Archbishop Michael Ramsey is for many one of the most inspirational figures for Anglican ecumenism from the last century. The Gospel and the Catholic Church, published in 1936, articulates a creative appropriation of Catholic Anglicanism that opens a pivotal role in the search for Christian unity. Decades later, Ramsey’s advocacy for the Anglican-Methodist unity scheme in England during his time as Archbishop, though ultimately unsuccessful, aligned him with the great hopes for overcoming historic divisions between the churches that welled up in the 1960s and early 1970s, only to dwindle in the following decades.
Ramsey was also capable of writing about other Christians in ways that can sound rather combative. A collection of pieces written while he was Bishop of Durham in the 1950s, Durham Essays and Addresses (London, SPCK, 1957), included an essay on “Faith and Society.” In it, he sought to identify the reasons for the decline of what he called “Christian sociology” in the Church of England, described as “The tradition of thought about the bearing of the Christian Faith upon the problems of society.”
A major factor here, he proposed, was that “the preaching of the Gospel has gone awry” (his italics). He associated this distortion specifically with “fundamentalist evangelism,” while clearly implying that it also exercised a pervasive influence across the Church of England. For Ramsey, appeals “for moral decision and submission” were being made such that “The moral will is separated from its context, because the appeal is made to less than the whole man as a reasoning being and a social being. So it is that fundamentalist evangelism helps to destroy the ground of a Christian sociology.” From Ramsey’s perspective, the argument that such methods of evangelism were effective in making converts missed the point: they dishonored humanity “by appealing to less than the whole of him as a creature made in the image of God.”
It is likely that Ramsey’s comments were prompted at least in part by the first Billy Graham crusades in the United Kingdom, in 1954 and 1955, and the enormous publicity that they attracted. Although Ramsey did not name Graham in “Faith and Society,” elsewhere he called Graham a fundamentalist and questioned the way he presented the need for a decision—criticisms that led to public objections to Ramsey being made Archbishop of York in 1956.
Ramsey’s attitude softened in the 1960s, and he shared a public platform with Graham on a couple of occasions as Archbishop of Canterbury, but the points made in “Faith and Society” go deep. In Ramsey’s perspective, the church’s faithful participation in God’s mission depended on its capacity to develop and promote a Christian sociology: a theological account of human beings in their God-given dignity as rational and social creatures.
As the long-term dynamics of secularization started to drain resources from the churches in the post-war decades, any initiative that appeared to be successful in returning people to discipleship in the life of the church could easily look tremendously attractive. Ramsey’s case, however, was that if it was ultimately in serious tension with the theological account of human beings that is bound up with Christ’s gospel, then such short-term success was bound to undermine the long-term prospects for lasting evangelization of modern societies.
The Gospel and the Catholic Church had sought to hold together a commitment to “Catholic Order,” as received in the Anglo-Catholic movement, with an embrace of the gospel’s communication as the heartbeat of the church. Written nearly 20 years later, in the context of Ramsey’s early years as a bishop, “Faith and Society” showed some of the difficulties in maintaining such a fine balance in practical ministry, with the headwinds of secularization strengthening in countries such as England.
There were notable developments—such as Billy Graham’s crusades—that seemed to be enabling the successful communication of the gospel to those who had turned their backs on it or simply never heard it; yet these developments also appeared quite detached from “Catholic Order,” and from the rich traditions of theological thinking about humanity, church, and society that it had nurtured. At the same time, although Ramsey does not say this explicitly, churches firmly embedded in those traditions did not look as though they had found methods of evangelism firmly aligned with them that could achieve anything like the same results. So must we ultimately choose between faithfulness to sacramental ecclesiology, together with the theological anthropology and sociology connected with it, and dynamic evangelistic engagement with contemporary society?
The issues Ramsey raised in the 1950s remain relevant today, certainly in the context of the Church of England, in which I minister. Pressure to reverse decline and achieve church growth is enormous, with a pervasive presumption that this can only be achieved through innovation of one kind or another. Where innovative approaches to evangelism can be presented as having a track record of success, to raise theological questions about their use can seem like quibbling procrastination that fails to grasp the urgency of our situation.
Nonetheless, as a report for the World Council of Churches noted in 1983: “Churches are free to choose the way they consider best to announce the Gospel to different people in different circumstances. But these options are never neutral. Every methodology illustrates or betrays the Gospel we announce.” Behind the concerns that could be raised about specific initiatives and projects, however, lies for some an unease about the extent to which the imperative of continual innovation is itself ultimately corrosive of ecclesial life, as explored by Andrew Root in the U.S. context. Moreover, the suspicion of method, technique, and instrumental rationality that reaches back to Romanticism has its own analogues in contemporary writing about mission.
Without claiming to address all of that, I would just like to venture a couple of comments on how reflection on Ramsey’s short and somewhat polemical essay might still be helpful for us. The first is that the Billy Graham crusades in the 1950s brought to new prominence in this country forms of church that had grown out of revival movements from the 18th century onward, in distinction from forms of church that existed before them and were more or less affected by them. In the contemporary global context, Pentecostalism—understood as a diverse movement rather than a formal denominational umbrella—perhaps encompasses the most striking examples of this phenomenon.
Churches born from revival movements are likely to have a different character, in all manner of respects, from churches that understand themselves as existing in continuity of polity and practice as well as belief across generations stretching back into the premodern past. That may well include ways of doing theology, which might, for instance, be expected in some revivalist churches at least to remain closely tied to the work of biblical exegesis firmly oriented to congregational preaching and teaching.
Theological dialogue about approaches to mission and evangelism is likely to face significant challenges where models of theological inquiry are very different from one another. In retrospect, Ramsey’s dismissal of “fundamentalist evangelism” with no sign of willingness to tackle those challenges is regrettable, which is not to say he was wrong to notice that there were serious questions to be asked about uncritical embrace by Anglicans of a new approach to evangelism rising to prominence in the mid-1950s.
My second comment relates to Ramsey’s point about the human person as “a reasoning being and a social being.” That being the case, all persons are formed in traditions of reasoning and ways of imagining sociality that are framed by the society in which they live. If we allow, then, that the trajectory of modernity is to promote traditions of reasoning and ways of imagining sociality that are sometimes in profound tension with distinctively Christian understandings of human persons in relation, then how are we to begin the conversation about the gospel with people for whom those traditions and ways of imagining have become unquestioned common sense?
How are we to interrupt their continual reinforcement? One common answer in the past hundred years has been: by dissociating Christian faith from the forms of Christianity that they and their parents and now grandparents abandoned—in other words, by ecclesial innovation, of one kind or another. There are glimmerings as culture in the U.K. becomes more thoroughly post-Christian that this need not be the only response: Christian traditions may increasingly appear attractive to some as a lost inheritance ready for rediscovery.
It’s possible that this is at least part of the story in what has been dubbed “The Quiet Revival” happening in this country, though there is considerable debate about what exactly is going on. Whatever we may make of that, however, the deeper challenge remains: how to speak to people profoundly formed by anti-theological conceptions of the self about a gospel that still meets them where they are and addresses them as they see themselves? How to attract people formed in a culture of hyper-individualism to a church that still wishes to sustain a Christian sociology?
The Rev. Jeremy Worthen, PhD is the Team Rector of Ashford in the Diocese of Canterbury. He previously worked in ministerial formation and in supporting national ecumenical and theological work.
