The Unhappy Fate of Optional Evangelicalism – how Fulcrum strengthens the case for the Anglican Mission in England

"He cannot love the Lord Jesus with his heart, which lendeth one ear to his Apostles, and another ear to false apostles" Richard Hooker

Fulcrum has a new ‘chair’, the Revd Stephen Kuhrt, and in last week’s Church of England Newspaper, he took the opportunity to review Fulcrum’s history and restate its vision in his article ‘Remaining at the Centre of the Church of England’. To readers outside England unfamiliar with its tribes, I should explain that Fulcrum is a grouping of self styled ‘open’ evangelicals which operates under the slogan of ‘renewing the evangelical centre’.

Unfortunately, Fulcrum is open towards just about anyone except those fellow evangelicals who are aligned with Anglican Mainstream, the GAFCON movement and of course the newly formed Anglican Mission in England (AMiE). Kuhrt ascribes Fulcrum’s origins to the ‘reactionary’ nature of the 2003 National Evangelical Anglican Congress (NEAC), but fails to mention that it met against the backdrop of the attempted consecration of gay champion Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading and the actual consecration of the actively homosexual Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire earlier in the year. It has become clear that this group is really energized by what it is against and that opposition not infrequently takes on a visceral quality, such as Bishop Tom Wright’s bizarre attack on the GAFCON leadership in 2008 as false teachers, akin to the ‘super-apostles’ of 2 Corinthians 11:5.

The centre to which Fulcrum is committed is not in fact an evangelical centre at all, but an institutional centre, as the title of Kuhrt’s article suggests. Indeed he sees Fulcrum as ‘a positive and confident evangelicalism remaining right at the centre of the structures of the Church of England’. This does not simply mean being engaged. It is an ecclesiology which works on the naïve assumption that the institutional church is for all practical proposes the ‘body of Christ’ and so Kuhrt writes of his hope for ‘A renewed commitment to ecclesiology as the Body of Christ, including the commitment to remain together with others in the Church of England despite our differences and work through the issues upon which we disagree.’

This sounds reasonable enough until two uncomfortable facts are recognized. The first is that when the whole institution is drifting on the current of the ambient culture – seen at its clearest in the influence of feminism and the homosexual agenda – and the centre necessarily moves with it. Secondly, the prevailing ethos of the Church of England is a liberal tolerance which seeks to reduce every difference to a matter of interpretation and preference. Indeed, as I demonstrate in my book ‘Shadow Gospel’, Dr Williams’ theology is a sustained attempt to recast ‘orthodoxy’ in just this way, as a tool for continued exploration rather than a deposit of faith we confess.

Fulcrum’s attachment to ‘the centre’ therefore entails what we might call an optional evangelicalism – it has no anchor external to the institution and it is willing to be tolerated as one perspective amongst others. There is no future here. In 1997, Roman Catholic theologian Richard Neuhaus wrote a celebrated essay entitled ‘The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy’ in which he set out ‘Neuhaus’ law’, namely ‘Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed’. His logic is arresting and really quite simple. In a denomination where orthodoxy is tolerated as an option rather than being normative, the orthodox are accepted only as long as they behave as if their convictions were matters of personal preference and interpretation. If they do not keep this rule, they will be ejected.

Neuhaus admits that his law is not always immediately obvious and this is because past experience can lend a superficial attractiveness to laissez –faire ecclesiology. He writes ‘some church bodies muddled through for a long time with leaderships that trimmed doctrine to the dictates of academic fashion and popular prejudice (the two, more often than not, being the same) while permitting the orthodox option as a kindness to those so inclined, and as testimony to the “balance” so cherished by placeholders radically devoted to the middle way.’

However, the days of the middle way and muddling through are fast drawing to an end. The outcome of the bitter debate on women bishops in the Church of England, which threatens to effectively eject those opposed to the innovation, is precisely what Neuhaus’ law would lead us to expect because the orthodox face a situation in which they are likely to find it impossible to remain within the Church with their convictions intact.

To read more, click here.