The Powers that Be

by Sheryl Anderson.

I was recently told by a friend and colleague that, in order to answer a question from an enquirer, they had found themselves having to give an account of the history of the Church. Wanting to be succinct, it had taken them about 15 minutes to get to John Wesley and Methodism. The enquirer was genuinely interested in what makes the different Christian traditions distinct from each other, and whether there was any rivalry between them. As my friend relayed the story I was in awe of their ability to give such an articulate account of the development of the Church, and I noticed something. One way of reading the history of the Church is that every disagreement, falling out, schism, divergence is about power; who gets to be in charge and who gets to say who is in charge. As an institution, the Church is as guilty as any other human institution, of the possibility of corruption.

The notion that ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ was first expressed by Lord Acton, who was an English Catholic historian, writer, and Liberal politician. Acton engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Mandell Creighton, an Anglican priest who was also an historian, about the nature and purpose of the study of history. In 1870, Acton had opposed the notion of the doctrine of papal infallibility proposed by the First Vatican Council and lobbied against it. Creighton, as an academic, had written extensively about the papacy in the medieval era and objected to Acton’s critique of it as immoral and corrupt. The two men met when Creighton was a professor at Cambridge.

The debate between them was part of a larger conversation about how historians should judge the past. Creighton tended towards a moral relativism and objected to what he saw as unnecessary criticism of authority figures. Acton disagreed, and argued that all people, leaders or not, should be held to universal moral standards.

On the 5^th April 1887 Acton wrote to Creighton

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility [that is, legal consequences during the rulers’ lifetimes]. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.”[1]

Acton was reflecting on the dangers of concentrated authority and understood that, unchecked power posed the greatest threat to human freedom.

Interestingly, Acton took a great interest in the United States. He thought its federal structure (with power vested largely in the states) was ideal to protect individual liberties. Ironically, this led him to side with the Confederacy who (among other things) fought to defend the states’ rights against a centralised government. Acton believed that such centralisation would inevitably become tyrannical.

It seems to me that this debate is ongoing in our times. Freedom of speech does

not include the right to use abusive or threatening language, but who decides what counts as abusive or threatening and on what basis do they do that? As our legal institutions seek to deal with increasing demand there is pressure to be more efficient, which threatens to concentrate the power in fewer hands – doing away with juries, for example.

As the Church, Methodism included, dwindles, there are fewer people to take on responsibility for running the institution, and consequently power is concentrated in fewer hands. Where are the checks and balances that keep corruption at bay, and who enforces them? The Methodist Church proudly announces that it is a justice seeking church but justice, like charity, begins at home. Would we be willing to invest the resources needed to enable all officers to be held to account for their exercise of power?

Walter Wink, in his book Engaging the Powers[2] writes,

“Any attempt to transform a social system without addressing its spirituality and its outer forms is doomed to failure. Only by confronting the spirituality of an institution and its concretions can the total entity be transformed, and that requires a kind of spiritual discernment and praxis that the materialistic ethos in which we live know nothing about.”

Perhaps then this is something to which we could legitimately give some thought?

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[1] Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887 Transcript of, published in Historical Essays and Studies, edited by J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1907).

[2] Wink, Walter: Engaging the Powers, Fortress Press, 1992: p10