Advent hope and Communion

Perhaps our present debates and divisions in the Communion are a form of exile - a time, as Andrew Jones says in Pilgrimage, "of crisis out of which emerged an amazing process of theological reflection".  But in the midst of our exile, we also see signs of Advent hope.

The recent statement of the Provincial Synod of the Episcopal Church of Sudan spoke into a situation of conflict and division:


The ECS will remain a beacon of the hope of Jesus Christ so that the people of Sudan and South Sudan, traumatised by decades of devastating civil war, recognise the renaissance of their time and the hope of this new beginning.

The Winter 2011/12 edition of the magazine of the Jerusalem and the Middle East Church Association carries an account and photographs of the ordination as priest of Fr Faiz Jerjes in Baghdad in September (pictured above), the first Iraqi Anglican priest to serve St George's, Baghdad.

While the Communion's debates and divisions may preoccupy the thoughts of many us in the Anglican blogsphere, the global economic crisis is - unsurprisingly - the focus for most of our fellow-citizens in the developed world.  +Mark Sisk of New York, however, has demonstrated Anglicanism's ability to see beyond a preoccupation with our own agendas, articulating the Church's proclamation in the market-place of the contemporary economy:


There can be little doubt that capitalism is a productive way to order economic life. But we need to remember, as the protestors have reminded us, that that is all that it is -- an economic system based on the entirely reasonable propositions that capital has value, and that supply and demand are the most efficient way to set prices. Capitalism is of no help at all in determining what is morally good -- that is something that must instead be determined by the community's wider values.

And there should be no question that when an economic system fails to reflect those communal values, it should be modified and governed until it does. To say, as some do, that any attempt to control or guide our economic system is neither wise nor possible is to admit that an economic system has decisive control of our lives. For a Christian, such an admission would be nothing less than to yield to idolatry.

There are signs of Advent hope in the Communion. 

A dangerous season ... and not just for the 1%

Via The Huffington Post, Matthew L. Skinner explores why "Advent is dangerous":

The impulses behind Advent should alarm those who are overly enamored with the current system (who probably number more than 1 percent), as well as any others who are overly confident in their ability to engineer what's best for the world.


Advent expresses the insistence that all is not right in our societies. That's a dangerous expression. Stoking hopes for a new world order, for justice really to be for all, usually implies that old systems, governments and loyalties aren't what they're cracked up to be.


Notice: The transformation anticipated in Mark 13:24-37 is such a monumental and all-encompassing upheaval, its description must resort to symbolism. The symbolism is unnerving, even though it was familiar to ancient audiences. It suggests that, in the face of the God's desires coming to full fruition, every other power (symbolized by sun, moon and stars) receives notice and sees its light go out. No aspect of human existence goes untransformed when God enters in for good.


The claims of Advent should rattle all who benefit from exploitative and domineering forms of power. This means a lot of us, of course.

Eve of Advent

He will come like last leaf's fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud's folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Rowan Williams Advent Calendar.

Time before Advent: "not lost but fulfilled"

From the reading for the Friday before Advent Sunday - taken from Michael Ramsey's The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ - provided in Celebrating The Seasons:


The end is a new creation, forged from out of the broken pieces of a fallen creation, filled with glory and giving glory to its Maker ... the hope of the resurrection of the body, when the body of our low estate is transformed into the body of Christ's glory, is the reminder of our kinship with the created world which the God of glory will redeem in a new world wherein the old is not lost but fulfilled.

Fulcrum listens

Fulcrum has published an anonymous reflection by a gay evangelical Anglican priest.  It exemplifies the respectful dialogue that should be occurring within the Communion.  As Fulcrum states:


Fulcrum has always supported the church’s traditional stance on homosexual relationships and our position on this has not changed. However, as on other subjects, we want to encourage careful listening to other perspectives in order to make a more thoughtful response to homosexuality. The article below, which has been submitted to us, presents a thoughtful challenge to the traditional view and Fulcrum is happy to publish it in the spirit of careful listening and dialogue.


The reflection itself addresses the issue of how we read Scripture:


Because I am an evangelical – and therefore committed to the supreme authority of the Bible – it is important to me that the Bible forms my opinions about what it is to be gay. But I cannot pretend to be straight when I read the Bible, and that means I read the text through a lens which is subtly different to the lens through which a straight man, or a woman, will read the Bible. That diversity is not a problem: it is a gift to the Church, and it helps us to see what the author is really saying. An example might help. In 1 Corinthians 7, the apostle Paul is concerned about ‘cases of sexual immorality’, and, therefore, recommends that if unmarried people ‘are not practising self-control, they should marry.’ His explanation is that ‘it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion’. The teaching here is very practical: the apostle sees a problem, and recommends, ‘by way of concession’,  a solution. Paul’s concern throughout 1 Corinthians is for the mission of the whole body of Christ, and it is no different here. I find it impossible to imagine Paul saying ‘It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion, unless you are gay, in which case it is better to be aflame with passion and, therefore, not a very effective participant in God’s mission to his world.’ That would undermine Paul’s whole argument. But it is the implication of traditional evangelical readings of 1 Corinthians 7.


No, it doesn't answer all the questions that the Church must address in considering same-sex partnerships in the light of Scripture.  It does, however, demonstrate that to which Lambeth 1.10 calls us: "we commit ourselves to listen to the experience of homosexual persons".  So thank you to Fulcrum for providing a platform for this "thoughtful challenge".


(From the Fulcrum site: "The picture accompanying the article is a representation of Jacob wrestling with God.  It is intended to represent the wrestling that we all do, with God and with Scripture, in our walk with God.")

Grace, the broken society and greed is good

From +Rowan's speech at the launch of UK Inter Faith Week - a reminder of the social nature of grace and the Church's mission after a generation of the Right's economic libertarianism and the Left's social libertarianism:

I believe very strongly that is a society which needs desperately to recover a sense of belonging. There are far too many people in our society who feel they have no stake in the public life of this country. The tragic disturbances in our cities in the summer showed how many such people there are around. Overcoming that is not just a matter of offering more material goods; it is, I believe, a matter of recovering a sense that there are relationships that we don't have to earn. There is grace, in fact - to use a nakedly religious word – there is grace available for people. They are able to belong.

ARCIC: a forgotten gift?

The co-chairs of ARCIC III this week declared their "sense of optimism" as they announced that the next meeting of the Commission will take place in Hong Kong in May 2012.  That sense of optimism, however, has some significant hurdles to overcome.  No, not just the ethical and ecclesiological differences between (and in) both Communions.  There is also the fact that the achievements of the ARCIC process are not shaping opinion within the Communions.


Two responses to +London's recent pastoral letter on the Eucharist illustrate this. Over at the Catholic Herald, columnist Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith took exception to +London's statement that ARCIC witnessed to "a good deal of common ground" between Canterbury and Rome on the Eucharist, what he goes on to describe as a "convergence of eucharistic doctrine and rites".  Not so, says Fr Lucie-Smith:


The Bishop refers to “a convergence of eucharistic doctrine and rites” between Anglicans and Catholics, but he gives no evidence for this optimistic view ... there has been no substantial convergence, even if there may have been some accidental ones.


This, despite the fact that Lambeth 1988 stated that "the provinces gave a clear 'yes' to the Statement on Eucharistic Doctrine" and "that the Agreed Statement on the Eucharist sufficiently expresses Anglican understanding" (Resolution 8).  And as for the Vatican's official response to the ARCIC statement on the Eucharist - it referred to "remarkable consensus".  (Take note, Fr. Lucie-Smith.)


Meanwhile, over at Thinking Anglicans, some took exception to +London's statement that the Bishop of Rome is "undeniably Patriarch of the West":


Bishop Chartres, *I* do not have a "Patriarch": West, East, North or South. That's why I'm an *Anglican/Episcopalian*, not a Roman or Constantinopolitan!


It takes a particularly ahistorical understanding of Anglicanism to believe that Anglicans deny a primacy of honour to the ancient patriarchal see of the West, the see of the apostles Peter and Paul.  Indeed, it was commonplace amongst 17th century Anglican apologists (e.g. Andrewes and Taylor) to acknowledge Rome's primacy of honour.  The point of Article xx was to deny those late medieval understandings of the office of the bishop of Rome which undermined a catholic understanding of the episcopate.


The ARCIC agreements on Authority in the Church I (1976) & II (1981), The Church as Communion (1990) and The Gift of Authority (1998) have allowed Anglicans and Roman Catholics to discover significant common ground on an understanding of the vocation of the See of Rome.  ARCIC has envisaged the See of Rome exercising a ministry in a manner closer to the Anglican understanding of primacy than Vatican I's 'immediate and universal jurisdiction':


the Bishop of Rome has exercised such a ministry either for the benefit of the whole Church, as when Leo contributed to the Council of Chalcedon, or for the benefit of a local church, as when Gregory the Great supported Augustine of Canterbury's mission and ordering of the English church. This gift has been welcomed and the ministry of these Bishops of Rome continues to be celebrated liturgically by Anglicans as well as Roman Catholics ...


We envisage a primacy that will even now help to uphold the legitimate diversity of traditions, strengthening and safeguarding them in fidelity to the Gospel. It will encourage the churches in their mission. This sort of primacy will already assist the Church on earth to be the authentic catholic koinonia in which unity does not curtail diversity, and diversity does not endanger but enhances unity. It will be an effective sign for all Christians as to how this gift of God builds up that unity for which Christ prayed (ARCIC II The Gift of Authority, 46 & 60).


There is, of course, no doubt that the ARCIC process faces considerable difficulties and challenges.  In the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the Roman Communion is seeking to address the debates and divisions emanating from the reception of Vatican II.  The Anglican Communion is coming to terms with the developments surrounding the ordination of women (now broadly settled) and debates over sexuality and ecclesiology.  


None of this, however, should detract from the enormous achievements of ARCIC.  Above all, the statements on the Eucharist and Ministry have been accepted by the Lambeth Conference as expressing Anglican understanding of both.  (A note to dissenting evangelical Anglicans - the resolution accepting the ARCIC statement has the same standing within the Communion as 1.10.)  These achievements deserve much greater recognition within both Communions.  This would not be an end in itself, a pat-on-the-back for ecumenical endeavours.  It would, rather, be a sign to the world of reconciliation after centuries of enmity and a contribution to the new evangelisation, aiding Anglican and Roman communities to pray, witness and serve together in the 21st century.


(The photograph is of ARCIC members sharing in Evensong.)

Lewis was wrong - we should commemorate him

There is little doubt that C.S. Lewis would be appalled that we should commemorate him today, the day in which he died in 1963.  (He had previously received the last sacraments from Austin Farrer in July 1963.)  In Letters to Malcolm, Lewis had robustly expressed his views on Anglicans adding figures to their calendar of commemorations:

I ... hope there'll be no scheme for canonisations in the Church of England.  Can you imagine a better hot-bed for yet more divisions between us.

Despite Lewis' fears, Anglicanism has proceeded to recognise "saints and heroes of the Christian Church in the Anglican Communion" (Lambeth 1958) in a remarkably non-divisive manner.  The Common Worship calendar, for example, includes Thomas Cranmer and William Laud, Charles Simeon and John Keeble.  It is, however, to the calendar provided by TEC's Holy Women, Holy Men that we must turn to find the commemoration of Lewis on this day.

That Common Worship makes no provision for the commemoration of the most influential Anglican of the 20th century is bad enough.  It is worse that the Church of Ireland's calendar of "worthies" does not include C.S. Lewis, the grandson of a CofI priest, baptised in St Mark's parish church Belfast.

The purpose of the CofI calendar of worthies is "to remind us of the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in all ages" (BCP 2004).  It is very difficult, therefore, to think of a compelling reason why Lewis is not included alongside the other two post-Reformation worthies - Jeremy Taylor and Charles Inglis.  Our calendar is, however, a notoriously conservative (one might say unimaginative) document.  It does not, for example, include George Berkeley, Richard Mant, nor any of the CMS Ireland missionaries who so significantly contributed to evangelisation in the 19th century.

If we as Irish Anglicans are indeed to celebrate "the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in all ages", that must surely include Lewis.  Then we could pray on this day in the words of the collect provided for use in TEC:

O God of searing truth and surpassing beauty, we give you thanks for Clive Staples Lewis, whose sanctified imagination lights fires of faith in young and old alike. Surprise us also with your joy and draw us into that new and abundant life which is ours in Christ Jesus, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.


(The stained glass window depicting Lewis is in St Luke's Episcopal Church, Monrovia, California.)

Time before Advent: Eucharistic liturgy and the end of history

The Christian idea that history would end with a Last Judgment - with salvation for some and damnation for others - would have been alien for pagans ... the Christian view that history had an inner direction and meaning meant that the convert not only acquired a new history, but also a history that contained an implicit philosophy of history ... the convert, in abandoning paganism, was compelled to enlarge his historical horizon.


William Harmless' study of Augustine's approach to the catechumenate notes the emphasis given by Augustine to eschatological themes.  The Church's sense of a new history and new philosophy history, summarised in the creedal affirmation of "he will come again to judge the living and the dead", was rejected by the theologies which flowed from the Enlightenment.  It is against this background that the Church's liturgical practice after modernity must proclaim the new history, the eschatological hope.


The virtue of a 'Kingdom season'/time before Advent is that it gives the Church a period in which to meaningfully reflect on this eschatological hope without the intrusion of Christmas trees, nativity plays and carols.  It also allows us to recapture the eschatological orientation of the Eucharist.  In Surprised by Hope, Tom Wright notes:


Eating and drinking the blood of Jesus means confronting here and now the one who is the judge as well as the saviour of all.


This is an ancient theme in the Church's liturgical reflection on the Eucharist.  The Cherubic hymn from the 4th century Liturgy of St James - in most of our hymnals as Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence - combines an affirmation of Christ's presence in the Eucharist with acknowledgement of his kingly judgement:


Christ our God to earth descendeth,
Our full homage to demand ...
As the Light of light descendeth
From the realms of endless day,
That the powers of hell may vanish
As the darkness clears away.


The 7th century Antiphonary of Bangor contains the anthem Sancti venite Christi corpus sumite - again in our hymnals as Draw nigh and take the Body of the Lord.  The anthem concludes with an explicitly eschatological emphasis:


Alpha and Omega, to Whom shall bow
All nations at the doom, is with us now.


While many contemporary Anglican Eucharistic prayers contain eschatological references (for example, the CofI's Eucharistic Prayer I includes "we look for the coming of his kingdom"), more can be done to retrieve this ancient liturgical, devotional and catechetical theme.  Modernity's secularisation of eschatology and postmodernity's rejection of the eschatological have profoundly shaped the Church, to the extent that the references in our Eucharistic prayers to "the coming of his kingdom" are all too easily passed over with little thought.  


Perhaps what we particularly need to retrieve is the less reserved eschatological language of the two ancient anthems quoted above, and their explicit affirmation of the One present in the Eucharist as the One who at the End of History will be Judge of all.  Thus might the Church begin to regain a historical horizon richer and fuller, more awesome and inspiring, than that offered by the ideologies modernity and postmodernity.

"The Eucharist builds the Church"

+London's pastoral letter to the clergy of his diocese on the Eucharist (h/t Anglican Down Under) has attracted considerable attention for its critique of those London parishes which use the Roman Rite.  As Anglican Down Under notes, there is also an important critique of those evangelical Anglicans who appear to have forgotten the Reformers' teaching on the significance of the Eucharist.  A crucially important aspect of this reminder to evangelical Anglicans of the mainstream Reformation's teaching on the Eucharist is the letter's rejection of 'lay presidency':

One of the conditions for such identification is the celebration of the liturgy by an ordained minister in communion with other ministers assembled around the Bishop.

What also should be noted is +London's affirmation of classical Anglicanism - the quotations from Elizabeth I and Hooker; the interpretation of ARCIC as expressing Hooker's understanding of the Eucharist; the need for a proper tension between common prayer and liturgical diversity.

More than all this, however, +London powerfully proclaims that the Eucharist builds the Church "amidst the dis-membering forces of our world":


The risen Jesus also demonstrated the action that was to be at the very heart of his community by revealing himself to the travellers on the road to Emmaus as they ate bread together. The community is nourished by Christ’s own body and blood which is really present when we enact the last supper which he shared with his friends on the night in which he was betrayed. Among the very few commandments that he gave to us is “Do this in remembrance of me”.


As the community celebrates the liturgy so we are built up into the body through which Christ can engage with our times. We re-member him in a dynamic sense. We do not merely recall his teaching and appearing long ago and far away. We re-member him among us amidst the dis-membering forces of our world. We become “very members” of the body of Christ and members one of another. The truth is that Christ “re-members” us as a community in which all other distinctions are transcended by our new life in Christ.


The Eucharist is performative and not merely illustrative. “We take not Baptism nor the Eucharist for bare resemblances or memorials of things absent, neither for naked signs and testimonies assuring us of grace received before but for means effectual whereby God, when we take the sacraments, delivereth into our hands that grace available unto eternal life.” [Richard Hooker Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity V: 57.]


It is by this grace that the Eucharist builds the Church. The Holy Communion is not something the church “puts on” to cater for our “religious” needs and feelings. It is the way appointed by Christ in which the world itself is “re-membered” through the growth of his body.

In a diocese notorious for extremes - Roman Missal in one parish, shirts-and-ties within minimalist non-eucharistic liturgy in the next - +London has wonderfully re-affirmed the Eucharistic theology and practice of classical Anglicanism.

Time before Advent: tension, patience and Kingship

The eschatological emphasis of the Gospel reading for tomorrow's Feast of Christ the King is unmissable: "When  the Son of Man comes in his glory ...".  This climax to the Kingdom Season/time before Advent recalls the Church to the tension of journeying to the City of God whilst living in the city of this world.  In the words of Into the Expectation:

The Church is a body of people who are citizens of another country centered in Jesus Christ and his kingdom. That Christians all too often subsume Christianity under other loyalties does not negate the responsibility to seek to get our loyalty (that to which we are faithful) straight. What Christians can do about that is remember that Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords and be free of undue concern with the principalities and powers knowing that Christ has triumphed over them (Colossians 2:15). Christians have another King and should beware of giving their heart and loyalty to any other principality, power, or nation.

Against this background, Tom Wright's critique of tomorrow's feast must surely be questioned:

It implies that Jesus Christ becomes King at the end of the sequence, the end of the story, as the result of a long process.

There is a sense in which that which Wright condemns is actually true.  A significant aspect of the kingship of Christ - "to judge the living and the dead" - is an eschatological hope, not a present reality: "he will come again to judge the living and the dead".  As Augustine states of the Church:

This security it now awaits in steadfast patience, until ... the final victory is won and peace established (City of God, 1:1).

The Feast of Christ the King directs the Church's gaze towards the Advent hope, to live in the light of that hope, even as we journey amidst the "city which aims at domination, which holds all nations in enslavement, but is itself dominated by that very lust of domination".  Tomorrow's feast speaks of the fulfillment of the Kingdom of the Advent proclamation.  And so, while in the city of this world, we rejoice that "you are the hope of the nations, the builder of the city that is to come" (Common Worship: Times and Seasons, proper preface for All Saints to Advent).

"The territory of God's work of grace"

What does it mean for the Church to be attentive to Scripture? +Rowan's sermon at the Thanksgiving Service for the 400th Anniversary of the Authorized Version speaks of the burden and illumination the Word written brings to the Church:

In the beginning was the Word'. Before anything, God is a God whose life pours out in the intelligence of love, necessarily and always. Every created word, even the words we use to speak of this eternal truth, will be struggling breathlessly to keep up with the Word itself, himself. The English Reformation often made use of the phrase 'God's Word written' to describe Scripture. And we should not take this to mean a mechanical dictation; rather it says that when human language writes what God does and says in all his acts throughout history, the Bible is what it looks like. Wax bearing the imprint of what I called just now the weight of the Word. To read or rather to hear that Word in our reading and hearing of Scripture is not to thumb through a volume of records and commands but to absorb Scripture's language in such a way, at such a depth, that we sense that weight and accept the burden and the joy of labouring at a lifelong response to it.


I've mentioned hearing as well as reading. It's easy to forget that when the 1611 Bible was first published it was not yet a volume that everyone could be expected to own ... it was meant to be part of an event, a shared experience. Gathered as a Christian community, the parish would listen, in the context of praise, reflection and instruction, to Scripture being read: it provided the picture of a whole renewed universe within which all the other activities made sense. It would not be immediately intelligible by any means, but it marked out the territory of God's work of grace. It affirmed, with St Paul in II Corinthians, that the landscape of the world was illuminated by the new and radical act of God in Jesus Christ, so that the standards of this world and society were shown to be under judgement; yet it also affirmed that this illumination was something it took time to get used to, time to find words for, and that the clay pots of custom and ritual were both necessary and problematic – and that this was simply how human beings heard and echoed the Word. 'How can man preach Thy eternal Word?' asked George Herbert a couple of decades after 1611; 'he is a brittle, crazy glass.' But, as that great poem of Herbert's goes on to claim, even in fragile material God's story can be sealed and printed, and the light come through.

"Ordained only by man's authority"?

Many thanks to Tobias Haller for posting his recent presentation to Albany Via Media.  Tobias has given us much food for thought in his reflection on the significance for Anglican ecclesiology of humility, provinciality and variety.  The fact that his reflections are undertaken in the context of the Thirty-Nine Articles is also to be welcomed - any serious Anglican theology has to wrestle with the Articles as, in the the words of the Covenant, "bear[ing] authentic witness" to the catholic and apostolic faith.

Where some of us, however, will be left wondering (or perhaps gravely worried) is with regard to Tobias' comments on Ordination and Matrimony:


It has also to be acknowledged that among the “issues” currently causing distress in the communion there loom two that concern rites and ceremonies: in particular ordination and marriage, neither of which, as the Articles say, “have any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God” (25), and so appear to fall within the rubric of permitted change. (This is an edgy argument, but I stand by it.)


Edgy indeed!  While the Articles quite clearly do not affirm Ordination and Matrimony as "Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel", do Anglican formularies regard them as merely "Ceremonies or Rites ... ordained only by man's authority"?


The Preface to the Ordinal quite explicitly states otherwise:


It is evident unto all men diligently reading holy Scripture and ancient Authors, that from the Apostles' time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ's Church; Bishops, Priests, and Deacons ... And therefore, to the intent that these Orders may be continued, and reverently used and esteemed, in the Church of England.


The Ecclesia Anglicana at the Reformation, therefore, entirely disowned any notion that the 'given' nature of Ordination - as received from the church catholic - could be changed or abolished.  Hooker's description of the ordained ministry affirms that it cannot be understood to fall under the rubric of rite or ceremony:


The ministry of things divine is a function which as God did him self institute so neither may men undertake the same but by authority or power given them in lawful manner (LEP V, 77.1).


In his discussion of the BCP ordination rite's use of the dominical words "Receive the Holy Ghost", Hooker insists that the Church's use of the phrase flows from Christ's intention:


A thinge much stumbled at in the manner of giving orders is our using those memorable wordes of our Lord and Savior Christ, 'Receive the holie Ghost'.  The holy Ghost they [the Puritans] saie wee cannot give, and therefore wee foolishlie bid men receive it ... he which giveth this power may saie without absurditie or follie 'Receive the holy Ghost', such power as the Spirit of Christ hath induced his Church withall, such power as neither prince nor potentate, kinge nor Caesar on earth can give ... Absurd it were to imagin our Savior did both to the eare and also to the verie eye express a real donation, and they at that time receive nothing ... Remove what these foolish wordes do implie, and what hath the ministrie of God besides wherein to glorie? (LEP V, 77.5-77.8).


As for Matrimony, the BCP rite rejects any notion that it is "ordained only by man's authority":


Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this Congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church ... and therefore is not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly ... but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God; duly considering the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.


The Anglican tradition of theological reflection quickly affirmed the sacramentality of marriage and employed terminology of infinitely greater meaning than "ceremonies or rites ordained only by man's authority".  Thus Jeremy Taylor's homily on marriage emphasised the 'giveness' of marriage in the the life of the Church:


Single life makes men in one instance to be like angels, but marriage in very many things makes the chaste pair to be like to Christ. "This is a great mystery," but it is the symbolical and sacramental representment of the greatest mysteries of our religion ... Here is the eternal conjunction, the indissoluble knot, the exceeding love of Christ, the obedience of the spouse, the communicating of goods, the uniting of interests, the fruit of marriage, a celestial generation, a new creature: Sacramentum hoc magnum est,"this is the sacramental mystery" represented by the holy rite of marriage; so that marriage is divine in its institution, sacred in its union, holy in the mystery, sacramental in its signification, honourable in its appellative, religious in its employments; it is advantage to the societies of men, and it is "holiness to the Lord."

What exactly the Anglican Reformation intended by its belief that a national church had authority to change or abolish "Ceremonies and Rites ... ordained only by man's authority" will be discussed in a subsequent post.  Whatever the intention, however, it surely did not include the nature of Ordination and Matrimony as sacramental rites.

This does raise some significant questions about Tobias' interpretation of provinciality and "the rubric of permitted change".  Abolishing the late medieval custom (not practised in the patristic churches) of handing paten and chalice to newly ordained priests was indeed permitted.  But the Anglican formularies recognised that both Order and Matrimony had a 'given' quality that a particular or national church did not have authority to change or abolish.

Time before Advent: "we are slaves"

After disagreeing strongly with Tom Wright's critique of the Kingdom season, catholicity and covenant feels compelled to note appreciation for his Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision.  Despite the furore from the representatives of a Protestant scholasticism over Wright's reading of justification, what caught catholicity and covenant's imagination was Wright's insistence that the Exile did not end with the return to the Promised Land:

many first-century Jews thought of themselves as living in a continuing narrative stretching from the earliest times, through ancient prophecies, and on towards a climatic moment of deliverance might come at any moment ... this continuing narrative was currently seen, on the basis of Daniel 9, as a long passage through a state of continuing 'exile'.

Alongside Daniel 9, Wright also points to Ezra 9 - today's Old Testament reading for Morning Prayer in the CofI lectionary:

From the days of our ancestors until this day we have been deep in guilt, and for our iniquities we, our kings, and our priests have been handed over to the kings of the lands ... we are slaves (9:7 & 9).

It is against this background that we can grasp the dramatic significance of the proclamation that "the kingdom of God has come near" (Mark 1:15), the Magnificat's joy that Yahweh "has helped his servant Israel", and the proclamation of the Benedictus that "we [are] being rescued from the hands of our enemies".  It does, in other words, allow us to see the Advent hope in glorious light - the promised deliverance from the centuries-long 'real exile'.  This being so, the theme of Exile should indeed be prominent in the Church's reflections in this time before Advent, the Kingdom season.

Seabury, Inglis and catholicity

The commemoration of the consecration to the episcopate of Samuel Seabury is a powerful statement of the significance to Anglicans of catholicity and communion.  Despite the political declaration of independence, Anglicans in the newly emerging United States signalled their dependence on the church catholic by seeking episcopal orders, firstly from a Church of England loyal to George III and only after this turning to Scottish Episcopalians.  It should be noted just how politically unwise such a move was.  The Non-Juring Scottish bishops, after all, were not exactly renowned for Lockean tendencies.

The fact that the British Government quickly moved to change the legal requirement of bishops consecrated by the Church of England swearing an oath of allegiance to the monarch led to the consecration of three subsequent bishops for the States - William White, Samuel Provoost and James Madison.  That these three received episcopal orders from the Church of England again emphasises that American Anglicans did not allow political developments to determine and shape their ecclesiology.

Alongside Seabury, those of us in the Church of Ireland and in the Anglican Church of Canada also commemorate Charles Inglis, son of a Church of Ireland priest, consecrated first bishop of Nova Scotia in 1787.  (Inglis is commemorated in the Church of Ireland calendar on 16th August.) Like Seabury, he was an active Loyalist in New York during the Revolutionary War.  Sharing the experience of being on the losing side in that political conflict, both became bishops in the new post-1776 dispensation in North America.

That dispensation brought radical change to Anglicans across North America.  Two polities, not one; a republic; victory and defeat; nation-building and exile; suspicion and hostility across a new frontier.  But it was not these experiences which fundamentally determined the shape of North American Anglicanism.  It was, rather, that American Anglicans in both polities received the gift of the episcopacy.  And it is to this that Seabury and Inglis witness - that catholicity, rather than being a destiny we seize through our actions, is a gift bestowed in mutual dependence with others.

Time before Advent: further reflections

This so-called Kingdom season drastically weakens Advent ... it belittles the hope that is set before us in Advent itself.

Catholicity and covenant has been mulling over Tom Wright's strident critique of the Kingdom season during the past few weeks.  While we in the CofI do not use the term 'Kingdom season', our collects for these Sunday explicitly reflect the themes of the season.  The ordinary time of 'Sundays after Trinity' becomes 'Sundays before Advent'.   Having once endorsed Wright's view, what has changed?

As previously discussed, there is the profound pastoral need to address the fact that Advent is very crowded.  Its eschatological themes are overshadowed from at least the mid-season point by the pastoral and parochial necessities of carol and nativity services for the parish, the schools, other institutions, the local community.

And then there is the liturgical precedent of a longer Advent season - 6 weeks in some of the ancient rites of the West (the Ambrosian, Mozarabic and Gallican rites).  4 weeks for eschatological reflection in the liturgical year is not written in stone.  Significant parts of the Western Church have given over a slightly longer period.

But what of Wright's view that by the 'Kingdom season' embracing what he terms the "muddle" of November - All Saints, All Souls, Remembrance Sunday (in the UK), and Christ the King - it "unscrambles the eschatological teaching of the old church year"?  Rather than unscrambling the Church's eschatological teaching, the Kingdom season reminds us of the 'not yet' quality of the Kingdom.  And it does so in a manner which reflects both our experience and our hope.

Yes, we do at present live within the communion of saints - but all too imperfectly (All Saints).  Yes, we do share in the paschal victory - but the fact of death remains a present reality (All Souls).  Yes, the Church is called to live the peaceable kingdom - but the City of this world is given over to the pursuit of domination (Remembrance).  Yes, the Church confesses Christ as King - but we await his judgement when all shall be made new (Christ the King).

At least to some extent this reflects the affirmation of the ancient baptismal creed, in which "the communion of saints [and] the forgiveness of sins" are related to the eschatological hope of "the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting".  It is in light of this hope that the Kingdom season interprets our present realities - of the imperfect Church, of death, of conflict, of the Kingship of Christ.  In a sermon preached shortly after the end of the First World War, Austin Farrer spoke of this tension which the Kingdom season reflects:

So even in the darkness and blindness of our present existence, our thought ranges abroad and spreads towards the confines of the mystical Christ, remembering the whole Church of Christ, as well militant on earth as triumphant in heaven; invoking angels, archangels and all the spiritual host.

The Kingdom season ensures that the Church does not lose focus on its eschatological hope, amidst carols and lights.  The "darkness and blindness of our present existence" needs this hope to be brought into sharp focus as we reflect on those very experiences which cry out for redeeming judgement - sin, death, conflict, injustice.  And thus we enter Advent more fully aware of the significance of the Advent proclamation.

Not the 99% - TEC and the diversity challenge

Catholicity and covenant reflected earlier this week on how the Communion needs a flourishing TEC, suggesting that the debate over same-sex relationships - whether as presented by the advocates of inclusivity within TEC or by TEC's critics in the rest of the Communion - missed the point.  TEC is, by and large, presently failing to live out the Trinitarian and Christological call to discipleship in a manner that those inhabiting the Great Republic find to be either convincing or compelling.

Over at the Daily Episcopalian, commentator Elizabeth Drescher has in a not entirely dissimilar manner highlighted the real challenge of inclusivity:

Paul points in his letter to the Ephesians to what throws us off tune in our efforts to sing a new, harmonious song, to live as one diverse body: barriers and the hostilities they cause among us. What do these barriers look like in our church in particular? If you've just lept in your mind to things like women's ordination or diverse opinions on human sexuality, I'm going to suggest that you guess again.

The barriers to TEC living out the radical inclusivity of the gospel are not those of gender or sexual orientation.  Drescher, in a reference to the Occupy Wall Street slogan, painfully acknowledges "we are hardly the 99%":


We are merely one percent of the total population, and a slight six percent of mainline protestants. But we pack a demographic wallop.


92 percent of us are white, making us among the least ethnically diverse of Christian denominations
5 percent of us are African American
1 percent each are Asian, Latina/o or mixed race/other
35 percent of us make over $100,000 a year, making us the wealthiest denomination by far, while we are half as likely as people in the population generally to make less than $30,000
51 percent of us have at least a college education, with half that many having earned graduate degrees, making us the most educated of all Christian denominations.


And though all of that might lead you to believe that we are a smart, ambitious, hard working, if somewhat pasty, club in which anyone would love to be a member, by the time they reach adulthood, 55 percent of the children raised in our churches will have left--20 percent claiming no religious identity at all as adults. That, by the way, makes us the biggest contributor to the fastest growing religious demographic, "nones"--people who answer "none" when asked with what religious group they identify.

Against this background, there are profound challenges for both TEC's 'progressives' and the Communion's 'traditionalists'.  For TEC to have quite deliberately pursued a course of confrontation with the majority of the Communion in this context of cultural irrelevance, to have invested so much of its time, thought and resources on a single-issue agenda, and to have alienated its own conservative minority, beggars belief.

For critics elsewhere in the Communion, however, you really have to wonder why an obsessively exclusive focus on TEC's approach to the theology of same-sex relationships can be justified while TEC's decline into cultural irrelevance continues.  And, no, it is not good enough to say - actually, it is almost certainly factually incorrect to say - that this decline is because of TEC's stance on same-sex relationships.


For all the pride TEC takes in inclusivity, the core problem is - in Drescher's words - "we are not all the 1 %, but, let's be honest, very many of us know how to get to the neighborhood".  And this, as the Presiding Bishop recently stated, from a Church conscious of "our understanding of our part in God’s mission, given that we are the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society".

"What he assumed in order to restore"

On the commemoration of St Leo the Great, words from his Tome - proclaiming the pastoral and evangelical significance of the faith of Chalcedon:


While the distinctness of both natures and substances was preserved, and both met in one Person, lowliness was assumed by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity; and, in order to pay the debt of our condition, the inviolable nature was united to the passible, so that as the appropriate remedy for our ills, one and the same “Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus,” might from one element be capable of dying and also from the other be incapable.  Therefore in the entire and perfect nature of very man was born very God, whole in what was his, whole in what was ours. By “ours” we mean what the Creator formed in us at the beginning and what he assumed in order to restore.

"This prayer of the Body of Christ" - on the liturgical praying of the Psalms

Yesterday at EP the CofI daily office lectionary commenced the reading of Psalm 119 - Israel's great meditation on the Torah.  So how is the Church to read such a celebration of the Torah, not least in light of John's confession that "the Torah was indeed given through Moses: grace and truth came through Jesus Christ"?

In his exposition of Psalm 119, Augustine reminds us that the Church's reading of this Psalm is the "prayer of the body of Christ". Laurence Kriegshauser's commentary reflects this this Augustinian approach:


For the Christian it is not difficult to see in the this Law, of which one of the synonyms is the "word" of God, the Incarnate Word himself, mediator between God and man, the revelation of God and simultaneously the way that leads to God.  Jesus is the Word made flesh and the Son of the Father, who by his obedience to the Father's will won eternal life for all mankind.  The Christian gives all his attention to Christ, the Incarnation of God's will, knowing that in him he shares in eternal life.


The speaker of the psalm is the whole Christ, head and members.  The Son speaks to the Father of his total commitment to the divine will.  The members speak to the Father and to the Son about the Incarnate Word who mediates life to them.  In praying the psalm we allow ourselves to be inserted into the obedience of the Son, permitting the Father to give us the life he has intended us to have.


It is the Church's liturgical praying of the Psalms which gives them a meaning beyond - and richer than - an ancient Israelite meditation on the Torah.  Historical-critical readings, whether liberal or conservative, focused as they are on authorial identity, intent and context, have little or nothing to offer the Church.  Praying the Psalms as the Body of Christ ensures that they become a means of entering into the mind of the Christ, a means of entering his into the mystery of his Cross and Resurrection.  


Such catholic praying of the Psalter was attacked by the Disciplinarian critics of the Elizabethan Settlement.  Hooker's defence of the practices of daily and antiphonal praying of the Psalms ended with a robust invocation of patristic authority:


But the end of our speech is to show that because the fathers of the Church with whom the self same custom was so many ages ago in use, have uttered all these things concerning the fruit which the Church of God did then reap observing that and no other form, it may be justly avouched that we our selves retaining it ... do neither want that good which later invention can afford, nor loose any thing of that for which the ancient so oft and so highly commend the former.  Let novelty therefore in this give over endless contradictions, and let ancient custom prevail  (LEP V, 39.5).


Here is one of Anglicanism's riches - shared, yes, with other Christian traditions, but central to Anglicanism's experience of "common prayer".  We do not read the Psalms according to historical-critical approaches.  We pray the Psalms in the daily office as the Body of Christ, united to our Head.  Thus Psalm 119 becomes, in Augustine's words, "this prayer of the Body of Christ".

The identity crisis of Anglicanism in the Great Republic

For friends of TEC in the rest of the Communion (and that includes some of us who are supporters of the Covenant), the reflections by The Curate's Desk (parts I and II) on the National Study of Youth and Religion are very sobering:

We have the lowest percentage of respondents that say our churches are welcoming to them.  We have the lowest percentage that says that church is a good place to talk about serious issues.  We have the lowest percentage that says church makes them think about important things.  If we are serious about intellectual engagement with the faith then the numbers would bear this out.  We would have young people who felt challenged and believed we talked about serious things and made them think about important things.


My fear is that too many of our churches are talking about things of the culture and not of the faith.  We have too many churches that try not to be too dogmatic and to be “welcoming” and “inclusive” without teaching where that welcome and inclusion comes from – the creeds, the life and death of Jesus Christ, and the Sacraments.


This welcome is not working – we have the lowest percentage of respondents saying our churches are welcoming!  Yet our slogan everywhere is that “the Episcopal Church welcomes you" ...


For all of our talk of sharing the love of God, our kids don’t feel it.  We are not challenging them intellectually, we are not sharing a love of the faith (84 percent of Assemblies of God teens say they talk about spiritual things with their families at least once a week, compared to only 27 percent of Episcopal teens – by far the lowest), we are not raising them up to read Scripture (only 8% of our kids – again by far the lowest – do this), and we are not helping them find a sense of God’s presence in their lives.

Too many of us in the rest of the Communion - and with some of us in North Atlantic societies facing challenges not dissimilar to those faced by TEC - cannot see past the debate over same-sex relationships when pondering TEC.  The figures in the NSYR and the commentary provided by The Curate's Desk, point to a much more significant reality than the current debate over same-sex relationships.  TEC appears to be failing when it comes to the proclamation and call to discipleship of the Trinitarian and Christological heart of the Christian faith.  The ascendancy of - to use John Milbank's term - "an outdated liberalism" has left parts of TEC increasingly irrelevant in a post-Christendom society.

Wrestling with the implications of Trinitarian and Christological faith for same-sex relationships is a debate the Church has to have.  But it is the case that - at least to some extent - this debate is pretty irrelevant to the real challenge facing TEC.  To again quote The Curate's Desk:

As a Church, we say we are opening and welcoming.  We say we encourage intellectual rigor.  We say we engage society.  We say we value justice-making.


We say we value so many things and yet our kids don’t see it.  They are not responding to the message we believe we are sharing!  As a product of our inputs as a Church, our kids are telling us that we are not offering them a sense of God’s closeness, of the value of Scripture, of a sense of serious engagement with the world, nor are we imparting a sense of social responsibility.


We have an identity crisis.  What we think the world and our young people are seeing in us, as a Church, is simply not the case.


For the rest of the Communion, it is important for us to see TEC flourish.  The cultural significance of the United States in shaping cultural trends across the globe; the importance of an Anglican witness in the vast melting pot of the US, alongside a populist evangelicalism and an increasingly intellectually confident Roman Catholicism; ensuring an Anglican witness in the midst a polity and economy which continue to dominate the world-stage.  For these reasons and more, the Communion needs TEC to be much more than a shrinking expression of "an outdated liberalism".

Not only a sign of love - Eucharist, CWOB and Covenant

In a Godward Direction has rightly expressed concern at the practice of Communion without Baptism (CWOB):


A thing that bemuses me about Communion without Baptism [CWOB] is that it is often favored by some who make the most fuss about the Baptismal Covenant. It is deeply ironic to me that some who advance the slogan "All the sacraments for all the baptized" don't seem to realize the implication of that slogan for CWOB. One of the reasons I do  favor CWOB is my strong support for the Baptismal Covenant and all it requires, including the promise to remain faithful in "the breaking of the bread." Yes, all the sacraments for all the baptized.

It has, of course, been the consistent witness of the church catholic that participation in the eucharist requires baptism.  To sacramentally feed on the Crucified and Risen One, we need to be sacramentally united with him in his Cross and Resurrection.  In the words of Hooker:


The grace which we have by the holy Eucharist doth not begin but continue life.  No man therefore receiveth this sacrament before baptism ... (LEP V, 67.1).


To do otherwise is to sunder the Eucharist from the Cross and Resurrection of the Christ in a manner reminiscent of the warning of Article 28:


The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another, but rather it is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ's death.

The implications for the rest of the Communion of a diocese (see Connecticut's recent decision to commence a year-long reflection on CWOB), province or national church overturning this catholic practice and introducing the innovation of CWOB are profound.  Above all, it "overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament", radically redefining the mystery of the eucharist and the mystery of the eucharistic community's communion with the Cross and Resurrection of the Incarnate Word.

A fundamental shared practice of the Communion, in continuity with the ancient Church, in common with the universal Church, would be overturned.  The very definition of the Church as 'communion' would be rendered irrelevant.  Our ecumenical agreements would not only be fatally undermined - what exactly would be the point of prayerfully striving for eucharistic unity when, in fact, we extend eucharistic hospitality to those who are not sacramentally united to Christ?

All of which, perhaps, could lead us to think about the Covenant's call for the Communion to authentically be Communion:


(3.2.4) to seek a shared mind with other Churches, through the Communion’s councils, about matters of common concern, in a way consistent with the Scriptures, the common standards of  faith, and the canon laws of our churches. Each Church will undertake wide consultation with the other Churches of the Anglican Communion and with the Instruments and Commissions of the Communion.


(3.2.5) to act with diligence, care and caution in respect of any action which may provoke controversy, which by its intensity, substance  or extent could threaten the unity of the Communion and the effectiveness or credibility of its mission.

Surely the impending debate over CWOB requires such a mechanism within the Communion?

Willibrord, Bonn and the new evangelisation

Today's commemoration of St Willibrord not only allows us to recall and celebrate the inter-communion between Anglicanism and the Old Catholics - it also reminds Anglicans in these Islands of their vocation as European churches.  The fact that Willibrord was sent from these Islands to evangelise in northern Europe and then become Archbishop of Utrecht speaks of the profoundly European identity of the Anglican churches of Britain and Ireland.  It stands alongside Patrick's relationship with the church in Gaul and the sending by Gregory of Augustine to the Angles.

As the ongoing economic crisis so painfully demonstrates, the countries of these Islands are inextricably part of Europe.  For English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh Anglicans, this can allow us to refocus on the European-wide nature of our mission.  The secularising trends seen in our societies in these Islands are, after all, profoundly European.  We share in the cultural phenomenon of Europe's de-Christianisation.

The Bonn Agreement and the deepening relationship between Anglicans and Old Catholics - now given expression in the yearly meetings of the Anglican-Old Catholic International Coordinating Council - can be read as an example of how a European ecumenism can serve the new evangelisation.  It is noteworthy that the recent focus of the AOCICC has been on a shared Anglican-Old Catholic statement on mission and ecclesiology entitled "Belonging Together in Europe".

In a recent interview by Vatican Radio, +Rowan spoke of his conversations with Archbishop Fisichella of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization:


We had a very fruitful conversation with Archbishop Fisichella ...we shall be looking for ways of cooperation, not only in the synod but also more broadly in exchanging views and experiences about new methods of evangelisation. The Archbishop and his staff were very interested in the 'Fresh Expressions of Church' movement in the UK and they've already had some contact with the 'Alpha Course', so plenty of avenues to explore there.

Just as Anglican-Old Catholic inter-communion is now bearing fruit in a shared approach to evangelism, the Porvoo Agreement with Nordic Lutherans pointed to the common mission "to proclaim the Christian hope, arising from faith, which gives meaning in societies characterized by ambiguity".  Similarly, the co-operation with Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation speaks of an ecumenism in the service of evangelisation.  It is by such means that the churches of Europe - Anglican, Old Catholic, Lutheran and Roman - can follow the example of St Willibrord.


(The photograph is of the Old Catholic Cathedral of St Gertrudis in Utrecht.)

Mitres, morals and markets

As religious affairs commentator Joan Bakewell notes, while Anglicanism was caught unawares and wrong-footed by the Occupy LSX protest at St Paul's, matters began to change last week:


when ... the Archbishop of Canterbury’s response to the crisis finally came, the Church appeared to have discovered its voice.

+Rowan's Financial Times' article highlighted the moral challenge posed by the protest:


The protest at St Paul's was seen by an unexpectedly large number of people as the expression of a widespread and deep exasperation with the financial establishment that shows no sign of diminishing. There is still a powerful sense around – fair or not – of a whole society paying for the errors and irresponsibility of bankers; of impatience with a return to 'business as usual' – represented by still-soaring bonuses and little visible change in banking practices.


Now in today's Sunday Telegraph, Ken Costa - the former banker now chairing the Bishop of London's St Paul's Initiative - similarly emphasises the moral dimension to the current economic crisis:


For some time and particularly during the exuberant irrationality of the last few decades, the market economy has shifted from its moral foundations with disastrous consequences. I cannot recall when public feeling worldwide has run so high, and even if only a minority takes its anger on to the streets, no-one should imagine that the majority is indifferent to their cause.


Rather than representing a somewhat bland reaction to the economic crisis, a range of policy proposals to 're-moralise' the financial services sector have emanated from Anglican circles.  +Rowan's article supported the Tobin tax.  +York suggested excluding those in the financial sector who rewarded themselves with unacceptably high salaries should be excluded from receiving Honours and that tax contributions should be made public.  Costa today also points to the need to reform a fundamental aspect of the financial sector:


The present duty put on all boards to maximise shareholder value as the sole criterion for satisfying the return to shareholders cannot continue.


Bakewell is correct - it has taken a while, and resulted in some embarrassing moments, but Anglicanism has realised that the public unease with the workings of the financial sector offers an opportunity to articulate a vision of the common good and human flourishing.  As +Rowan implied in his article, this vision is no mere political agenda.  It flows from the Church's confession of the Crucified and Risen One as Lord:


The Church of England and the Church Universal have a proper interest in the ethics of the financial world and in the question of whether our financial practices serve those who need to be served – or have simply become idols that themselves demand uncritical service.


Update: the St Paul's Institute published its report on the City of London's financial sector today, Value and Values: Perceptions of Ethics in the City today.  The full report can be found here.

Milbank on the vocation of the cathedral

John Milbank's commentary (h/t Anglican Down Under) on the St Paul's fiasco provides an outline of the catholic vocation of cathedrals - a vocation of greater significance than a cathedral's constitutional autonomy.  Also to be noted is his critique of those cathedrals which have conformed to secularist modernity, either through a theological liberalism or an evangelicalism which, through its rejection of the practices of catholic liturgy and spirituality, colludes with secularism.  For Milbank, a post-liberal catholicity in many ways defines the particular vocation of the cathedral - a richer vocation than has sometimes been recognised by the Anglican establishment:

How can one explain this blindness? The minor aspect to any such explanation must concern the remarkable independence of Anglican Deans from episcopal oversight.


In some ways this is commendable and has, in part, allowed many cathedrals recently to renew High Church populist, festive and educational practices which have resulted in an increase in their congregations against current trends.


The failing cathedrals are the ones stuck in an outdated liberalism or anti-ritualistic evangelicalism. And, indeed, one can assume that the more successful cathedrals - like St Albans, led by the highly creative (and otherwise famous) Jeffrey John - would have responded much more successfully to the unprecedented events now unfolding on the steps of St Paul's.


St Paul's itself has participated positively in this new trend, yet is still infected with a countervailing inherited sclerosis which has crippled it in the present instance. This sclerosis has to do in part with the negative aspect of cathedral independence, an inability always to think outside the narrow remit of cathedral duty: the daily round of evensong and the shepherding of tourists.


It is at this point that one can suggest that, especially in an interconnected world, the Anglican Church actually requires more hierarchical oversight, rather than less, and a willingness of bishops to intervene, even if this risks rocking the boat of that notorious Anglican diversity.


This is completely necessary in order to maintain a genuine Catholic openness to all parishioners throughout the country in terms of liturgy, pastoral care and social involvement - never mind public response to sensitive political issues.

Have you heard the one about TEC and Pelagius?

Some in TEC can be very ... innovative.  Below is the text of a resolution submitted to the Diocesan Convention of the TEC Diocese of Atlanta (h/t Rod Dreher):

R11-17 Contribution of Pelagius


Whereas the historical record of Pelagius’s contribution to our theological tradition is shrouded in the political ambition of his theological antagonists who sought to discredit what they felt was a threat to the empire, and their ecclesiastical dominance, and whereas an understanding of his life and writings might bring more to bear on his good standing in our tradition, and  whereas his restitution as a viable theological voice within our tradition might encourage a deeper understanding of sin, grace, free will, and the goodness of God’s creation, and  whereas in as much as the history of Pelagius represents to some the struggle for theological exploration that is our birthright as Anglicans,   Be it resolved, that this 105th Annual Council of the Diocese of Atlanta appoint a committee of discernment overseen by our Bishop, to consider these matters as a means to honor the contributions of Pelagius and reclaim his voice in our tradition  And be it further resolved that this committee will report their conclusions at the next Annual Council.

Submitted by the Rev. Benno D. Pattison, Rector, the Church of the Epiphany


That reference to "our birthright as Anglicans" is somewhat interesting, not least in light of the words Article 9: "Original Sin standeth not in the following of Adam (as the Pelagians do vainly talk) ...".  One assumes that the Diocesan Convention of the Diocese of Atlanta is fully aware that it does not have the authority to act in a manner contrary to the church catholic and the Anglican tradition.  Right?

Update: The Creedal Christian reflects on the most recent moves on this matter, including an amendment to the motion.