Dissident Dispatches

by Andrew Fraser

  Conclusion

  One of the greatest obstacles to belief in the coherence of the account of Jesus Christ found in the New Testament is the refusal of New Testament scholars to take Jesus Christ seriously when he proclaimed in Revelation 22:20: “Yes, I am coming soon”. By contrast, many independent scholars who interpret Revelation within the framework of the Master Story told by Gregory of Nazianzus have concluded that Jesus Christ kept his promise. In AD 70 the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed along with the entire Old Covenant sacrificial system. Within a Biblical hermeneutic informed by both covenant creationism and covenant eschatology, it seems clear that the New Covenant was consummated by that apocalyptic event in fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel.542

  Needless to say, this interpretation has not won favour among New Testament scholars. The conventional wisdom in academic circles is that Revelation was written well after AD 70 and the great city of Babylon therein refers to imperial Rome.543 The Master Story of covenantal history found among the patristic writers, however, makes a good fit with the basic presuppositions of covenant eschatology. Of course, we do not know what Athanasius made of the Apocalypse of John beyond the significant fact that he was instrumental in the decision to include that book within the Biblical canon and that he found it helpful in his polemics against heresy.544 We do know, however, that he saw the destruction of Jerusalem as an indisputable sign that the Old Covenant was no longer in force. The “great proof of the advent of the God Word is that Jerusalem no longer stands, nor does a prophet arise, nor is vision revealed to [the Jews], and rightly so”. To his mind, Christian myths of a Redeemer reviled and rejected by the Jews rhymed perfectly with the really-existing ruins of the reprobate city where the Lord was “lifted up…in the air” to be killed as a common criminal.545 Athanasius appreciated God’s ability to tell a coherent story by endowing his providential narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.

  Unlike many modern New Testament scholars, Athanasius was not prepared to deed the Old Testament to the Jews. Instead, he asked “why do they willingly ignore, that the Lord who was prophesied by the scriptures has illumined the inhabited world and has been made manifest bodily to it, just as the scripture says”. For Athanasius, the fact that the Jews “have neither king, nor prophet, nor Jerusalem, nor sacrifice, nor vision” was providential proof that the New Testament provides a coherent account of Jesus Christ.546 Building upon his insights, we can see that the New Testament also contains the documentary record of the successful divinization of the righteous remnant of Israel according to the flesh. We also see there the process of deification spreading to the ends of the earth. Gentiles, too, experienced a profound moral transformation as they participated in a way of life guided by the myth-symbol complex generated within the early church.547

  Over the millennium to come, the church was able to use the New Testament to construct mythic accounts of Jesus Christ sufficiently coherent to divinize the historical nations of Europe. The result was the Golden Age of Christendom. Conversely, the powerful peer-group pressures on theology professors to presuppose the incoherence of the New Testament may just have something to do with the visibly accelerating process of de-divinization in the post-Christian West.

  Postscript

  Once again, this essay was graded by Dr Ben Myers, who gave it a High Distinction and made the following comment:

  There is some very fine work in this essay. Your engagement with the primary sources, especially Gregory and Athanasius (but also Irenaeus), is careful and convincing. You’ve developed your own creative synthesis of these sources using the concept of “myth,” and I find this quite illuminating.

  The argument stretches to breaking point once you try to align these patristic authors with your thesis that AD 70 was, in any sense, part of the economy of salvation. For your argument the really interesting question that I would have liked to see you tackle is this: Given that anti-Judaic polemic was such an important component of patristic theology, why is it that none of these authors take the step of including AD 70 in the economy of salvation? Is there something about the “rule of faith” that prohibits this move?

  Just one more criticism: I enjoyed (and sympathised with!) the polemic against contemporary scholarship with its breezy refusal to seek for any deeper coherence within the scriptural canon. But it’s important to note that this isn’t quite as true as it used to be. A whole growing school of NT scholarship adopts Irenaeus’s “rule of faith” as a point of departure, so that coherence is posited at the outset. In other words, it’s not all darkness out there!

  Anyway, thanks for all your work on this paper.

  12: All in the Family

  Alan James, New Britannia: The Rise and Decline of Anglo-Australia (Melbourne: Renewal Publications, 2013)

  There are at least two ways of writing the history of any ethnic group: from the inside or from the outside.

  The detached, more or less objective approach of the outside observer is, ostensibly at least, the academic discipline of “ethnic history”. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant academics pioneered such arms-length studies of “the other”. By a curious irony of history the survival of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant people in Australia and elsewhere may now depend upon our capacity to develop a committed insider’s view of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. Anthony D Smith, a well-known student of ethno-nationalism, calls this literary form “ethno-history”. Alan James has written a wonderful example of the genre dealing with the past, present, and future of the Anglo-Australians.

  Ethno-histories are often associated with a crisis of identity in the life of a nation, when its collective survival is in doubt. It is just such a crisis in the life of Anglo-Australia that has called forth this book. Mr James notes that a “national culture that was once extremely proud of its mainly English origins has degenerated to the point that ordinary Australians dare not or cannot speak up for their Anglo-Saxon heritage”.

  A recurrent theme in the book concerns the “revolt of the elites” that has undermined the collective self-identity of Anglo-Australians. In his preface, Mr James holds up the expatriate art critic, ardent republican, and very well-connected Robert Hughes as the perfect illustration of “the sneering tone and smug self-satisfaction with which this elite dismisses its own caricatured version of the British — and mostly English — origin of Australia’s traditional culture”. Such an adversarial stance towards whatever feeble traces of an ancestral ethno-patriotism are still to be found among older Anglo-Australians has assumed the character of a cult among cosmopolitan university-educated upper-middle class WASPs.

  The upper-middle class “cult of Anglophobia” was already well-established by the early Seventies when I was contemplating migration to Australia from Canada. In fact, the “progressive” assault on WASP cultural and political hegemony was far more advanced in Canada. The dramatic ascent of Pierre Eliot Trudeau was the last nail in the coffin of the English Canada which once sang of the fabled “days of yore” when “Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came and planted firm Britannia’s flag on Canada’s fair domain”.

  I could read the writing on the wall well before I graduated from law school in 1975. I was keen, therefore, to find a bolt-hole in Australia. Visions of a working man’s paradise (in a land without either snow or querulous, endlessly importunate “francophones”!) had lodged itself firmly in my then rabidly leftist consciousness. I eagerly read the radical nationalist histories of Australia produced by left-wing historians such as Russel Ward but I also came across the recently-published book by Humphrey McQueen entitled A New Britannia which aimed to debunk the “myths” of Australian radicalism and expose the essentially “racist” character of Australian nationalism.

  I vividly recall being unaccountably annoyed both by the tone of McQueen’s book and by a remark made by one of my professors when I told him that I’d got a job in Australia. “Oh,” he snorted, “white Australia”!

  Even though I then consider
ed myself to be a “libertarian Marxist,” I never doubted that the White Australia Policy was simple common sense for a British people isolated in the distant reaches of the South Seas. A “new Britannia” didn’t seem such a bad idea to me — the old one certainly wasn’t anything to write home about in the early Seventies.

  Such latent “racism” no doubt accounts for the pleasure I took on arrival down under in the still-visible signs of Australia’s British identity such as stroppy trade unions, tea ladies in academic common rooms, and red telephone boxes. Reading Mr James book, I was again struck by the powerful similarities between the proudly British culture of colonial Australia and the loyalist traditions associated with the part of Canada where I was born and raised.

  In fact, Upper Canada (present-day southern Ontario) was settled at the same time as the British colonies in New South Wales and Tasmania. Like the Botany Bay expedition, Upper Canada began as a colony of exiles, peopled by United Empire Loyalists driven from the newly-independent American republic.

  The story that Mr James tells of the development of Australia from a predominantly English colony to a nation of “independent Australian Britons” is therefore one familiar to English-Canadians of my generation. So, too, is the depressing denouement of the story.

  Ethno-history helps to generate a complex of myths and symbols that provide people with a coherent sense of collective identity. Unfortunately, Anglo-Australians, like English-Canadians and, indeed, every other white Anglo-Saxon Protestant people allowed the nation-state to become the vehicle and primary repository of that collective identity.

  In the era of globalization, the state (in co-operation with the transnational corporate sector) has de-coupled itself from the nation in every erstwhile Anglo-Saxon country. Mr James describes how the White Australia Policy was undermined and replaced by the ongoing campaign to transform Australia into a multi-racial system that amounts to “institutionalised racism” targeting Anglo-Australians.

  In considering the prospects of Anglo-Australia, Mr James fears that only a “massive external shock” or the presently unforeseeable “moral reinvigoration of our people” will save Anglo-Australians from extinction. But he points out that “all people of Anglo-Saxon and related origin” have a stake in the survival of the Anglo-Australians as a distinctive ethno-nation.

  Mr James is convinced that Anglo-Saxons “around the world can learn from Australia’s cultural experiment”. This book will help them do so. It also provides young, mis-educated, Anglo-Australians with an indispensable introduction to the historical achievements of their British ancestors together with a clear-sighted account of the challenges facing them and their children.

  With any luck, this book will also encourage readers, both old and young, to learn from the history of other Anglo-Saxon nations. Anglo-Australians no less than English-Canadians and indeed the English themselves desperately need to rediscover the ethno-religious solidarity that even our famously individualistic ancestors imbibed with their mother’s milk.

  The Scottish-born Sir John A Macdonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada, once proudly proclaimed, “A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die”. Whether they realise it or not every white Anglo-Saxon Protestant still belongs to an extended family of British peoples. More than likely we will stand or fall together.

  Thanks in part to Mr James, the dream of a new Britannia is not dead, buried, and forgotten; it may still have a place in our future. In “the long emergency” looming ahead of us, Anglo-Australians will be abandoned when they are not exploited by a failing state. In a multi-racial, increasingly corrupt Empire based on the unholy alliance between the neo-communist left and transnational corporate capital, a postmodern confederation of more or less autonomous Anglo-Saxon tribes may turn out to be an essential life support system for people of British descent all around the world.

  13: The Pragmatic Political Theology of the Protestant Establishment in England

  Richard Hooker and Rowan Williams in Anglican Church History

  Introduction

  Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, describes Richard Hooker (1554–1600) as “perhaps the first major European theologian to assume that history, corporate and individual, matters for theology”.548 Another prominent church historian, Paul Avis, heaps still greater praise upon Hooker, declaring that he “is unquestionably the greatest Anglican theologian”.549 Avis identifies Hooker with the first of three periods in the modern history of the Anglican Church. The course of Anglican history, Avis suggests, corresponds roughly to the serial hegemony of three overlapping models of ecclesiology. The nation-as-church model arose in the sixteenth century and persisted in a weakened state until the nineteenth by which time it had been replaced by the Episcopal (or apostolic) succession model. The latter has given way, in turn, to the presently dominant baptismal model.550 Rowan Williams finds Hooker interesting because both men share a pragmatic approach to political theology that has led the Anglican Church into a monumentally arrogant indifference to the fate of the English nation that it did so much to bring into being.

  The first model of post-Reformation Anglican political theology, the so-called “Erastian paradigm,” required the English Church to accept “greater State involvement in its affairs and the ascendancy of lay authority — embodied in the sovereign — within the one Christian commonwealth”.551 After the English Civil War, the restoration of the episcopate gave rise to the second model of Anglican ecclesiology. While the third, baptismal model of Anglicanism was implicit in the Tudor ideal of a Christian commonwealth, the transnational, logic of a church which offers membership to any and all baptized persons only manifested itself fully in the twentieth century expansion of the Anglican Communion into the Third World. There is a close fit, therefore, between the final stage of Avis’ church history and the rise to prominence of Rowan Williams’ ecumenical theology. If, as Williams suggests, history and theology are closely intertwined, one might expect an interpretation of the corporate history of the Anglican Church which departs significantly from Avis’ account to give rise to a very different theology (and vice-versa).

  As it happens, it is possible to tell a very different story of the corporate history of Anglicanism and of the individuals — such as Hooker and Williams — important to such a narrative. One such alternative history calls into question Avis’ understanding of both the nation-as-church model and Hooker’s relationship to such a paradigm. On this interpretation, Hooker worked to establish the theological foundations of a “Christian commonwealth” but in so doing he contributed to the secular decline of “Christian nationhood” in England, a process which might be said to have reached its nadir in the Anglican Communion over which Rowan Williams presided.

  Christian Nationhood

  Christian nationhood, in other words, is not synonymous with a Christian commonwealth conceived in accordance with the abstractly philosophical categories of “Aristotelian republicanism” employed by Hooker.552 Christ commanded his disciples to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19). In the Greek New Testament, the term used is ethnie, not politea. The task of baptizing the English nation began with the mission of Augustine (of Canterbury) to the Angles in AD 597. By the time Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People553 in the early eighth century, that mission had been accomplished. In a very real sense, therefore, the Church invented the English people as a distinctive ethno-nation. As a consequence, the English were conscious of their distinctive cultural, linguistic, and spiritual identity well before they were united into a single polity. Alfred the Great never ruled over the whole of England; even so, in the history of the Anglican Church, his kingship marks the golden age of Christian nationhood.

  It is more than passing strange, therefore, that Alfred’s achievements should have gone largely unrecognized by Anglican historians and theologians such as Hooker, Williams, and Avis. Soon after the Reformatio
n, English theologians developed “a critique of the Anglo-Saxon period when the pure, proto-Protestant and autonomous church established among the Britons began to fall under the sway of Rome and its corrupting innovations”. Colin Kidd observes that “John Jewel was merely rehearsing a commonplace of Tudor historiography when he blamed Augustine for defiling the purity of British Christianity”.554 In our time, Avis takes a similar view. He acknowledges that the “Anglican Church did not come into existence at the Reformation”. But he simply passes over the Anglo-Saxon era in silence, remarking only that the break with Rome enabled “an ancient Church, with origins in the Celtic twilight, one that had had its delegates at early councils of the Church Catholic,” to reform abuses and liberate “itself from an oppressive external jurisdiction”.555 A better view is to recognize that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms laid the foundations of Christian nationhood in England. Avis, much like Jewel, fails to acknowledge that, while late Roman Britain may have been home to a significant number of Christians, it was by no stretch of the imagination a “Christian nation”.

  In particular, it is more than ironic, possibly even tragic, that Anglican historians should fail to see in the explicitly Angelcynn kingdom of Alfred the Great the earliest working model of Christian nationhood in England. Avis claims that it “is not controversial…that the terms ‘Anglican’ and ‘Anglicanism’ derive etymologically from the Latin anglicanus = English”.556 He appears not to be aware that the Anglo-Saxon term Angelcynn, meaning English-kind (literally, English-kin) was used deliberately by Alfred and his court as “part of an attempt to promote a nascent concept of one people”. Significantly, Alfred’s nation-building program began with a project designed “to restore Christianity among the English aristocracy”. Alfred worried that the nobility and the people had fallen into a state of ignorance and corruption so profound “that God had sent the Danes as punishment”.557