catholicity and covenant

"The sacrilege of dividing the communion of the Church"

2012-03-09T09:00:00.002Z

As members of the Church of Ireland's General Synod prepare to meet today for the conference on "Human Sexuality in the context of Christian Belief", words from St Augustine on the need for "patient and humble charity" to maintain the peace, unity and communion of the Church:

For how could a matter which was involved in such mists of disputation even have been brought to the full illumination and authoritative decision of a plenary Council, had it not first been known to be discussed for some considerable time in the various districts of the world, with many discussions and comparisons of the views of the bishop on every side? But this is one effect of the soundness of peace, that when any doubtful points are long under investigation, and when, on account of the difficulty of arriving at the truth, they produce difference of opinion in the course of brotherly disputation, till men at last arrive at the unalloyed truth; yet the bond of unity remains, lest in the part that is cut away there should be found the incurable wound of deadly error.

And so it is that often something is imperfectly revealed to the more learned, that their patient and humble charity, from which proceeds the greater fruit, may be proved, either in the way in which they preserve unity, when they hold different opinions on matters of comparative obscurity, or in the temper with which they receive the truth, when they learn that it has been declared to be contrary to what they thought ...

For we are but men; and it is therefore a temptation incident to men that we should hold views at variance with the truth on any point. But to come through too great love for our own opinion, or through jealousy of our betters, even to the sacrilege of dividing the communion of the Church, and of founding heresy or schism, is a presumption worthy of the devil.

St Augustine On Baptism, Against the Donatists Book II, 4-5

(The painting is Carle Van Loo's Saint Augustine defeats the Donatists Bishops at Carthage, 1753.)

Cranmer against the Covenant? Well, yes, of course ...

2012-03-08T10:51:00.001Z

Professor Sarah Coakley is a respected voice amongst contemporary Anglican theologians. This means that her new role as a patron to the No Anglican Covenant campaign should give those of us who are supporters of the Covenant pause for thought. That said, her invocation of Cranmer against the Covenant was, to say the least, curious:

The Covenant bespeaks a quite different ecclesiology from that of Cranmer's ‘blessed company of all faithful people'.

Now, there is no doubting that the ecclesiology of the Covenant is indeed "quite different" to that of Cranmer. There is no doubting this precisely because some of the key features of Cranmer's ecclesiology have played little or no part in Anglican ecclesiology since the Elizabethan Settlement.

Cranmer's exalted doctrine of the Royal Supremacy led him to declare Edward VI to be "Christ's vicar". Maurice Elliott rightly says, "As with Henry, so now also with Edward ... these words were often used with reference to the Papacy and so we can again notice how Cranmer’s attitude to the King was in effect to make of him a new quasi-pope".

That doctrine, however, came crashing down when Mary became queen. To again quote Elliott, Cranmer began to adhere to "a completely different interpretation of the role of the monarch". The devastating failure of Cranmer's doctrine of the Royal Supremacy resulted in Elizabeth's much more moderate and modest understanding of what it was to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. To invoke Cranmer's ecclesiology, however, is to invoke an understanding of the Royal Supremacy not only utterly alien to contemporary Anglicanism - it has been utterly alien to Anglicanism as a living tradition since the late 16th century.

Then there is Cranmer's view of predestination. Speaking about Cranmer's post-communion and post-baptismal prayers (and the former is, of course, quoted directly by Coakley), Gordon P. Jeanes states:

In both the communion and baptism services Cranmer uses the most fulsome and confident language about the grace received by the recipients of the sacrament. He knew that he was exercising the unspoken caveat that this only applies to the elect, but would the clergy and congregations of the Church of England also have known this?

It is, says Jeanes, "the spectre of the doctrine of election" which overshadows Cranmer's use of such language. Invoking Cranmer against the Covenant, therefore, is surely a very dangerous game, threatening to push Anglicanism back to an understanding of predestination which has never shaped how Anglicans pray the very liturgy quoted by Coakley.

How generations of Anglicans have prayed Cranmer's words is a more authoritative guide to their meaning than Cranmer's understanding of predestination. This emphasis on receiving the doctrine of predestination in a corporate and communal manner - more authentically catholic, more authentically Augustinian - is of infinitely greater significance than Cranmer's personal views.

So is the Covenant's communion ecclesiology "quite different" to Cranmer's? Of course it is - and for that we should be exceedingly thankful. Shaped by his understanding of the doctrines of the Royal Supremacy and predestination, Cranmer's ecclesiology - unlike his liturgical genuis - has contributed little to Anglicanism's life and witness as a part of the church catholic.

Hunger Games: WWPD?

2012-03-08T10:06:00.000Z

Into the Expectation has a wonderful reflection on The Hunger Games from the perspective of the 3rd century AD martyrs at Carthage, St Perpetua and her companions(commemorated yesterday):

As I’ve read the story, I have wondered how Katniss or the other tributes should respond if they were Christians. Or, on this feast day of Perpetua and Her Companions, I am wondering, “What would Perpetua do?” ...

But I suspect Perpetua would probably find running unseemly and not a very complete witness (martyr means witness) to the hope of resurrection. After all, she and her companions entered the amphitheatre "joyfully as though they were going to heaven, with calm faces" singing Psalms. In the end, demonstrating true christian courage and fortitude, she took the trembling hand of the young gladiator and guided his sword to her throat so he could kill her. Thus, like the ideal martyr, she demonstrated her scorn for death and bore witness to her hope in a Life that transcends Death’s power and the power of all those who would use the threat of death to control others.

What would that look like in the Hunger Games? Again, marked clearly with the cross, I think Perpetua would have simply stood were she found herself as the the beginning of the Games was signaled and begin singing a Psalm or hymn, continuing until someone killed her. Unless they edited her out completely, the whole of Panem would see that there are some who refuse to play this world’s game of oppression, violence, and death. And all would see the power of the cross, however weak and foolish it might seem to some. (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). She would have thus considered herself a victor of the the only game that matters.

Together celebrating Peter's witness in Peter's See

2012-03-07T09:00:00.001Z

From Vatican Radio, a sign that - despite the challenges - the Sees of Rome and Canterbury are committed to deepening their relationship and building a more perfect communion:

Westminster Abbey’s world-famous choir has been invited by the Holy See – through the Maestro of the Cappella Musicale Pontificia “Sistina” – to sing at St Peter’s in Rome. The Choir of Westminster Abbey will sing alongside the Cappella Musicale Pontificia, the Sistine Chapel Choir, at the liturgies of the Solemnity of St Peter and St Paul which will be broadcast across the world. This momentous ecumenical occasion is the first time in its over-500 year history that the Sistine Chapel Choir has joined forces with another choir.

The invitation to Rome came after Pope Benedict XVI visited the Abbey in September 2010 when he attended Evening Prayer and prayed at the tomb of St Edward the Confessor with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dr Rowan Williams, as part of his State Visit to England and Scotland.

The Pope has asked that arrangements for the June collaboration be made in such a way as to reflect the Christian vocation of the Choir and encourage the enriching mutual exchange of gifts between the two liturgical and cultural traditions. As Westminster Abbey is formally known as the Collegiate Church of St Peter, there will be an important shared resonance as both choirs celebrate their patron together.

The two choirs will together sing at First Vespers in the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura on 28th June and at the Papal Mass in the Vatican Basilica on the morning of 29th June.

Expressing a common Christian faith, the choirs will combine to sing music from the Roman tradition by Palestrina and Perosi. In addition the Abbey Choir will sing music from the English choral repertory, including some from the English-language Anglican tradition at the beginning and end of each liturgy.

Whilst in Italy, the Abbey Choir will pursue other engagements, including a public recital in the Basilica di S. Maria Maggiore, and a Festal Evensong in Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

Westminster Abbey Choir will also travel to the Benedictine Monastery at Montecassino to sing Vespers and Mass with the monastic community at the burial place of St Benedict.

As part of the preparations, the Sistine Chapel Choir will be visiting London and will offer a public concert in Westminster Cathedral on the evening of 6th May.

The Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, said: ‘This is a wonderful invitation, a fruit of the memorable visit of Pope Benedict to Westminster Abbey, when the Abbey choir played its significant part in the ecumenical liturgy. I am heartened by this sign of the Holy Father’s wish to receive from the rich Anglican tradition that informs the daily worship at Westminster Abbey. It is more than ever important that Christians of different traditions pray together and receive from each other.’

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend and Rt Hon Dr Rowan Williams said, ‘I am delighted that the Abbey Choir will be taking part in the celebration of St Peter’s Day in Rome. St Peter is the patron of the Abbey; and celebrating together his apostolic witness and example is a powerful reminder of the call that our churches share to be faithful to the apostolic fullness of the Gospel today, “so that”, says St Peter, “in all things praise may be given to God through Jesus Christ” ‘ (I Pet, 4.11).

The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, said: ‘I welcome this generous ecumenical gesture by the Holy See. It signals the mutual appreciation of our musical and spiritual traditions. I eagerly look forward to welcoming the Sistine Chapel Choir to Westminster Cathedral where, on 6 May, it will sing for the first time in this country. The concert will be a historic moment.’

A number of aspects of the statement are worth reflection. The first (as +Rowan's comments note) is the occasion for the visit of the Westminster Abbey choir, the solemnity of Ss Peter and Paul. To have an Anglican presence in the liturgies of the feast day which gives expression to the particular vocation of the See of Rome powerfully declares that Canterbury has a historic, special relationship with this ancient patriarchial see of the West.

Secondly, Pope Benedict's desire that there should be an "enriching mutual exchange of gifts between the two liturgical ... traditions" speaks of the Pontiff's respect for the Anglican liturgical tradition.

Thirdly, that glorious phrase "expressing a common Christian faith", recalls the 1968 Malta Report:

We record with great thankfulness our common faith in God our Father, in our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit; our common baptism in the one Church of God; our sharing of the holy Scriptures, of the Apostles and Nicene Creeds, the Chalcedonian definition, and the teaching of the Fathers; our common Christian inheritance for many centuries with its living traditions of liturgy, theology, spirituality, Church order, and mission.

While the communion shared between Rome and Canterbury is presently imperfect, it is deep.

Ut unum sint

2012-03-06T12:46:00.001Z

+Rowan's message on the Covenant - carried on the YES to the Covenant site - ends with an important emphasis on how our significant ecumenical partners support the Covenant. This debate is not only about the Anglican Communion's internal relationships. It is also about whether or not we as Anglicans are authentically oriented towards the restoration of communion across historic divides. The ethic of autonomy suggests not, prizing independence over interdependence. In contrast, the communion ecclesiology of the Covenant signals our hope, and commitment to, 'that they may be one'.

Mystery or natural law? Questioning the Cardinal's intervention

2012-03-06T09:00:00.002Z

Can we simply redefine terms at a whim? Can a word whose meaning has been clearly understood in every society throughout history suddenly be changed to mean something else? ... No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage ... This universal truth is so self-evident that it shouldn’t need to be repeated.

Cardinal O'Brien's robust attack on the Coalition's proposals for the recognition of same-sex marriage has been hailed by the Catholic Herald's William Oddie as precisely the sort of intervention in the public square that the Church should be undertaking. Oddie described the Cardinal's article as contributing to the "defining struggle in the culture wars of our times".

There is, however, a problem. The Cardinal's understanding of marriage is couched entirely in terms of natural law. Marriage, he says, is a 'universal, self-evident truth'. But is it? The Church's proclamation surely says something greater and richer about marriage. Natural law discourse presents an understanding of marriage which falls considerably short of the sacramentality of marriage.

Yes, this sacramentality - in the words of John Milbank - "requires both sexual difference and openness to procreation". But it does so on explicitly theological grounds. That is, it is grounded in the relationship between Christ and his Church. As Rowan Williams declared in a marriage homily:

this is what your life together will be a sacrament of ... you're going to be a sacrament of this for us; but even more powerfully and richly, you're going to be a sacrament to each other.

This is not "the universally understood meaning of marriage": it is specific to the Church's proclamation. Natural law discourse cannot but fail to fall short of this. It becomes merely a defence of the status quo in the post-Christian societies of late modernity - a status quo which, to state the obvious, is radically challenged by the Church's understanding of the sacramentality of marriage.

Defending the status quo may be good culture war tactics but its necessary reliance on natural law discourse undermines the place of marriage in the Church's mission. Milbank's Being Reconciled reminded us of the Church's struggle to fully realise the implications of the sacramentality of marriage:

It is, however, in a way heterosexuality and sexual difference which the Church finds really difficult to accept, even though it lies at the very heart of its mystery.

The Cardinal's article reveals something of the theological weakness of natural law arguments, particularly in the context of the new evangelisation. The Church does not - not least in societies shaped by secularisation, deChristianisation and late modernity - proclaim a universally understood meaning of marriage (if, indeed, this has ever been the case). Its understanding of marriage is grounded in and flows from the mystery of the Word made flesh.

It's not Super Tuesday

2012-03-05T11:21:00.047Z

As the CofE diocesan synods continue to vote on the Covenant, the entire debate is unfortunately assuming Super Tuesday characteristics. It is, however, perhaps worth considering the voting trends in the English episcopate. According to The No Anglican Covenant Blog, this is presently running 84.2% for and 10.5% against the Covenant. That bears some reflection precisely because this process is not equivalent to Super Tuesday. Bishops are not merely another demographic. In Anglican ecclesiology - as with other churches in the catholic tradition - they have a particular vocation to promote the unity and communion of the Church. As the TEC Catechism so finely puts it:

What is the ministry of a bishop?
The ministry of a bishop is ... to guard the faith, unity and discipline of the whole Church.

ARCIC II's The Church as Communion likewise states:

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

That those in England whose particular vocation it is to promote the Church's unity and communion are overwhelmingly assenting to the Covenant, requires a response more grounded in the catholic tradition than is often seen in comments on Thinking Anglicans and Episcopal Cafe. This is not to detract from the role of the laos in synods. It is, however, to remind ourselves - in the words of the Church of Ireland's Preamble and Declaration - that synodical government is to be "consistent with [the Church's] Episcopal Constitution".

The developing role of synods in Anglican ecclesiology over the past two centuries is grounded in the catholic tradition's understanding of vocation of the laity and the consensus fidelium. This is precisely why synodalism is not equivalent to the political process. The episcopate is required to prayerfully listen to the consensus fidelium as given expression in synod. The laos are required to prayerfully listen to the episcopate when it exercises its teaching authority in service of the Church's unity and communion.

This dynamic is not meant to be conformed to the norms of the polities of this world. Rather, as the Windsor Report stated:

This process of consultation, designed to strengthen Communion, is the very opposite of confrontation, and leads to a shared discernment of God's truth (68).

Irrespective of the outcome of the Covenant debate in the CofE, Anglicanism has failed to model how synodality serves discernment and communion. It has, instead, become the forum for our own little culture war.

Communion, modernity and The Unintended Reformation

2012-03-03T12:17:00.002Z

Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation is fast becoming a must-read. Catholicity and covenant was struck by the fact that one Amazon reviewer suggested that "this book may end up being as important as Macintyre's After Virtue". That Gregory is critically addressing the sources of pluralism and secularism also recalls another seminal work - Taylor's A Secular Age.

Sublunary Sublime, while clearly greatly impressed with Gregory's book and its thesis, nevertheless rightly draws attention to an important review by Dale Van Kley in Books and Culture. A key aspect of Van Kley's critique of Gregory is summarised by Sublunary Sublime:

It does seem that Gregory at times tends to paint a picture of a monolithic Catholicism standing over and against an ever-fragmenting Protestantism; the latter of course is true, but the former? What Gregory misses, as this is one of Van Kley’s key objections, is that Catholicism before and during the Reformation was hardly a seamless unit.

Pre- and post-Reformation Papal Catholicism was not the monolith beloved of papalist apologetics. As Van Kley states:

The equal if opposite optical illusion of Catholic unity ever less convincingly concealed the reality of internal Catholic divisions which, beginning with the De Auxiliis controversy between Dominicans and Jesuits over the issues of grace and free will, culminated in the Jansenist controversy in Habsburg Flanders and France ...

Also largely missing in this book's action is any sustained attention to late medieval Christendom's conciliar movement, which asserted the superiority of the Catholic Church's general council over the papacy although failing to reform the church "in head and members," mainly due to opposition by the papacy. It was in order to thwart the threat of that movement to its power that the post-conciliar popes struck Faustian bargains with Europe's most powerful kings—arrangements that, apart from and just before the Reformation, vastly increased their states' power over the church in return for withdrawing their support for councils.

For Anglicans, Gregory's The Unintended Reformation could be read as an invitation to abandon Canterbury for the Ordinariate - to give up on the apparently inevitable doctrinal incoherence of Anglicanism, inevitable because of its debt to the Reformation, and embrace the Roman tradition as the only plausible theological response to the discontents of modernity. Van Kley does, however, give us pause for thought. The catholic experience cannot easily be equated with a post-Vatican I understanding of papal authority, itself a very modern response to the crisis of modernity and a form of authority utterly alien to the Tradition. Rome's staunch condemnation in Humani Generis of the Ressourcement's re-engagement with patristic thought over and against the arid abstractions of neo-scholasticism is a relatively recent reminder of how the Tradition is of much more significance to the Church's life and mission than authority.

That said, Van Kley's reflections on The Unintended Reformation do carry an exhortation for Anglicans. Doctrinal incoherence and an ecclesiology shaped by the ethic of autonomy produces a Church which merely echoes modernity and its discontents. Communion, given expression through conciliarity, is fundamental to the Church's vocation and mission amidst the fragmentation of modernity:

In lieu of either sola scriptura or papal infallibility, a Catholic Church restructured along conciliar lines would make for an ideal forum, not only for healing the still open wounds of a divided Christendom, but also for articulating a "common good" for the present age, the ills and ailments of which this book so eloquently describes.

An inability - or a refusal - by Anglicans to articulate and live a vision of authentic communion rather than the incoherence and fragmentation of autonomy would, ironically, suggest after all that Gregory's thesis in The Unintended Reformation is painfully correct.

"The stuff of his saving passion"

2012-03-02T09:00:00.009Z

In the Catholic Church you meet the very symbols, the stuff of his saving passion; bathe in the waters of her font as in the stream that flowed from Christ's side, take the bread as his body, hear the absolution as from his lips; above all, love the Christians as Christ; for what you are to love in them is Christ - Christ fashioned and growing in them, as he begins to grow in you.

From Austin Farrer's sermon "All Souls' Examination" in Said or Sung.

"No untrue figure of a thing absent": the Homily, the Fathers and the Eucharist

2012-03-01T09:00:00.001Z

As The Conciliar Anglican prepares for a blogging series on the Anglican understanding of the Eucharist, he neatly captures the heart of the Anglican approach to this sacrament:

The Anglican Reformers and Divines utilize a different vocabulary when talking about the sacrament than their contemporaries do, which makes for difficult reading for those of us who have been taught to understand the Eucharist in the typical categories that we have inherited from the sixteenth century. Unsurprisingly, it is my contention that the reason that much of this is difficult for us to grasp today is because the Anglican tradition reaches back beyond the concerns of the Reformation to the worldview of the Fathers of the early Church. The desire of the Reformers and Divines was less for philosophical precision than for fidelity to the Bible and to the spirit of the patristic age.

It is this retrieval of patristic eucharistic grammar which differentiated 16th and 17th century Anglican eucharistic theology from that of Tridentine Catholicism and, after not inconsiderable overlap, increasingly from Reformed formulations and practices.

But what of the Homily concerning the Sacrament? There is little question that this is the most 'Protestant' of the Anglican Formularies:

Herein thou needest no other man's help, no other sacrifice or oblation, no sacrificing priest, no mass ...

Despite the discomfort such language will produce for many of us, the Homily provides a rich vein of reflection on the Eucharist. Alongside the polemics against medieval eucharistic theology, there is also the concern to reject a denial of the nature of the Supper of the Lord as Sacrament:

Thus much we must be sure to hold, that in the supper of the Lord there is no vain ceremony, no bare sign, no untrue figure of a thing absent.

Rather, patristic understandings of the Eucharist - which a footnote attributes to Ignatius, Dionysius, Origen, Cyprian, and Athanasius - are invoked over and against any notion of "bare sign":

The true understanding of this fruition and union, which is betwixt the body & the head betwixt the true believers and Christ, the ancient Catholic Fathers, both perceiving themselves, and commending to their people, were not afraid to call this Supper, some of them, the salve of immortality and soveriegn preservative against death: other, a deifical Communion: other, the sweet dainties of our Saviour, the pledge of eternal health, the defence of Faith, the hope of the Resurrection: other, the food of immortality, the healthful grace, and the conservatorie to everlasting life.

Alongside this, individual Fathers are quoted throughout the text - Ambrose, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Augustine, Eusebius Emissenus, and Basil. The thought of such "godly fathers" shapes the Homily's understanding of "this celestial banquet".

It is this retrieval which, perhaps, significantly added to the Homily's polemical edge. Why? Precisely because there was a significant contrast between patristic eucharistic practice and late medieval eucharistic practice. Eamon Duffy's evocation of late medieval English devotion is, indeed, beautiful literature - but is it a eucharistic practice which the Fathers would commend?

The reception of communion was not the primary mode of lay encounter with the Host ... For most people, most of the time the Host was something to be seen, not to be consumed.

The answer of the Homily is, to say the least, explicit:

Every one of us must be guests and not gazers, eaters and not lookers ... For (as that worthy man St Ambrose saith) he is unworthy of the Lord, that otherwise doth celebrate the mystery, than it was delivered by him.

While the polemical tone may be uncomfortable, the Homily is repeating Augustine's assertion:

Eat what you are, become what you eat.

It is also worth noting the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "It is in keeping with the very meaning of the Eucharist that the faithful ... receive Communion when they participate in the Mass" (CCC 1388). It is this practice, retrieved by the Anglican Reformation, which the Homily promotes against late medieval practices which represented a rupture with the patristic traditions.

With perhaps some exaggeration, it might be said that this Homily must be read in conjunction with those passages in Duffy's Stripping of the Altars which address eucharistic belief and practice. Late medieval eucharistic practice was a significant departure from patristic practice. The Homily's harsh and urgent tones indicate something of the seriousness with which the Anglican Reformation regarded patristic eucharistic theology and practice as authoritative and the pressing need for the ecclesia anglicana to recover that theology and practice.

The Covenant - to "embody and promote" communion

2012-02-29T10:48:00.002Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pentience, forgiveness and commission

2012-02-28T09:00:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron's drest

2012-02-27T09:00:00.010Z

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

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

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

Holiness on the head,

Light and perfections on the breast,

Harmonious bells below, raising the dead

To lead them unto life and rest:

Thus are true Aarons drest.

Profaneness in my head,

Defects and darkness in my breast,

A noise of passions ringing me for dead

Unto a place where is no rest:

Poor priest, thus am I drest.

Only another head

I have, another heart and breast,

Another music, making live, not dead,

Without whom I could have no rest:

In him I am well drest.

Christ is my only head,

My alone-only heart and breast,

My only music, striking me ev'n dead,

That to the old man I may rest,

And be in him new-drest.

So, holy in my head,

Perfect and light in my dear breast,

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

But lives in me while I do rest),

Come people; Aaron's drest.

Left as consumers?

2012-02-25T12:07:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012-02-24T11:31:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not consumers but communicants

2012-02-23T19:44:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012-02-22T09:00:00.001Z

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

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

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

Shrove Tuesday

2012-02-21T09:00:00.003Z

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

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

"The medicine of divine assurance"

2012-02-20T09:00:00.004Z

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

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

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

Authority, sacramental order and Covenant

2012-02-19T20:41:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012-02-18T15:25:00.001Z

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

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

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

Augustine on the commemoration of the faithful departed

2012-02-16T09:00:00.002Z

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

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

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

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

From St Augustine, Sermon 172.

The Warsi speech - ecclesia or cultus privatus?

2012-02-15T11:37:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herbert, Baxter and the Anglican-Reformed future

2012-02-14T16:09:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"As Saint Augustine saith ..."

2012-02-13T21:41:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creation, pre-Lent and the Paschal Mystery

2012-02-11T14:21:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episcopacy and the "special responsibility"

2012-02-10T12:33:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After "fratricidal tensions", hope-filled signs?

2012-02-09T14:35:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+Rowan has previously articulated this position:

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

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

+New Hampshire, Empire and the public square

2012-02-08T16:03:00.002Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Synod, mission and human dignity

2012-02-07T13:57:00.001Z

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

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

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

Accession Day and subversive pre-modern discourse

2012-02-06T21:24:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

The architecture for liturgy: emptiness or icon?

2012-02-03T11:13:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silent, hidden, concealed: the Presentation

2012-02-02T09:46:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

St Bridget of Kildare: ecclesia not imperium

2012-02-01T15:25:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

The threshold of Evensong and the wound of our sound

2012-01-31T21:57:00.000Z

A Tribe called Anglican draws attention to a thought-provoking reflection by the Daily Telegraph's Stephen Hough on Evensong:

This past Sunday I went to Westminster Abbey to attend Evensong, their superb choir conducted by James O'Donnell and accompanied by Robert Quinney. Woven between Thomas Cranmer's matchless words was music of Herbert Howells, William Byrd and a sparkling anthem by Jonathan Dove. If you are visiting London and want a perfect slice of England there's no better place to go.

The Church of England's evening service, adapted after the Reformation from the monastic hour of Vespers, is a wondrous phenomenon. Even the word 'Evensong' is poetic, and it seems to chime in perfect harmony with England's seasons: Autumn's melancholy, early evening light; the merry crackle of Winter frost; Spring's awakening, or the lazy, protracted sun strained through the warmed windows of a Summer afternoon.

Evensong hangs on the wall of English life like a old, familiar cloak passed through the generations. Rich with prayer and Scripture, it is nevertheless totally nonthreatening. It is a service into which all can stumble without censure – a rambling old house where everyone can find some corner to sit and think, to listen with half-attention, trailing a few absentminded fingers of faith or doubt in its passing stream.

Most religious celebrations gather us around a table of some sort. They hand us a book, or a plate, or speak a word demanding a response. They want to 'touch' us. Choral Evensong is a liturgical expression of Christ's Nolle me tangere – 'Do not touch me. I have not yet ascended to my Father' (St. John 20: 17). It reminds us that thresholds can be powerful places of contemplation; and that leaving someone alone with their thoughts is not always denying them hospitality or welcome.

There is much here to encourage us to think through the ongoing importance of non-eucharistic worship, of the mixed economy in contemporary Anglicanism's liturgical provision, and the importance of liturgical space being given for contemplation in the midst of a society shaped by what Lucy Winkett has described as the 'wound of our sound'.

"Both me and my enemies": the prayer of the Royal Martyr

2012-01-30T20:57:00.000Z

On the commemoration of the martyrdom of Charles I, words from Eikon Basilike.

My greatest conquest of Death is from the power and love of Christ, who hath swallow'd up death in the victory of his Resurrection, and the glory of his Ascension ...

Let the capacious Kingdome of thy infinite mercy at last receive both me and my enemies. When being reconciled to thee in the bloud of the same Redeemer, we shall live farre above these ambitious desires, which beget such mortall enmities. When their hands shall be heaviest, and cruellest upon me, O let me fall into the armes of thy tender and eternall mercies.

Ecumenism, evangelisation and the human person

2012-01-27T17:00:00.000Z

There was already a heavy hint on this from Vatican sources discussing the next ARCIC III meeting, but in an address to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Benedict XVI has explicitly drawn attention to the next phase of the ecumenical agenda:

In our dialogues ... we cannot ignore the great moral questions about human life, family, sexuality, bioethics, freedom, justice and peace. It shall be important to be able to talk about these issues with one voice, drawing on the basis in Scripture and the living tradition of the Church. Defending the fundamental values of the great Tradition of the Church, we defend humanity and we defend creation.

At one level it can, perhaps, be read as an affirmation of the work undertaken to date by ARCIC and the Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue. In other words, in the statements of ARCIC I and II, Anglicans and Roman Catholics have an agreed theological framework which addresses the historic differences between the communions on eucharist, authority, ordained ministry, justification and the BVM. Now, however, we turn to the very issues which are central to the Church's proclamation in postmodern, post-Christian societies and which are, of course, proving to be so divisive within Anglicanism.

There may be a temptation amongst some Anglicans to inwardly groan - 'Rome is now setting up new barriers to deeper communion with Canterbury'. Such a response, while giving expression to anti-papal prejudices all too apparent amongst some progressive Anglicans, misses the point. Anglicanism does indeed need to get its house in order on such issues precisely because of their centrality to the Church's mission in contemporary societies. Benedict is, therefore, providing us with an opportunity - in dialogue with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters - to prayerfully reflect on the mystery of the human person in light of the Tradition's affirmations regarding Creation, Incarnation, Redemption and Resurrection.

Not only has this the potential to lead Anglicans to think through such issues outside of the context provided by our very politicised debates and thus hopefully address some of our ecclesiological dilemmas, it also - perhaps more importantly - directs our gaze towards the new evangelisation and the pressing need to present to our societies a vision of the human person in light of the Crucified and Risen One.

Liturgical diversity and the new evangelisation

2012-01-26T22:43:00.000Z

The decision this week by the Vatican to approve liturgical aspects of the Neocatechumenal Way is further evidence of Benedict XVI's view that such movements (one might say 'fresh expressions') are an essential aspect of the new evangelisation.

Aspects of how the Neocats celebrate the eucharist - in small groups on Saturday evenings, gathered around the altar, sharing views on the Scripture readings, the peace shared before the eucharistic prayer, all receiving together in both kinds standing - have been criticised from a number of perspectives within the Roman communion. Benedict has, however, affirmed their practices:

The celebrations in the small communities, regulated by the liturgical books -- which are to be followed faithfully, and with the particularities approved of in the Statutes of the Way, are tasked with helping those who follow the neocatechumenal itinerary be aware of the grace of being part of the salvific mystery of Christ ... the neocatechumenates can celebrate the Sunday Eucharist in their small communities after the first Sunday vespers according to the arrangements of the diocesan bishop.

Responding to some of the criticisms of Neocat liturgical practices, liturgist Fr. Neil Xavier O’Donoghue(h/t PrayTell) has placed these practices within the wider spectrum of liturgical diversity present in Roman Catholicism:

What binds the Catholic Church together is not uniformity in liturgical practice, but unity in belief and faith in communion with the Successor of Peter. This past summer I personally attended Mass in at the Opus Dei shrine in Torreciudad (Spain), at London’s Brompton Oratory and a Pontifical Mass in the Extraordinary Form celebrated by Cardinal Burke at the Fota Liturgical Conference in my native city of Cork (Ireland). While not everything in these celebrations would be my own cup of tea, I have no difficulty in accepting that these are valuable parts of the Church’s liturgical treasury and I appreciate how they can help in the salvation of many souls. In a similar way, the minor liturgical adaptations that have been granted to the Neocatechumenal communities are precisely to help them answer to the needs of the New Evangelization and bring people back to the Church and to a fuller encounter with the Risen Lord.

For Anglicans, of course, much of this is familiar. Liturgical diversity - to a greater or lesser extent - has been part of the Anglican experience for centuries. What is different, however, is the sense of ensuring that liturgical diversity - rather than merely being a badge of ecclesastical identity - is orientated towards and serves the new evangelisation. And this is what Anglicanism's "mixed economy" in liturgical provision must serve: "to ... answer to the needs of the New Evangelization and bring people back to the Church and a fuller encounter with the Risen Lord".

It does, in other words, place a much greater burden and responsibility on Anglican diversity. Diversity is not meant to be an end in itself. It is not meant to perpetuate 19th century ecclesiastical battles. It is, rather, a means of ensuring that Anglicanism fulfils the Great Commission.

Of course, for such liturgical diversity to authentically serve the new evangelisation, a common and coherent understanding of faith is necessary for Anglicanism. Which brings us back to the Covenant:

the catholic and apostolic faith uniquely revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds, which faith the Church is called upon to proclaim afresh in each generation. The historic formularies of the Church of England, forged in the context of the European Reformation and acknowledged and appropriated in various ways in the Anglican Communion, bear authentic witness to this faith.

Contra Empire

2012-01-25T12:11:00.000Z

For the feast of the conversion of St. Paul, words from N.T. Wright on Paul's "counter-imperial theology" in Paul: Fresh Perspectives (2005):

Paul, it seems, is himself integrating his theology of salvation from sin and death, here and hereafter, with his call to allegiance to Jesus, not Caesar, as lord. The retelling of the story of Israel in Romans 9-11, reaching its climax in Jesus the Messiah, serves from this point of view as a counter-story to the by now standard imperial narrative of Roman history reaching its climax in Augustus Caesar. And the ecclesiology of Romans 12-16 sustains the church as a community right under Caesar's nose in Rome, which is called to demonstrate in that unity the fact that the true God has acted and will act to create a new version of humanity before which Rome's attempts at uniting the world pale into insignificance. At virtually every point in the letter, all is focused once more on the cross of Jesus, the point at which Caesar did his worst and God did his uttermost.

The gift of unity and redeeming our past

2012-01-24T17:14:00.000Z

The former Roman Catholic bishop of Leicester - now serving in the RC diocese of Cork - has called for an ecumenical "truth and reconciliation commission":

I propose that we will only have true ecumenism if [Roman] Catholics and other Christian churches and communities together look at the bad things we have done to each other in the past. We need a truth and reconciliation commission, otherwise we are just playing at ecumenism by pretending that we haven’t got this past. We cannot airbrush our history out of existence with warm words and a positive spin on things.

The suggestion does have some merit, not least in potentially breaking down triumphalist and sectarian narratives (and for evidence of such narratives, take a look at some of the readers' comments on the Catholic Herald story).

At the very least, however, such a "truth and reconciliation" approach would need to focus not just on acknowledgement of past wrongs but also promote a recognition of grace in the midst of historic divisions. Today many Anglican calendars commemorate Francis de Sales, the Counter-Reformation bishop of Geneva. It is a small but not insignificant sign of Anglicans celebrating the grace of Christ present in another communion at a time of bitter, violent division. It is, in other words, a way of redeeming our past - a past which continues to shadow and shape the ecumenical present.

A recognition that the grace of the Crucified and Risen was present in the midst of divisions and across divisions during the Reformation era, calls us to give up the idolatry of sectarian narratives. The grace at work in the life of Francis de Sales was the grace evident in the life of Thomas Cranmer and John Bunyan. The Cross and Resurrection again breaks down the barriers which divide, making the Church one.

As the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity draws to a close, redeeming our shared past - not least the bloody and bitter divisions of the Reformation era - can contribute to the Church re-receiving the gift of unity.

"Spiky and distinctive" on welfare reform?

2012-01-23T21:37:00.000Z

The opposition of Church of England bishops in the House of Lords to the Coalition's proposed £26k p.a. cap on welfare benefits for families has caught the headlines in the UK - and caused some embarrassment for the Coalition. There is considerable political danger here for the CofE bishops. The fiscal constraints faced by the UK mean that some form of welfare reform is a necessity, not an option. More significantly, however, there is a moral case for reforming welfare: casually consigning hundreds of thousands of families and entire communities to welfare dependency is neither compassinate nor just.

The Economist columnist Bagehot has neatly summarised the danger in the stance taken by the CofE on welfare reform:

The economy may be about to fall off a cliff. That poses a huge test for the Church of England and its claims to be a source of national strength. If the church cannot offer a message more spiky and distinctive than social democracy in a clerical collar, it will fail that test.

The danger is profound and not in mere political terms. The Church's social vision cannot be a baptised form of either social democracy or neo-liberalism. Rather, as Milbank states:

The Christian confidence in its ethical tradition is peculiarly strong because we claim that, in the life of Christ, we already have a definition of a perfect social reality.

The Church's critique of any prevailing economic and social order flows from the Word made flesh, not Keynes or Friedman. We are called to be much more than chaplains to a social democratic - or neo-liberal - order.

So where does this leave the CofE bishops and welfare reform? While their intervention in the debate does run considerable risks, it also has ensured that the welfare reform debate has not been conduced in purely fiscal terms or, as often happened in the 1980s, with considerable hostility to welfare reciepents.

In their open letter of last November on welfare reform, the CofE bishops in the House of Lords outlined their key concerns with the proposed welfare reform package. Their focus was on the most vulnerable children in our society:

The introduction of a cap on benefits, as suggested in the Welfare Reform Bill, could push some of the most vulnerable children in the country into severe poverty. While 70,000 adults are likely to be affected by the cap, the Children's Society has found that it is going to cut support for an estimated 210,000 children, leaving as many as 80,000 homeless. The Church of England has a commitment and moral obligation to speak up for those who have no voice. As such, we feel compelled to speak for children who might be faced with severe poverty and potentially homelessness, as a result of the choices or circumstances of their parents. Such an impact is profoundly unjust.

It is unlikely that without the involvement of the CofE bishops any campaign against the benefit cap would have attracted the publicity it has - or achieved a victory in the House of Lords' vote. But has the intervention of the bishops passed Bagehot's "spiky and distinctive" test? That is at least debatable. It does, after all, appear to be a very conventional social democratic stance. Alternatively, the bishops ensured that the welfare reform debate acknowledged the realities faced by the most vulnerable in our society.

The real test of "spiky and different", however, is what the bishops say next. The Church's vision for these children, their families and communities must surely be greater, more oriented to authentic human flourishing and more explicitly shaped by faith in the Incarnation of the Word than an additional £83 per week in welfare payments.

Allegory and the Church's imagination

2012-01-21T14:31:00.000Z

Over at the First Things blog, Peter Leithart - a leading figure in the Federal Vision movement - has drawn attention to the vast difference between how contemporary Christians read the Song of Songs and how the Church has traditionally read that text:

Medieval Christians were obsessed with the Song of Songs. No book of the Bible received such intensely devoted attention in commentary and preaching. Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six homilies on the Song and died just as he was getting started on chapter 3. The Song has a much-diminished place in the modern Christian imagination. The time is far past to reverse that trend, but it is worth reversing only if the Song is recovered as allegory.

This, of course, overturns the traditional Reformed disdain for allegory. Yet, as Leithart has demonstrated on his own blog, Calvin's theological rejection of allegory sits alongside his use of typology and allegory in his preaching. He quotes Calvin as saying of the Old Testament "no part were without a mystical meaning". The difference between Calvin's approach and that of medieval allegory merely "has to do with the degree of detail".

So what of the Song of Songs? Leithart rightly tells us that we can receive the Song only as allegory:

The Song helps us relearn what nearly every civilization before ours already knew: Sex is allegory, and as allegory it is metaphysics and theology and cosmology. For Christians, sexual difference and union is a type of Christ and the church: How could an erotic poem (and in the Bible!) be anything but allegory? From the Song we relearn that poetic metaphor does not add meaning to what is itself mere chemistry and physics. Nor is erotic poetry a euphemistic cover for Victorian embarrassment. Poetry elucidates the human truth of human sexuality, and it seems uniquely capable of doing so. Only as allegory does the Song have anything to teach us about sex. Only as allegory can the Song play its central role in healing our sexual imaginations.

Leithart's words remind us of the theological cul-de-sac of the Church's captivity to modernity in her approach to Scripture. The attempts, whether liberal or conservative, to understand the meaning of the text outside of and apart from the Church's tradition of prayerful reading gave expression to an impoverished imagination. The Song of Songs thus became merely another erotic poem. Read by the Church, however, it is a rich meditation on covenant love.

Rome and Canterbury in 2012

2012-01-20T18:26:00.000Z

In an interview this week with Vatican Radio, Mgr Mark Langham of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity drew attention to events in 2012 which will give expression to Anglican-Roman Catholic search for unity and communion:
We’re looking forward to the Synod of Bishops on the new evangelisation and that has a particularly ecumenical aspect because the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has been invited out to speak at some length and lead a discussion during that synod.

Two (other) things that immediately spring to mind, in March the 1000^th anniversary of the order of the Camaldolese means that the Archbishop of Canterbury will again be visiting Rome, because their headquarters is San Gregorio Magno which is a very significant church for the worldwide Anglican communion – it was from there of course that Pope San Gregorio sent Saint Augustine of Canterbury to England to revive the Catholic faith there.

Perhaps even more wide-ranging and important will be later in May when we have the second session of the latest round of ARCIC dialogue...... this is a time in all our dialogues when we’re not really looking to dive into the most difficult problems, but we’re more thoughtfully going back to first principles, re-examining the scriptures, the common tradition, the Councils, the Fathers of the Church, the teachings of the Churches, to really re-assess where we begin, how much we have in common and at what point we diverge…it’s important work for laying down foundations and building up trust.

Here we see signs of hope for the Anglican-Roman Catholic call to unity beyond the obvious limitations of the Ordinariate. +Rowan's involvement in the Synod of Bishops on the new evangelisation points to what should be a compelling reason for a deepening communion between Rome and Canterbury. The visit to San Gregorio Magno will recall the opening words of the 1966 Common Declaration of Archbishop Michael Ramsey and Pope Paul VI which initiated the ARCIC process:

In this city of Rome, from which Saint Augustine was sent by Saint Gregory to England and there founded the cathedral see of Canterbury, towards which the eyes of all Anglicans now turn as the centre of their Christian Communion.

Finally, the second meeting of ARCIC III offers the opportunity of surveying the progress ARCIC has made, the healing of the wounds of the Reformation division, and the shared understanding that ARCIC has given to Anglicans and Roman Catholics on the eucharist, ordained ministry, the Church, justification, and the Blessed Virgin.

The Ordinariates may indeed have a contribution to make to the pilgrimage of Rome and Canterbury to communion. But for the vast majority of Anglicans across the globe, the path to "a restoration of complete communion of faith and sacramental life" (1966 Common Declaration) is through ARCIC and a deepening of the imperfect communion we already share.

Unity, communion and justification

2012-01-19T20:35:00.000Z

The week of prayer for Christian unity can too easily become an ecumenical version of cheap grace, avoiding the painful wounds of the Great Schism and the Reformation divide. Today in Rome, an event occured which reminds us that an authentic ecumenism will recognise these wounds and prayerfully seek grace to transfigure them. Benedict XVI addressed a delegation of the Lutheran Church of Finland:

The recent ecumenical bilateral dialogue document in the Finnish-Swedish context not only reflects a rapprochement between Catholics and Lutherans over the understanding of justification, but it urges Christians to renew their commitment to imitate Christ in life and action. We trust in the power of the Holy Spirit to make possible what may still seem beyond our reach: a widespread renewal of holiness and public practice of Christian virtue, after the example of the great witnesses who have gone before us.

This echoes, of course, the historic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church:

The understanding of the doctrine of justification set forth in this Declaration shows that a consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification exists between Lutherans and Catholics ... the doctrinal condemnations of the 16th century, in so far as they relate to the doctrine of justification, appear in a new light: The teaching of the Lutheran churches presented in this Declaration does not fall under the condemnations from the Council of Trent. The condemnations in the Lutheran Confessions do not apply to the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church presented in this Declaration.

ARCIC II's Salvation and the Church similarly declared a convergence between Anglicans and Roman Catholics on the doctrine of justification:

We are agreed that this is not an area where any remaining differences of theological interpretation or ecclesiological emphasis, either within or between our Communions, can justify our continuing separation. We believe that our two Communions are agreed on the essential aspects of the doctrine of salvation and on the Church's role within it. We have also realised the central meaning and profound significance which the message of justification and sanctification, within the whole doctrine of salvation, continues to have for us today.

Here is a profound gift to the contemporary Church: the bitterness of the 16th century division over justification has not been set aside on the basis of cheap grace. Rather, Anglicans, Lutherans and Roman Catholics have prayerfully listened to the Scriptures, the Tradition and each other's insights, moved beyond past misunderstandings and misconceptions, and affirmed a common understanding of justification. A deep wound of the Reformation era has been healed.

In Benedict's words today to the Finnish Lutherans:

Our longing for the full, visible unity of Christians requires patient and trustful waiting, not in a spirit of helplessness or passivity, but with deep trust that the unity of all Christians in one Church is truly God’s gift and not our own achievement.

Confession, chair, primacy

2012-01-18T14:24:00.000Z

That today, the beginning of the week of prayer for Christian unity, should also be the feast of the Confession of St Peter is not, of course, mere coincidence. The Anglicans of the English Church Union who initiated the week of prayer in 1908 quite deliberately chose to commence it on what was then in the Western calendar the feast of the Chair of St Peter. Anglican calendars now (e.g. Scotland, Wales, TEC) tend to commemorate today as the Confession rather than the Chair of Peter. The point is, however, the same - the Petrine confession leads to the distinctive Petrine ministry. Today we celebrate that distinctive Petrine ministry and vocation, recognising its service to the Church's unity and communion.

For Anglicans that distinctive Petrine ministry is dispersed. It is exercised by bishops, individually and collectively. That is the point to the 1662 BCP employing a form of the collect for the feast of St Peter and John 21:15-17 in the order for episcopal consecration. It is exercised also by Primates in the various provinces and in their meeting together to "strength[en] the mutual life" of the Communion (Windsor, Appendix 1.5). And the See of Canterbury has fulfilled a Petrine mission by being "the pivotal instrument and focus of unity" within Anglicanism (ibid., para. 99).

That bishops, primates and Canterbury share in the Petrine mission has, however, not prevented Anglicanism from recognising that the ancient see of Peter - Peter's Chair - is a particular expression of that mission and ministry. When the Bishop of London recently referred to the Pope Benedict XVI as "undeniably the Patriarch of the West", he was following a well-established Anglican practice of acknowledging the primacy of honour due to the See of Rome precisely because it is Peter's Chair.

This, of course, falls very far short of Vatican I's "universal immediate jurisdiction" - but it does demonstrate that Anglicanism's reflections on Peter's Chair are not exhausted by simply repeating Article 37. Reconciliation with the ancient patriarchal see of the West - the Chair of Peter - does not have to undermine or deprive Anglicanism of its dispersed Petrine ministry. The ARCIC process has given us a vision of the vocation of bishops and primates in serving the Church's unity and communion itself being served by the See of Peter:

The Commission's work has resulted in sufficient agreement on universal primacy as a gift to be shared, for us to propose that such a primacy could be offered and received even before our churches are in full communion. Both Roman Catholics and Anglicans look to this ministry being exercised in collegiality and synodality – a ministry of servus servorum Dei (Gregory the Great, cited in Ut Unum Sint, 88). We envisage a primacy that will even now help to uphold the legitimate diversity of traditions, strengthening and safeguarding them in fidelity to the Gospel. It will encourage the churches in their mission. This sort of primacy will already assist the Church on earth to be the authentic catholic koinonia in which unity does not curtail diversity, and diversity does not endanger but enhances unity. It will be an effective sign for all Christians as to how this gift of God builds up that unity for which Christ prayed (ARCIC II The Gift of Authority: Authority in the Church III, 60).

In celebrating the Confession of St Peter, therefore, we give thanks for the various expressions of the Petrine ministry granted to the Church - and pray that the confession and chair of Peter may bring us a fuller experience of unity and communion.

Desert and silence, grace and truth

2012-01-17T19:21:00.000Z

In Silence and Honey Cakes, +Rowan explores the message for the contemporary Church of the monastic movement started by St Antony of Egypt, commemorated today:

The church is a community that exists because something has happened which makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God's truth and God's mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, have worked the transformation that only God can perform and told us what only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreaded consequences of our failure, so that we need not labour anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God. The church's aim is to be a community that demonstrates this decisive transformation is really experienceable. One of the chief sources of the anxiety from which the gospel delivers us is the need to protect my picture of myself as right and good.

Peaceable kingdom or culture wars: where is the Church?

2012-01-16T16:07:00.001Z

The LA Times editorial on the Ordinariate, highlighted by TitusOneNine, makes for incredibly sobering reading. How does the world view Anglican divisions and the Ordinariate? As an ecclesiastical reflection of the world's culture wars:

The defection of Episcopalians en masse might seem of interest only to students of religion, but it illustrates a larger point: that the culture wars that rage outside stained-glass windows have come to dominate debates within and among Christian churches ...

With the exception of the role of women in leadership positions, these are issues that also figure in secular politics ... there is a striking similarity between sacred and secular debates over what the news media call "hot-button" issues. On those questions, increasingly, there is no separation of church and state.

From the world's perspective, therefore, the Church is demonstrating that it is merely one more arena in which the polity's culture wars can be played out. And it is in Anglicanisms divisions that this is considered to be particularly evident.

The deep irony is that across the Anglican spectrum we have considered ourselves to be prophetic (through the consecrations in New Hampshire and Los Angeles) or counter-cultural (by breaking communion over the issue of same-sex relations). The shrill polemics accompanying the prophetic/counter-cultural stances have echoed the political discourse of an age of fear, anger and heightened partisan divisions.

At the very time that the Church in general, and Anglicanism in particular, should have been pointing the world to the peaceable kingdom in a time of divided, fearful polities, we have echoed back to the world its own divisions and fears. We have become an extension of, not a radical alternative to, the culture wars.

There is an alternative vision for the Church, a means of living out the peaceable kingdom we proclaim. In his 2011 Advent Letter to the Primates, +Rowan stated:

Throughout the time of my service as Archbishop I have tried to keep before my own eyes and those of the Communion the warnings given by St Paul about the risks of saying ‘I have no need of you’ to any other who seeks to serve Jesus Christ as a member of His Body.

It is our collective failure to live out this vision of communion that has most dramatically conformed us to the culture wars of this world.

"On the third day there was a wedding ..."

2012-01-15T17:13:00.001Z

Out of his own side he formed you, when for you he fell asleep on the cross and accepted the sleep of death ... Now you have been betrothed to him. Now the wedding feast is being celebrated; for indeed a banquet is being prepared in heaven and the eternal court. Will the wine give out there? Never think it! There we will be inebriated with the abundance of God's house and we will drink from the torrents of his delight. A river of wine has been prepared for this wedding - yes, of wine that gladdens the heart.

St Bernard of Clairvaux - from a sermon for the first Sunday after the Octave of the Epiphany, "On Changing Water into Wine".

Formed by the Magnificat

2012-01-14T16:25:00.005Z

Following on from his Episcopal Cafe post on the 1979 BCP, Derek Olsen responded to a tiresomely predictable comment that the 1979 BCP lacked reference to the "Divine Feminine" by pointed instead to a more meaningful absence:

I too feel that there is a lack of the feminine in our liturgical language. However, I'm not so much feeling a lack of the "Divine Feminine" but of the human, embodied, feminine who teaches us, leads us, points us, and mediates to us the divine. I'm speaking of the preeminent disciple who was present at the Incarnation of Christ, his public ministry, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the birth of the Church, and who treasured and pondered all these things in her heart - the Blessed Virgin Mary. My spirituality feels more complete with devotions that ask the Blessed Virgin Mary to pray with me to her Son. Now, I understand that not all Episcopalians feel this way. In fact, for some Episcopalians anything around the Virgin Mary is viewed as unedifying or even down-right divisive. Because I know this about our church, I would not push for including a host of Marian devotions into our prayer book. It simply wouldn't be common prayer, and the controversy and division would not be worth it. However, there's nothing against me including a Marian devotion or two to supplement my private praying of the Offices.

There is, indeed, a reserve in Anglican liturgy when it comes to acknowledging the ongoing presence within and ministry within the Church of that "preeminent disciple". In many ways, the Anglican reformers were recapturing the same reserve noted in the ancient Roman liturgy which - unlike the liturgies of the East or those Western liturgies, such as the Mozarabic, influenced by the East - did not invoke the Blessed Virgin.

As ARCIC's Seattle Statement notes, however, "in spite of the diminution of devotion to Mary in the sixteenth century, [Anglican] reverence for her endured in the continued use of the Magnificat at Evening Prayer". And it is here, in the daily praying of the Magnificat, that Anglican liturgy particularly celebrates the presence within the Church of "the human, embodied, feminine, who teaches us, leads us, points us, and mediates to us the divine". In a wonderful essay in the Center for Evangelical and Catholic Theology's excellent Mary Mother of God, Lutheran theologian David Yeago brilliantly captures the significance of the daily praying of the Blessed Mary's song:

The Magnificat is the church's song because it is the song of the specific Jewish woman Mary, whom God's election and promise have set in the midst of the church as the prototype of the church's faith and prophecy - and therefore as the archsinger of the praise of God's mercy in Christ. When we sing the Magnificat, all of us, male and female together, take our stand with Daughter Zion, the Lord's slave-woman, identifying with her, and joining in her song, the primal, and in this life unsurpassable, articulation of the joy of the Kingdom.

Alongside the cycle of Marian feasts celebrated in Anglican liturgies - what Yeago terms "Mary's literary presence in the church" - our praying of the Magnificat, her song, celebrates Mary's "active presence in the continuing life of the church and of the faithful":

It is moreover chiefly through her word to us, through the Magnificat, that Mary's prototypical embodiment of faith and prophecy become genuinely formative for us. Through the Magnificat, her paradigmatic faith becomes not so much an example of impossible purity by which we are measured, as an available form of life into which we are invited to enter. To be formed by Mary our Mother means in the first place to stammer and lisp along with her in her song; in so doing we take our stand with her in faith and join with her in prophecy and praise, and it is chiefly in this way that she shapes us as worshippers and servants of the great King whom she has brought forth into the world.

Derek Olsen is not wrong - since the late 16th century, Anglicans have supplemented the liturgy of the BCP with a rich devotional witness to Mary the Godbearer. The anchor of our Marian devotion, however, is the Magnificat at Evening Prayer. When we pray it, she again leads us to the Crucified and Risen One, who took flesh in her womb.

Renew the Church - pray the liturgy

2012-01-13T07:27:00.000Z

Derek Olsen's article at Episcopal Cafe is worth reading for a number of reasons. It provides a robust apologia for the liturgical church; it warns against the search for transient 'relevance'; and it rightly characterises Anglican liturgy as balancing Western norms with patristic practices.

The article also, however, urges TEC to discover renewal through a focus on the Trinitarian, Christological centre which shapes and is proclaimed by the 1979 BCP. As Olsen says in his own blog:

if our chief goal is revitalizing the Episcopal Church as a local political action committee, then my suggestions will be quite unhelpful.

Instead he urges a quite different agenda, which has application to Anglicanism beyond TEC:

If we want to renew and strengthen the Episcopal Church in light of these very real challenges that are facing us, then the one thing that we dare not mess with is our commitment to the contents and spirit of our 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

A lot could be said about this welcome statement. Above all, it urges that theological trends (local or otherwise) which militate against the 1979 BCP's Trinitarian and Christological core should not shape alternative liturgical provisions.

As Olsen goes on to state:

Frankly, I don’t care if you’re “into” Quaker spirituality and so want to cut out some of the prescribed prayers and have us sit in silence then; I’m “into” Anglican spirituality, and I’d appreciate it if you did what the book says to do. Perhaps I’m a little touchy on this topic, but I’ve seen too many places where Sunday morning deviations from the book are about the rector inflicting the twists and turns of their own spiritual journey on the congregation. If we want to get serious about being the Episcopal Church then I suggest we would do well to get serious about our core messages and principles and—by canon as well as plain ol’ good sense—these are in the book. As a layperson, I see the book as a contract. It may not be exactly what I want, but it’s an agreed-upon corpus of embodied theology that we have all given assent to. I promise to use the book, and I expect that the clergy will do the same. This is a benefit that we offer those who come seeking—a place of stability in a culture that desperately needs it.

In other words, 'renew the church - pray the liturgy'. This is not about liturgical correctness. It's not about a fussy, condescending Anglican rejection of informality. It is about recognising that our catholic liturgy shapes and forms us in the fullness of Trinitarian, Christological faith. Or, as Olsen puts it:

As we consider the future of the Episcopal Church, we must do so with a sense of where we have come from, where we wish to go and how to keep our experience of and witness to the Triune God at front and center of our efforts.

A mixed economy for North American Anglicanism?

2012-01-11T15:26:00.000Z

In a series of three recent postings (1, 2 and 3), Anglican Down Under has urged the Communion to think creatively and realistically about how the schism in North American Anglicanism - between TEC/ACC and ACNA - can be resolved. ADU proposes that TEC/ACC and ACNA "mutually recognise that the breadth of global Anglicanism in North America is best represented by an arrangement whereby all three churches operate in that region".

As ADU points out, there is already precedent for this within the Communion:

(a) the respectively American and British oriented jurisdictions in Europe where (I suppose) the exceptional circumstance is the cultural differences between Americans and British residing, permanently or temporarily, in European cities and resorts;

(b) the arrangements of my own church the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, whereby up to three different bishops may have jurisdiction in a given area ...;

(c) with appropriate permissions granted by the local Australian bishops, etc, our Maori bishops share responsibility for Maori congregations in the Australian cities of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

Two other issues are also worth considering. The first is Fresh Expressions. Admittedly the parallel is not direct, but the ecclesiology is not dissimilar. (This is not to detract in any way from the excellent and very significant critique of aspects of Fresh Expressions in For the Parish.) +Rowan's comments at a recent Fresh Expressions conference surely have some application to the TEC-ACNA relationship:

I have absolutely no doubt that the Church ... will be looking far less homogeneous in a couple of decades; different kinds of congregations, with different rhythms of life. I believe very strongly that whether we're talking about inherited models of church or fresh expressions, the real heart for the next generation is pretty well bound to be in those small groups of people working at their relationships, at their understanding, together, quietly, in the long term. The cell, in other words. Whether inherited or not so inherited we're looking at that development of mutual formation, mutual shaping of life and possibilities that will take place within the sort of group where people really trust one another.

None of this is to suggest that schism is unimportant - no Augustinian could ever accept such a proposition. In other words, it be preferable in light of communion ecclesiology not to start from the current situation in North American Anglicanism. Nor is it to propose that the breakdown in ecclesial relationships which led to the creation of ACNA or TEC's refusal to authentically live in communion with Anglicanism across the globe are matters that can be easily resolved. It is, however, to propose that grace is present in the midst of failure and brokeness. Discerning this grace in the broken relationships of North American Anglicanism might lead us to applying +Rowan's Fresh Expressions thinking to TEC/ACC-ACNA.

The second issue for consideration must surely be the Ordinariates. Whatever misgivings we might have about the Ordinariaties, about Rome's intentions, about their impact on the ARCIC process, and about their ability to genuinely bring an Anglican patrimony into communion with the See of Peter, it is difficult to deny that this was an innovative response to an ecclesial dilemma. When Anglicanorum Coetibus declared that "each Ordinariate ... is juridically comparable to a diocese" and that "a Personal Ordinariate is entrusted to the pastoral care of an Ordinary appointed by the Roman Pontiff", it was creating something akin to parallel jurisdictions within geographic terroritories. Now, surely, if inflexible, bureaucratic, centralised Rome can display such an innovative approach, why can't Anglicanism?

Doug LeBlanc's important review of The Accidential Anglican for The Living Church, written in light of the AMiA debacle, gives some idea of what is at stake and what could be gained if a 'parallel jurisdictions' approach was applied to the TEC/ACC-ACNA relationship:

In The Accidental Anglican the Anglican Mission is the Sun and the Anglican Communion is somewhere out in deep space. Hunter repeatedly stresses the importance of remaining in patient conversation with a non-Christian and postmodern culture. What has destroyed the Anglican Mission’s ability to remain in patient conversation with its brother bishops in Rwanda? How is an 11-year transatlantic ecclesial relationship so readily discarded?

Depending on how many of the Anglican Mission’s congregations sever their ties with Rwandan Anglicans, Hunter’s skills as a church-planter could best serve the movement’s self-preservation. His attraction to Anglican thought may yet bear fruit within Anglicanism. His influence on Anglicanism would be richer, however, if the Anglican Mission were moving toward true and full fellowship with the Anglican Communion, rather than stepping toward more independence.

Restoring communion is not a matter for professional ecumenists or church bureaucrats. It is the very essence of being Church, the heart of the Church's mission and proclamation. Communion is not - as the catholic tradition at its best testifies - about homogenity. The apparent inconsistency of parallel jurisdictions in communion with one another can witness to this. To return to +Rowan's Free Expressions lecture - we are perhaps envisaging a 'mixed economy' approach for North American Anglicanism:

So mixed economy – yes it's one of those phrases I occasionally regret having coined. It keeps coming back ad nauseam but what I was trying to say when I first used that phrase some 12 or 13 years ago I think in South Wales, what I was trying to say with it was, not that we're looking for a church which is a kind of Balkan map of little independent, autonomous, self-serving groups doing what they fancy, finding the style that suits them, which is always a danger there but much more a context in which there really is a flow of communication, good news and challenge between different styles of church life that may respond to different personalities and different stages on the journey.

"Some of my predecessors have gone this way"

2012-01-10T20:43:00.001Z

There is an unfortunate Whiggish reticence displayed in the failure of the CofE's Common Worship calendar to appropriately commemorate William Laud, martyred on this day in 1645 (see the TEC provision here). Laud is a mere optional commemoration in Common Worship, with no propers, in stark contrast to the other three martyred Archbishops of Canterbury, Alphege, Becket and Cranmer.

Laud's participation in the dynamics of Charles I's personal rule - not least the Star Chamber - may be invoked against him. This involvement in the affairs of state, however, was little different in nature to Becket's conflict with Henry II over ecclesiastical privileges or Cranmer's incredibly grubby role in Henry VIII's divorces. Alphege's death at the hands of the Danes was a symbol of Anglo-Saxon resistance from one who was a representative of the Anglo-Saxon elite.

It was in the midst - and not in spite - of the compromises occasioned by their involvement in state affairs that Alphege, Becket and Cranmer came to be witnesses to the Crucified and Risen One. It was Alphege's involvement in diplomacy on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that led to his imprisonment and death. Mary Tudor's hatred for Cranmer principally arose from his role in Henry VIII's divorce of her mother, Catherine of Aragon. Henry II's increasing impatience with Thomas Becket flowed from the Archbishop's insistence that English secular courts had no jurisdiction over clergy. None of these issues - to put it very mildly - are matters central to the catholic faith. But, the conflicts which ensued allowed Alphege, Becket and Cranmer to be conformed to the Cross in light of the Resurrection.

And this was the same pattern seen in William Laud. His participation in the constitutional conflict that began to engulf England during the 1630s was the arena in which grace worked to conform him to the Cross. In his own memorable words on the scaffold:

I am now come to the end of my race, and here I find the cross, a death of shame, but the shame must be despised, or there is no coming to the right hand of God. Jesus despised the shame for me, and God forbid but I should despise the shame for him ... some of my predecessors have gone this way.

In celebrating the witness of Laud, we are declaring that it is in the midst of failure and compromise that the Crucified and Risen One is to be discerned - not in power and success. We should, therefore, be commemorating William Laud alongside his predecessors Alphege, Thomas Becket and Thomas Cranmer, those Archbishops of Canterbury with whom he shared the way of the Cross.

The poetry of the local church

2012-01-09T20:24:00.002Z

This week's Tablet - the Roman Catholic weekly in the UK - has a challenging account by poet Sally Read of her conversion to catholic Christianity. What is striking, amidst other details, is Read's description of how an icon in a church, the liturgy and silence before the Reserved Sacrament shaped her desire for and experience of prayer as she travelled from atheism to the Faith.

She refers to beginning to spend time day by day in a local church:

Each day I stopped off at a little Carmelite church by the sea to sit and listen. I was open to the presence of God, but I was still not Christian – and far from Catholic. In that church, there was an icon of Christ and, prayerless, I would simply look at him. It was on one of these occasions that I spoke aloud to the face and asked for help. There was no visual or aural hallucination, or anything, as a poet, I can use as a metaphor to tell what happened. The nearest I can come to describing it is to say that it felt like I was an amnesiac in a fit of quiet panic, and suddenly someone walked into the room that I recognised.

Back in London, she sought out a Church with the Reserved Sacrament:

I walked down street after street, feeling, for once, a foreigner in London. There were no churches open. The miracle of finding an open door with a lit candle at the tabernacle was suddenly nothing small. I was already attending Mass in Italy and praying through Communion, often in tears, sometimes simply awed. The most important part of all this, I realised, was being with Christ, was the liturgy itself. I walked for an hour without hope even of a Mass, just wanting to sit by the Blessed Sacrament.

In some ways, Read's account points us in the direction of Davison and Milbank's For the Parish, not least the suggestion that the local parish mediates faith through "a liturgical ethics":

The parish through its whole life is empowered by liturgical praxis, and by the synergy between the Holy Spirit and the Christian body, which catches it up into the Divine life.

It is the ordinariness of the context surrounding Read's journey to Faith that is striking - ordinary parish churches, providing prayerful silence, celebrating the liturgy, housing ancient imagery. And it is here that the Body of Christ can yet surprise our secular culture. Or in Read's words:

As a poet from a most secular culture, I have come to know the Church as the ultimate poem. An intricate composition of allegory and reality, that tries to give image to God’s presence on earth.

The Baptism of the Lord - "you humble yourself profoundly"

2012-01-07T15:42:00.000Z

He came to the baptism of John among crowds of people. He came like one of the people, he who alone was without sin. Who would then have believed that he was the Son of God? Who would have thought that he was the Lord of Majesty?

You humble yourself profoundly, Lord ...

[John] trembles. Is it any wonder? Is it, I ask, any wonder if a person trembles and does not dare to touch God's holy head, the head to be adored by angels, revered by powers, held in awe by principalities? You choose to be baptized, Lord Jesus?

... O humility, moral excellence of Christ, how you confound our pride and vanity!

St Bernard of Clairvaux - from a sermon on the Lord's Epiphany, "On the Three Appearances".

Epiphany - "a suckling child in a shabby hovel"

2012-01-05T21:00:00.001Z

What are you doing, O Magi, what are you doing? Are you worshipping a suckling child in a shabby hovel, in shabby rags? Is he then God? Surely "God is in his holy temple, the Lord's throne is in heaven", and are you looking for him in a shabby stable, in his mother's lap? What are you doing, offering gold? Is he then a king? And where is the royal palace, where is the throne, where the crowd of royal courtiers? Is the stable his palace, the manger his throne, Mary and Joseph the throng off courtiers? What has made these wise men so foolish as to worship a child as contemptible for his age as for the poverty of his family?

... Was it not to be feared, brothers, that those men would be offended, and believe that they had been made sport of, when they saw such unseemly things? From the royal city, where they guessed they should seek the King, they are directed to the insignificant village of Bethlehem; they enter a stable, they find a tiny infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. For them, the stable is not mean, the swaddling clothes are not displeasing, the suckling child does not cause offence. They fall prostrate, they venerate him as King, they worship him as God.

St Bernard of Clairvaux - from a sermon on the Lord's Epiphany, "On the Three Appearances".

Imagination, doctrine and the Anglican future

2012-01-05T16:43:00.001Z

In a New Directions article (h/t Ordinariate Portal), Geoffery Kirk expresses his despair at the state of affairs in contemporary Anglicanism. He sees Anglicanism's fundamental weakness to be an "indifferentism" about theology in general and dogma in particular. Quite movingly and insightfully, he cites one incident to demonstrate this:

How vividly I remember Dennis Nineham celebrating in the [Keble] college chapel in a chasuble bought by Austin Farrer, behaving for all the world as though he believed in the Real Presence, when he did not even believe in the Incarnation.

Outside of the United States - where Spong is still invited to lecture at certain seminaries - some of us may wonder, however, if Geoffery Kirk is describing an Anglicanism of the 1970s and 1980s, rather than of the early 21st century. In an interview with the New Statesman three years ago, Tom Wright certainly indicated that the stale, tired liberalism of The Myth of God Incarnate which once dominated the CofE establishment, was a thing of the past:

"I remember talking to my godfather, who was an archdeacon near the Tyne," says Wright, "and he said it was his judgement that a lot of the clergy that he knew in the Sixties and Seventies did have a personal conversion experience which they had misinterpreted as a call to the ministry. They didn't really know what to do, so there was a sort of embarrassment: 'Are we allowed to talk about God? Do we know who God is?'" Also at that time, "The Trinity, the Incarnation - much of that was under serious question and challenge. People said these were just silly old 5th-century ways of talking about God."

And now? "That's largely gone. I think anyone who ends up in almost any senior position in the Church now probably has not only a pretty robust personal belief in God but also a sense of why this matters. Of course there are large debates, but not about whether we do or don't believe in God."

We have moved a considerable distance from the CofE bishops feeling the need to publicly reaffirm belief in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, after one of their number denied both - as they did in the 1986 statement The Nature of Christian Belief.

Allister McGrath highlighted the changing complexion of Anglican theological identity in his 1993 The Renewal of Anglicanism. McGrath is, perhaps, a case in point, having travelled from a conventionally liberal theological position to a thoughtful expression of evangelical Anglicanism. And it is the renewed evangelical presence within Anglicanism that - for all of its weaknesses - catholic Anglicans can celebrate. Is it better for Anglicanism to be moulded by a rootless liberalism or by a thoughtful evangelicalism? For any catholicism serious about being catholic, the answer really is straightforward.

Perhaps surprisingly, Jonathan Clark - chair of Affirming Catholicism - in his review of 2011, indicated something similar:

I don't think Affirming Catholics have anything to fear from the resurgence of evangelicalism, but we do have a lot to learn ... The Church of England is going to be a more evangelical place; I for one rejoice in that, as I don't think the Catholic tradition is the only part of the Church in which God is at work.

None of this is to suggest that a 'hangover' from the theological liberalism of the 70s and 80s does not continue to afflict Anglicanism. In this, however, we are not alone. Aidan Nichols has, after all, warned that those former Anglicans joining the Ordinariates may require "a special environment" in order to "preserve orthodoxy and orthopraxis until the crisis of postconciliar Catholicism in the West has passed".

While Anglicanism's current debates over women in the episcopate and same-sex relationships have their origin the liberalism of the 70s and 80s, they can - and should - be addressed from the perspective of Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy i.e. the way the Church, not the academy, does theology.

Anglicanism has, therefore, travelled some distance from Dennis Nineham donning Austin Farrer's chasuble. The crisis in orthodoxy and orthopraxis has not disappeared, but it has - outside of the United States and Canada - lost its momentum. This is not just a matter of the presence of the Global South becoming more visible and vocal within the Communion, although this has been significant. The theological mindset within Anglicanism has changed.

Today's reading from Celebrating the Seasons is taken from St Gregory of Nyssa, in which he refers to those who cannot accept the Incarnation because they have "too paltry an idea of reality". We Anglicans - amongst others - left the 60s with "too paltry an idea of reality". Now, in the early 21st century, we are beginning to rediscover our imagination - an imagination shaped by Trinity and Incarnation, Scripture and Creeds, Ecclesia and Eucharist, rather than by the stale conventions of the 1960s.

"He is not coming with weapons"

2012-01-04T08:29:00.000Z

Do not flee, do not fear. He is not coming with weapons, he is seeking not to punish but to save. And in case you are even now saying, "I heard your voice, and I hid myself", look, he is a baby, and he has no voice. The sound of his crying inspires compassion more than trembling ...

He became a little child. The virgin mother wraps his tender limbs in swaddling clothes - and do you still tremble with fear? Or will you realise from this that he has not come to destroy but to save you, not to bind but to set you free?

St Bernard of Clairvaux - from a Christmas sermon, "On the Five Springs".

(The painting is Botticelli's "Virgin adoring the sleeping Christ Child", 1490.)

Basil and Gregory: proclaiming the mystery of the Word made flesh

2012-01-02T16:05:00.000Z

The Common Worship collect for today's commemoration of Saints Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus, reflects the appropriateness of celebrating these Cappadocian fathers during the Christmas season:

Lord God,whose servants Basil and Gregory
proclaimed the mystery of your Word made flesh,
to build up your Church in wisdom and strength:
grant that we may rejoice in his presence among us,
and so be brought with them to know the power
of your unending love.

The reflections of Basil and Gregory on the mystery and wonder of the Incarnation of theology are a profound example of theology prayerfully undertaken in service of the Church's proclamation of the Word made flesh.

God in the flesh! It is no longer the God who acts only at particular instants, as in the prophets, but one who completely assumes our human nature and through his flesh, which is that of our race, lifts all humanity up to him ...

Look deeply into this mystery. God comes in the flesh in order to destroy the death concealed in the flesh ... when the saving grace of God appeared and the sun of justice rose, death was swallowed up in his victory, being unable to endure the dwelling of the true life among us (from a homily of St Bail the Great);

Light from light, the Word of the Father comes to his own image in the human race. For the sake of my flesh he takes flesh ... the self-existent comes into being; the uncreated is created. He shares in the poverty of my flesh that I may share in the riches of his Godhead ...

Let us honour this tiny Bethlehem which restores us to paradise. Let us reverence this crib because from it we, who were deprived of self-understanding, are fed by the divine understanding, the Word of God himself (from an oration of St Gregory of Nazianzus).

Feast of the Circumcision: "the Word ... further abbreviated"

2012-01-01T09:00:00.001Z

In flesh the Word was abbreviated, and he was further abbreviated when that flesh received circumcision. Made a little lower than the angels, the Son of God put on human nature; yet now, lest he reject the medicine for human corruption, clearly he becomes much lower than they ...

The child who is circumcised is the Lamb without blemish; even though he did not require it, nevertheless chose to be circumcised. Without any trace whatever of the wound, he did not flee the bandaging of the wound ...

What a great and wonderful mystery! The boy is circumcised, and he is called Jesus. What does this connection mean? Circumcision seems to pertain more to the one being saved than to the Saviour, and for the Saviour to circumcise is more appropriate than for him to be circumcised. But recogize the mediator between God and humankind who from the very beginning of his birth joins what is human to what is divine, the lowest to the highest ... He is wrapped in swaddling clothes, but those very clothes are honored by angelic praises. He is hidden away in a manger, but a start shining from heaven proclaims him. Similarly, his circumcision proves the reality of the human nature he has taken on, and the name which is above all names declares the glory of his majesty.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux - from a sermon on the Feast of the Circumcision, "On the medicine of circumcision and its value".

"The infant Word"

2011-12-30T13:45:00.000Z

But what kind of mediator is this, you ask, who is born in a stable, laid in a manger, wrapped like other infants in swaddling clothes, who cries like the others - a baby who lies there just as others have always done? ... Yes, he is an infant, but the infant Word, and not even his infancy is silent.

"Be consoled, be consoled, says the Lord our God", Emmanuel, "God with us", is saying this. The stable proclaims this, the manger proclaims it, the tears proclaim it, the swaddling clothes proclaim it.

St Bernard of Clairvaux - a Christmas sermon, "On the Father of Mercies, who has mercy on our many miseries".

"Not even his infant limbs are silent"

2011-12-29T14:38:00.001Z

His tongue does not yet speak, and everything about him cries aloud, preaches, declares the good news. Not even his infant limbs are silent.

In everything is the world's judgment censured, turned upside down, and confuted. What human being, if given the choice, would not choose a strong body and the age of understanding rather than of babyhood? ... The Word became flesh, weak flesh, infant flesh, tender flesh, powerless flesh, flesh incapable of any work, of any effort.

St Bernard of Clairvaux - a Christmas sermon "On Christ's birth and passion, on Mary's virginity and fruitfulness".

Christmas

2011-12-24T21:00:00.001Z

God the Father has made his Word abbreviated. Do you want to know how long his Word was and how short he made it? "I fill heaven and earth", says his Word; now made flesh, he has been laid in a narrow manager. "From everlasting and to everlasting", says the Prophet, "you are God", and see, he has become an infant one day old.

St Bernard of Clairvaux - a Christmas sermon, reflecting on the Vulgate's translation of Romans 9:28, "Verbum breviatum".

(The painting is Geertgen tot Sint Jans' Nativity at Night, 1490.)

"A physician is coming"

2011-12-24T09:00:00.001Z

A physician is coming to the sick, a redeemer to those who have been sold, a path to wanderers, and life to the dead. Yes, One is coming who will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea, who will heal our diseases, who will carry us on his own shoulders back to the source of our original worth.

St Bernard of Clairvaux - a Christmas Eve sermon on Exodus 16:6-7, used as the Invitatory at the Eucharist and a responsory at the Night Office on Christmas Eve.

O Emmanuel

2011-12-23T20:38:00.000Z

With the invocation of O Emmanuel, the Church's Advent prayer draws to a close. Here the Church's memory goes back to a time of insecurity, failure and unfaithfulness: the reign of Ahaz. And in the midst of that insecurity, failure and unfaithfulness a sign of promise is given - a Maiden will be with Child.

Isaiah dared Ahaz to ask for any sign of Yahweh, as "deep as Sheol or as high as heaven". The sign given, however, entirely lacks the imperial grandeur that Ahaz would have desired or the military might that would have brought relief to the residents of Jerusalem. Instead, a Maiden will be with Child.

It is the very weakness and vulnerability of the sign that proclaims hope. In the midst of our sense of insecurity, our failure, and our unfaithfulness, it is not our own resources which save. Nor is it the might and power of empires of this world. It is, rather, the weakness and vulnerability of the Child born of the Maiden.

In the words of Austin Farrer:

Mary holds her finger out, and a divine hand closes on it. The maker of the world is born a begging child; he begs for milk, and does not know that it is milk for which he begs. We will not lift our hands to pull the love of God down to us, but he lifts his hands to pull human compassion down upon his cradle. So the weakness of God proves stronger than men, and the folly of God proves wiser than men. Love is the strongest instrument of omnipotence, for accomplishing those tasks he cares most dearly to perform; and this is how he brings his love to bear on human pride; by weakness not by strength, by need and not by bounty.

O Rex Gentium

2011-12-22T17:51:00.000Z

Tertullian's question, "what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?", demonstrates - albeit dramatically and with some over-emphasis - the priority for the Church of Israel's story over and against the claims of classical Athens and Rome. The Church stands in continuity not with the academies of Athens or the rhetorical schools of Rome, but with the story of Abraham, Moses, David and Isaiah.

Paul's description emphasises the organic unity between Israel's story and the Church's proclamation and mission:

You have been cut from what is by a nature a wild olive tree and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree.

Now the promise of Covenant with Abraham has been extended to the Gentiles. In and through Jesus the Christ, Israel story is now also our story - he is the cornerstone, uniting the Gentiles to Israel. Jew and Gentile together share in Abraham's blessing. Here is the rich narrative which the Church proclaims during a time when the rise and fall of great powers and great economies is deemed to be the prime narrative. Amidst the fears of decline and depression, the Church's prayer of O Rex Gentium speaks of Abraham's blessing, fulfilled in the One who is "the son of Abraham".

In the words of Marvin Wilson:

"Our father Abraham" expresses more than historic memories of a virtuous biblical character or present spiritual ties to a family of faith. The expression is ultimately an eschatological statement. Abraham is a symbol of hope; he binds Christians and Jews together with a common vision of the outworking of the kingdom of God: Abraham, "all peoples on earth will be blessed through you".

"At this time to be born of a pure Virgin"

2011-12-22T14:18:00.000Z

Thanks to Anglican Down Under for highlighting the TLC article on Cranmer's Christmas collect. ADU notes that the NZPB makes "modest changes" to the collect. This is true but for one phrase - Cranmer's "pure Virgin" becomes "Virgin Mary".

NZ appears to be somewhat out of step with liturgical reform elsewhere in the Communion. The CofE's Common Worship, the CofI's BCP 2004 and TEC's BCP 1979 have all retained Cranmer's original phrase - "pure Virgin".

The change in the NZPB has not insignificant, although almost certainly unintentional, implications. Contrary to what we may guess were the assumptions of the NZPB authors, "pure Virgin" is not a biological reference. ARCIC's Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ summarises the context in which the Anglican Reformers understood the phrase:

Following Augustine, they showed a reticence about affirming that Mary was a sinner ... They neither affirmed nor denied the possibility of Mary having been preserved by grace from participation in this general human condition. It is notable that the Book of Common Prayer in the Christmas collect ... refers to Mary as 'a pure Virgin' (45).

Together with the fact that the BCP calendar from 1561 retained the commemoration of the Conception of the BVM - which, notwithstanding the debate in the medieval West between maculist Thomists and immaculist Scotists, affirmed Augustine's "exception" regarding Mary - it does seem clear that Cranmer's "pure Virgin", understood in the context of the Latin West's Augustinian reflections, had soteriological rather than biological overtones.

All of which should leave us thankful that, NZPB apart, most of the Communion's liturgical revisions have retained Cranmer's original phrase, a phrase which allows Anglicans to receive and confess the ARCIC formulation:

In view of her vocation to be the mother of the Holy One (Luke 1:35), we can affirm together that Christ's redeeming work reached 'back' in Mary to the depths of her being, and to her earliest beginnings (59).

O Oriens

2011-12-21T21:25:00.000Z

In his Planet Narnia, Michael Ward summarises C.S. Lewis' study of the medieval worldview, The Discarded Image:

Lewis ... repeatedly encourages his readers to take a stroll under the sky at night. Looking up at the heavens now, Lewis argues, is a very different experience from what it was in the Middle Ages. Now we sense that we are looking out into a trackless vacuity, pitch-black and dead-cold. Then we would have felt as if we were looking into a vast, lighted concavity.

In praying O Oriens, the Church in the midst of the flattened, disenchanted universe of postmodernity, perceives the weight of glory present in our universe. Here is the Church's apologetic of imagination, described by Alister McGrath as "a world, which though rooted in the real, reaches upwards and beyond it".

The Morning Star - dimly perceived in Balaam's vision, fully revealed in the vision of John the seer - speaks of the One who brings light to our darkness. We do not gaze into a trackless vacuity, pitch-black and cold. The Advent hope proclaims a meaning-drenched universe, bearing the weight of glory.

O Clavis David

2011-12-20T20:35:00.000Z

The invocation of the Key of David is no statement of imperial triumphalism. In Isaiah, it is invoked from a context of deep pain:

Look away from me,
let me weep bitter tears;
do not try to comfort me
for the destruction of my beloved people.

In the Revelation of John, the Key of David is invoked in the Exalted Christ's message to the Philadelphian church:

I know that you have but little power.

Today's antiphon is a recognition of weakness. It is, in the words of Rosemary Hannah's reflection on Thinking Anglicans, addressing "all those of us who know too well our flawed and dark passions, our divided loyalties and the complexities of our lives". We are thus exhorted to turn from our own resources, our own narratives, to the One daily lauded daily in the Church's liturgy as he who "gives light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death".

For the post-Christendom church, confused and disorientated in the secular public square, here is hope. Not in projects to restore Christendom, but to know that the One whom we proclaim opens doors - in our compromised, shadowed lives - that no power can shut.

"Adam asks this of you ... Abraham begs this of you"

2011-12-20T14:55:00.000Z

In preparation for the Church's celebration of the Incarnation, the Gospel readings in the daily eucharistic lectionary for 20th and 21st December are those of the Annunciation and Visitation. This reflects the ancient Western custom of having these Gospel readings during the old December Ember Days.

In central Europe there is a custom of celebrating the Eucharist on these days before dawn by candlelight - we see the beginnings of the Dawn in the Annunciation and Visitation.

St Bernard of Clairvaux's reflection on the Annunciation highlights how the hopes of patriarchs and prophets, priests and kings rest on this moment when Gabriel addresses Blessed Mary:

Adam asks this of you, O loving Virgin, poor Adam, exiled from paradise with all his poor children. Abraham begs this of you; David begs this of you; all the holy patriarchs, your very own fathers, beg this of you, as do those who dwell in the valley of the shadow of death. The whole world is waiting, kneeling at your feet. And rightly so, for on your lips hangs the comfort of the afflicted, the redemption of captives, the deliverance of the damned; in a word, the salvation of all the sons and daughters of Adam, your entire race.

O Radix Jesse

2011-12-19T22:14:00.001Z

The hopes and dreams invested in a tribal dynasty of an Ancient Near Eastern monarchy significantly shape the imagination of the scriptures of Israel and of the Church. What O'Donovan says about the second stanza of the Te Deum applies to the hopes and dreams placed in the line of Jesse:

The general picture is a political one, quite clearly: there is a ruler; he has achieved a decisive act of public liberation; by that act he has founded and sustained a community.

This, however, is not the politics of postmodernity - the politics of focus-groups, of apathy, of disengagement, of the impoverished discourse of secularism. As O'Donovan goes on to state of the politics of the Te Deum:

Yet it all belongs not within the usual sphere of earthly politics but in heaven. And at its centre is the breathtakingly unpolitical image of the Virgin's womb.

In the dreams of the prophets of the Exile, the hope of the line of Jesse was to become the breathakingly unpolitical image of the wolf living with the lamb. And in the cross and resurrection of the One born of the Virgin, the breathtakingly unpolitical image finds its fulfilment.

In the disenchanted, flattened polities of postmodernity, the Church prayerfully invokes the politics of Radix Jesse - the breathtakingly unpolitical politics of the King to whom the nations pray.

O Adonai

2011-12-18T13:08:00.001Z

The Advent hope takes shape in Israel's story of Torah and Covenant, Exodus and Exile. This is not the traditional triumphalist narrative of nation and empire, a narrative praising national virtues. It speaks, rather, of something quite different. In the words of Balthasar:

The God of Israel ... is distinguished from all other gods by the fact that he brings into being a people to worship him by his own free sovereign act of choosing - whether we look at the first manifestation of this choice of a people - when God called Abraham - or at his choosing his people when he led them out of Egypt at the hand of Moses ... thus making something like a nation out of a miserable collection of uncultured and demoralized slaves; before all this, in each case there is a free act of the divine initiative that can neither be foreseen, demanded, nor deduced.

Here, then, is the shape of the Church's Advent hope, revealed in Torah and Covenant, Exodus and Exile. The Church's hope rests not in powers or privileges bestowed by and in the city of this world. As with Israel in Egypt and in Babylon, our hope rests in the One whose love alone redeems the slaves and the exiles:

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love upon you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples; but it is because the Lord loves you, and is keeping the oath which he swore to your ancestors, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage.

O Sapientia

2011-12-17T19:00:00.003Z

There is something almost underwhelming, perhaps even cautious about the concluding petition of the first of the Advent antiphons:

Come and teach us the way of prudence.

Aquinas defines prudence as "wisdom concerning human affairs". He goes on to say:

actions are about singular matters: and so it is necessary for the prudent man to know both the universal principles of reason, and the singulars about which actions are concerned.

Why do these ancient prayers of Advent hope begin with a petition for a virtue which appears to have little eschatological significance?

Prudence is, however, grounded in the reality of exile. It was the "wisdom concerning human affairs" exercised by Daniel in Babylon, the same wisdom that led Jeremiah to urge the exiles "seek the welfare of the city". Prudence in exile was an expression of hope as Israel awaited restoration. For the post-Christendom Church, experiencing a not dissimilar exile, prudence is indeed - as for Israel - a part of our eschatological orientation.

"Wisdom concerning human affairs" expresses the Church's Advent hope, for we know that the Kingdom is yet to come and, as a result, our affairs in the city of this world should be marked by the meaningful waiting of prudence.

(The illustration is from Linda Witte Henke's "The Great O Antiphons", to be found at the Episcopal Cafe's Art Blog.)

There's something about Mary

2011-12-17T14:05:00.000Z

Lord,
we beseech thee, give ear to our prayers,
and by thy gracious visitation
lighten the darkness of our hearts
by our Lord Jesus Christ ...

Tom Wright would probably be pleased with the Advent 4 collect for the Church of Ireland's Rite One - Cranmer's translation of the Sarum rite's Advent collect. In For all the Saints?, Wright complains of contemporary liturgical provision for Advent:

The newer [Advent] lectionaries focus on people: on John the Baptist, and (not for the first or only time in the year) on Mary.

Neither the Advent 4 collects in 1662, in the ancient Latin rites nor in the contemporary Roman Missal focus on Mary. That said, the lectionary provision across those Communions using the Revised Common Lectionary has an explicit focus on Mary, with most contemporary Anglican collects similarly having reference to her.

There are good pastoral reasons for this. The majority of Anglican worshippers (and this is probably true across Communions) do not participate in the cycle of Marian feasts. And as Anglicans continue to celebrate 1st January as the Naming/Circumcision of Jesus rather than the Orthodox/Roman feast of Mary Mother of God, there is no opportunity in the Christmas cycle - or, indeed, on other Sundays of the liturgical year - to reflect on the role of Mary other than Advent 4.

There is, however, also a compelling theological case for the contemporary lectionary focus on Mary. The Lutheran theologian David Yeago puts it this way:

The Mother of Jesus is not simply present in the scriptural witness by implication, as a Christological postulate; she is named and presented to us directly as a character in the Christological narrative of salvation ... A Christ without Mary, a Christ in whose presence Mary is not also present, would be some other Christ than the scriptural Christ, the construct of some variety of "gnosis falsely so-called".

In the midst of the Church's prayerful reflection on the Advent hope and preparations for the celebration of the Incarnation, we surely must think upon Mary - the one pregnant with Hope.

Dark night and Advent faith

2011-12-14T14:30:00.000Z

There is something particularly appropriate about commemorating St John of the Cross during Advent - a time (in the northern hemisphere) of darkness, a time when the theme of exile is prominent in the Church's liturgy, a time when our eschatological hope confronts the reality of pain, failure, fear and confusion.

In a 2010 lecture +Rowan urges us to listen to John of the Cross on faith in the One who remains when the signposts and landmarks (social, personal, ecclesial) have been taken away:

What St John of the Cross says to us – and he's not just writing for Carmelite nuns in sixteenth-century Spain – is that out of this sense of a 'brick wall' before our intelligence, and this sense of confusion and loss where our understanding is concerned, faith grows in its true meaning. It appears not as system, not as a comprehensive answer to all our problems. It appears quite simply in the form of 'dependable relationship'. You may not understand, you may not have the words on the tip of your tongue, but you learn somehow to be confident -- or at least to be reliant – on a presence, an other who does not change or go away. You realize that when the signposts and landmarks have been taken away there is a presence that does not let you go. And that's faith, I would say, in a very deeply biblical sense. Look at the disciples in the gospels. Look at the number of times when they say something spectacularly stupid and Jesus says, 'Don't even you understand?' Look at the times when they ask the silly questions, the times when they try to turn away, when they manifestly don't know what's going on. But in the great words at the end of John spoken by Peter, they also say, 'Where else can we go?' They know that the presence that has called them is dependable and that while they may be insecure, volatile, and easily capable of betrayal, forgetting and running away; what they confront in the one they call Rabbi and Master is one who will not go away.

The episcopate and the unexpected

2011-12-13T15:16:00.000Z

Anglican Down Under is wondering if "any bishop has ever done the unpredictable or the unexpected". He points to two quite predictable episcopal performances - Akinola (former Primate of Nigeria) supporting a draconian anti-gay bill before the Nigerian Senate and Spong (formerly of Newark) being Spong at a lecture in the Episcopal Divinity School.

The entirely predictable nature of both performances, however, should not mean that certain questions are not asked. Most obviously, of course, what on earth did the EDS think it was doing inviting Spong to lecture? Spong's (very tired, old hat) pronouncements have no place in thoughtful liberal theology and the contribution it can make to the Church's mission.

But then there is Akinola. Leave aside for the moment the grave assault on the civil rights of gay people that the legislation before the Nigerian Senate propagates and the fact that this contradicts Lambeth 1.10 (c) and (d). What is odd is Akinola's conformity to his cultural context:

Same-sex marriage ... is against our African custom and traditions.

Custom and traditions in London, Dublin, and New York have significantly changed over the last 20 years on this matter. But if Anglicanism's theological discourse is to be shaped by something more than merely assenting to our differing cultural contexts, invoking "our ... customs and traditions" will not do. The alternative is Spong and Akinola, each conformed to their cultural context, talking past one another.

So can bishops ever do anything unpredictable or unexpected? Perhaps two examples suggest that they can. The new Bishop of Durham - James Welby - has responded with charity and grace to one of his parishes, and its priest, moving to the Ordinariate:

I have known Ian Grieves [the parish's priest] for a long time. When I was training, in 1992, I did a placement with him at St James and I learnt a huge amount from him. He’s a very good priest and he’s clearly going to be a loss to the diocese and we are sad about that ...

This is the path that he and a number of the congregation have chosen. We have friendly relations with him and he’s very kindly invited me to preach on the last Sunday before they leave. I think the tone of that will be to wish them every blessing in their continued walk with Jesus Christ.

No bitterness. No recriminations. Instead, a grace-filled response to a painful situation.

The second example is from outside the Anglican Communion. In his Advent pastoral letter, the new Roman Bishop of Aberdeen urged not a culture war nor action on global warming ... but silence:

We live in a noisy world. Our towns and cities are full of noise. There is noise in the skies and on the roads. There is noise in our homes, and even in our churches. And most of all there is noise in our minds and hearts ...

There can be no real relationship with God, there can be no real meeting with God, without silence. Silence prepares for that meeting and silence follows it. An early Christian wrote, ‘To someone who has experienced Christ himself, silence is more precious than anything else.’ For us God has the first word, and our silence opens our hearts to hear him. Only then will our own words really be words, echoes of God’s, and not just more litter on the rubbish dump of noise.

Grace and prayerful silence: now there is an episcopal agenda that could renew the Church.

Reclaimers and imaginatively engaged faith

2011-12-12T21:52:00.002Z

In a Church Times article (h/t Thinking Anglicans), Fr Duncan Dormor - President and Dean of St John's College, Cambridge - reflects on the renewed popularity of Anglican choral worship in the chapels of Cambridge and Oxford colleges:

Choral compline or evensong provide an accessible and non-threatening space within which young people can think about their lives and become accustomed to the idea of worship — to the possibility that worship might actually make sense.

In some ways, the Anglican choral tradition may well be entering a golden age — not necessarily a fresh, but certainly a refreshed and refreshing expression of Christian worship, fit for purpose in the 21st century.

That may appear counterintuitive, although recent research from the United States, which seeks to identify characteristic types of religious engagement among the young, suggests that a significant proportion of those becoming involved in Christian worship can be described as “Reclaimers”. Like many others, they seek religious experience rather than instruction or dogma, but, unlike some, they reject most of the elements of contemporary worship, seeking instead to reclaim established traditions, finding within them a refuge from the superficiality of much popular culture, and the onslaught of the commercial world.

This thesis finds strong support in the increased engagement with Anglican choral worship, where young people can reconnect with the depths of human experience, in a context that allows, indeed encourages, them to think things through for themselves. Unsurprisingly, under such conditions, many find an intelligent, imaginatively engaged Christian faith compelling.

Yes, the social context of Oxford and Cambridge is somewhat exclusive and Oxbridge college chapels are not parish churches. But there are points here worth considering - the place of non-eucharistic worship in giving space to meaningfully reflect on the Christian story; the counter-cultural nature of traditional liturgy, challenging the hegemony of the market and its culture; the phenomenon of the 'Reclaimers', suggestive of the extent to which in a post-Christendom society the Christian narrative can be authentically radical. And all of this, of course, is given expression through the Anglican tradition, which surely speaks of the potential of this tradition even in the midst of our debates and divisions.

Into the wilderness, fleeing illusory landscapes

2011-12-10T20:05:00.001Z

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness ...

In the disconcerting season of Advent, few figures are as disconcerting as the Baptist. Why does his word address us from the wilderness? Rowan Williams' Silence and Honey Cakes - a reflection on the wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers - perhaps provides an answer:

Every search for truth involves some kind of fleeing, some kind of asceticism. Every act of imaginative creation, in science as well as art, needs silence, a wariness about what looks easy. At a time when politics is increasingly dominated, it seems, by people's worries about appearance and presentation, about 'how it will play', where the culture of celebrity is a daily trading in illusory images, where show business reaches out tentacles in all directions, we need to know how and when to flee; bearing in mind that it is not other people's folly we are running from so much as our own deep-rooted propensity to be drawn into these games. Remember Macarius's blunt summary, that the world is a place where they make you do stupid things ...

It takes time, once again, to discover that the apparently generous horizon of a world in which my surface desires have free play is in fact a tighter prison than the constrained space chosen by the desert ascetics. When you have learned more or less successfully to 'flee' some of the illusory landscapes in which life appears easier, you still have to learn how to inhabit the landscape of truth as more than occasional visitor.

Rejoice, O daughter Zion

2011-12-08T22:06:00.003Z

Richard Hooker's reference to the conception of the Blessed Virgin in his Learned Discourse on Justification exemplifies how Anglicans approach this mystery within the plan of salvation with a reserve shaped by the patristic witness:

Now concerning the righteous, there neither is, nor ever was, any mere natural man absolutely righteous in himself: that is to say, void of all unrighteousness, of all sin. We dare not except, no not the blessed Virgin herself; of whom although we say with St. Augustine, for the honour’s sake which we owe to our Lord and Saviour Christ, we are not willing, in this cause, to move any question of his mother; yet forasmuch as the schools of Rome have made it a question, we must answer with Eusebius Emissenus, who speaketh of her, and to her to this effect: “Thou didst by special prerogative nine months together entertain within the closet of thy flesh the hope of all the ends of the earth, the honour of the world, the common joy of men. He, from whom all things had their beginning, hath had his own beginning from thee; of thy body he took the blood which was to be shed for the life of the world; of thee he took that which even for thee he paid. ‘A peccati enim veteris nexu, per se non est immunis nec ipsa genitrix Redemptoris:’ The mother of the Redeemer herself, otherwise than by redemption, is not loosed from the band of that ancient sin.” If Christ have paid a ransom for all, even for her, it followeth, that all without exception were captives. If one have died for all, all were dead, dead in sin; all sinful, therefore none absolutely righteous in themselves; but we are absolutely righteous in Christ. The world then must shew a Christian man, otherwise it is not able to shew a man that is perfectly righteous: “Christ is made unto us wisdom, justice, sanctification, and redemption:” wisdom, because he hath revealed his Father’s will; justice, because he hath offered himself a sacrifice for sin; sanctification, because he hath given us of his Spirit; redemption, because he hath appointed a day to vindicate his children out of the bands of corruption into liberty which is glorious.

Hooker's reflections flow from the two patristic statements by Augustine and Eusebius of Emesa. But for the speculative theology of others, Hooker declares of the reformed Church of England, "we say with St Augustine". Augustine's affirmation is thus worth quoting in full:

Now with the exception of the holy Virgin Mary in regard to whom, out of respect for the Lord, I do not propose to have a single question raised on the subject of sin - after all, how do we know what greater degree of grace for a complete victory over sin was conferred on her who merited to conceive and bring forth Him who all admit was without sin - to repeat then: with the exception of this Virgin, if we could bring together into one place all those holy men and women, while they lived here, and ask them whether they were without sin, what are we to suppose that they would have replied? (De natura et gratia PL 44:267).

This, says Hooker, is what Anglicans confess. The statement from Eusebius of Emesa then addresses the consequences of speculative theology as to the precise nature of the grace bestowed upon Blessed Mary at her conception - how does it relate to the fullness of the redeeming work of the Incarnate Word? Mary's status, says Hooker following Eusebius, is also ours:

none [is] absolutely righteous in themselves; but we are absolutely righteous in Christ.

This concern to ensure that we understand the grace lavished upon Mary at her conception to be fully and totally dependent on Christ similarly shaped ARCIC's Seattle Statement:

The negative notion of 'sinlessness' [in the 1854 papal pronouncement] runs the risk of obscuring the fullness of Christ's saving work. It is not so much that Mary lacks something which other human beings 'have', namely sin, but that that the glorious grace of God filled her life from the beginning (59).

On this basis, ARCIC then goes on to confess the mystery of Blessed Mary's conception in a manner distinct from the 1854 pronouncement but much closer to the patristic witness central to classical Anglican thought:

In view of her vocation to be the Mother of the Holy One, we can affirm together that Christ's redeeming work reached 'back' in Mary to the depths of her being and to her earliest beginnings.

The fact that Anglican liturgical calendars have since 1561 - in common with the tradition of Latin West and Greek East - commemorated the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary testifies to a shared belief (albeit rendered in different doctrinal grammars) in the grace lavished from her beginnings upon the one called to be the Theotokos. In the midst of Advent, then, we rejoice in the grace that gives hope: the Triune God pours out grace upon a daughter of Zion, preparing her to be the God-bearer.

"No one before or since ..."

2011-12-07T11:31:00.000Z

On the eve of the feast of the Conception of the BVM, Adam Hamilton's (senior pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, Leawood, Kansas) celebration of the vocation of Mary in his Advent book The Journey illustrates why we give thanks for her conception:

The redemption of humanity, and God's plan to step into our world, all hinged upon what Mary would say to Gabriel, the messenger.

Her assent set in motion the mystery of the Incarnation. As a consequence of her willingness, Mary's own body knit together the Messiah. It was her blood that carried nutrients to the child. It was her tender words, spoken and sung as mothers do to the children in their wombs, that quieted and comforted him. For nine months, divinity resided in her womb. No one before or since has had such intimate union with God. An ancient Christian hymn captures Mary's role in our salvation when it says, "He whom the entire universe could not contain was contained within your womb". The early church called her Theotokos - the one who gives birth to God - as a way of capturing both the identity of her son and the importance of her role in this story.

Questions in a disconcerting season

2011-12-06T20:59:00.001Z

In a discussion of the character of the Advent season, Creedal Christian rightly reminds us of its penitential nature: "it's about hope and repentance". In an earlier post, he emphasised the the cultural significance of recognising Advent's character:

That’s a strikingly counter-cultural message for a time when many churches are all too eager to embrace in part if not in whole the consumer culture’s Advent-trumping version of Christmas. But the message is right there in our Prayer Book.

Advent is indeed meant to be disconcerting. The traditional themes of the four Sundays - patriarchs, prophets, John the Baptist, and the Blessed Virgin - each illustrate how the Advent of Yahweh is inherently disconcerting. Before the revelation of the God of Israel, these foundational characters in the history of salvation are led to question. Abraham is forced to ask, "what will you give me, for I continue childless?". The prophet can only ask, "What shall I cry?". The imprisoned Baptist sends his disciples to ask Jesus, "are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?". And in the final Sunday of Advent we hear Blessed Mary's, "how can this be ...?"

The revelation of the God of Israel - to patriarchs and prophets, to the Baptist and to she who is to be the Theotokos - so overturns our understanding that we must question our assumptions of ourselves, the world and the God who acts. In Advent, then, rather than merely echoing the consumer society's holiday season, the Church's proclamation should be provocatively disconcerting. As +Rowan has written in an Advent article for a popular UK magazine:

what changes things isn’t a formula for getting the right answer but a willingness to stop and let yourself be challenged right to the roots of your being.

(The painting is by Jim Curtis, based on the Third Song of Isaiah, part of the ECVA exhibition "Imaging the sacred art of chant".)

"God showed up in Mary's belly"

2011-12-05T21:45:00.000Z

In the week that the Church celebrates the Conception of the Blessed Virgin, The Living Church has published a great sermon by Stanley Hauerwas, preached as he was installed as Canon Theologian of Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville:

Once in the burning bush, now in the womb of Mary, the grandeur of creation is made manifest as God himself comes to us, reminding us who we are. We are those who receive him. This is our good work.

Christian humanism is not based on the presumption that our humanity is self-justifying. Rather Christians are humanists because God showed up in Mary’s belly ... Together, at this time called Advent, let us wait in joyful expectation for the surprising coming of the Lord.

The tension of being on the eve

2011-12-03T15:51:00.001Z

Advent pulls the imagination in two directions. We turn our minds to the universal longing for God that is given voice in the Jewish scriptures, the great yearning towards the 'desire of the nations'; in the cycle of the great Advent antiphons that begins with O Sapientia on 16th December, the phrase comes twice, in the the sixth and seventh texts: O Rex gentium, 'O King of nations and their desire', O Emmanuel, 'desire of all nations and their salvation'. And at the same time, 'Woe unto you who desire the day of the Lord' and 'Who may abide the day of his coming? For he is like a refiner's fire' ...

In Advent, in that day, we all become - as it has been said - Jews once more. We relearn the lessons of the first covenant: that we cannot make God, however we long for him; that we must be surprised, ambushed and carried off by God if we are to be kept from idols. The loyalty of the Jewish people to God is the fierce preservation of such a story: there is no sense to be made by thinking or imagining only the violent upheaval by which Israel become a single community of obedience and praise ...

We are perpetually looking forward to and giving thanks for an uncovenanted event, a transforming newness, the history of Israel and Jesus; we are perpetually 'on the eve' of God's coming, knowing and not knowing what it will be. Advent insists that we stay for a while in this tension of being 'on the eve', if only in order that the new thing we celebrate at Christmas may have a chance of being truly new for us, not a stale and pious cliché ...

Because Advent tells us to look for mystery, absolute grace and freedom, in a fleshly human face, within the mobile form of our shared history, it brings our idolatry - philosophical and mythological alike - to judgement. Our hunger is met, we are talked and touched into new and everlasting life, our desire is answered; but only insofar as we have lived in an Advent of the religious imagination, struggling to let God be God; casting out idols of silver and gold to the moles and bats.

Rowan Williams "Advent: a university sermon" in Open to Judgement.

Our food and our dwelling in exile

2011-12-02T16:11:00.000Z

There is an interesting and honest admission by Kathleen Henderson Staudt on the Daily Episcopalian:

In our effort to distinguish ourselves from literalist and fundamentalist approaches to Scripture and doctrine, we may well have ceded too much ground in the public conversation about and use of Scripture to guide and inform our account of ourselves.

This is preceded by an equally interesting acknowledgement of the classical Anglican tradition:

Certainly it is true to our tradition to take Scripture seriously -- part of the “three-legged stool” of Scripture, Reason and Tradition, but taking a place of priority in many ways. At the consecration of Bishop Mariann Budde I noticed again that one of the things every ordained person must say publicly (in addition to accepting the “doctrine, discipline and worship of Christ as this church has received them”) is “I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary for salvation” (BCP, 538).

There is a 'postliberal' character to such observations. In their Good News in Exile, three postliberal pastors in mainline US churches similarly emphasised the need to rediscover Scripture over and against "the insights and experiences" of modernity:

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has observed that it was during times of exile that Israel became a textual community. Living as strangers in a strange land, Israel's very identity as a people was threatened, so they read and listened to stories to remind them of who they were and where their true home was ... When a community of people is no longer in charge, when the more corporeal sources of identity are vanishing, the community turns to texts and stories as wellsprings of life. Surely this is part of what we are observing in our churches today. It is now becoming clearer that the scriptural story is our home in exile ... Now that the world no longer provides such an accommodating home for the scriptural community, Scripture has become our home.

That we all - evangelical, catholic and broad-church, conservative and liberal - became too comfortable and complacent in modernity is surely a given. The same culture of individualism which so profoundly shaped liberal theology in modernity, also influenced evangelical hermeneutics. The challenge of reading Scripture disappeared in the midst of the culture wars. For liberals - in the words of Good News in Exile - "neither tradition nor Scripture was thought to hold much authority". Conservatives succumbed to an Enlightenment epistemology in which, as Oliver O'Donovan has stated, "the immediacy of the insight tends to make the interpretation of Scripture seem superfluous": what Scripture proclaimed was 'known' before Scripture was read and listened to.

In his recent Advent letter to the Primates of the Communion, +Rowan referred to the Communion's "Bible in the Life of the Church" as a "very significant project". It will indeed be very significant if the project leads to Anglicans more seriously engaging with Scripture. The two case studies undertaken by the project - Biblical engagement with our approach to the environment and regarding our call to challenge unjust structures in society - pose challenges to both 'Left' and 'Right': a 'Left' which too easily abandons the canonical text and canonical readings for progressive, secular discourse and a 'Right' which too easily ignores the catholic and cosmic nature of Scripture's witness.

Advent, when we prayerfully place ourselves within the experiences of ancient Israel, is a meaningful season in which to rediscover Scripture as our food and our dwelling in the midst our exiles - amidst the ruins of Christendom and a global economic crisis, and within our own personal exiles of brokenness, disappointment, fear, and grief. It is indeed a time to "read, mark, learn and inwardly digest".

World Aids Day

2011-12-01T19:47:00.003Z

"To be made more truly the Church"

2011-12-01T13:18:00.002Z

+Rowan's Advent letter to the Primates of the Communion wonderfully summarises the Advent challenge to the churches:

In these weeks before Christmas, we Christians all have to acknowledge that in many ways we still live as if Christ had not come. We recognize the marks of the old habits in our lives, the ‘works of darkness’ that the Collect speaks of. We pray that the new light of Jesus may rise in our hearts. In other words, we as believers acknowledge that we are all of us, whatever ecclesiastical communion we live in, still on the way to being truly and fully the Church here and now in history, a place fully inhabited or indwelt by Christ through his Spirit. The gift of life in Christ is given us in baptism, and the reality of Christ’s Body is at work in our life together; nothing can cancel out that supreme privilege. Yet we have to pray continually to be made more truly the Church by being set free to receive more of Christ, more of the gifting of the Spirit. As St Augustine wrote in his treatise on baptism, if we were a perfect Church, we should no longer need to pray the Lord’s Prayer, asking for the Kingdom to come and for our sins to be forgiven.

Advent hope and Communion

2011-11-29T11:11:00.003Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are signs of Advent hope in the Communion.

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

2011-11-27T10:00:00.003Z

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

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

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

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

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

Eve of Advent

2011-11-26T11:19:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

Rowan Williams Advent Calendar.

Time before Advent: "not lost but fulfilled"

2011-11-25T11:42:00.000Z

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

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

Fulcrum listens

2011-11-25T10:53:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grace, the broken society and greed is good

2011-11-24T22:09:00.000Z

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

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

ARCIC: a forgotten gift?

2011-11-23T14:36:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis was wrong - we should commemorate him

2011-11-22T15:40:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time before Advent: Eucharistic liturgy and the end of history

2011-11-21T20:52:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Eucharist builds the Church"

2011-11-20T10:00:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time before Advent: tension, patience and Kingship

2011-11-19T17:00:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The territory of God's work of grace"

2011-11-18T11:09:00.000Z

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

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

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

"Ordained only by man's authority"?

2011-11-16T11:35:00.001Z

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

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

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

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

The Preface to the Ordinal quite explicitly states otherwise:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time before Advent: "we are slaves"

2011-11-15T17:53:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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