was in danger of losing its authority. At all costs it was felt the new invention must be captured and controlled or power would flow into other hands and other voices. The struggle to preserve the institution, on the one side, and to use new techniques and new language-media for the setting-up of new authority, on the other side, constitutes one of the most dramatic aspects of the whole history of mankind.

Any reader who has followed me so far may well be inclined to comment: "This guest-editor is suffering from an acute attack of McLuhanitis." So be it! Only two weeks ago I received a card from a graduate student showing on one side a lovely Alpine scene. On the other he had written: "Spring has come here but more than weather-changes have me thinking in terms of 'hot' and 'cool': The McLuhan is the malaria; one never completely recovers from even a single attack." And it is slightly ironical to me that McLuhan, himself a practicing Roman Catholic, may through his writings have brought us closer to an understanding of the underlying causes of the present crisis of authority in this great international institution than any other single man.

The new electronic age with its new techniques of control and its new media of communication brings all existing institutions under judgment. No walls, no palace-guards, no fortifications, no

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censorship, no sacred languages, can resist the universal operations of these new forces. Personal authority is threatened within any large-scale context perhaps as never before. And the small-scale institution can no longer operate independently of the large.

For Ian Ramsey the only man of authority today is the man of vision; for Donald MacKinnon it is the man of faith. But I think it must be the man of vision who is vividly aware of and ready to employ the techniques of the new situation; the man of faith who is acutely sensitive to and ready to express himself through the language-forms of the new situation. These new disclosures are God's gifts to men. If accepted reverently and operated in humility, they can surely serve to establish in a new way the authority of God amongst men.

Oriel College
Oxford University