The Christian in the World        
The Rev'd Dr. Charles Miller

Michael Ramsey was thought by many to cut a wholly ecclesiastical figure. There was, of course, the physical impression: tall, somewhat corpulent, slow moving, prematurely balding and white-haired with eye-brows equaled only by those of his current successor. Then there was his voice which, as his first biographer noted, could acquire a quintessentially parsonical sing-song character. Finally, there were his early writings, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (1936), The Resurrection of Christ (1945), and The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (1949), each in their way signaling Ramsey’s preference for what some might call a ‘churchy’ theology. The evidence so far, therefore, suggests that the title of this lecture, ‘Catholic & Anglican: The Christian in the World’, might be somewhat off base, might be inconsistent with Michael Ramsey’s preferred orientation as a priest and bishop, and as a theologian and pastor.

That, however, would be a mistake. It’s true that Michael Ramsey’s early theological explorations and expositions were notably those of a ’churchman’ rather than of a disinterested scholar, that he drew—unconventionally—upon church traditions of prayer, mysticism and liturgy as sources for theological insight in ways that distinguished him from the theological ‘mainstream’. But that must be set against the backdrop of his early passion for politics, meaning by that a concern for the social good, and of the remark of Lord Cecil which made an indelible mark and set his church commitments really into motion. “After all,” Cecil declared at a public political gathering during Ramsey’s university years, “it is men like Newman in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in Oxford, and Wesley, preaching up and down the country, who do the most good.” In embracing the import of that maxim, Ramsey never lost sight of the commitment to the social good which stood behind it. The religious stance was conceived not as an escape from the needs and good of the world, but as the most effective way to meet them.

The writings that followed through Ramsey’s early ecclesiastical career might seem to side-step what we might call social or ‘secular’ concerns. In fact, though, they lay the ground-work for his articulation of a concern for ‘the world’ and the rightful place of the Christian living in the world, and responding to its challenges as well as its needs.

The influence of early studies

A quick look at Archbishop Michael’s early writings reveals how they encouraged and shaped his later sense of ‘the Christian in the world’. In his first and seminal work, The Gospel and the Catholic Church, the church in history is not viewed as mystical, pristine, and disconnected from the burdens of the historical context. Instead it’s identified with the passion and suffering of the Messiah, and to a Messianic life which is not its own. These words at the conclusion sum up the tension of the church’s relationship to the world which appears again and again in Ramsey’s thought:

As the Messiah rejoiced in nature and in the common life
of men, so His church has entered the world to claim its
common things for God; and as the Messiah faced the
nothingness of the world and the end of time, His Church
has borne witness to the coming of the end and to the
transitoriness of the things of the earth.

We see how the church, and by consequence each Christian, lives in the world identified with its situation and affirming its good, yet at the same time realizes and asserts its relativity in light of the supreme reality of God and God’s purposes both in history and beyond.

That posture acquires more articulation in his second great book, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (1949). When he summarizes ‘the Gospel of transfiguration’ he declares that ‘to the Christian the world is transfigured. Liberated from its dominance he discovers it afresh as the scene both of divine judgment and of divine renewal within the new creation of Christ.’ He goes on:

The transfiguration of pain, of knowledge and of the world
is attested in centuries of the experience of Christians. It
comes neither by an acceptance of things as they are nor by
a flight from them, but by that uniquely Christian attitude
which the story of the Transfiguration represents. It is an
attitude which is rooted in detachment—for pain is hateful,
knowledge is corrupted and the world lies in the evil one, but
which so practices detachment as to return and perceive the
divine sovereignty in the very things from which the
detachment has had to be. Thus the Christian life is a rhythm
of going and coming; and the gospel narrative of the ascent
of Herman, the metamorphosis and the descent to a
faithless and perverse generation is a symbol of the
mission of the Church in its relation to the world.

There Ramsey heightens the nature of what he later will call the ‘duality’ of the Christian posture viz.-a-viz. the world: going into it with deep identification; acquiring detachment from its dominance.

What’s also notable in that quotation from his study of the Transfiguration is Ramsey’s use of the word ‘detachment’. It’s a word with a long, noble, though at times misunderstood, sense in the Christian spiritual tradition. It means not a turning away from what is bad, but a properly ordered relationship to what is good. At its best, therefore, it represents the essential spiritual dynamic animating the Christian’s life in the world. It also underscores what we’re liable to miss because of its obviousness, namely, that the heart of the issue of Christianity, or the church, and ‘the world’ is not chiefly an external, institutional issue, but an inner, spiritual one.

We find, therefore, a working tension in Ramsey’s early, biblical studies, and the tension—again, to state the obvious—is borne out of his insistence that the Christian’s ‘religious’ life should not disassociate believers from the world in which they live.

An Evolving Synthesis

As Michael Ramsey’s ministry, work and witness evolved during the 1940s those interests in expounding great themes of biblical theology (viz. church, resurrection, transfiguration) began to be set within Christian reflection on ecumenism—the greatest force in twentieth-century Christianity. An element in that church-wide reflection was an attempt on the part of a prestigious group of English Anglicans, clerical and lay, to articulate the meaning of ‘catholicity’ not just for the Church of England and Anglicanism but for all the churches seeking reunion. Ramsey was a member of the commission. Their report, Catholicity, sought to consider, in light of ‘deadlocks’ in ecumenical progress, ‘whether any synthesis between Catholicism and Protestantism is possible.’

At its simplest, the report sees the western Christian tradition as ‘fragmented’ into competing visions of the Gospel and divine truth, each of them having its own institutionalized form. So, they speak of ‘Orthodox Protestantism’, the legacy of the sixteenth-century Reformation movements, with a keen sense of its ascendancy in Barthian and other forms of so-called Neo-Orthodoxy in the twentieth-century. They speak of ‘the Renaissance and Liberalism’; they mean by that the impressive humanist culture of the European tradition, and the rational, analytic, scientific culture which its legacy has engendered. Then they speak of the ’Post-Tridentine Papal Communion’, that is, the Roman Catholic Church as it was before the aggioramento of the Second Vatican Council.

What is important about the study is its affirmation that catholicity expresses a ’synthesis’ of the tragically divided perspectives on God, humankind, and the world, that each of those three visions and ecclesial forms embody. This report was important for Ramsey in my view in that it emphasized synthesis—the togetherness of Christians’ life and witness 1. under the judgment and consolation of God’s living word; 2. as participants in the mystical and sacramental body of Christ; and 3. as rational and critical creatures living in and working with the world, its social structures, its cultural endeavors.

As Ramsey moved into his more public witness, first as bishop of Durham in 1952, we find Catholicity’s theme of ‘synthesis’ re-worked by Ramsey into a concern for ‘totality’. It is hard to put this simply and with stylistic ease. I mean just that henceforth we see Ramsey stressing the Gospel’s impact on ‘the totality’ of the human being.

Ramsey stressed the ’totality’ of the impact of the Gospel upon believers, and the ‘totality’ of their response in a important essay titled ‘Faith and Society’. One impetus for exploring the theme there was the rise in Britain of fundamentalist Christian revival movements. Ramsey objected to them strenuously precisely because, in his view, they did not seek to elicit the response of the total person. In such a form of Christianity, he said,

The act of decision and conversion, instead of being
related to man’s place and duty in society, abstracts
a man from his place and duty in society…The moral
will is separated from its context, because the appeal
is made to less than the whole man as a reasoning being
and as a social being.

Its problem was that it appealed to ‘less than the whole man.’

However, Ramsey had a broader territory to claim in that essay, for it gave him the chance to spell out more succinctly than ever his sense of the guiding principles that informed the relationship between the church, the Christian, and the world.

He begins where his own writings began: with the church. It may surprise readers that his starting point is a thoroughly Neo-Orthodox view of the church ‘as standing over against society.’ At the root of this view is the recognition, as he puts it, that, as Christ’s new creation, the church is ‘an island-realm amid the perishing world.’ But he immediately wants to ‘modify’ that view, admitting its strong support in the New Testament, with other equally vital factors.

First, he recalls the Christian doctrine of God as Creator. The world is therefore fundamentally ‘good’ (as Genesis 1-2 declares). The corollary of that doctrine is that the world is, as he puts it, ‘penetrated’ by the Logos (that description of Christ so central to St. John’s understanding.) This second notion preserves the truth of God’s continuing involvement in the world, and serves as the basis for Christian attention to what we would call ‘secular’ movements, attitudes and phenomena. Equally—and this is an area where Ramsey’s legacy has been largely ignored in Anglican ethics and social thought—both doctrines point to a concept of natural law as a necessary factor in the interpretation and evaluation of personal and social life.

Secondly, Ramsey emphasizes that the world, not just the church, is redeemed. Here we see in part, at least, a result of the influence of Ramsey’s interest in Eastern Orthodox Christian thought, building upon themes Ramsey already noted in B. F. Westcott’s writings, where the cosmic scope of Christ’s redeeming work is emphasized. ’His [Westcott’s] theme was the place of the Resurrection as the climax of creation no less than of redemption.’ He does not mean that the secular world of non-believers is redeemed in the same way or extent as Christians properly speaking. He means, though, that both the material universe as well as human societies, are affected by the resurrection not least, though not exclusively, through the agency of the church, ‘by the presence within the universe of the risen Christ and his Church in paradise and on earth.’

Third, the members of the church have what Ramsey calls ‘double existence’. ‘They belong,’ he says, ’to the new age of the regenerate; they also belong to race which is created and creaturely, illuminated by conscience and subject to natural law.’ While their other-worldly interests may distinguish them from the secular scene, yet the very life of grace, because it is a humbling life of an ever-increasing sense of creaturely dependence, will place believers along side their ‘secular’ neighbors. And the salt of the Christian witness will show itself in serious Christian commitment to all the natural goods, personal and social, such as justice, order, etc.

In what sense, then, can we say that the church stands ‘over against society’? It is a relation not of avoidance or indifference, but of ‘critical involvement.’ The role of the Christian community, then,

Is to go both farther from the world in supernatural
sanctity than is commonly seen in our present-day Church
life; and in so doing to gain the power of affirming with
confidence the validity of the natural order and something
of its significance and its obligations. The Catholic can
fail to grasp this in practice no less than the fundamentalist
hot-gospeller: in going to Mass, in receiving Holy Com-
munion, and in seeking the union of his soul with God he
is doing something which should affect his impact upon
the pattern of society around him—without waiting until
that society is converted like himself.

He goes on:

This theology…seems familiar enough and orthodox
enough: but it has become far to seek as an effective
doctrine in the Church to-day, especially the truth that
the supernatural status of the Christian enhances his
grasp of the natural. We have had much theology, both
in Protestant and in Catholic circles, which does not
take the natural order with due seriousness. And we
have theology which takes the natural order seriously
enough, but level the supernatural down to it.

I find that text especially significant in the statement that ’the supernatural status of the Christian enhances his grasp of the natural.’ Here we see from a different angle the same point made earlier, namely, that the life of faith and the experience of grace, while they distinguish the Christian from the world, should not, if they are authentic, falsify believers’ sense of the world in which they life and act, or extract them from it in a kind of quietism.

The Challenge of the Sixties

These perspectives were an essential basis for Michael Ramsey as his ministry as Archbishop of York (1956) and then of Canterbury (1961) unfolded. Certainly the Canterbury years (1961-1974) coincided with momentous changes in society and culture, and with challenges in and to the church, which were unimaginable in the confident post-war years. This unavoidable tumult, Ramsey said at the outset of his Canterbury years, would break the heart of the church, and in so doing would make the church more Christlike.

One of the sharpest changes in the 1960s was the rise of ‘secularity’. In simple terms, it meant an understanding of the human situation without reference to any concept of God, or to a concept of God shorn of its biblical and traditional attributes such as transcendence. Such secularity could be benign, a mere failure to see the relevance of inherited Christian or other religious language about ‘God’ and the experience of other-worldliness with what it was usually concerned; or a more aggressive sort that, in a world come of age, actively sought to jettison any religious concepts and activities that sought to extract people from their material and historical situation.

In responding to this Ramsey was guided by the principles which he had shaped throughout his preceding ministry. I think a key influence was played, consciously or otherwise, by the legacy of the Christian social thought of F. D. Maurice, Scott Holland and, above all, Charles Gore. In the case of Gore it was precisely the doctrine of Christ as the Logos, the operative creative agent in the making and sustaining of the world, which enabled the Christian to try to take positive account of contemporary social trends and changes. In the ‘Preliminary Considerations’ to his book Christ and Society (1928) Gore writes:

We must lend our ears, then, not only to the wisdom
of the Gospels but to the wisdom of the ages and of the
present age. We must learn to preach “the everlasting Gospel”
so that the men of our time may catch in it the reflection of
their best thoughts and aspirations. We must interpret the
old creed into modern speech…We must avoid such rash
dealing with what claims to be a divine message and word
of God. Nevertheless, if we believe that there is such a per-
manent Gospel which speaks through all the changing ages
to the unchanging heart of man, yet it must be able to recognize
also a fresh “movement of God” in each age. As of old it spoke
in terms intelligible to the spirit and philosophy of the Greco-
Roman Empire, and again of the Middle Ages, and again of
the Renaissance—correcting the current spirit and philosophy
but also assimilating it—so also it must be able to
assimilate the movement of God in the heart of our
own age as well as to correct what it interprets.

It seems to me to have been on that basis that Ramsey was able to place himself, as a self-styled ‘learner’, beside the troubled explorers of the new ‘secular’ world.

It’s that stance that is epitomized in his brief but incisive study God, Christ and the World. A Study in Contemporary Theology (1969). Here we see a movement from the concern with secular society to an engagement with a quickly emerging ‘secularist’ culture. As a basis for his discussion Ramsey describes its assumptions and assertions like this. First, only the temporal world exists; the notion of eternity is both meaningless and irrelevant; and human values cannot transcend their historical situation. Second, the specifically religious project should be abandoned since it is both unscientific and offers no ‘authentic knowledge about the world’; prayer and worship express withdrawal into fantasy, and so divert human energies from the world’s ‘proper business.’ Third, on account of a characteristic “positivism”, human knowledge, as knowledge, can only be based on empirical evidence. Then fourth, the secularist view insists on what Ramsey calls “autonomous man.”

But, true to his stated principles, Ramsey engaged his context critically. Two elements stand out in Ramsey’s response to that new situation. First, his response is theological in the sense that he refuses to accept the secular abandonment of the concept of a transcendent God engaged with yet beyond history.

Second, his response is ascetical. That is, his insistence that the issues raised by secularism are in part issues raised by the limits or breadth of empirical religious experience. In short, Christians, let alone non-believers, are willing to abandon a concept of a transcendent God and a reality and goal for humankind beyond the material and historical context because they do not find transcendence in religious experience. Ramsey’s interest in commending the witness of Evelyn Underhill was a small sign of Ramsey’s advocacy of a response to secularism through prayer and ‘mystical’ experience broadly defined. And the issue here was not that it would simply side-step the intellectual challenges Christianity faced from secularist interpreters. On the contrary, it would provide a wider experiential basis for an analysis of total human experience.

It is notably how often in this latter period Ramsey drew upon the witness of St. Gregory the Great. Part of Gregory’s ascetical contribution to the western church was his concept of the ‘mixed life’ of contemplation and action. In interpreting the role of the Christian in the new secular context Ramsey draws upon that ascetical ideal as a model for believers. In Ramsey’s view it honored the call of the secular world for involvement; in the face of a materialist and anti-transcendent world-view, it called the Christian, and by implication others, to see the secular world—our world—from another perspective that offers both criticism and hope.

Ramsey’s ascetical emphasis, it should be emphasized, was not advocacy of withdrawal. In his Scott Holland Lectures entitled Sacred & Secular. A Study in the other-worldly and this-worldly aspects of Christianity (1965), he says:

The hope of heaven is fundamental to man as created
in the divine image. It is the outcome of his affinity to
his creator. It can never be a selfish hope, for heaven is
the perfection of love, and selfishness can have no place
there. It is a hope in God and towards God springing from
hunger and thirst for God whose purpose it is to bring his
creatures to reflect his love perfectly. But as love is one
and indivisible the movement of lives towards heaven is
inseparable from their present energy in the service of the
world.

Catholic & Anglican

We said little explicitly of the themes ‘catholic’ and ‘Anglican’. In a way their relevance is bundled up with the discussion of Catholicity already mentioned. If the concept of catholicity, and being catholic is, as that report argues, really a matter of synthesis between revelation, church, and the rational and critical human spirit—so often separated in Christian experience; and if it means cleaving to the doctrines of God the Creator, of Christ the Logos, and of humankind made in the divine image, called to reflect God’s own life; if it is a perspective which honors the totality of the human situation in the world; then what does it men to be an Anglican? Ramsey and the authors of that report see it as a ‘power of construction’. They put it like this:

The Anglican Reformation embodied principles from
Which some degree of return to the fullness of the
Christian Tradition might be made. There was the appeal
to the ancient Tradition of the undivided Church to which
the ‘Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops’ bore witness.
There was also a freedom to learn from Protestantism and
from the Renaissance, without falling under the domination
of any contemporary dogmatic system. Hence there has been
a true Anglican witness to the fullness of Christian Tradition;
and the history of Anglican theology shows that it possesses
a power of construction which has made for synthesis rather
than for division.

From that angle ‘Catholic Anglicanism’ works from a strong doctrinal basis; it honors the secular context and the natural law, as well as the transcendent goal of the human person and of human societies in light of the resurrection; it thus attends to the totality of being human and the human socio-cultural setting as that which God in Christ seeks to touch, heal and transform; it recognizes the centrality of the life of prayer, worship and contemplation as the basis of Christian action in the world; and it sees its own ecclesial life as a ‘power of construction’ by means of which the dichotomies of the Christian churches can be overcome in a synthesis that honors the fullness of divine revelation, the total reality of human persons, and the formal integrity of Christ’s Body the Church.

Conclusion

A chapter of Ramsey’s Sacred & Secular begins with an overt expression of indebtedness to the Tractarian spiritual vision of the world:

Two worlds are ours: ‘tis only Sin
Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth within
Plain as the sea and sky.

The words are taken from John Keble’s poem in The Christian Year for ‘The Sunday called Septuagesima’. He might have quoted earlier lines in the poem such as these:

The works of God above, below,
Within us and around,
Are pages in that Book, to shew
How God Himself is found.

In that poem in particular Keble carries on the tradition of the ‘two books’ by which God communicates himself to humankind: the ‘book’ of nature, and the book of Scripture. The Tractarian ‘spiritual universe’ of which that poem is such a key expression provides Ramsey with the foundation for his understanding of the Christian in the world.

In Ramsey’s setting the ‘book’ of nature becomes, in keeping with Bishop Gore’s view, the whole natural context of human life structured and energized by the Logos. The task of Christians in the world is to bring to bear all their opportunities for solidarity and all their powers of discernment to perceive what God is doing by way both of affirmation and of judgment in human life and relations.

Ramsey wrote before ecological concerns had gained much momentum. Today we would want to add that dimension to any Christian account of humankind’s situation in and relation to ‘the world’. Certainly huge and complex developments in genetic engineering, for instance, compel us to understand their possibilities in light of the doctrine of God as Creator. In both those spheres Ramsey gives us not answers but an orientation.

No one can read Ramsey’s critique of secularism without appreciating his prescience in advocating—contrary to those without and even to many within the church—acknowledgment of the human need for the transcendent, what friends like Eric Mascall would have described as our natural craving for the supernatural. The evolution into ‘post-modernity’ has demonstrated how right Ramsey was in this witness. The attention to ‘soul’, craving for spirituality and for spiritual experience represent, a one level at least, an astonishing rejection of the ‘secular’ agenda of the sixties. At the same time, Ramsey’s advocacy for recognition of the transcendent both as a legitimate, indeed essential, aspect of Christian experience and language, and as a component of authentic human experience possessed a critical dimension which current interests often obscure and may indeed altogether lack. Ramsey’s insistence on the theme of withdrawal and of dis-passion represent the basis by which spiritual experience increases both solidarity and judgment. It is unclear to what extent, if any, present-day ‘spiritual’ commitments in the culture generally engender a critical stance toward
culture and society in a way that is consistent with Ramsey’s advocacy of a critical ‘edge’.

And there was a critical edge to Ramsey’s view of the Christian in the world. While he eschewed random comment on social and political questions, he thought that when Christian principles were unequivocally at stake, Christian leaders had a duty to speak and to act. Both his biographer and other commentators have documented key issues when Ramsey sought to bring those Christian principles to bear. To the degree that this critical edge must be preserved, Ramsey’s witness remains relevant.

“As the soul is in the body, so are the Christians in the world.” Ramsey quoted those words of an early Christian writer to remind his contemporaries that however otherworldly the early Christian movement was, it did not mean a lack of care for the world in which all human beings have a stake. While he would have rejected an interpretation of that text which Christians an easy proprietarily claim on the world’s meaning, he never doubted the necessity of Christian insight into the discovery of that meaning if it was to be both true and life-giving.