Monthly Archives: November 2010

Church Ale

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I came across a report that St. James Episcopal Church in Lancaster, PA, has its own beer: St. James Brown Ale. Apparently, among its members are owners of a microbrewery who came up with this creative fundraising idea. It’s not a new idea, by any means. Monasteries have long been in the business of brewing beer and the Belgian Trappists have their own very popular style.

It’s not just monks. In the Middle Ages, Church Ales were among the most popular fundraisers for English parish churches. They didn’t necessarily brew their own, but they certainly sold large quantities, especially around the Feast of Pentecost. Church Ales were popular festivals for centuries, and often criticized by religious and social reformers. Brewing was a bone of contention in another way. Among the rites and privileges of many parish priests, in England and on the continent, was the right to brew, and sell their own beer. This put them in competition with inns and angered many local merchants.

It worked both ways, however. Parish visitation records are full of complaints from clergy that parishioners, especially men, spent most of Sunday service times in the local alehouse rather than in church, coming to service only in time for mass.

I doubt we’ll be brewing beer to raise funds for Grace, but you’ve got to give the people of St. James, Lancaster credit for creativity, and for marketing.

Will the Primates meet?

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Quite the hubbub over this question. The primates of the Anglican Communion are scheduled to meet in Dublin in January 2011. A report by George Conger puts this meeting in question, and indeed raises issues about the Primates Meeting itself. It is important because it is one of the “four instruments of communion” so often discussed in the last 10-15 years. The meetings have at times been acrimonious, and recent ones have featured, if not outright boycotts, then pointed refusals on the part of some, to participate in joint Eucharists.

According to Conger, who tends to be a reliable source, the Archbishop of Canterbury has proposed smaller meetings of “like-minded” archbishops before the Dublin meeting itself. This report received confirmation from a number of sources. Conger goes on to say that Williams is proposing a restructuring of the meeting itself:

suggesting that an elected standing committee be created and the powers and responsibility of the meeting of the communion’s 38 archbishops, presiding bishops and moderators be delineated.

The problem here is two-fold. How can the primates be an “instrument of communion” if they cannot gather together? The second problem is an ongoing one as the ABC attempts to tinker with Anglican structures and create a more cohesive body. An elected standing committee would seem to further narrow and centralize powers within this group and decrease democratic representation. One can see similar attempts at work in the proposed restructuring of the Anglican Consultative Council–which would increase representation from the Primates, at the expense, as always of the laity.

The structures of the Anglican Communion, the “instruments of communion” are unwieldy. The alternative is to create a centralized bureaucracy that holds all power and makes the decisions. That sounds a great deal like the Vatican to me.

According to late reports, the Anglican Communion Office vehemently denies that the Primates Meeting has been canceled or postponed.

As always, you can follow the discussion on Thinking Anglicans and the Episcopal Cafe.

Resigning Bishops

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By some bizarre coincidence, the retirement and/or resigning of bishops has made a great splash in the news. On this side of the pond, Bishop Gene Robinson, whose election and consecration caused so much consternation throughout the Anglican Communion, announced his retirement. His address to the Diocese of New Hampshire is here. The New York Times article is here.

Meanwhile, a number of bishops of the Church of England have announced their resignation. Unable to come to terms with the ordination of women to the Episcopate, they are swimming the Tiber and becoming Roman Catholic. You can follow the discussion at Thinking Anglicans.

Someone more theologically or spiritually astute than me might be able to draw some conclusion from this interesting convergence, but any connection escapes me now.

Perhaps it is only this. Bishop Robinson writes about the toll that the last seven years have taken on him and his partner. No doubt those bishops who are resigning in the Church of England can also say something about the emotional, physical, and spiritual toll that has affected them since the decision to ordain women to the priesthood in the Church of England.

Being a bishop is no easy thing. Being a bishop when it seems the forces of church and culture are arrayed against you must be exceedingly difficult. These bishops may have very different theological perspectives, but no doubt all of them have suffered a great deal. And the Church is diminished by their leaving.

My prayers are with them all.

Who are these like stars appearing?

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We sang this hymn yesterday on All Saints’ Sunday. I suppose I’ve sung it many times before, but as with so many hymns, I didn’t pay particular attention to the text. Then, a parishioner drew my attention to verse 4:

These are they whose hearts were riven,
sore with woe and anguish tried,
who in prayer full oft have striven
with the God they glorified;
now, their painful conflict o’er,
God has bid them weep no more.

The first two verses of the hymn are a description of the saints arrayed before God’s throne, asking the question: who are they? Verse three begins to answer the question. So verse four is an answer to the question of who are the saints?

What’s wonderful about verse four is that it describes people who do not simply submit to God’s will:

“who in prayer full oft have striven with the God they glorified.”

In other words, their prayer has often been an intense struggle with God. It’s a powerful description of one aspect of a devout Christian life.

The text is a translation by Frances Elizabeth Cox of a hymn written by Theobald Heinrich Schenck (1656-1727). I tried to learn more about the author. He was German, educated at Giessen University (in Hesse) taught in the high school (Gymnasium) there and then became a pastor. It’s the only hymn he wrote that was published. His other publications are several funeral sermons (a popular genre of edifying literature in the early modern period). Giessen was a hotbed of Pietism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but whether Schenck belonged to that reform movement is not mentioned in the material I found.

I was also unable to find the original German text of the hymn. No doubt I’ve got it in a hymnal somewhere, but apparently the Germans aren’t as quick to put stuff like that on the internet. I’d be curious to see what it reads like in the original. There are a total of fifteen verses in the original.

For All the Saints: A Sermon for All Saints Sunday, 2010

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One of the questions I often get from newcomers to the Episcopal Church, especially if they are coming from more Protestant backgrounds, has to do with the meaning of the saints. There’s a view among some Protestants, and it goes back to the Protestant Reformation, that devotion to or commemoration of the saints, is not quite biblical. Often these questions turn to whether, if someone joins the Episcopal Church, they need to start praying to the saints. Other times, though, there’s a bit of an edge to such questions, not unlike the time a former student once blurted out during a discussion on the Virgin Mary’s significance in the Christian tradition, “What’s so special about Mary?” My response? “She’s the Mother of God.” Continue reading →

William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1944

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Today we remember William Temple who died on this date in 1944. He had been Archbishop of Canterbury only since 1942 and it is said that his death was caused by exhaustion due to the strains of his job. The son of Frederick Temple, who was also Archbishop of Canterbury, Temple was a gifted leader and a brilliant theologian. His Christus Veritas is a compelling argument for understanding the Incarnation of Jesus Christ in light of God’s love that created the universe.

He writes:

Creation and Redemption are, indeed, different; but they are different aspects of one spiritual fact, which is the activity of the Divine Will, manifesting itself in love through the Creation, and winning from the Creation an answering love.

This conception undergirds his understanding of the church, the sacraments, the doctrine of the Incarnation, and the Atonement.

For example:

Thus we have the following background of the sacramental worship of the Church: the universe is the fundamental sacrament, and taken in its entirety (When of course it includes the Incarnation and Atonement) is the perfect sacrament extensively; but it only becomes this, so far as our world and human history are concerned, because within it and determining its course is the Incarnation, which is the perfect sacrament intensively—the perfect expression in a moment of what is also perfectly expressed in everlasting Time, the Will of God;…

With regard to the Atonement, he says,  “No doctrine can be Christian which starts from a conception of God as moved by any motive alien from holy love.”

His vision is as inspiring today as it was in the darkest days of World War II, and his theology offers much to ponder today as well.

Reading the notes I took some years ago while reading Christus Veritas, I was struck again by the compelling language and challenging ideas that seemed to jump off the page.

Covenant and Coercion

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The Episcopal Lead points to an essay by Savi Hensman that explores the disciplinary regime laid out in Part 4 of  The Anglican Covenant. Beginning with the baptismal vow to resist evil, she asks whether individuals or a church resisting evil (e.g., the oppressive treatment of GLBT persons) must submit if other churches object:

This might imply that member churches seeking to be faithful to their Christian calling, and to experience and reflect the love of the Holy Trinity, should never do anything to which certain other churches strongly object, if those objecting can convince the Standing Committee that the action would be wrong or harmful to unity.

But is achievement of a ‘common mind’ – or appearance of this – and greatest possible degree of communion always the highest good? In a world where evil can often seem plausible, even moral, there are many occasions when this is not so.

She goes on to cite the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted Hitler and was martyred for it. More importantly for her purposes, Bonhoeffer was among the leaders of those German Protestants who refused to participate in the German Christian movement. She quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury writing about Bonhoeffer:

[I]f we ask about the nature of the true Church, where we shall see the authentic life of Christ’s Body – or if we ask about the unity of the Church, how we come together to recognise each other as disciples – Bonhoeffer’s answer would have to be in the form of a further question. Does this or that person, this or that Christian community, stand where Christ is? Are they struggling to be in the place where God has chosen to be? And he would further tell us that to be in this place is to be in a place where there are no defensive walls; it must be a place where all who have faith in Jesus can stand together, and stand with all those in whose presence and in whose company Christ suffers, making room together for God’s mercy to be seen.

That is how Bonhoeffer had already come to the paradox of saying – as he did in 1936 – that unity between Christians could not be the only thing that mattered – if all it meant was good will towards everyone who claimed the name of a believer or everyone who satisfied some limited definition of human decency and fluency in religious talk.

One of the things that I was trying to get at in my previous post on Hooker is the issue of coercion. Coercion operates on many levels. Historically, as in the case of Elizabeth I and the other Tudor monarchs, coercion takes the form of state action to enforce conformity. In contemporary institutional Christianity, state action is not an option. However, there are other means at hand in some churches. The Vatican can suppress dissent by silencing theologians, but in other denominations, excommunication has become a rarity.

Part of the struggle in Anglicanism is a struggle over definition–What is it? Who are the members of the Anglican Communion? Since its beginning in the 19th century, the Anglican Communion has lacked clear boundaries, a clear definition of what it is and what it isn’t. The Covenant is part of a process aimed at defining boundaries, and certainly distinguishing members of the Anglican Communion from those churches that do not belong to it. Defining boundaries and membership involves enforcing conformity, at least on some level. And enforcing conformity requires coercion.

Hensman’s question comes down to “At what cost conformity?” At the cost of resisting evil? Or breaking our baptismal vows to “respect the dignity of every human person?” And here’s where Hooker comes in. Elizabeth and Hooker both were saying to nonconformists that they had to submit to doctrine and practice which they regarded is evil. Conformity was more important than faithfulness to the truth of the Gospel. The disciplinary  measures of the Anglican Covenant make the same argument against those who accept the ordination of Gays and Lesbians (and women, and perhaps the presidency of laypeople at the Eucharist in the Diocese of Sidney).

 

Hooker, Covenant and No-Covenant: Or, the uses and abuses of history

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For Anglicans and Episcopalians, the big news this morning wasn’t the election results in the USA but the announcement of a new coalition directed against the Anglican Covenant. Called noanglicancovenant, it has a website, a facebook page, press–at least among bloggers–and its own logo:

 

Thinking Anglicans announced:

International Campaign Seeks to Stop Anglican Covenant

It wasn’t a coincidence that the announcement came on November 3, the date of the commemoration of Richard Hooker in Anglican calendars:

Susan Russell wrote to members of the Anglican Resistance Movement’s facebook page,

It is no coincidence that today — November 3rd AKA the Feast of Richard Hooker — was chosen to launch an international campagin to oppose the proposed Anglican Covenant.

The new website — No Anglican Covenant: Anglicans for Comprehensive Unity — offers an impressive wealth of resources, background information and context to inform, empower and engage in the process of pushing back on this ill conceived proposal. And I am honored to listed among a truly amazing cloud of witnesses calling our communion to reclaim its foundational value of Anglican comprehensiveness.

Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the current proposal is coercion in covenant clothing. Scripture and tradition tell us to value the ideal of Covenant. Reason tells us to reject this proposal lest we throw out the baby of historic Anglican comprehensiveness with the bathwater of hysteric Anglican politics.
Tobias Haller chimed in: Richard Hooker’s Smiling
Don’t misunderstand me. My sympathies lie with the No-Anglican-Covenant group. I think it’s a bad idea on several levels. My problem is with the attempt to bring in Hooker to support it.
The church and the world in the twenty-first century are very different than they were in the 1590s when Hooker wrote The Laws of Ecclesiastical Piety. To appeal to him for support is misguided. Today scholars debate the extent to which Hooker was Reformed in theology and whether he can be seen as the architect of the via media or of what later came to be called Anglicanism.
What is certain is the immediate context in which he wrote The Laws. In 1593, Parliament was debating a series of laws that would increase penalties against Roman Catholics and introduce new restrictions on radical Calvinists. Hooker wrote The Laws in an attempt to convincing wavering members of the House of Commons that the restrictions against the Radical Protestants (later called Puritans) were necessary and legitimate. In other words, Hooker was writing in support of the Crown’s use of coercion to enforce uniformity.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Church of England was the Established Church (it still is, of course) and Elizabeth demanded outward conformity to the Church from her subjects, while famously admitting that she couldn’t “see into men’s souls.”
We can debate Hooker’s contributions to Anglicanism; we can’t debate the fact that he wrote in support of forced outward conformity.

Richard Hooker, 1600

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Today we remember Richard Hooker, who died on November 3, 1600. Hookrt is one of the great icons of Anglicanism, although that term was unknown to him, and certain Anglicanism whatever it means today, would be unrecognizable to him.

What established his reputation for later generations is The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Bloggers occasionally like to run contests about books that everyone claims to have read but few people actually have; if there were such a context in the Anglican world, I’m sure The Laws would fare very well. It’s dense reading, in a prose style that is quite alien to modern sensitivities and I can’t imagine there are many people today with the stamina to make it all the way through all five books. Hooker was a man of immense learning and it shows throughout. He draws on patristic sources and on the scholastics, especially, Thomas Aquinas, in making his arguments.

Hooker is credited with originating the “three-legged stool” of Anglicanism, referring to the authority of scripture, tradition, and reason (actually he thinks of the latter more in terms of common sense). The image is not his own, and in his work, the three are not quite equal. Scripture is paramount. Hooker was a Protestant, after all. Reason is used to help elucidate scripture, especially when scripture seems unclear or contradictory. Tradition, too, is largely viewed as an interpreter of scripture.

Hooker’s pre-eminence in later Anglican tradition is largely due to historical developments. As conflict over theology and ecclesiology deepened in the seventeenth century, Hooker’s half-hearted defense of the episcopacy and his moderate Calvinism became weapons in the war against outright Puritanism. Having defended the Elizabethan Settlement, Hooker came to stand for the via media, even as the poles between which the via media balanced shifted dramatically.

 

The Feast of All Saints, 2010

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I received an inquiry today from someone who wanted to know if we had a service today. We don’t, and until she asked, I hadn’t even considered the possibility. We celebrate All Saints on the Sunday following November 1. So far as I can remember, that’s been the custom at every parish I’ve been at. That’s going to change.

All Saints is one of my favorite celebrations of the church year. I probably say that about all of them, but All Saints is unique because of what it is about. As I was writing a brief description of the service for our parish newsletter, I came across this explanation: “In the Prayer Book tradition All Saints’ Day is essentially a celebration of Christ in his whole Mystical Body—the ‘elect’ and the ‘saints’ in the New Testament sense of these terms.” (Quoted in Hatchett’s Commentary on the Book of Common Prayer).

It’s a celebration of the church; to use traditional language with which I am uncomfortable, the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. It’s an important reminder that the community to which belong encompasses both the living and the dead; that we are united in our faith in the Risen Christ, all members of his body.

I want to sing Sine Nomine today–Ralph Vaughan Williams’ majestic “For All the Saints.” I want to hear the lessons that are appointed for the day. I want to join with my brothers and sisters on earth and in heaven in one hymn of praise.

Maybe next year…