Anglican entities, Anglican futures?

Not the Same Stream (h/t Thinking Anglicans) has an intriguing analysis of the likely impact of FCA on the future of Anglicanism:

Therefore there will be no schism in the sense of one organization separating itself out from another on a certain day, followed immediately by either or both bodies setting up new structures and legal identities.

Instead there will be a steady continued tearing of the fabric as distinct ecclesial units (parishes, dioceses and provinces as well as individuals) align themselves explicitly with the FoCA. The legalities will depend on the law of each country (property and pensions being governed by secular law) and on the ecclesiastical structure of each Church.

I anticipate that the FoCA churches will thrive, purposeful and enthusiastic for at least the medium-term foreseeable future. It will thus be self-legitimating.

On the other hand I guess the remaining churches will flounder for a while before accepting the reality that there will be no accommodation between the two Anglican entities. Then they too will revise their own relationships, structures and communications and will settle into the new geography of Anglicanism where, in most places, there will be one dominant Anglican Church and a minority owing allegiance to its mirror image.

The key words in the above analysis?

"No schism."

"Steady continued teearing of the fabric."

"Thrive, purposeful and enthusiastic."

"New geography of Anglicanism."

It is a depressing outline of what the Anglican future could be ... because it is not an Anglican future.  FCA's ecclesiology is definitively protestant, not catholic, with what appears to be a very functionalist understanding of order.  (FCA has, remember, rejected the "grammar of obedience", the grammar which gives fundamental expression to the Church's life as communion.) As for the "mirror image", think of the contemporary TEC - hardly a convincing model of creedal and sacramental orthodoxy. 

What of those Anglicans left out of this scenario, those who believe contra TEC that the vocation of catholic order is to serve creedal and sacramental orthodoxy and contra FCA that creedal and sacramental orthodoxy requires catholic order?  Answers please.

MacIntyre and the subversive catholic in university

In the late 1990s one lecturer placed two books in my hands - Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale and MacIntyre's After Virtue.  Both have been defining influences in my theological formation.  And both come to mind in light of Philip Reed's excellent review in TLC of MacIntyre's latest book, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition.

Reed summarises MacIntyre's call for catholic Christianity (he notes that "what MacIntyre identifies as the essence of the Catholic philosophical tradition has nothing distinctively Roman Catholic about it") to live out a very different understanding of the university than the contemporary higher education paradigm:

Part of MacIntyre’s conviction is that philosophical questions are not only for professional philosophers but for all persons, who are the intended audience of his book. This brings us to the importance of the university and the instruction of philosophy therein. The earliest universities of the 13th century were dedicated to the unity of knowledge and an integrated relationship between disciplines, with philosophy and theology having special places because of their systematic nature. MacIntyre observes that universities then marginalized or abandoned philosophy and theology, treating them as just one discipline among many, leading to the fragmentation of knowledge.

MacIntyre suggests ultimately that Catholic universities should reject the paradigm of the modern research university and focus on a truly liberal education with a unique place for philosophy and theology, for only these disciplines can adequately address the enduring questions of human life. No doubt this will not necessarily be the answer that budget conscious administrators of Catholic universities want, but this would only be a symptom of the problem that MacIntyre intends to rectify.

This critique of the modern research university raises some quite significant questions for the Church's life and mission.  The modern research university embodies the Market philosophy which defines life in the contemporary West.  As ++Rowan has recently said, "it is a philosophy that regards any imaginable object or transaction as capable of being exchanged for measurable material".  Amongst the consequences noted by him is the contemporary assumption "that education could have some value other than improving profits seems to be unthinkable" because the Market "define[s] what is humanly desirable strictly in terms of material profit".

Here we can begin to see the challenge for the Church's life.  A catholic Christian vision of higher education will seek to define "the enduring questions of human life" in terms of philosophy and theology.  The modern research university "define[s] what is humanly desirable strictly in terms of material profit".  In the increasing absence of higher education institutions shaped and formed by the catholic Christian vision of human flourishing, how does the Church interact with higher education and how does it form those of its members studying and teaching in higher education?

Interestingly, John Milbank in a provocative essay on the future of Anglicanism raises a similar point:

The Church of England needs to make higher education its top priority - especially given that it can no longer necessarily rely on the universities providing theological courses if they are given no ecclesial assistance. In Britain, we need excellent divinity schools and an enhanced church role in the existing universities of Anglican foundation - from Oxford and Cambridge to the smaller and more recent institutions. (It should be noted that already the life of Oxbridge chapels and churches, like that of cathedrals, is showing strong signs of recovery, alongside the beginnings of a theological and vocational revival.)

It is Milbank's reference to the ministry of Oxbridge chaplaincies (and their renewed significance) that perhaps offers the outline of how the Church can seek to model the idea of a catholic university education.  Through spiritual and liturgical formation - shaping students and faculty in the form of the mysterium paschale - chaplaincies can shape a subversive alternative to the paradigm of the modern research university.  A focus on the spiritual formation of those preparing for study in higher education also becomes necessary, something in which chaplaincies and dioceses should co-operate.

Shaped by the Cross and the Resurrection of the Incarnate Word, the catholic Christian's approach to higher education cannot but be in tension with a view of higher education which allows the Market to define it "strictly in terms of material profit".  Historian Eamon Duffy, in a sermon preached at Vespers in Magdalene College in 2000 pointed to how the Church's practices and proclamation define the catholic vision of a university:

Nowadays, the University is inexorably being colonized by the values of the marketplace.  Research is market-led, funding is given to work with direct commercial application, and learning is valued by whether or not it can be sold.  In candlelit Chapel and candelit Hall tonight it is good to be reminded of the real meaning of our University: that we are not a shop or a factory, but a community of human beings who share a common life, so that we can support one another in our efforts to make sense of the whole of this terrible and wonderful world - the world God made, and shed his blood for.

GAFCON, the grammar of obedience and Anglican ecclesial life

The ecclesiology contained in the address by the GAFCON Chair has another significantly disturbing aspect.  Consider the following extract:

Some sections of the Anglican Communion have been echoing the words of the serpent; ‘has God really said…?’ And their strategy has been to continue this dialogue endlessly in order to wear down resistance while all the time pursuing their self determined mandate of radical inclusion. In this they have been greatly helped by those Anglican theologians who claim that our identity is found in what they call ‘the grammar of obedience' ...

While we should never shirk the hard work of biblical exposition, we can never disregard the plain teaching of the inspired text ... The ‘grammar of obedience’ is a theological Trojan horse for profound disobedience.

Remember, this is a conservative primate speaking.  A primate speaking at a conference opposing the revisionist agenda within Anglicanism - a revisionist agenda which refuses to practice the grammar of obedience with regards to the clear expression of the Communion's conciliar mind in 1.10.  And now we are told by the GAFCON Chair that the "grammar of obedience" is to be rejected.

The grammar of obedience, however, is inherent to Anglicanism's theological discourse.  Consider Article 34:

Whosoever, through his private judgment, willingly and purposely, doth openly break the Traditions and Ceremonies of the Church, which be not repugnant to the Word of God, and be ordained and approved by common authority, ought to be rebuked openly, (that others may fear to do the like,) as he that offendeth against the common order of the Church ... and woundeth the consciences of the weak brethren.

Similarly, Article 20 asserts that the Church has "authority in Controversies of Faith".  The 1662 rite for the Ordination of Priests requires the candidates for the priesthood to embrace the grammar of obedience:

Will you reverently obey your Ordinary ... following with a glad mind and will their godly admonitions, and submitting yourselves to their godly judgments?

It is this grammar of obedience which configures the fallible, broken Church and fallible, broken Christians to Christ - it ensures that our/my judgments do not define our/my ecclesial life.  Hence Paul's call to the Philippians: "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus ... he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death".  Here the grammar of obedience enables the unity and communion which Paul desires for the Philippian church:

be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind ... in humility regard others as better than yourselves.  Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.

That GAFCON would now consider "the grammar of obedience" to be "a Trojan horse" is deeply unfortunate.  Much of the disunity within contemporary Anglicanism is precisely because the grammar of obedience has been undermined or rejected by TEC.  The grammar of obedience enables communion to be a reality, a practice which shapes our life together as Church, as communion.  What exactly would ecclesial life look like without this grammar? Ironically, it would look pretty much like life in contemporary Anglicanism. 

Indebtedness, primacy and the GAFCON proposal

Thanks to Creedal Christian for highlighting the insightful commentary of Shreds and Patches on the GAFCON proposal to elect the Communion's primus inter pares, ending the historic vocation of the See of Canterbury.  The revolutionary nature of the proposal cannot be understated.  As Fr Tony notes:

For as long as there has been an expression of Christianity termed ‘Anglicanism’ the primary mark of identification is that a bishop (not a Province) is in communion with the See of Canterbury. The rest of us are authentically Anglican because our bishops enjoy this fraternal relationship.

The case for such a radical redefinition of Anglicanism has worryingly been articulated in utilitarian and political terms. The GAFCON Chair's address referred - in management-speak - to the "need for creative thinking so that a pattern of global governance that is no longer fit for this context is not perpetuated by default".  Another leading GAFCON figure mirrored the case of those in TEC who invoke 1776 and the American political order in defence of an ecclesiology of autonomy:

Archbishop Nicholas Okoh, the leader of 23 million Anglicans in Nigeria, said that while the historic position of the Archbishop of Canterbury would always be respected he should be seen as “one of” many primates.

Likening the overhaul to the way in which the Commonwealth now elects its leadership, he said: “It is the same thing, the church of independent countries – no longer the British Empire – must make some changes.”

Perhaps most significant, however, is the profoundly un-catholic nature of the ecclesiology underlying the proposal.  The recognition of the primacy of particular sees has been an enduring feature of the catholic experience.  It is a potent reminder of what - in a different context (the debate over "lay presidency") - Rowan Williams has described as the "indebtedness" of the Church, an indebtedness which emphasises the Church's given identity as Christ's Body rather than "a transient human association".

An early example of this is Irenaeus pointing to the sucession in the See of Peter and Paul as "a most complete proof of the unity and identity of the life-giving faith, which has been preserved in the Church from the apostles until now and handed down in truth".  This was not about jurisdiction - it was about communion with this See, amongst others, being a sign of the 'giveness' of the faith.  (In this context it is important to remember that Article 37's critique of Roman claims concerns "jurisdiction" not the ancient understanding of primacy outlined by Irenaeus.)

The GAFCON proposal overturns this sign of indebtedness and giveness related to the See of Canterbury by making primacy within the Communion "a transient human" feature, emanating from a democratic majority.  What does it say about the understanding of Church that authority is regarded as more legitimate when it derives from a voting majority rather than an ancient see?

Pascha Nostrum: shaped by the Easter mystery

The Rector's Corner highlights one of the understated glories of the Anglican liturgical tradition - Pascha Nostrum, the Easter Anthems.  Cranmer's composition powerfully captures the dramatic Pauline insistence that the Resurrection transforms life now - an insistence that shaped the great patristic meditations on how the baptised participate in mystery of Easter.  In the words of St Cyril of Jerusalem:

You were led to the holy pool of divine baptism, as Christ was carried from the cross to the sepulchre ... And each of you was asked whether you believed in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and you made that saving confession, and descended three times into the water, and ascended again; in doing so covertly pointing by a figure at the three-days of burial of Christ.  For as our Saviour passed three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, so you also in your first ascent out of the water represented the first day of Christ in the earth, and by your descent, the night ... ascending again you were as in the day.  And at the self-same moment, you died and were born; and that water of salvation was at once your grave and your mother.

Sharing the mystery of Easter we are thus called to live the Resurrection.  The Easter Anthems, prayed as the invitatory throughout Eastertide (or, in 1662, the Easter octave) in the morning office, shape the Church after this deeply Scriptural and patristic understanding of the Paschal Mystery.  As The Rector's Corner puts it:

The Pascha nostrum underscores the power of Christ’s rising as a complete break with the old life…something that each Christian must not only celebrate at Eastertide, but learn to live in the daily life of discipleship.

Praying these words will, at times, cast the light of the Resurrection on those corners of our life we are still trying to live the old way, with “the leaven of malice and evil.” For that knowledge we need to give thanks: it is the active work of the Spirit in our life as Christians this Eastertide and always.

St George, Easter and the public square

St. Peter Damian's 11th century sermon on the feast of St George captured the appropriateness of celebrating in Eastertide the one described by the Orthodox tradition as "the Great Martyr":

Our joy in today’s feast is heightened by our joy in the glory of Easter, just as the splendor of a precious jewel enhances the beauty of its gold setting.

George - the Roman soldier martyred under Diocletian for refusing to participate in the Empire's persecution of Christians - speaks of how the truth of the Resurrection compels the Church to speak in the public square.  The Orthodox prayers for the feast, based on an apocryphal account of the trial and passion of St George, beautifully illustrate this:

The brave soldier of Christ spoke out openly against the emperor's designs. He confessed himself a Christian, and appealed to all to acknowledge Christ: "I am a servant of Christ, my God, and trusting in Him, I have come among you voluntarily, to bear witness concerning the Truth."

"What is Truth?" one of the dignitaries asked, echoing the question of Pontius Pilate. The saint replied, "Christ Himself, Whom you persecuted, is Truth."

It is the Resurrection which propels the Church into the public square with public truth.  In the words of Oliver O'Donovan:

Before God raised Jesus from the dead, the hope that we call 'gnostic', the hope for redemption from creation rather than the redemption of creation, might have appeared to be the only possible hope.  'But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead ' (1 Cor. 15:20) ... In the resurrection of Christ creation is restored and the kingdom of God dawns.

In communion with St George, the Church cannot but confess the Risen One in the public square.

(The illustration is a 13th century icon of St George, from St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai.)

"That little word 'for'"

From time to time some of you startle me by referring to the Atonement itself as a revolting heresy, invented by the twelfth century, and exploded by the twentieth.  Yet the word is in the Bible.  We have to consider, not how much we disagree with Luther or Calvin, but how we are to be saved.

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

Catholicity and covenant has previously referred to ++Rowan's openness to reasserting a view of the Cross deemed unfashionable by liberal theologies.  In his sermon to mark last week's 1,000th anniversary of the martyrdom of St Alphege, he made reference to the profound relevance of a theologian particularly disliked by liberal theology - Anselm:

Alfege’s successor, Anselm, 100 years after Alfege’s martyrdom, developed a complicated theory about how God saves us through the cross of Christ. A theory which has not always found favour with theologians in the modern era. But at the heart of that theory, strangely, is that same vision. There is something about us as human beings which is beyond price, something which only God’s love can really honour, can really deal with. And when we look at what God does for us and the cross and Jesus Christ, what we discover, above and beyond anything else we might want to say about it, is that it shows us a love beyond limit, rescuing lives beyond price.

Here we see something of the essentially postliberal vision of ++Rowan's theological project, moving beyond the shallowness of 1960s liberalism and its collusion with the dynamic of secularism, to encouraging a generous, thoughtful reassertion of the catholic tradition's prayerful reflection on the Incarnate Word, Crucified and Risen for us.  Anselm's understanding of the atonement, then, convincingly challenges those ideologies and practices of secularism which demean and disfigure the human person.

He went to his death, he rose, and was taken up, and left that little word 'for' sticking in his disciples' hearts.

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

"Planted in the likeness of your death and resurrection" - Anselm in Eastertide

On the commemoration of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury and Teacher of the Faith, words from his Prayer Before Receiving the Body and Blood of Christ:

Make me, O Lord, so to perceive with lips and heart
and know by faith and love,
that by virtue of this sacrament I may deserve to be
planted in the likeness of your death and resurrection,
by mortifying the old man,
and by renewal of the life of righteousness.
May I be worthy to be incorporated into your body
'which is the church',
so that I may be your member and you may be my head,
and so that I may remain in you and you in me.
Then at the Resurrection you will refashion
the body of my humiliation
according to the body of your glory,
as you promised by your apostle,
and I shall rejoice in you for ever
to your glory,
who with the Father and the Holy Spirit
lives and reigns for ever. Amen.

(The icon is of St Anselm and his predecessor Archbishop Lanfrac, with Our Lady of Bec.  It is in Canterbury Cathedral.)

Jewel, Rome and primacy - 450 years on

The Prayer Book Society USA notes that 2012 is the 450th anniversary of Jewel's Apology of the Church of England, "an excellent statement of reformed catholicism".  Jewel's contention that the reformed Church of England "returned to the ... old catholic fathers" and that "the ancient bishops, and the primitive Church do make on our side" neatly captures the Anglican understanding of the need for the 16th century ecclesia anglicana to retrieve patristic norms.

One aspect of a retrieval of patristic norms mentioned by Jewel is worth reflecting upon:

according to the judgment of the Nicene Council, we say, that the Bishop of Rome hath no more jurisdiction over the Church of God than the rest of the patriarchs, either of Alexandria, or of Antiochia have.

This is an early and significant recognition that the reformed ecclesia anglicana did not seek to deny the ancient primacy which the See of Rome had exercised amidst the churches of the Latin West during the first millennium.  Jewel is here referring to Canon 6 of the First Council of Nicaea:

Let the ancient customs in Egypt, Libya and Pentapolis prevail, that the Bishop of Alexandria have jurisdiction in all these, since the like is customary for the Bishop of Rome also. Likewise in Antioch and the other provinces, let the Churches retain their privileges. And this is to be universally understood, that if any one be made bishop without the consent of the Metropolitan, the great Synod has declared that such a man ought not to be a bishop.

Jewel's critique of Rome was not because of primacy, but the claim to universal jurisdiction by which the Bishop of Rome "now calleth all matters before himself alone".  This (not the primacy defined by Nicaea), Jewel states, is "plainly contrary to the ancient councils, and contrary to the old fathers".

In celebrating the 450th anniversary of the Apology, therefore, we are being reminded that the classical Anglican understanding of autonomy is much more nuanced than some of its latter day devotees would have us believe.  Even at the height of Reformation controversy, amidst bitter and deadly political dispute between Elizabethan England and Papalist Europe, Jewel did not deny the ancient patristic norms according a primacy to the See of Rome amidst the churches of the West. 

Alphege and the primacy of honour

Today's commemoration of the martyrdom of Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury is a powerful reminder that the foundation of Anglicanism's experience of the primacy of the See of Canterbury is to be found neither in the Reformation nor in British colonialism.  Since the mission of St Augustine to England, Canterbury's primacy of honour served and nurtured the communion of the English church and its communion with the wider Church - in particular, the See of Rome which had sent Augustine to England.


The changing nature of the See of Rome's claims in the medieval West and the Reformation rupture allowed Anglicanism to recover in the role of the See of Canterbury an earlier patristic understanding of primacy - far removed from Vatican I's declaration of Rome's universal and immediate jurisdiction.


This can be seen in the affirmation of the Windsor Report that the See of Canterbury is Anglicanism's "pivotal instrument and focus of unity", and the Covenant's recognition that Canterbury has "a primacy of honour and respect among the college of bishops in the Anglican Communion as first among equals".  It is this experience of primacy - as incomplete and weakened as it is - which Anglicanism contributes to the ecumenical reflections on the unique vocation of the See of Rome to (in the words of St Ignatius of Antioch) "preside in love".


Contributing to Canterbury's primacy of honour is the witness of those Archbishops of Canterbury who have been martyrs - Alphege, Thomas Becket, Thomas Cranmer, William Laud.  Their witness declares that while the See of Canterbury, both prior to and following the Reformation, had a particular relationship with the English State, this history was also marked by confrontation and the blood of the four martyrs.


Any discourse of 'autonomy' within Anglicanism - such as seen yesterday in the response of the Church in Wales to the Covenant - needs to be balanced by and understood within the context of an affirmation of the See of Canterbury's primacy of honour.  It is a profound contradiction to describe oneself as Anglican without recognising that See's primacy.


The primacy makes no claim to be universal and immediate, a claim unknown to the patristic churches, but this does not detract from its vocation as the premier instrument of unity and communion within Anglicanism.  And it this primacy which we celebrate and affirm on the commemoration of the martyr Alphege.

Tom Wright and the Tradition: cause for concern?

Is Tom Wright a liberal?  Okay, the question is as misleading as it is provocative.  But precisely the same could be said about the subtitle to Wright's latest book - How God became a King: the forgotten story of the Gospels.  (It is worth noting that the UK edition has a different sub-title - "Getting to the heart of the gospels".)  In a great review of the book, Reformed philosopher James K.A. Smith (h/t Sancrucensis) levels some very serious charges against Wright's latest offering:

Wright regularly faults the catholic creedal tradition as the villain that tempted us to miss this "forgotten story." Nicea and Chalcedon are blinders and screens that prevent us from seeing what Wright, "the historian," has uncovered. The creedal tradition, on Wright's account, was fixated on ontological questions about divinity and humanity and thus missed the backstory of Israel's covenant which really makes sense of the Gospels. And so when he frames his argument, even if he doesn't reject "Nicene Christianity," he certainly dismisses it and sees little if any value in it. For those of us who have been struggling to get evangelical and Reformed folk to remember they are catholic, it is disconcerting to have yet another teacher come along and promise a new "secret key" to unlock the Bible. Indeed, there is an odd kind of primitivism at work in Wright's framing of this account. 

This leads to one last layer of my frustration: Wright's dismissal of "canonical" readings of Scripture. There is much more that needs to be said here, and I hope to unpack this further elsewhere, but let me just note: Wright is very dismissive of discussions about the "theological interpretation of Scripture" or "canonical" readings of Scripture or invocations of "the rule of faith" ... This is because Wright has already functionally dismissed "the tradition" as more of an obfuscating "blinder" than illuminating light; more specifically, Wright's account hinges on the supposed illuminations of "history" as finally providing the extra-canonical resources we needed to be able to read the Gospels aright.

Catholicity and covenant has not yet read How God became a King and, like Smith, I readily confess to being "something of a Tom Wright enthusiast".  But of all the criticisms of Wright that one reads - from both Right and Left - Smith's is undoubtedly and by far the most disconcerting.  Is Wright advocating reading Scripture outside the Tradition?  Is he proposing another tradition rather than the Tradition as the hermeneutic key to Scripture?

Wright himself responded in an appropriately lengthy comment on Smith's blog post:

I take care precisely NOT to ‘fault’ the great creedal tradition. I use the two classic creeds in my regular prayers and worship – in the Anglican manner: the Apostles’ Creed every day, and the Nicene Creed at the Sunday Eucharist ... The creeds are not the ‘villains’. They were not written to provide a teaching syllabus. They are the symbol, the badge, the list of things that were controversial early on which the church had to hammer out. The problem comes – and at what point in church history this occurred I couldn’t say, that not being my period – when the creeds are used as teaching outlines; because of course they skip precisely over the ‘middle bits’ of the gospels, and thereby, quite accidentally and non-villainously, collude with a quite different movement, with which many of my readers tell me they are all too familiar: a form of Christianity in which it would be quite sufficient if Jesus of Nazareth had been born of a virgin, died on a cross and never done anything in between. The rise of such a truncated form of Christianity is not at all (I suggest) the fault of the wonderful and beloved Creeds, but of quite different movements which have then (ab)used them as a teaching outline which has reinforced (quite accidentally in terms of the Creeds’ original purpose) the omission of the kingdom of God as a present reality. In other words, I not only don’t reject Nicene Christianity, I embrace it, affirm it, love it, live it, and pray it. But the best sort of Nicene Christianity has always insisted that you read the gospels themselves, and indeed pray the Lord’s Prayer, and that these are just as important for shaping who we are in Christ as the formulaic creeds themselves. They weren’t intended to ‘cover all the bases’, and to use them as though they were is, however subtly, to misuse them. And what then happens is a form of ‘Christianity’ from which the main thing Jesus himself was doing and talking about has quietly been removed or hushed up. Very convenient, of course, especially after the Enlightenment.

There is, I hesitatingly suggest, some cause for concern here.  The Tradition, Wright appears to suggest, is deficient.  It provides an incomplete - and dated - account of Christian faith.  This seems to be Wright's emphasis in his closing comments:

The entire book is saying, not that ‘the secret’ is found outside the canon, but that ‘the secret’ is precisely what the canon itself has all along been saying but which most western traditions (except of course for that represented by Vos, Ridderbos and Rich Mouw) have managed to ignore ... My problem, rather, is, yes, with the assumption that either ‘the tradition’ or ‘the rule of faith’ can tell us what the canon is saying. Actually, sadly, they don’t.

So what does?  If it is not the Tradition/the regula fidei which guides and provides the context for the the Church's interpretation of Scripture, what does?  This, after all, is how the 39 Articles approach Scripture.  Unlike - for example - the Westminster Confession, the Articles only turn to the sufficiency of Scripture (Article 6) after recounting the Church's Trinitarian and Christological faith (Articles 1-5).  To rightly attend to Scripture requires the Church to approach the text in the context of this Trinitarian and Christological confession.

There cannot, of course, be a tradition-less reading of Scripture.  Every text is read from within a tradition.  The question is, which tradition?  The Articles set out for Anglicans in 1-5 the Tradition of Trinitarian and Christological faith by which we read Scripture.  The suggestion that Wright could be proposing that the Church can read Scripture apart from the Tradition/the regula fidei - and that thereby we will discover a "secret" hidden from Tradition - does have disturbing overtones.

There is no 'secret', no 'forgotten story', outside of the Tradition.  This was precisely Irenaeus' contention against the Gnostics and their 'secret tradition':

We appeal to the tradition that comes from the apostles, the tradition preserved in the Churches.

Wright admits in his comment on Smith's blog that "maybe the rhetoric of the subtitle is too extravagant".  There is no "maybe" and it is not merely "extravagant".  Reading Scripture apart from the Tradition, as if there is a 'secret gospel' unknown to the Church and the Tradition, undermines the very theological project of which Wright - in his own words - is a part:

I can well understand the reaction to a negative, destructive ‘liberalism’, and the desire to rediscover some form of ‘orthodoxy’. I have, actually, spent the last 40 years trying to undermine the former and reaffirm the latter.

At the Lamb's high feast

I often find myself humiliated at Mass by the awareness that my mind is preoccupied. Many, many times during the prayers of consecration I’ve caught myself thinking about how I’ve got to solve this or that problem. Money, reputation, politics: I’m in the temples of the gods of this world, propitiating them, negotiating with them, raging at them.

Then, suddenly, everyone around me is saying “Amen” and starting to rise for the Lord’s Prayer. I’m jarred out of my distracted preoccupations, my mental list-making, my ardent problem-solving. As I said, it’s a humiliating moment. The mystery of Christ made present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist is in front of me, and I’m off in my mind worshipping the gods of this world whom I tacitly presume control my future.

In that painful moment I try to follow St. Paul’s advice. I don’t stop thinking about my responsibilities. Instead, I refer them to Christ, asking him for guidance. And who better to know the answer? “He is before all things,” St. Paul writes earlier in Colossians, “and in him all things hold together.”

R.R. Reno "Things Above" at the First Things blog On the Square.

The Anglican crisis and being in the right place

Ephraim Radner's reflection on the place of conservative Anglicans in TEC - posted on the ACI and Covenant sites - is important in many ways, but particularly noteworthy is his statement of the cruciform nature of ecclesial life:

We have learned that carefully strategic and political positioning is a weak tool when it comes to pursuing the purposes of our common life as we have discerned it. The Church belongs to God, who has claimed it for the glory of His Son. And this is true of the disparate pieces of the Church, like TEC as well. Ordering local and national convention legislation, organizing partisan allies at meetings, pressuring budgets and secretly preparing legal maneuvers — sometimes this can provide short-term ‘gains” for a position, but in the long-term it is actually a toxic form of Christian life ... 

The Church belongs to God, and given the strange mystery of God’s own exercise of power in the world — a mystery embodied in Jesus — we cannot be sure if God’s purposes may not counter everything we had thought to count as success.

This may be pushing Radner's words, but there is here a sense that powerlessness in ecclesial life - rather than being interpreted via a political discourse as an injustice - provides a grace-filled opportunity to be conformed to the Crucified One.  And thus, while in a very different context, it does call to mind Benedict's Chrism Mass homily:

configuration to Christ is the precondition and the basis for all renewal.

Radner's closing paragraph emphasises how the very ecclesial dysfunction we now experience is an occasion for such configuration to Christ:

I think it fair to say that many conservative Episcopalians like myself look to the coming days of Anglicanism with some trepidation. Most of this unease, however, comes from residual anxieties over ongoing hostilities such as we have experienced from the past few years. At the same time, such learned patterns of feeling are not good gauges of the present or future. We know that. Far more important are the things we value, pray for, lift up in our ministries, and thus know in hope to be promised in the real grace of God’s work in Christ. To look upon these realities is in fact to be deeply encouraged. It is, therefore, worth reaffirming who we are in this time. For as objects of God’s grace in Christ, we are in just the right place.

Contemporary Anglicanism's failures and weaknesses, caught up in the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection, can become the occasion for our configuration to Christ - the Risen One who shows His wounds to the Church.  We are in just the right place.

"Not unclothed" - Virgin, Resurrection, and flesh and blood

Interrupting the Silence reminds us that the Marian anthem for Eastertide is Regina Caeli:

O Queen of heaven, be joyful: Alleluia
For he who was born of your body: Alleluia
Has arisen as he promised: Alleluia
Pray for us to the Father: Alleluia

V: Rejoice and be glad, O Virgin Mary, Alleluia.
R: For the Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia.

In the Easter season the Blessed Virgin is a sign that the Church's confession of the Resurrection must be rooted in the Incarnation.  Mary's body and the fruit of her womb provide the Church with its heremeneutic as we approach St Paul's seemingly disconcerting declaration that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God". We come to see this can only be read in light of his later statement that "we do not wish to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life".  In the Risen One, flesh and blood does indeed inherit the kingdom of God.

The words of Irenaeus indicate the fundamental significance of this profound relationship between Incarnation and Resurrection:

If He was not born, neither did He die.  And if He did not die, neither did He rise from the dead.  And if He did not rise from the dead, He did not conquer death and abolish its reign.  And if He did not conquer death, how are we to ascend to the light, we who from the beginning have been subject to death?  Those who rob man of redemption do not believe that God will raise man from the dead.

In Eastertide, then, the Church's communion with the Blessed Virgin proclaims that her Crucified and Risen Son has redeemed flesh and blood humanity.  In the Risen One, we enter into life "not unclothed".

Light, fire, flame

On Easter night, the night of the new creation, the Church presents the mystery of light using a unique and very humble symbol: the Paschal candle. This is a light that lives from sacrifice. The candle shines inasmuch as it is burnt up. It gives light, inasmuch as it gives itself. Thus the Church presents most beautifully the paschal mystery of Christ, who gives himself and so bestows the great light. Secondly, we should remember that the light of the candle is a fire. Fire is the power that shapes the world, the force of transformation. And fire gives warmth. Here too the mystery of Christ is made newly visible. Christ, the light, is fire, flame, burning up evil and so reshaping both the world and ourselves.

Benedict XVI's homily at the Easter Vigil 2012

"What matters isn't our usefulness ... it's God"

We are not told that Jesus 'survived death'; we are not told that the story of the empty tomb is a beautiful imaginative creation that offers inspiration to all sorts of people; we are not told that the message of Jesus lives on. We are told that God did something – that is, that this bit of the human record, the things that Peter and John and Mary Magdalene witnessed on Easter morning, is a moment when, to borrow an image from the 20th century Catholic writer Ronald Knox, the wall turns into a window. In this moment we see through to the ultimate energy behind and within all things. When the universe began, prompted by the will and act of God and maintained in being at every moment by the same will and action, God made it to be a universe in which on a particular Sunday morning in AD33 this will and action would come through the fabric of things and open up an unprecedented possibility – for Jesus and for all of us with him: the possibility of a human life together in which the pouring out of God's Holy Spirit makes possible a degree of reconciled love between us that could not have been imagined.

It is that reconciled love, and the whole picture of human destiny that goes with it, that attracts those outside the household of faith and even persuades them that the presence of religion in the social order may not be either toxic or irrelevant after all. But for the Christian, the basic fact is that this compelling vision is there only because God raised Jesus. It is not an idea conceived by the spiritual genius of the apostles, those horribly familiar characters with all their blundering and mediocrity, so like us. It is, as the gospel reading insists, a shocking novelty, something done for and to us, not by us ...

Someone once remarked that resurrection was never something you could plan for. But what we can do is to make the space, the silence, for the act of God to come through. When all's said and done about the newly acknowledged social value of religion, we mustn't forget that what we ultimately have to speak about isn't this but God: the God who raised Jesus and, as St Paul repeatedly says, will raise us also with him. Even if every commentator in the country expressed generous appreciation of the Church (and we probably needn't hold our breath...), we'd still be bound to say, 'Thank you – but what matters isn't our usefulness or niceness or whatever: it's God, purposive and active, even – especially – when we are at the end of our resources. It's the moment when the wall becomes a window.'

++Rowan's Easter sermon 2012

"By the grace of His resurrection"

Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father.  This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, when He had fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men.  This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection.  Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.

Athanasius De Incarnatione II.9

Most blessed of all nights!

This is the night when Jesus Christ vanquished hell,

broke the chains of death

and rose triumphant from the grave.

This is the night when all who believe in him are freed from sin,

restored to grace and holiness,

and share the victory of Christ.

This is the night that gave us back what we had lost;

beyond our deepest dreams

you made even our sin a happy fault.

Most blessed of all nights!

Evil and hatred are put to flight and sin is washed away,

lost innocence regained, and mourning turned to joy.

Night truly blessed, when hatred is cast out,

peace and justice find a home, and heaven is joined to earth

and all creation reconciled to you.

Therefore, heavenly Father, in this our Easter joy

accept our sacrifice of praise, your Church’s solemn offering.

Grant that this Easter Candle may make our darkness light.

From the Exsultet

"Being dead with the dead God"

If one asks about the 'work' of Christ in Hades, or, better, since we have described that work as a purely passive 'vision' of sin in all its separateness, about the 'fruit' Christ brought forth there, we must, in the first place, guard against that theological busyness and religious impatience which insist on anticipating the moment of fruiting of the eternal redemption through the temporal passion - on dragging forward that moment from Easter to Holy Saturday ...

The proclamation [to the dead cf. 1 Peter 3:19], in its sheer objectivity, and inasmuch as it is evangelion or good news, should be understood as an action which plants within eternal death a manifesto of eternal life ...

The dramatic portrait of the experience of triumph, of a joyful encounter between Jesus and the prisoners, and in particular between the new Adam and the old, is not prohibited as form of pious contemplation, but it does go beyond what theology can affirm ...

On Holy Saturday the Church is invited rather to follow at a distance ... being dead with the dead God.

Hans Urs von Balthasar Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter.

Good Friday

The murdered Physician, by his very death, has compounded a medicine out of his own blood to heal the sick.

St Augustine

Reading Scripture in light of the mandatum novum

Christ, therefore, has given us a new commandment, that we should love one another, as He also has loved us. This is the love that renews us, making us new men, heirs of the New Testament, singers of the new song ... [it] is now renewing the nations, and from among the universal race of man, which overspreads the whole world, is making and gathering together a new people, the body of the newly-married spouse of the only-begotten Son of God ... Let us, then, also so love one another, that, as far as possible, we may by the solicitude of our love be winning one another to have God within us. And this love is bestowed on us by Him who said, As I have loved you, that you also love one another. For this very end, therefore, did He love us, that we also should love one another; bestowing this on us by His own love to us, that we should be bound to one another in mutual love, and, united together as members by so pleasant a bond, should be the body of so mighty a Head.

Tractate 65 (1-2) on John's Gospel

Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbour does not understand it at all.

On Christian Doctrine I.35-36

Symbolic imitation, salvific reality

The concluding petition of Cranmer's Holy Week collect - "that we ... may also be made partakers of his resurrection" - has an obvious eschatological reference.  As the Church moves towards the celebration of the Paschal Mystery, we are reminded that it is not a Gnostic myth we celebrate.  In the words of Irenaeus:

They are totally foolish, these people who despise the whole saving plan of God, who deny the salvation of the flesh, and scorn its regeneration, claiming it is not capable of incorruptibility.  If the flesh is not saved, the Lord did not redeem us by His blood.

The collect's final petition, however, also prepares the Church for participation in the Paschal Mysteries of the Triduum.  Through the Liturgy of the Passion and veneration of the wood of the Cross, the solemn silence of Holy Saturday, the light of the Paschal Candle, the renewal of Baptismal vows, the proclamation of the accounts of creation and deliverance through the Red Sea, and sharing in the Eucharist, we are renewed as those who are "partakers of his resurrection".

And so in praying the words of Cranmer's Holy Week collect, we are prepared to share in the amazed joy of Cyril of Jerusalem:

What a strange and astonishing situation! We did not really die, we were not really buried, we did not really hang from a cross and rise again.  Our imitation was symbolic, but our salvation a reality.

"By ... His utter weakness and poverty"

Surveying the Pax Romana, Augustine's City of God exposed the proud claims of Empire:

Is it reasonable, is it sensible, to boast of the extent and grandeur of empire, when you cannot show that men lived in happiness, as they passed their lives amid the horrors of war, and the shedding of men's blood - whether the blood of enemies or fellow-citizens - under the shadow of fear and amid the terror of ruthless ambition?  (Part I, Book IV, 3).

Against the background of this imperial narrative, the Church's proclamation of the Cross declared a radically subversive example.  Cranmer's Holy Week collect captures this:

... to suffer death upon the cross,
that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility;
Mercifully grant,
that we may ... follow the example of his patience.

Humility and patience - not the virtues celebrated by the Pax Romana.  As the humility and patience of the Cross shaped communities and individuals across the Empire, patristic writers rejoiced in the power of these virtues over and against the military, economic, political and cultural might of Empire. 

It is difficult not to read Irenaeus's account of the rejection of violence by the Incarnate Word as a contrast between the Crucified One and Empire:

He did not use violence, as the apostasy had done at the beginning when it usurped dominion over us, greedily snatching what was not its own.  No, He used persuasion.  It was fitting for God to use persuasion, not violence, to obtain what He wanted, so that justice should not be infringed and God's handiwork not be utterly destroyed (Adversus Haereses V 1,i).

Athanasius similarly pointed to the 'quiet and hidden' power of the Crucified One, against the "pomp and parade" of the false gods who presided over the Empire's claims:

By what seems His utter weakness and poverty on the cross He overturns the pomp and parade of idols, and quietly and hiddenly wins over the mockers and unbelievers to recognise Him as God (De Incarnatione I.i).

Cranmer's Holy Week collect prays this patristic celebration of the subversive Cross, calling the Church to a radically different account of the virtues than that offered by the polities of this world - calling the Church to be the polity shaped by patience and humility.

"He who says Incarnation, also says Cross"

Cranmer's Holy Week collect (itself derived from the 8th century Gelasian Sacramentary) is another wonderful example of the extent to which the liturgical patrimony he bequeathed to Anglicanism is saturated in patristic reflection.  The collect for Palm Sunday, which 1662 provides for use up to and including Maundy Thursday, has been retained in contemporary translation by a number of Anglican provinces.  The CofI BCP 2004 offers the version:

Almighty and everlasting God,
who, in your tender love towards the human race,
sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ
to take upon him our flesh
and to suffer death upon the cross:
Grant that we may follow the example
of his patience and humility,
and also be made partakers of his resurrection ...

The profound relationship between the Incarnation and the Passion is the focal point of the collect.  He "took upon him our flesh" in order that he might "suffer death upon the cross".  Here, in other words, Cranmer proclaims that the Incarnation is ordered towards the Passion (a theme also mightily present in his collect for the Annunciation).  Balthasar's reflections in Mysterium Paschale perhaps draw out the full significance of Cranmer's prayer:

There can be no theological assertion in which East and West are so united as the statement that the Incarnation happened for the sake of man's redemption on the Cross ... To 'take on manhood' means in fact to assume its concrete destiny with all that entails - suffering, death, hell - in solidarity with every human being.  Let us listen to the words of the Fathers themselves.

Balthasar then quotes Tertullian, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexandria, Leo the Great, Ambrose, and Maximus the Confessor.  The quote from Athanasius is typical of the patristic witness:

The passionless Logos bore a body in himself ... so as to take upon himself what is ours and offer it in sacrifice ... so that whole man might obtain salvation.

Balthasar goes on to state:

These texts show, in the first place, that the Incarnation is ordered to the Cross as to its goal.  They make a clean sweep of that widely disseminated myth of theological textbooks, according to which, for Greek theology, over against Latin, 'redemption' was basically achieved with the Incarnation itself in relation to which the Cross was only a sort of epiphenomenon.  And with that, these citations also give the lie to the modern myth (which would like to find support in the one just mentioned) that Christianity is above all an 'incarnationalism': a taking root in the (profane) world, and not a dying to the world.

Secondly, and more profoundly, these texts offered here demonstrate that he who says Incarnation, also says Cross.

John Milbank has asserted that a misreading of the doctrine of the Incarnation is a besetting sin of contemporary Anglicanism:

The incarnationalist rhetoric of Anglicanism can sometimes be used in such a fashion as to suggest that God's will can be derived from a mere immersion in present realities.

Cranmer's Holy Week collect rescues us from such a misreading.  The Eternal Word "took upon him our flesh ... to suffer death upon the cross".  Or, in Balthasar's powerful dictum, "he who says Incarnation, also says Cross".