Category Archives: Anglican

Radical Orthodoxy; or the search for a theological voice

Posted on by
Reply

There’s a recent interview with John Milbank, the founder of the theological school known as Radical Orthodoxy. The interview, and much of the theology associated with the movement, is obscure to the point of incomprehensible. Still, I found the work of Milbank’s students helpful in rethinking the relationship between the pre-modern Christian theological tradition and contemporary philosophy. It’s a bridge I found difficult to construct for myself, in part because of my own theological training.

I read a great deal of German neo-orthodoxy in college (Barth, et al). Then I went to Harvard where I encountered constructivist theologians like Gordon Kaufman, critical theologies like Feminism and Liberation, and the writings of Derrida and Foucault. Putting it all together was impossible. That may be why I retreated into historical study. But I studied history because I thought it continued to have relevance to the life of faith today, and making it relevant was in some sense my ultimate goal.

There are aspects of the project of Radical Orthodoxy I find helpful–especially the attempt to rethink traditional categories, rituals, and the like with an eye to contemporary questions, and to offer a critique of the Enlightenment project from the perspective of earlier thinkers. Thus, Augustine provides an interesting foil to Descartes (see Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity).

The interview with Milbank made clear that there is not only a philosophical project, there is also a political one. That I find somewhat alienating, if only for odd statements like “Marriage and the family, for all their corruption and misuse, are at base democratic institutions,” which is so patently false from an even cursory reading of history.

In addition, there seems to be something of a nostalgia for another time, when Christianity was in some sense “given;” when children were raised in the faith. Such times are long past, and it is silly for theologians or pastors to try to recapture them.

In many ways, we are living in a post-Christian age, when the churches have retreated from the central role they played in culture and society. Whatever the loss, Christianity’s new role holds out exciting possibilities for creating new ways of being faithful, and reaching with new language to embrace people into our communities.

The lives and actions of bishops.

Posted on by
Reply

News came out today that Mary Glasspool has received the necessary consents from Diocesan standing committees and from a majority of bishops with jurisdiction. The news and reactions from various corners of the Anglican world are here.

She will be ordained and consecrated as Suffragan Bishop of Los Angeles on May 15. The reason for the wide interest in her election is that she is the first openly-gay candidate elected bishop in the Episcopal Church since Gene Robinson was elected bishop of New Hampshire. In the aftermath of his election, and the actions of General Convention 2003 in consenting to the election (there are different procedures in place for regular elections, and those that occur in the months before the triennial meeting of General Convention), there has been ongoing turmoil among worldwide Anglicans.

The news from the diocese of Los Angeles came at the same time as the sexual abuse scandal has resurfaced in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Benedict XVI himself has been implicated directly in the cover-up of abuse and the protection of abusive priests. The German press has been particularly keen on following this story but there are also extensive reports in the American press and blogosphere.

And today, the Archbishop of Dublin, who is also under fire for his actions thirty years ago as a canon lawyer, addressed the issue directly in his sermon for St. Patrick’s Day (it doesn’t get any more high-profile than that in Ireland). The Episcopal Cafe’s post on Cardinal Brady’s sermon immediately precedes the report on the consents to Glasspool’s election.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition. A woman who has lived in a committed relationship for twenty years becomes a bishop and is the target of vitriol from conservative Anglicans, some of whom are considering the invitation from the pope to become Roman Catholic.

Lent reminds us that we are broken vessels living in a broken world, that the institutions we hold dear–even the church, the Bride of Christ–have deep flaws. We live in a culture and a religion deeply divided and conflicted over sexuality. Sometimes that boils over into culture wars like those the Episcopal Church and the Anglican world have suffered, sometimes it results in deep internal division, conflict, and brokenness that manifests itself in clergy sexual abuse.

John and Charles Wesley, March 3

Posted on by
Reply

The Wesleys might well be the two most influential figures in the history of English-speaking Christianity. I suppose that’s debatable, but certainly the shape of Christianity would be dramatically different without them. Sons of an Anglican priest and educated at Oxford, after travels to colonial America, they became leaders of the Evangelical Revival in England. John was the elder and more responsible for the theological and structural basis of what would become Methodism; but it might be that Charles, through his thousands of hymns, had the greater impact on the religious lives of English-speaking Christians over the past two and a half centuries. His hymns are probably in the hymnals of every Protestant Church, and generations of people undoubtedly knew many of them by heart.

They were often criticized in their own time for the kind of emotional responses evoked by their sermons and in Methodist prayer meetings. Hogarth’s engraving captures anti-Methodist sentiment:

Much of the opposition could be attributed to class issues–the Methodists target working and middle class people–and to their tactics. They adopted George Whitefield’s practice of preaching in the open air, held meetings outside of regular church hours and in places other than churches, and they licensed lay people to preach.

From a twenty-first century perspective shaped by contemporary Christianity, what may be most surprising is the social justice emphasis of the Methodist revival. John Wesley opposed slavery and one of the last letters he wrote before dying was to William Wilberforce who was leading the campaign for abolition in Parliament, urging him to persevere in his efforts.

I can’t think about the Wesleys, though, without thinking of their hymns and beginning to sing them: “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing” or “Love Divine, All Loves’ Excelling.

George Herbert

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday in Lesser Feasts and Fasts, we remembered George Herbert (1593-1633). Herbert is chiefly known for his poetry, especially The Temple and The Country Parson, but neither appeared in print during his lifetime. Apparently he struggled with a call to the ministry and was only ordained a priest in 1630. The Country Parson seems to have been written as something of a guidebook for him to follow after he took up his cure, so it doesn’t reflect his practice of ministry. It has had a profound effect on Anglican priests over the centuries, and probably on laypeople as well. Several of his poems appear in The Hymnal 1982 and his poems continue to capture the imagination of readers today.

Among my favorites:

Prayer: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/983.html

And in honor of the season of Lent:

Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authority,
But is compos’d of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow
To ev’ry Corporation.

The humble soul compos’d of love and fear
Begins at home, and lays the burden there,
When doctrines disagree,
He says, in things which use hath justly got,
I am a scandal to the Church, and not
The Church is so to me.

True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,
When good is seasonable;
Unless Authority, which should increase
The obligation in us, make it less,
And Power itself disable.

Besides the cleanness of sweet abstinence,
Quick thoughts and motions at a small expense,
A face not fearing light:
Whereas in fulness there are sluttish fumes,
Sour exhalations, and dishonest rheums,
Revenging the delight.

Then those same pendant profits, which the spring
And Easter intimate, enlarge the thing,
And goodness of the deed.
Neither ought other men’s abuse of Lent
Spoil the good use; lest by that argument
We forfeit all our Creed.

It’s true, we cannot reach Christ’s forti’eth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Saviour’s purity;
Yet we are bid, ‘Be holy ev’n as he, ‘
In both let’s do our best.

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
That travelleth by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn and take me by the hand, and more:
May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast,
As may our faults control:
That ev’ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlour; banqueting the poor,
And among those his soul.

From: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lent-2/

veils, mirrors, and faces

Posted on by
Reply

I’m working on my sermon for this Sunday, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany. The gospel is always the story of the Transfiguration. This year we hear Luke’s version, which is notable because it does not use the word transfiguration. Luke says only that “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white” (Lk. 9:29). While Luke refers to Jesus’ face, both Exodus and Paul talk about a veil. Moses needs a veil to protect himself when he approached and talked with God. Paul uses that image to draw a contrast between the direct experience of the believer with God.

It puts me in mind of another image from Paul. In I Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.”

I’ve been reading Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. Traherne was a seventeenth-century Anglican priest who wrote extensively. Little of what he wrote was published in his lifetime and manuscripts have been found within the last decade. The Centuries of Meditation were discovered in a used bookshop in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.

I came across this in the Centuries yesterday:

O let me so long eye Thee, till I be turned into Thee, and look upon me till Thou art formed in me, that I may be a mirror of Thy brightness, an habitation of thy Love, and a temple of Thy glory. That all Thy Saints might live in me, and I in them: enjoying all their felicities, joys and treasures.” 63

I hope to write more extensively and seriously on Traherne at some point, but I’m intrigued by that statement “O let me so long eye thee till I be turned into thee.”

More on Holy Women, Holy Men

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve continued to think about my reaction to Holy Women, Holy Men. My earlier post is here. It was initiated on Friday when I went on Episcopal Cafe and found no mention of the Martyrs of Japan and instead a quotation from a work on Anne Hutchinson. I think I’ve figured it out. I’ve not read it carefully. It’s not available in print and I haven’t been interested enough to go back to the materials presented at General Convention. So, my only exposure to it is through Episcopal Cafe.

Speaking to the Soul provides no historical context for Williams and Hutchinson, no discussion of what influenced them. There’s nothing that would help a non-expert make any sense of their relation to Anglicanism, why they are worth commemorating, and how their commemoration might enrich our current life as a communion.

To me, that reeks of arrogance–assuming that anyone who is of interest religiously or spiritually is inherently worth recognizing by Anglicans and worth coopting.

Granted, I come to this as someone from an outsider background whose academic specialty was religious outsiders. Still, I think it more hubris than humility to pay lipservice to the diversity within Christianity without acknowledging it, and without acknowledging the deep differences that persist between the Anglican tradition and others, like the Baptists, of whom Williams was one of the leading lights.

Holy Women, Holy Men

Posted on by
Reply

I suspect I posted something on this last summer in the run-up to General Convention. There is a major revision in the works for Lesser Feasts and Fasts, which is the liturgical book dealing with commemorations of the saints and other notable figures in the history of Christianity and the history of the Episcopal Church. There has been some debate about the inclusion of this or that figure (John Muir, who wasn’t a conventional Christian by any stretch of the imagination), people who left Anglicanism for the Roman Catholic Church, like John Henry Newman, and many more.

My sense when I first looked through Holy Women, Holy Men was that it was something of a politically-correct attempt to acknowledge everyone who has made an important, or not so important, contribution to contemporary religion and culture. There are two aspects of it that deeply bother me. First, the expansion of commemorations. One of the things the Protestant Reformation did was simplify the religious calendar, removing the commemorations of many saints from the annual ritual year. Now we are back where we were in the Middle Ages. Perhaps that’s not so bad, but on the other hand a proliferation of commemorations might lead to the lessening importance of the whole enterprise.

Secondly, I am deeply concerned about what I suppose I should call religious imperialism. One of my most memorable moments from the time I spent teaching History of Christianity in an Episcopal Seminary was when a student commented after our discussion of Erasmus, “He was an Anglican.”

Well, no.  He wasn’t an Anglican, he remained a Catholic and died one. As I was reading on Episcopal Cafe the entry on Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson yesterday, I sensed the same thing. To adopt or assimilate members of other denominations or Christian traditions, or even from other religious traditions, seems to me rather arrogant. Williams challenged not only the Puritan orthodoxy of colonial New England, he would have been equally vocal against the Church of England. To learn from and respect those who would have had deep disagreements with Anglicanism is one thing, to place them in our ritual calendar is quite another.

I presume the goal is to honor their contribution and their faith; but how can we do that authentically by eliding the deep differences between themselves and us?

Sermon post-mortem

Posted on by
Reply

I’m never quite sure whether I pull off what I’m working on. Yesterday, given the constraints of other commitments, I wasn’t happy with the final shape of the sermon. But some of what I was groping toward must have come through. A parishioner called me today and said lovely things about my sermon yesterday.

That’s not why I’m writing. Instead, I’m writing about two other things. First, a series of conversations at coffee hour about our decrepit dishwasher and how we should proceed. We can get it fixed. The problem is, it doesn’t do what we need it to do. It constrains our ministry because our kitchen is not adequate for the purposes to which we put it, or could put it, with the proper equipment. Our food pantry can’t re-package bulk food for example.

Then, I saw a post on the Episcopal Cafe that led me to this. There’s much here with which I disagree but it seems to me that the right questions are being asked. I especially like the parable of the life-saving station. I’d heard it before but it had slipped my mind. In some ways, it captures the history of Christianity in America. The full parable is here.

I was involved for a couple of years in a parish that was a fairly recent church plant. It was successful at the level of bringing people in, but I don’t think it was particularly at shaping and forming disciples.

I do think on one level that it is all about liturgy or worship. The old Anglican/Episcopal mantra was lex orandi, lex credendi, praying shapes believing. We have a gift to offer the larger church and the world–a gift of an experience of God rooted in beautiful music, beautiful language, and at Grace, a beautiful space. We need to find ways of sharing that.

More on the Trinity Institute

Posted on by
Reply

Rowan Williams wrote a brief essay for this week’s Newsweek that summarizes much of what he said last week at the Trinity Institute. The essay is available online. In it, he points out pervasive the use of economics to understand relationships (customer, consumer, for example, even in the church), and how any perspective that narrows the range for understanding human being to a single factor diminishes humanity. He concludes:

Our job as human beings is to imagine ourselves—using all the raw materials that science, psychoanalysis, and economics provide us—in the hope that the images we discover and shape will have resonance and harmony with the rhythms of what Christians, and others, call the will and purpose of Almighty God.

He consistently stressed during the institute the importance of both a full account of human being and developing ways to nourish fuller human being. If that truly is the goal, not just of political institutions, but of churches as well, then one might think finding ways of nourishing people who find fuller human being in same-sex relationships, and nourishing those life-giving relationships, ought to be a priority as well. Of course, he argued just that in essays written long before he became Archbishop of Canterbury.

William Laud

Posted on by
Reply

The January calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts (no, I’m not going to address Holy Men and Holy Women) has one of my least favorite commemorations, that of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. Fortunately for my Protestant sympathies there is still no commemoration of King Charles I.

Even though my liturgical sensibilities tend toward the Angl0-Catholic, as I said in a recent post, I’m always rooting for the Protestants in the English Reformation. Certainly that’s true when we get to the seventeenth century (and let’s be real, the English Reformation didn’t end until the Restoration in 1660). But Laud is no hero of mine. Even if his liturgical sympathies corresponded to mine, his political ones did not. And besides that, he lacked political sense. His attempt to impose a prayer book on the Scottish church was bone-headed, and his whole-hearted support for Charles I was all about putting your money on the wrong horse. Charles may have been deeply religious and of authentic faith, but scholars agree that he was not a very good ruler, apparently not terribly intelligent.

True, the Presbyterians and Puritans were pressing their point, but surely some compromise short of revolution was possible.

As I write this, I wonder about the relevance of the seventeenth century experience for contemporary Anglicanism. It may be that we have an Archbishop of Canterbury and Primates who are urging centralization when there are powerful forces moving the other direction.

For more information on Laud, the place to begin is Affirming Laudianism. Hattip to David Sibley.