Category Archives: Faith

Wheat and tares

26 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by in Bible, Faith, Reading the BIble, St Matthew's Gospel

≈ 7 Comments

As part of a course I am on, we have been looking at some of the parables. Matthew 13: 23-30, 36-43, on the wheat and the tares is particularly rich, and the Rev. Paula Gooder’s new book on The Parables, throws a particularly interesting light on a parable which has long intrigued me. I didn’t know that there was a Roman law against the sowing of darnel (which is the weed at issue) in a wheat field as an act of sabotage; it suggests that the scenario Jesus was outlining was not uncommon. Darnel looks just like wheat at forst, but as it gorws it produces a black seed and a fungus which is toxic to us; those who heard the parable would have known this, which would have made its message even more telling. The contrast between the good seed and the black seed, the one giving life, the other bringing disease and even death is striking.

The focus in this parable is on our experience of the kingdom in the present, although of course there are lessons for the future. It directs our attention to how we deal with the presence of evil and wrong-doing in our world, not just in the church. I have always taken the ‘enemy’ to be Satan, who deliberately sets out to sabotage the kingdom, and was relieved and pleased to see that Dr Gooder suggests this is a reasonable interpretation. This invites the question of what we are to do in the face of deliberate evil, and here, Jesus surprises us (as he so often does). He does not advise that we go out and root up the tares because we might damage the good wheat in the process. His advice is to let God judge.

That’s a good reminder to all those of us who are apt to think we can help God out by judging who is and who is not in his kingdom; we can’t, and we shouldn’t. C451 is fond of saying that God is the only just judge, and that being the case, we should back off. But it invites us to think about what we should do, because the outcome for the tares is not going to be a good one when the harvest is gathered in.

The two main images used by Matthew are interesting. One, used in Matthew 8:12; 22:13 and 25:30 is ‘outer darkness, but here it is more graphic – and fiery. The suggestion is clear – that there will be a judgement and those who are toxic will be subject to it. How we align that with ‘outer darkness’ is another issue.

What can we do? The kingdom is coming, it is here, it is growing. It grows in us, and criticial here is the water of life and the body and blood of Christ. The one garden we can cultivate us our own, and we should concentrate on that rather than on passing judgment on others.

Godly Sorrow: a sermon

25 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by in Bible, Faith, Homilies

≈ 9 Comments

2 Corinthians 7

Sorrow is an emotion that exists because of suffering, and suffering is the result of the existence of sin in the world. But there is such a thing as godly sorrow over sin. What is it, and what does it look like?

This morning’s sermon by Pastor Charmley, Bethel Evangelical Free Church, Hanley.

sermonaudio.com/sermon/102520121157656

“Real Presence”

23 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Faith

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

It is said that fools step in where Angels fear to tread, and for me writing on this theme smacks of that. I am so grateful to C451 for his help here, both in helping focus my reading, and also in marshalling my thoughts. It seemed to me a model of supervision, and I envy his research students. What follows is entirely mine, and I know he has his reservations as a Roman Catholic, which means I am even more grateful for his generosity in not pressing me down the path he follows. Now to plunge in!

I believe in the ‘Real Presence.’ What do I mean? I mean that in ways not to be described, or even understood by sinful men and women, Jesus is present in the consecrated bread and wine. This agrees, up to a point, with what the Roman Catholic Church believes, but only up to a point. The Catechism states:

1376 The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: “Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.”

If I have understood correctly (and if not please correct me) this is based in part on Aquinas’ idea of “accidents”, that is that although the bread and wine look the same, they have been changed into the actual blood and flesh of Christ. In this view, the natural elements have been abolished and replaced by the body and blood of Christ. Why does this cause me, and other Anglicans, a difficulty?

Across the first five centuries of the Christian faith’s history there is one golden thread which runs, and that was to do with how to understand the Incarnation. First there were arguments about docetism. Was Christ’s human body real, or did it just seem to be real. Was he not, in fact, Spirit, and the flesh merely an image for our eyes? No, the Church decided that was not the case. Christ was fully human and fully divine. That also put an end to the debate about whether he had a real human mind and soul. But if he was fully human, what about original sin? He was like us in all things save sin. Aquinas put it best (thank you C451): ‘grace does not abolish nature, but perfects it.’ That being so, why are we to hold that the bread and wine cease to be bread and win but become something else?

Hooker (again, thank you C451) pointed out that the eucharist was ‘the sacrament of continuing santification,’ a key part of what the Eastern Orthodox call theosis – God became man so that man could become God, as St Athansius put it. The purpose of the Eucharist isn’t to change the bread and wine, it is to change us, again, to quote Hooker: ‘we are not to doubt but that they really give what they promise and are what they signify’. The change effected in us is ‘a true change both of soul and body, an alteration from death to life.’ This, thankfully, takes us away from old controversies over the manner in which Christ is present in the eucharist, which, frankly, we cannot and do not need to know (oh how our pride in our own ingenuity can lead us into controversy), and it restores to us the idea that the eucharist is a dynamic action of Grace leading us to fuller participation in the life of Christ.

I am with Hooker here. The ultimate location of Christ’s body and blood is not to be sought in the sacraments but ‘in the worthy receiver … only in the heart and soul of him which receives him’. I know from what I experience when I receive the eucharist (which is I twice a month) that Christ is there, the manner in which he is there is a mystery beyond me, neither do I seek to know what is not knowable – except what I know – that he is in me, and I am in him, and the whole world is thereby set to rights.

Rendering under Caesar

21 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Church/State, Faith

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

One of the few things of which Bishops and Archbishops can be sure in this fleeting and fitful world is that if they comment on its affairs they will be criticised, and if they don’t, they will also be criticised. Thus, when the Archbishop of Canterbury intervened in the ongoing Brexit saga to protest against the idea that the Government was willing to abrogate international law, there were the usual cries for the Church to stay out of politics, intermingled with the usual “whabouttery” to the effect that how could a church where a recent investigation into child abuse had revealed real failures, comment on politics. The latter reaction, which we get in the Catholic Church too, would puzzle me if it were not so obviously the product of an inability to think. People who engage in that line of casuistry are best left to wallow in their own vomit.

The first cry, “stay out of politics” is odd in a country with an Established Church where the Archbishops and some Bishops have seats in the House of Lord. The Archbishop has responded with robustness: “Christians and people of all faiths take part in the national debate. This is democracy and freedom. I have seen the opposite. Treasure what we have.” He spoke a truth of which we stand in sore need of hearing on both sides of the Atlantic:

Politics, if it is to draw out the best of us, must be more than just the exercise of binaries, of raw majority power unleashed. It exists to seek truth, to bring diverse peoples together in healthy relationships.

If anyone is authorised to speak about morality in politics it is an Archbishop. The binary approach to politics which we have seen growing across the past decade is destructive of the body politic itself. If we cannot disagree civilly with those who have views different from our own then democracy is going to die. In this country at the last general election we had a choice between a communist and a clown, whilst the USA has one between an egotistical braggart and a man slipping into dementia, and neither of their financial affairs bears close scrutiny. Where a system offers people this sort of “choice” whilst failing to deliver on the first duty of government – public safety – then that system is on borrowed time.

We have already seen, with the growth of populist movements, where this could lead, and it is to be hoped that one of the few positives of the current debacle in the UK is that it will provide an object lesson in the consequences of entrusting government to those who make promises which they knew they cannot not keep. The Archbishop is right, if a government admits that it is willing to break international agreements in order to get its way, that needs calling out and condemning, and if it takes a Church to do it, so be it. Sometimes what Caesar needs is reminding that morality plays a part in his world too.

We have created an economic system which lacks any sense of an objective moral order – what Aquinas called natural law. We are stewards of this earth, not its owners. Our leaders are stewards, not absolute monarchs. When they, or we, put power, technology or money above the health and welfare of people, we makes them idols, and we frustrate God’s purpose for mankind. We cannot serve God and Mammon, and it is the duty of Church leaders to call our leaders to account.

*And to help those who wonder why the ABC does not talk about other things, he does, as with this about the situation in Nigeria.

Underground

19 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by in Audre, Faith

≈ 39 Comments

Tags

As persecution has increased around the world, and the countries of the West are in dire threat of socialism, I’ve worried for some time about “what if?” I’ve just finished reading Rod Dreher’s Live Not by Lies, which is very good, but I’ve also read books about life under Communism and Socialism. We are told repeatedly in the Bible, “Fear not”. Ok; I’ll try, but I’m not having a whole lot of success with that, quite honestly. They say ‘you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone’ but I beg to differ. I know right now what I’ve got and what it will be like when it’s gone and I’m not happy.

The subtitle to Dreher’s book is A Manual for Christian Dissidents. He has a lot of great information for families but it seemed scant information for the rest of us. I am reminded of the fish symbol – half the image in the sand and a knowing person finishing the image and then scuffing away the sign. Maybe we should begin buying fish statues for the front yard. Perhaps fish flags under the American flag. Should we replace our Cross necklaces with fish tattoos? This all sounds fairly funny and light hearted but there’s nothing in the least light hearted behind it.

What will we do when we can no longer take our religious freedom for granted? We’re on the cusp and if you’re not aware of that, you’ve been blinding yourself to it. What will we do when governmental constraints become so strict as to choke off – and finally, kill – the Church? I read this article this morning and it follows a thought that’s been in my mind for some years now. https://www.smallgroupchurches.com/preparing-the-american-underground-church/

It’s one thing to see an event coming, it’s quite another to prepare for it. I see that every hurricane season here in Florida. Two things happen when a hurricane is threatening – the availability of plywood in the anticipated hit zone goes to zero and the beer coolers in the supermarkets are emptied. People make choices and not always intelligent ones. How one prepares in large part determines the outcome. So. How do we prepare for what may not be so far off in the distant future?

It’s time for us to address this issue with our church families. How will we continue to worship? How will we continue Bible study? Who can ‘say a few words’ at a funeral? We, the baptised, are able (thank God and His mercy) to baptise at need, so that’s covered. How will a house church in neighborhood A stay in contact with the house church in F neighborhood?

Even as I write these words, it sounds ludicrous even to me. But the shot heard round the world was Senator Feinstein’s remark, “The dogma lives large … ” It does, indeed, and not just in the life of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. I believe in Christ exactly the same way I believe I have blue eyes. I believe the tenents of the Church the same way I believe in the pulse in my wrist. I believe the loss of community in Christianity is as deadly as gangrene.

These questions I pose are not rhetorical. If you have had thoughts along these lines, I suggest that right now, here on this site, we should open some dialog and make some plans, hash out ideas, give voice to the concern. Cliches become cliches exactly because of their underlying truths; in this case, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Catholic?

18 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

I was moved by one of the comments on my last post, the link from Scoop to a friend’s blog wherein the latter, a recent convert to Rome, lamented both the state of the current Pope and the Church, but expressed his joy at being in the right Church, the one founded by Jesus. I felt his pain, as I feel that of Scoop. It can’t be easy to be an orthodox Catholic at the moment. It’s a feeling which I know drove some Anglicans out of the Church of England into Rome, some via the Ordinariate.

I have a sense from those I know that those in the Ordinariate are happier than those who converted and joined their local Catholic congregation, though would be delighted to be wrong on this, as I know, from personal experience, how bitterly awful it can be when you and your church seem constantly at odds, and I can well understand why people change church. But I have also observed how often it does not bring what the person converting hoped it would bring.

At the centre of much of this is the question of the Pope. If you sincerely come to believe that the only Catholic Church is the one headed by the Pope, then the Tiber must be crossed, though quite what you do if you conclude Pope Francis isn’t the Pope, I am not sure. I guess wait out the storm and hope for better days. But, outside the Roman tradition, no one else believes that the one infallible mark of being the Catholic Church is recognising the Bishop of Rome as the supreme authority. It was not so in the Church of the Fathers, and not all the selective cherry-picking of quotations will ever make it so. It would be hard to convict the Eastern or non-Chalcedonian Orthodox of a love of novelty, and neither of them holds the Bishop of Rome in that role. My own Church takes the same view.

I am a Catholic in so far as the Church to which I belong recognises the historic Creeds and the Councils of the undivided Church, and it adheres to the ancient orders of the Church – deacon, priest and bishop. For those who feel that these orders can never be held by women then the Orthodox Church or the Roman Church is the place to be. For those, such as myself, who are unconvinced that such a view is based on more than a patriachal insistence on reading Scripture in that way, the Anglican Communion is the place to be.

Is it perfect? No more than any other Church. But the idea that unless you are communion with the Bishop of Rome you are bound to hell is a confection of late origin, designed by Rome to strengthen its hand against Constantinople. This insistence by Rome helped shatter the unity of the early Church, just as Rome’s insistence on having its own way shattered the unity of the Western Church. This, naturally, is not how Rome reads it, but it is how all the other Catholic Churches read it. It may, of course, be that Rome alone is correct, but its own openness to ecumenism since the Seconf Vativan Council suggests a willingness to move beyond old disputes, which many of us welcome. No-one is happy to see the Bishop of Rome separated out from the other Apostolic Churches, though I doubt anyone much thinks that the way to union is easy, or near.

I can do no more by way of concluding with what that great Christian, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes wrote about the Church of England’s fundational beliefs:

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.

Andrewes introduced two other related features which became characteristic of Anglicanism and which differentiated it from both Rome and Geneva – a reserve about points of doctrine which are not central, and a freedom of private judgement outside these central articles of faith. If you want to make windows into men’s souls, fine, but I have to say that I prefer the Anglican way.

The Eschatology Framework 15: Conclusion

17 Saturday Oct 2020

Posted by in Faith

≈ 2 Comments

This series has been written from a futurist, pre-wrath, pre-millennialist perspective. The aim has been to derive a basic chronology for the end times from Scripture. I was prompted to write this because Audre explained that, in her experience, there is generally little teaching on these matters in her church. My concern when introducing people to study of the end-times is two-fold: that they will either get lost in the complex passages or that they will come with pre-conceived ideas that will result in forced, rather than natural, readings of the texts.

Continue reading →

The Reformation Martyrs

16 Friday Oct 2020

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

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

,

Martyrs’ Memorial, Oxford

As an undergraduate and then a graduate, this was a view which greeted me most days as I went about my studies. On this day there would be flowers and other tributes laid here. Occasionally a tourist would ask me what it was about, and some of them seemed none the wiser (though at least they were better-informed) when I told them it marked the site of the burning of an Archbishop of Canterbury and two other bishops of the Church of England. On one occasion only did I get an answer which surprises me, less now than it did then: “They took the Faith seriously back then, not like now!” It has not ceased to shock me – no one who toils in the blogosphere could be shocked – but it saddens me, not because I am some milquetoast who wants us all to “lurve” one another, but because it brings to mind Byron’s comment in “Don Juan” about “Christians have burned each other, quite persuaded, that all the Apostles would have done as they did.” God is the only just judge, and anyone who thinks that burning someone to death is a sign of how seriously they take their faith should pause and ponder what Jesus might have meant when he said that “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again”. [Matt. 7:2].

In addition to Bishops Ridley and Latimer, whose burning was on this day in 1555, the more famous Archbishop Cranmer was burned on the same spot six months later, which is why today, in the Church of England calendar is called the memorial of the “Reformations Martyrs”. There were, as any historian can tells you, plenty of Catholic martyrs too, although, perhaps tellingly, it took until 2008 for a small plaque to be erected on Holywell Street in memory of four Roman Catholics — Thomas Belson, Humphrey Prichard, and the priests Richard Yaxley, and George Nichols — who were hanged, drawn, and quartered there in 1589, and beatified as martyrs in 1987. When a memorial was dedicated in 2009 to 23 Catholic and Protestant “Martyrs of the Reformation” in the Uni­­ver­sity Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, there were complaints that this was not what those who had been martyred would have wanted. Perhaps those complaining would have preferred another public burning of a “heretic”, which might well have been what those who were martyred would have wanted?

Violence begat violence, and and whatever one’s view of the English Reformation, and it remains a hotly contested field of scholarship, it was marked by a level of cruelty which to most of us does no service to the name of Jesus or to our common faith, for make no mistake, divided as we are by ecclsiology and history, Anglican or “Roman” Catholic, we share one faith, even as we share a sorry history of intra-communal violence.

None of this is to denigrate the martyrs on both sides, they were men (and women) who paid the ultimate price to stand by their beliefs, but we do their memory no service by continuing to dig ditches and erect barbed-wire to defend positions which a century of ecumenical dialogue has shown need no such defences. As Churchill put it in another context: “Jaw Jaw is better than War War.”

On the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York spoke in the spirit of the fruits of ecumenical dialogue when they spoke firts of the “blessings” of the Reformation:

Amongst much else, these would include clear proclamation of the gospel of grace, the availability of the Bible to all in their own language, and the recognition of the calling of lay people to serve God in the world and in the Church

but also of the:

 the lasting damage done five centuries ago to the unity of the Church, in defiance of the clear command of Jesus Christ to unity in love. Those turbulent years saw Christian people pitted against each other, such that many suffered persecution, and even death, at the hands of others claiming to know the same Lord.

Much has been done to try to overcome the resulting legacy of mistrust, and indeed it can seem at times as those the most intense warfare is the internecine sort, where Catholics can be vitriolic about their own Pope and about those Catholics who are vitriolic about him. Maybe we really do learn nothing from history?

The Reformers in the sixteenth century, like later reformers within the Catholic Church, wanted to draw us back to what is at the heart of our faith, and that is the love of God for us, manifested through His Son, Jesus Christ who died for us that we should have life eternal. It is easy, which is why it is done so often, to mock ecumenism as a search for the lowest common denominator, and it may, or may not, be significant that this tendency is often to be found among converts, but properly understood, it is a search for the highest common factor – that the love and sacrifice Jesus made for all who would receive Him, can be made manifest in this vale of tears where we see Him as through a glass darkly, but where the scars of sin run vivid red and orange in the flames which consumed the martyrs.