Vigil4synod

From Fidelium (previously The New Oxford Movement), a call to pray in advance of the CofE's General Synod meeting beginning on 7th July.  As the vigil4synod site states:

It is an opportunity to join together to pray for mutual love and understanding at a time when the biggest story may seem to be one of division. There will be prayers for all members of General Synod as they prepare for the meeting, and for the unity and mission of the church.

The chair of the Catholic Group in General Synod has written to all Synod members in light of the amendments proposed by the House of Bishops to the legislation permitting the consecration of women to the episcopate:

The House of Bishops’ amendments are consistent with their responsibility to try to hold the Church of England together; their amendments are also consistent with their responsibility to find a way forward that stands a reasonable chance of success at Final Approval. Synod’s voting in May showed that unamended, this Measure was doomed to fail at Final Approval.

The present agitation also provides a warning as to what would lie ahead of us were this Measure to be passed, with or without amendment. The formation of the Code of Practice would become a new battleground. Were the House of Bishops to be forced to retreat over their amendments to the Measure, they would be forced to have the contents of the Code of Practice dictated to them. Even after the Code were initially agreed, it would be open to pressure groups to campaign to whittle away its provisions over time.

A recent survey by Christian Research has found that 69% of CofE members surveyed wanted to see women bishops, and 75% wanted to see proper provision made for opponents so that they are not forced out of the Church of England. We have to ask ourselves: how do we achieve legislation that is faithful to the majority of CofE members? Pressurising the House of Bishops into withdrawing their amendments is most clearly the wrong way. Reliance on a Code of Practice is now looking to be an increasingly shaky and temporary foundation for making provision - which is what the Catholic Group in General Synod and others have consistently said.

The letter hits the right tone.  The theological arguments in support of the consecration of women to the episcopate clearly have the support of a majority of English Anglicans.  But it is important for the witness of both the CofE and wider Anglicanism that generous and gracious provision is made both for those Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals who are unable to accept women in the episcopate. 

A number of reasons make this significant for the entire Communion.  Firstly, tt signals a humility on the part of Anglicanism, that while we have embraced the development of the consecration of women to the episcopate, we recognise that the overwhelming consensus of the church catholic cannot accept this development.  We thus provide space for two integrities.  Secondly, it affirms that traditional Anglo-catholics and Evangelicals have a valued place in the witness and mission of Anglicanism (as opposed to the 'let them go' attitude of some commenters on Thinking Anglicans).  Thirdly, it declares that unity and communion - however imperfect - are of infinitely greater significance to our ecclesiology than political majorities and victories. 

Across the Communion, then, Anglicans can participate in vigil4synod.  Amidst contemporary Anglicanism's painful divisions, our prayer can be that the Church of England symbolises for the Communion a different way, an ecclesiology based not on majorities but on the peace and unity that are the Crucified and Risen One's gift to His Church.

"The city where Peter and Paul died"

If God's will for the unity in love and truth of the whole Christian community is to be fulfilled, this general pattern of the complementary primatial and conciliar aspects of episkope serving the koinonia of the churches needs to be realised at the universal level. The only see which makes any claim to universal primacy and which has exercised and still exercises such episkope is the see of Rome, the city where Peter and Paul died.It seems appropriate that in any future union a universal primacy such as has been described should be held by that see.

ARCIC The Authority of the Church I (1976), 23.

Irenaeus against the Whiggish Latitudinarians

In a recent posting on those included in TEC's sanctorale in Holy Men, Holy Women, Bishop Dan Martins suggested that greater care should be taken by Anglicans in including Roman Catholics who have not been canonised by the See of Rome.  To this quite sensible suggestion, one commenter responded:

I don't care if the Church of Rome has chosen to honor a particular person or not.

It is a statement typical of a strain of thought particularly present on Thinking Anglicans and Episcopal Cafe.  Perhaps the best illustration of this was the Thinking Anglican commenter who took issue with +London describing the Bishop of Rome as "undeniably the Patriarch of the West":

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

There is, of course, a long history of Whiggish nationalism and Enlightenment prejudice combining within Anglicanism to produce a quite vicious anti-Roman sentiment.  Alongside this, however, has been a quite different tradition.  Jewel's Apology - at the height of Reformation controversy - acknowledged the See of Rome's primacy of honour amongst the Churches of the West, in terms of Canon 6 of the First Council of Nicaea:

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 affirmation of the See of Rome's status as a patriarchal see reflects the Anglican Reformation's desire to restore the relationships of the first 1,000 years.  Hence, Article 37 declared that "the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England" - the medieval concept of papal jurisdiction, as opposed to the See of Rome's honour and primacy, was denied.

It is on this basis that Anglicans can read St Irenaeus' (on this day of his commemoration) statement on the See of Rome:

It would be too tedious, in a work like this, to go through the succession lists of all the Churches.  We shall, therefore, take just one, the greatest, the most ancient Church, the Church known to all, the Church founded in Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul ... With this Church, because of its most excellent origin, every Church must agree (Adversus Haereses III 3, 1-3).

Anglicanism is called to agree with this "most ancient Church", as it lived and witnessed during the first 1,000 years, prior to the development of a concept of jurisdiction alien to the patristic tradition. This was the intent of Jewel's Apology.  In his critique of non-communicating attendance at the Eucharist, Jewel invoked the patristic practice of the ancient See of Rome:

If there had been any which would be but a looker-on, and abstain from the Holy Communion, him did the old fathers and bishops of Rome in the primitive Church, before private mass came up, excommunicate as a wicked person and as a pagan. Neither was there any Christian at that time which did communicate alone, whiles other looked on. For so did Calixtus in times past decree, "that after the consecration was finished, all should communicate, except they had rather stand without the church-doors; because thus (saith he) did the Apostles appoint, and the same the holy Church of Rome keepeth still."

Tomorrow, the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, we will see a small sign of classical Anglicanism's reverence for the See of Rome.  The choir of Westminster Abbey will join with the choir of the Sistine Chapel to sing the papal Mass for the feast day.  It is an expression of the historic relationship between the Sees of Canterbury and Rome, and of Anglicanism's willingness to recognise the primacy of honour rightly accorded to the See of Peter and Paul.  The Whiggish nationalism and Enlightenment prejudice of latitudinarian Anglicanism is a paltry offering when compared to an Anglicanism that takes it place in the Great Tradition, affirming with St Irenaeus the honour to be accorded to "this most ancient Church".

Our "militantly post-liberal" ABC

Catholicity and covenant was surely not alone today in choking on the morning coffee while reading Theo Hobson's Comment is Free: belief piece:

Rowan Williams has flashed a few glimpses of his final book as archbishop.  One of these relates to British Muslims. Muslims living in Britain should show loyalty to "the nation state" rather than "the international Muslim community". They "must make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state".

It is hard to know what to make of this. For 10 years he has been sending out a very different message, insisting that religion of all stripes is threatened by the aggressively secular liberal state.

As we begin to reflect on ++Rowan's legacy to Anglicanism, his critique of the postmodern liberal, secular state - alongside his engagement with atheism - must surely rate as of prime importance.  Unless, of course, the words quoted by Hobson suggest a quite startling and disturbing change of view.

Thankfully, the ABC's website comes to the rescue, assuring us that the words quoted by Hobson are indeed from a lecture given by ++Rowan - a lecture in which he poised the above quoted view as typical of contemporary liberalism before going on to refute it.

This, however, does not detract from the importance of Hobson's article.  He critiques ++Rowan's belief that for the believer "the community to which you belong is greater than any limited human society".  This "very low opinion of the liberal state", says Hobson, is an unfortunate rejection of "a new narrative of national identity in 'liberty'".  (It is difficult to see this as "new": it is a re-heated version of the old liberal Protestant Whig interpretation.) This narrative of the liberal state, Hobson goes on to say, does require that "not all religion can be allowed full expression in the public square".

Which, of course, somewhat proves ++Rowan's point.  As he recently argued in his Magna Carta Lecture, the postmodern secular, liberal state has an impoverished vision of human and civic flourishing:

I am arguing that there is a trend in our public philosophy in the UK (and elsewhere) that is pushing us back towards a naivety about democracy or democratic accountability which in turn makes us increasingly tone-deaf to the moral and legal need for true representation – that is, for public argument, for the labour of understanding and giving voice to genuinely different perspectives or interests or varieties of expertise.  And this leads ultimately to a deadening of language itself, a reduction of shared speech to functional and calculable categories, categories and standards and terminology that belong to no-one because they are thought to be universal and rational. It becomes harder and harder for someone with specific, local and historical loyalties to recognise himself or herself in the abstract categories of calculated function or profitability. State and society drift apart, with the former increasingly claiming the right to shape the latter, and thus in the long term putting a question mark against the legal principle of guaranteeing the interests of each and every citizen in their existing diversity.

The place of religious traditions in this context is not the collusion of polite silence in the public square, as Hobson advocates:

Healthy societies are those which understand concepts like sovereignty, democracy and justice against the background of a firm conviction about universal human dignity and the fundamental character and calling of the law to protect this. In a very challenging essay, the German philosopher Robert Spaemann has said that ‘modern civilization poses a threat to human dignity unlike any that has ever existed’ ... because it is so obsessed with objectifying the human subject by way of scientistic, managerial and behaviourist strategies that erode the first-person perspective. Religion is the primary force that resists this on the basis of clear theoretical principle ... [This] is the point that has been an underlying premise of the whole of my argument here: religion, because it conserves a robust and irreducible commitment to the personal dignity of all, is among the strongest allies of a full-blooded theory of law and so of a sustainable and just democratic system.

Here we see the political consequences of the Church's proclamation that the Crucified and Risen One - not Caesar - is kyrios, and the political consquences of the Church's sacramental practice.  In Baptism and Eucharist we see the vision of human dignity restored in communion with the Triune God, a vision infinitely deeper and fuller than the shallow, flattened landscape of the secular, liberal state.  Or, as Hobson so delightfully puts it:

It was ironic that the press dubbed him a liberal on account of his relative sympathy with gay rights and his leftwing politics, because he represented a militantly "post-liberal" form of theology.

As we prepare for Anglicanism after ++Rowan, we should be asking ourselves how Anglicans in the West can develop this rich teaching he has bequeathed to us, on the Church's critique of the secular state.

No longer established but still in the public square

Viewing today's Service of Thanksgiving for the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, held in Enniskillen's Cathedral Church of St Macartin, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Irish Church Act 1869 had not after all become law.  While being disestablished for nearly a century and a half, the Church of Ireland is often called upon to host liturgies of civic celebration and commemoration - despite the fact that the island of Ireland has a Roman Catholic majority and Northern Ireland a Presbyterian majority.  It might be our generous ecumenical ethos which ensures this role (wonderfully evident today in the participation of the Primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland and the President of the Methodist Church in Ireland).  Or perhaps it reflects a residual, dim recognition of Anglicanism's claim to be a via media.

More convincingly, however, it might be a sense that the CofI was the established Church on this island, and that its cathedrals in particular have over centuries maintained as part of their vocation a ministry to the civic communities in which they exist.  It was this sense that was evident in today's Service of Thanksgiving in St Macartin's Cathedral.  It was given expression in ++Armagh's sermon, with its classical Anglican affirmation of the vocation of monarchy, the need for a Pax Hibernica (a contemporary Irish take on the old Anglican commitment to social cohesion), and its generous statement of the relationship between civic life and a Christian account of the social virtues.

In reflecting on how the Church of Ireland can contribute to the new evangelisation on an island which, both north and south, is increasingly defined by the secularism common elsewhere in Europe, this civic ministry of our cathedrals (and some of larger, provincial parish churches) deserves careful thought.  Of course, this is not unique to Ireland - other Anglican provinces will identify with this public role.

The fact that this ministry almost always now has an ecumenical dimension is of great importance - affirming in the public square that the Churches share in a common mission.  The role of the Church's artists (above all, of course, musicians) in such contexts is also important, ensuring that artistic excellence and beauty is shown in the public square to be affirmed rather than denied by the Church's proclamation.  Then there is preaching for civic celebrations and commemorations.  ++Armagh's sermon today exemplified how such occasions should be used to communicate the Christian tradition's vision of the common good and its implications for the polity.  The formation of clergy serving in cathedrals and parishes with a civic role should pay careful attention to this particular aspect of homiletics.

It is one of the gifts that Christendom and establishment has bestowed upon the post-Christendom Church in many Western societies that, despite the postmodern State's ideological blindness to the Church's confession, the Church continues to be recognised as as appropriate context place for significant civic celebrations and commemorations.  This gift should be gratefully received and, amidst the pains, confusions and delusions of postmodernity, the Church should use such occasions - as happened today in St Macartin's Cathedral - to share in the public square its vision of human and civic flourishing.

Gifts from the Bridegroom or property of postmodern aspirations?

Anglican Down Under neatly summarises why many of us elsewhere in the Communion have a deep interest in TEC:

The reason ADU takes great interest in TEC is twofold: (a) it is a pioneer in a new style Anglicanism, full of novelties; (b) some key leaders in our church seem bent on taking ACANZP down the same path that TEC has pioneered.

TEC is, indeed, something of a trailblazer - whether we deem such trailblazing to be prophetic or heterodox.  A certain type of Anglican liberalism which is present in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia and New Zealand is dominant in TEC.  So, consider TEC to see what North Atlantic and Australasian Anglicanism would look like if this particular expression of theological liberalism became dominant in these provinces also.

+Mary Glasspool to some extent personifies such trends.  Her consecration to the episcopate signalled TEC's definitive rejection of the moratoria called for by the Instruments of Communion.  It gave expression to the ecclesiology of autonomy/Manifest Destiny shaping TEC's self-understanding, rather than the communion ecclesiology of the Windsor and ARCIC processes.

In a recent Huffington Post article, Bishop Glasspool addressed the issue of same-sex marriage.  Doing so, in the words of Episcopal Cafe, she "considere[d] the sacramental dimensions of marriage equality":

In the Episcopal Church, marriage has traditionally been treated as a sacrament. The outward and visible signs of the sacrament are the rings and vows that two people make to each other. The inward and spiritual grace is the reality of the relationship the two people already have given by God.

As a priest friend in TEC recently pointed out to me, some in TEC may wish this was the case - but it's not.  The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage in the BCP 1979 is quite explicit that gender is a given part of the sacramentality of marriage.  The Catechism similarly defines the sacramentality of marriage:

Q.	What is Holy Matrimony?
A.	Holy Matrimony is Christian marriage, in which the woman and man enter into a life-long union, make their vows before God and the Church, and receive the grace and blessing of God to help them fulfill their vows.

The point at issue here is not the cases for and against same-sex marriage in civil law.  Nor is it even about the provision of a liturgy of blessing for same-sex relationships.  It is, however, about the Anglican understanding of the Church's sacramental economy and its expression in the formularies of Anglicanism in general and TEC in particular.  Judged against these formularies, Bishop Glasspool's definition of the sacramentality of marriage is significantly flawed.  Now, it may be after General Convention 2012 this is no longer the case.  At present, however, TEC shares with the rest of the Anglican Communion a definition of the sacramentality of matrimony in which gender has significance.

For Catholic Anglicans, the sacramental economy is no mere matter of ordinances, rites or functions.  It is instructive to recall that Article 27 begins by declaring that Baptism "is not only a sign of profession" and Article 28 declares that the Eucharist "is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves".  Rather, Baptism is a sign and instrument "of Regeneration" and the Eucharist is "a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ's death".

The sacraments (both the two "generally necessary for salvation" and the other five which serve and promote the Church's communion) are the life-giving gifts of the Crucified and Risen One, the means by which He enables us to share in the life of the Triune God.  It is worth noting here that Bishop Glasspool's view that in celebrating the sacraments "we are recognising God's gift of grace in others" falls considerably short of a catholic understanding of the sacraments.

The debate over how the Church responds to the contemporary phenomenon of committed, same-sex partnerships should be reflected upon within the contours of the sacramental economy, shaped by these gifts the Bridegroom has bestowed upon His Church.  But increasingly this is not what is happening.  Instead, the sacramental economy is being regarded not as gift but as property, shaped not by what has been received from the Crucified and Risen One, but by that to which early 21st century postmoderns aspire.

.

"A voice is being born"

John is born of an old woman who is barren; Christ is born of a young woman who is a virgin. That John will be born is not believed, and his father is struck dumb; that Christ will be born is believed, and he is conceived by faith ...

Zachary is struck dumb and loses his voice, until John, the Lord’s forerunner, is born and releases his voice for him. What does Zachary’s silence mean, but that prophecy was obscure and, before the proclamation of Christ, somehow concealed and shut up? It is released and opened up by his arrival, it becomes clear when the one who was being prophesied is about to come.  The releasing of Zachary’s voice at the birth of John has the same significance as the tearing of the veil of the Temple at the crucifixion of Christ. If John were meant to proclaim himself, he would not be opening Zachary’s mouth. The tongue is released because a voice is being born – for when John was already heralding the Lord, he was asked, 'Who are you' and he replied 'I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness' ...

John is the voice, but the Lord in the beginning was the Word. John is a voice for a time, but Christ is the eternal Word from the beginning.

From St Augustine's sermon for the Feast of the Birth of St John the Baptist - in the midst of 'Ordinary Time', the cycle of salvation history continues, renewing the Church in the confession of the Incarnate Word.

Alban's confession and the post-Christendom Church

You have chosen to conceal a sacrilegious rebel.

The words the Roman judge addressed to Alban, according to Bede, summarise the confrontation between the ecclesia and the imperium.  Today's feast of Alban's martyrdom falls at a time when the relationship between the post-Christendom ecclesia and the postmodern imperium appears to be entering a phase of confrontation. 

The Church of England's response to the Coalition Government's proposals on gay marriage was widely reported in the UK media as pointing to the biggest confrontation between Church and State in the UK for 500 years, fatally undermining the establishment of the CofE.  In the States, Roman Catholics are observing the Fortnight for Freedom - a time of prayer, study, catechesis and public action on the nature of religious liberty, against the background of the Obama Administration's birth control mandate. 

The Roman judge's description of the priest to whom Alban gave sanctuary - "sacrilegious rebel" - reflects something of how the postmodern polity regards the Church's witness in the public square.  The Church's vision of the human person is seen to undermine the pluralism and tolerance of the polity.  It is rebellious.  It is a sacrilege. It destablises the social order.

The relationship between Church and State post-Christendom has the potential to take on characteristics of the pre-Christendom relationship.  For churches whose approach to catechesis, ministry and evangelisation is still shaped by the modes of Christendom, this poses a deep threat in which collusion with and conformity to the postmodern polity result in decline and irrelevance. The opportunity, however, is for the Church to re-embrace a radical public confession of the Crucified and Risen One, in which discipleship offers an authentic alternative vision of human flourishing to that adhered to by the polity - Alban's confession, Alban's discipleship.

Ignorantia sacerdotum?

Following a council of the English church held at Lambeth in 1281, Archbishop Pecham issued a catechism best known by its opening words, Ignorantia Sacerdotum - the ignorance of priests.

Now, there is not necessarily a relationship between Ignorantia Sacerdotum and the two quotations below:

The majority of Houses of Clergy (26) voted against ...

(From a CofE press release ahead of the July General Synod, summarising how clergy voted in diocesan synods on the Anglican Covenant.)

Most decisive is the collapse of theological literacy among the clergy - again, this is partly a legacy of the 1960s and 70s (made all the worst by the illusion that this was a time of enlightening by sophisticated German Protestant influence) ...

(From a recent John Milbank article on the challenges facing Anglicanism in general and the CofE in particular.)

Perhaps it is uncharitable to suggest that not much has changed since 1281.  Ignorantia sacerdotum?

"A more complex phenomenon" - ++Rowan and engaging with atheism

Following on from yesterday's post, part of ++Rowan's Evening Standard interview is worth reflecting upon:

We are haunted by Christianity in this country; there’s a bit of can’t live with it, can’t live without it in some people’s approaches. Even with Dawkins, the sense that he can’t leave it alone is fascinating. It does mean that it’s a more complex phenomenon than it looks at first; it’s not as if everyone on that side wants to sweep things away and start from day one. I’m interested in how much scope that still gives for mutual understanding.

Perhaps ++Rowan's most important legacy will be his commitment to meaningfully engaging the new atheism.  It is as a cultural phenomenon that the new atheism is making headway in shaping public opinion.  The rather shaky, wide-eyed scientific fundamentalism of Dawkins et al leaves both academic and public opinion rather cold.  But its cultural critique of faith - narrow, anti-scientific, responsible for violence and persecution - appears to be putting down roots.

It is here that ++Rowan's generous but meaningful engagement sets a pattern for the Church.  Demonstrating - as ++Rowan has sought to do - that the Church's life and proclamation is shaped by an infinitely greater, more gracious and beautiful Reality than that seen by the new atheists, helps us see how the new evangelisation can respond to the "complex phenomenon" of atheism.  Or, in ++Rowan's words ending the Evening Standard interview:

The Dostoevskian picture of human beings says you have to look at yourself and realise just how much of a mess there is. You have to avoid liberal and conservative lies; you have to bring it all into the light; but the light is benign.

When Moral Truth becomes a Person - atheism and the Church's mission

The news that Unequally Yoked - the self-described "geeky atheist" blogger - is to become a Roman Catholic has provoked (for quite obviously different reasons) significant commentary in the atheist and Roman Catholic blogospheres. 

It is humbling to read Unequally Yoked's last posting on the Patheos Atheist Portal:

I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant.  It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth. And there was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth.

For those of us who had thrown out Lewis' Mere Christianity as hopelessly rationalistic, it might be time to demonstrate a little humility and dust down our old copies.  There is a Lewis-like quality to this confession and, perhaps, a reminder that questions about how the universe is 'hard-wired' may have a much greater significance to contemporary evangelisation than perhaps some of us have recognised.

The role played by Macintyre's virtue ethics in Unequally Yoked's conversion - "I kept running into moral philosophers who seemed really helpful, until I discovered that their study of virtue ethics has led them to take a tumble into the Tiber" - is also suggestive of the pressing need for the Church to encourage that tradition of moral reflection which provides a compelling account of the moral life.

At the end of it all - or, more accurately, at the beginning - there is the practice of prayer:

I asked my friend what he suggest we do now, and we prayed the night office of the Liturgy of the Hours together ... I’ve been using the Liturgy of the Hours and St. Patrick’s Breastplate for most of my prayer attempts.

It is a glorious reminder that the daily offices are not just for the ordained or those in cathedral communities: they provide that immersion in the rhythms of the Psalms, in the ordered reading of Scripture, and the celebration of the liturgical year, that shapes us all in the mind of Christ.

We cannot, obviously, suggest an approach to evangelisation based solely on the conversion of a "virtue ethicist atheist whose transhumanism seems to be rooted in dualism" - something of a rare demographic.  But certain themes do emerge that can give us pause for reflection, themes that have a place in the new evangelisation. Maintaining a loving, respectful, intellectually coherent engagement with atheism (as ++Rowan has done) is perhaps the most obvious point to emerge from this particular conversion.  And then having close at hand that book containing the daily offices, for when an atheist friend asks 'what now?'

It seems appropriate to end this post with the words of St Augustine:

You have called,
you have cried,
and you have pierced my deafness.
You have radiated forth,
you have shined out brightly,
and you have dispelled my blindness.
You have sent forth your fragrance,
and I have breathed it in,
and I long for you.
I have tasted you,
and I hunger and thirst for you.

Bernard Mizeki and Anglicanism after Christendom

The history of the establishment of the Church of England has cast a long shadow over Anglicanism.  Not that establishment of itself was a 'bad thing'.  As Oliver O'Donovan reminded us in The Desire of the Nations, Christendom signalled that "the rulers of the world have bowed before Christ's throne".  Therefore:

The core idea of Christendom is ... intimately bound up with the church's mission.

Post-Christendom, however, the shadow of establishment can make Anglicanism appear almost reliant on privilege and the favour of the state.  Remove these and is Anglicanism incapable of meaningfully witnessing to Crucified and Risen One?

Bernard Mizeki - commemorated today - suggests otherwise.  Martyred in Southern Africa in 1896, he stands alongside other Anglican martyrs of the great age of mission in our liturgical calendars - on 3rd June the Martyrs of Uganda (1885-7), on 2nd September the Martyrs of Papua New Guinea (1901), on 20th September John Coleridge Patteson and companions (1871), and on 29th October James Hannington (1885).

These martyrs of Anglicanism's contribution to the Church's global mission embody our tradition's vocation to witness the Cross and Resurrection apart from Christendom.  For post-Christendom Anglicanism the martyrs of the great age of mission hold a special relevance in two ways.  Firstly, they encourage us not to be fearful of institutional powerlessness and minority status.  Secondly, they demonstrate that growth and renewal flow from a conformity to the Cross.

Bernard Mizeki was led to the Sacrament of Baptism by priests from the Society of St John the Evangelist.  His martyrdom has nourished the faith of generations of Anglicans in Southern Africa.  Now his witness and that of his companions martyred during the great age of mission can encourage a hope-filled witness by Anglicans in the post-Christendom West.

Alpha and eucharistic adoration: Anglicanism and the new evangelisation

What does the new evangelisation look like?  Two recent examples from London perhaps give an idea.  The first is from the Roman Catholic tradition - the Spirit in the City initiative, pioneered by four Roman parishes in the West End, ran from 7th-9th June.  The three day event combined traditional aspects of catholic tradition - eucharistic adoration, a Marian procession, sacramental confession, benediction, liturgy of the hours - with teaching workshops, praise sessions, testimonies and outreach.  Thus in the streets of the West End were placed tents for eucharistic adoration and sacramental confession.

The second example is from an Anglican context.  On 10th June Cardinal Koch of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity visited Holy Trinity, Brompton and spent two hours discussing the Alpha Course with Nicky Gumbel (who was also speaking at the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin this week).  On the Tablet blog, Abigail Fryman noted what was happening elsewhere in HTB as Cardinal Koch met with the Alpha leaders:

While he was in the HTB vicarage, two services packed with young people (ie under-40s) were going on concurrently at two of its different sites. The congregation sang for half an hour led by a loud eight-piece band swirled in dry ice and spotlights. The notices were given as a slickly edited video news bulletin, and many people followed the Bible reading on their iPhone. The church's latest innovation was to offer members the chance to make their offering by text message. Doctrinally conservative but technologically open to anything, and hugely popular.

So what does the new evangelisation look like? It will be deeply rooted in the beauty and grace of Christian orthodoxy.  It will find expression in different spiritualities, flowing from the Church's Christological centre.  It will embrace a gracious ecumenism not of the lowest common denominator but of a shared Christological confession.

For all of its flaws and weaknesses, Anglicanism has something particular to contribute here.  Cardinal Koch's visit also included a meeting with Anglo-Catholic clergy in north London.  It is reported that the Cardinal was "surprised at how much the two Churches have in common [and he] asked the Anglo-Catholic clergy what, if their theology was so Catholic, was keeping them in the Church of England".  In other words, Anglicanism - in the service of the new evangelisation - can embrace both HTB and Anglo-catholic parishes which foster prayer and holiness through the practice of eucharistic adoration and sacramental confession, the spirituality of both Alpha and Spirit in the City.

If this is the promise and potential of Anglicanism, we begin to see what is at stake in light of the threats to Anglicanism's Christological centre.  The proposal for Communion without Baptism is but the most recent example of attempts to reconstitute the centre of Anglicanism apart from the Christological confession of orthodoxy (as the Creedal Christian has powerfully stated).  An Anglicanism that authentically serves the new evangelisation will be an Anglicanism of both Alpha and eucharistic adoration - an Anglicanism embracing the rich diversity of spiritual traditions which flow from and cohere around the Church's Christological centre.

"That a spouse might be formed" - celebrating the feast of the Divine Compassion

Today (the Friday after Trinity I) the Roman tradition celebrates the Feast of the Sacred Heart, a profound reflection on the truth that - to quote Balthasar - Love Alone is Credible.  Anglicans have often baulked at this feast and devotion.  It emerged from the quite alien context of the post-Tridentine, Baroque Church's internal confrontation with Jansenism.  The iconography associated with the devotion, as Fr. Alexander Lucie Smith notes in The Catholic Herald, has often been "sentimental, soppy, lacking in robustness, devoid of theological vim", lacking the reserve of the Anglican tradition.

It is not the case, however, that the feast is entirely alien to Anglicanism.  The Society of St Francis provides excellent propers for the Feast of the Divine Compassion of Christ, reflecting the fact the first Anglican Fransican community founded after the Reformation was the Society of the Divine Compassion (1894).  The introductory notes to the propers rightly emphasise that devotion to Christ's wounds as the sign of love considerably pre-dates the cult of the Sacred Heart.  St. Bonaventure authored two treatises on the wounded side of Christ.  Julian of Norwich similarly reflected on the wounded side.

This, however, was no medieval invention.  It followed a rich strain of patristic devotion to the pierced side of the Crucified One.  Origen proclaimed the pierced side as the sign of spousal love:

Christ has flooded the universe with divine and sanctifying waves. For the thirsty he sends a spring of living water from the wound which the spear opened in His Side. From the wound in Christ's side has come forth the Church, and He has made her His Bride.

Likewise for St. John Chrysostom, the Church is born from the pierced side:

There flowed from his side water and blood." Beloved, do not pass over this mystery without thought; it has yet another hidden meaning, which I will explain to you. I said that water and blood symbolized baptism and the holy Eucharist. From these two sacraments the Church is born: from baptism, "the cleansing water that gives rebirth and renewal through the Holy Spirit," and from the holy Eucharist ... As a woman nourishes her child with her own blood and milk, so does Christ unceasingly nourish with his own blood those to whom he himself has given life.

And, of course, for St Augustine, the wounded side of the Crucified One is the means of life:

A suggestive word was made use of by the evangelist, in not saying pierced, or wounded His side, or anything else, but opened; that thereby, in a sense, the gate of life might be thrown open, from whence have flowed forth the sacraments of the Church, without which there is no entrance to the life which is the true life ... This second Adam bowed His head and fell asleep on the cross, that a spouse might be formed for Him from that which flowed from the sleeper's side. O death, whereby the dead are raised anew to life! What can be purer than such blood? What more health-giving than such a wound?

As we leave the Paschal season behind us for another year, the trio of feasts in the weeks following - of the Holy Trinity, of Corpus Christi, of the Divine Compassion of Christ - both lead the Church to prayerfully reflect on nature of the Paschal mystery and to recognise how the Paschal mystery shapes the Church's life and existence in 'ordinary time', in the present.  We go forth, then, into the Sundays after Trinity, reminded that our very life as the Church - as the Bride of the Bridegroom - flows from the wounded side of the Crucified and Risen One.

Completorium in the city

The Sunday Telegraph recently interviewed Professor Till Roenneberg of Munich's Ludwig-Maximilans University, author of Internal Times:

Roenneberg, who might be the world’s foremost authority on body clocks, is very worried that a terrible thing is happening to them. The modern world is sending them out of whack. In fact, he explains, we are torn between two types of clocks – the real clocks in our brains, and the clocks we put on our wrists, on our walls, in our pockets, and on our bedside tables. These are not so real. Roenneberg calls them “social clocks”. And in the battle between the clocks, the fake clocks are winning.

Summarising Roenneberg's research, the Sunday Telegraph states, "our bodies want to live according to the sun, rather than the alarm clock".  This sense of the 'giveness' of time, light, night and sleep is confronted by both the practices and conventions of late modernity.  In Roenneberg's words:

Modern society regards sleep as superfluous – something we should get rid of ... As if we need a cure for sleep.

This does bring to mind the counter-cultural significance of Compline.  As the Common Worship introduction to the office of Compline notes:

The ancient office of Compline derives its name from a Latin word meaning 'completion' (completorium).  It is above all a service of quietness and reflection at the end of the day.  It is most effective when the ending is indeed an ending, without additions, conversation or noise.

The cycle of daily prayer ending with Compline is a reassertion of the 'giveness' of our living over and against the 'false clocks', the rejection of the silence and rest of the night hours as "superfluous".  Perhaps not so much in rural or suburban communities, but in cities it does suggest that one way the Church can testify to a different way of living is through the communal celebration of Compline.  There are examples of Anglican churches doing just this.  It is also worth noting that the Catholic Underground experience concludes with the praying of Compline:

We end our evening as we began. With the prayer of the Church. Compline (Night Prayer) is simple and beautiful. It concludes with a hymn to Our Lady, Daughter Zion. Mother of the New Jerusalem.

In her collection Patience after Compline, Canadian poet Marya Flamengo's "Nunc Dimittis" reflects something of how Compline attunes us to 'giveness':

This sorrow sits on summer
knows of autumn
lives in winter
ponder the bruise
                        of spring.

Restoring the completion of the ancient cycle of daily prayer may be far from some manifestations of 'Fresh Expressions', but within the cities of late modernity - shaped by the virtual and the artificial - it could point to a different way, a way which receives the Triune God's gifts of night and rest with a thankful, patient heart.

The mystery and iconography of gender

Anglican Down Under has drawn attention to the statement made by In a Godward Direction:

The argument that the physical embodiment of the sexes is morally determinative for marriage is identical in form and substance to the argument that the physical embodiment of the races is morally determinative for slavery.

Leave aside for the moment the reference to slavery (which does appear to be akin to Godwin's law).  Focus instead on the opening phrase:

The physical embodiment of the sexes.

It is a strange choice of wording.  The sexes do not, cannot exist apart from "physical embodiment".  There is no sexuality apart from "physical embodiment".  To be human (this side of the eschaton) is to be physically male or physically female.  This is not an incidental aspect to our identity as human beings.  It is, rather, fundamental to such identity.

To refer to "the physical embodiment of the sexes" appears to suggest that gender is an irrelevant (if not inappropriate) category for moral theology.  The reference to race and slavery, of course, emphasises this.  What is striking about such a line of thought is its rejection of  (and perhaps even contempt for) a catholic celebration of gender as icon rather than irrelevant accident.

The Radical Orthodoxy school has provided some important reflection on this theme.  Thus Catherine Picstock on the iconic symbolism of women in the ministerial priesthood:

Allowing womens’ ordination does not remove gender from the symbolics of the Incarnation and the liturgy. On the contrary, one can think of the relation between Christ and his Bride, the Church, as echoing the relation between the Logos and the Spirit ...

In mediaeval times, it was often considered to be a Marian function with the Priest offering the Eucharistic elements as Mary bore Christ in her womb. And secondly, the Church as Bride is also the Body of Christ. This suggests that the female bride can also represent Christ as much as any male. Therefore, I want to argue for female ordination without suppressing the mystery of sexual difference.

John Milbank has also recently pointed to the significance of "the mystery of sexual difference" to understanding the place of marriage as sacrament in the Church's life and proclamation.  He reminds us that rather than conforming a socially reactionary agenda, such a belief is authentically radical:

Asymmetrical reciprocity of gender needs to be reacknowledged as naturally rooted in bodily differences that, unsurprisingly, have psychic equivalents ... This conclusion is by no means simply traditional since it rejects the patriarchalism that puts men naturally on top. Instead, it newly implies that just as we need men in the home, so we need women in politics, business, the arts, academia and even the military. This prospect belongs to a radical as opposed to a liberal feminism, because it suggests that a new public role of women can truly make a difference.

A theology which embraces gay marriage and rejects "the mystery of sexual difference", Milbank goes on to warn, rejects the catholic tradition's fundamental affirmation of the created order:

This ... would mean embracing a dubious theology separating soul from body by imagining ethereal souls entirely free from their corporeal and so engendered connections. And any such development would represent a retreat from the Latin development, after Augustine, away from the excessive Platonism of some Greek Fathers (though not, perhaps, Origen) who regarded embodiment and sexual difference as a lapse from an original created perfection.

This perhaps gives an indication of what is at stake in Anglicanism's reflections on and debates over the move by various secular authorities to remove the category of gender from the definition of marriage.  Irrespective of how Anglicanism makes generous, gracious pastoral provision for Christians of same-sex orientation, the iconography of gender is inherent to the Church's proclamation.  To lose this iconography, this mystery, this sacramental sign, weakens the Church's ability to live out and witness to the renewal and restoration of the created order in the spousal relationship between the Bridegroom and the Bride.

Giles Fraser and the Whig church

Giles Fraser's somewhat intemperate response to the CofE's official reply to the Government's consultation on same-sex marriage, once again demonstrates that Anglicanism's current confusions are not actually about same-sex relationships.  They are, rather, fundamentally about ecclesiology.

Fraser views the Church as just another political body in which authority derives from a mere voting majority:

This statement has not gone before General Synod for any sort of discussion. It has not been discussed at diocesan level. It has been put together by small team in Church House, Westminster, who purport to speak in the name of many thousands of people who will think the whole thing is complete tosh. Those receiving this contribution in government need to appreciate that it has all the democratic authority of a President Putin election victory.

Here we see a contemporary expression of what John Milbank recently described as "the worst part of the Anglican legacy .., the surrender of too many 'latitudinarians' to just this whiggery". The Church Catholic is not about "democratic authority".  She derives her authority and her very life not from voting majorities but from the Crucified and Risen One.

Rumours and revelations: "The Weight of Glory" 70 years on

Yesterday's RCL New Testament reading - " .. preparing for us an eternal weight of glory" - will have led many of us to think of one of C.S. Lewis' most beautiful and memorable sermons, "The Weight of Glory".  It is a happy providence that we reflected on the words of the Apostle 70 years on, almost to the very day, that  Lewis ascended the pulpit of Newman and Pusey to preach this sermon:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.  Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased ...

In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both ...

Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth ...

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in ...

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare ...

There are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.  This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption ...

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

Extracts from "The Weight of Glory", preached at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, 8th June 1942.

Anglicanism and the (re)turn to metaphysics

The Guardian newspaper carried a fascinating editorial earlier this week, entitled "Philosophy: back to big thinking":

The new mood in British philosophy, however, at least in its popular guise, is that the time has come for a more expansive role. Indeed, even the word "metaphysics" is making something of a comeback. And this is partly down to questions that physics and technological advance are throwing up. To what extent does virtual reality challenge what we mean by reality? Do advances in medical science and cybernetics suggest that humanity can overcome the limitations that have hitherto been associated with what it is to be human? Even Hawking himself has stimulated considerable reflection on the idea that science can tackle "the question of why it is that we and the universe exist", going on famously to insist that "if we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God".

The suggestion that science needs nothing from philosophy is both intellectually arrogant and critically naive. But given the evidence of this week's discussions at Hay, the idea that science does not need to interrogate its own conceptual scaffolding, nor the moral and ethical implications of its work, is thankfully a minority position. Indeed, those scientists who speak of God with such alacrity might even learn a thing or two from theologians.

Such a (re)turn to metaphysics should offer the Church an opportunity to share its vision of the human person and human flourishing, invoking the long tradition of Christian philosophical reflection.  But is Anglicanism prepared for this aspect of the new evangelisation?  John Milbank's recent reflection on the potential for Anglican coherence post-Rowan suggests not.  He notes the post-60s "collapse of theological literacy among the clergy" and the pressing need for Anglicans to move away from a dangerous reliance on secular universities for theological formation and thinking.  Both factors have probably been significant contributors to Anglicanism's contemporary inability to convincingly address postmodernity's confusions in understanding the human person.

Milbank also points to a third factor:

The Anglican Church needs to increase the effectiveness of its teaching office, since this is an essential aspect of priesthood and episcopacy. While the operation of the Catholic magisterium is still (whether fairly or unfairly) regarded as too draconian by many Anglicans, there is little doubt that Anglicanism has gone way too far in the other direction, and offers its members pitifully little guidance and only partial and sporadic leads on doctrine and practice.

Compare this with how the Roman tradition has been able to respond to the confusions of postmodernity with John Paul II's Veritatis Splendor, Fides et Ratio and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, shaping a new generation of bishops, priests, theologians and catechists with a vision of the human person rooted in the Cross and Resurrection, and capable of being expressed within the Augustinian and Thomist categories of Christian philosophical reflection.

In After Virtue, Alasdair Macintyre famously said of postmodernity, "there seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture".  It is perhaps at this point that Anglicanism is most dangerously conformed to contemporary culture, seemingly incapable in its own deliberations to reflect on contemporary questions regarding the dignity of the human person in light of the Incarnation (as opposed to merely aping postmodernity's incoherent and ultimately empty discourse of justice and rights).  And it is this very conformity which compromises the Anglican ability to convincingly respond to the contemporary search for the metaphysical with the glory and beauty of the Crucified and Risen One. 

Milbank's anaylsis provides us with the outline of how Anglicanism can regain its ability to speak with a philosophical confidence shaped by the Cross and Resurrection - a new vision of the Church's relationship with the academy, no longer shaped by Enlightenment presuppositions; a deepening of the theological formation of clergy, with a renewed confidence in the Tradition's understanding of the human person; and, irrespective of the outcome of the Covenant debate, the recognition of the need for a teaching office within the Communion.  Without this we will became a pale reflection of postmodernity - postmodernity in albs, sharing all of the confusions of postmoderns.  And this just at the time that our culture is returning to metaphysical questions.

Corpus Christi and "the mystery of our coherence with Jesus Christ"

Why celebrate Corpus Christi today, the Thursday after the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity?  Are we not detracting from the unity of the liturgical year, undermining 'Ordinary Time' and irrationally repeating the theme of our Maundy Thursday observance?


For those who reject Corpus Christi as a medieval innovation, it is worth noting that Trinity Sunday is a similar medieval innovation.  It was in the early 14th century that Pope John XXII instructed the Western Church to observe the Feast of the Trinity on the Sunday after Pentecost.  Corpus Christi actually predates Trinity Sunday by half a century, sanctioned by Pope Urban IV in 1264.


Both feasts enable the Church to prayefully reflect upon the conclusion of the Paschal season and the observance of the Advent-Pentecost cycle.  First on Trinity Sunday, we confess that it is the Triune God who has wrought our salvation in Incarnation, Epiphany, Cross, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost.  Then, today, we proclaim that it is in the Holy Eucharist that this salvation is made present amongst us - and that the Eucharist witnesses to how the Triune God saves His creation.


It is the consistent witness of the Fathers that it is in the Eucharist that the Church experiences and confesses the saving dynamic of the Incarnation:


[Against the Docetics] They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again - St. Ignatius of Antioch;


We do not consume the eucharistic bread and wine as if it were ordinary food and drink.  We have been taught that just as Jesus became a human being of flesh and blood by the power of the Word of God for our salvation, so also the food that our flesh and blood assimilate for their nourishment becomes the flesh and blood of this Jesus - St. Justin Martyr;


[Against the Gnostics] 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 cup of the Eucharist is not communion with His Blood, and the bread we break is not communion in His Body -  St.Irenaeus.


In our celebration of Corpus Christi, we affirm the flesh-and-blood reality, the very earthiness, of the redemption upon which we have meditated since Advent Sunday.  God in real flesh and blood, in the manger, in the Jordan River, in the Garden, on the wood of the Cross, in the Tomb, Risen, Ascended, Glorified.  And in the Eucharist.


It is for this reason that Richard Hooker famously situates his reflection on the Church's sacramental economy within an extended meditation on the Incarnation (see LEP V, 50-56).  This leads to one of the most beautiful passages in the Lawes:


It is too cold an interpretation, whereby some men expound our being in Christ to import nothing else, but only that the self same nature, which makes us to be men, is in him, and makes him man as we are.  For what man in the world is there which has not so far forth communion with Jesus Christ?  It is not this that can sustain the weight of such sentences as speak of the mystery of our coherence with Jesus Christ.  The Church is in Christ as Eve was in Adam.  Yes, by grace we are every one of us in Christ and in his Church, as by nature we are in those our first parents.  God made Eve of the rib of Adam.  And his Church he frames out of the very flesh, the very wounded and bleeding side of the Son of Man.  His body crucified and his blood shed for the life of the world, are the true elements of that heavenly being, which makes us such as himself of whom we come (V 56.7).


It is in the Eucharist that the Church experiences and proclaims "the mystery of our coherence with Jesus Christ" - the gift of the grace lavished upon us by the Triune God in Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost.  Flesh is saved by flesh.  By the flesh and blood of the Son of God we in our flesh and blood participate in the communion of the Holy Trinity. 


By celebrating Corpus Christi, the Church is renewed in the scandal of the Incarnation.  It is not just the world that adheres to flesh-denying narratives of the Docetics and the Gnostics.  Too often we in the Church collude with such narratives.  Corpus Christi beautifully but forcefully reminds us that the plan of salvation we have celebrated is the salvation of this world, of our flesh, our bodies.  For today we hear the Crucified and Risen One say, "those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide me, and I in them".

The Diamond Jubilee, the Enlightenment Project and the Church's proclamation

What has been the theological significance of the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee?  ++Rowan's sermon in St Paul's pointed to Her Majesty as an exemplar of an ethic of dedicated service powerfully contrasting with the ethic of individualism, celebrity and consumption:

We are marking today the anniversary of one historic and very public act of dedication – a dedication that has endured faithfully, calmly and generously through most of the adult lives of most of us here. We are marking six decades of living proof that public service is possible and that it is a place where happiness can be found. To seek one’s own good and one’s own well-being in the health of the community is sacrificially hard work – but it is this search that is truly natural to the human heart. That’s why it is not a matter of tight-lipped duty or grudging compliance with someone else’s demands. Jesus himself says ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me’, and that’s what is at the heart of real dedication.

Here we see something of the counter-cultural nature of a monarchy which flows from sacramental anointing.  In a flattened public square - defined by the utilitarian values of Market, the Individual and the secular State - Elizabeth II speaks of a radically different vision.  Pope Benedict's statement on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee captures this:

During the past sixty years you have offered to your subjects and to the whole world an inspiring example of dedication to duty and a commitment to maintaining the principles of freedom, justice and democracy, in keeping with a noble vision of the role of a Christian monarch.

"A noble vision", not an anachronism.  The anachronism is, as Elizaphanian reminds us, the very Enlightenment project which has given us the public square defined by the Market, the Individual and the secular State:

The Enlightenment project had a profoundly deficient understanding of what it meant to be human and placed far too much weight on our capacity to think, disregarding the importance of how we feel – and how our thinking and feeling interact. As part of this Enlightenment project all of the building blocks of human culture are dismantled and we become, not so much creatures planted in a garden, but programs operating within a computer. Fortunately, the problems with the Enlightenment project are now widely recognised, the ideal of a purely rational re-building project is rejected, and the monarchy tends mostly to be rejected by the crustiest of procrustean republicans who believe that it is somehow radical and revolutionary to be supporting a centuries-old project that has been a proven failure!

For some Anglicans - whether catholic, evangelical or liberal - the historic relationship between Anglicanism and the British monarchy is an embarrassment.  For some, not least those living in republics, it is viewed as an irrelevance.  The problem is that Anglicanism cannot be understood as a tradition, as a community of faith apart from its relationship with the Crown.  Even for those Anglicans in republics, this can hold significance.

The historic relationship with the Crown speaks of Anglicanism's belief that the polity is no mere utilitarian contract to serve the Market or the autonomous Individual.  For post-Christendom Anglicanism, the Church's proclamation should therefore seek to reshape the polity in light of the Cross and Resurrection of the Incarnate Word.  This will take different forms in republics and in societies without an Anglican establishment.  But it is a reminder that Anglicanism does not genuflect before the public square - we call on the public square to genuflect before before the Crucified and Risen One.  Of this Queen Elizabeth II is an icon.

Polity, monarch and sacramental anointing - "a body within the ecclesiastical body"

The point of the Church is the assembly of humanity as such in order that it might govern itself by love.  Once one has this "church" idea, no other basis for human society can be regarded as fully legitimate.  Caesar is in a way irrelevant, only to be appeased, until, after Constantine, he has himself derived the more aspiring aspect of his authority from the authority of the gospel ... Christianity is Christendom, as the older history of the coinciding usage of these words suggests, else it is disincarnate and so not really the religion of the Incarnation at all ... Hence the most ancient socio-political of the realm of England are the ecclesiastical parishes ... Even if parishes have now legally lost their civil administrative status, since the legitimacy of the civil realm is still officially dependent upon the anointing of the monarch, England remains, as a political body, a body within the ecclesiastical body ... England as a realm is still in theory gathered together only because of the gathering of humanity as such in love, which is the Church.

From John Milbank's essay "Stale Expressions: The Management Shaped Church" in The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology.

"Salvation history is ... the Trinity observed"

She sees that somehow, laid out over all time, and therefore in successive events, one occuring after the other, one event giving rise to another, one anticipation being met by its fulfillment, Creation followed by the Fall, the Fall followed by the Incarnation and the Cross, the resurrection meetings its fulfillment in the coming of the Spirit and in the life of the Church - in these events, stretched in sequences across time, are to be found a historical map of the Trinitarian life itself, of the Trinity's very constitution as God.  For salvation history is ... the Trinity observed in the only way human beings can observe it - in time, in succession, in history.

From Denys Turner's excellent Julian of Norwich, Theologian - summarising Julian's Trinitarian theology and also providing a description of why immediately following the end of the Paschal Season the Church celebrates the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity.

Justin Martyr - "discern the mystery"

Our detractors proclaim our madness, because we honour a crucified man alongside the unchangeable and eternal God, the creator of all.  They do not discern the mystery in this, and it is to this mystery that we beg you attend.

From St Justin Martyr's First Apology - words which speak in a profound way to the new evangelisation as a call to attend to the mystery of the Logos made flesh, crucified and risen.