Ask an Anglican: Something About Mary

Posted on January 8, 2013 by

0205searchlosticonSeveral questions have been coming in about the Blessed Virgin Mary and her place in Anglicanism. Derek writes:

I have been studying the articles, and have a question about the invocation of the Saints. Now, even as someone who identifies as “Anglo-Catholic”, who is closer to a “Prayerbook Catholick”, I have never, ever thought that st. joseph will sell my house, st. clare would clense my t.v., or st. jusde would find my missing keys. I have also never thought that “flying to the patronage” of the Blessed Mother would “save me”. But, what is doctrinally wrong with the Hail Mary in regards to asking for prayer? How is it different than me asking you for the same?

And Ian writes:

I love the Blessed Virgin Mary and pray the Angelus everyday. There are two versions that I use, one where the refrain goes:  ”Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death”. The other refrain is “Son of Mary, Son of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death”. There are a few other variations in the prayer also. Would you say these prayers contradict classical Anglicanism, and if not, why did they become less popular until the Oxford Movement?

There have also been a smattering of more general “What do Anglicans believe about Mary?” type questions as well. Clearly this is something of interest to many Christians, for a variety of reasons. The more Catholic minded folk tend to ask because they already have some degree of devotion to the Blessed Mother and they do not wish to see that diminished. Many Evangelicals, on the other hand, worry that any kind of devotion to Mary would be a sign that Anglicanism has become a bastion of latent popery, ready to swallow us whole into the belly of the beast.

A Cautious Embrace

The concerns that people have about Mary are not new. Anglicanism has always accepted the first four Ecumenical Councils as authoritative, which means we accept the decree of the First Council of Ephesus in 431 that Mary is to be regarded not merely as Christotokos (the bearer of the Messiah) but as Theotokos (the God-Bearer or the Mother of God). To deny the special place that Mary holds in the history of salvation as the one whom God chose to bear His Son, the one from whom God took human flesh, is to deny the Incarnation itself. Moreover, we affirm what Scripture says in Luke 2, that Mary is “full of grace” and that “all generations shall call [her] blessed.” The Magnificat which is said or sung at Evening Prayer is a daily reminder that Mary is no ordinary woman but a great Christian saint, perhaps the greatest, and certainly the Blessed Virgin Mother of God.

That said, early Anglicans were somewhat careful about what they said about her, out of fear that veneration of one sort or another could easily lead to worship which would be entirely inappropriate. King James I wrote:

For the Blessed Virgin Mary, I yield her that which the Angel Gabriel pronounced of her, and which in her Canticle she prophecied [Sic] of herself, that is, That she is blessed among women, and That all generations shall call her blessed. I reverence her as the Mother of Christ, of whom our Saviour took His flesh, and so the Mother of God, since the Divinity and Humanity of Christ are inseparable. And I freely confess that she is in glory both above angels and men, her own Son (that is both God and man) only excepted. But I dare not mock her, and blaspheme against God, calling her not only Diva but Dea, and praying her to command and control her Son, Who is her God and her Saviour. Nor yet not, I think, that she hath no other thing to do in Heaven than to hear every idle man’s suit and busy herself in their errands, whiles requesting, whiles commanding her Son, whiles coming down to kiss and make love with priests, and whiles disputing and brawling with devils…

This was a popular sentiment among early Anglicans, the rather strange insinuation about Roman priests wanting to have sex with her notwithstanding. Mary was to be honored, above all other saints and even above the angels, but there must not be even a hint that she could be called upon or otherwise related to because to do so would be to open the door to calling upon her instead of her Son for our salvation.

Quite Contrary Thoughts About Mary

Though this is an overreaction, it is an understandable one. Neither Rome nor the East have ever taught that Mary is in any way a kind of second savior. Nonetheless, the popular cult of Mary persists in those communions and at times it seems that there is very little said about Christ that differs from what is said about His mother, particularly in the Roman Church. Medieval Marian piety led prominent theologians such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Duns Scotus to conclude that Mary was not only sinless but that she had been conceived without original sin. Centuries later, this would become dogmatized by papal decree, much to the chagrin of all other Christians. It may not be the last problematic position that Rome takes on Mary either. There continues to exist in the Roman Catholic Church a movement to dogmatize the popular belief that Mary is “Co-Redemptrix” with Christ. It should not be a surprise then that the reformers wished to be cautious.

Mary Makes a Comeback

The Catholic Revival that took place during the Oxford Movement helped to re-establish Marian piety within Anglicanism. Anglican spiritual manuals were produced containing the prayers of the Angelus and other similar Marian devotions. Groups like the Society of Mary were established. Pilgrimage to the Marian shrine at Walsingham became popular amongst Anglicans once again. Many Evangelicals and other Anglicans were scandalized by this, of course, worrying that the same Marian idolatry that they see in Rome might be coming home to nest in the supposedly Reformed Church of England. There is room for disagreement about whether or not any particular element of the Marian revival goes too far.

But on an official level, does adoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary contradict both Scripture and the Anglican formularies? Not necessarily. Certainly the idea of referring to Mary as “Co-Redemptrix” is beyond the pale, but what about a simple prayer like the Hail Mary which is mostly scriptural and which asks the Blessed Mother to pray to her Son on our behalf? As I have written elsewhere, there is a great difference between invocation of saints and advocation of saints. The former involves making a saint into a kind of demi-god who must be appeased in order for you to find your car keys, sell your house, cure your cancer, or whatever it is that a particular saint is supposed to specialize in. The latter, however, is nothing more than what Christians do every day when we ask our friends and loved ones to pray for us. No one should ever be forced to ask a saint to offer a prayer, and all our official collects for various feasts are written directly to God accordingly, but there is also no Biblical warrant to anathematize the same.

One of the best spots to see a modern Anglican understanding of Mary at work is in the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) document produced in 2005 called “Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ.” There were dissenting voices when this document was released, but by and large it does a nice job of showing the places where Rome and Anglicanism agree and where we disagree about Mary, without any unfortunate insinuations attached.

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Praying Twice: Love Came Down at Christmas

Posted on December 27, 2012 by

Christmas carols are lovely, but so often they just roll right over me. The words to many of the carols found in the Hymnal 1982 are wonderful, but they are associated for me with childhood memories, bits of forgotten television specials and cups of hot cider on cold December afternoons. None of that is bad, but it does rob them of their power to speak to me about the mystery of Incarnation, the deep and abiding truth of Christmas. It takes something a little less familiar and a little more simple to wake me up and shake me out of my Christmas complacency.

When Jars of Clay put out their Christmas album a few years ago, I heard Love Came Down at Christmas for the first time and found it quite moving. I assumed at first that the band had written it and was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was in the Hymnal. It is a short hymn, spanning just three verses. As with many great hymns, it began as a poem, and unlike most other Christmas carols it does not have one particular tune associated with it. The Irish melody Gartan that accompanies it in the Hymnal 1982 is but one of many options (and honestly, not to my ear the best.) But the words are where the action is, not just in what they say but in how they say it.

“Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine.” The power of poetry is in the way it rolls off your tongue. That’s what melts your heart. It may seem redundant or even non-sensical to say that love is lovely, but in saying it, in singing it, there is a kind of opening of the spirit. It is subtle, but a question lives there. What does it mean to be lovely? What does it mean to be love? We say that God is love all the time. It is a fairly popular idea, actually. People who have no taste at all for the Christian faith are happy to affirm the aphorism that God is love. But I dare say that the problem that most of us have with saying such a thing is not just that we do not have any real concept of God, but that we do not have any real concept of love.

Whenever I sit with young couples who are preparing to be married, I ask them what love is. They usually say that it is an emotion, something you feel for someone when you truly care about them and just cannot stop thinking about them. Their response mirrors the way that western culture at large has come to envision love. It is not that people are unaware of the sacrifices of love, but they see such sacrifices as the result of love, not the definition of it. The feeling comes first. The response is doing good for the object of our affection. In reality, though, this is backwards. We love first through sacrifice, through the total giving of ourselves, the placing of the other’s needs above our own. Whatever emotional appeal comes after that is gravy. Love is in the action. You can find someone disgusting in many ways and still love them. What you cannot do is to treat them with indifference and think that your good feelings about them makes up for it.

True, sacrificial love, like so much else we do, is an impossible task for sinners so curved in on ourselves that we cannot see past our own shadows. It is not something we do naturally. When we are able to love like that, to make “love our token,” it is the result of what has been given to us. “In this is love,” says John, “not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Love is propitiation. Love is sacrifice. It is God’s sacrifice. We only know what love is because we know who He is and what He has done, giving Himself for us not when we deserved it but when we did not deserve it, when we were at our worst (Romans 5:8).

Love is sacrifice, but love is also God. And the very act of God becoming man is itself the beginning of that sacrifice, the reality of love made flesh. To say “Love was born at Christmas” is not a truism meant to give us warm and fuzzies. It is a stark, beautiful, difficult truth. The birth of the Son of God was the embodiment of sacrifice, the beginning of His death and consequently the beginning of the end of ours.

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Sola or Solo Scriptura? (And Other Questions That Don’t Make Grammatical Sense)

Posted on December 21, 2012 by

montoyaFollowing my recent thoughts on Lutheranism and the inherent problems of sola Scriptura, the events that have swept us all up here in America have overshadowed my desire to delve back into this too terribly deeply. There just is not enough time in the day for me to rant endlessly on the internet and repent, and tragedies like the one in Connecticut this past week serve as a good reminder that I do far too much of the former and far too little of the latter. Be that as it may, there are a couple of thoughts still sticking out from this discussion that I want to briefly address. My apologies in advance for not being as attentive and responsive as usual to the conversation in the com boxes.

Several people have suggested that I am perhaps not being fair to Lutherans by judging them based on my experience of this one set of people talking about this one particular passage. I am certainly no expert on Lutheranism, so it is entirely possible that I am in error in my understanding of it, but my argument is not based solely on one particular conversation about one particular set of verses. I have spent a good deal of time thinking about this in the past year, reading the Lutheran confessions and various Lutheran thinkers over the centuries to try to get a handle on it. The argument over Luke 7 simply serves as a convenient example with which to show what seems to me to be a problem so endemic to Protestantism as a whole that even its most “tradition-positive” tradition cannot help but succumb to it.

Likewise, a couple of people noted that differences of opinion over John the Baptist’s state of mind when he was in prison are not particularly consequential and certainly not something worth breaking fellowship over. I concur with that assessment, and I certainly was not trying to suggest that every single passage of Scripture has one and only one definite interpretation that has been locked down since the fourth century. My point was rather that this sort of disregard for the weight of the Church’s teaching about Scripture leads to all sorts of unforeseen consequences. I had a conversation recently with a Messianic Jew who tried to tell me that Jesus’ statement in John 14:6 – “I am the way, and the truth, and the life…” – was not actually Jesus affirming His own divinity by identifying Himself with the divine name I Am, but rather was just His way of saying to the rest of us that we should do like Him and look to Yahweh to be the way, the truth, and the life. When I tried to dissuade him of this notion by citing the way the Church has always read this passage, his response to me was fairly similar to that of my Lutheran friends. “Sure, that’s how some people have read it, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. Scripture alone!”

Here then is where the real parsing comes in, because inevitably at this point in the conversation someone will say, “Yes, but what you’re describing is solo Scriptura, not sola Scriptura.” The person who says this usually goes on to argue that what the average Protestant practices today in thinking that he or she can just go off with the Bible and know what it says is solo Scriptura, which is something foreign to the Reformation. Real Reformational Protestants understand that sola Scriptura is not about reading the Bible and interpreting it all by yourself but about reading the Bible within its context, informed by tradition and scholarship and the teaching of the Church, but recognizing that it is ultimately its own authority.

There are three ways in which I find this distinction problematic: It fails grammatically historically, and logically.

First, the grammatical problem. I realize that this is a bit nit-picky, but if you are going to try to come up with a way of describing how the other guy’s position differs from yours, it helps to use a term that is not a synonym of the one you are already using. “No, no, we believe in Scripture alone, but they believe in Scripture by itself!” Sola is from the Latin word solus which means alone. Solo is a modern English word that evolved from the same Latin word, meaning the exact same thing.

But of course, the very fact that a new term has to be invented is itself an indicator that this distinction is something of a novelty. This is the historical problem. There have always been divisions amongst Protestants about how to understand the Bible. Sixteenth century Lutherans strongly rejected the arguments of Calvinists, Zwinglians, and Anabaptists, all of whom laid claim to the purity of their own appeals to Holy Scripture. Yet, while the Lutherans said that these other groups were wrong because they misunderstood the Scripture, they never suggested that the problem was that these groups were mixed up about the self-authenticating power of Scripture. As far as I can tell, the coining of this term solo scriptura is a twenty-first century phenomenon. It seems rather strange at this late date to say that there has been a significant difference about this all along and nobody bothered to notice until, like, yesterday.

But of course, the real problem with this newly minted distinction between sola and solo scriptura is the logical problem. What so many serious Protestants decry as the solo scriptura attitude of their co-religionists is nothing more than the logical extension of sola scriptura in its purest form. Keith Mathison, who literally wrote the book on sola versus solo Scriptura, defines what he believes to be the pure Reformation doctrine this way:

To summarize the Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura, or the Reformation doctrine of the relation between Scripture and tradition, we may say that Scripture is to be understood as the sole source of divine revelation; it is the only inspired, infallible, final, and authoritative norm of faith and practice. It is to be interpreted in and by the church; and it is to be interpreted within the hermeneutical context of the rule of faith.

The tension inherent in this statement comes from the idea that the revelation of God in Scripture can in any way be understood apart from the teaching of the Church. This is the opposite of what Mathison intends, of course. He is actively trying to make a place for the Church, but at the same time he is arguing that the locus of inspiration in Holy Scripture does not extend to the Church’s faithful reading of same. The words on the page are divine, but the Church’s reception of them is flawed and fallible. The Church is necessary, but entirely human.

This reasoning leads invariably to an impoverished understanding of the Church. If the Church is needed for the right reading of Scripture but the Church often errs at the same, it follows that there needs to be some other measure for discovering what a true reading of Scripture really entails. Having the tradition of the Church’s historical interpretation of Scripture on your side is nice, but it does not guarantee anything because the Church could have been wrong all along. So what is the Christian to do? How is he or she to avoid despair?

For some Protestants, the answer has been confessionalism, essentially creating a new church with a new tradition and imbuing the founding documents of that new tradition with an air of infallibility because they are just saying what Scripture says, man. But in a world of competing confessions, each claiming to be nothing more than the pure Word of God explicated, how can we know which voice rings true? The confessionalist can and often does try to make use of tradition to bolster his claim, but he undercuts himself by saying at the start that tradition is subordinate to the words on the page. Only Scripture is trustworthy, and only in a vacuum where the Church cannot defile the Scriptures with her dirty hands. The Bible is a perfect book, so long as nobody ever reads it.

This may strike some as an argument for the papacy, but it is not. There is an opposite error that Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy tend to fall into, and that is the idea that the Church derives and holds authority apart from Scripture, as a kind of second poll of the Word of God. Herein the encyclicals of popes, the scattered thoughts of long dead saints, and even the canons of councils that do such strange things as regulate bathing with Jews suddenly become addendums to God’s Word. This is a grievous error, leading to all kinds of false conclusions and abuses of power.

Nonetheless, the Church’s interpretation of the Scripture is part of the divine revelation in the same way that the mouth and the voice are a part of speaking lines in a play. The actors must read the words as printed, without ad libbing new material, but the way a word is said, the inflection used and the tone struck, can create great variety in what is communicated to the audience. In the historical, catholic, and conciliar view, the Holy Spirit is not merely the writer of the play but also the director, making sure that the words He entrusted to the page are faithfully rendered in their performance. In the Protestant view, the Holy Spirit remains the writer, but the director could really be anyone. In both views, there is a clear desire to get the words right, but in the latter, getting the words right is all that matters.

To be sure, Anglicanism is not immune from this problem, on either end. There have been moments when we have drifted towards the heresy of Rome in making too much of the Church and moments when we have drifted towards the heresy of Protestantism in making too little of her. At our best, though, we have accepted our inheritance of what another blogger recently called prima Scriptura, a doctrine of revelation that acknowledges both the impotence of the Church without the Scripture and the incomprehensibility of the Scripture without the Church. It is in this respect, and perhaps only in this respect, that we can lay claim to Archbishop Fisher’s famous quote, “The Anglican Communion has no peculiar thought, practice, creed or confession of its own. It has only the Catholic Faith of the ancient Catholic Church, as preserved in the Catholic Creeds and maintained in the Catholic and Apostolic constitution of Christ’s Church from the beginning.” Ours is not to invent but to faithfully pass on and apply the Word of God, a Word that exists not only in the theoretical realm but in the actual, concrete, lived reality of the Church’s teaching and life.

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Every Man a Pope (or Why I’m Not a Lutheran)

Posted on December 12, 2012 by

Sola scriptura alert - Bible alone errorFor the past year or so, I have participated in a Bible Study every Tuesday morning with a group of mostly Lutheran Church Missouri Synod pastors. We look at the readings for the week in the original languages and discuss the meaning of the text. It is an experience I am glad to be a part of, though I am always aware of the fact that I am a visitor and not a native. That is not to say that the group is not hospitable. They have been wonderfully welcoming, much to the contrary of the reputation that LCMS pastors sometimes get for being anti-ecumenical. They are holy men of God who have my utmost respect, and I have learned a great deal from them. The LCMS is something of a mixed bag these days, but this group is made up of convinced, conservative Lutherans who take seriously not just the Scriptures but interpreting them according to Lutheran confessional standards. It is this last bit that often leaves me as odd man out.

John the Doubter?

Case in point, this past week we were discussing the LCMS Gospel passage for this Sunday, Luke 7:18-35, in which an imprisoned John the Baptist tells two of his disciples to go to Jesus and ask Him, “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” This gives Jesus an opportunity to sketch out the difference between Himself and John, remarking finally that “among those born of a woman none is greater than John; yet he who is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he.” It is a fascinating passage with lots of twists and turns to work out, but one of the things that is most striking is that, on the surface, it seems as if John, who had earlier identified Jesus as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), now has grown doubtful. During his time in prison, he has started to second guess himself and to wonder whether he made the right call, so he sends his servants to find out.

Except, if you read what the early Church Fathers have to say about this passage, that is not what is happening here at all. Rather than sending his disciples to confirm his own faith, John sends them so that they may find faith themselves. “So great indeed was [John], that he was taken for Christ,” says Saint Augustine, “and if he had not himself testified that he was not He, the mistake would have continued, and he would have been reputed to be the Christ.” Thus, according to Augustine, John said, “‘Go then, ask Him;’ not because I doubt, but that ye may be instructed.” Saint John Chrysostom says similarly, “Having sent them forth, He withdrew Himself, giving them opportunity and time to do the things that He had enjoined; for while He was present and ready to heal, no man would come to His disciples.” The same sort of teaching is found in the writings of Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Remigius, Jerome, Hillary, and countless others. The Fathers do not always agree with one another about how to interpret a passage of scripture, but on this passage they are in complete unanimity.

This also seems to be how a lot of Lutherans have understood this passage, both modern and old, including dear old Martin Luther himself. Nonetheless, at Bible Study this week, several of the Lutherans present argued for the opposite reading, that John was simply a doubter who had backslid into skepticism because of his hardship. Since the text does not tell us explicitly which version is correct, both of these interpretations are plausible. Nonetheless, one of them holds the weight of sacred tradition and the consistent teaching of the Church over the centuries, while the other is merely a private opinion foisted upon the text by individual readers many centuries and cultures removed from the actual events. Yet our conversation remained deadlocked because ultimately there is no place in Lutheranism for the Church to speak definitively on a matter of controversy.

Me Alone

By comparison to the standards of most of modern Protestantism, confessional Lutheranism is wonderfully, refreshingly Catholic. Unlike the radical iconoclasm of many other early Protestants including Puritans in the Church of England, early Lutherans went out of their way to retain just about anything from the tradition they could which they saw as consistent with Scripture. Vestments, gestures, crucifixes, ancient hymns, celebration of the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, and even the continued use of the confessional were all hallmarks of the Lutheran Reformation. It is not anathema to quote from the Fathers in the company of good Lutherans who know their faith. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, the standard of faith for Lutherans is sola scriptura, “Scripture alone,” which means that the ultimate standard of faith is only the individual Christian and what he or she thinks the Bible is saying.

I am certain that my Lutheran and other Protestant friends will feel that this is an unfair rendering of their position. They will say that Scripture is largely perspicacious, an argument that many Anglicans have also made historically. It is true that much of what is found in the Scripture is a lot clearer and a lot more straight forward than our post-enlightenment, post-modern world would care to admit. As Lutherans rightly point out, “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood” cannot mean anything other than what they actually say. Still, there are a variety of places in the Scriptures where multiple readings of the same passage are plausible. Herein, classical Protestants would say that we interpret the unclear passages in light of the clear ones. This is a fine rule, so far as it goes. But in the case of our passage about John the Baptist and his intentions, there is very little that can be found elsewhere in Scripture that can be of much help. So how then can a judgment be rendered?

Anglicanism and Sola Scriptura

Anglicanism maintains the primacy of Scripture in the formation of doctrine, and there is a way of describing sola scriptura that is consistent with the Anglican formularies. If by sola scriptura, we mean what Article VI says, that “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation,” than sola scriptura is an appropriate and historic doctrine, adhered to by the Fathers themselves. Scripture forms the foundation of the deposit of faith. It cannot be contradicted. It is not incomplete. It holds the key to our salvation. Everything that the Church teaches must conform to Scripture’s standard. Scripture is the ultimate rule of faith, and the doctrinal assertions of any particular church can and must be judged by an appeal back to Scripture, as Article XX makes clear.

However, Article XX also tells us that the Church “hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith.” The addition of this phrase to the article was objected to strenuously by the Puritan factions at the Convocation of 1563, but Archbishop Parker and those aligned with him prevailed. While Scripture is our highest standard of authority as Christians, bearing the unique Word of God that is not to be found anywhere else, the Scriptures are not self interpreting. The Church must not only keep and bear witness to the words of Scripture but also attest to their meaning. This the Church does through an appeal to an unbroken inheritance of apostolic interpretation, handed down from generation to generation, guarded by the episcopate, and carried forth by the liturgy itself which forms us even as we worship. As new issues arise, the Church tests them against the apostolic inheritance, finding answers ultimately in an appeal to Scripture made not in isolation by each individual Christian, but through conciliarity, within which the Holy Spirit works to guide the Church into all truth.

Scripture and the Conciliar Church

It is a complicated and messy process, made much muddier by the schisms that have rended the Church over the centuries, but it is ultimately beautiful and elegant in its outworking. And, of course, it is itself scriptural. When the early Church encountered controversy concerning the matter of eating meat sacrificed to idols and whether or not to accept Gentiles, the apostles and bishops met in council, seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit to come to a conclusion, not apart from the Scriptures but in and through them. And when that conclusion was reached, it was announced as that which “seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28).

Is this a process that is open to abuse? Certainly, as we see in councils today wherein the bishops fail to acknowledge that they are meeting in schism, without the whole council of the Church, but act as if they have similar authority. Councils can and do err, but the Holy Spirit guides the Church faithfully over time, always bringing her back to what has been revealed to her through the power of God’s Word. The alternative is to adopt the notion that the Scriptures do not need an interpreter, in which case every person individually becomes the chief interpreter of Scripture, every man or woman a pope in their own right, unable to be moved even by God Himself to believe that their own infallible readings of the text could ever be suspect. And so, though I have great respect for Lutherans and for the contributions that Lutheranism has made to the Church, I could never be one, nor any other kind of Protestant, except in the very narrow sense in which Anglicanism could be so defined. I simply do not trust myself to have that kind of unmitigated power over the Word of God.

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The Right and Wrong Way to Be a Pastor

Posted on December 9, 2012 by

jesus_save_after_each_level_icon820Justification and how we are saved is still very much a live wire in Christian dialogue today, as I think we have proved on this blog several times over. Nevertheless, while there are very real differences between how Roman Catholics and Reformational Christians of various sorts understand this doctrine, the divide is probably not as wide as we make it out to be. After all, if there is one thing that can be demonstrated by the Joint Declaration on Justification between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, it is that we are able to talk about justification using the same language when we want to do so. Everyone agrees that salvation comes uniquely through Jesus Christ and we all agree that this is rendered to us uniquely through grace and by faith, though there is significant disagreement about exactly how to define these terms. So where then does the heart of the disagreement lie?

It is easy to get lost in the small details and miss the big picture here. If we want to truly understand where the division takes place, we have to take our eyes off of the abstract theological concepts and take a good hard look at the facts on the ground. The division lies, ultimately, in how we pastor our people.

Feeding the Sheep

A parish priest is first and foremost a pastor. The Risen Lord asks Simon Peter three times, “Do you love me?” When Simon Peter replies, “You know that I do,” Jesus says, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15-17). This is not a word to all Christians. It is specifically a word to Peter and the other apostles, a word which then is carried to their successors, the bishops, and which they share with their presbyters. Those of us who don the clerical collar are to feed the lambs of Christ. And Christ has been very specific about what we are to feed them. We are to give them the Gospel. We are to give them Christ for the sake of their salvation.

We feed the sheep through the celebration of the holy Mysteries, through the cup of Christ’s Blood and His Body broken, through the water of regeneration, through the words of absolution, through the Word preached and taught from the pulpit, and through the individual contact with each person, standing with them in the midst of both their celebrations and sorrows to speak God’s Word into the room.

Real Words With Real People

But how do we approach it? What do we say? This may seem like a secondary question, a matter not of content but of style, but surely it is the opposite. If the entire congregation on a Sunday morning is people who are apathetic at best about their faith, what should the pastor say to them from the pulpit to change that? What word does he bring to the man about to undergo an operation, or the couple who has been living together for three years with one child already and another on the way who have finally decided to get married, or the mother of a child who has died before there was a chance to baptize him? What hope is there for the habitual sinner who cannot seem to escape slavery to her favorite sin or the skeptical teenager who has been bought and sold by the culture three times over already and sees you as just another in a long line of people with their hand out?

These are not idle questions. The way we priests answer them makes up not only the fabric of our ministry but the entire tapestry of spiritual life on the ground in a parish. As a priest, every time I show up in one of these settings, every time I open my mouth, I am taking someone’s eternal soul into my hands. Therefore, the doctrine of justification is not abstract. It is the beacon that I use every day in my life as a parish priest to let me know whether I am near or far from leading people to the path that leads to righteousness. If I do not have justification clear in my head, I risk leading the sheep of Christ off a cliff instead of into His waiting arms. I risk poisoning the sheep instead of feeding them.

There is a common usage in today’s Episcopal Church of the term pastoral that is highly misleading. We say, “Oh, Father Smith is very pastoral,” when we mean that Father Smith is very nice. He has a gentle way about him. He makes people feel good. Likewise, we call the ministry of making people feel good pastoral care. But this is not what it means to be a pastor. Being nice is all well and good, but the pastor’s task is to speak the Word to you. It is to ensure that you receive the Word of eternal life. Sometimes that will make you feel good. Other times that will make you feel miserable. The parish priest has to determine which Word you need when and to apply it.

How to Beat the Gospel Back Out of People

So how does this tease out the differences over the doctrine of justification? Quite simply, it is the difference between preaching the Gospel that points only to Christ or a new kind of law that points people finally back to themselves. The temptation with the room full of apathetic, going-through-the-motions Sunday morning pew sitters is to yell at them, to tell them that unless they get out there and start loving God and their neighbor, God is going to smite them, so they better get to it. Equally, the temptation when one has a sinner sitting in front of them is to say, “Change your ways, or else!” And there is a certain warrant for that, at least at first. It is true that there must be a kind of conviction that takes place, which means that sin must be confronted and the conscience must be awakened with the application of the law. But the conversation cannot be left there or else there is no cross and no good news. So we say, “Jesus died for you. Your sin is forgiven. You’re made new in Him.”

So far, so good. The priest who wishes to bring people to Christ stops right there with the truth of the Gospel held out before his people like a golden key to unlock all the mysteries of heaven. But the priest who denies the doctrine of justification, or who accepts something akin to the Roman version, is apt to go on, to say, “Now that you know what Jesus did for you, get out there and stay pure, never falling into your old ways, doing good things. You are God’s hands and feet in the world. He’s relying on you to make the difference. He needs you to apply it in your life. He’s made it possible for you to be saved, but now you have to live that out through your own good works.” And once you have done that, the whole project is lost.

The People Left Out

If justification and sanctification are not just God’s work being done in and for me by Christ, but also my work of responding to God and giving Him my best, then ultimately I am left with despair, because the very best that I have will never be enough to vanquish my sin or to fill the big empty hole that lives inside of me. And I will always be left to wonder whether I really have it, whether I am a real Christian or not, whether I am really saved or just in the queue where they give out salvation to all the good little boys and girls. Furthermore, this presents a real challenge to the person who simply has no capacity to respond to the call in the ways we might encourage, the person who is schizophrenic, the person who suffers from some form of neurological deficiency, the baby just born who does not yet have reason and recourse to do good works, the elderly person with dementia who is never quite the same from hour to hour. If justification is not just God’s work for them but their work with Him, where do they begin? What hope can they possibly have? The standard answer is both unbiblical and unsatisfying. “God only holds us to the standard of our own capacity.” Well, then, why does God bother to hold us to any standard at all since none of us have the capacity to come to God of our own free will, given that we start out “dead in our sin” (Ephesians 2:1-5)? But if our salvation is God’s work alone, there is both hope and comfort for people in all conditions who can look to their Baptism and know that Christ has saved them, who can look to the Word that has been preached in their hearing and know that it brings faith.

crucifixion

The Joy of True Justification in Christ

If we preach self-justification to our people, regardless of what name we give it, we rob our people of the pearl of great price. Richard Hooker says it beautifully:

Such we are in the sight of God the Father as is the very Son of God himself. Let it be counted folly, or phrensy, or fury, or whatsoever. It is our wisdom and our comfort; we care for no knowledge in the world but this: that man hath sinned and God hath suffered; that God hath made himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God.

The Word that Christ has given to His apostles with which to feed His sheep is the Word that we who are not righteous have actually been made righteous, that we who are sinners have been made saints, because Jesus Christ has switched places with us. He has not only taken our punishment, He has filled us with His holiness that we might be seen by the Father as the very image of the Son. Thus, Hooker again says:

Although in ourselves we be altogether sinful and unrighteous, yet even the man who in himself is impious, full of iniquity, full of sin, him being found in Christ through faith, and having his sin in hatred through repentance, him God beholdeth with a gracious eye, putteth away his sin by not imputing it, taketh quite away the punishment due thereunto, by pardoning it, and accepteth him in Jesus Christ as perfectly righteous, as if he had fulfilled all that is commanded him in the law: shall I say more perfectly righteous than if himself had fulfilled the whole law?

It is more than just forgiveness. It is more than just a second chance. It is more than we can ever hope to achieve through moral shaming or bucking up. What Christ has done for us is to make it as if we were deserving of His share, not in an artificial way but in a real way. And that good Word, given to the sinner who has become convicted of his or her sin, is quite enough to change the heart and cure the soul. But we don’t believe it. We think there has to be more, so we apply extra bits. There are a variety of ways these extra bits come out, be it the added works of Rome, the added testimonies and declarations of faith of the Evangelical, or the added social justice and healing of the world of the Liberal. In all cases, it is no longer just Christ. It is Christ plus [insert extra item here]. As soon as we make it Christ plus anything else of our own making, we are doomed.

Christ is not a possession. His grace is a gift that runs through the hands of the priest like water, into the waiting parched mouths of the people of God. We need not add anything to the mix to make it better. We need only to open our hands and let the living water run through, to open our mouths and drink.

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Ask an Anglican: Not So Free Will

Posted on December 2, 2012 by

Free WillMatthew writes:

Over the past few years I have grown to admire and long for the ancient faith. Through my studies I have come to hold that Anglicanism is for me, however, I need to know if I can, in good faith, join an Anglican congregation due to my soteriological beliefs.

I am a Molinist. I hope you know what that is, for, it is hard to explain briefly. It ultimately holds that God is sovereign and can control His creation in the most particular way (via His middle knowledge), if He so chooses, but that man is also fully free (in the libertarian sense). It is not Pelagian in that it does not deny original sin and its effect on us, and it still holds that we need God’s grace. It was a belief that came about after the Protestant Reformation that combated the extremes advocated by Calvinism. In Catholic theology, it stands between Thomism and the Eternal/Open View, although it shares similar positions with both (although I’d say it is friendlier with Thomism). It simply denies determinism and so-called compatiblism, as well the assertion that God’s knowledge is evolving (open).

So, to make a long story short, does one have to believe in Predestination/Election in the Calvinistic sense? Or is there some wiggle room?

I desire to be a part of the Anglican tradition, but I do not want to do so if I cannot fully conform to something it deems as a necessary belief.

Thank you and may the Lord’s peace be with you!

There are a lot of “isms” in that question which could take us off in various directions, but essentially this is a question about free will or, to be a little bit more on the nose, a question about whether or not we have any power to choose God or if He alone must choose us. Those who would say that we have no free will towards God include several strands of classical Protestants, including various kinds of Reformed and Lutherans. They argue that sin has so completely destroyed us, from the inside out, that there is simply no way for us to even begin the search for God without His intervention and to say otherwise is to make light of sin’s effect on us and to effectively say that we are our own saviors, having only need for Jesus to give us a push in the right direction. On the other side are Roman Catholics and various kinds of Arminians who use different arguments from one another but come to largely the same conclusion that our salvation is dependent both on God’s gracious action towards us and our free choosing of God because to say otherwise is to make God into an arbitrary tyrant who uses us as little more than rag dolls. Given what is at stake, it is easy to see how this debate could become heated very quickly.

The Molinist Both/And

Molinism was sort of an attempt to have it both ways. It gained its name from the sixteenth century Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina who taught that God predestines some to salvation but that He does so by manipulating the circumstances of their lives in such a way that they would naturally choose to accept Him. In the Molinist understanding, God has the ability to see all possibilities for human action and to therefore choose the set of circumstances that will lead those He has predestined to make the choice to come to Him. He determines who He will choose in part based on His knowledge of how well they will make use of the grace He intends to grant them. Thus, Molinism seeks to affirm both God’s ability to choose us and our ability to choose Him, both predestination and free will.

Not So Free To Be You and Me

From an Anglican perspective, the difficulty with a theory like Molinism is not so much what it says about God as what it says about us. The nineteenth century Anglo-Catholic John Mason Neale wrote that the problem with Molinism is that, “however the fact may be glossed over, it subjects, in fact, the will of God to the will of man.” Even with a more charitable read, however, Molinism assumes a kind of synergy between God’s will and ours that is necessary for our salvation. But Article X attests:

The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith; and calling upon God. Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.

The archaic use of the word “preventing” here often throws people, but what this article is essentially saying is that when it comes to our relationship with God, we have no free will. Our nature is so thoroughly damaged by sin from birth that we are not capable of coming to God on our own. In fact, just the opposite. Our natural desire is to be our own gods and to push the true God as far away as possible. In our natural state, if God were to show up on our doorstep and want to come in for a beer, we would close the door and call the cops to get Him off our lawn. (Or perhaps we would do something even more drastic, like say, nail Him to a piece of wood and leave Him for dead…)

Before we come to faith in Christ, our will, like everything else about us, is enslaved by sin. This is often a frustrating realization, because it means that nothing about our salvation is even just a little bit ours. It means, consequently, that the great and noble conversion story that we pull out of our pockets from time to time, the one in which we talk about how we made a decision for Christ and gave our lives over to Him, is at least partially a fabrication. Though it may seem like it is the very heart of our piety, it is in fact the sneakiest of all ways that Satan keeps a grip on us, by making us think, however subtly, that Jesus needs our help to save us, that His work on the cross is insufficient without our happy consent.

Calvinism and Molinism Sitting in a Tree…

Nevertheless, it is important to reiterate that the Anglican view of predestination and election is not identical to that of Calvinism. You can read a rather lengthy set of articles that delve into those differences here. At heart, the great criticism that classical Anglicanism would level at Molinism would be similar to that which it levels at Calvinism. Both systems seek to know more of the mind of God than Scripture reveals. Both attempt to tie up the mystery of our election in a neat little bow. Consequently, both end up arriving at terrifying conclusions about the nature of God that do not come from Holy Scripture but from a rationalistic desire to get all the pieces to fit. The God of Scripture is neither the Calvinist insecure sadist who purposely creates some people just so He can burn them, nor the Molinist cosmic casino owner who only gives out grace to those He is certain will be a sure bet. The truth is far more grand and more frustrating to our intellects than either of these possibilities will allow.

A Word of Encouragement

Having said all of that, though, I would still encourage you, Matthew, to spend some time worshiping and praying in an Anglican parish. While I believe that Molinism is difficult to square with classical Anglican doctrine about free will, it is perhaps worth taking the time to wrestle with these very difficult and fine distinctions in a community setting. Whether or not you ever become an Anglican, you may find that there is something worthwhile in the wrestling itself. It is the sort of thing we would be better off discussing while sharing the Lord’s Table rather than away from it.

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Ask an Anglican: The Future of North American Anglicanism

Posted on November 17, 2012 by

Ethan writes:

I’m a seminary student and recent convert to Anglicanism from charismatic non-denominationalism. Since marching down the Canterbury Trail, I have been involved with an Anglican Mission church that is part of the realignment movement. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog as part of my transition and only noticed today that you minister within TEC. I respect your thoughts on classical Anglicanism as a back-to-the-Fathers kind of Christianity, thus a good balance of Catholic and Protestant sentiments, and so I would love to hear what you think about the realignment (ACNA, AMiA, etc.). Obviously the historical fact of the Reformation implies the need to separate from corrupt ecclesiastical authority, but I’ve also encountered many orthodox Christians, such as yourself, who are committed to TEC. Any wisdom/perspective you have on the issue would be of great value to my journey, if you have the time.

Though this question came in a while ago, it seems fitting to answer it this week as the sparks continue to fly in South Carolina, leading many of us to wonder if there really is a place anymore for traditional orthodox Christians in the Episcopal Church.

The Good, the Bad, and the Reformation

Ethan mentions the Reformation as a touchstone which proves that sometimes schism is necessary. If this is the lesson that the Reformation has taught us, we are quite far from the truth and love of God. We can and should celebrate the Reformation for the ways in which it clarified and inspired Christians to return to ancient truths of the faith that had become obscured, but we should also mourn the Reformation, just as we mourn the Great Schism, as a moment in time when the Body of Christ was ripped apart and Christians became even more walled off from one another than they already were. To turn a phrase from Luther, we might even say that the Reformation was both justified and sinful. Much like the crucifixion, it was an unavoidable tragedy that God has used in His mercy to shower the world with His grace and love.

Anglican Alphabet Soup

I do not feel qualified to say much about the Anglican churches that exist outside of the Anglican Communion as my familiarity with them is limited. What I can say is not much different than what I have said in the past. I remain a loyal and faithful priest of the Episcopal Church and I will continue as such, unless the official doctrine of the church is changed so as to be no longer recognizably Christian or I am asked to leave. Despite the fact that the corner I have been shoved into in the current Episcopal Church is getting smaller and smaller, my calling as a Christian is to be a witness to Christ within that small corner for as long as such a thing is possible. I win no brownie points with God for this. I curry no favor. It is, quite simply, what God calls all of us to do, and the fact that we all fail at it does not make us any less culpable for it. If nothing else, it should make us want the Gospel that much more when we realize just how sinfully schismatic we are, how quickly and easily we make orthodoxy itself into an idol.

It is a dizzying array of options that greets the person who discovers the faith of classical Anglicanism and then goes searching for a church, and frankly we should be embarrassed by how quickly and how often we have been willing to break ties with one another. I say this not as a condemnation of those who have left the Episcopal Church, but as an indictment upon all of us for not believing in Our Lord’s promise and call that we all should be one (John 17:22). Every schism is a sin, just as every divorce is a sin, even though there are sometimes mitigating circumstances that might make such things necessary in our fallen world. Our proper attitude towards our own contribution to schism must always be one of repentance. And if you do not think you have contributed at all to schism, you are self-deluded and need to repent all the more.

A Plan for Renewal

But Ethan’s question is about the future, and it is difficult for anyone to look at the Episcopal Church as she is today and see bright things. Truth be told, it is difficult to look at any American church today and be sanguine, but the situation in the Episcopal Church is particularly dire. At the rate we are losing members, it is unlikely that there will be an Episcopal Church for my grandchildren. We are broken from top to bottom, and the problems are insurmountable without God’s grace and mercy. So here is my plan for the renewal of the Episcopal Church: constant prayer for God to be merciful and to use our tiny little mess of a church to bring people to Him. That should be the prayer of every Episcopalian and probably also of those who have gone on to form their own purer churches that have almost always turned out to be not quite as pure as expected. We are Nineveh and we ought to be in sackcloth and ashes.

Tearing Down and Building Up

All of this probably sounds rather grim, but in actuality I am filled with hope for the future of Anglicanism in North America. And that’s because I believe that the best thing that will come out of the current crisis in North American Anglicanism is an abandonment of institutional idolatry.

One of the great strengths of Anglicanism is its preservation of the doctrine that the Church is more than just a fellowship of believers, that she is an incarnational reality, an organic and tangible means by which Our Lord makes us one with Him. Yet this has also been our Achilles Heel as too often Anglicans have confused the mystical reality of the Church with the accoutrements of church life. We have worshiped the clerical collars and the vestments. We have celebrated our property and preached our pension plan. We have glibly pointed to our apostolic succession, as if it were a mechanical process, and we have said to the world and to the rest of the Christian Church, “This is who we are!” In short, we have celebrated ourselves instead of Christ. Is it any wonder we have split into so many pieces?

Yet I am hopeful because the collapse of broken institutions makes it possible for us to rediscover, in all humility, the true glory of Anglicanism which is found in the revelation of Jesus Christ. What Anglicanism has to offer to North America and the world is a surprisingly simple, holy, and beautiful path that leads right to the foot of the cross. It is the ancient and living faith of the apostles running through our liturgy and articles, pulsing within the pages of the greatest works of our theologians, and characterizing the pastoral relationships of countless clergy and people through the centuries that gives us the ability to proclaim that we are inheritors of the Catholic faith. I have no clairvoyance, but my strong suspicion is that the renewal of North American Anglicanism will happen far away from the places where ecclesial machinery is churning out one resolution after another, advocating this and anathematizing that. It will happen in parishes where Word and Sacrament are faithfully preached and administered by priests who find their calling not just in wearing fancy robes and standing in the pulpit but in the regular visitation of the people and in the continuous offering of prayer in the Daily Office. It will happen in small groups of young people who come together in far flung places to form new parishes and to build for the future. It will come in the late night reading of long forgotten books by long dead heroes of the faith who became heroes not through self-initiative but through total surrender to God.

Our Hope for an Anglican Future

Of course, the renewal of Anglicanism could take many forms, but one thing I am certain of is that a renewal is coming. I am certain of it because Anglicanism, at its core, is no less and no more than the Gospel delivered in the clearest way possible. In the end, it really does not matter what we call it. Perhaps the very names Anglican and Episcopalian will die. It will not matter if they do. The death of our structures is inevitable, as much as the crumbling of the Temple was inevitable. Nothing made with human hands, no matter how glorious it may seem, will exist forever. Only God is eternal and only Christ is our refuge. The heart of Anglicanism is Christ. No sin, even one as large as our ongoing institutional idolatry, can even come close to exhausting the saving power of Jesus.

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Death Is Not Natural

Posted on November 12, 2012 by

Among the clumsy things that we say to try to comfort one another when somebody dies, there are a number of phrases that insinuate, either explicitly or implicitly, that death is a good thing, even a godly thing. ‘It was his time.’ ‘She lived a good life, so this was probably for the best.’ ‘He did what he had to do here, so the Lord called him home.’ People mean well when they say these things, but these pithy phrases are almost universally unsatisfactory to hear if you are the person bereaved, and with good reason. They offer a view of what happens in death that is very different than the one offered by the Christian revelation. While most of us spend the better part of our lives trying to forget that we are all going to die one day, the moment inevitably comes when we must face the reality of death head on. And when that moment arrives, the common wisdom says that we are supposed to “work through it” by making friends with death, as if death is not an alien force in a world that was made to be filled with the life of God.

Death Pretty Much Sucks

“The wages of sin is death,” says Paul, and in that sense alone we can say that death is natural. It is the natural consequence of the poisoning of our nature that took place at the fall. But that is not the sense in which the word natural is generally employed by those who wish to soften death’s blow. Pop spirituality asserts blithely that death is the natural end to things, the low ebb of the circle of life in which our ravaged bodies are returned to the ground and our weary souls are sent off to “a better place.” What this vision fails to capture is the harsh reality of death’s relentless ability to swallow our dignity. Death does not simply escort us over the bough into a higher plain of existence. It rips us apart, fundamentally destroying and disintegrating what God made to be an integrated whole, the human person, body and soul as one. It weakens and cripples us, robbing us of our faculties and even our most basic independence as we slide backward into nothingness. If you have ever been with someone as that person dies, you have witnessed this firsthand. Old or young, rich or poor, happy life or sad, all are swallowed up mercilessly by the beast.

Don’t Fear the Reaper?

In his book Holy Dying, Jeremy Taylor attempted to give many reasons why those who are facing death as Christians can take comfort. Nonetheless, Taylor adds, “I do not say it is a sin to be afraid of death: we find the boldest spirit that discourses of it with confidence, and dares undertake a danger as big as death, yet doth shrink at the horror of it when it comes dressed in its proper circumstances.” It is no sin to call death out for what it is, a horror, an unnatural occurrence, an evil. We should not be ashamed to say that we do not want death, either for ourselves or those we love, and that we hate it and intend to fight it with every fiber of our being.

But, whether it is natural or not, death is certainly inevitable. We are sinners, living in a world corrupted by sin, and there is no way to escape the fact that death will be our end. So the question is, what do we do with that? From where is our help to come?

The Glory of Death

There is glory in death, but it is Christ’s glory which is not to be found in any particular action on our part. Holy Dying encourages repentance and confession to a priest, both of which are good for the soul and especially important for the sinner as he or she nears the time of death, but our ultimate hope, in death as in life, is found not in us but in Jesus Christ who has defeated death by dying and rising. Our comfort is in our Baptism by which we have been united to Christ in His death, and “if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” because “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him” (Romans 6:1-11). We cannot defeat death, no matter how hard we rail against it, and so our hope must be in Christ’s promise to us that His defeat of death can be given to us as a gift, that we can receive the fruits of His labor which He chooses to freely bestow upon us.

One of the finest prayers in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer is found at the conclusion of the liturgy for Good Friday. It begins, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and at the hour of our death…” There is a simplicity to this that is absolutely necessary for us to recover if we are going to counter the culture’s notion of death with something brighter and sweeter than what pop spirituality has to offer. We need not wax poetic or descend into complicated theological constructs when we sit with those who are preparing to shuffle off this mortal coil. We need to be plain and simple, telling them that we know that what they are going through is horrible, and that we know that they are scared and perhaps doubtful, and that all of that can be cast onto the cross with the simple words, “Lord, have mercy.” He will lift it all in the end and He will even make us holy through our sufferings. For the Christian, no suffering is in vein.

Death is undignified, particularly when it is drawn out, but even in the midst of that suffering God can redeem us, so long as we understand that death is a punishment and not a secret friend. It is something to be endured, not something to be loved. It is the rightful punishment of the law which we must endure, even as the Gospel of Christ’s death on our behalf assures us that it does not get the last word. As Taylor puts it, “We have nothing else to do with the terrors of the law, for, blessed be God, they concern us not. The terrors of the law were the intermination of curses upon all those that ever broke any of the least commandments once or in any instance; and to it the righteousness of faith is opposed.”

The Death that leads to Holiness

In the 1662 Burial rite, the priest proclaims that Christ “shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body.” Death is horrible for everyone, but for the Christian it is a horror that can be overcome, not by our solemn patience but by His grace showered upon us. In that context, every suffering is still a horror, but it is also a kindness, because Christ is in it, allowing what is wretched in us to burn away while holding fast to what is of God within us, that we may be lifted up and given new life. And so the only prayer that the sinner needs is “Lord, have mercy.” It is a prayer that can be shared, both by the person dying and the person grieving. It is a prayer that casts all our hopes and fears onto the cross of Christ. And if the Gospel is true, it is a prayer that Christ has answered, not by making friends with death but by vanquishing it once and for all. We need not make friends with death. We need only to be friends with Christ that we might share in His victory.

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The Myth of the Big Tent Church

Posted on October 23, 2012 by

A while back, I heard someone describe Anglicanism as an effort to get Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin to sit together in the same pew. At the time, I thought that was fairly clever, but in retrospect I realize that this way of understanding Anglicanism lies at the heart of our precipitous decline. We have come to think of ourselves as a church without a theology, even to pride ourselves on that description, but it is not true. It is impossible to be a church without a theology. The very act of saying that we have no theology is itself a theological statement. We may be a church that has often had competing theologies, but that is not quite the same thing. In a competition, for better or worse, there is a common acceptance that one party is right and the other is wrong, that there will be winners and losers, and so no one is surprised when one group or the other rises to the top. But in the murky world of the modern Episcopal Church, where we have told ourselves repeatedly that we have no theology, we are constantly shocked and surprised when someone else makes a competing claim, which leads to an almost constant state of outrage.

In My Father’s House There Is Much Roominess

I thought about all this today after reading this post by Fr. Matt Marino who is distressed over the goings-on in South Carolina (the details of which I will not go into, but you can find lots of info here). Fr. Marino laments the breakdown between liberal leaders in The Episcopal Church and conservative leaders in South Carolina that has led to what appears to be schism. It is a sad state of affairs, no matter how you look at it. But Fr. Marino’s concern is in part that we are abandoning big tent Anglicanism:

The church I fell for promised roominess. It welcomed progressives to come in and allowed them to push the envelope on many issues. One would have thought that same roominess could be extended toward those who disagree with the new directions of the church. Unfortunately, yesterday we found out that was not to be.

The problem is that this “roominess” was always manufactured and does not reflect the history of Anglicanism. The Anglican Reformers did not believe they were inventing a big tent church but rather that they were restoring the Church of England to what they believed to be biblical and patristic faith. The contours of this Reformation were made clear in the Elizabethan settlement by the authoritative formularies that were produced. Anglicanism was going to be both Reformed and Catholic, not so as to keep everyone getting along but so as to comprehensively express the truth of the faith that was obscured both by papism and puritanism.

Of course, the theology of the Elizabethan Settlement never had everyone’s support, despite the fact that it formed the legal and doctrinal basis for the Church of England. Roman recusants tried to bridge the gap of schism that had opened with Rome, while puritans slowly became more and more disenchanted with the lack of further reform, eventually leading to a civil war. But recusants and puritans never labored under the illusion that the Church of England had a unique theology that allowed all of them to get along. They understood that the theology of the Elizabethan Settlement fundamentally clashed with their own, which meant that they either needed to get the Church of England to abandon the Settlement, or else they needed to abandon the Church of England.

It’s Our Party and We’ll Schism If We Want To

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the phenomenon of modern church parties began to influence the development of Anglican identity, even as Anglican churches began to spread around the globe. Over time, the adherents of these parties would begin to find common cause with like-minded people in other churches, slowly drawing these movements further and further away from classical Anglicanism. But in the beginning, both Anglican Evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism were reform movements aimed at bringing the church back to basics, which meant a return to the formularies. Evangelicals like Charles Simeon fought for and defended the Book of Common Prayer. Anglo-Catholics insisted upon strict adherence to the 39 Articles.

By the twentieth century, however, the remnants of classical Anglicanism were largely buried under the disparate visions of church parties that were less and less interested in connecting with classical Anglican theology. The fight for control was bitter and brutal. Catholics, Evangelicals, and the johnny-come-latelys known as Liberals hardly talked to each other within the Church of England. Meanwhile, around the world, churches had been planted not by Anglican missionaries but by missionaries from the various parties who enshrined their own visions in the DNA of these upstart Anglican provinces. Anglicanism as a theology had been reduced to an option on the menu, and it was largely one that was never ordered. Yet no other option was floating to the top. The Anglican world had myriad theological options, but no clear way forward.

Making Virtue Out of Vice

Steps towards healing the rift between the parties were taken as early as the 1930s when Michael Ramsey wrote his famous The Gospel and the Catholic Church, arguing from the Anglo-Catholic position that the Church needed Evangelicals. However, it was not until the 1960s that Anglicans began to argue that Anglicanism itself is a lowest common denominator compromise between competing theologies. Bishop J.C. Wand wrote in his 1962 book Anglicanism in History & Today that the parties within Anglicanism are “the glory of the church.” According to Wand, while some Anglicans might bemoan what appears on the surface to be incoherence, Anglicans ought rather to be proud of the fact that so many different views can be held together within one tradition. “It is surely a good, even a splendid, thing,” wrote Wand, “to have groups of people so unwilling to surrender any particle of the truth as they see it, and yet maintaining their unity in one communion and fellowship.” It was a perfect PR solution to a situation that seemed so dire just half a century earlier. Instead of insisting that the Church adopt and maintain one theology, we can claim that the Church should adopt and maintain every theology and that this somehow makes us superior to those narrow-minded Christians who only manage to believe one thing at the same time.

Of course, in order to maintain this idea that we can be a church of conflicting theologies, we had to come up with some kind of common ground. After all, even if we did not agree on everything, there had to be something we could all say we held in common, or else there would be no point. So theologians and apologists began to try to tease out where the center might lie in our giant Anglican Venn Diagram. But nothing has ever seemed to stick for long. Wand and others in his day argued that our common ground was common prayer. Catholic, Evangelical, or Liberal, we all prayed using the same prayer book. Of course, that was already beginning to erode back then, but today this is a complete fiction, our prayer books around the world now being largely divorced from one another and often overtaken by a flurry of liturgical supplements and imports from other traditions. Other folks have pointed to the creeds as our common ground, but these have been re-defined to the point of meaninglessness by some of our more colorful characters. The Scriptures are of no help since any interpretation goes. Even Jesus Himself is now largely compromised as we see clergy embracing other religions with other gods while trying to maintain that they are faithful Anglicans.

Majoring in Minors Means Minoring in Majors

The truth of the matter is, there are no minor theological issues. This is not to say that we must all agree on everything, down to the letter, in order for us to be the Church together, but we do need to have a common set of first principles, and many of the theological issues that are often marked as “secondary” by one group or another — such as marriage, ordination, election, sacramental theology — lead inevitably back to those first principles. In North American Anglicanism today, traditional Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals have become strange bedfellows, largely because their first principles, while radically different, are nonetheless much closer to each other than they are to the first principles of Liberalism. But take away the common enemy and the old conflict quickly re-emerges.

Another Way Forward

So what is the answer? In the current climate, it is hard to say. Certainly, the kind of mean spiritedness that has marked our separations thus far is not necessary, but the reality is that without common first principles we will pull apart, whether today, tomorrow, or a century from now. It would be helpful if we could acknowledge that reality and own it, which would allow us to treat each other with more grace and charity. From there, we can stop trying to discern whether we want to be together or apart and start actually discerning the truth.

And when that happens, perhaps classical Anglicanism will have a chance to re-emerge as a long forgotten gem from our past, a pearl of great price that was buried by our ancestors for us to find. The first principle for Anglicanism is that we come to know Christ primarily through His Word, we come to understand His Word through the witness of the early Church, and we come to be formed in this patristic and biblical faith through common worship in the prayer book tradition. We need to re-discover the beauty and truth of the formularies, particularly the Book of Common Prayer, if we wish to have an Anglican future. The classic prayer book tradition is not a catch all. It is a vibrant and living expression of the true faith.

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Ask An Anglican: Roman Fever

Posted on October 18, 2012 by

Bradley writes:

I’m 19 years old, and I’m an Episcopalian currently in the Diocese of Dallas.  I’m writing to you because I’m experiencing a crisis of faith in the Anglican church, and I’d love to get your opinion/help.

I was raised baptist, but confirmed in the Episcopal Church on January 9th, 2012 by Bishop Andrew Waldo in the Diocese of Upper South Carolina.  It was an amazing day! I had finally thought I was ‘home’ spiritually…but the recent drift (or rather, the long drift) of the national leadership into lukewarm faith and heresy is very disturbing to me…and it’s causing me to wonder whether or not I should remain an Anglican or ‘jump ship’ for Rome.   I love Anglicanism, I really, really do! And I’d love to remain in the fold, but the claims of the Catholic Church are so compelling, I’m hoping you might respond to them…

First and foremost, I have to commend Bradley on his zeal for the truth at such a young age. It is quite a wonderful thing to see.

Second, before digging into the specific questions that Bradley asks me to address, I should say a word about my own history with the Roman Church. I grew up Roman Catholic, attending Mass weekly, although in a liberal environment in which I very rarely encountered the more challenging claims of the Catholic faith. By the time I found my way into the Episcopal Church, I had long been estranged from Roman Catholicism. It was only really after I became an Episcopalian that I learned to appreciate much of the theological education and development I received as a child.

In the last couple months, this site has gained a fair number of Roman Catholic visitors, some of whom comment regularly, and I value that interaction. So let me state up front that I have a great love for the Roman Catholic Church and I owe it a great deal. My intention is not to cast aspersion on Roman Catholics or to tear down their faith. I am grateful for all that I have personally received, both from my Catholic upbringing and from the experience of reading and interacting with Catholics. Moreover, at the current time, I think the Roman Catholic Church has done more to promote adherence to scriptural norms than almost any other Christian body, often taking difficult stances on moral issues in spite of the cultural consequences. I admire this. Nonetheless, I am an Anglican, not simply because I do not accept all the claims of Rome, but because I believe that Anglicanism is fundamentally true in a way that Romanism is not.

Bradley’s first question is this:

1) The Catholic Church claims to be the Church of Christ, and it has 2000 years of history to back this claim up.  It has taught a common faith for 2000 years and has spread over all the earth, can Anglicanism claim to be the Church of Christ?

The Anglican Communion makes a much more humble claim than that. We do not claim to be the Church in her entirety, though we claim to be the Church in her fullness, having within us all that the Catholic Church is and always has been. What I mean by that is that we do not deny that other Christians truly are Christians. If you have been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and you hold the essentials of faith found in the Nicene Creed, you are a Christian. And if the body that you are a part of upholds the creeds, the scriptures, the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, and the historic episcopate, than that body can truly claim to be the Church.

Anglicanism is not a Church, but a way of being the Church. So the real question for someone who has come into the Episcopal Church, or into any of the churches of the Anglican Communion, is whether or not the Church they are in is a true Church, truly part of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ. The short answer to that question is yes, we are, because the two thousand years that Rome claims are not Rome’s alone. We share that two thousand year history. The Church of England, from which all Anglican churches spring, was not born in the sixteenth century Reformation but has existed in England at least since the late sixth century and goes back possibly even as far as the second century. Those who established the Church of England were in communion with those who came before them, the Fathers and the Apostles. But we can do even better than that, because the faith held by Anglicans is the faith of the early and undivided Church. It is the faith found in Holy Scripture. It is the faith lived and died for by martyrs. And yes, it is a faith that can still be found in Anglican churches all around the world, despite our various problems and ways in which we often betray it.

I have written a more detailed evaluation of the catholicity of the Episcopal Church that can be found here.

2) What is the authority of Anglicanism? I feel like there is no real voice of authority in our church…the Bible has become slave to everyone’s interpretation.  When we’re in a debate about something, who do we appeal to?

The best answer to this question is the one that was offered by the famous early seventeenth century divine Lancelot Andrewes:

One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries that is, before Constantine, and two after, determine the boundary of our faith.

This framework is not arbitrary. Rather, it reflects the core conviction of Anglicanism that God’s Word contains all things necessary for salvation and that the Church’s true understanding of God’s Word is assured by appealing both to plain reason and the witness of the early Church. The latter is especially important since the Fathers are much less removed from the culture and time of the Apostles and therefore are less likely to make culturally biased misinterpretations of the faith (though, of course, this is not impossible). Moreover, the earliest Fathers received their teaching from the Apostles themselves. This gives their consensus, which we find most especially expressed in the creeds and ecumenical councils, a special kind of weight.

Rome also claims both the Scripture and the Fathers as authorities, but they add a third layer in the idea of the magisterium or the sacred teaching office of the Church, which resides infallibly in the pope’s teaching on faith and morals and in the Ecumenical Councils, provided that those councils are in communion with the pope, which essentially also brings us back to the papal office. Rome uses a number of arguments to defend their claim from Scripture and Tradition (a couple of which I address here). However, what is often the most seductive argument for the magisterium today is the claim that an infallible interpretive authority is necessary to avoid incoherence. In other words, Roman apologists point to the ways in which various Protestant groups have gone at each other over the centuries, each group reading the same set of Bible verses but coming up with completely different interpretations, and they say, “See, if you don’t have a magisterium to tell you definitively what this all means you end up with chaos! Cats and dogs! Mass hysteria!”

There are a lot of problems with this critique. First of all, it assumes an equivalency between all Protestant groups that simply does not exist. The mere fact that there are Christians who disagree with each other over what the Scriptures mean does not necessitate there being a divinely appointed Scriptural interpreter. Second, from a practical standpoint, this method of running the Church does not seem to work very well at achieving the desired end of unanimity, as the dissent and divisions among Catholics are just as great as they are among Protestants. Third, the claim for a magisterium is on shaky historical grounds and non-existent biblical ones.

But the most important objection to the magisterium hypothesis is that it inevitably leads to a snowball effect wherein the grounding of the faith grows exponentially over time. To take a simple example, in 1854 Pope Pius IX promulgated the papal bull which declared infallibly the doctrine of the immaculate conception, the idea that the Virgin Mary was born without the stain of original sin. The pope did not invent this notion out of whole cloth. The concept developed over the course of several centuries. Nevertheless, by invoking his prerogative to teach infallibly that this doctrine has to be accepted by Catholics, the pope effectively knocked a whole bunch of people out of the Church throughout history. In November of 1854, if you did not believe in the immaculate conception, you were still a good Catholic. In January of 1885, if you did not believe in the immaculate conception you were a heretic.

The Church is a messy place. There is just no avoiding that reality. The Church, much like the world, is made up of sinners. And that means that on this side of the eschaton, we must endure hardships, squabbles, and other sinful acts of division. In the midst of that, we can lose heart. Which is why, when the Roman Church holds out the claim that it can lift you out of the fray, untenable though that claim may be, it is appealing. It sounds like salvation. But ultimately, it leads right back where it started. The Roman Church is filled with the same foibles and divisions that the rest of us are experiencing. That’s not to knock them. It’s just to say, you cannot avoid sin. At some point, you have to come to love the Church the same way that Christ loves her, forgiving her sin and embracing her anyway. Which means that the ultimate answer is Christ Himself, since He’s the only one who can give our hearts rest.

3) Is there proof that the Anglican way of theology/ecclesiology is the Biblical/historical norm?

The answer is embodied in the question. How can we know that the Anglican way is biblical and historical? By looking at Scripture and Tradition, particularly the Fathers. The beauty of our formularies, particularly the Book of Common Prayer, is that they form us in a biblical and patristic worldview. Every individual Christian does not need to re-invent the wheel or read all the documents of the Ecumenical Councils or do a comparative study of the Fathers. But of course, one can do those things, and if it will ease your conscience, I encourage you to do so. I needed my own study of the Scriptures and the Fathers before I was convinced of Anglicanism. I commend you to speak with your priest about how you might do the same.

4) Why do you remain Anglican? What prevents you from crossing the tiber (or another proverbial river)? Do you believe the Episcopal Church has a future in this country?

There is a long answer and a short answer, and since this post is already quite long, I’ll restrict myself to the short answer for now. I am an Anglican because I believe that Anglicanism is the truth. I believe that it preserves, preaches, and teaches the Gospel. I am an Anglican because it is within the fold of Anglicanism that I was given the gift of faith and learned to know and love Jesus Christ as my Lord. I am an Anglican because the path that Anglicanism sets before me routinely kicks my butt and makes me holier than my sinful flesh wants me to be. I am an Anglican because of the great saints of the Anglican tradition who inspire me, from the pre-Reformation English saints like Augustine, Julian, and Anselm, to more modern saints like William Laud, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Hooker, John Henry Hobart, and Michael Ramsey. I am an Anglican because this is where God has placed me, this is where Christ is to be found, and unless and until He calls me elsewhere, I am under His jurisdiction. I am an Anglican because Jesus died for me.

I would like to believe that the Episcopal Church has a future. It is difficult to fathom how, when we ignore rank heresy in our midst while simultaneously attacking the few orthodox leaders who remain. We live under judgment at the moment, under wrath, but that could change. Nineveh repented, after all, and God had mercy upon them. But for those of us who are orthodox Anglicans who remain in the Episcopal Church, our focus cannot be on the institution. It has to be solely on Christ. We need to be about Christ in all that we do. I am an Anglican because I am a Christian. The Episcopal Church may be renewed and grow, or it may destroy itself, but the truth of the Gospel will remain. Christ calls us to carry our cross. It is a burden, but only until we realize that He’s been carrying us all along. I believe that we are called to bear witness to that, even as many of the structures crumble around us. We are called not merely to survive, not merely to persevere, but to thrive even in the midst of desolation, to have joy even in the face of persecution, and to focus ourselves not on the bouncing ball of ecclesial politics but on Christ and His Cross, the world’s one and only, glorious hope.

Posted in Ask an Anglican | Tagged , , , , , , | 57 Comments