Church, Society, and the Christian Common Good: Essays in Conversation with Philip Turner

Church, Society, and the Christian Common Good

Essays in Conversation with Philip Turner

edited by Ephraim Radner

foreword by Stanley Hauerwas

afterword by Philip Turner

Church, Society, and the Christian Common Good

Essays in Conversation with Philip Turner

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paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-8137-9

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8139-3

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-8138-6

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Radner, Ephraim, 1956–, editor. | Hauerwas, Stanley, 1940–, foreword. | Turner, Philip, 1935–, afterword.

Title: Church, society, and the Christian common good : essays in conversation with Philip Turner / edited by Ephraim Radner ; with a foreword by Stanley Hauerwas and an afterword by Philip Turner.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-4982-8137-9 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-8139-3 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-4982-8138-6 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Turner, Philip, 1935–.

Classification: BR517 .C48 2017 (print) | BR517 .C48 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 08/03/17

Excerpt from Little Gidding from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company; Copyright © renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1940, 1942 by T. S. Eliot; Copyright © renewed 1968, 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction

Section I: Missionary

Chapter 1: Philip Turner: Eponymous Elder

Chapter 2: The Trajectory of Christian Mission

Section II: Priest

Chapter 3: Sanctity and Suffering

Chapter 4: The Politics of Repentance

Section III: Scholar

Chapter 5: Psalm 2 in the Entry Hall of the Psalter

Chapter 6: The Future of the Ethical Church

Section IV: Prophet

Chapter 7: The Church: A Family of the Adopted

Chapter 8: The Ethics of Love and the Problem of Abortion

Chapter 9: The Myth of Public Reason

Chapter 10: Inclusive Church? The Theology and Ethics of Inclusivity

Chapter 11: The Practice of Being Old

Afterword: The Point Is the Difference

Foreword

Stanley Hauerwas

I do not remember when I was fortunate enough to first meet Phil Turner, but I cannot remember a time when it seems we did not know one another. That memory, or lack of memory, indicates how important for me our friendship has been over the years. Phil Turner is simply one of those people whom you cannot imagine not existing. At least you cannot imagine people like Phil not existing if we are to believe that God has not abandoned us.

So it is entirely appropriate we now have this book of essays to honor him. I am sure, as Phil makes clear in his Afterword, that one of the aspects of the book he appreciates is that most of the chapters are not about him or his work. They are about what he cares about. What Phil most determinatively cares about is God and God’s church. That church, God help us, is for Phil the Episcopal Church, which Phil loves with his whole heart. That love, moreover, means he has had to assume the stance of the critic, but a critic who never forgets that those who hold positions different from his own remain his sisters and brothers in Christ.

This is a book of wisdom. It rightly is so because Phil is a person of wisdom who has attracted wise friends who have written essays in his honor that are first and foremost wise. The chapters of the book are organized to reflect the different aspects of Phil’s life, that is, his work as a missionary, priest, scholar, and prophet. That organization makes a good deal of sense, but it is the same Phil that occupies each of those offices. Phil is the person of wisdom who has embodied and exemplified the steady patience of those we look to in order that they might teach us how to discern the good, the beautiful, and the true.

That Phil began as a missionary I suspect has everything to do with the kind of wisdom he displayed as a priest, scholar, and prophet. When I have heard him talk about his time in Uganda I thought Uganda is where Phil has felt most at home. That he was at home in Uganda, moreover, gave him the ability to see and help us see how the church in America was less than it should be. That seeing has earned him the designation of being a conservative when in fact he represents an ecclesial position that is far more radical than those self-identified as liberal can imagine.

Though I celebrated that these essays are not about Philip there is one aspect of Phil’s life that I should have liked to have seen treated. He wrote his dissertation under Paul Ramsey on Yves Simon. I have always assumed that Phil took to heart Simon’s account of authority as a form of wisdom about matters that can be other. For Simon practical truth is the relation between a judgment and the requirements of an honest will that makes a noncoercive authority possible. Such an account of authority is a nice description of Phil Turner, who has spent his life trying to help imagine what a faithful church might be.

Reading these essays I am reminded again of how fortunate I have been to be claimed a friend by Phil Turner. We are fortunate to have this book to honor him, but even more we have been fortunate to have Phil Turner among us to help us know what a genuinely good and wise person looks like.

Introduction

Ephraim Radner

Philip Turner’s professional life has spanned the roles of Christian missionary, Anglican priest, scholar, and finally, in a way he surely had not anticipated, prophet of the gospel. Turner took up all of these roles and callings within a specific era, and it is this era that has informed the unique profile he has given to his work and made his witness so compelling in a manner that will rightly garner interest into the future.

Turner was born in 1935, and his life thus straddles one of the most turbulent and critical periods not only in American history, but in the Christian church’s global expansion. Within that period, the life expectancy of Americans rose by a third. In much of Africa, where Turner worked for ten years in the 1960s, it has risen by almost 100 percent. Behind such astonishing figures lurk vast changes, not only in health care but in economic and political ordering; and within them, the turmoils of war, social collapse, and nation-building. In the United States, where Turner was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1961, the questioning of social values and their re-sorting and re-creations drove and shaped Christian self-identity and mission in ways we are still attempting to understand.

Turner’s own career, then, is situated in a period of unprecedented transformation. The church of his ordained ministry, the American Episcopal Church, seems to be among those Christian denominations most reflective of the social change around it. But Turner’s original missionary location in Uganda placed him in the midst of one of the most radical, and ultimately violent, examples of social transition, shared across vast swaths of the postcolonial world, and taking hold, in the process, of global political attention in the second half of the twentieth century. In his subsequent seminary teaching and leadership, Turner brought his acute mind and vital faith to bear on some of the major areas of combustion between these two realities, of America and the world. His unique confluence of geographical experience and theological and ministerial gifts thrust him into the midst of the struggle over global Anglicanism, an ecclesial phenomenon both seemingly well adapted to the needs of a culturally diversifying Christianity, but also singularly susceptible to its unsettling pressures.

Across a fifty-five year career in the church, Turner has reflected upon, taught about, mentored younger Christian leaders within, and finally sought faithfully to shape the results of the tremendous theological and ethical developments we have all been a part of during this drawn-out period of human upheaval. That is why we not only continue to pay attention to his guidance, but honor him with our own attempts to engage the service to God he has so graciously modeled over the years. This collection of essays is a small token of this common vocation within which Philip Turner has been a precious example and colleague.

The following notes on each of the volume’s essays are not meant to summarize their contents. Rather, the rich substance of each must be gleaned only by reading each on its own terms, and not simply as a contribution to a volume about something (or someone) else. That is what each chapter deserves. However, this collection of distinct essays, ordered by their own internal qualities and interests, is nonetheless a gathering of voices elicited by the witness of one distinct Christian individual. As such a response, we have arranged them emblematically according to Turner’s own service as missionary, priest, scholar, and prophet. In a way, this embodies the power of testimony within the Christian community: one disciple’s specific witness to his Lord, in Turner’s case, is not simply a cause for other responses, but actually draws the witness of other Christians into an order of renewed testimony, the infinitely complex coordination of which constitutes the church’s praise of God.

Missionary

Following his graduation from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1961, Turner and his young family moved to Uganda, where for ten years he worked as an appointed missionary of the Episcopal Church, serving the Anglican Church in that young nation. Without doubt, this early labor proved enduringly formative of Turner’s Christian outlook.

His work was varied during this decade, beginning as priest in charge of a rural mission congregation in the Buganda region, but soon moving on to the training of ordinands as a tutor at Bishop Tucker College. After a stint in Oxford being formed in the discipline of social anthropology, Turner then spent the rest of his time in Uganda as a lecturer in religious studies and sociology at Makerere University, at the time an institution that had gathered instructors of a dizzying vitality from within and from outside of Uganda.

Anybody who knows the history of this region is aware of the heady nature of the times—enormous energies unleashed after independence, excitements about the future, educational hopes breaking the seams of still-inadequate institutions, and of course, political turmoil that led to the descent into Idi Amin’s horrors. The Turners were able to escape this last conflagration only barely.

The Anglican Church in Uganda was, at the time, a unique community of its own, with a power that still shapes the dynamics of the larger Anglican Communion. The product of evangelical missionary work by groups like the Church Missionary Society, the Ugandan church had also been the center, since the 1930s, of what is now known as the East African Revival. A movement of extraordinary Christian energies, shaped by pneumatic practices of confession and forgiveness, as well as transformed social relations, the revival’s formative dynamism was in full swing still during Turner’s time. It immediately challenged his American pieties, even as its interaction with the social and political complexities of the time were confusing.

The opening essay by Sumner and Radner addresses some of this confusion, as Turner himself describes it, as well as some of the key insights about Christian enculturation he was able to articulate as a result of his work and reflection in Uganda. As the essay emphasizes, many of Turner’s questions and responses to the challenge of how a church properly reflects its own setting—especially an African church born within a particular history and culture—are still pressing in our day. Turner’s engagement with the reality of the tradition of the elders as a proper lens by which to engage and evaluate enculturation was ahead of its time in taking seriously non-Western Christian cultures on their own terms. It also remains inappropriately unheeded by many, especially Westerners. Hovering behind the dismantling of much of Western Christianity is a kind of amnesia about—or perhaps willful rebellion against—the way that knowledge has generally been shared and passed on, so that enculturated or deeply rooted truth can be engaged at all by individuals and groups, like the church. The pitting of Western against African Christianities that is so problematic today in part represents a failure to learn from Turner’s early analysis of the fundamental character of tradition in any culture.

In the next essay, Timothy Sedgwick’s delicate rehearsing of Charles Henry Brent’s missionary biography is, as he puts it, a kind of tribute to Turner’s own work. One of the major things that Turner learned in Uganda was the way that individuals working across cultures must be both honest and humble about the differences into which their simple presence thrusts them. There is nothing obvious about how this is done, and it turns out to be a profoundly ascetic discipline. Sedgwick deftly takes up this missionary reality and places it within a broader Christian dynamic: of going out and encountering, of engaging difference, of doing so in the context of the great difference that is God in Christ Jesus. As he argues, such a deeply missionary movement is not so much about the overcoming of distinction as about distinction’s transfiguration, whereby the truly particular is taken up in its particularity in the creative love of God’s own utterly separate being and presence.

Sedgwick’s interest is in the movement from human person to ecclesiological breadth. The complex relation of both elements—the individual bound to and formed by and for the church—has been embodied in Turner’s ministry and reflected in his concerns as a minister of the gospel. In 2001, as it became clear that the deep differences between the Global South churches of the Anglican Communion and many Western Anglican churches, in America especially, were proving unbridgeable, Turner was part of the team that sought to inform the Anglican primates meeting at the Kanuga Conference Center in North Carolina. Their report, entitled To Mend the Net, sought to chart a way forward that could be based on true Christian communication across divides of attitude and vision. Interestingly, many of the recommendations echoed, in a transposed institutional form, some of the key ways East African Revival Christians met and sorted out their disagreements at the foot of the cross. But the report was also clearly cognizant of the demands of something larger than a local congregation, and of the difficult and complex calling that a truly missionary encounter must grasp. This awareness has informed Turner’s work throughout his career and has prevented his most committed writing from ever lapsing into the merely ideological, however rhetorically persuasive.

Priest

Although Turner’s priesthood was originally embedded in his life as a missionary in Uganda, it is his priesthood that has also been the continuing form out of which he carried on his ministry in theological education back in the United States. Always involved in the life of a local congregation, in later years he took on full-time pastoral leadership in a number of churches. More than that, his theological work, both in teaching and in writing, has been resolutely ordered towards the life of the local Christian church, founded in baptism, gathered around the Lord’s Table, and sent out in mission.

In 1997, Turner wrote a small booklet called A Rule of Life for Congregations Based Upon the Baptismal Covenant, which proposed a form for parish renewal that was founded on the Baptismal promises that are part of the American Book of Common Prayer.¹ At the center of these promises is the vow to follow Christ as Lord and Savior and to continue in the apostles’ teaching, the breaking of bread and the prayers (cf. Acts 2:42), which, Turner argued, indicates several things. First, these promises radically reorient the Christian life away from individual enterprise to corporate calling; second, they place the theological task at the center of congregational life itself, because of its joining of apostolic teaching to common life; and finally, they set the church against all idolatries, in the most activist of ways, because they drive the church—understood as people gathered together—into a following of one Lord whose form is particular and given, and hence distinguishable from all other forms. The Christian pastor has the task, simply but awesomely, of leading others in this vow-keeping.

Both Timothy Jackson’s and Annette Brownlee’s essays engage aspects of this truth. Jackson scrutinizes the Beatitudes, in an attempt to gauge their claim on our historic existences (as opposed to leading our vision away from the world as it is). In an analogy with the Christian this-worldly discipline of reminding ourselves of our mortal frame—the so-called memento mori tradition—Jackson suggests that the Beatitudes ought to set in motion, for the church, a kind of memento beatitudinem: living with constant reminder of the particularity of God’s creative choice—for any individual, but especially for those whose lives are bound, in their form, to God’s own self-offering, e.g., the poor, the mourning, the persecuted. But because Jackson is adamant that this kind of memento is rooted in the actual temporal existence of Christians, in their actual following of Christ as Lord, he argues against the kind of radical nonviolence in the face of evil some have associated with the Beatitudes. This, he claims, would constitute an almost Gnostic temptation, in that it would practically consign others to the evil of the world.

Jackson’s argument, in this regard, forms an interesting comparison with Brownlee’s discussion of André Trocmé, who famously led the Protestant congregation in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in harboring Jewish escapees from arrest in Vichy-dominated France during World War II. Trocmé was a fervent pacifist and believed that nonviolence of the kind Jackson questions is bound up with a faith in the practical power of Jesus’s own present and impinging truth. Trocmé would probably want to rephrase Jackson’s language of strongly (human) pragmatic instrumentality with respect to Christ’s Kingdom. Still, both would surely agree on the fact that there is a morality of the Kingdom—Turner’s focus on the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, following Christ as Lord—that demands human choice, and thus some basic activism in the most radical form. Infinity’s change, to repeat a phrase of Kierkegaard that Jackson quotes, cannot be contained in only the inner being of a person, by definition. And this impossibly bounded breadth of divine life must embrace the world as much as the church and the church’s individual members. The order of the relationship, however, is one that Jesus’s own reality as truth set up with an inescapable particularity and form.

Brownlee’s article, in any case, provides a careful exposition of how a radical Christian discipleship, as embodied in congregational life and sacrifice, can be formed by the ordinary means of pastoral leadership: Bible study, straightforward scriptural preaching, ordered common prayer, catechesis, the daily round of visitation, encouragement, engagement, and of course, personal witness. To remember beatitude, as given in Christ Jesus, is perhaps not the novel congregational task some have assumed. Instead, many of the traditional disciplines of pastoral life may well lie as its foundation. Certainly, this is something Turner has stressed over and over. The generations of seminarians whom he has trained have always been challenged by Turner’s teaching on this score: novelty of ministry has rarely revived the faithfulness of the church; serious commitment to the ministry’s basic baptismal map of common life, on the other hand, has transformed the world in profound ways.

Scholar

When Turner returned from Uganda, he entered and completed a doctoral program in Christian ethics at Princeton University. There he worked with the great ethicist Paul Ramsey and formed friendships and working partnerships with a range of serious and brilliant scholars. Bound up with his earlier work at Oxford and Makerere, Turner’s scholarly equipment proved a potent and unusual mix of theological, sociological, and philosophical knowledge. These resources were mostly focused in the subsequent decades on theological education, and he taught successively at three major Episcopal schools: Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, General Theological Seminary in New York, and finally, Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, where he was also dean. (He subsequently returned to Austin as interim dean and president.)

During that time, Turner’s writing focused mostly on ethical issues as they related to the church. His 1985 volume Sex, Money, and Power drew considerable attention. But at that point, Turner was already attuned to the changing attitudes of his church and culture that were to prove fundamental in reorienting and finally dividing his denomination and the Anglican Communion more widely. The tone of this volume was, however, moderate, and he appealed to what seemed at the time still to be a credible sense of responsibility to the tradition. Only seven years later, The Crisis in Moral Teaching in the Episcopal Church, which Turner coedited with Timothy Sedgwick of the present book, openly grappled with a perceived chaos in the church’s ability to offer coherent ethical witness.² As that crisis only continued to rise up in looming presence and widen in its unsettling force, Turner’s thinking began to engage more fundamentally with some of the varied components in which he was trained. These he tended to share in the classroom and with colleagues rather than in discursive volumes. Behind the scenes, as it were, he was investigating issues of social form, catechetical method, and theological principle in ways that could try to make sense of the great upheaval that had now clearly emerged as his church’s destiny.

Among the key contexts in which this work took place was the organization known by the acronym SEAD—Scholarly Engagement with Anglican Doctrine. Begun in the mid-1990s out of Virginia Seminary, by two of its faculty—David Scott and Christopher Hancock—the organization became a lively forum for theological discussion and renewal in the Episcopal Church. Yearly conferences and local chapter gatherings brought together American and international Anglican thinkers on a range of topics, but also attracted younger scholars and students. For several years the organization produced regularly published materials. Later, under the leadership of Christopher Seitz, SEAD moved in a new direction (see below). But at every stage, Turner played key roles in organizing, participating, and encouraging.

Out of this work grew currents of theological discussion that remain both active and influential, not only in Anglican circles but more widely: the renewal of scriptural theology and its interpretation; wide-ranging ecclesiological reflection; and missiological study, involving the wider Anglican Communion and its theological leaders. In all of this the ethical concerns that were Turner’s professional expertise were reframed back into, one could say, the more traditional contexts that properly explicated their meaning and power. Turner’s many talks and papers from this period reflect this ferment. Some of their common concerns found fully-grown fruit in his recent mature volume Christian Ethics and the Church: Ecclesial Foundations for Moral Thought and Practice.³ Here, Scripture, ecclesiology, and ethical witness find a common form, and in a way that obviously touches on the interests of all of the essays in the present volume.

In particular, Christopher Seitz’s contribution gives a sample of some of the stimulating cross-fertilization that Turner’s scholarly involvement has pointed towards. Seitz’s essay is about reading the Scriptures whole. This is not a personal discipline, although it could be. Seitz is exploring the way that the Scriptures themselves present themselves as whole, in their very being. That being is rooted in the nature of their divinely ordered voices, given in the plural. Here, Turner’s congregational-pastoral intuitions and claims find fascinating grounding in Scripture’s own ontological identity.

Using the opening two psalms as his base of reflection, Seitz shows how in fact the earliest Christian interpreters, even across what have traditionally been viewed as rival outlooks (the Antiochene and Alexandrian schools), intuited this plurality. They might have answered the question who is speaking? differently—David, Christ, Everyman—but with a driven sense of the psalms’ proper opening to these voices and their apprehension by later readers. Rather than pressing for a single template for the psalms’ subjective and objective referents, Seitz shows, moving into the Reformation, the way that this ordered malleability had its own force in shaping the minds and hearts of readers.

That force tells us something about the two-Testament character of the Scriptures themselves, and to this degree does imply some parameters of interpretation that should direct our judgments (Seitz has some questions for too-quick christological readers of the Psalms). But more importantly, it tells us something about the character of Scripture’s reach into and formation of God’s people. Scripture’s ecclesiality, Seitz indicates, does not lie in the direction simply of the church’s claim over the Bible, but rather in Scripture’s intrinsic creative power in bringing into being its own appropriate listeners. Here is precisely where we see convergences with Turner’s way of linking church and Bible: divine grace, scripturally given, as the initiating ground of ecclesial being and form. Wholeness, which is a key modern trope both in Christian and secular terms, is—as in Goddard’s examination of inclusion later in the volume—located in its proper biblical sphere of truth.

Radner’s essay is another example of reflection that grew out of soil Turner helped to till in the 1990s and early 2000s. In this case, the topic is explicitly ecclesiological. Here, Radner focuses on how a figural understanding of the church’s future—a decidedly scriptural way of framing ecclesiology—unveils some of the same congregational imperatives that Turner’s own concerns have argued after (the ecclesial graces, as he puts it). Rather than understanding these graces as simply the duties of faithful common life, they can properly be understood as well as the pneumatic shape of the church’s actual coming-to-be in time, in a way that reflects the scriptural identity of Christian corporate existence, e.g., Israel. Along with Seitz, Radner shared intimately with Turner in the work of SEAD and its subsequent evolution, and it is proper to think in terms of a shared set of theological tasks among them, for all the distinctions and individual interests involved.

Prophet

Many of these shared tasks, however, took on a distinct profile as the turn of the millennium arrived. Both the Episcopal Church and the wider Anglican Communion became notoriously embroiled in conflicts and finally structural divisions over the matter of sexuality, none of which have yet been resolved. On this matter, Turner’s profile as a Christian thinker and leader has, for the past two decades, been associated with the more traditional wing of the church, and from the posture of increasingly minority witness. If we can speak of Turner’s prophetic ministry, it can be focused on this matter.

But Turner’s driven willingness to speak openly to threats against the gospel from within his own church emerged much earlier. His discussion of indigenization, as the first essay in this volume argues, was itself prophetic in grappling with a major issue from a still unpopular perspective and in a way that aimed at preserving the gospel from too-easy cultural contortions. Later, he engaged in discussions regarding abortion and the Episcopal Church’s teaching—or lack of it—on the topic, involving groups like the National Organization of Episcopalians for Life (NOEL). To apply the term prophetic to Turner’s roles in any of this, however, may seem ironic, since it was just the church’s inadequate and often inappropriate claim to the prophetic mantle, he insisted, that lay behind a good bit of her moral confusion. In a 1991 article, in fact, Turner carefully examined the Episcopal Church’s ill-advised adoption of an advocatory stance, of being prophetic as the only way there is for the Christian churches to respond properly ‘to what God is doing in the world.’⁴ Building on the work of Paul Ramsey, Turner argued that a careful process of rightly grounded reflection and teaching on the theological elements involved in a critical moral dilemma was ultimately the only prior basis upon which practical witness could be prudentially founded; and it was just such a process that the Episcopal Church had failed to pursue.

Yet just this argument has proven such a challenge to most Protestant churches, including the Episcopal Church in particular, that already in 1991 its very articulation seemed obstructionist to the advocates of moral change. In the late 1990s, his involvement in the scholarly group known as The Ramsey Colloquium elicited protests against him at Yale Divinity School. And like others of his colleagues, by 2010 Turner was the object of formal accusations of abandoning the Episcopal Church, simply for having insisted that there is a framework for theological reflection, as well as ecclesial order in doing so, that is itself an evangelical imperative for Christians to engage. To call Turner a prophet, then, is the result of the