The Covenant - to "embody and promote" communion

John Watson's Fulcrum essay on the Covenant is a must-read (and see Anglican Down Under's comments).  It nails the myth that the last word on catholic ecclesiology is the bishop in the diocese:

Picture 1st Century Jerusalem. In the heat of the day an equally heated issue is raised to the leaders of the Church. A council is convened to advise the way forward. The Jewish Christians faced with a cultural challenge of their own way of faith and worship being challenged by another culture, who bring a new perspective, dynamic and worship. Acts 15 tells the story of this first of many challenges this fledgling community faces. It is all about how to live with difference. 


The result? Unity is better than division. Common ground in Christ is the cement that holds them together. And this cement is more than just pragmatic and surface glue that hides the cracks beneath. It is an attempt to faithfully and radically live out Jesus’ prayer “That they may be one”. 


It is a deep christological  and ecclesiological response. For them the way forward is not to act in isolation, but being aware that their actions will have an affect on the other. This is a response that goes to the heart of what being church, being a communion is all about. We are tied to each other in Christ. 

From this understanding of communion flowed a range of 'instruments of communion' in the patristic churches - synods of bishops, regional councils, general councils, primatial sees, patriarchial sees.  These instruments ensured that the bishop in the diocese was indeed in communion with the church catholic.

The alternative to this is not a supposedly catholic ecclesiology of bishop in diocese but, as Watson rather provocatively states, a Baptist ecclesiology characterised by independence rather than interdependence.  An ecclesiology of independence/autonomy is "fine if your Baptist", but it falls far short of the Anglican vocation to catholicity:

Anglican ecclesiology is very different. Independence of a congregation is not the defining stamp. We are gathered into a communion of interdependent Dioceses, within a province which is interdependent with others, globally. This is how it has been expressed and chosen as the Anglican Communion has grown over the years. This is the gift we inherit. This is why we have four Instruments of Communion - not to be an exterior body of control - but to help bring union and communion with each other. Where we hold each other in high regard as each of us are sewn together into the fabric of life in Christ. 

As Watson implies in his essay, the debate over the Covenant is not over mere procedural issues or 'church structures'.  It goes, rather, to the essence of what it means for Anglicanism to authentically live as part of the church catholic.  The ARCIC II document The Church as Communion powerfully reminds us that the call to communion flows from the very heart of the Church's vocation and mission:

For a Christian the life of communion means sharing in the divine life, being united with the Father, through his Son, in the Holy Spirit, and consequently to be in fellowship with all those who share in the same gift of eternal life. This is a spiritual communion in which the reality of the life of the world to come is already present. But it is inadequate to speak only of an invisible spiritual unity as the fulfilment of Christ's will for the Church; the profound communion fashioned by the Spirit requires visible expression. The purpose of the visible ecclesial community is to embody and promote this spiritual communion with God (43).

An ecclesiology of autonomy and independence falls pitifully short of this vocation to "embody and promote" communion.  The Covenant debate is not about +New Hampshire or +Los Angeles.  It is not about TEC's stance on LGBT issues nor Sydney's theology of lay presidency.  It is about what it means for Anglicanism to be catholic.  And to be catholic is to be in communion - not autonomous.

Pentience, forgiveness and commission

From N.T. Wright's powerful address on the Resurrection of Jesus to the recent Conference of Italian Bishops:

You are familiar, of course, with the story of the breakfast by the shore, and I’m sure you are aware that the charcoal fire in John 21.9 is meant to remind us, the readers, of the terrible moment in the High Priest’s hall by another charcoal fire (John 18.18), when Peter three times denied even knowing Jesus. No doubt the smell of it reminded Peter of that moment as well. If this little story is the beginning of the true Petrine ministry, as some have suggested, then we do well to notice that this ministry begins with confrontation and penitence. ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’

It is a question we all face, perhaps particularly those of us called to ministry and leadership within the church. If we know our own hearts – and woe betide a church that is led by people who do not – we know that we have all let Jesus down, that our hearts and minds have plenty of memories of our own charcoal fires, of the times when by our actions or words we have in effect denied that we even knew Jesus. Yet Jesus comes, and comes again, and asks us the same question. ‘Do you love me?’

The Greek text makes it quite clear that Peter’s response uses a different word. He can’t bring himself to say the word agapao, the word for that utter self-giving love that Jesus himself has shown on the cross. He uses the word phileo: ‘Yes, Lord,’ he says, ‘You know I’m your friend.’ That’s as far as he can go. Anything else would seem to be back in the realm of blustering, of boasting: ‘Yes, Lord, I’m OK, I can do anything for you.’ That’s what he’d said in the Upper Room (13.36-37). He is going to start further back.

But then the miracle: ‘Well then,’ replies Jesus, ‘feed my lambs.’ This is the moment we as pastors and church leaders need to note most closely, the moment when the risen Jesus becomes once more our uncomfortable contemporary. We expect, perhaps, a note of rebuke: ‘Why did you let me down?’ We might hope for a word of forgiveness: ‘Peter, you let me down, but I forgive you.’ What we do not expect is a fresh word of commission: ‘Feed my lambs.’ Here is the miracle of resurrection as it applies directly to vocation. All vocation to be pastors in the church of the risen Jesus comes in the form of forgiveness. Forgiveness and commission turn out to be the same thing. Forgiveness never simply brings us back to a neutral position; and commission can never be on the basis that we are good people, well qualified, fully prepared for what we have to do. That was Peter’s problem before. Now he begins again in the proper way: with penitence, forgiveness, and fresh commission. That is the gift of the risen Jesus to Peter, and please God to us as well.

But it doesn’t stop there. Jesus asks the same question a second time and gets the same answer, this time responding with ‘look after my sheep.’ But then, on the third occasion, Jesus changes the question. Peter has said, ‘Yes, Lord, you know I’m your friend.’ Now Jesus asks, ‘Simon, son of John, are you my friend?’ John, telling the story, indicates that Peter was upset that on this third occasion Jesus used these words. Perhaps he thought Jesus didn’t believe him, that he was challenging even the lesser claim that he had made. I don’t read it like that. I think Jesus is saying, in effect, ‘Very well, Peter: if that’s where you are, that’s where we’ll start. If you can say you’re my friend, we will build on that. Now: feed my sheep.’ And then, of course, he goes on to warn Peter of what is to come; this sheep-feeding business will cost him not less than everything, as it had cost the master Shepherd himself.

But this, for me, stands at the heart of the message of Jesus our contemporary, the one who is risen from the dead as the first-fruits of those who sleep. With the resurrection, a new creation has dawned, and in that new creation new possibilities are open before us. The resurrection is not the end of the story; it’s the beginning of the new one, precisely because Jesus is the first-fruits and the full harvest is yet to come. And we who are called to work within that new creation, from the Petrine ministry through to all other ministries, find those ministries not in a grandiose claim or the blustering confidence that Peter had shown in the days before Jesus’ death. We find our ministries given to us afresh day by day as we confess our own failures and yet come, humbly, and say, ‘Yes, Lord, you know I’m your friend.’ Resurrection and forgiveness are, after all, two sides of the same coin; to believe in the one, you have to believe in the other. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, it is love that believes the resurrection. Here in John’s gospel, in Mary, in Thomas, and above all in Peter, we discover what it means to know the risen Jesus as our contemporary, wiping away our tears, answering our hard questions, but above all inviting us to come with the humility and the love through which the power of his risen life, his shepherding of his sheep, can go to work afresh in our own day. This is what it means to know the risen Jesus as our contemporary. ‘Yes, Lord,’ we say. ‘You know.’ ‘Well, then,’ replies Jesus, ‘feed my sheep.’

Aaron's drest

The moment when I realised that I could not become a Roman Catholic took place in a restaurant in Islington, when we were arguing about the Roman view of Anglican orders being ‘null and void’. It shot in upon me, with terrible force, that I could not join a church that taught that George Herbert was no true priest.

On today's commemoration of George Herbert, many of us will identify with the words of Caroline Moore - wife of Spectator editor and former Anglican now Roman Catholic, Charles Moore - in expressing her view on why she could not join the Ordinariate.  Herbert gives pastoral expression to the early 17th century Anglican ressourcement (what Graham Perry has called, with only some exaggeration, the "Anglican counter-reformation").  After the polemics and bitter divisions of the Reformation era, we begin to see what historian Eamon Duffy has beautifully described as "the mellow light that plays over the church of George Herbert". 

Recovering the "fully sacramental and sacerdotal apparatus" of patristic catholicism (see Robert Whalen on this), Herbert's poetry, pastoral reflections and understanding of priesthood helped to shape an Anglicanism both duly reformed and generously catholic.  Anglicanism has been blessed with many saints who have contributed to our portion of the household of faith - Cranmer's tortured wrestling with the Reformation recovery of Augustine; Andrewe's glorious expression of the ecclesia anglicana's place in the church catholic; Keble's recovery of a catholic Anglicanism after the Babylonian captivity of whiggish latitudinarianism.  But the witness and sanctity of Herbert - that "mellow light" - has a special place in Anglicanism's catholic vocation.  And for this we give particular thanks today.

Holiness on the head,

         Light and perfections on the breast,

Harmonious bells below, raising the dead

         To lead them unto life and rest:

                Thus are true Aarons drest.

Profaneness in my head,

         Defects and darkness in my breast,

A noise of passions ringing me for dead

         Unto a place where is no rest:

                Poor priest, thus am I drest.

Only another head

         I have, another heart and breast,

Another music, making live, not dead,

         Without whom I could have no rest:

                In him I am well drest.

Christ is my only head,

         My alone-only heart and breast,

My only music, striking me ev'n dead,

         That to the old man I may rest,

                And be in him new-drest.

So, holy in my head,

         Perfect and light in my dear breast,

My doctrine tun'd by Christ (who is not dead,

         But lives in me while I do rest),

                Come people; Aaron's drest.

Left as consumers?

It is difficult not to see something commendable in the 'Ashes to go' phenomenon.  In The Living Church, two priests from a Connecticut parish describe their experience with commuters on Ash Wednesday past:

Much to our delight and surprise, and with the enthusiastic support of our vestry and parishioners, we encountered numerous people of faith who welcomed the opportunity to receive ashes. Many were hurrying for the train yet stopped and wanted to experience again a cross of ash being placed on their foreheads ...

Standing on the train platforms with those ash crosses on their foreheads, this group of Christians had just begun their day witnessing with that outward and visible sign and would continue to do so throughout that day. They would all be carrying that sign of the life-giving cross further into the world — into New York City, into their offices, into public places, and back into their homes.

The critics of the practice, however, remind us that ashes on the forehead on Ash Wednesday is a practice that is without meaning outside the Liturgy.  Fr. Patrick Barker emphasises this:

Simply put, the problem is context: there is none. Without the liturgical context from whence the imposition of ashes comes and to which it belongs, the act itself means no more than “You are going to die.” While it is true that we humans try to forget our mortality, and while it is true that a reminder of it may spur us to get our various selves in order, still the practice of severing a part from its theological/liturgical body and hawking it on the street under the misguided impression that such is evangelistic outreach is merely another piece of evidence that the Episcopal Church has fallen under the bewitching spell of faddishness.

It is worth comparing this with the practice which happens at the end of Lent - the veneration of the Cross of Good Friday.  Would 'Veneration-to-go' appropriately communicate the meaning of the Passion? The Creedal Christian likewise points to ashing as merely part of a narrative communicated through a range of inter-related actions:

When we impose ashes with the words prescribed by the Prayer Book ("Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return"), the message we give each person who receives them is: "Remember that you are going to die." Isolated from the context of the Ash Wednesday liturgy - which includes the call to repentance, a stress on God's desire that sinners "may turn from their wickedness and live," the reminder that "it is only by [God's] gracious gift that we are given everlasting life," and the Holy Eucharist's affirmation that "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again" - the message "Remember that you are going to die" is very bad news!

Deprived of liturgical context, 'Ashes to go' unwittingly colludes with contemporary culture's most prevalent heresy, as The Curate's Desk suggests:

My worry about Ashes-to-Go is that it reinforces the privatized spirituality that plagues much of the Church. “I” do not get ashes. “We” get ashes so that we may know ourselves, as a Body, to be marked for a moment but saved, together, forever.

And this, I think, is perhaps the most compelling criticism of 'Ashes to go'.  To use the words of the Bishop of London's Ash Wednesday sermon, it does not call us from being 'consumers to communicants' - it leaves us as consumers.  The article by the two Connecticut priests actually suggests this:

It’s also important to see it in a pastoral context, one in which technology is taking away people’s discretionary time and where opportunities for religious expression are being eliminated.

'Ashes to go' accepts rather than challenges that we are defined by the marketplace.  It does not challenge us to change our practices, our routines, our activity.  It leaves us as consumers rather than calling us to be communicants.

"Not a thing which we render, but which we receive": the Homily, justification and the Church

Many thanks to The Conciliar Anglican for posting his reflection on justification and linking to the Homily of Justification.  The Homily necessarily has a particular place in Anglican thought because of the explicit reference in Article 11.  But surely the Homily, written in the context of bitter Reformation polemic and misunderstanding, represents a period of Anglican thought that is best forgotten?

That the Homily has polemical aspects cannot be denied.  However, the Homily is much more than merely Reformation era polemic.  In a number of ways, the Homily challenges some later renderings of the doctrine of justification:

i. The Homily's understanding of the Sacrament of Baptism is far removed from that upheld by Mr. Gorham and his successors - "that sacrifice which our high Priest and Savior Christ Jesus the son of GOD once offered for us upon the Crosse, to obtain thereby GODS grace, and remission, as well of our original sin in Baptism, as of all actual sin committed by us after our Baptism";

ii. The second part of the Homily begins with an affirmation of the Tradition  - "to be justified only by this true and lively faith in Christ, speaks all the old and ancient Authors, both Greeks and Latins ... As beside Hilary, Basil, and Saint Ambrose before rehearsed, we read the same in Origen, Saint Chrisostome, Saint Cyprian, Saint Augustine, Prosper, Oecumenius, Phocius, Bernardus, Anselme, and many other Authors, Greek, and Latin";

iii. There is a consistent recognition of the need to shape the Church's reflection on justification in light of the emphasis of patristic discourse  - "we be justified ... freely by this lively and perfect faith in Christ only (as the ancient authors used to speak it) ... We be justified by faith in Christ only, (according to the meaning of the old ancient authors)";

iv. The relationship between justification and sanctification entails more than sola fide may at first suggest  - "this sentence, that we be justified by faith only, is not so meant of them, that the said justifying faith is alone in man, without true repentance, hope, charity, dread, and the fear of GOD, at any time and season";

v. The purpose of the doctrine of justification "by faith only" is to re-centre the Church around the saving work of the Triune God - "justification is the office of GOD only, and is not a thing which we render unto him, but which we receive of him: not which we give to him, but which we take of him, by his free mercy, and by the only merits of his most dearly beloved Son, our only Redeemer, Savior, and Justifier Jesus Christ".

The Homily's presentation of the doctrine of justification is, therefore, much richer in patristic roots and sacramental expression than some renderings of Anglican theology and practice have suggested. And it is this which was captured in the ARCIC II document Salvation and the Church:

Justification and sanctification are two aspects of the same divine act (1 Cor 6:11). This does not mean that justification is a reward for faith or works: rather, when God promises the removal of our condemnation and gives us a new standing before him, this justification is indissolubly linked with his sanctifying recreation of us in grace. This transformation is being worked out in the course of our pilgrimage, despite the imperfections and ambiguities of our lives. God's grace effects what he declares: his creative word imparts what it imputes. By pronouncing us righteous, God also makes us righteous. He imparts a righteousness which is his and becomes ours (16).

Reading the Homily, then, is not a divisive, reactionary exercise.  It recalls Anglicans to an understanding of justification shaped by patristic thought and the sacramental economy.  And, despite the polemics, it contributes to the conclusion of ARCIC II:

this is not an area where any remaining differences of theological interpretation or ecclesiological emphasis, either within or between our Communions, can justify our continuing separation.

Not consumers but communicants

From +London's Ash Wednesday sermon, preached in St Paul's Cathedral:

Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people.

This Ash Wednesday 2012 there is a note of urgency and relief.

It was only 20 years ago that we who dwell in the West could entertain the thought that we were on top of the world. It was 1992 when an American sage published a book entitled “The End of History”. We were within sight, we thought, of building heaven on earth – without God of course but with the assistance of liberal democracy and market economics.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and a new economic philosophy in China; with unchallengeable American military hegemony and the prestige of Western ideas there were those who predicted the end of boom and bust and instead an era of growth and happiness without limit.

Now with alarm bells ringing all over the world; with the return of religion as a factor for good but also for ill in global affairs; with a financial imbroglio described by Chancellor Merkel as the gravest crisis faced by Europe since World War II; with so much of the world converted into waste that there is now a continent of plastic soup, the Great Garbage Patch, equal in size to the USA, floating in the Pacific; now the outlook is very different.

We seem to be entering a period in which the narrative of the past; a narrative of growth without limit with no end in view beyond the process itself looks increasingly implausible and unsatisfying. As we meet this Ash Wednesday, our perspective on the world is being refashioned in response to contemporary economic and environmental challenges. The search for a more convincing narrative explaining why we are where we are and how we emerge into a more hopeful future is urgent.

“Even now says the Lord return to me with all your heart”.

We have discovered that if the reference to God is edited out of our perspective then the world simply becomes a theatre of human willing. We come to regard ourselves as gods and our wills as sovereign. We no longer experience ourselves as participants in an animated universe but as detached exploiters of mere matter. Dominance is substituted for connectedness in our relations with the world around us. Everything is degraded into a thing; an object to be possessed but which cannot give us joy.

The first step in becoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god. This is what Jesus Christ taught by coming among us as a servant. He embodied the truth at the heart of the Christian faith that “God so loved the world that he was generous and gave himself to us.”

On Ash Wednesday we get close to the humus – not with any artful, feigned humility but with a clear recognition that dust we are and unto dust shall we return. Genesis; Charles Darwin and Brian Cox all agree that we are creatures of the dust– star dust in fact.

Yesterday’s hubristic story is turned to ashes but not with the motive of leaving us in the dust or wallowing in an orthodox grovel. Jesus Christ came that we should have life and have it in all its fullness. Jesus Christ, the human face of the God who so loved the world that he was generous, is God’s embodied plan for a truly fulfilled human life. Human life in the Biblical perspective is evolving. We have not reached the end of history. Our destiny is not to turn more and more of the world into things but to be engaged with God in turning matter into spirit and to participate in the evolution of the human animal into the human being who is a partaker, as St Peter says, of “the divine nature”.

When impelled by the Spirit we go beyond ourselves in generous love; when we reach out to the God who so loved the world; when we embrace the world and first and foremost our neighbours with compassion then we discover within ourselves the Spirit like an inexhaustible well spring. As more and more of our life is translated into Spirit; as ego is diminished so that soul can grow; then we are equipped to play our part as spiritually evolved people in the unfolding human drama whose author is God. We come alive in a way that even overcomes death.

Ash Wednesday is an urgent call to conversion from an inadequate way of being in the world to the way which God intends. Genuine conversion to the way of Jesus Christ consists in turning away from deifying our own will; turning away from life as a consumer of the world and turning towards being a communicant; a citizen and a contemplative.

Ash Wednesday: "it is by this that the Church on earth stands"

In the order of the Creed, after the mention of the Holy Church is placed the remission of sins. For it is by this that the Church on earth stands: it is through this that what had been lost, and was found, is saved from being lost again. For, setting aside the grace of baptism, which is given as an antidote to original sin, so that what our birth imposes upon us, our new birth relieves us from (this grace, however, takes away all the actual sins also that have been committed in thought, word, and deed): setting aside, then, this great act of favor, whence commences man's restoration, and in which all our guilt, both original and actual, is washed away, the rest of our life from the time that we have the use of reason provides constant occasion for the remission of sins, however great may be our advance in righteousness. For the sons of God, as long as they live in this body of death, are in conflict with death. And although it is truly said of them, "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God", yet they are led by the Spirit of God, and as the sons of God advance towards God under this drawback, that they are led also by their own spirit, weighted as it is by the corruptible body; and that, as the sons of men, under the influence of human affections, they fall back to their old level, and so sin ...

Even crimes themselves, however great, may be remitted in the Holy Church; and the mercy of God is never to be despaired of by men who truly repent, each according to the measure of his sin. And in the act of repentance, where a crime has been committed of such a nature as to cut off the sinner from the body of Christ, we are not to take account so much of the measure of time as of the measure of sorrow; for a broken and a contrite heart God does not despise. But as the grief of one heart is frequently hid from another, and is not made known to others by words or other signs, when it is manifest to Him of whom it is said, "My groaning is not hid from You", those who govern the Church have rightly appointed times of penitence, that the Church in which the sins are remitted may be satisfied.

From St. Augustine's Enchiridion (64-65).

Shrove Tuesday

The fidelity which is the soul of religion is not our fidelity, it is God's.  We give ourselves to him in no reliance on our own trustworthiness.  Experience has taught us what we are.  Our confidence is that God's faithfulness will prevail over our faithlessness, that he will recall us, that he will not let us go.  Our broken resolutions witness against us, but he renews to us daily the miracle of his forgiveness.

From Austin Farrer's sermon "The Old Rosewood Desk" in Said or Sung.

"The medicine of divine assurance"

As Lent approaches, it is a time for Anglicans to reconnect with our tradition's pastoral practice of sacramental confession:

The sacrament of confession and absolution administers the medicine of divine assurance to doubting minds.  If I hold God so feebly, is it not, I ask, because he is so shadowy, and so distant?  I go to confession, and it is blindingly clear, as soon as I am dealing direct with Christ in his priest, that his love is very present, but that the perversity of my sin is very great.  If I sin so much, I ask, is it not that he lets me be conditioned so to sin?  I go and confess, and know without a shadow of a doubt that my sin was simply my choice, and that as for him, in him is light, and no darkness at all.  If I have been so often defeated, I ask, can I any longer hope to fight?  I go to confession and in that moment I know that he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead quickens our mortal wills and clears our consciences from the works of death to serve our living God.

From Austin Farrer's sermon "Assurance" in Said or Sung.

Authority, sacramental order and Covenant

Giles Fraser's broadside against the Covenant in last week's Church Times invokes an organic vision of the Communion-as-is against the Communion-with-the-Covenant:

The idea that all the different Churches of the Communion can be held together only by signatures on a page rather than years of tradition and common baptism and liturgy is an unnecessary bureaucratisation of theology and fellowship.

It is an initially attractive argument, appealing to a catholic understanding of tradition, sacraments and liturgy.  There is, however, a problem - a very significant problem - with this.  Apply the same reasoning to a diocese.  Different churches spread across a geographical area, held together by tradition, baptism and liturgy ... so we don't need bishops who have authority to exercise discipline?  Of course not.  We need bishops precisely so that the tradition, sacraments and liturgy are upheld against challenges and threats to their integrity.

The Covenant applies the same principle to the Communion.  What happens in Anglicanism at present when our sacramental order is undermined or threatened?  When, for example, a diocese or a province overthrows apostolic and catholic tradition by authorising 'lay presidency'?  Nothing happens.  The sacramental order is ruptured and the Communion takes another step towards being something less than a Communion.  Which is precisely what has been happening to Anglicanism over the past decade.

The purpose of the Covenant is to maintain and promote our common life and sacramental order as a Communion - not by "signatures on a page" or "bureaucratisation" but through an authentically catholic understanding of unity and communion.

The alternative?  Anglican Down Under very soberly summarises the alternative:

without the Covenant there will not be a Communion: neither a good, bad nor indifferent Communion, no Communion.

"All for Mount Tabor, nothing for Mount Calvary?": Transfiguration Sunday and the Lenten pilgrimage

From a sermon by Mark Frank, suggestive of how Transfiguration Sunday prepares us for our Lenten pilgrimage:

When we will have nothing here but tabernacles to shelter us, when we think much to descend out of the mount to suffer with our Saviour, would not willingly part with any point of honour, safety, or advantage, for him, would have Christ glorified before he is crucified, contrary to his Father's decree upon him and us, that we should both first suffer, and then enter into glory; when we thus shun the cross, and will have nothing but the comfort; all for Mount Tabor or Mount Olivet--peace, and quiet, and glory, and triumph: nothing for Mount Calvary, any kind of suffering; all for being "clothed upon," not being unclothed or disrobed at all,-would avoid even death itself, which we cannot avoid; when we can brook no article of the faith but the ascension into glory,--then "you know not what you ask," as Christ said to the sons of Zebedee at another time; you know not what yon would have, ye know not what you say ...

Consider the words spoken, as proceeding out of fear of death and suffering, and a desire to avoid it, to disturb the method of redemption by ... a subtle new device to persuade Christ to favour himself and his followers ... to turn off the cross, to keep with Moses and Elias in the mount; or at least, if he would, keep them from departing, keep them however with him,--Moses with his wonder-working rod, Elias with his commanding fire to defend him. Consider them thus, and he and his fellows may well be answered ... "Ye know not what spirit ye are of;" what you are to look for in the service of your Master; Christ's cross the chief lesson they were to learn.

Augustine on the commemoration of the faithful departed

Of necessity we must be sorrowful when those whom we love leave us in death. Although we know that they have not left us behind forever but only gone ahead of us, still when death seizes our loved one, our loving hearts are saddened by death itself. Thus the apostle Paul does not tell us not to grieve but “not to give like those who are without hope.”

Let us grieve, therefore, over the necessity of losing our loved ones in death but with the hope of being reunited with them.  If we are afflicted we still find consolation. Our weakness weights us down, but faith bears us up.  We sorrow over the human condition, but find our healing in the divine promise ...

There is no doubt that the dead are helped by the prayers of holy Church, by the saving sacrifice, and by alms dispensed for their souls; these things are done that they may be more mercifully dealt with by the Lord than their sins deserve.

The whole Church observes the custom handed down by our fathers: that those who died within the fellowship of Christ’s body and blood should be prayed for when they are commemorated in their own place at the holy sacrifice, and that we should be reminded that this sacrifice is offered for them as well.

From St Augustine, Sermon 172.

The Warsi speech - ecclesia or cultus privatus?

According to the Guardian, UK Cabinet Minister Baroness Warsi's speech to the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy received a "rapturous reception" from the Holy See's future diplomatic corp.  Warsi - a Muslim - spoke of how her experience was enriched by the presence of Anglican Christianity in the UK's public square:

What truly enabled me to learn about my faith and to practice it...
Was that my country – the bed over which the river of my faith flowed – had a strong Christian identity.
This defined, shaped and gave me confidence in my own faith...
Which, combined with the confidence of my country’s principles and values….
…Have since been evident in the decisions I’ve taken as an adult.
One decision which I think demonstrates how strongly I believe this...
...was my choice of school for my daughter:
An Anglican convent school.
Many might think it is unusual for a Muslim mother to send her daughter to a Christian school.
But I knew she would be free to follow her faith there...
...that she would not be looked down on because she believed. 
And as I had hoped, she found it strengthened her faith.

Warsi's speech has given a significant context for English Anglicanism in particular to recover a proper confidence in articulating the rationale for its Establishment.  For wider Anglicanism, the issue is not - of course - establishment, which is merely one (and not necessarily the most meaningful) expression of the Church's presence in the public square.  Recovering confidence in Anglicanism's ability to share in the Church's mission and proclamation in the public square - rather than colluding with those forces which seek the privatising of the Church's mission - is the broader issue for Anglicanism raised by the Warsi speech.

On the Fulcrum site, Jon Kurt has outlined the profound significance for Anglicanism in recovering this vocation: are we as Anglicans called to be ecclesia or merely a cultus privatus? 

The thing is that truly following Jesus cannot be done in private – it is a public commitment which needs to be lived out in the real world. Right at the start of the Church’s life under the shadow of the Roman Empire there were many sects which through religious practices offered their adherents a route to personal salvation. These cultus privatus were not persecuted by the authorities because they posed no threat to the status quo.

But the Church never used this term for itself – it almost uniformly used the phrase Ecclesia – the public assembly. Like Jesus’ himself, the public statements and actions of the Church were in conflict with both the Jewish and Roman authorities because they proclaimed a public and universal truth – not a privatised belief ...

Christians can easily be seduced by the idea of a privatised faith – the heresy that says what we believe is simply an issue between us and God. These routes might be cosy and safe but they are not authentic Christianity.

Herbert, Baxter and the Anglican-Reformed future

+Rowan's sermon at last week's joint CoE-URC service of reconciliation and commitment (this year is the 350th anniversary of the Act of Uniformity), recognised the importance of the Reformed witness in England during the 18th century, a time during which he acknowledged "Anglicanism [was] in its most rationalist and often least imaginative form".  It was a time, then, when the Reformed evangelical witness was particularly significant:

Isaac Watts’ hymnody reminds us of that—in the most positive sense—enlightened dimension to the world of classical dissent – seeing the great events of Christian history and revelation against the background of the universe, and yet in no way reducing Christian identity and Christian exploration to the dry rationalism of the Enlightenment.  Indeed it’s during the eighteenth century that the thought world of Dissent in England and Wales—at least as represented in its most enduringly powerful hymn writers—moves more and more away from the temptations of Unitarianism, of a reductive approach to thought and prayer, rediscovering and deepening all the time its roots in the classical and essential doctrines of Christianity.

Anglicanism was neither untouched nor unmoved by the Reformed presence in England.  And, as +Rowan insists, this dynamic was good for Anglicanism and reminds us of the ongoing need for both traditions to heed the insights of the other:

Because of the questioning gently but relentlessly pressed by our brothers and sisters in the Reformed tradition, we’ve had to discover how both episcopacy and monarchy, and many other features of the seventeenth century settlement, have to change and grow in order to serve maturity not to frustrate it ...

We have to take a deep breath and expect to be challenged by one another.  We have to assume that our discoveries will sometimes be painful and that they will not be without rupture and misunderstanding.  But we have to trust that the irresistible pressure – and I use the word ‘irresistible’ in deliberate genuflection toward John Calvin here – within us of Christ seeking to be mature in us.  That is what we celebrate in and through any number of conflicts ruptures and tensions.  Can we as Anglicans bring what we have to bring to the ecumenical table without any empty hierarchical posturing?  Can we even seek to persuade our Reformed brothers and sisters that it is possible to value tradition without being shrunk and infantilised by it?

So what shape could an Anglican-Reformed future take?  +Rowan ended his sermon by pointing by two figures from our past, suggestive of a hopeful future:

It does seem that an Anglicanism deeply informed and shaped by George Herbert, and a Reformed identity deeply informed and shaped by Richard Baxter, could hardly be a more attractive proposition for our future.  A friendly church, a church in which our shared friendship with God bound us more deeply together, in which our shared friendship enabled us to grow into maturity into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, something which allowed us to grow into a church together.

Here is the hope of a gracious ecumenism in which the Anglican and Reformed traditions contribute to a mutual maturing into the fullness of Christ - a model for other ecumenical relationships with similarly pained histories and memories.  What do we need to hear from the witness of the tradition from which we have been separated, which we have not heeded in the past, and with whom we are now in dialogue?  The pain of the memories of separation can then be caught up in the reconciling work of Christ, which the Anglican and Reformed traditions are called to proclaim and live out.

"As Saint Augustine saith ..."

Do you believe in the faith as it is taught by the 39 Articles?

This is one of the questions The Conciliar Anglican urges is asked when seeking to identify classical Anglicanism.  For all the difficulties involved, any authentically Anglican theology has to wrestle with the Articles - a point rightly required of us by the Covenant.

The various expressions of Anglican identity are each challenged by aspects of the Articles.  For evangelical Anglicans, this challenges the Zwinglian sacramental theology prevalent in contemporary evangelical circles.  And, often un-noticed, the fact that the Articles start with the regula fidei rather than - as with the Westminster Confession - Scripture, demonstrates that it is only in the communion of the church catholic that Scripture can be properly read.  For liberal Anglicans, the Trinitarian and Christological confession of the Articles challenges liberal theology to ensure it remains grounded in revelation. 

And for catholic Anglicans?  Since Tract XC, the temptation for catholic Anglicans has been to sideline the Articles, to ignore them as the more uncharitable of us might do with an embarrassing older relative.  As Robert W. Pritchard argues in his contribution to Reclaiming Faith - a series of essays on the 1991 Baltimore Declaration - that the moves by catholic Anglicans to sideline the Articles ironically resulted in "pluralism" defining Anglican theology by the late 19th century.  Pritchard goes on to say:

This pluralism would, in turn, influence the way in which [Anglicans] met the theological challenge of modernism.

A catholic concern with reasserting the doctrinal core of Anglicanism will bring us back to the Articles, beyond both the theological gymnastics of Tract XC and the anti-doctrinal sidelining of the Articles.  And it is where the Reformation debate was at its bitterest - over the presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist - that catholic Anglicans can affirm the Articles' teaching. 

"As Saint Augustine saith" - there is great significance to Article 29's invocation of Augustine (from Tractate 26 (12) on John's Gospel).  It symbolises the desire of the Articles to retrieve a patristic understanding and practice of the Eucharist which late medieval theology and practice had displaced.  There is a profoundly Augustinian emphasis throughout the Articles' addressing the Eucharist, beginning with Article 28's use of one of Augustine's most frequently used phrases for the Eucharist, "Sacrament of our redemption" (see, for example, Confessions IX.36 on Monica, "your handmaid bound her soul to the sacrament of our redemption"). 

The critique in Articles 29 and 30 of a range of late medieval practices - "reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped" and communion in one kind - ensured that Anglicanism retrieved the patristic emphasis on receiving the Eucharist: in Augustine's words to the newly-baptised, "be what you see, receive what you are". 

For catholic Anglicans to sideline the Articles, or to be embarrassed by them, is to refuse a great gift: the affirmation of patristic theology and practice which is fundamental to any experience of being catholic.  So, yes, do ask the question urged by The Conciliar Anglican - "Do you believe in the faith as it is taught by the 39 Articles?"

Creation, pre-Lent and the Paschal Mystery

The provision in many contemporary Anglican eucharistic lectionaries of the creation theme for the Second Sunday before Lent echoes the ancient practice of beginning the reading of Genesis at Septuagesima.  It is also reflected in many of our daily office lectionaries which commence the reading of Genesis in the Epiphany season.  This pre-Lent emphasis anticipates and pre-figures the Easter Vigil's proclamation of the Genesis creation narrative. 

In doing so, the Church encourages us to reflect on the Genesis account in light of the Paschal Mystery - to have, in other words, a Christological reading of Genesis 1-3.  We read the creation account in light of the Cross and Resurrection, rather than conflating Genesis with science.  In his excellent Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives, Orthodox scholar Peter C. Bouteneff points to this being key to patristic readings of Genesis:

If we follow the fathers, we will see the Genesis creation accounts as God's uniquely chosen vehicle to express his truth about cosmic and human origins and the dynamics of sin and death, all recapitulated and cohering in the person of Christ.  However we might reckon the narratives' relationship to the unfolding events of historical time, our gaze will be fixed decidely on the New Adam.

The Second Sunday before Lent, as part of the pre-Lent time, orients us towards the Pashcal Mystery, recalling the great words of Athanasius:

The renewal of creation has been wrought by the self-same Word Who made it in the beginning (De Incarnatione, 1).

We are thus prepared for our Lenten pilgrimage which will end when darkness falls for the Easter Vigil and we again hear the words "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth".

Episcopacy and the "special responsibility"

Over at the Covenant site, Christopher Wells makes a vital point about the outcome of the CoE General Synod deliberations on the consecration of women to the episcopate:

May I say, as an American Episcopalian, that various bumps in the road, awkwardnesses, and general disorder and hurt feelings notwithstanding in the C of E debate over the last years, it’s refreshing that the proposal finally has been placed in the hands of bishops before a final vote. This surely is meet and right, ecclesiologically and theologically.

The Church of Ireland's Preamble and Declaration, adopted at disestablishment, declares that "a General Synod of the Church of Ireland ... shall have chief legislative power therein", going on to importantly qualify this statement of synodical authority: "as ... consistent with its Episcopal constitution".  It is an important reminder to Anglicans that synods should not displace the episcopate and its vocation to promote the unity and communion of the Church.  The ARCIC II document The Church as Communion captures the essense of this vocation:

For the nurture and growth of this communion, Christ the Lord has provided a ministry of oversight, the fullness of which is entrusted to the episcopate, which has the responsibility of maintaining and expressing the unity of the churches. By shepherding, teaching and the celebration of the sacraments, especially the eucharist, this ministry holds believers together in the communion of the local church and in the wider communion of all the churches (45).

The Windsor Report echoed this understanding of the episcopate as a focus of unity in its historical reflections:

The unity of the Communion is both expressed and put into effect among other things through the episcopate. At the Reformation, the Church of England maintained the threefold order of ministry, in continuity with the early Church. As the events of the seventeenth century bear witness, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the Church of England would end up with a continuing episcopacy. But in the event “there was no attempt [during the sixteenth-century Reformation] to minimise the role of bishops as ministers of word and sacrament or to stop a collegial relation between bishops and presbyters in the diocese or bishops together at the level of Province.” Within a short period of time, in fact, this retention of episcopacy as the foundational form of government within the Anglican churches became the distinctive mark of its claim to be both Catholic and Protestant; and, reflecting the practice of the very early Church, the ministry of bishops as chief pastors and teachers of the faith, as the focus of unity and source of ministry, became central. The principle of Anglican episcopacy was fought over and defended in the life of the Scottish Episcopal Church. It was retained in the life of the Episcopal Church (USA). It was subsequently, and carefully, preserved in the life of all thirty-eight provinces of the Anglican Communion, including the United Churches of South Asia (63).

The consecration of women to the episcopate is, self-evidently, a divisive issue, threatening the unity and communion of the Church of England.  It is entirely proper, therefore, that the matter of providing a gracious space for those as yet unconvinced of the theological merits of this development should be given over to the bishops, who have "a special responsibility to maintain and further the unity of the Church" (the Church of Ireland's form for the consecration of bishops).  

The ecclesiastical politics behind yesterday's General Synod votes are, ultimately, of little worth.  Those opposed to the development are called to graciously and patiently stay with their sisters and brothers who will welcome the ministry of women bishops.  Those celebrating this development are called to make gracious and patient provision for their sisters and brothers who cannot.  And it is the "special responsibility" of the bishops to ensure this is so.

After "fratricidal tensions", hope-filled signs?

The CoE's General Synod debate on women bishops has been described by the Guardian's Michael White as exposing "fratricidal tensions":

There were also a lot of appeals for love ... But no one listening from the gallery of Church House's assembly hall could miss fratricidal tensions between the Manchester dioscesan faction – which favours a bit more delay in the name of Anglican unity – and the Southwark dioscesan posse, which advocates a bit less delay for the same reason.

Well, amidst the "fratridical tensions", there are also hope-filled signs.  It was Archdeacon Cherry Vann of Manchester who moved the Manchester Motion proposing a code of conduct as suggested by +Canterbury and +York last year:

Many who want to see women as bishops remain profoundly uncomfortable with legislation that will mean some faithful clergy and laity sense that they no longer have an honoured place in our church. Synod, throughout its history, the Church of England has found ways of accommodating difference, of holding things together in tension (sometimes in considerable tension) and finding a middle way through compromise mutual respect and a desire to make it work.

Archdeacon Vann's efforts were recognised by the Synod's traditionalist groupings :

We are hugely grateful to Archdeacon Cherry Vann for moving the Manchester motion; she has shown great understanding, courage, conviction and love – love for God and for God's people. We give thanks to God for Archdeacon Cherry, and assure the House of Bishops of our prayers as they discern the right way forward for the Church of England.

Riazat Butt who live blogged the debate for the Guardian, noted the words of Synod member Emma Forward:

I speak to you as a young Anglo Catholic who cannot accept women as bishops. When the archbishops' amendment was lost in 2010 I was surprised at how the will of the majority could be bypassed in a vote of houses. Sometimes Synod needs two bites of the cherry. We want to stay and we are grateful to those of you who will vote for this, our best chance to stay in the Church of England

"We want to stay".  The traditionalists' statement likewise emphasised this desire to remain part of the CofE:

The archbishops' amendment is a long way from our original proposals for provision; what we are saying is that we are willing to work with it, or something like it, for the sake of the unity of the church.

+Rowan's words in the debate summarise the content and significance of these hope-filled signs:

 I hope that the two principles that we have, I think, enunciated as basic in this debate—clarity about a single structure of episcopal ministry, and clarity about respect and adequate provision for a minority—are for all members of Synod clear enough to feel grateful for.  Because I think it’s rather remarkable that in spite of the depth of division and the sharpness of theological disagreement that has been around in Synod, we have nonetheless come to a point where we can say, ‘This is the kind of church we could, with celebration, with affirmation, live in’.  I hope we won’t lose sight of that today.

There is more - much more - to this than mere pragmatism.  It provides within the foundation church of the Anglican Communion a model which holds in relationship two strains of Anglican reflection on the consecration of women to the episcopate.  Elizaphanian's thoughts can, I think, be used to give gracious expression to this.  Firstly, there is the issue of authority:

I believe that the CofE has authority in this matter. If I didn't believe that I'd be a Roman Catholic.

I struggle with this.  Is this the type of authority the CofE claimed for itself at the Reformation, the authority to reform in light of patristic catholicity?  Perhaps it is, if the consecration of women to the episcopate is a legitimate development of classic patristic Christology - "that which he has not assumed he has not healed".  If so, can this only be a provisional development awaiting further reflection from the rest of the church catholic?  As such, its provisionality can be reflected in provisions for the recognition of the "theological integrity and pastoral continuity" (+Rowan) of those who cannot at this time accept the development.

Secondly, there are serious theological objections which remain and the nature of the debate within Anglicanism on this matter has not fully addressed these objections:

I believe that there are objections to the ordination of women that are non-trivial and that are not rooted in anti-women prejudice (there are, of course, many objections that are trivial and rooted in prejudice). In particular, this is not a matter of 'equality', 'discrimination' or 'justice' - except derivatively so, from a broader theological framework. That is, there is a genuine debate to be had here about what it is to be a priest, what it is to be a bishop. The greatest sadness for me is that the argument has been hijacked by secular thinking (on the pro side) and reactive, panicked negativity (on the anti side). In so far as there has been higher quality theological reflection on it (and there has been some) it hasn't filtered down.

The work of theological reflection on this matter is not, therefore, over.  This being so, giving space for the minority who will contribute meaningfully to Anglicanism's ongoing discernment.

Thirdly, there is the theological integrity of the majority of Anglicans in the British Isles and North America:

the root issue is that vocation is not reducible to biology. That is, to be a priest or to be a bishop is not a matter of having the correct chromosomes - nor is that a necessary condition.

+Rowan has previously articulated this position:

 I think those of us who believe that there can be women bishops would say that the whole ordained ministry of the Church is part of the identity of the Church as baptised people, and men and women are baptised, they take on the responsibilities and dignities of being baptised, as the Bible says: having the likeness of Jesus Christ. And if men and women are both baptised then it seems reasonable to think that they can represent the congregation, and represent Christ in the congregation because they're baptised.

For many of us, this is the robust theological case for the CofE to now consecrate women to the episcopate - but to do so in a manner which provides space and communion for those whose discernment reflects that of the wider church catholic.  This would be the hope-filled sign to emerge from this decades' long debate that has so dominated the councils, enthusiasms and passions of the CofE in general, and Anglo-catholics in particular.  It is from the very brokeness of the CofE's debate on this matter that hope can emerge - beyond reactionary sexism and beyond secular discourse, a hope-filled pattern of a Church shaped by grace.

+New Hampshire, Empire and the public square

In the midst of the Church of Ireland's debate on same-sex relationships, one of the most effective criticisms of the conservative evangelical organisation EFIC came from Changing Attitude Ireland:

This is only the tip of an iceberg of an unhealthy obsession with the subject of homosexuality from Conservative Evangelical groups in the Church of Ireland. Seven of the eight statements published on the homepage of the Evangelical Fellowship of Irish Clergy, for example, concern the issue of homosexuality.

You find a similar obsession when you visit The Lead at Episcopal Cafe - a thoroughly depressing obsession for those of us who believe in the importance of an Anglican witness in the American republic.  Even a cursory glance at The Lead will confirm the number of articles addressing same-sex relationships.  Instead of Anglicanism, as an expression of the church catholic, offering a radical alternative to polities defined by the culture wars, it seems that we desire to become combatants in that conflict, allying ourselves (as taste determines) to either secular Right or secular Left.

This is perhaps painfully clear in an article by Bishop Gene Robinson, highlighted by The Lead.  In the article for the Boston Globe, +Robinson defends New Hampshire's marriage equality law:

As someone who has spent his life in religious life, I believe it has no place in this public policy debate.  While we are “one nation under God,’’ no one set of religious values is or ever has been the basis of the law of our land. Theological questions about same-sex marriage may be an issue for many lawmakers, and while I respect their faith, I want them to consider that these important religious questions should remain in the religious sphere and out of the State House.

That’s because while our government cannot impede the right to the free exercise of religion, no particular religion has the right to impose its values on our society ...

Instead, policymakers need to be reminded that the United States is not a nation founded on religion: We are a nation founded on the rights of individuals and on the basic premise that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’’

The implications of these words are of much greater significance than Bishop Robinson being in a same-sex relationship, and of greater significance than TEC's consecration to the episcopate of candidates in same-sex relationships.  +Robinson is arguing that the church should willingly collude with a particular reading of the American Order, a reading which promotes a public square shaped and defined by a discourse which banishes the Church's proclamation to the private realm.

In his "Preaching Repentance in a Time of War", Stanley Hauerwas points to the defining aspect of the "mess" we face:

Dear God, we are in a mess.  By "we" I mean Christians in America.  I believe we are in a mess because as Christians in America we are more American than Christian.

It is an indictment which stands over the Church in modernity and in the marketplace of contemporary Western societies.  We have been moderns first, not Christians.  Consumers in the free market first, not Christians.  It is not, therefore, a specifically American issue.  But it does find particular American expression in Bishop Robinson's words. 

The words of 1776 can be read (as has been the norm throughout the history of the Great Republic) to give space in the public square for the Church to proclaim Kyrios Christos and for those shaped by this confession to thus reflect on the pursuit of the common good in light of it.  However, if the words of 1776 are interpreted to mean that the Church has no business proclaiming Kyrios Christos in the public square, which is to have pre-eminence in the life of the Church - Christological confession or Declaration of Independence?

If legislators who are Christians are required to leave their faith in the private sphere, what is to become of Christian reflection on poverty, torture, war, environmental stewardship?  What values then contribute to the shaping of public policy on these matters? 

Let's take Bishop Robinson's words and apply them to a specific example.  Mitt Romney, a man who could be the next President, says he is "not concerned about the very poor".  The Church's proclamation is very clear that we should actually be very concerned about "the least of these" and that the public actions of Christians should be shaped by this teaching.  Bishop Robinson, however, says 'theological questions about poverty may be an issue for many lawmakers, and while I respect their faith, I want them to consider that these important religious questions should remain in the religious sphere and out of the State House'.

In the face of Empire, Kyrios Christos was a confession that inherently addressed the public square, incapable of being contained in the private sphere, necessarily shaping the public actions of Christians (regarding, for example, the state, war, and commercial activity).  For a bishop to suggest in the early 21st century that this confession should, after all, be a merely private affair is a matter which far exceeds the significance and implications of Anglicanism's contemporary debates.

Synod, mission and human dignity

What will be the most significant statement to emerge from this meeting of the CofE General Synod?  Not women bishops or same-sex relationships, issues which are not of first order importance to the Church's self-understanding.  Consider instead +Rowan's words in the debate on assisted dying:

Changes in the law of this kind are, at the end of the day, changes in the default position that our society adopts.  The default position on abortion has shifted quite clearly over the past 40 years, and to see the default position shifting on the sanctity of life would be a disaster.  We are not, as I say, committed to the notion – the eccentric notion – that Christians believe that we should cling to life at all costs.  We are committed, as Christians, to the belief that every life in every imaginable situation is infinitely precious in the sight of God.  To say that there are certain conditions in which life is legally declared to be not worth living is a major shift in the moral and spiritual atmosphere in which we live.  We can be realistic, we can be compassionate in the application of the existing law ... But to change the law on this subject is, I believe, to change something vital in our sense of the value of life itself. 

Here the vision of human dignity inherent in the Church's proclamation of the Triune God dramatically contrasts with postmodern society's definitions of human flourishing.  It is here, then, that the Church's mission is best served by General Synod, in encouraging the Church to graciously but consistently proclaim and live out the dignity of the human person.

Accession Day and subversive pre-modern discourse

Being head of this state is not a secular office but a Christian one, for which the Sovereign is anointed with oil and consecrated.  It is a Christian vocation, which Her Majesty freely accepted and exercised as such. 

+Rowan's words at the Church of England General Synod today - Accession Day and the 60th anniversary of Her Majesty's ascending to the Throne - point to the subversive nature of pre-modern and sacramental symbolism in the era of postmodernity.  It is no accident that the relationship between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace was particularly strained during the Thatcher years.  Thatcherism declared that 'we' were merely a marketplace of individual consumers: the monarchy embodied a very different narrative of 'we', shaped by tradition and public service.  Similar tensions arose during the Blair years, when 'Cool Britannia' gave expression to the Left's naked public square, secular and ahistorical, in stark contrast to the values of the monarchy.

In challenging both narratives of Right and Left - the sovereign individual in the marketplace and the naked public square - the monarchy does so, as +Rowan stated, through a sacramental history and character.  For Anglicanism, of course, this is not a novel reflection.  As Benjamin Guyer has noted (in a 2010 Living Church article "Restoring the Restoration"), the calendar of the 1662 BCP quite deliberately included four royal saints (Edward of the West Saxons, Edmund the martyr, Edward the Confessor, and Charles the martyr).  Guyer emphasises that the inclusion of of these royal saints was not merely anti-Puritan polemic.  The sacramental character of monarchy ensured that "the story of royal saints is one of miracle, no less than martyrdom".

The fact the Church's proclamation is inherently bound up with the discourse and symbolism of King and Kingdom is no pre-modern anachronism. The democratic societies of postmodernity, shaped as they are by the narratives of market and naked public square, have become - in the phrase of Danny Kruger - social deserts, landscapes of "cultural aridity".  Narrative, purpose and teleos can inhabit this desert when the Church meaningfully proclaims its pre-modern discourse of King and Kingdom, a discourse and symbolism echoed - however faintly - in today's celebration of Accession Day.

The architecture for liturgy: emptiness or icon?

The Living Church has an excellent article on the decision of the Roman Catholic diocese of Orange, California to purchase and renovate the (in)famous Crystal Cathedral.  The author of the article, architect Matthew Alderman,begins by quoting a colleague's assessment of the modernist architecture of the Crystal Cathedral: "impermanence, cheapness, and emptiness". 

At the heart of Alderman's critique is the contrast between the architecture of a meetinghouse and that which rightly adorns sacramental worship:

There is a difference between a meetinghouse, an auditorium built for preaching, and a true church, with its sacramental character. The Crystal Cathedral stands solidly in this tradition: minimally ornamented, eschewing a processional layout in favor of a prominent, stagelike pulpit.

Yet, even if it is rooted in a tradition, it is nonetheless a modernistic structure. It rejects stylistic organic continuity with the past save for superficial touches such as a pseudo-Gothic belfry. Its glass envelope exemplifies Wright’s “sense of the continuing nature of space” inside and out. The sole ornament of the interior is exterior light; the exterior decorative scheme is reflected grass and sky. This is perfect for a pantheist, but for a sacramental Christian it is troubling.

It is as if modern architecture itself is skeptical of its ability to communicate a coherent message. Compare this with the original “crystal cathedrals” of Chartres and Rheims, bristling with stone saints, and where stained glass broke white light into a rainbow of biblical stories, martyrdoms, and allegories.

While Alderman is dubious about the Diocese's plans to renovate the Crystal Cathedral - " I often caution prospective renovators that they will not be able to turn their suburban St. AstroTurf’s into Westminster Abbey unless they are prepared to use a bulldozer" - he does make suggestions which would attempt to give a sacramental character to the building:

Liturgically, the building must be transformed from an auditorium into a church. The structure is laid out on a cruciform plan, but its principal axis lies within the short “transept” arms. The interior should be reoriented to follow the long axis to give a sense of procession. Sufficient space should be found for the sanctuary to avoid the broad, shallow appearance of a stage. The theatre-like upper balconies should be played down visually. The old choir platform and pulpit area in one transept should be screened off to form a raised choir area; below, there would be space for a daily Mass chapel, shrines, and a baptistery — the little devotional nooks and crannies that usually give so much life to a cathedral, and which have no place in a meetinghouse.

This action will also serve to create an explicitly defined nave, which in turn will lead the eye more easily toward the chancel. A large, straightforward retablo will do much to terminate the processional axis; thes pace behind could be converted into an adoration chapel or sacristy space. A baldachin in a spare modern style might also be suitable. The altar should be prominent, raised, and of a noble material. Other liturgical fittings such as clergy stalls and the bishop’s cathedra should be designed to create a high implied sill below the church’s glass walls, transforming the interior from a glass envelope to a discrete space. Further definition can be achieved by a “ceiling” of colorful translucent hangings to mediate between the exterior glass and the interior.

Alderman's article is a reminder of the iconic quality of the catholic emphasis on the sacramental context for worship.  It has a transformative centre - more than a painting, more than a table, more than a building.  It is not just the aesthetic contrast with the physical architecture of modernity that is striking.  It is, rather, the meaning of this contrast.  This is the point made by Milbank and Davison in For the Parish:

The interweaving of form and content is not the preserve of philosophy ... The union of form and content is a matter of mediation, and mediation is a defining feature of Christian theology ... Salvation comes to us as material, speaking and communal beings: in the matter of the sacraments, through water, bread and wine, in the deposit of faith handed on in human words and cultures, and through the mission of a visible body of people, the Church ... the Faith is to be found in the practices of the Church and the forms of her common life.

Matter, in other words, matters.  Collusion with an architecture of impermanence and emptiness cannot be dismissed as 'merely' an issue of form - it undermines the Church's proclamation of the One who made matter and assumed matter.

Silent, hidden, concealed: the Presentation

On the Feast of the Presentation, words from a hymn of Ephrem of Syria:

Praise to you, Son of the Most High, who has put on our body!

Into the holy temple Simeon carried the Christ-child
and sang a lullaby to him:
'You have come, Compassionate One,
having pity on my old age, making my bones enter
into Sheol in peace.  By you I will be raised
out of the grave into paradise' ...

Anna embraced the child ... She sang him a lullaby:
'Royal Son,
despised Son, being silent, you hear;
hidden, you see; concealed, you know;
God-man, glory to your name.'

St Bridget of Kildare: ecclesia not imperium

There was no such thing as a Celtic Church; the concept is unhelpful, if not positively harmful.

On the feast of St Brigid of Kildare it is good to be reminded of Wendy Davies iconoclastic 1992 paper The Myth of the Celtic Church.  What is striking about Davies' paper is the implicit conclusion that, while the churches in Celtic lands were not 'un-Roman', their geographical existence on the periphery of Europe did shape their existence.  This was particularly evident by the late 11th century when the churches in Celtic lands remained untouched by the various reform initiatives and movements that had defined the early medieval church elsewhere in Latin Europe.

What Davies does not touch on, however, is the very fact that churches flourished in the Celtic lands - lands which had been outside the Roman imperium (Ireland and Scotland) or on its very margins (northern England and Wales).  In so doing, they witnessed to the fact that the community called into being by the Crucified and Risen One could take root and transform social relations where the mighty imperium itself, despite its armies and its wealth, was unable to do so.

Which brings us to Bridget of Kildare, at the edge of the known world, doing that which was beyond the power of the military and economic superpower of late antiquity.  Here, perhaps, is the particular relevance of Bridget and her follow saints of the churches in the Celtic lands.  We too live in an age of turmoil - of post-Christendom, of declining empires, of falling markets, of terror and anxiety, of cultural and social uncertainity.  But in this uncertain landscape, a landscape without the certainities of imperium, today's Church, like Bridget's Church, can  - by forming communities of hope, oriented towards the Kingdom, not the imperium - take root and shape cultures.