Aidan and the civitate Dei after Empire

Came days of pestilence, on all sides men fell dead,
death fetched off the flower of the people;
where they stood to fight, waste places
and on the acropolis, ruins.

The 8th century Anglo-Saxon poem, The Ruin, was probably written amidst the ruins of the Roman city of Bath.  It evokes something of the sense of living after Empire that would have been experienced by St Aidan and the monks of Lindisfarne as they passed through similar reminders of the Pax Romana.  Amidst the ruins, however, and in the tumultuous times of after Empire, Aidan as bishop of Lindisfarne laboured to build the civitate Dei.  As Bede declares of Aidan's episcopate:

From that time, as the days went by, many came from the country of the Irish into Britain and to those English kingdoms over which Oswald reigned, preaching the word of faith with great devotion.  Those of them who held the rank of priest administered the grace of baptism to those who believe.  Churches were built in various places and the people flocked together with joy to hear the Word.

Bede records that Oswald, king of Northumbria and future martyr, requested the community at Iona "to send a bishop by whose teaching and ministry the English race ... might learn the privileges of faith in our Lord and receive the sacraments".  The significance of Iona's role in evangelising Northumbria, establishing Lindisfarne, and thus contributing both to the evangelisation of Britain and northern Europe is difficult to overstate.  And yet Bede reminds us that Iona was "at the ends of the earth", very far removed from the once proud imperial city.

Today's feast of St Aidan reminds the post-Christendom Church, living in the tumultuous times of the early 21st century, amidst the fall and rise of great powers, that the civitate Dei can be built in such times, that our reliance is not on imperium but on a greater narrative, a greater proclamation.  Small communities, bound together by Creed, Word, Sacrament and the Great Commission can flourish in dark ages after the collapse of empires.  Iona, from where Aidan was sent, may have been "at the ends of the earth" - but the communities shaped by the faith of Iona, unlike the cities of this world, endure.

Dangerous Sydney Anglicans under the bed?

Anglican Down Under's response to Muriel Porter's Sydney Anglicans and the Threat to World Anglicanism: The Sydney Experiment provides an excellent summary of why Porter's thesis is, to put it bluntly, bonkers.  According to Porter:

Sydney Diocese can be seen to pose a threat to the stability of the Anglican Communion, to the cohesion of the Australian Anglican Church, and also to other Anglican churches such as those in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in Canada, and New Zealand ... Overall, Sydney's influence is of real concern for the future of world Anglicanism.

In the words of Anglican Down Under, "this is just nuts". 

One reason why it is nuts is because of a fact identified by Porter - Sydney is completely outside the Anglican mainstream:

A radical congregationalism, coupled with a hardline conservative neo-Calvinist Evangelicalism more akin to North American Protestantism, has taken hold in most Sydney parishes.

Porter makes much of Sydney's influence within GAFCON:

Archbishop Jensen claims he is "recognized as a key leader in the worldwide Anglican Church" and notes that he was "one of the organizers of the [GAFCON] conference in Jerusalem in 2008." Plans for a second GAFCON meeting in 2012, announced recently, included approval for an expansion of the Sydney-based secretariat.

Sydney's role is not just secretarial. Its diocesan budget funds provision of training programs to GAFCON-aligned national churches in Africa and Asia sourced from the diocesan training college, Moore Theological College, among other things.

And yet, the Church Society - advocates of a Sydney-style conservative evangelicalism - produced a strongly-worded critique of GAFCON's Jerusalem Declaration.  For example, according to Church Society, the Jerusalem Declaration's understanding of justification by faith is "in need of urgent rectification".  Isn't it strange that as a supposed Sydney-inspired conspiracy, GAFCON produced a document so open to criticism from conservative evangelicals?

Sydney's very commitment to an evangelicalism outside Anglican norms - indeed, outside the norms of the Jerusalem Declaration (6) and (7) - ensures that it cannot be the threat suggested by Porter.  Even within the councils of GAFCON, Sydney is not mainstream on a range of issues.  We can be thankful that Sydney - in stark contrast to its position in previous decades - is working alongside catholic Anglicans to renew the Communion in creedal orthodoxy.  As for its innovations, particularly 'lay presidency', they have little or no support outside a very small constituency within Anglicanism. 

Muriel Porter can rest easy at night.  Contrary to her claims, there are no Sydney Anglicans under the bed.

The historic episcopate and the call to communion

The recent reflections of The Conciliar Anglican and The Creedal Christian have explored the significance of Anglicanism's retention of the historic episcopate.  The Anglican experience of catholicity and apostolicity is caught up with our commitment, in the words of the Preface to the Ordinal, "that these Orders may be continued".

The Ordinal's retention of the historic episcopate has been partnered in Anglicanism with a charitable approach to churches which at the Reformation lost the historic episcopate.  While insisting on the patristic norm of episcopal ordination, Anglicanism has not denied that non-episcopal churches and their ministries are means of grace.  This has allowed for the emergence of a vocation particular to Anglicanism - of offering to the non-episcopal churches of the Reformation the gift of the historic episcopate as a means of promoting communion, catholicity and apostolicity.

It is striking the extent to which the most significant Anglican ecumenical dialogues with non-episcopal Reformation churches - Methodist, Lutheran and Reformed - have been oriented towards facilitating the acceptance of the historic episcopate by those churches.

The Anglican-Methodist 1996 statement, Sharing in the Apostolic Communion, was structured around the offer by Anglicans to Methodists of the gift of the historic episcopate:

It has to be admitted that the Methodists have not always seen episcopal consecration as the Porvoo Common Statement describes it, or experienced the historic episcopate as a sign of the unity, continuity or apostolicity of the church.   To the extent that they have in their history experienced it otherwise, the effectiveness of the sign has been de facto called in question. A sign, even when it is given by God, can become in the fallenness of human life, even life within the Church, an occasion of disunity rather than unity. By the same token, in the mercy and calling of God, it can become again a gift of grace. Anglicans who treasure the historic episcopate within the polity they believe God has given them, seek to offer it to Methodists in the hope that it become again for all of us a gracious sign of the unity and continuity Christ wills for his Church ...

The Commission believes that the historic episcopate will be one sign of the unity and continuity of the Church, as it moves into greater unity in the future ... For the sake of the unity of the Church, it is open to Methodists to reclaim the historic episcopate as a rich sign of the continuity and faithfulness of the church which within their own life they have solemnly sought to maintain (paras. 78, 80 & 84).

Similarly, the Anglican-Lutheran 2002 statement, Growth in Communion, noted Lutheranism's acceptance of the historic episcopate:

Increasingly Lutherans around the world are prepared to appreciate the significance of the episcopate in apostolic succession as a sign and servant of the apostolic continuity and unity of the church. The agreements show a growing readiness to become part of this succession by inviting Anglican and Lutheran bishops who belong to churches that share in the historical episcopal succession to actively participate in the ordinations or installations of Lutheran bishops in churches which have not so shared (para. 133).

Perhaps most surprising - although it has yet to produce significant movement - is the acceptance by the Reformed side in the Anglican-Reformed 1984 statement God's Reign and our Unity of episcopacy, as defined by Anglican liturgy:

If our two communions are to become one, Reformed churches will have to face the question of bishops ... The bishop's role would be more than that of presiding at meetings. The following extract from the ordination prayer for a bishop from the Church of England's Alternative Service Book may indicate the most important elements in the work of a bishop:

Almighty Father, fill this your servant with the grace and power which you gave to your apostles, that he may lead those committed to his charge in proclaiming the gospel of salvation. Through him increase your Church, renew its ministry and unite its members in a holy fellowship of truth and love. Enable him as a true shepherd to feed and govern your flock; make him wise as a teacher, and steadfast as a guardian of its faith and sacraments. Guide and direct him in presiding at the worship of your people. Give him humility, that he may use his authority to heal, not to hurt; to build up, not to destroy.

In other words, the one so ordained would be called to ministerial leadership in the whole life of the Church in his area (paras. 112-113).

These various dialogues bear witness to Anglicanism's vocation to encourage and facilitate the re-reception of the historic episcopate by the non-episcopal churches of the Reformation.  As a commuion both catholic and reformed, Anglicanism is called to work for the healing the ruptures of the Reformation division.  Our relationships with Methodism and Lutheranism, in particular, are bearing the fruit of unity and communion.  Restoring the unity of the Church according to patristic norms - this is a noble vocation for Anglicanism.

Harvest, liturgy and the created order

Creationtime - for those of us who missed this new season in the liturgical calendar, a recent CofE press release explains all.  The 'season' lasts from 1st September to 4th October.  Churches Together in Britain and Ireland has produced liturgical resources, which this year take the theme of "Our daily bread - food in God's creation".

It would be easy to ridicule this innovation.  There is, put bluntly, no season of 'Creationtime' in the liturgical calendar.  The concluding date of 4th October represents a somewhat clumsy attempt to appropriate St Francis of Assisi (brother sun, sister moon etc).  The five weeks given over to this 'season' (longer than the Advent and Christmas seasons!) give no recognition to the Sundays after Trinity and a number of significant feast days - Nativity of the BVM, St Matthew, Saint Michael and All Angels.

However, what 'Creationtime' does recognise - in perhaps a somewhat hamfisted manner - is the well-established rhythm in the Anglican liturgical year of giving thanks for the harvest at some stage during late September/early October.  Most Anglican parishes in the British Isles will have their Harvest Thanksgivings during this period.  'Creationtime' is also an implicit admission that the efforts of contemporary liturgical utilitarians and puritans to purge the Anglican calendar of undesirable commemorations and celebrations such as Harvest were ill-conceived. 

Our utilitarians and puritans regarded Harvest Thanksgiving as an ancharonism, a left-over from bygone days when Anglicanism ministered in a largely rural context.  Such liturgical provision was, it was said, utterly irrelevant to urban and sub-urban 20th century parishes.  The utilitarian and puritan agenda, however (and not for the first or last time), had the effect of subtly conforming the Church to the norms of late liberal, industrialised society.  In an excellent essay "Agrarianism after Modernity", philosopher Norman Wirzba reminds us that modernity's attempt to deny our reliance on the created order has profound theological consequences:

Agrarianism [defined by Wirzba as "the sustained attempt to live faithfully and responsibly in a world of biological and social limits and possibilities"] also represents one of the most honest and practical ways for us to become reacquainted with the grace of God.  It does this by connecting us practically and intimately - through our mouths, nostrils, and stomachs, but also with our hands and feet - with God's sustaining action in the ways of creation.  If we believe with the Psalmist that God makes "springs gush forth in the valleys," and causes "the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for people to use, to bring forth food from the earth," and that if God's face were to be hidden from us all creation would return to dust (Ps 104:10-30), then we must look to creation and to each other in new ways so we can see there, however dimly and mysteriously, the ways of God in our midst.  Agrarian practices and responsibilities open up new lines of vision, lines that have increasingly been closed in the time of modernity.

The traditional liturgical pattern of Rogationtide and Harvest (and note what also happened to the former at the hands of liturgical reformers) gave expression to a radically different understanding of humanity's relationship to the created order than that proclaimed by the Enlightenment and modernity.  In the era of postmodernity, this has - if anything - intensified.  The almost Gnostic denial of physicality and physical limits by postmodernity is challenged when the Church prays and gives thanks for the fruits of the earth.  The fact that Common Worship includes a quite fulsome liturgical provision for "The Agricultural Year" suggests that there is some recognition of this.

As clumsy as it is, 'Creationtime' captures something of this, as seen in +London's comments in the CofE press release:

Human beings, according to the Book of Genesis, are to 'till and keep' the earth.  This balance between preserving and developing the creation is reflected in the thanksgiving of the Church for our daily bread as 'fruit of the earth and work of human hands'.  The prayer of thanksgiving transforms the fruits of creation into gifts of divine love and Creationtime is a season for contemplating this wonderful mystery.

The rediscovery of the counter-cultural wisdom of traditional liturgical rhythms offers hope that the utilitarianism which has afflicted so much liturgical revision has run its course. There may be no season of Creationtime, but the recovery of a theological, pastoral and evangelical rationale for Harvest is a welcome contribution to a re-enchanted liturgy for a re-enchanted world.

On this day in 1662 ...

Anglicanism asserted its catholic identity.  The Act of Uniformity, passed by the Restoration Parliament, required that, by St Bartholomew's Day 1662, all clergy of the Church of England take an oath assenting to the Book of Common Prayer and subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles.  In addition, the Act required that those who had received non-episcopal ordination during the Commonwealth era present themselves for episcopal ordination:

No person whatsoever shall thenceforth be capable to bee admitted to any Parsonage Vicarage Benefice or other Ecclesiastical Promotion or Dignity whatsoever . . . before such time as he shall be ordained Preist according to the forme and manner in and by the said Booke prescribed unlesse he have formerly beene made Preist by Episcopall Ordination.

It was, in many ways, the triumph of Laud's aspirations: the reformed catholicism of the Book of Common Prayer, the studied rejection of both medieval and reformation scholasticism (what Laud had described as "school opinions") by the Articles, the recognition of episcopacy as - in the words of the Preface to the Ordinal - that form of government present in the Church "since the Apostles' time".

For the Puritans it was "Black Bartholomew's Day".  Not so for Anglicanism.  We will wish to repent of the persecutions and harrassment subsequent to the Act of Uniformity, but today symbolises Anglicanism's determination to be an expression of "the whole Catholick Church of Christ" (the 1662 preface to the BCP). The approximately 2,000 Puritan clergy ejected from the Church of England because of the Act of Uniformity were, indeed, a loss.  This is symbolised in the inclusion of one of those ejected - the holy Richard Baxter - in the contemporary Church of England's calendar as a 'teacher of the faith'.  But a much greater loss would have occurred if the Act had not been implemented, thus failing to secure Anglicanism's commitment to patristic and catholic norms.  In such circumstances, Anglicanism would have descended into the latitudinarian and ultimately deist morass that was to be the fate of 18th century Dissent.

Next year marks the 350th anniversary of the Act of Uniformity.  The United Reformed Church - heir to the ejected Puritans - will be commemorating the event, celebrating the prophetic witness of the Puritan clergy who "for conscience's sake" refused to conform.  Anglicans, too, should be celebrating.  Yes, we can give thanks for the witness and courage of Baxter and his companions during an era of confrontation and division.  But we are also called to rejoice in Anglicanism's vocation, as expressed in the Act of Uniformity: to be a Church whose liturgy, doctrine and order expresses patristic catholicity.

On the virtue of Common Prayer

In the midst of an interesting interview with Richard Chartres - one of the two leading candidates to be next Archbishop of Canterbury - it emerges that +London does not join in the saying of the morning office in St Paul's Cathedral:

He never attends the morning office in the cathedral, however, because the new order of service is used and Chartres, an implacable traditionalist, prefers the Book of Common Prayer. Instead, he rises at 6am and says morning prayer by himself.

Alongside the fact that it is reassuring to have a liturgical traditionalist holding the See of London, the insight does raise the issue of which version of the daily office Anglicans prefer.  The CofE's Common Worship Daily Prayer is immensely popular, and not just in the CofE.  Its provision for the seasons can be understood as enriching the Church's prayer and potentially deepens our reflection on the mysteries of Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection.

The BCP, however, has a quite different strength: common prayer.  Irrespective of the season, the BCP daily office draws us into the same sanctified, common practice - psalm, Scripture, canticles, creed, Lord's Prayer, collects.  The very absence of seasonal material ensures a prayerful reflection on the narrative of the Canon.  For Cranmer, this better reflected patristic pratice than did the late medieval approach, driven as it was by changing material for the seasons:

these many years passed, this godly and decent order of the ancient Fathers hath been so altered, broken, and neglected, by planting in uncertain Stories, and Legends, with multitude of Responds, Verses, vain Repetitions, Commemorations, and Synodals; that commonly when any Book of the Bible was begun, after three or four Chapters were read out, all the rest were unread ... And furthermore, notwithstanding that the ancient Fathers have divided the Psalms into seven Portions, whereof every one was called a Nocturn: Now of late time a few of them have been daily said, and the rest utterly omitted. Moreover, the number and hardness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the Service, was the cause, that to turn the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.

+Rowan illustrated something of this in his comments in an interview in 2003:

Q: What is your feeling now about the Book of Common Prayer? Its still normative in the Church of England, isn't it?

A: That's right, so you have to describe other things as alternative, even if they are the most often used. I suppose that formation gave me a lasting enthusiasm for the Book of Common Prayer, although I have to recognise now that it is not what speaks most readily and immediately to a lot of people, you don't start from there, it remains one of the things I most easily slip into ...

Q: When you prayed you might frequently use collects from the Book of Common Prayer?

A: Yes, and quite often on holiday I say the office from the Book of Common Prayer, not least because on some occasions that's what I can most easily remember.

Q: Do you think that's a worry about modern liturgies, that they are harder to remember?

A: Yes. I think there's a whole dimension of praying things in, getting them to be part of the rhythm, that we are in danger of losing.

This is, perhaps, one of the chief virtues of the rhythm of the BCP daily offices - the fact that it can, in large part, be prayed from memory, as the rhythms enter the soul over years.  The absence of large amounts of seasonal material (in fact, the near absence of any seasonal material), rather than being a weakness, therefore recommends the BCP offices.

Irrespective of whether it is BCP or Common Worship, however, it is worth recalling the resolution of Lambeth 1998:

This Conference, affirming the importance of Bishops being faithful in the praying of the daily offices, urges the bishops present at this Conference to re-commit themselves to this spiritual discipline and to endeavour to encourage their clergy and people in the discipline of daily prayer.

Bleak language or a peculiar hope?

Guardian columnist and self-described "Protestant atheist" Andrew Brown has proclaimed his affection for the Book of Common Prayer's Order for the Burial of the Dead:

The bleak iron language of the prayer book's funeral service seems to me more true, plainer and more frightening than all of the painted devils in baroque basilicas around the world.

Contrasting the supposedly bleak outlook of the BCP with the richer vision of medieval and Tridentine catholicism has been a theme pursued by historian Eamon Duffy:

The burial rite of 1552 spoke only of the elect ... This was to make the most universal of all popular rituals, burial, into a rite not of inclusion, but of separation ... the logical working out of this drastic redrawing and limiting of the Christian community.

For Duffy, "the reformed doctrine struck the Church dumb at the graveside of sinners" - unable to pray for the departed, unable to plead for mercy or express penitence.  Only the 'godly', according to Duffy, could take comfort in the BCP's words at the graveside. 

The historical record tells a very different story.  As Judith Maltby has demonstrated, it was the 'godly' - Puritan clergy and their lay supporters - who rejected the BCP's funeral rite.  Maltby quotes a typical Puritan critique of BCP order for burial, drawing attention to the belief that the liturgy marked continuity not rupture with pre-Reformation practices:

Likewise also, as these priests visit and housel their sick by this book [of Common Prayer], so they do in like manner bury their dead by the same book.  The priest meeting the corpse at the church stile, in white array (his ministering vesture), with a solemn song, or else reading aloud certain of their fragments of Scripture, and so carry the corpse ... to the grave, made in their holy cemetery and hallowed churchyard ... Then may then boldly proceed to cover him, whiles the priest also proceedeth to read over his holy gear and say his Pater-noster ... and his other prayers over the corpse.

This reflects Hooker's contention that the funeral rite "is a dutie which the Church doth owe to the faithfull departed" (LEP V, 75.3) contrary to Duffy's view that the BCP was merely concerned with the living. 

Rather than giving expression to the atomistic stoicism of the Enlightenment, the BCP funeral rite gathers the Church around the departed with the opening proclamation of Christocentric faith, "I am the resurrection and the life".  At the graveside, in the presence of the departed, the Church prays:

Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Amongst the prayers said over the grave, is a collect reminding us that the Church living and departed shares a common destiny and calling:

that we, with all those that are departed in the true faith of thy holy Name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul, in thy eternal and everlasting glory.

None of this is to deny that the BCP did mark a significant change from the focus of medieval practice and devotion on the pains of purgatory, a focus that was the creation of late medieval Latin theological speculation and far from the measured prayers for the departed of the patristic era. 

But nor is it the case that with the BCP funeral rite, the faithful departed are considered as having passed out from the Christian community.  The Anglican liturgy was not couched in "bleak iron language" but in the discourse of penitential hope in the Risen One through whom the Church - living and departed - shares in the victory over death.  The BCP funeral rite, in the words of Hooker, proclaims "the peculiar hope of the Church of God concerninge the dead" (V, 75.4).

Wright: let Anglicanism be Anglicanism

Tom Wright's Spectator article (not yet available online) might be regarded as somewhat low key.  There are no dramatic announcements or proposals in it.  There is no focus on the divisive issues afflicting Anglicanism.  This, however, does not detract from the quietly radical nature of Wright's agenda.

Firstly, he urges the CofE in particular, and Anglicans in general, to be Church - to recover a focus on prayer, liturgy, and a theology grounded in the Scriptural narrative:

The only way to resist being squeezed into the tired old mould of modernism or the nihilistic anything-goes world of postmodernism is through that strange combination of worship and prayer on the one hand, and biblically based theology on the other, for which the Church of England has, historically, an excellent track record.

Secondly, he proposes that the CofE regains its confidence and ability to undertake in the 21st century its historic vocation of forming the polity's understanding of the common good:

The next generation of church leaders will need to be able to be on their toes to articulate a vision of human community which our pragmatic, short-term politicians have forgotten.

In many ways, Wright is recalling Anglicanism to its classical experience of Common Prayer and establishment, re-applied to the circumstances of postmodernity.  Anglican liturgy has classically sought to ground the ecclesia in the ordered, communal reading of Scripture and the celebration of the Triune God's saving acts in the Sacraments, at once evangelical and catholic, immersed in the patristic witness.  This ancient-future, patristic emphasis was described by Cranmer as the "godly and decent order of the ancient Fathers".

The Anglican experience of establishment has flowed from and contributed to a communitarian, Aristotelian understanding of the community, which runs profoundly counter to the economic and social individualism which defines late liberal societies.  The traditional Anglican emphasis on the peace and stability of the realm has reflected Hooker's Aristotelian insistence that the polity is necessary for human flourishing, rather than being a necessary evil over which the individual takes precedence:

For as much as we are not by our selves sufficient to furnish ourselves with competent store of things needfull for such a life as our nature doth desire, a lift fit for the dignitie of man: therefore to supply those defects and imperfections, which are in us living, single, and solelie by our selves, we are naturally induced to seek communion and fellowship with others.  This was the cause of mens uniting themselves at the first in politique societies (LEP I, 10.1).

A recent example of how contemporary Anglicans can express this was seen in +Rowan's excellent contribution to the House of Lords' debate on the riots in English cities, a contribution which highlighted the catholic tradition's critique of postmodernity's individualism and untilitarianism.

Wright's article is a reminder that Anglicanism does not need to head for the lifeboats, "whether those sent across the Tiber or the homemade ones which offer a 'safe' perch for 'conservative evangelicals'".  Nor does it need to embrace a dated, modernist agenda couched in the ideologies of the 1960s rather than grounded in the Church's historic confession of the Incarnate Word.  Renewal will come when we recognise that it is time to let Anglicanism be Anglicanism. 

Is World Youth Day at Madrid or Trent?

There is much about the Roman communion's World Youth Day to celebrate.  Benedict's profound challenge to the Church's youth to respond with faith, hope and love to European secularism.  The moving symoblism of the Way of the Cross being prayed on the streets of Madrid.  The emphasis on meaningful catechesis rooted in the Tradition, which must be central to the renewal of the church in Europe.

Which is why it is bitterly disappointing to read the following on the offical WYD website, in answer to the question "The Communion service at my local Anglican or Episcopalian church seems very similar to the Catholic Mass. So why are we not worshipping together?":

Those who founded Anglicanism in the sixteenth century wanted to maintain the outward appearance of the kind of liturgy to which people had been accustomed for centuries. Similarly in modern times, an Anglican communion service often follows the general form of the Mass and may even be called a ‘Mass’. Nevertheless, Anglican liturgy differs from Catholic liturgy in subtle but important ways. For example, the Catholic priest will say before Communion, “This is the Lamb of God ...” whereas the Anglican minister will usually say, “Jesus is the Lamb of God ...”.  The reason for this change is that Anglicanism, according to its own historical articles of faith, rejects Catholic belief in transubstantiation.  Anglican liturgy therefore avoids referring to the host as the Lamb of God. Anglicanism’s Thirty-Nine Articles also deny that the Mass is a sacrifice (article 21) and that ordination is a sacrament (article 25). While there are, in fact, some Anglican ministers who believe all of these Catholic teachings, they do so by virtue of their private judgment, not the official teaching of Anglicanism. So we do not celebrate the Eucharist together because an Anglican liturgical service is not a Catholic Mass. It is also forbidden for non-Catholic Christians to receive Holy Communion at Catholic Mass for two reasons: first, because one must profess complete faith in the Real Presence of Jesus before receiving, and second, because reception of the Eucharist implies full communion with the Church, a unity with all those who gather at the altar of the Lord. As St Paul has said, “Because there is one, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). So  communion takes place with unity in faith and not without that unity.

Leave aside, for the moment, the debate over inter-communion and Eucharistic hospitality.  What is so disappointing about the above text is its pre-ARCIC account of Anglican Eucharistic theology.  It would have been entirely legitimate for the WYD site to stress that there remain ecclesiological issues which prevent a shared Eucharist between Roman Catholics and Anglicans.  But to entirely ignore the fact that the Roman and Anglican communions have - in the words of the Vatican's official response to ARCIC 1 - reached "remarkable consensus" on Eucharistic theology is staggering.  In fact, the consensus was recognised as so significant that the official response noted "no further study would seem to be required at this stage".

Not to be forgotten, of course, is Lambeth 1998's acceptance of the ARCIC I statements:

Recognises [that] the Agreed Statements of ARCIC I on Eucharistic Doctrine, Ministry and Ordination, and their Elucidations, as consonant in substance with the faith of Anglicans and believes that this agreement offers a sufficient basis for taking the next step forward towards the reconciliation of our Churches grounded in agreement in faith ... The Provinces gave a clear 'yes' to the statement on Eucharistic Doctrine ... the Agreed Statement on the Eucharist sufficiently expresses Anglican understanding.

Which should leave us wondering why exactly the WYD site refused to recognise the catholic understanding of the Eucharist shared by the Roman and Anglican communions.

A place of purification

A debt of gratitude is owed to The Conciliar Anglican for his "Ask an Anglican" series, not least modelling a serious engagement with the Thirty-Nine Articles.  The most recent posting addresses the issue of purgatory in light of Article XXII.  Noting classical Anglicanism's affirmation of the patristic prayer of prayer for the faithful departed, The Conciliar Anglican states:

As Thorndike says, “The practice of the Church in interceding for them at the Celebration of the Eucharist is so general and so ancient, that it cannot be thought to have come in upon imposture, but that the same aspersion will seem to take hold of the common Christianity.” Yet the Divines are extremely hesitant to say what the effect of these prayers is, beyond intercession to Christ for mercy upon the departed at his or her judgment. There is no indication in this practice, either in the ancient Church or in Anglicanism, that purgatory exists.

The reintroduction of a commemoration of the faithful departed in the 1662 Eucharistic rite is evidence of Anglicanism's desire to recapture a patristic dynamic that had been lost in the late medieval approach to the departed and purgatory.  Where we might take issue with The Conciliar Anglican is in the contention that the ancient Church did not have a concept of purification after death.  Augustine's Enchiridion, for example, would seem to suggest otherwise:

Nor can it be denied that the souls of the dead are benefited by the piety of their living friends, who offer the sacrifice of the Mediator or give alms in the church on their behalf (CX).

So where does this leave Anglicans and purgatory?  Article XXII's rejection of "the Romish doctrine" of purgatory reflects a host of medieval devotional practices that had little in common with patristic practice.  Lewis' in Letters to Malcolm, as an example of this, pointed to John Fisher:

Fisher, in his Sermon on Psalm VI, says the tortures are so intense that the spirit who suffers them cannot, for pain, "remember God as he ought to do" ... [Lewis continues] It is a place not of purification but purely of punishment. 

It is this approach to purgatory - as The Conciliar Anglican states - that the Articles (thankfully) exclude.  Article XXII does, therefore, leave open other possibilities, such as that proposed by Lewis.  Perhaps also worth noting are Tom Wright's comments in his review of Benedict XVI's encyclical Spe Salvi:

Anyone familiar with the origins of the European Reformation will be fascinated by Benedict’s rejection ... of the late mediaeval idea of purgatory as a chronologically extended period. Instead, drawing on 1 Corinthians 3, we find that it is the encounter with Christ himself that is ‘the decisive act of judgment’, and that indeed ‘our defilement . . . has already been burned away through Christ’s passion’. The power and pain of Christ’s love meets us in ‘a transforming moment’ of judgment and salvation. Several questions remain in the way Benedict works this out; but if a Pope had said this loud and clear in Germany in, say, 1517, the entire course of European history would have been different.

There has been some debate over Wright's analysis of Benedict on this point, so it is worth considering the words of Spe Salvi:

Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves ... Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God ... if “Purgatory” is simply purification through fire in the encounter with the Lord, Judge and Saviour, how can a third person intervene, even if he or she is particularly close to the other? When we ask such a question, we should recall that no man is an island, entire of itself. Our lives are involved with one another, through innumerable interactions they are linked together. No one lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone (47 & 48).

There can be little doubt that with these words we have travelled a great distance from Fisher's understanding of purgatory and - potentially - closer to a view that is compatible with Article XXII.  The believer's purifying encounter with the Cross of Christ, where grace and judgment meet, continues after death until fulfilment in the beatific vision.  It is on this basis that the Church, above all at the Eucharist, intercedes for the faithful departed. 

The Covenant and the ecclesial vocation of the Anglican theologian

The United Church of Canada is not what you might call a bastion of Nicene orthodoxy.  The extent to which this is not the case is illustrated in a story carried by The Living Church about the top 25 theologians favoured by United Church clergy.  8 of the 25 are Anglicans.  Top of the list is the Jesus Seminar's Marcus Borg.  At the very bottom of the list, the orthodox Tom Wright.  Ahead of Wright is - wait for it - Matthew Fox.

It does get you thinking about the ecclesial vocation and responsibility of theologians.  A church whose clergy are shaped by the thinking of Borg and Fox will be a church like the United Church of Canada.  Or, in the words of a recent Moderator of the United Church, "I don’t believe Jesus was God, but I’m no theologian".

That Anglican theologians (predictably, Spong is also on the list) should have contributed to the rejection of orthodoxy by a significant denomination should be a matter of shame for those of us who are Anglicans.  Words recently spoken by Fr. Thomas Weinandy, executive director of the Secretariat for Doctrine at the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops’ conference, are relevant:

Theologians can be a “curse and affliction upon the church,” according to the U.S. bishops’ top official on doctrine, if their work is not grounded in church teaching and an active faith life, and ends up promoting “doctrinal and moral error.”

Weinandy's words do, of course, indicate that the problem is far from being exclusive to Anglicans.  The Roman Communion, however, has the means to indicate that a theologian's work is not building up the Body of Christ.  This happened recently with the US bishops' conference stating that Sister Elizabeth Johnson's Quest for the Living God departed from from the faith of the Church.

Needless to say, no similar mechanism exists within Anglicanism.  And perhaps we should not be too keen to emulate the Roman model.  It was, after all, less than a century ago that De Lubac and Balthasar - two theologians central to the contemporary renewal of catholicism, both Roman and Anglican - were similarly condemned by Roman authorities.  That said, there surely must be an alternative to the present free-for-all within Anglican theology, the end result of which can be seen in the United Church of Canada.

The Covenant perhaps offers a way forward here.  In 1.2.4, the Covenant affirms the significance of "the results of rigorous study by lay and ordained scholars" to the Church's witness.  Importantly, however, this is placed in the context of the Communion ensuring that its witness accords with Scripture and Tradition:

(1.2.1) to teach and act in continuity and consonance with Scripture and the catholic and apostolic faith, order and tradition, as received by the Churches of the Anglican Communion, mindful of the common councils of the Communion and our ecumenical agreements.

(1.2.2) to uphold and proclaim a pattern of Christian theological and moral reasoning and discipline that is rooted in and answerable to the teaching of Holy Scripture and the catholic tradition.

If the "results of rigorous study by lay and ordained scholars" are to contribute to the Communion's witness, such study must be shaped and formed by the commitments of 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.  Anglicans are free to pursue theological study outside of these commitments - but it cannot be deemed to be Anglican theology nor can it regard itself or be regarded by others as making a contribution to the Church's discernment of the mind of Christ. 

In addition to deepening Anglicanism's understanding of the Church as Communion, the Covenant therefore also holds out the possibility of the renewal of the ecclesial vocation of the Anglican theologian.  In such a scenario, we can hope for Anglicanism's attentiveness to the Tradition to be enhanced by the prayerful study of future O'Donovans, Wrights and Milbanks, rather than be distracted by the heterodoxies of the successors to Borg and Fox.

The Bard and the Anglican Settlement

An interesting follow-up to the Dean of York Minster's defence of the Anglican settlement.  Catholic Herald columnist Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith, praising a new production of All's Well that Ends Well, urges scepticism regarding the fashionable theory that Shakespeare was a recusant:

Though, we have no way of knowing one way or the other. I reckon that Shakespeare was at the very least sympathetic to the old ways of Catholicism, as many Elizabethans must have been. But there is really no evidence of a Catholic faith, though there may be some sympathy with Catholic ideas ...  It is understandable that some may wish to claim the national poet for the faith, but it seems to me little more than wishful thinking.

For a Roman Catholic commentator to pour cold water on the theory is notable.  The theory is so fashionable that +Rowan came close (but only close) to endorsing it at this year's Hay Festival:

I don't think it tells us a great deal, to settle whether he was a Catholic or a Protestant, but for what it's worth I think he probably had a Catholic background and a lot of Catholic friends and associates.

Part of the apparent strength of the argument for Shakespeare's allegiance to 'the old religion' is a refusal to recognise the elements of continuity in the Elizabethan Settlement.  Even Eamon Duffy - hardly sympathetic to Anglicanism - concludes his profoundly moving study of the village of Morebath with a recognition of such continuity:

Elizabeth was a sincere Protestant, but she had none of her brother's precocious reforming zeal, and in her reign some of the deep rhythms of pre-Reformation religion, outlawed or suspected under Edward, were allowed to reassert themselves.

Duffy goes on to acknowledge that the conformity of Morebath's parish priest had a theological integrity:

That such a man could come to place so high a premium on preaching, and to see in the worship of the Prayer Book the 'decent Rits of the church of Christ' is a reminder that sharp distinctions between Catholic and Protestant, traditionalist and reformed, may look more straightforward and clear-cut to the historian than they did to those immersed in the press of events.

One result of a belief in "sharp distinctions" and a refusal to recognise the "deep rhythms" of continuity in the Elizabethan Settlement is a misreading of Shakespeare.  Take, for example, the words of the ghost of Hamlet's father:

Thus was I sleeping by a brother's hand
Of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched,
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,
No reck'ning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
I, v, ll. 74-79.

To die "unhouseled" (without receiving the Holy Eucharist) and without "reck'ning made" (without private confession to a priest) obviously recalls pre-Reformation practice.  What is significant, however, is that the 1559 Book of Common Prayer continued such practices.  The order for The Communion of the Sick recognised that sick persons are "disquieted for lack" of receiving "the holy Communion of the body and blood of our Saviour Christ".  The Order for the Visitacion of the Sicke declared that "Here shall the sicke persone make a speciall confession, if he feele hys conscience troubled with any weighty matter. After whiche confession the priest shall absolve him" (using the pre-Reformation form of absolution).  In his defence of the Elizabethan Settlement, Richard Hooker also noted that Anglicanism retained private confession "for the comfort of such as are readie to depart the World".

Shakespeare did not need recusant sympathies to invoke the image of a dying person receiving the holy Eucharist and confessing to a priest.  The Elizabethan Settlement provided for such practices, an example of what Duffy terms the "deep rhythms" of continuity inherent in Anglicanism.  That we consider the Bard a closet papal catholic for referring to such piety is an unfortunate example of how we have forgotten an essential aspect of the catholic and reformed Anglican identity.

York Minster and the Anglican claim to continuity

In the course of a recent Catholic Herald column attacking entry charges for York Minster, William Oddie indulged in ultramontane triumphalism:

I have had this problem before, getting into Anglican cathedrals built by the Catholic Church and purloined at the Reformation.

In this week's Herald, the Dean of York Minster - the Very Rev Keith Jones - responds to Oddie and in doing so articulates a generous but appropriately robust Anglican vision of the English Church's historic relationship with both the English people and the See of Rome:

Then there is his charge of the Minster being “purloined” at the Reformation. As an expression of hard-line opinion he is entitled to utter it, but for those Christians who hope and pray for better it is crude and hopeless. For the record, our Anglican view is that York Minster is the product and expression of English Christianity, and belongs now as always to the people of England under their lawful sovereign. The Dean and Chapter maintain and administer it for them by the same law of the land.

The relationship of the Church of England with the see of Rome has varied in form considerably over the centuries; however, we do not believe that the Church of this land is constituted by our recognition of the jurisdiction of the Pope and we hold to the hope of a union of the Churches in which we can belong together again, the honour (and even primacy) of the Roman see being appropriately recognised.

There is a pressing need for such confident statements of Anglicanism's historic claim to catholicity, not least in the face of the impact of recent historiographical revisionism (Duffy et al), the claims of the Ordinariate, and the present crisis afflicting the Communion.  York Minster and the other great cathedrals of England - and across the British Isles - are an outward and visible sign of Anglicanism's claim to continuity with the pre-Reformation Church, a Church in which the relationship between monarch, pope and people was quite unlike that experienced amidst the Baroque triumphalism of Tridentine papal Catholicism.  The Anglican experience of catholicity surely has a greater claim to such continuity than does 19th century ultramontane triumphalism.

"Grant that we ... may share with her": Anglican collects for 15th August

Many Anglicans across the Communion will have celebrated today's feast of the Blessed Virgin.  The terminology employed to describe the feast will have differed.  Most (if not all) Anglo-Catholic parishes are today explicitly celebrating "the Assumption".  Anglican liturgical calendars, however, hit a slightly more restrained note.  The calendar of the Church of England describes today as "The Blessed Virgin Mary", TEC as "Saint Mary the Virgin", SEC as "Mary the Virgin".

Despite the differences in terminology, Anglicans will have prayed today in a very similar manner.  Bosco has highlighted the common language of the collect used by various provinces for 15th August.  The CofE's Common Worship is typical:

Almighty God,
who looked upon the lowliness of the Blessed Virgin Mary
and chose her to be the mother of your only Son:
grant that we who are redeemed by his blood
may share with her in the glory of your eternal kingdom;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

TEC's BCP 1979, as Bosco notes, has slightly "stronger" Assumption/Dormition wording:

O God, you have taken to yourself the blessed Virgin Mary,
mother of your incarnate Son: Grant that we, who have been
redeemed by his blood, may share with her the glory of your
eternal kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives
and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God,
now and for ever.

What appears to common across the Communion, however, is the central petition of such collects:

grant that we who are redeemed by his blood
may share with her in the glory of your eternal kingdom.

This petition accords with the declaration of the ARCIC II Seattle Statement - "we can affirm together the teaching that God has taken the Blessed Virgin Mary in the fullness of her person into his glory".  What is more, the genealogy of the collect emphasises that what Anglicans are here celebrating is precisely what ARCIC articulated.  The wording of the collect now used almost universally across the Communion for 15th August derives from the provision in the Scottish Prayer Book 1929 for what it describes as the "Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary":

O God, who as on this day didst take to thyself the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of thy Son: Grant that we who have been redeemed by his blood, may share with her the glory of thy eternal kingdom; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, ever one God, world without end.

The Scottish 1929 provision for the feast of the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin, therefore, has provided Anglicans with their central petition on this day.  The original intent of the language of the collect is to celebrate, on the day our Roman brethren celebrate the Assumption and the Orthodox the Dormition, the Blessed Virgin sharing in the glory of her Risen Son's kingdom.

A very few Anglican provinces remain fearful of celebrating the Tradition's affirmations concerning the Blessed Virgin.  Amongst these, unfortunately, is Ireland.  All, however, is not lost.  The CofI collect for the feast of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary (8th September) is, ironically, the same collect - with the same affirmation of the Tradition - used by most Anglicans on 15th August!

Hope, grace and the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin

On the eve of the Feast of the Dormition, words from ARCIC II's Seattle Statement Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (2005):

The pattern of hope and grace already foreshadowed in Mary will be fulfilled in the new creation in Christ when all the redeemed will participate in the full glory of the Lord (cf. 2 Corinthians 3:18 ). Christian experience of communion with God in this present life is a sign and foretaste of divine grace and glory, a hope shared with the whole of creation (Romans 8:18 -23). The individual believer and the Church find their consummation in the new Jerusalem, the holy bride of Christ (cf. Revelation 21:2, Ephesians 5:27 ). When Christians from East and West through the generations have pondered God’s work in Mary, they have discerned in faith that it is fitting that the Lord gathered her wholly to himself: in Christ, she is already a new creation in whom “the old has passed away and the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Viewed from such an eschatological perspective, Mary may be seen both as a type of the Church, and as a disciple with a special place in the economy of salvation ...

Given the understanding we have reached concerning the place of Mary in the economy of hope and grace, we can affirm together the teaching that God has taken the Blessed Virgin Mary in the fullness of her person into his glory as consonant with Scripture and that it can, indeed, only be understood in the light of Scripture (57-58).

Taylor's grove of peace

A short distance from my home are the ruins of the church in which Jeremy Taylor ministered during the latter years of the Commonwealth era, between 1658 and 1660.  Taylor, after he became bishop of the diocese at the Restoration, constructed a new parish church to replace the somewhat run-down ancient building.  But it was in what are now ruins at Portmore that Taylor ministered according to the rites and liturgy of the Anglican tradition, attracting the unwelcome attention of the authorities. 

Mentioned in official records from 1306, there is now little left of the old church apart from the ivy-covered east and west walls.  Today, after reading the Ante-Communion with the propers for Jeremy Taylor amidst the ruins, I took this picture of what would have been the window in the east wall.

Here was Taylor's grove of peace during turbulent times, when the Anglican future seemed - at best - radically uncertain.  Alongside his contribution to the Laudian recovery of a patristic catholicity (see, for example, his On the Reverence due to the Altar), Taylor's contemporary significance perhaps most lies in what he did in that little, ancient church during those years of conflict and persecution - administering Word and Sacrament according to the Anglican tradition, in light of the teaching of the Church of the Fathers.

Almighty God,
your servant Jeremy Taylor found in Ireland

a grove of peace in time of conflict

before being called to be a bishop to bring order at a time of reconstruction:

Grant that we who give thanks for his holy life and legacy

may be strengthened by your Spirit in holy living and for holy dying;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

(The Church of Ireland collect for the feast of Jeremy Taylor.)

Jeremy Taylor and the Church Catholic

On the feast of Jeremy Taylor, extracts from the Rules and Advices he gave to the clergy of his diocese of Down and Connor:

Every Minister ought to be careful that he never expound Scriptures in publick contrary to the known sence of the Catholick Church, and particularly of the Churches of England and Ireland, nor introduce any Doctrine against any of the four first General Councils; for these, as they are measures of truth, so also of necessity; that is, as they are safe, so they are sufficient; and besides what is taught by these, no matter of belief is necessary to salvation ...

Let every Preacher in his Parish take care to explicate to the people the Mysteries of the great Festivals, as of Christmas, Easter, Ascension-day, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, the Annunciation of the blessed Virgin Mary; because these Feasts containing in them the great Fundamentals of our Faith, will with most advantage convey the mysteries to the people, and fix them in their memories, by the solemnity and circumstances of the day ...

Let every Minister exhort and press the people to a devout and periodical Communion, at the least three times in the year, at the great Festivals: but the devouter sort, and they who have leisure, are to be invited to a frequent Communion: and let it be given and received with great reverence ...

Every Minister ought to be well skill'd and studied in saying his Office, in the Rubricks, the Canons, the Articles, and the Homilies of the Church, that he may do his duty readily, discreetly, gravely, and by the publick measures of the Laws. To which also it is very useful that it be added, that every Minister study the ancient Canons of the Church, especially the Penitentials of the Eastern and Western Churches: let him read good Books, such as are approved by publick authority; such which are useful, wise and holy; not the scriblings of unlearned parties, but of men learned, pious, obedient and disinterested; and amongst these, such especially which describe duty and good life, which minister to Faith and Charity, to Piety and Devotion; Cases of Conscience, and solid expositions of Scripture. Concerning which learned and wise persons are to be consulted.

All may, none must, some should ... very few do?

The place which sacramental confession should have in Anglicanism is admirably explored by The Conciliar Anglican in a recent posting:

As with so many other things that we find in Anglican theology, the key to understanding Confession is scriptural and patristic. Scripture gives no requirement for private Confession, so neither does the Church. Yet Scripture does offer a ministry of Absolution, carried out by the apostles and their successors, and so it is imperative that the Church make provision for the carrying out of this ministry.

While the Anglican Reformation did critique late medieval practice regarding sacramental confession - what Hooker termed "these inconveniences, which the world hath by experience observed" (LEP VI, 4.15) - the retention of the discipline is abundantly clear (not least by the BCP's retention of the medieval form of private absolution).  Hooker emphasised how a "speciall caution" encouraging sacramental confession was given "for the admonition of such as come to the holy Sacrament, and for the comfort of such as are readie to depart the World". 

Alongside this Hooker also clearly envisaged a wider pastoral role for sacramental confession:

It hath pleased Almightie God in tender commiseration over these imbecilities of men, to ordeine for their spirituall and ghostly comfort, consecrated persons, which by sentence of power and authoritie given from above, may as it were out of his verie mouth ascertaine timorous and doubtfull minds in their owne particular, ease them of all their scrupulosities, leave them settled in peace and satisfyed touching the mercie of God towards them.  To use the benefitt of his helpe for our better satisfaction in such cases, is soe naturall, that it can bee forbidden noe man: butt yet not soe necessarie, that all men should bee in case to neede it (LEP, VI, 6.18).

It is in light of this that the mantra 'all may, none must, some should' requires critique.  Conventional Anglican pastoral practice has forgotten Hooker's "speciall caution" and "spirituall and ghostly comfort" to the extent that sacramental confession plays no part in the experience of the vast majority of Anglican communities.  Anglicanism is not alone in this.  In 1984 John Paul II explicitly declared of the situation in the Roman communion:

The sacrament of penance is in crisis ... It is good to renew and reaffirm this faith [in sacramental confession] at a moment when it might be weakening, losing something of its completeness or entering into an area of shadow and silence, threatened as it is by the negative elements of the above-mentioned crisis.

Sharing in this crisis, how can Anglican communities recover a theological vision and pastoral practice in which sacramental confession is a normative discipline for those specifically referred to by Hooker - those who regularly receive the Holy Eucharist, those gravely ill and those with "timorous and doubtfull minds in their owne particular"?

Perhaps three means can be initially suggested.  Firstly, there is a need for specific Anglican communities to model how sacramental confession can be a living, hope-filled pastoral reality significantly contributing to the formation of disciples in an Anglican context.  Secondly, the development of catechetical materials promoting an Anglican understanding of sacramental confession.  It is worth noting that the Global South's Anglican Catechism In Outline pointed to the practice of catechesis in the Diocese of Kuching, South East Asia:

Though the Sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion are the two sacraments considered 'necessary for salvation', the other five sacraments of the Church are also taught.

Finally, there is a profound need for a renewed Anglican theological reflection on sacramental confession as an expression of the Church's communion in the life of the Triune God.  The ARCIC II statement Life in Christ: Morals, Communion and the Church, in the section addressing the common Anglican-Roman heritage on "growing up into Christ", provided an outline for considering the role of sacramental confession:

The fidelity of the Church to the mind of Christ involves a continuing process of listening, learning, reflecting and teaching. In this process every member of the community has a part to play. Each person learns to reflect and act according to conscience. Conscience is informed by, and informs, the tradition and teaching of the community. Learning and teaching are a shared discipline, in which the faithful seek to discover together what obedience to the gospel of grace and the law of love entails amidst the moral perplexities of the world. It is this task of discovering the moral implications of the Gospel which calls for continuing discernment, constant repentance and "renewal of the mind" (Rm 12:2), so that through discernment and response men and women may become what in Christ they already are (29).

It is in this context, Life in Christ states, that the Anglican formularies regard sacramental confession is "a wholesome means of grace" (46). 

For some of us (and I speak here particularly for myself), the absence of sacramental confession from our discipline allows for a conformity to the powers of this world to go unchallenged by the call to metanoia that confronts and transforms through sacramental confession.  All may, none must, many of us should.

The Wound which gives life

The theological richness of the catholic tradition's reflections on the blood and water pouring forth from the pierced side of the Crucified One is perhaps exemplified in Augustine's words:

Then came the soldiers, and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who was crucified with Him. But when they came to Jesus, and saw that He was dead already, they broke not His legs: but one of the soldiers with a spear laid open His side, and immediately came there out blood and water. A suggestive word was made use of by the evangelist, in not saying pierced, or wounded His side, or anything else, but opened; that thereby, in a sense, the gate of life might be thrown open, from whence have flowed forth the sacraments of the Church, without which there is no entrance to the life which is the true life.  That blood was shed for the remission of sins; that water it is that makes up the health-giving cup, and supplies at once the laver of baptism and water for drinking (Tractate 120, 2).

Augustine, in a common patristic exegesis, identifies the water and blood with (respectively) the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist.  Balthasar captures this patristic emphasis with his commentary in Mysterium Paschale:

In the context of the Johannine symbolism at large, it can hardly be doubted that John saw in the flowing forth of blood and water the institutions of the sacraments of Eucharist and Baptism.

What is particularly noteworthy is the emphasis given by the patristic witness and reflected by Balthasar to these two Sacraments - Baptism and Eucharist.  It is also precisely the emphasis given by Richard Hooker in his reflection on pierced side of the Crucified One in the midst of his discussion of the sacramental economy:

The Church is in Christ as Eve was in Adam.  Yea by grace we are everie of us in Christ and his Church, as by nature wee are in those our first parentes.  God made Eve of the ribbe of Adam.  And his Church he frameth out of the verie flesh, the verie wounded and bleedinge side of the Sonne of man.  His bodie crucified and his blood shed for the life of the world, are the true elements of that heavenlie beinge, which maketh us such as him selfe is of whome wee com.  For which cause the wordes of Adam may be fitlie the wordes of Christ concerninge his Church, 'Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones' (LEP V, 56.7).

Here we see something of the Anglican insistence that these two Sacraments have a particular priority in the Church's life.  Perhaps we can say more.  It is these two Sacraments which give life to the Church.  To again quote Hooker:

Wee receive Christ Jesus in baptisme once as the first beginner, in the Eucharist often as beinge by continewall degrees the finisher of our life (V, 57.6).

In this context, then, we can perhaps have a greater understanding of why the Anglican formularies at the Reformation - while not denying the sacramental nature of Orders, Matrimony, Reconcilation, Anointing and Confirmation - emphasised the centrality of the two Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Eucharist.  According to the patristic witness, it is these two Sacraments, pouring forth from the pierced side of the Crucified One, which give life to the Church.  In the words of Balthasar:

What shows forth the inner inclusiveness [of the Cross] is the open heart our of which is communicated what is ultimate in Jesus' substance: blood and water, the sacraments of the Church ... The opening of the heart is the gift of what is most interior and personal for public use: the open, emptied out space is accessible to all.

Augustinians of the world unite

Amidst turmoil in the world markets, Anglican Down Under asks what a theological response should be:

Theologically I wonder if God has any interest in saving the world economy. The stronger the global economy the more we entrust our lives to building up wealth, to acquiring possessions, and to aiming to get ahead in life as measured by increasing income. Nothing in the gospels is more anti-kingdom than Mammon!

Surely the Christian tradition does have an interest "in saving the world economy" - not in the sense of merely restoring the prevailing economic paradigm but in seeing the global economy re-ordered away from the  individualism, consumerism and materialism of late modernity.  Grace, after all, does not destroy nature and the marketplace is a part of the nature of our existence.  As +Rowan has stated:

The point doesn't need to be laboured.  Monetary exchange is simply one of the things people do.  It can be carried out well or badly, honestly or dishonestly, generously or meanly.  It is one of the areas of life in which our decisions show who we are ... Economic exchange is one of the things people do.

+Rowan's emphasis throughout the economic crisis has been the need to rethink how we do economic exchange: what values shape the marketplace?  We could go further.  We could ask 'what theology shapes the marketplace?'  William Cavanaugh, from the Radical Orthodoxy school, has pointed to the "quasi-Gnostic tendencies" present in economic discourse and practice:

From a spiritual point of view, what we are seeing here is an aspiration to freedom, understood negatively as freedom from obligation to others. The kind of relationships of dependence that limit human freedom, the necessity of community and reliance upon others, the stasis of an economy restricted to local, face-to-face encounters - these are seen as outmoded remnants of the economies of traditional societies and have no place in the contemporary economy.

I have concentrated thus far on the most recent crisis of "financialisation," but the quasi-Gnostic tendencies that I have identified - the various forms of this longing to transcend the limitations of the material world - have been aspirations of the prevailing economic system for much of the twentieth century.

To this extent, we could affirm John Milbank's assertion that "capitalism is to be regarded as a Christian heresy", refuted by the Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection - the material order, the market-place included, is not an illusion and should be shaped by the love and mutuality revealed in Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection.

In light of this, it is Augustine who can provide the Christian tradition with its response to the economic crisis.  In light of the Christian revelation, Augustine re-defined Cicero's statement that a community is "united in association by a common sense of right and a community of interest".  Rather, according to The City of God:

A people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love.

As O'Donovan's excellent study explores, "community has its roots in evalutations that we form and hold together, the common objects of love":

The loves of some communities attach to concrete material goods as mediations of spiritual realities.  Materialism, for Augustine, is the paradigm of the lying love, attached to real goods and yet untrue, since it misconceives the significance of those goods within reality as a whole.

The capitalists of the world have nothing to lose but their wealth.  The neo-Marxists, their perceived chains.  The Augustinians, our inordinate loves which have shaped and defined the marketplace.

When a creed is not the Creed

The Creedal Christian's critique of an 'Affirmation of Faith' used at a service of Morning Prayer is well worth reading.  The section of the Affirmation on the Incarnate Word is something less than what (in fact, Who) is proclaimed in the orthodox creeds:

We believe in Jesus Christ,
who lived as a friend and savior to all he met
as he traveled the countryside,
who ate and laughed,
wept and celebrated with people in all walks of life.

As the Creedal Christian indicates, this is not the Christ of the Christian narrative:

The section about Jesus reveals the most about this "Affirmation of Faith" precisely by what it does not affirm. For starters, it speaks of Jesus only in the past tense. That makes sense, because there's nothing here about the Resurrection (not even in a watered-down, "spiritual" sense). Also missing are any affirmations of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Crucifixion, the Ascension, the Second Coming, and the Final Judgment. All of which begs the question: why Jesus and not some other prophetic figure from the past?

The desire for alternatives to the three orthodox creeds appears to be a prevalent trend in liturgies providing 'new patterns' for Services of the Word and 'All-Age services'.  For example, the CofE's Common Worship, includes an 'authorised Affirmation of Faith' with the following reference to the Incarnate Word:

We believe in God the Son,
who lives in our hearts through faith,
and fills us with his love.

Well, I say it is a reference to the Incarnate Word ... of course, it makes no reference whatsoever to God the Son becoming Incarnate.  The Creedal Christian's critique similarly applies here - no Incarnation, no Cross, no Resurrection.  And this, recall, is an 'authorised Affirmation of Faith' to be used in place of one of the orthodox creeds.  In the words of the relevant Common Worship rubric:

In addition to the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed and the Athanasian Creed, these Affirmations of Faith are also authorized.

Another alternative provided by Common Worship is somewhat deceptive:

Do you believe and trust in God the Son,
who took our human nature,
died for us and rose again?
All: We believe and trust in him.

Here we do appear to have reference - admittedly in barest outline - to the Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection.  What is missing, however, are the affirmations contained in the orthodox creeds which proclaim the particularity of the Incarnation and the Passion:

And was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary ...
And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate ...
And on the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.

The Common Worship variant just quoted reduces the Christian narrative to ahistorical abstractions.  The Nicene Creed proclaims a particular narrative in which and through which the Triune God is revealed.

Things get no better when Common Worship produces yet another alternative - also popular in Services of the Word and 'All-Age services':

Christ died for our sins
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he was buried;
he was raised to life on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures;
afterwards he appeared to his followers,
and to all the apostles:
this we have received,
and this we believe.
Amen.

They are, of course, St Paul's words from 1 Cor. 15.  Isn't there something profoundly evangelical about using such words as a creedal statement?  No - there isn't.  The attempt to get 'behind' the orthodox creeds to more primitive formulations is not only a defining characteristic of the Liberal Protestant mindset.  It was also Arius' methodology.

Homoousion, as Arius and his followers never tired of pointing out, was not a phrase found in Scripture.  Rowan Williams' now classic study of Arius has demonstrated that Arius' flaw was his 'primitivism'.  And the same error of 'primitivism' animates the use of words from 1 Cor. 15 in place of the orthodox creeds.  Whereas the Nicene Creed's proclamation that the Son is "of one substance with the Father" enables the Church to rightly read Scripture, replacing the Nicene Creed with a more 'primitive' affirmation removes this insight and potentially leads to a situation where it does not guide the Church's reading of Scripture.

The popularity of such 'alternative Affirmations of Faith' in the non-eucharistic liturgies that are now common-place, particularly in many evangelical and charismatic Anglican parishes in the British Isles, is - ironically - the fulfilment of the 18th century Latitudinarian and Deist ambition: to remove the orthodox Creeds from Anglican liturgy, 'sanitising' the liturgy according to Enlightenment principles.  For Anglicans wishing to see our Communion renewed in the riches of the Tradition's Trinitarian and Christological faith, a meaningful alternative should be offered: deep catechesis and liturgical formation based on the orthodox creeds.

The hope of the Transfiguration

The Lord displays His glory, therefore, before chosen witnesses, and invests that bodily shape which He shared with others with such splendour, that His face was like the sun's brightness and His garments equalled the whiteness of snow ...

With no less foresight, the foundation was laid of the Holy Church's hope, that the whole body of Christ might realize the character of the change which it would have to receive, and that the members might promise themselves a share in that honour which had already shone forth in their Head.

From St Leo the Great's homily on the Transfiguration.