According to Sellars and Yeatman, the Cavaliers were ‘Wrong but
Wromantic’ whilst the Roundheads were ‘Right but Repulsive’.
This is a book by a Cavalier for Cavaliers. With the Elizabethan
Settlement looking distinctly threadbare and culture wars
breaking out everywhere, it is not too far-fetched to characterise
current conflicts within the Church in terms of old Reformation
and Civil War wounds reopening. Whilst most attention is on
human sexuality, other deep-seated conflicts persist and, as Alison
Milbank shows, the parish is often at the heart of them.
As one would expect from a scholar of Milbank’s stature, the
historical background, theology and rationale of the parish system
are well researched and lucidly explained. That is, perhaps, the
book’s greatest strength, as those things are not well understood
within, let alone beyond, the Church. But it becomes increasingly
clear that Milbank has allowed a romantic attachment to a particular
vision of the parish system to curdle into misleading attacks on
some mythological gorgon called ‘the Church of England’ which is
apparently hell-bent on destroying its parochial legacy and assets.
The gorgon is variously identified as the bishops, the diocesan
structures, the National Church Institutions and the Archbishops’
Council. Lost is any sense that each of those entities is a contested
space where ideas, theologies and practical issues are thrashed out
between Christians who disagree about many things. That is, after
all, what it means to be a Church where geography (the parish)
trumps doctrinal purity. Nor is there any real cognisance here of
the problems which the Church faces. A chapter entitled ‘Following
the Money’ has nothing about the gap between the aspiration to be
a ‘Christian Presence in Every Community’ (i.e. the parish) and the
means to sustain it.
Any institution which attempts to hold together radically
different perspectives on what it means to belong, will offer easy
hits to those who write from one perspective alone. Milbank is
suitably excoriating on management jargon in the Church, and the
theological vacuity that it often conceals. But, as another critic of
ecclesial managerialism, Stephen Pattison, acknowledged, when