Christian Faith and Anglican Identity By The Reverend Dr Duncan Reid, Head of Religious Education | Camberwell Girls Grammar School, VIC
The world we’re preparing our students to live and work in is, among other things, a postsecular world. It’s a world in which religion is in the news every day in ways that might surprise those who’ve held the Enlightenment vision of ever-increasing progress and secularity. We no longer live in a Eurocentric world, and the non-European world is looking decidedly religious. This is not always a good thing, of course. Instead of being a way of addressing and counter-acting our deep-seated human tendencies to exclusion and violence, religion can very easily be hijacked to become the vehicle of exactly those tendencies. Faith perspectives can easily become expressions of exclusive forms of identity, and the political agendas that flow from them. But in any case, the reality is that religious faith does not seems to be in danger of fading away. The view that religious faith is in conflict with scientific knowledge and an unfortunate delusion, but may nevertheless be socially useful, is looking decidedly oldfashioned.
the church.’ We could see this second, ‘in-spirational’ intention as corresponding to the ‘invitational’ and ‘interactive’ strands in Anglicanism identified by Daniel Heischman in his address to the 2018 ASA forum.
A sympathetic observer of Anglicanism from outside our Anglican tradition is the contemporary German theologian Ulrike Link-Wieczorek. She discerns within Anglicanism two ‘Christological intentions’, an incarnational Christology and an ‘in-spirational’ Christology.
We also welcome, without proselytising, those of other faiths or none. And we seek to guide and inform those of our students who are undecided as to where they stand in relation to Christian faith. This means that no one should feel excluded in an Anglican school, but everyone should feel encountered and invited, not simply though religious education but through the whole curriculum, by the living God who comes to us and offers us a new identity in Christ.
The first of these intentions, she argues in a wide-ranging survey of Anglican thought over the past 200 years, is to help us speak of God; the other to speak of the human Jesus, in the Spirit of God. The underlying aim in both tendencies is to ‘speak to those within, and those outside 8
Anglican identity is shaped, according to Prof. LinkWieczorek, by these two overlapping intentions, to speak both of the incarnate God and the human Jesus, and to speak to two similarly overlapping audiences: inside and outside the church. These audiences are very much part of our Anglican schools communities: we seek to catechise those who see themselves within the church.
This inclusiveness of Anglican Christianity highlights another element which for Link-Wieczorek is an expression ASA NEWS
