Category Archives: Church/State

Converts and Newman

10 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith, Newman

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It is some time since Newman appeared in this place, which is, by itself, sufficient excuse to write about him; but there are other reasons.

Newman was the most famous of the English converts to Catholicism in the nineteenth century; one might extend that to say of modern times. At the time of his canonisation well-deserved tributes were paid, and I found attending the ceremony an immensely moving experience. But in all of that there is a point which was not made. It is quite clear that the Catholic Church had not the slightest idea of what to do with its new convert, and from the point of view of utilising what God had made available to it, the hierarchy frankly fluffed it. In one way that is hardly surprising, their Anglican counterparts had not found a way to accommodate Newman’s talents either. Before, however, dismissing this thought, I want to extend it for a while.

One of the most talented of  my colleagues made an observation which merits wider distribution, although as I am writing without consulting him, I shall keep his name to one side. English converts, he said, fall into two categories: Manning or Newman. The Mannings adapt to their new environment, and some even thrive; the Newmans endure prolonged periods of practical sterility and isolation, remaining in their new Church only because of the conviction which took them there – that this is the Church founded by Christ. In many ways this is the deepest witness to the hope that is in them. When asked how one can remain in a Church so marred with scandal, and where so many of the leaders can seem at times to demonstrate the spinal fortitude of a jellyfish, answering that “because this IS THE CHURCH” is a powerful testimony.

This should not be taken as any criticism of Manning; there is no zero-sum game. Conversion is a profoundly personal experience, and it is unwise to assume that one’s previous spiritual formation will somehow cease to be relevant. In this sense, someone who comes to Catholicism straight from a non-Christian background may find life simpler.

Newman had never entered an English Catholic Church before his conversion, and knew very few Catholics. His Catholicism was intellectual and spiritual. In his day conversions were even rarer than now, and a Community which had so recently been in political internal exile and persecuted intermittently for three hundred years, was but poorly equipped to be a welcoming one to incomers with no knowledge of it or its ways. The handful of aristocratic Recusant families who had kept the flame alive so long were beginning to die out, and were, in any case, geographically and socially isolated from the new, Irish, influx which brought so many more Catholics to the mainland. Newman fitted in with neither group. It is so often underplayed in the story of his life that he spent so many years working in Birmingham with that most underprivileged immigrant group, as indeed did Manning in London.

The Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham is, in one sense, an answer to the wider problem illustrated by Newman, that is the difficulty the Church and converts sometimes have integrating with each other. Those converting de novo, often integrate more swiftly, those from another religious tradition can find the process more difficult, as can the Church which receives them.

On the one hand there are those in the Church who see the converts as unwelcome reinforcements for conservative causes (as they see them) or tradition (as others see them) such as an all-male priesthood and distrust them for that reason. On the other hand, for the convert, there is the inevitable culture shock.

One of the first things to strike me was the banality of the Missal. It made the Alternative Service book I had been used to as an Anglican seem well-written. Then there was the absence of the altar rail and the queue for the Eucharist, which was received in the hand rather than, at my Anglican church, kneeling at the altar rail and on the tongue. There was also the sense of coming into a close-knot community which, like many such, was not necessarily welcoming to outsiders from a very different tradition.

That is where the Ordinariate, had it been available when I converted, would have been useful and where its presence is for many of us, essential. The Catholic tradition in England did not end with the Reformation, and non-one familiar with the Caroline Divines, would assume that it revived only with the Oxford Movement. It is good to see that tradition continue within the Catholic Church.

More on the Book of Common Prayer

28 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith, St John

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[My thanks to C451 for his help on the history of this, JH].

One of the many consequences of the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 following the demise of Cromwell’s commonwealth was that the Church of England was restored to its position as the Established Church. In an effort to secure as much support as possible, Charles II summoned twelve bishops and twelve Puritan ministers to a conference at the Savoy Palace in 1661. The idea was to see how wide the bounds of Communion might be. It was good timing. The Bishops, after the experience of Cromwell, had learned something of where intransigence might lead, and the Puritans might, without him, be about to learn the same lesson.

The Book of Common Prayer had not been revised since 1604. It had been banned in 1645 and suppressed during the Commonwealth. The hopes that it might be possible to find a revised form of the Book which would command support from the Puritans were generally dashed; their breach of Elizabeth I’s wise injunction not to ‘make windows into men’s souls,’ ensured that. The Bishops would not agree to a Minister having the right to say who could and who could not receive Communion, nor would they agree to his having the right to refuse to baptise a child; the Church was either national, or it was sectarian. The sectaries went their way.

The Bishops took their stand on precedent:

“If we do not observe that golden rule of the venerable Council of Nice[a], ‘Let ancient customs prevail,’ till reason plainly requires the contrary, we shall give offence to sober Christians by a causeless departure from Catholic usage, and a greater advantage to enemies of our Church, than our brethren, I hope, would willingly grant.”

And they went on:

“It was the wisdom of our Reformers to draw up such a Liturgy as neither Romanist nor Protestant could justly except against.” For preserving of the Churches’ peace we know no better nor more efficacious way than our set Liturgy; there being no such way to keep us from schism, as to speak all the same thing, according to the Apostle. This experience of former and latter times hath taught us; when the Liturgy was duly observed we lived in peace; since that was laid aside there hath been as many modes and fashions of public worship as fancies.”

On 20 December 1661 the (fifth) revised Book of Common Prayer was approved by the Convocations of Canterbury and York and annexed to the Bill of Uniformity, which was passed by Parliament and received Royal Assent on 19 May 1662. There were few significant changes since 1604. On the whole, that settled things until the nineteenth century, which is not to say there were not the usual discussions among the learned and the interested (which two parties even sometimes coincided).

It is not often stressed that one of the most fervent defenders of the BCP was that great and good man, John Keble. The third of the Tracts for the Times, written by none other than Newman, argued that those who thought like him and Keble should petition the bishops to resist changes in the BCP being demanded by men like the famous headmaster of Rugby, Thomas Arnold. In the 1850s what was then called the “Broad Church” formed an association to press for changes in the BCP, but despite a series of bills tabled in the Lords, they got nowhere.

Inevitably the issue got caught up in the wider controversy over “Ritualism,” with those opposed to what they called the “Romanising tendencies” of the Oxford Movement. What was clear was that there were many in the Church who wished to keep it comprehensive, and in the words of one set of commentators:

“If, therefore, the Church of England is to remain the National Establishment of a free country, room must be found within it, as far as is consistent with general conformity ‘in such matters as may be deemed essential’.”

In 1872 the Archbishop of Canterbury managed to guide a short reform through the Convocations and Parliament sanctioned the changes, which were largely to do with making the services shorter. Its critics said that it would lead to chaos and accused Tait of what we would call “dumbing down”; truly there is nothing new under the sun!

The experience was not a happy one, and the issue would rumble on until the 1920s when a serious attempt at Prayer Book revision, complete with a new Book, was proposed – but the attempt to get it through Parliament failed – but as that is one of C451’s hobbies, I shall stop there.

But what I hope this little excursus shows is that the Prayer Book has always been the focus of how Anglicans pray, a topic to which I want to return. On the one side its adherents have consistently rejected attempts to de-sacrilise our Liturgy and refused to water down the sacramental elements in it. On the other, they have resisted attempts to go the whole road to Rome route. It can be argued that in not using the Prayer Book as much, our Church lost something in terms of coherence, but that’s another argument for one more learned than myself.

I’ll finish simply by saying that it remains, for me, at the centre of my private devotions, but I also use “Common Worship” which I also find helpful. Anything that allows me to join millions of others in worshipping the Triune God is most welcome.

The Cathedral of Divine Wisdom

26 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Early Church, Faith, Islam

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A little over three years ago Chalcedon described the last day of Constantinople. I have nothing to add to his moving account, which is here.  Some of us of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian stock may remember 29 May 1453 as the day when Emperor Constantine XI dies amongst his household which included the Varangian Guard, his personal guard recruited from Scandinavia since Viking times and joined by Anglo-Saxons after the Conquest of England. Truly was Constantine reputed to have told his nobles and his household both that:

Constantine told his hearers that the great assault was about to begin. To his Greek subjects he said that a man should always be ready to die either for his faith or for his country or for his family or for his sovereign. Now his people must be prepared to die for all four causes.

He spoke of the glories and high traditions of the great Imperial city. He spoke of the perfidy of the infidel Sultan who had provoked the war in order to destroy the True Faith and to put his false prophet in the seat of Christ. He urged them to remember that they were the descendents of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome and to be worthy of their ancestors.

For his part, he said, he was ready to die for his faith, his city and his people

But Constantinople and it’s wondrous cathedral, Hagia Sophia, the Cathedral of Divine Wisdom of the title. had been on the front lines of the jihad for centuries. Indeed Mohammed himself lusted after the city, which capturing would open the road into Europe.

Raymond Ibrahim wrote last week in FrontPage Magazine about one, perhaps the greatest effort to capture the city, and it’s Cathedral.

At the head of 120,000 jihadis, Maslama crossed into Christian territory and, with “both sword and fire, he put an end to Asia Minor,” wrote a near contemporary chronicler.   On August 15, 717, he began bombarding the city, which was defended by Leo III, formerly a general.  Just weeks earlier, and because he was deemed the ablest man, Leo had been consecrated in the Hagia Sophia as new emperor.

Unable to breach the cyclopean walls of Constantinople, Maslama waited for 1,800 vessels containing an additional 80,000 fighting men to approach through the Bosporus and completely blockade—and thus starve—the city.

Suddenly Leo ordered the ponderous chain that normally guarded the harbor cast aside. Then, “while they [Muslim fleets] hesitated whether they should seize the opportunity . . . the ministers of destruction were at hand.” Leo sent forth the “fire-bearing ships” against the Islamic fleet, which was quickly set “on fire,” writes Theophanes the chronicler: “some of them were cast up burning by the sea walls, others sank to the bottom with their crews, and others were swept down flaming.”

Matters worsened when Maslama received word that the caliph, his brother Suleiman, had died of “indigestion” (by reportedly devouring two baskets of eggs and figs, followed by marrow and sugar for dessert). The new caliph, Omar II, was initially inattentive to the Muslim army’s needs. Maslama stayed and wintered in.

Unfortunately for him, “one of the cruelest winters that anyone could remember” arrived, and, “for one hundred days, snow covered the earth.” All Maslama could do was assure his emaciated, half-frozen men that “soon! Soon supplies will be here!” But they did not come; worse, warlike nomadic tribesmen known as Bulgars—whence the nation of Bulgaria—accustomed to the terrain and climate began to harry any Muslim detachment that left the starving camp in search of food.

By spring, Muslim reinforcements and provisions finally arrived by land and sea. But the damage was done; frost and famine had taken their toll on the Muslims encamped outside the walls of Constantinople. “Since the Arabs were extremely hungry,” writes Theophanes, “they ate all their dead animals: horses, asses, and camels. Some even say they put dead men and their own dung in pans, kneaded this, and ate it. A plague-like disease descended on them, and destroyed a countless throng.”

I’ve little to add to his account, it’s well out of my field, but he wrote a fascinating article on it that I urge you to read.

But I can read a map, and Constantinople blocked the easiest route into Europe, thus blocking the easy early conquest. Not long after this Charles Martel, at the Battle of Tours blocked the western path up through what is now Spain. Thus in the eighth century was Europe saved for all we know to develop.

In the sixteenth century, the twin battles of the Siege of Warsaw, featuring King John Sobieski and his cavalry, and the naval battle of Lepanto, again checked aggressive Islamic moves on Europe.

This allowed the modern world we know to develop, with all the advances we have made.

Malcolm wrote about his visit to Hagia Sophia here.

I wrote about the amazing acoustics designed into the cathedral here.

The Cathedral of Divine Wisdom indeed.

National Apostasy

14 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith, Keble

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On 14 July 1833 the Rev. John Keble gave the Assize Sermon at St Mary’s, Oxford, the University Church. Its title was “National Apostasy”, and it has usually been taken to mark the beginning of the Oxford Movement. Keble asked: “What are the symptoms, by which one may judge most fairly, whether or no a nation, as such, is becoming alienated from God and Christ?” Whatever the answer in his day, it would seem that the answer in our own time is obvious.

The challenge facing the Church in the West is a unique one. The literature on the unfashionable subject of “mission” and “church planting” mostly proceeds from the assumption that we are moving into areas where the Church has not had much, if any reach. What it does not generally do is deal with how to work in an environment which was Christian and where the Faith has been ebbing for some time, to the extent that in large areas the tide has gone out altogether. The difficulty there is that what is left on the beach is the detritus of anti-Christian polemic, aggressive secularism and the failure of the Church. In some senses, indifference is a worse enemy than active hostility, in so far as the latter is a sign that Christianity is to be challenged.

Our view of “mission” tends to be skewed by the Western experience, where missionary activity is seen historically as white people going out to convert non-white people, but that is a very small part of the history of mission. We have fogotten, if we (in the West) ever remembered those missionaries who went out along the Silk Road as far as China and established large and thriving Christian communities on the way. Indeed, if one placed oneself in the nineth century, one might easily have presumed that the area between North Africa and China would become the heartland of Christianity which was under extreme pressure in western Europe.

Keble’s fear of “national apostasy” came to realisation in a way that even the most pessimistic Christian could hardly have predicted. But we should beware of historical myths. Scholarship has shown that the Church of England was not the bloated and corrupt caricature which is sometimes assumed from the polemic of the Oxford Movement. The nineteenth century saw growth, not only from the Oxford Movement itself, but from other parts of the Church, and in some ways the most notable achievement of the Catholic revival in Anglicanism was what happened at parish level, although what is most often noted is the achievement in theological terms.

Which brings us full circle to now and to the challenges of a Church that is getting smaller and narrower. The idea of “hell” is not one which, outside certain Christian circles, has much purchase. One might say “so much the worse” for us, but emphasising that unless you believe in Christ you are going to hell is not, I venture to suggest, going to be a successful strategy for mission, quite apart from what that says about our view of God. If the reason we believe in God is that we are frightened of what He might do to us if we don’t … well an appeal to what sounds like an eternity of abuse because we deserve it isn’t saying anything very positive about Christianity. There will be some who think “tough”, but it’s not clear what their mission strategy is other than to welcome the “Benedict option,” which seems something of a cop-out from the Great Commission.

If in Christ we have “life abundant” then how does the Church reflect that? In the parishes of England priests inspired by the ideals of the Oxford Movement worked to make life better for their parishioners, recognising that part of that was to reflect the “beauty of holiness” in worship. Do we do that any more? How does going to Church elevate us? Does it elevate us? If not, what should and could we doing to change that? If Church is simply like a social club with added music and worse coffee, what in that would attract anyone to it?

At a time when Government in the UK has increasingly withdrawn from the expanded role it took on post-1945, what is the Church doing to move into the vacuums created? The answer here is more than one might think but less than it might, partly because there is no strategy. So, foodbanks have been a great initiative and the local Churches have played, not least in the current crisis,a notable role. When he was Prime Minister, David Cameron talked a lot, for a while, about the “Big Society,” but it came to little in practice. Is this not a role that the Church is well-placed to play. What can we do in those areas where the State is withdrawing or has withdrawn? How do we work in communities and what is our role in them?

Here there may be a salutary lesson, if we are humble enough to learn it, from the pandemic. We allowed the Churches to be shut as though they were not essential buildings for the community. If they weren’t, why weren’t they and how could we set about changing that? In the parishes run by clergy inspired by the Oxford Movement, as well as in circuits inspired by the Wesleys, church buildings were not just places of worship, they provided centres for community life.

On this anniversary of Keble’s call to arms, it’s worth reminding ourselves that throughout the world priests and laity are working hard to bring the Word of God to all who will receive Him and to acknowledge that work and pray for them and for the Church as we face the challenge of how to revangelise our Society.

“God talk”: an opportunity?

27 Saturday Jun 2020

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Politics

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Some have taken yesterday’s post to be hyper-critical of ++ Justin, a reminder that the post-modernists have a point when they say the author of a text has no control over how it is read. It seems to me that the Archbishop’s words have been taken out of context, but that even in context, they show a deafness of tone which is worrying.

The Very Reverend Professor Martyn Percy, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, commented some years ago that “one of the disappointing and alarming features of ++Justin’s primacy is his refusal to birth his proposed reforms in any good theology.” For Professor Percy, the heart of the problem is “++ Justin’s bewildering reluctance to talk about God.” That is not a problem confined to one Communion. The speed with which, mainly white Bishops moved to condemn the “systemic racism” of their own churches, has been contrasted by some with the want of serious theological talk about the pandemic and the place of Christianity at this time. Others think that unfair and point, rightly, to the good work done on parishes up and down the land.

One of the best analyses of how Christian churches should respond in the aftermath of Covid19 is that of the Bishop of Burnley, The Rt. Rev. Philip North in the Church Times, where he writes:

First, it is revealing something about our national life, and any attempt to rethink the ministry of the Church of England must begin with an attentive listening to the culture that it is our task to transform in Christ.

This is a brave and evangelical approach, but +Philip is clear:

We need priests — and bishops — who see themselves not as functionaries of an organisation, but as free-roaming evangelists in the style of Aidan or Cuthbert.

There is, of course, here the danger identified by Adrian Hilton (“Cranmer”) in his discussion with Professor Percy, that there is “no point teaching if no-one is listening.” But +Philip sees in the events of the past few months a period where, despite churches being closed, people have been listening, and may remain attentive – for a while:

we are seeing the unpicking of the lie that people today are not interested in the gospel. We have, instead, a nation relearning how to pray, looking to us for answers to the big questions, and accessing church life through online means in a way that we could not have imagined possible six months ago. Some studies reckon that one in three of the population have attended online worship since lockdown began. One Sunday, the Christians crashed Zoom.

At the same time, the economic and social consequences of the “lockdown” period are likely to be severe, and that part of parish ministry which has been quietly devoted to foodbanks and helping those bady hit, is only going to increase. As one whose family benefitted from such an initiative during industrial action in the mid-1960s, I can attest to the lasting effect of such a ministry; the Church was there for my family when no one else, including the Union which had called the strike, was.

Bishop Philip is right to say:

We now need to be ready to honour and acknowledge this new generation of lay leaders who have learnt how to use their gifts in Christ’s service, and who will not be happy to be mere consumers again.

To quote Professor Percy again (and yes, I know there may seem to be an irony in juxtaposing him with +Philip in view ofhis part in the former not becoming Bishop of Sheffield, but that just shows God’s providence, and maybe His sense of humour): “Theology and faith is always contextual, but that does not suggest an ultimate capitulation to relativism.” (Percy, Thirty-Nine New Articles, 2013, p. 19). A Church which, in times of crisis, adapts to bring the Word of God in action to those in need, has in the past, and can again, help transform the society within which it is set.

And this is where Professor Percy and +Philip are at one. If the Church is to meet the challenge set then it will need to be theologically-grounded as well as nimble. That would require it to move beyond the current “understanding of the diocese as an organisation, and its bishop and clergy as no more than “leaders”.

a diocese is not an organisation. It is a communion: a network of sacramental relationships flowing from the bishop, which together make up part of the body of Christ. Rather than draw everything into the centre, perhaps we need smaller, looser, central structures, which trust the local and encourage resourceful leadership; a bishop would offer oversight, but not control

In Professor Percy’s words, there needs to be more“God talk” and it needs to inform and drive how the Church reacts:

If A nation is, indeed, turning again to its Church, now is not the time to withdraw and manage decline. This crisis is showing us patterns of ministry which can enable us to reconnect to the culture and recapture imaginations with the gospel.

What +Philip writes, although addressed to a predominantly Anglican audience, is true for all Christian Churches.

There is a hunger for something beyond the material rewards offered by the consumerism that has been dominant in the West for so long. The question is whether the Churches are led by those who can seize the opportunity identified by Bishop Philip North.

Christianity without Christ?

25 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by in Church/State, Early Church

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Gene Veith at Cranach had an interesting post yesterday on whether the Christian virtues can survive without Christianity. I think this ties in well to mine on NEO today on the immorality of Christian clergy supporting BLM, instead of continuing our own mission, the most successful in helping the disadvantaged in history, by far. Here’s part of Gene’s article.

The secular British historian Tom Holland has published a new book entitled Dominion:  How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books).  Here is the summary from Amazon.com:

Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. As Tom Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the modern world.
His book shows just how different Christian values and ethics were from those of the Greeks and the Romans and how the Christian mindset has prevailed in Western Civilization even among his fellow secularists.  (Holland is an atheist.)  The Greeks, for example, considered compassion, for example to be a weakness, not one of the highest virtues as Christianity made it.  The principle from Christianity that all human beings have equal value was incomprehensible to the hierarchies of ancient Rome.  Today we assume that peace is better than war, a legacy of Christianity utterly foreign to the ancient Greeks, Romans, and European tribes.

It’s something that is easy to forget, and mostly we have.

Holland appears to think that it’s possible to have the fruits without the faith, to have Christian influence without the Christianity.  Strand, however, disagrees:
Christian ethics cannot be about merely upholding and claiming certain values that flow from the Christian faith. That would be to mistake the fruit from the tree. The very center of the Christian life is not what the cross teaches us morally but what the cross did for us in atoning for our sins and bringing us from life to death in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The transformation of the person from death to life and the ultimate union with the Triune God in the City of God is the goal of all Christians. Their works of mercy and sacrifice for neighbor and their culture-building over millennia are a testament of this transforming power. We make a mistake if we think the fruit is the goal or that we can separate the fruit from the tree that produced it.

I would say that although principles such as love, equality, compassion and the like are still dominant, even among the secularists, they are starting to fade.  Certainly those who no longer believe in the key Christian teachings of atonement and redemption will have difficulty with the concept of forgiveness, and we are seeing that.  Secularists today say they believe in equality, but they are also demonizing and deriding the worth of those with whom they disagree.  And the strange embrace of abortion on the part of so many secularists, even liberals and progressives, undercuts their claim to be compassionate and supportive of the powerless.  It is, in fact, a reversion to the Greco-Roman practice of infanticide, with everything else that implied about the value of human life.

I should at this point go on and add examples of my own, but two things, I think this is perfectly lucid, clear, and self-evidently correct. Our morality will never stand on its own, its foundation is in our hope of redemption, not in earthly values. To claim otherwise is sophistry and sophistry which history has shown to be false. Without the hope of redemption, we return to the dog eat dog world of Greece and Rome, where the only reason for doing anything is self-aggrandizement. We see that happening already in our so-called elites, who are mostly post-Christian, for not believing in God, they seem to only believe in earthly acquisition and what may be even worse, they seem to think this is a zero-sum game.

Well, Christ taught us better, as they will find out one day. After all, the Lord did say, “Vengeance is mine”. And as I’ve said a few times, without hell there can be no heaven.

Iconoclasm

23 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by in Anti Catholic, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith

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We have been here before, at least in England and other parts of Christendom. It has been estimated that upto ninety percent of the artwork of medieval England was destroyed at the Reformation. The “Reformers” regarded statues as idols and broke and burnt them. The statue of Our Lady of Walsingham, along with the medieval Abbey, one of the greatest pilgrimage sites in Europe, was destroyed. There was only one way to regard such statues – idolatry – and if you failed to agree, then you too were marked for destruction. Depressing as it is, we seem to be here again.

The original Christian iconoclasts were led by Emperor Leo III (717-741) who banned the use of images and had many destroyed. John of Damascus led the argument against the iconclasts, and at the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787, the Empress Ireme secured a victory against iconoclasm. One of the proximate causes of the crisis was the fact that the new religion of Islam took a very hard line indeed on images, and there had been those in the Church who thought that by taking the same view, they could stem the rise of Islam. They were wrong. So were those who thought that Nicaea 787 had solved the problem.

There seems to be, in our fallen nature, an almost Caliban-like instinct to destroy images our ourselves – perhaps some cannot bear to look into the mirror, like Shakespeare’s Caliban. There will, of course, always be those whose attempt to regulate thought includes governance over what might and might not be displayed in public, whether it is the ankles of a woman or the statue of someone of whom they disapprove.

In democratic countries there is a legal process by which statues can be erected, and there is one by which they can be removed, which is why comparisons with what happened in the former Communist bloc and Iraq are wide of the mark. It may be that there are those who think mob rule preferable to the tedium of democratic process, but it may be unwise to pay them Danegeld.

Historically, destroying representations of people has tended to be accompanied by harming real people. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and every human life is sacred. Orthodox Christianity has tended to eschew iconoclasm for good reasons. now is not the time to change. As a reminder of the past, I include not a statue, but a poem:

 

A Lament for Our Lady’s Shrine at Walsingham

In the wracks of Walsingham
Whom should I choose
But the Queen of Walsingham
to be my guide and muse.

Then, thou Prince of Walsingham,
Grant me to frame
Bitter plaints to rue thy wrong,
Bitter woe for thy name.

Bitter was it so to see
The seely sheep
Murdered by the ravenous wolves
While the shepherds did sleep.

Bitter was it, O to view
The sacred vine,
Whilst the gardeners played all close,
Rooted up by the swine.

Bitter, bitter, O to behold
The grass to grow
Where the walls of Walsingham
So stately did show.

Such were the worth of Walsingham
While she did stand,
Such are the wracks as now do show
Of that Holy Land.

Level, level, with the ground
The towers do lie,
Which, with their golden glittering tops,
Pierced once to the sky.

Where were gates are no gates now,
The ways unknown
Where the press of peers did pass
While her fame was blown.

Owls do scrike where the sweetest hymns
Lately were sung,
Toads and serpents hold their dens
Where the palmers did throng.

Weep, weep, O Walsingham,
Whose days are nights,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to despites.

Sin is where Our Lady sat,
Heaven is turned to hell,
Satan sits where Our Lord did sway —
Walsingham, O farewell!

Working with the Spirit

21 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by in Church/State, Early Church, Faith, Galatians

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As expected, yesterday’s post on Black Lives Matter, evoked some heated responses. It is essential that we differentiate between what extremists (on both sides) say and the problem itself; to identify the two, or to deny there is a problem, seems to me self-defeating. One way lies political opportunism masquerading as concern, the other way lies a continuation of the ills which caused the problem in the first place. Whilst it is true that extremists have sought (literally) to fan the flames, the idea that the emotions behind the protests is all manufactured by sinister agencies intent on overthrowing the system, risks precipitating the danger it dismisses. Scoop, yesterday in the comments, rightly listed all the legislation passed in the USA since the Civil War, and yet there are problems to this day. Law alone is not enough. As we know, we are not saved by the Law, were that the case, Jesus would never have had to suffer and die to redeem our sins, neither would He have needed to rise again as the first-fruits of His sacrifice for us.

There are those who see the attitude of the Churches on this issue as mealy-mouthed; these are, in the main, critics of whatever Church leaders do. None of that is to say that Church leaders get it right all the time, but it is to put the heated criticism in context. Church leaders have a wider responsibility than to the scribbling and commentating classes, and even as criticism is levelled (no doubt some of it deserved) it should be leavened with that caveat. To ignore the furore would be to condemn Church leaders as out of touch, to acknowledge it risks the accusation of being an appeaser. As statues of Saints fall, Church leaders have to respond whether they will or not. Nor should ot be forgotten that Churches are multi-racial organisations. Christianity, from the beginning, has been unusual in religions in this aspect of its teaching and practice.

The main problem with the slogan “Black Livers Matter” is that taken to extremes it implies that there is a united “Black” view of the world, and it can lead, and has led to, those BAME politicians who are conservatives or Republicans, being insulted, as though they are the “wrong sort” of BAME person. This, as yesterday’s post argued, is as pernicious as the attempt to deny there is any problem in our society for people of a different skin colour. I suppose extremists will, by nature, go to extremes, but that’s no reason for the rest of us to follow them. To deny that there are those in the Church who feel that their skin colour makes them a problem for others is to deny the obvious. The orthodoxy of men like Cardinal Sarah has occasionally drawn the ire of some Western Bishops in terms which suggest that the latter may not be free sin here.

We know from St Paul’s struggles on the matter, how hard it was for him to persuade his fellow Jews that Gentiles were not “unclean” and that it was in order to break bread and share wine with them. It is very easy for us, at thise distance, to forget how fierce an argument this was among early Christians. Even St Peter, under pressure from Jerusalem, recant from his position of sharing table fellowship with Gentiles, forcing St Paul intoa fierce condemnation of his position. For St Peter to agree with St James and the Jerusalem Church undermined, for St Paul, the whole thrust of the Gospel message that “For no one is put right with God by doing what the Law requires.”

The Church is a fellowship of believers or it is nothing. The first Christians found it as hard as we often do. Men from Corinth probably found men from Rome stand-offish and a bit inclined to assume superiority; men from Rome probably found the Corinthians a bit lively for their taste; and women, such as Phoebe, would have wrestled with male condescension as much as their modern contemporaries often do. But they were one on Christ, and the Spirit worked through them to make them one, as He does with us, if we let Him.

 

Oak Apples and Restoration

29 Friday May 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Church/State, Faith

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Until 1859, the Church of England marked 29 May as “Oak Apple Day,” marking the day that the Monarchy, and with it, the Church of England, was restored after the interlude of the Commonwealth under Cromwell. As Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary:

Parliament had ordered the 29th of May, the King’s birthday, to be forever kept as a day of thanksgiving for our redemption from tyranny and the King’s return to his Government, he returning to London that day.

The “oak tree” commemorated the fact that after the Royalist defeat at Worcester in 1651, the young Prince of Wales (later Charles II) had hidden in one whilst the Rounheads sought him. The English like a good story, and a good party, and Restoration Day provided both.

The Church of England had good reason to commemorate the day, and the decision to abolish its official memorial in 1859 was, along with the decision to drop the service for Guy Fawkes’ day, a sign that parliament wanted to take a less censorious line towards Nonconformists and Catholics, which whilst welcome in itself, should not lead us not to celebrate the day on which the Monarchy was restored.

History and identity are important to a nation, and as one commentator has shrewdly suggested:

Against a joyless Puritan commerical republic, the Restoration symbolised the renewal of convivality, balance, memory, locality, a deeper, more joyful vision of communal flourishing than the Puritan republic could envisage or allow.

There is in this a deeper message to be grasped too.

A nation is more than the sum of its Gross Domestic Product and its balance sheets. A nation which knows the cost of everything often knows the value of nothing, and its polity can become one which sees people as means to an end. This can never be a Christian view of mankind. Life is given to each of us by God for His purpose which, across the course of that life we work out more or less. Any polity which neglects the poor and denies the rights of workers is headed for degradation. At the heart of the Restoration was “monarchy – an expression of the anointed, sacramental nature of communal life, a rejection of the idea of the ‘secular’.” Man does not live by bread alone, and his worth cannot be defined solely by the material. Neither the free market nor social activism quite cuts through to what makes the good life, even if both might have their place.

During this crisis we have seen people going on line to find Church is a way not as many did beforehand; will this continue? Sceptical by nature of claims that “everything will/must change” and of assertions that “nothing will be the same”, if only because history tens to show that change is slow and human beings are always the same, nonetheless, it will be interesting to see whether a chance to slow down and reflect, to be more rooted on one place than usual, will have any lasting effects.

In the meantime, Oak Apple day was, by tradition, an occasion for joy and celebration, so let us do that as best we can, giving God thanks for His many and great mercies, as we await Pentecost.