By Adrian Worsfold
Max Weber (1864-1920), the sociologist, was a pessimist. All he could see, as the process of modernisation, was the continual disenchantment of life. Understanding authority as moving from the magical charismatic power of personality, through to sacredness and on to bureaucracy (the latter a rational pyramidal process of top down authority through career in office appointments), meant that life would become dull and mechanical. Allowing as he did for ideas to shape institutions, he nevertheless conceded that, in the end, the institution would shape ideas. At least Karl Marx was an optimist: there would be liberation at the end of all the strife, but not for Weber: whereas for Marx, the human would be liberated when the institutions became dissolved, for Weber the human was to face impersonal power for evermore, almost as though original sin was irredeemable.
How else then to understand the latest machinations of an Archbishop of Canterbury and his appropriately named Secretary General other than to first suggest that his documents based actions are the workings out of a bureaucratic ethic towards sacred Churches?
Despite the apparent timing, of Pentecost, the Pentecost Letter was actually utterly joyless. Its use of biblical quotes seemed mechanical and formulaic (appropriate for a bureaucratic approach), as indeed they had to be given the task of beginning a process of exclusions all based around a document given high and mighty justification (The Windsor Report) and another approaching inviable status, the Covenant – and just as it is, without any further change or reservation. Here is the ultimate menu of rules from the top that are to be followed if the label Anglican is to be applied, inviable because it is already being given a role of acceptance before it is even accepted, on the apparent basis of necessity.
The bureaucratic form of authority was seen as the arrival at modernist organised rationality after a history of charismatic and sacred forms of authority.
The previous forms of authority are both inherently religious, even though the charismatic can be the force of any human personality. The Roman Catholic Holy Father has acquired pyramidal power and authority through a sacred period of time, but its sheer organisation and physical self-support points to something further to come elsewhere – where life becomes secular. Furthermore, the argument a pope gives is because there is a recognition about the role of reason in theology, especially since Thomas Aquinas. Nevertheless, the reasoning given is always secondary to the fact that a pope has sacred power. You shouldn’t engage in an argument to contradict the pope; he is “right” because he is the pope and represents the sacredness of the Church and its orders.
Now the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot as such claim such a heady position, in that his sacredness at best is more diffused and shared, and so the whole effort he is making in producing an Anglicanism based on a singular policy identity, rather than a diversity of Christian Churches in cultural settings with historic patterned connections, seems to have this current bureaucratic air of document pushing and delivery.
Indeed the problem (should be a ‘gift’) for any Anglican Archbishop is that the Reformation, of which Anglicanism is a peculiar part, was tied up with the development of principalities and nationalities, as opposed to the Roman and then Holy Roman Empire of Roman Catholicism. Thus national Churches are autonomous because they are also Reformed.
So my further suggestion is that the Archbishop of Canterbury is trying to claw backwards to some sacredness of the past, and one that surely pre-dates Anglicanism as a particularity. Despite the dullness, then, of bureaucracy, despite the present Covenant having all the disenchantment of a bureaucratic diktat, the Archbishop sees himself as standing at the peak of a set of bishops and then himself, bypassing the national boundaries – much less Protestant, much more Catholic, and going backwards in time before even Anglicanism and the Reformation. In the end, the Covenant, the exclusions, will be based not on a bureaucratic ethic, but on trying to re-envision sacred power.
And he goes backwards despite the fact that we now know that Weber’s pessimism was misplaced. Weber’s ‘classical’ view is somewhat superseded by both a systemic view and human relations view of organising. The pessimism in McGregor’s (1960) Theory X is here replaced by his Theory Y of relative optimism, and furthermore that a bureaucracy depends increasingly on expertise within its ranks. Peter Rudge (1968, 1976), following on from Paul S. Minear (1961), has argued that the systemic organisational method, where knowledge and responsibility is spread throughout the organisation, as is necessary for innovation today, is consistent with a Pauline view of the dispersal of specialities within the Church body. The systemic view allows the sacred within it organisationally, whereas the human relations view is, according to this argument, valuable but too humanistic in basis, too thoroughly liberal and democratic.
I would disagree, and would do so on the basis of the sacred in the secular, an argument similar to the one put by Andrew Linzey in 1988 and one I have brought into use as a counter-argument to that of Christopher Seitz’s campaign against the Presiding Bishop (Worsfold, 2010). For me, the sacred is diffused into the human cultural and the wider evolved and chaotic order of complexity. However, there is a good argument that the Anglican model for each Church is that of systemic authority, and even if this is to be applied across the Anglican Communion it is one that requires and relies upon theological and cultural sensitivity and expertise on the ground. It most definitely does not promote a singular view, even if ‘the management’ promoted a singular international mission-statement, a vision as a whole. The organisation is far too organic for that, and they are indeed organisations.
It seems to me that the present Archbishop of Canterbury is bringing Anglicanism to a deep crisis. It was already in difficulty, but his solution is worse than the problem, bringing the issues to one focused head. The difficulty is that he can be in office a very long time still, and is now completely attached to his policy. To stop the policy means stopping him, and probably means his removal (the alternative being him becoming a lame duck Archbishop, who says and does nothing, except carries on doing his personal lectures – which, these days, utterly contradict his bureaucratic ethos – his treatment of other Anglicans is considerably less generous than his treatment of other faiths).
What is the focus? The focus is, in of itself, a Report and a document, Windsor and the Covenant respectively, neither of which must succeed if Anglicanism as has been is to survive in any shape. However, behind these documents is a long time deeper issue of a truce between the Catholic and the Reformed, and ‘Reformed’ means not one fellowship of believers but a number of geographically State based Protestant derived Episcopal Churches. The Archbishop, once he grew up more Catholic, became increasingly Catholic, and now pushes his personal stance on to everyone else, assisted by those who would have one confessing style fellowship of believers, one Protestant identity with the high level authoritarianism to match – indeed very close to the bureaucratic in its centralised modernisation.
Once again, and to be clear: if you don’t want the consequences, don’t vote for the document. To remove the Covenant is to finish Windsor too. This applies far wider than for The Episcopal Church and The Anglican Church of Canada, the latter of which is dragging its feet somewhat in its aching movement from its desire to be agreeable in the Communion and its realisation that this document is a disaster.
The Archbishop of Canterbury believes in the bishops as people of a body, as in traditional authority, so policies are in the end sacred and personal. He is attached to this road, the only road, and in detail. I see him as a person, let’s say, in the passenger seat of a rally car with all the maps, the details and the documents, handed to him by the bureaucrats on the back seat according to tasks he set them. And then he’s the one who gives the instructions to his Secretary General, whose foot is slammed on the accelerator and whose hands are held fast on the steering wheel. They are in a rally and they are deciding the route for all the following Anglican cars. The fact that everyone sees this in slow motion should not alter the reality that there is an almighty car crash about to take place, with the lead car, and every other car following behind, generating a pile up for which ambulances are to be needed in numbers. Some rally driver, somewhere behind, needs to apply the brakes and radio the others.
Adrian Worsfold (Pluralist), has a doctorate in sociology and a masters degree in contemporary theology. He lives near Hull, in northeast England and keeps the blog Pluralist Speaks.
For a bibliography click Read more.
Burns, T., Stalker, G. M. (1961), The Management of Innovation, London: Tavistock.
Linzey, A. (1988), ‘On Theology’, in Clarke, P. A. B., Linzey, A., Moses, J. (1988), Theology, the University and the Modern World, London: Lester Crook Academic Publishing, 29-66.
McGregor, D. (1960), The Human Side of Enterprise, London: McGraw-Hill.
Minear, P. S. (1961), Images of the Church in the New Testament, London: Lutterworth.
Rudge, P. (1968), Ministry and Management, London: Tavistock.
Rudge, P. (1976), Management in the Church, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.
Weber, M. (1957), The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 2nd edition, Glencoe: The Free Press.
Worsfold, A. J. (2010), ‘Unity is Different from Seitz’s Uniformity’, Pluralist Speaks; June 08 2010; [Online], Available World Wide Web, URL: http://pluralistspeaks.blogspot.com/2010/06/unity-is-different-from-seitzs.html. [Accessed: Thursday June 10 2010]