Written by Samuel G. Parkison |
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
God’s Wisdom, by the power of his Spirit, makes us like himself. The Triune God shapes us into the image of true Wisdom. To be brought into Christ, then, is to be brought into Wisdom. And to become more like Christ (to become who we are—the journey of sanctification in the Christian life) is to become wise.

Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child, and your princes feast in the morning! Happy are you, O land, when your king is the son of the nobility, and your princes feast at the proper time, for strength, and not for drunkenness! Through sloth the roof sinks in, and through indolence the house leaks. Bread is made for laughter, and wine gladdens life, and money answers everything. Even in your thoughts, do not curse the king, nor in your bedroom curse the rich, for a bird of the air will carry your voice, or some winged creature tell the matter.(Ecclesiastes 10:16-20)
This chapter ends with further wisdom regarding kings and their influence on a land. A foolish king is a disaster for the land, and a wise king is a great blessing to the land. The higher the authority, the higher the stakes. Foolishness and sin have ripple effects for everyone, of course, but the greater the authority, the further the ripple effects extend. So, a child who acts sinfully effects the home. But not as severely as when a mother acts sinfully. And whether he realizes it or not, a husband and father’s sinfulness have a far greater impact on the home than anyone else. Likewise, when a member of the church breaks his marriage vows, the whole body is affected. But not nearly as affected as when a pastor breaks his marriage vows.
When a king is a fool, it is disastrous for the whole land, because his influence stretches far. But when the king is wise, it blesses the whole land for the exact same reason. We should also note folly and wisdom here is all about fittingness. This puts us squarely within the conversation of natural theology. God has created the world and we must live in it. There is a nature to everything—including wine, laughter, money, and authority. It is unnatural—unfitting, foolish—for a king to feast and drink in the morning in a spirit of pure indulgence; to be lazy, ignoble and childish. But it is natural—fitting, wise—for a king to conduct himself with nobility and hard-working diligence; to drink and feast at the right time. Since wisdom begins with a fear of the Lord, it knows that God has created everything in its proper place, and to try to impose our own wishes on nature is folly. The best kind of authority recognizes that it is under authority.
One of the best illustrations of this kind of kingly authority is the example of King Lune in Lewis’s Narnia classic, The Horse and His Boy. In this story, King Lune finds his long-lost son, Cor, who is heir to his throne. Cor also has a brother, named Corin, and he would rather Corin be king. But the wisdom King Lune demonstrates how authority doesn’t change nature—it doesn’t buck against natural hierarchies or roles of responsibility—but rather harmonizes with it:
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If young people are taught to look at history only through the lenses of power and oppression, they will conclude that power and oppression are everything. Conversely, let them be introduced first to the genuinely great historical deeds, philosophical ideas, literary creations, and works of art of which humans have been capable. Then they will discover the ideals that moved our predecessors.

Decadence, in the sense of sustained, apparently irreversible decline, is a notoriously slippery concept. When considering an entire culture or society, so many metrics can be used, so many different aspects can be assessed, that one should be wary of making overly general claims.
Nonetheless, it seems hard to dispute that in recent years our society has been plagued by what could be described as multiple institutional failures across completely different fields. Political institutions, like Congress and the two major parties, are broadly viewed as seriously dysfunctional. Public education is in a deep crisis in many parts of the country. Public health institutions did not fare well during the pandemic. The mainstream media are widely distrusted. The military has lost much of its prestige. The leaders of large corporations like Disney and Boeing have proven to be corrupt or incompetent. Many professional societies seem to have become hostage to political interest groups. Even Scientific American is no longer “scientific.” The list goes on and on.
One can certainly argue that these failures are counterbalanced by some success stories, but it is hard to avoid the impression that there is a pattern of widespread institutional decline. Time will tell whether it amounts to long-term decline, but for now, we can ask whether any common factor unites these disparate phenomena.
Explanations for Institutional Decline
Both the political Left and Right have their favorite explanations. The Left tends to blame “neoliberalism”; allegedly, the shift toward market-based solutions and privatization, which started with Ronald Reagan, weakened America’s public institutions, both by depriving them of funding and by fostering a selfish and individualistic mindset. The Right typically counters that the weakening of traditionally liberal institutions like academia and the media is self-inflicted and due to extreme politicization, which alienates them from the public they ought to serve and makes them the playground of a new, highly ideological elite.
In my opinion, the two explanations simply illuminate two different aspects of the same phenomenon. On one hand, today’s great private economic powers are perfectly comfortable with progressive political ideology. On the other hand, the progressive professional and managerial classes are perfectly comfortable with, and benefit from, advanced capitalism, and liberal intellectuals give it ideological cover. Political polarization is deep, but as far as the elites are concerned, right-wing “market” ideology and left-wing “woke” ideology are not in serious conflict. As many surveys have shown, the Western ruling class is “socially liberal and economically conservative.”
I would say, then, that the root cause of social decline today is the prevalence among our social elites of what could be called “bourgeois individualism,” be it in the traditional economic-libertarian form or the more recent progressive-politicized version. In this view, people pursue only their private interests along different tracks (either raw accumulation of financial resources, or accumulation of cultural, bureaucratic, and managerial power) and society suffers. As Blessed Antonio Rosmini once wrote in The Philosophy of Politics,
when society has reached a stage when the immediate object of the masses is no longer social, but private—a period when the only stimulus to action is selfishness…society exists only accidentally, that is, it does not exist as a result of any force it receives from the spirit of its members, but solely as a result of the material solidity of its constitution—in other words, through its inertia. It stands like a stiffened corpse ready to fall at the first blow.
A Return to Ideals: A Solution to Institutional Decay
This answer, however, is not completely satisfactory. At the very least, one needs to ask a further question: how did we get to this point? Is it a matter of a purely moral decay, in the sense that people have simply become worse, more selfish?
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The Global Anglican Future Conference and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches–which combined represent an estimated 85% of Anglicans worldwide in predominately non-Western countries–gathered in April of 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda to produce the Kigali Commitment, which has urged the leadership of the Church of England to repent, and called for a significant reset of how global Anglicans understand themselves and relate to one another. The Kigali Commitment’s summons to reset the global Anglican communion especially envisages a recovery of Holy Scripture as the final authority of the church’s belief and practice, in at least three regards. Lamenting current divisions caused by “failure to hear and heed God’s Word undermines the mission of the church as a whole,” the Kigali Commitment declares.

What gives global Anglicanism today its identity and coherence? After decades-long tensions reached a breaking point in early 2023, the global Anglican communion has entered a new era for its members’ relationships to one another and to the world. This provides a singular opportunity to recover and bolster the reformed and catholic character of global Anglicanism, and offers a pathway towards renewal.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has historically been an influential means for Anglican unity around the world, being recognized as a first among equals in the college of bishops in the Anglican Communion. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been regarded as neither an Anglican equivalent to the Pope in terms of ecclesiology and institutional power, nor as merely one more bishop among others, given the significant influence and potential to foster voluntary unity historically associated with the See of Canterbury. But a realignment has been underway for several decades, and a drastically different conception of what unifies the Anglican communion is now assumed by the overwhelming majority of Anglicans worldwide.
Tensions that had been mounting for decades reached a pivotal moment in February of 2023, when the General Synod of the Church of England voted by a majority to commend the blessing of same-sex couples/unions. Subsequently, the Global Anglican Future Conference and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches–which combined represent an estimated 85% of Anglicans worldwide in predominately non-Western countries–gathered in April of 2023 in Kigali, Rwanda to produce the Kigali Commitment, which has urged the leadership of the Church of England to repent, and called for a significant reset of how global Anglicans understand themselves and relate to one another. The Kigali Commitment’s summons to reset the global Anglican communion especially envisages a recovery of Holy Scripture as the final authority of the church’s belief and practice, in at least three regards. Lamenting current divisions caused by “failure to hear and heed God’s Word undermines the mission of the church as a whole,” the Kigali Commitment declares:
The Bible is God’s Word written, breathed out by God as it was written by his faithful messengers (2 Timothy 3:16). It carries God’s own authority, is its own interpreter, and it does not need to be supplemented, nor can it ever be overturned by human wisdom. God’s good Word is the rule of our lives as disciples of Jesus and is the final authority in the church… this fellowship is broken when we turn aside from God’s Word or attempt to reinterpret it in any way that overturns the plain reading of the text in its canonical context and so deny its truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency, and thereby its authority (Jerusalem Declaration #2).
Further, the authority of Scripture is identified as the issue at the heart of recent crises in the Anglican communion, declaring that “despite 25 years of persistent warnings by most Anglican Primates, repeated departures from the authority of God’s Word have torn the fabric of the Communion.” The most recent precipitating event from early 2023 is thus described as undermining of “biblical teaching,” and the Archbishop of Canterbury and other leaders are charged with having betrayed their vows “to uphold and defend the truth taught in Scripture.” The constructive alternative that the Kigali Commitment foregrounds that “‘communion’ between churches and Christians must be based on doctrine,” declaring “Anglican identity is defined by this and not by recognition from the See of Canterbury,” thus summoning the Archbishop to repentance and the global Anglican communion to renewal. In short, we might ask, how does the Kigali Commitment envisage what unifies global Anglicans? Rather than bare communion with a bishop or a set of common practices or aesthetics, the glue holding global Anglicans together is commitment to certain theological doctrines whose authoritative basis is Holy Scripture.
Perhaps the strongest critique that has been raised about the Kigali Commitment from within conservative Anglicanism is the June 2023 First Things essay by Hans Boersma, Gerald McDermott, and Greg Peters entitled “Is the Anglican ‘Reset’ Truly Anglican?” The authors are not concerned about the Kigali Commitment because they hold a progressive outlook on recent controversies, but rather:
We applaud our Anglican bishops’ willingness to reject neocolonial demands to accept the hegemony of the sexual revolution. But we are concerned that in an admirable attempt to resist the liberal project, they unwittingly have themselves opened the door to the use of Scripture for liberal ends. The Kigali Commitment repeatedly appeals to the authority of the Bible alone and fails to mention either the authority of the Church or the role of tradition, describing the Bible as “the rule of our lives” and the “final authority in the church” without mentioning that Scripture functions within the context of tradition—in particular, the common liturgy of the Church and the Book of Common Prayer—and the Church’s teaching authority.
Boersma, McDermott, and Peters agree with the Kigali Commitment that “the divine Scriptures are indeed the ultimate authority for matters of doctrine. The Church has no authority to define dogma that the Scriptures do not already contain or to admit heretical teachings that contradict them.” However, they are concerned that “a strict sola scriptura hermeneutic, which fails to recognize the Bible’s origin in the ancient Church and its authoritative interpretation by the Church fathers and creeds, opens the way to a liberal method in which every reader serves as his own authority.” Where the Kigali Commitment asserts a “plain reading” of Scripture, its “clarity,” and that Scripture is “its own interpreter,” Boersma, McDermott, and Peters contend “the Church cannot avoid interpreting the Scriptures, and she must do so faithfully, in line with sacred tradition. Without tradition as norm and guide, the canonical context and clarity of Scripture are meaningless… Kigali’s strict ‘Bible alone’ viewpoint is also a departure from the approach of the English Reformers,” from Thomas Cranmer through bedrocks of Anglican theology such as John Jewell and Richard Hooker.
The critique offered by Boersma, McDermott, and Peters is helpful and stimulating in many ways. A biblicistic disregard for the rule of faith, ecclesiology, and the Great Tradition indeed can have disastrous consequences in the life of the church. Does the Kigali Commitment’s theological prolegomena and hermeneutic unintentionally undermine its commendable aims? It is of dire importance that our reimagination of the global Anglican communion proceed on sound theological grounds, informed by theological practices that have preceded and will also long outlast us. Indeed, for Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker, as well as magisterial Reformers such as Calvin and Luther,[1] the authority, sufficiency, and clarity of Scripture were never imagined to mean that everything in Scripture is clear to everyone. Sola Scriptura after all, is a statement about Scripture’s authority, rather than a hermeneutical principle. Even at that, it might be better to say Prima Scriptura rather than Sola, since Holy Scripture is the highest, final, and primary authority for the church’s faith and practice, rather than the only authority.[2] If the Kigali Commitment indeed envisages an individualistic biblicism as the hermeneutic governing the church’s life, wherein every individual interpreter’s reading of Scripture becomes the final arbiter for faith and practice, abstracted from ecclesial structure, then indeed its efforts are in vain. That would be to cede the church’s theology to the whims of political biases and self-autonomous individuals, rather than the church’s reading of Holy Scripture being ordered to the rule of faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3), a torch passed down through the ages for us to pass on to others, especially in the ecumenical creeds and their early exposition and defense by the Church Fathers. But is that indeed the theological program and hermeneutic advocated for by the Kigali Commitment?
If we take into consideration the context assumed by the Kigali Commitment, then concerns of a biblicism that disregards Anglican tradition and the rule of faith are allayed. When the Kigali Commitment mentions the plain sense of Scripture in its canonical context, it cites the second statement of the 2008 Jerusalem Declaration. That section, and the two which follow, declare:

We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God written and to contain all things necessary for salvation. The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.
We uphold the four Ecumenical Councils and the three historic Creeds as expressing the rule of faith of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.

While these commitments to a catholic and evangelical theology under the historic and conciliar rule of faith are not made in the Kigali Commitment itself, the Kigali Commitment’s citation of the Jerusalem Declaration on this matter arguably means these concerns are part of the wider context within which the Kigali Commitment should be read.
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