In the summer of 1999, as part of an internship at an Episcopal church in Washington DC, I was invited to preach at the Iglesia de San José, a Hispanic Episcopal congregation in Arlington, Virginia. Their Sunday morning mass gathered around 150 worshippers, all Spanish speaking, representing nearly 20 Latin American nationalities. Within the congregation, there were a few white faces, but the overwhelming majority were mestizos, that is, women, men and children of mixed ancestry, European and indigenous; as well as a few Afro-Caribbeans, mostly from Cuba and the Dominican Republic. They constituted a small microcosm of the Hispanic world in the United States, and of the diversity of Latin America as a whole. This was a mestizo church, both by virtue of having a significant number of mestizo Anglicans in it, and because within the actual community coexisted a wide range of differentiated ethno-cultural groups. San José Episcopal Church was also a microcosm of the Anglican Communion. It was a great example of a community that was able to live with diversity, and where mestizaje offered a space for intercultural engagement and spiritual growth.
This anecdotal example illustrates, albeit in a limited way, how mestizaje is able to provide an ecclesio-theological space in which true human and spiritual flourishing can take place. Anglicans have experienced mestizaje at two levels: the theological and the cultural. From the perspective of cultural studies, as I will show below, this particular form of mestizaje has been applied by some to ecclesiological reflection. Although the literature in this area is somewhat limited, emerging primarily from the USA Latino context, its contributions provide some helpful insights for contemporary Anglican identity and ecclesiology. In this context, a mestizaje ecclesiology is deeply connected with the notion of interculturality as a model for deepening in both relational catholicity and cultural contextuality.
From the perspective of theology, Anglicanism has historically been conceived as a hybrid ecclesial model, born out of the Elizabethan Settlement, containing a mestizaje of Catholic and Protestant elements. Although the terms ‘mestizo’ or ‘mestizaje’ have not been employed, some scholars have used the language of hybridity in this context. To my knowledge, nevertheless, there have been no extensive explorations either of its meaning or its implications.Footnote 3 This particular notion of mestizaje, far from being an innovation in Anglican theology and ecclesiology, has been present in Anglicanism from its genesis, and continues to be embodied in the Communion today.
These two dimensions of mestizaje, the cultural and the theological, are deeply connected in Anglican history. At some level, interculturalism and hybrid ecclesiology mirror each other, feed each other, and act as a counterbalance for each other. Richard Hooker’s (c. sixteenth century) conversational hermeneutics is a mestizo model for theological reflection, as much as F.D. Maurice’s (c. nineteenth century) synthesis represents an ecclesiological mestizo for Anglicanism. Finally, I will show that mestizaje, as a cultural and ecclesiological metaphor, is able to both describe the Anglican Communion and challenge certain inherited modes of thinking about Anglicanism.
Mestizaje, Hybridity and Culture
In contemporary cultural studies the terms ‘hybridity’ and ‘mestizaje’ are largely used interchangeably. Some scholars, like Néstor García Canclini, defend the use of hybridity over mestizaje, on the basis of the limitations and connotations of the latter. According to García Canclini hybridity has ‘a greater capacity to include diverse intercultural mixtures than mestizaje, which is limited to racial mixing’.Footnote 4 The Latin American scholar, nevertheless, fails to acknowledge that mestizaje has been applied to cultural synthesis almost from its origin, albeit as a direct result of the mixing of races.
In this article, although I will use the terms mestizaje and hybridity interchangeably, I will favour mestizaje. Partly because it has a long and well attested history of being applied to culture and interculturalism – in fact, a direct result of racial intermingling is cultural mestizaje – and partly because mestizaje has strong connections with a colonial past and a postcolonial present that involve elements of violence, inclusion and exclusion, not intrinsically present in the concept of hybridity.
The language of mestizaje has its roots in the Iberian colonization of the Americas from the end of the fifteenth century onwards. Literature professor Lourdes Martínez Echazabal has mapped out its development as a type of identity discourse in Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries clearly and succinctly. According to Martínez:
‘Mestizaje,’ the process of interracial and/or intercultural mixing, is a foundational theme in the Americas, particularly in those areas colonized by the Spanish and the Portuguese. During the nineteenth century, mestizaje was a recurrent trope indissolubly linked to the search for lo americano (that which constitutes an authentic [Latin] American identity in the face of European and/or Anglo-American values). Later, during the period of national consolidation and modernization (1920s–1960s), mestizaje underscored the affirmation of cultural identity as constituted by ‘national character’ (lo cubano, lo mexicano, lo brasileño, etc.). Most recently, since the late 1980s, the concept of mestizaje has come to play an important role in the recognition of the plurality of cultural identities in the region and, therefore, of the hybrid constitution of the nation.Footnote 5
In today’s Latin America mestizaje is no longer used as an aspirational tool of racial blending, pointing to a future society in which all its members are ethnically and culturally mestizo. Instead, it is considered a new inclusive space in which diverse ethno-cultural groups can flourish in relationship with each other. Mestizaje becomes a synonym of interculturalism.Footnote 6 This understanding of intercultural mestizaje is applied not just to Latin American contexts, but to other parts of the world, and it is not just limited to cultural studies, but to theories of communication,Footnote 7 literature,Footnote 8 law,Footnote 9 psychologyFootnote 10 and theology.Footnote 11
Virgilio Elizondo, a Roman Catholic priest and theologian, is a good example of someone who has appropriated the notion of mestizaje as a theological metaphor, within a USA Latino context. Elizondo’s works, particularly his books, Galilean Journey and The Future is Mestizo,Footnote 12 may be more autobiographical than sociological or theological, appealing to somewhat utopian or romantic ideas of ‘the new humanity’. Nevertheless, the value of his contributions as a US Hispanic theologian are novel and remarkable.
Elizondo describes two mestizajes in the history of the Mexican-American people. The first mestizaje took place around ‘the Spanish-Catholic conquest of Mexico’.Footnote 13 For him, ‘the Catholic conquest of the Americas brought with it a new people, a new ethnos – la raza mestiza (“mixed clan, family”, or “race”).’Footnote 14 This process, however, was driven by violence. Not just physical, but cultural violence. In his words, ‘Catholic missionaries were the agents of a violence more radical than physical violence. They attempted to destroy what physical violence could not touch: the soul of the indigenous people.’Footnote 15
The second mestizaje, according to Elizondo, was the ‘Nordic-Protestant conquest of Mexico’.Footnote 16 This particular colonization did not approve of ethnic mestizaje. Instead, it tried to maintain a pure European society in the Americas, mirroring the home contexts of the settlers, yet taking advantage of the freedoms of the new world. The result was a cultural, rather than racial, mestizaje. Although his analysis contains enormous generalizations, it draws a largely accurate picture. When describing the dynamics of mestizaje, in both its biological and cultural dimensions, Elizondo makes some significant observations. According to the Roman Catholic theologian:
Mestizaje is feared by established groups because it is perceived as a threat to the barriers of separation that consolidate self-identity and security. It is perceived as a threat to the security of human belonging – that is, to the inherited cultural identity that clearly defines who I am to myself and to the world.Footnote 17
Elizondo is here speaking from the experience of marginalization of many Mexican-American mestizos/as in the USA. The dominant white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon culture seeks to preserve its identity by excluding, marginalizing or treating mestizo chicanos Footnote 18 in a paternalistic manner. Yet there is an added dynamic that makes these two-times mestizos doubly rejected, excluded or misunderstood. They are also regarded with amusement or suspicion by Mexican mestizos. In this sense, he points out that:
A mestizo group represent a particularly serious threat to its two parent cultures. The mestizo does not fit conveniently into the analysis categories used by either parent group. The mestizo may understand them far better than they understand him or her. To be an insider-outsider, as is the mestizo, is to have closeness to and distance from both parent cultures.Footnote 19
At this point, Elizondo introduces an important category in the mestizaje debate, that of ‘parent culture’. Here, we are no longer in the territory of ethnic parents, breeding racially mixed children. Rather, we have moved into the broader arena of cultural contexts interacting with each other and giving birth to mestizo cultures. The parent cultures, according to Elizondo, struggle to recognize the legitimacy of the new mestizo culture.
Mestizaje: Critiques, Objections and Limitations
There are serious critiques both to the difficulties and limitations intrinsic to hybrid models, and to the way in which mestizaje has been employed ideologically as an instrument to perpetuate socio-economic inequalities. The latter criticism is widespread in the context of racial mestizaje in Latin America. The former is concerned more with cultural hybridity conceptually, yet it also seems to echo some of the social and economic consequences of this model.Footnote 20
British anthropologist Peter Wade, although acknowledging the dimension of racist exclusion in Latin American mestizaje, challenges this view.Footnote 21 For Wade, the ideology of mestizaje ‘inherently implies a permanent dimension of national differentiation’, and ‘while exclusion undoubtedly exists in practice, inclusion is more than simply a mask’.Footnote 22 Wade’s rethinking of mestizaje recognizes both its experiential dimension (‘it’s a lived in thing’) as opposed to solely ideological, and its affirmation of difference, as opposed to simply homogeneity. He writes:
This approach emphasises the ways in which mestizaje as a lived process, which encompasses, but is not limited to, ideology, involves the maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference alongside spaces of sameness and homogeneity. Scholars have recognized that mestizaje does not have a single meaning within the Latin American context, and contains within it tensions between sameness and difference, and between inclusion and exclusion.Footnote 23
Wade’s contribution to this debate is the recognition that mestizaje is not a mere synonym of social homogeneity and shallow inclusivity (i.e., covert exclusivity). Rather, mestizaje ideologies include true diversity and differentiation, ‘maintaining permanent spaces, of a particular kind, for blackness and indigenousness, and creating a mosaic image of national identity’.Footnote 24 In other words, mestizaje acts as a third space in which a wide range of diverse ethnocultural groups, including ethnic mestizos, are able to coexist with each other. This has significant implications for the way in which cultural mestizaje operates as an intercultural social phenomenon.
Ecclesiological and Cultural Mestizaje in AnglicanismFootnote 25
Ecclesiologically, the church has been described as ‘the mestizo par excellence because it strives to bring about a new synthesis of the earthly and the heavenly (Eph. 1:10)’.Footnote 26 In the case of Anglicanism, in addition to this fundamental theological synthesis, inspired by a theology of the Incarnation, there have been attempts to construct other forms of hybridization. Peter Wade offers a helpful distinction between two versions of hybridity that can shed light on contemporary Anglican mestizaje. According to Wade:
The first, which as a shorthand I will call roots-hybridity, depends on a simple syncretism of two anterior wholes to make a third new whole. In this teleological mode, roots and belonging are paramount and exclusive essentialisms can easily be reproduced. The second, which I will label routes-hybridity, depends on unpredictable diasporic movements, creating unstable complex networks, not reducible to teleological progressions, but moving to and fro erratically in time and space. In this mode, routes and movement are paramount and exclusivism gives way to more inclusive identities based, for example, on perception of common interests and goals, rather than common origins.Footnote 27
In Anglican identity, ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ mestizaje coexist with each other in a third space, that of ecclesiological mestizaje. In Anglican history roots-mestizaje has always been ecclesio-theological. In other words, it has defined itself as the result of the great Elizabethan synthesis, articulated by Hooker through his conversational hermeneutical paradigm. This is what theologians mean when they describe the Anglican way as ‘a hybrid of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism’.Footnote 28 Anglican ecclesiologist Paul Avis, though not using the language of hybridity, has consistently defined Anglicanism as ‘liberal reformed catholicism’.Footnote 29 Contemporary Anglicanism, according to Avis, is the product of a historical development from an erastian to an apostolic paradigm, that has resulted in a cumulative identity, inclusive of both emphases. This identity, for Avis, is best described as containing liberal, reformed and catholic elements, within a single space. In this respect, for Avis, one can confidently affirm that there is a shared Anglican identity, in singular, shared by most Anglicans across the Communion.Footnote 30
Theologically, this roots-mestizaje, albeit imperfectly, reflects the supreme mestizaje that took place at the Incarnation. Virgilio Elizondo from a Catholic perspective, and Martyn Percy from an Anglican one, have made this important connection. For Percy, Anglicanism’s ‘very appeal lies in its own distinctive hybridity. Indeed, hybridity is an important key in understanding the wisdom of God – in Christ, his incarnate son – who chooses to work through miscibility rather than purity’.Footnote 31
The routes-mestizaje, on the other hand, is ecclesio-cultural in nature, appealing both to cultural contextuality and to relational catholicity. Kwok Pui Lan refers to this dimension in her essay, ‘The Legacy of Cultural Hegemony in the Anglican Church’.Footnote 32 Here, she discusses Bhabha’s understanding of cultures being continually in a process of hybridity.Footnote 33 According to Kwok, ‘cultural hybridity challenges the myths of purity and cultural lineage, homogeneity of identity, and monolithic understandings of national cultures’.Footnote 34 Although the starting point of her understanding of Anglican mestizaje is the ecclesio-theological synthesis born in sixteenth-century England, Kwok is more interested in the unsuccessful routes-hybridity of the nineteenth century. According to the Chinese theologian, Anglicans missed an opportunity during the colonial age to develop a process of ecclesio-cultural hybridity worldwide. Instead, ‘Anglican churches were formed during the imperialistic period as mimicries of churches at the metropolitan center’.Footnote 35 In her conclusion, she raises some significant questions for the future of Anglicanism, while encouraging a mestizo ecclesiology:
The urgent question is how to construct identity in community so that the result will not be fragmentation, fundamentalism, or balkanization. The Anglican Communion can offer a unique prophetic model. On the one hand, it should encourage the experimentation of new cultural forms among member churches. On the other hand, the different cultural hybrids are in communion with one another, so that each can serve as a mirror for the others, without absolutizing one’s specific cultural form.Footnote 36
Kwok proposes a deeper exploration of what it would mean for national Anglican churches to become truly intercultural, by affirming their cultural contextuality. Relational catholicity will take place when national mestizo churches act as mirrors to each other, in a space where all are regarded as equally valid and authentic, ‘without absolutizing’ one over the other. Kwok implicitly advocates a mestizo ecclesiology for global Anglicanism that is inclusive enough to contain a diversity of intercultural ecclesial expressions within one larger intercultural family of churches.
Dialogue and Mestizaje Ecclesiology in Anglicanism
A recurring theme in the above explorations of interculturalism and mestizaje is the centrality of the dialogical process. This is true of mestizaje ecclesiology. It is also a central aspect of Anglican synodical life, at local, diocesan and national levels, and of the experience of relational catholicity, at a Communion-wide level.
The dialogical process has served as a means of koinonia, and has enabled Anglicans, from time to time, to articulate basic forms of ecclesial consensus. Internationally, the Covenant has been the latest attempt to create a consensual statement of Anglican belief and identity. Prior to it, the Lambeth Conferences have played a key role in providing generally agreed guidelines for the Communion. Yet, up to date, the most widely embraced affirmation of Anglican doctrine is found in the succinct Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral.
Likewise, different theological traditions have sought to promote their particular versions of Anglicanism. In most cases, searching for consensus was qualified by a reference to adiaphora, and to the maxim: in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity. In the first half of the twentieth century, the search for consensus was driven by liberal catholic Anglicans, with an emphasis on the social responsibility of the church.Footnote 37 In the latter part of the last century and the beginning of this one, the appeal to consensus, in the form of doctrinal uniformity, has been articulated particularly by conservative evangelicals, and to a lesser extent by traditionalist Anglo-Catholics.
The project of creating an Anglican consensus beyond the Quadrilateral, however, failed time and time again. Not because Anglicans refused to agree on basic doctrinal principles, but because it clashed with the reality of both cultural and theological diversity. Consensus, understood as the absolutization of one particular theology or culture, goes against every bone of Anglican identity. It is the denial of Anglicanism’s DNA. In the case of the most recent appeals to consensus, they have been constructed as attempts to win the battle that Puritans lost within the Church of England during the Elizabethan Settlement, and again later after Cromwell’s Republic, to create a pure church, based on a particular Protestant ecclesiology that excluded many of the emphases Anglicans have historically cherished.Footnote 38 In Anglicanism, the opposite of a consensus-based ecclesiology is a mestizo ecclesiology, where relationship and communication are valued as sources of communion.
The Indaba conversations are a clear example of this type of dialogical ecclesiology in Anglicanism. The process, although only partially successful at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, incarnated a dialogical ecclesiology that, rather than consensus, sought to become a ‘theology of reconciliation’.Footnote 39 The main challenge Indaba has faced since 2008 has been the unwillingness of some to engage with the process. To some extent, the lack of engagement in a dialogical ecclesial praxis has revealed a de facto rejection of the mestizo ecclesiology that has shaped and continues to shape Anglicanism.
In addition to the Indaba process, Anglicans have used other conversational models. In Canada, indigenous Anglican communities have their national gatherings following the model of ‘sacred circles’, every two to three years.Footnote 40 These sacred circles follow a conversational pattern that affirm the equal value of all participants, young and old, men and women, lay and ordained, as well as respect for the views of all interlocutors. In this sense, the circle embodies the sort of inclusive dialogical ecclesiology central to mestizaje Anglicanism.
Unfortunately, in practice, neither the dialogical attempts of the Instruments of Communion have been truly dialogical – in many cases they have been monological – nor has the notion of a dialogical ecclesiology extended beyond these largely episcopocentric institutional gatherings. For Anglicanism to rise above its current monologic praxis, attention needs to be paid to the essential values of respect, freedom and reciprocity, inherent in dialogical and intercultural ecclesiologies.Footnote 41 Likewise, new types of intra-Anglican gatherings need to be encouraged to foster relational catholicity in a manner that is consistent with the horizontal, synodical governance of the local churches. I do not advocate here an expanded version of the ACC, but rather something more like the 1963 International Anglican Congress. In other words, gatherings in which all Anglicans, lay and ordained, can participate in genuine intercultural spaces through mutual listening, reflection and conversation, inspired by the Indaba conversations, or the sacred circle gatherings.
Exclusion and Inclusion in Mestizaje Ecclesiology
Inclusion and exclusion, within mestizaje ecclesiology, operate at different levels. The starting point is always the inclusive dimension of mestizaje. The main drive of intercultural mestizaje is to include, rather than exclude, others. As an extension of this, mestizos consider themselves ‘un pueblo puente’ – a bridge people – able to draw together and reconcile different groups.Footnote 42 Anglican mestizaje ecclesiology, from Richard Hooker to F.D. Maurice and beyond, expressed high ecumenical aspirations to act as a bridge church in Christendom. The main reason for this self-confidence was their self-perception as a mestizo church, able to understand, and therefore to relate well to both Catholic and Protestant parent cultures.
Exclusion, on the other hand, takes place in a number of ways. There is the exclusion experienced in the form of rejection by the parent cultures of the mestizo one. Then, there is the analogue response of exclusion of the mestizo, who mimics the behaviour of the parent cultures. In this case, mestizos tend to align their identity with the dominant parent culture in order to exclude the less dominant parent culture; more on this below. Finally, there is a type of inclusion-exclusion dynamic that takes place within the intercultural mestizo community itself, which responds to the questions: who is in and who is out, and how is this decided? This occurs often within the context of the dialogical processes described above.
This inclusion-exclusion dynamic in the church is nothing new. It has existed since the genesis of Christianity and has been the source of numerous schisms throughout history. They are connected with the dynamic of ‘rejection of the other’ in general, and the experience of being rejected by the various parent cultures in particular.
In Anglicanism, this dynamic played a key role during the Elizabethan Settlement. The sixteenth-century Anglican mestizaje project was critiqued by both ecclesial parent cultures, the Roman Catholic and the mainstream Protestant one in Europe. The Church of England, which defined itself as both Catholic and Reformed was not recognized as such by either parent culture. The way in which the English Church affirmed continuity and change set it at odds with both the Church of Rome and other Protestant churches in Europe. For the Catholics, Anglicans were introducing new categories to redefine their understanding of catholicity. For many magisterial Protestants, the English Reformation was only a ‘part boiled’ reformation, since it did not totally break with certain so-called ‘Popish practices’, such as the episcopacy or the use of liturgy.
In the political and religious climate of sixteenth-century Europe, the most significant drive for excluding the mestizo ecclesia anglicana was not solely theology, but power, resulting from the tactical manoeuvres of political interest, as well as territorial and jurisdictional tensions. In most cases, these were clothed in the language of polemic documents and theological apologetics. This twofold rejection was met with a similar response by the Church of England which, in turn, created a national church apologetic that exalted Anglicanism as a via media away from the extremes of both Catholic and Protestant parent cultures. In doing so, the English church’s claim was to include within itself the best elements of both parent cultures’ theologies and praxes.
The final and most unequivocal rejection of Anglicanism by Rome was expressed in the papal bull ‘Apostolicae Curae’ in 1896. In this statement, Leo XIII declared Anglican orders ‘absolutely null and utterly void’.Footnote 43 The document did not affirm anything new. It based its conclusion on the change of sacramental theology and practice, including the rites for the ordination of priests, introduced under the reign of Edward VI, and reinstated under Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. The Anglican responses to this document reflected the breadth of theological views within the Church of England.Footnote 44 This controversy mirrored a similar one in the seventeenth century with the non-conformist Anglican clergy who eventually embraced Presbyterianism in England. The 1662 Prayer Book ordination rites defined the role of the priest and bishop in an unequivocal manner, affirming a priestly theology that was fully rejected by the Presbyterian clergy.Footnote 45
By virtue of being an intercultural third space, Anglican mestizaje ecclesiology too is caught up in ‘an inescapable interweaving of inclusion and exclusion in processes of mixture’.Footnote 46 For Wade, mestizaje ‘always involves both processes and one cannot be separated from the other’.Footnote 47 Reflecting on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in Latin American ethno-cultural mestizaje, Wade admits that:
[M]estizaje is a space of struggle and contest. It is not a reason for automatic optimism or for Latin Americans to feel benevolent about their societies simply because mestizaje can have inclusive effects. It is a site of struggle to see what and who is going to be included and excluded, and in what way; to see to what extent existing value hierarchies can be disrupted.Footnote 48
Nowhere is this site of struggle more visible in contemporary Anglicanism, than in the dialogical processes that have taken place at all levels in the Communion in recent decades. When the dialogical process is taken seriously, mestizaje ecclesiology has the potential of becoming a truly inclusive third space where diversity can flourish unashamedly, and koinonia be experienced relationally. However, when the conversational praxis fails, it can become an exclusive space. In most cases, this will be the result of the self-exclusion of those who are unable to recognize the value or legitimacy of fellow interlocutors. It is also the result of exclusive attitudes, such as a presumption of one’s own superiority, a negative judgment of the other, a lack of humility, being out of touch with present day realities, defensiveness and a lack of appreciation of what is good in the modern world.Footnote 49 For Mannion, this form of exclusivism is a ‘transdenominational reality’.Footnote 50
The dialogical processes in Anglicanism seek the strengthening of inclusive koinonia, rather than the exclusive articulation of a confessional consensus. In other words, to the question of ‘who is in/out’, the answer is, ‘everyone is in, until they decide they wish to move out, because they are unable to accept the intrinsic value of diversity within this mestizo space’. This is not decided, normally, by the mestizo community, but by those within the community who seek to erase its intercultural diversity, and with it, the mestizo identity of the church.
At times, however, it would be appropriate for the mestizo community as a whole to actively exclude those whose views are incompatible with certain fundamental Christian values. In such instances, a possible line of inclusion-exclusion may be drawn around the Christian understanding of the dignity of every human being. That is, as highlighted by Pernigotto, on a Christian anthropology that affirms the dignity and equality of every human being as created in the image of God.Footnote 51
Finally, the dynamics of inclusion-exclusion in mestizaje ecclesiology are deeply connected with mestizaje’s subversive capacity to unsettle ‘hierarchies, orthodoxies and purities, creating a “third space” outside binary oppositions’.Footnote 52 Anglican mestizaje, at its best, is able to embody a subversive hybridity that rejects ecclesio-theological ‘purity’ in favour of theological provisionality; that rejects homogeneity and uniformity in favour of difference and diversity; that rejects exclusive monologue in favour of inclusive dialogue; and that unsettles the authority of institutional structures in order to affirm the value of human relationships (relational catholicity) and of local contexts (cultural contextuality).
Anglican Mestizaje: Historical Precedents and Contemporary Applications
Hooker’s Conversational Hermeneutics as Theological Mestizaje
There is no doubt that Hooker’s conversational hermeneutics contain many of the ingredients of a theology of mestizaje. According to church historian Euan Cameron:
[T]he ‘Anglican’ hybrid of high reformed doctrine, mixed liturgy, and traditional structure began to win devoted supporters. The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, published in 1594–7 by Richard Hooker (c.1554–1600) offered the most famous and thorough defence of the hybrid.Footnote 53
Hooker’s hermeneutical paradigm, first of all, affirmed the intercultural complementarity of catholic and reformed elements, as well as the need for continuity and change. In his ecclesiology, as in every mestizaje, binary notions defined in the form of ‘either-or’ disappeared, and a new ecclesio-cultural subject emerged, with a new ‘both-and’ identity. Secondly, it served to articulate a hybrid ecclesiology based on a mixed hermeneutical paradigm, resulting from the conversation between Scripture, reason and tradition. In this respect, his mestizo paradigm included the protestant emphasis on the Bible, the catholic emphasis on tradition, and the renaissance humanist emphasis on human reason. This theological conversation was not exhausted by these epistemological agents, but was inclusive of others, such as ‘common sense’, ‘experience’, ‘testimonies’ and ‘human skills’.Footnote 54 Thirdly, it affirmed the importance of theological generosity and humility in the dialogical process with his opponents.Footnote 55 In this respect Hooker was able to assert the widest possible lines of inclusion-exclusion, whereby only apostasy – that is, the denial of the entire Christian faith – was able to exclude someone from the visible church.Footnote 56 Fourthly, connected with the last point, it recognized the importance of adiaphora-based-diversity, as a reality both within the Church of England and the wider church.Footnote 57 In the ecclesia anglicana this diversity coexisted in one mestizo ecclesial space, contained within the framework of the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity; whereas in the ecumenical context, unity in diversity was an aspirational notion.
In recent decades, Hooker’s conversational hermeneutics has been expanded to include different types of human experience (female, LGBT, postcolonial, indigenous, etc.). Kwok, writing from a postcolonial feminist perspective, admits that:
[T]he contents of these four categories – Bible, tradition, reason and experience – have been defined in the past through the lens of Western culture alone. Today, they must be subject to a postcolonial scrutiny and amplified by the cultural resources from many parts of the Communion. For example, postcolonial interpretation of the Bible helps us to lift up neglected voices in the Bible and pay attention to the racial and cultural politics in biblical times. Furthermore, “tradition” must not be a code term for the tradition of the Church of England, but must include the various traditions in the Communion formed by interaction of the Anglican church with local cultures. In order to become a hope for the future, the Anglican Communion must value different styles of reasoning and configurations of human experiences.Footnote 58
Kwok appeals here to a contemporary rearticulation of Hooker’s hermeneutical paradigm with a strong emphasis on culture and on the inclusion of minority groups’ reasoning and experiential contributions. She advocates an Anglican mestizaje rooted on Communion-wide interculturality. A hybrid Anglicanism in which all, including subaltern groups, especially subaltern communities, have a voice that is heard with the same respect and dignity.Footnote 59 Likewise, she defends a dialogical ecclesiology that is ‘seasoned with humility, and sustained by compassion and empathy for oneself and others’.Footnote 60
Examples of Kwok’s articulation of Hooker’s method include indigenous, feminist and LGBT attempts to engage with Scripture, tradition and reason, through the lens of their unique contexts and experiences. Although in some cases this has led to confrontation with more conservative agendas, on the whole they have sought to create inclusive mestizo spaces, inspired, for example, by the image of God’s rainbow people.Footnote 61
Maurice’s Mestizo Synthesis
F.D. Maurice was one of the most significant articulators of the Anglican synthesis. For him, this synthesis does not consist in the amalgamation of the three schools of theology of his day, namely, Anglo-Catholic, evangelical and liberal. Maurice is critical of each school as an exclusive system that denies the validity of the other. Nor does he advocate a via media between these systems, as a way to reconcile conflicting diversity. Instead, he advocates a mestizo ecclesiology that seeks the blending of the essence or theological DNA of each school or system. His vision for the United Church of England and Ireland of his day was of an ecclesiological via unitiva, a unitive way inclusive of catholic diversity and reformed contextuality. The result is a mestizo church that reflects the essential elements of its parent theological cultures, and points to the kingdom of the mestizo par excellence, Christ himself. A mestizo church, in addition, which holds together its protestant-national and its catholic-universal dimensions. As Vidler points out, ‘no one will be able to understand Maurice nor, what is more important, the English Church and the Anglican Communion, who supposes that the Catholic Church and National Churches are incompatible’.Footnote 62 Cultural contextuality and relational catholicity are the two inseparable, complementary sides of a single ecclesiological coin.
Although Maurice never used the term ‘mestizo’, his synthesis contained strong elements of theological and cultural mestizaje. It favoured the unity of seemingly opposed theological principles in one new, hybrid, ecclesial space. Indeed, for him that space was not new. It had existed in England, at least, since the Elizabethan Settlement, within the boundaries of the national church. Yet, by the nineteenth century it had become a fractured space, far removed from the original vision of the ecclesia anglicana. Maurice, however, remained optimistic and pointed to the foundational document that, for him, embodied the mestizo character of Anglicanism: the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion. Toward the latter part of his life, he wrote:
[T]he Thirty-Nine Articles do exhibit, to anyone who reads them [...] a union of Catholicism with Protestantism. I need not spend any time on that point: it is the ground of all charges against them that they are neither honestly Roman or [sic] honestly Genevan, but a mere compromise. I discover in them no hint of compromise; on the contrary, a strong spirit of assertion; a belief that Protestantism is necessary to Catholicism; the assumption that without individuality and nationality there can be no unity, no universality; that Catholicism trampling on individuality and nationality (i.e. becoming Romanism) ceases to be Catholic.Footnote 63
The starting point of his essentialist synthesis was the divisions between the different factions of the nineteenth century Church of England. His proposal to combat internal sectarianism was a novel method which became instrumental in later ecumenical dialogue. It was a three-staged method that began with a positive description of each ecclesial tradition, followed by a critique of their key weaknesses, ending with the distillation of the essence of each system. Once the essence was distilled, a synthesis was proposed showing the interdependence and complementarity of all the essential principles. His Anglican synthesis, therefore, incarnated the mestizaje of all the essential theological emphases of each ecclesial school: Anglo-Catholic, evangelical and liberal. It also affirmed, as seen above, the continuity with the English Reformation understanding of catholicity and nationality. As an articulation of Anglican identity, his synthesis reflected the richness that ‘lies in the fact that birth out of two great traditions allows for the choice of the best in both in the forging of a new existence, a new creation’.Footnote 64
Maurice’s method and synthesis had a limited success in the following generations. The mestizaje ecclesiology he advocated was only partially fulfilled through the emphasis on Anglican comprehensiveness, particularly by liberal-catholic theologians. Yet, neither conservative evangelicals, nor traditionalist Anglo-Catholics were able to commune with this vision. Their response remained one of antagonistic rejection, fuelled by a theology of suspicion of the other. In a sense, this exclusivist response reflected, in a small scale, the rejection that Elizabethan Anglicans experienced from both Roman Catholics and other European Protestants. So, if Maurice’s method and synthesis did not succeed in the nineteenth century, does it have anything to offer to the twenty-first century Anglican Communion? I believe the answer to this question is yes.
As in Hooker, central to Maurice’s method was the notion of theological humility. Much of the crisis in contemporary Anglicanism has its roots in an exclusivist theological arrogance that both fears and demonizes the other simultaneously. Maurice’s method, in addition, rests not on superficial theological consensus, be it doctrinal or ethical or both, but on a deep recognition of the complementarity and unity of all those elements in each tradition that lead to human flourishing. Or, as he would prefer to phrase it, that are signs of the Kingdom of Christ. In the context of the Anglican Communion today, this requires a major exercise of national and global interculturality. It involves a careful listening to the other, and an honest openness to be changed in the process. It does not mean the extermination of particular traditions – catholic, evangelical, liberal, emergent, or other – but their inner transformation as they recognize genuine signs of the Kingdom of Christ in the others. The synthesis, ecclesiologically, is not embodied necessarily in a single tradition or an individual local church, but in the broader space of mestizaje that makes those expressions fruitful and possible.
Conclusions
Anglican mestizaje ecclesiology as a theo-cultural hybrid is both a latent reality, and a theological aspiration. As a reality, some have accused its hybridity of being the source of Anglicanism’s ‘identity crisis’.Footnote 65 Indeed, it seems true that mestizaje is both Anglicanism’s greatest strength and deepest threat. The answer to the threat, however, should not be to become something different, or to give in to the pressures – even coercion – of exclusive partisan ecclesiologies. Instead, it should be addressed and minimized through education, conversation and greater, more regular, more meaningful interaction. In other words, as pointed out in this article, through fomenting open and honest dialogical processes, through affirming local attempts of cultural contextuality, and through investing in intercultural exchanges as a means to express relational catholicity.
In this article I have sought to affirm Anglican mestizaje ecclesiology as a space of dynamic diversity, with multiple points of contact, contrast and confluences.Footnote 66 I have acknowledged the difficulties and limitations of this model, as well as the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion connected with it. I have critiqued and challenged certain modes of thinking about Anglicanism that deny the key elements of mestizaje: respectful dialogical processes, the recognition of the value of the other, and the affirmation of intercultural diversity, equality, reciprocity and theological humility.
Finally, I have sought to establish the notion of Anglican mestizaje on both its historic hybrid ecclesio-theological synthesis, and its intercultural experience. In doing so I have shown that mestizaje ecclesiology is not a novel concept in Anglicanism, but a new language to express inherited theology and contemporary ecclesial praxis. In this respect, mestizaje is present as much in Hooker and Maurice as in Kwok, Percy or Avis. Likewise, it is articulated as much in the early Lambeth resolutions as in the recent responses to the Anglican Covenant.
The implications and opportunities emerging from this type of mestizaje ecclesiology for the future of Anglicanism are significant. Mestizaje has the potential to become a new narrative to define an already-existing space that is in need of greater clarity as to where the lines of inclusion and exclusion are. It also has the potential to become a new source of confidence for Anglicans from diverse theological and cultural backgrounds, to live with theological and contextual integrity, while remaining faithful to being in relational and sacramental communion with other Anglicans around the world.
