Tag Archives: Church of England

How unbelievable?

02 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Faith

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They are at it again, I thought, when I read (and thank you C451) the Rev Marcus Walker’s stirring piece in The Critic on the Church of England. Not, I hasten to add, the good Reverend himself, who is a candle in the darkness, but the usual suspects.

After more than forty years presiding over a decline in parishes across the country, the Rev David John Keighley has come up with a cunning plan to reverse the decline – intensify the causes of it! I jest not, you can read it all here, though it would take a heart of stone not to alternate weeping and laughter. What does he want to do? There may be a familiar ring to it, so apologies to those suffering from PTSD on this: sell off many of the churches for housing (erm, I thought we’d been quietly doing that?); get rid of outdated doctrine and historic prejudices; (by which he seems to mean the idea of the bodily resurrection of Christ and the Virgin birth, and the miracles (erm, we’ve had forty years of doing that too – just saying); and he is convinced that:

the idea of God as some kindly, bearded patriarch sitting on high in Heaven, while the Devil resides below in Hell, is ill-suited to the modern, critical mind.

Golly, how original! Well it was back in the nineteenth century or so!

The good Rev appears to think that junking all of this will bring young people into the Church. Well I guess I am no longer “young” being in my late thirties, but this sort of stuff almost drove me out of the church when I was, and I can’t imagine it would bring anyone over the age of 70 into it!

The best antidote to this stuff is to read what Marcus Walker writes. It hits home. He rightly points out that:

If you find a priest crossing his fingers during the creed or wincing at the mention of the Virgin Birth it is likely he was ordained many decades ago and is now floating around the edge of retirement. It is also very likely that he is a he, as at the height of the modernist movement only men could be ordained in the Church of England.

That has certainly been my experience, and may well be part of why the Roman Catholic Church, which is full of such old men (including the Pope) has the same problem. What he writes next cheers me up and certainly reflects my own lived experience (as they say):

Younger priests just don’t have this affliction. They may be dripping wet, they may preach about Brexit or refugees, they may not know their way around the Prayer Book, but you really can’t say they don’t believe. The vision of the Church of England as primarily a social organisation is one which, while still live in the public imagination, simply does not match reality.

That is my experience. It boils down, as he says, to the fact that where, once upon a time there was a social cachet to being a member of the Church of England, that has quite vanished:

It has never been cool to go to church, but now it isn’t even really respectable. There is simply no market for a church which doesn’t really believe in God. If you’re going to take the social hit of admitting to being a Christian, you might as well actually be a Christian. 

Quite so. It has been our younger priests who have been at the forefront of further efforts by the old men to go further down the modernist route – which is, as C451 once put it to me “a one way line to perdition”. More than not, it is often younger priests who oppose a continuation of the bankrupt policies of the past few decades:

And of the younger priests, it’s the gay ones who are often at the forefront of the battle to defend the creeds and Christian orthodoxy (if my more traditional readers can park, for a moment, their disbelief in the separation of questions of sexuality from orthodoxy). A study by the Dean of Virginia Theological Seminary showed that, across the American church, “our LGBT seminarians are not interested in a vacuous liberal theology that has no authority, no God, no Christ, and no sacraments”.

As Marcus Walker puts it:

Once again we see that if you’re going to embarrass yourself in front of your peers by being a Christian, you might as well actually find God in the process 

This certainly matches my experience. The American “culture wars” is American, and I can’t speak for those experiencing it, but what I can testify to is that in the Church of England, not least among priests of my generation and younger, there is a real commitment to the Creeds. We don’t cross our fingers when reciting it, neither do we think that “science” has disproved God. I can’t quite get my head around a charitable explanation as to why a retired priest who believes that

the teachings of Jesus provides just one of many ways to experience ‘God’, and that progressive Christianity is focused on creating a community that is inclusive of all people, regardless of sexual identity and even if they are “questioning sceptics or agnostics”

stays in the Church. He imagines that the “product” behind the Church remains “woefully out of date”. I have bad news for him and those of his generation who think likewise – it is they who are out of date. Those of my readers who are of that generation are not, I know, of his persuasion, so take heart, the cause for which you have fought is alive and well and prospering, It may be that on some matters we look to you “unorthodox”, but when it comes to the Creeds and belief, we are Christians because we are. We stand here and can do no other because whatever the Rev David John might believe, we believe in God, the Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son … and all the rest of it.

So cheer yourself up by reading Marcus Walker!

Core membership

27 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Bible, Faith

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Not for the first time, I ended the day reflecting that the comments to this blog are often better than the posts. The comment on my post two days ago by Alys summed up a particular, and widespread point of view very well:

The Church Of England is dying and will soon be completely dead thanks to weak leadership, female ordination, watering down of scripture and the word of God, identity politics and failure to recognise that the more it attempts to berelevant the less appealing it becomes to what should be its core membership.

That puts in very understandable terms what I have not only often heard, but also read, indeed as I said in my response, I was reading something from the Restoration period recently saying much the same, leaving out, of course, the reference to women’s ordination. Much the same was said in the period marked by Wesley’s ministry. Christianity, or at least the Church, is always about to die, and the leadership is usually at fault. You can’t be surprised, look at that Peter fellow, he even denied knowing Jesus. Has there ever been a time when the leadership,of the Church has been held in universal, or near universal, high regard? As for watering down God’s words, how clear could he have made it that certain foods were. It to be eaten? That Paul fellow claimed to have had a vision to the contrary, but we have only his word for it, and even he was willing to admit circumcising might be necessary. Things change, sometimes even the Church leadership is willing to see the Holy Spirit at work, as the Council of Jerusalem did over diet.

I jest, a little, because in truth, there have been those from the beginning convinced that the Church was going to the dogs and that its leaders were rubbish. Even St John faced break away groups from his church who claimed to know better than he did what Christ meant. It is a permanent feature of Christian life and isn’t going to change any time soon this side of Christ’s coming again in glory.

What did intrigue me was the idea of “core” membership. That set me thinking and rereading. I could see only one “core” in the teaching of Jesus, and that was the Jews. There were many occasions when Jesus made it clear that the ‘bread’ was for the Chosen People. Even among them, Jesus’ “core” was considered odd – his tendency to dine with wine-bibbers, tax collectors and fallen women was not well-regarded by the “core” membership of the synagogues, any more than that same group welcomed the evangelism of the disciples.

A Church that takes Jesus seriously has only one core, I thought, sinners. That’s all of us, and for all its failings as an institution, as long as there are sinners, there will be a Church. It may be that those who have laboured in the vineyard all day will look askance at those who came in the last hour, even as the elder brother had his views about how their father had treated the prodigal. But that’s Christianity for you, all that gratiutous love and grace. As I have been given freely, so I have received, and so I will give, or try to to others. It isn’t just the comfortable and the established who need to feel the church is for them – it is those who think it isn’t. Perhaps they are the “core”? At any rate, there are more than enough lost sheep to keep the shepherds busy.

Catholic?

04 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Bible, Catholic Tradition

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Every now and then in the comments section, someone will tell me that this or that is what the Catholic Church teaches, as though I am a Protestant. That’s either kind or unkind of them according to taste, but to put it beyond doubt, like most Anglicans I consider myself a Catholic, and so let me explain a bit.

To start with, the Church is an organic institution and in its visible form, it changes. Thus, prior to the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church was a loose federation of churches under the headship of the Pope in Rome. The precise extent of his powers were not defined, and one of the effects of the changes in Europe in the nineteenth century was the need to make explicit what Pius IX and the Ultramontanes claimed had always been agreed – that the Pope was, in certain matters, infallible. I don’t have a dog in that fight, but use it as an example of how the visible church here on earth changes in response to events. At Vatican II it acknowledged, for the first time, that the visible church had some deficiencies: ‘This empirical church,’ it stated, ‘reveals the mystery [of the Church] but not without shadows, and it does so until it is brought into the full light of Christ, who also reached glory through humiliation.’

My own Church, in repudiating Rome’s jurisdiction, already, in the sixteenth century acknowledged this problem; indeed it was one of the difficulties which precipitated the Reformation, that Rome regarded itself as not in need of reform because what is taught was ‘once delivered’ to the saints, not acknowledging that difference which those wanting reform saw. The English bishop, John Jewell expressed this well when he wrote: ‘The general or outward Church of God’s elect is visible and may be seen; but the very true Church of God’s elect is invisible and cannot be seen or discerned by man, but it known to God alone.’ [Works, Pt. 4, p. 668]

Hooker elaborated on this. The Church of England was, he stated in his Ecclesiastical Polity, only part of the Catholic Church, existing for the preservation of Christianity in which ‘consideration as the main body of the sea being one, yet within divers precincts has divers names; so the Catholic Church is in like sort divided into a number of distinct societies, everyone of which is termed a church within itself.’ The Church had its faults, and, unlike some of those with a more sectarian mind-set, Hooker could consider that Rome was a ‘church’ too: ‘we have,’ he wrote, ‘and do hold fellowship with them [Rome] for even as the Apostle doth say of Israel, that they are in one respect enemies but in another beloved of God; in like sort with Rome we dare not communicate concerning her gross and grievous abominations, yet touching those main part of Christian truth wherein they constantly still persist, we gladly acknowledge them to be of the family of Jesus Christ.’ For the time and the circumstances, this was a remarkably irenic view.

For Hooker, what the New Testament envisages in its imagery about the Church is, to some extent, visible in the Church of England and in the Church of Rome and, I am sure he’d have agreed, the Orthodox Churches, but it is imperfect. The mystery is present but imperfectly revealed. The catholicity of the church is to be found by those who are attentive to the Gospel’s message and who are being formed in its image through that attention and through the Eucharist. This formation in Christ is the real tradition and is the dynamic part of a triad formed by reason, scripture and the church.

For Hooker, and for most Anglicans, the way in which we represent the Gospel and the forms through which we do it are framed within the context of the ‘place and persons for which they are made.’ Nations, and peoples, are not all alike and, as Hooker sagely remarks: ‘the giving of one kind of positive laws unto only one people, without any liberty to alter them, is but slender proof that therefore one kind should in like sort be given to serve everlastingly for all.’ It is simply not in the human condition for the form of the church not to change. It did so from the time of Christ, it will do so to the end because the Holy Spirit leads us into truth, and as truth is infinite in the person of Jesus, and as our understanding is only ever ‘as through a glass darkly’ it has to be so. Living things grow and respond to their enironment and the promptings of the Spirit. One can enjoy an ecclesiastical museum, but it’s unwise to live in it; life forms preserved in aspic and amber can be pretty, but they are dead.

Rome caught up at the time of Vatican II. At the heart of our Anglican understanding of catholicity is the acknowledgement that the universality of the visible church is impaired because communion is incomplete, but in its local expression the Catholic Church is there, even if, as Vatican II finally acknowledged it is not ‘without shadows.’ That is my own understanding of what my church teaches and of catholicity.

Hooker

03 Tuesday Nov 2020

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Today the Church of England commemorates the memory of Richard Hooker (25 March, 1554 – 3 November 1600), whom many regard as the founder of Anglicanism. Ah, I already hear cries of ‘that was Henry VIII’. It was certainly Henry who broke with Rome but the nature of the Church of England was not decided then, or indeed across the next century and a half; it was contested.

In Henry’s reign the break with Rome was complete in terms of politics and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but well before his death, theologically he had rowed back against some of the more extreme claims made by those who saw themselves as disciples of Luther and Calvin. These Protestants made greater strides under the young Edward VI, before being decisively checked by his half-sister Mary, who returned England to obedience to Rome. But her half-sister, Elizabeth I, steered a way between the two extremes. But that was in many ways a political strategy rather than an ecclesiastical solution.

Oddly, Hooker’s great eight volume “Of the Laws of Ecclesiatical polity”, only four volumes were published in his lifetime, and then toward the end. They were taken up by the Laudian party in the Church, who wanted to emphasise the catholic heritage and saw his arguments against the Puritans as great ammunition – which indeed they are. It was during this period that the other volumes were published, but it was not until the Restoration of Charles II that Hooker came into his own, as his work was cited by those wishing to establish a middle way between papism and puritanism.

I am not even going to pretend that I have read the eight volume, but I have read and would encourage anyone interested to read the selection edited by Raymond Chapman. Once you get used to sentences with 200 words, he makes great reading, and his style is very much the man – and the Church. He treats his opponents with respect, and dismantles extremism very skilfully. He represents the temper of English Christianity, not too much emphasis on individual reason, and not too much emphasis on docility to authority.

Hooker’s legacy, like Newman’s, was his work, and it is what has been received by posterity which has marked him out. He was a man of faith who steered his way through parlous times. His legacy is one all Anglicans should treasure. Let me finish with the Collect for today from Common Worship:

God of peace, the bond of all love,

who in your Son Jesus Christ have made the human race your inseparable dwelling place:

after the example of your servant Richard Hooker,

give grace to us your servants ever to rejoice in the true inheritance of your adopted children

and to show forth your praises now and ever;

through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

In praise of Anglicanism

10 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith

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It’s often said that Anglicanism lacks coherence, how, for example can you have a church which ordains women in which there are people who don’t agree with that? The answer is simple and an example of Christian witness. Those who remain within the Anglican communion do so because they see it as their church, and they do not see the issue of the ordination of women as a cause for a break in communion. This is because the church exists because God acts, and he acts not because of what we do or do not do. We did not invent the church, it is given to us as our means of participating in his eternal reality. In which case it is a sign of Grace that those who were on opposite sides of the debate have theologically commited themselves not simply to tolerate each other, but to get beyond that and, in prayer and mutual communion, to pursue ‘mutual flourishing.’

Looked at that way it seems obvious. What else is a Christian to do? Those who could not, in all good conscience, commit to this left, and those of us who stayed regret their loss, for they are a formidable and Godly group. The rest of us followed what Paul said to the Ephesians, deciding ‘with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.’

The Anglican communion offers itself an example, for good or ill, who yet knows, to see whether a church can cohere with such different views in it. Naturally at both ends of the spectrum there are those who cry “fudge!” What they really mean is that they’d like their view to have prevailed. I know women (and some men) who think that anyone who doesn’t accept the ministry of women should be driven from the church, and I know those on the other side too. But for most of us the 2014 settlement is one we want to see work. For me there are good arguments both way, and by tradition I was sceptical but in the end convinced by those arguing for it; the example of some of my female friends helped, as it was as clear to me as anything that it was the Spirit leading them. Some of us believe the resulting settlement has something to teach all churches about the reconciliation of relationships in the love of Christ.

There’s a caricature put about in terms of women in the ministry, that they are bra-burning feminists (did anyone really do this, or is it an urban myth?) with a liberal agenda. I can’t speak for those in the Catholic Church, but those I know in my own church are a mixed bag, and at least as many of us are in the catholic tradition, emphasising the corporate and the sacramental. The church is a human society founded on the life of the Trinity in which as Alison Milbank put it, ‘our worship bears witness to God’s holiness and the call to become holy.’ We think it important that this long tradition in our church plays its part alongside the evengelical tradition.

Indeed some of us don’t think the two are in conflict. I’m far more worried about the emphasis on managerialism and conversion strategies which seem not to see the parish as central to mission. Mission comes from the gift of our life to God and the growth in personal holiness, from work at parish level. These are the people with whom God has placed us in all our glorious diversity. At its best, good managerialism is rooted in that recognition. I often hear people, especially now, saying that “we” are the church and “we” don’t need buildings. We are, but we do. Places hallowed by those who came before us in the faith, are there for all. It’s one of the great things about the Church of England, we’re there for all who want us.

Trying to concentrate on the work God wants us to do locally is, for most of us, the task at hand. Part of that task is to take forward his word in unity. Women have always been good at reconciliation and healing, and in my wide experience, women’s ministry is a blessing to the Anglican church. Whether any other church will find that example one it would follow, who knows? I am glad not to be in a place where people spend time examining the obiter dicta of bishops in an hermeneutic of suspicion, but in one where generosity of spirit prevails. In my beginning is me, and the one soul whom I can hope to convert with God’s Grace is mine, and outwith that, if I can be of service then that’s all I want. The rest, well some thoughts are too high for me, and I’ll get on with cleaning up the church after yesterday’s socially-distanced Mass – and in this heat that’s a penance!

God bless you all!

Justice for Bishop Bell?

05 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Anglicanism, Church/State

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George Bell was Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958. I first came across him when working on Churchill, who clearly found the good bishop a great trial. On one level this might seem odd, since Bell was one of the earliest opponents of Nazism, and at a time when public policy in the UK was one of trying to find accommodation with Hitler, Bell’s view was that his system was so evil that that would be impossible. He worked closely with ‘confessing churches’ in Germany which refused to join the official Reichkirche, and he worked tirelessly to help Jewish refugees, especially those who were Christian converts who were often not helped by anyone else. Bell also supported those in Germany who wanted to overthrow Hitler, and the last letter the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote was to Bell. One might, therefore, have imagine that the great anti-appeaser, Churchill, would have admired Bell, and perhaps even have recommended him for the See of Canterbury upon William Temple’s sudden death in 1944; he didn’t and he didn’t. Why?

T.S. Eliot described Bell as a man of ‘dauntless integrity’ – and that was his undoing in Churchill’s eyes. Bell detested Nazism with every fibre of his being, but he did not think barbarism should be fought with barbarism. He was an early, consistent and vocal opponent of area bombing – which brought him public opprobrium and the hostility of Churchill – and lost him the chance of Canterbury.

Reputation is fleeting, and even by the time I was writing in the 1980s, Bell’s name was not one to conjure with. It was good, then, to hear that a biography of him was in the press, not least because its author, Dr Andrew Chandler, Director of the George Bell Institute at Chichester, was a friend and colleague whose work I have long admired. What neither of us could have known was that a few months before publication date the diocese of Chichester would issue a statement saying that it accepted allegations that Bell had committed paedophile activities with a young girl, and it had paid a sum of money to the complainant. Suddenly Bell’s reputation was in ruins.

The odd thing was that the official inquiry had not looked at any of Bell’s voluminous papers, nor had it questioned his domestic chaplain (now 94) who had spent a great deal of time with Bell at the time of the alleged abuse. Now it might be that there would be no evidence coming from any of these sources, but they should have been consulted. Could it be possible that, in the post-Savile atmosphere, the Diocese had simply wanted to clear up the case and move on? Was it really possible that one of Bell’s successors had, effectively thrown him under the proverbial bus? That, according to a report commissioned by a group set up to defend Bell, was precisely what had happened – or at least it looked like it. The Diocese was asking us to believe its processes, but providing no detail about them. If they had not involved any work on his papers or talking with surviving witnesses, it was hard to put any faith in them.

One of the lessons from the Savile story is that we must take seriously allegations of abuse; one of the lessons which comes, as Cranmer points out today, from the way the police have handled some of the allegations, is that when they say they are ‘credible’ that does not mean they are true. It is easy enough, in the post-Savile era, to accept allegations and thus avoid the allegation one is putting more pressure on the complainant by subjecting their story to forensic examination; but that is how the justice system works. Because the Diocese has not seen fit to reveal its enquiry, we either have to take it on trust or question its results; it may be there are those still prepared to take an internal enquiry on this matter on trust – but not many any more.

Charles Moore and Peter Hitchens have written eloquently about the case, and the Bell Group is determined that there should be a proper inquiry. At the moment we have, as Peter Hitches has said, an absurd situation where Archbishop Justin can tell the BBC that ‘George Bell – a man he believes to be a filthy child molester who dishonestly and selfishly abused a little girl – is also ‘the greatest hero that most of us have’. I’ve heard of a broad church, but this is ridiculous. One or the other. Not both.’ Quite.

 

Itsy witsy teeny weeny?

01 Monday Feb 2016

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The good news appears to be that were I to become ordained in the Church of England, I could, perhaps, officiate in my bikini – had I such an article of clothing (I don’t – sorry to disappoint Neo 🙂 ). At the moment what can be worn is strictly controlled by canon law and liturgical rubrics. Currently, a surplice or alb with scarf or stole must be worn at holy communion, morning and evening prayer on Sundays and at weddings, funerals and baptisms. In many churches it has become the fashion to ignore this, but instead of telling vicars to smarten up, the Church Synod is going to discuss relaxing it altogether. This seems a little counter-intuitive to me. Ministers have worn vestments for the longest time because it marks out what they do as sacred, different from what happens in the everyday sphere. Even the mere act of vesting before a service is a sign that something special is about to happen, and I know of instances where someone in their clericals has been approached and asked for a prayer by a perfect stranger.

My own Anglican tradition is hardly likely to be taking advantage of any lightening up of the dress code, and I do hope that whatever happens, bikinis will remain far away – but in an era where we have had clown masses in Roman Catholic Churches, who can tell?

It is a sign of a lack of reverence. I cannot help myself. When I go into Church I dress as though I am going out to an important event – as I am. So I put on my best clothes and make sure that I am ready to meet Jesus. When I get into Church I hate anyone chattering – there’s time for that at coffee after Mass. I need time to prepare myself, so I arrive about half an hour before Mass starts. How those who arrive at the last minute can be ready for what is to come I can’t imagine. Is this my form of Pharisaism? No, it is simply a matter of respect. When I go to receive communion I kneel at the altar rail and receive on the tongue because the only hands that should handle the blessed sacrament are those of the priest. Afterwards, I pray in silence. Recently someone has adopted the fashion of having a hymn during communion – I wish they wouldn’t, but I can tune out.

In short, for me, as for many, this is the highlight of the week. My priest is properly vested according to the rubrics, that is his sign of respect for the order the Church insists upon, The Church does so not because it is pharisaical, but because it wishes to mark off the sacred from the profane. In front of the reserved sacrament, I kneel, how could I not in the Lord’s presence?

It may be that our irreverent age cannot understand these things, but then, so much the worse for the age. As I say, and alas for it, any change won’t change what happens in many places now, it will just excuse it. It won’t change what we do where I worship, or, I guess, in many places, but it is a sad sign of sad times.

At the day’s ending

31 Sunday Jan 2016

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If we let it, our faith can do more for us than we suppose. One of the great joys of my life at the moment is being able to pray the Compline service before I go to sleep. I find the words of the general confession such a comfort, as they express what I could never express so well myself, and they lead me through, after the absolution, to the Psalms, which I always approach like one scrubbed fresh clean – with the sins of the day absolved and the words of the Psalmist pulling me into line with the countless numbers of people who have found in them comfort and healing. Psalm 31:-16 (in our numbering) allows me to cast myself onto the infinite and tender mercy of God. The words of Hebrews 13:20-21 further help my soul to go to that calm place whence a quiet and peaceful night might be found. The Nunc Dimittis  takes me further down that road, and then we come to my favourite Collect:

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord/and by thy great mercy defend us/from all perils and dangers of this night/ for the love of they only Son, Our Saviour Jesus Christ

Could anything make a more perfect ending to the day? As the last notes die away, we fold our prayer books in perfect silence and we make our way back to our rooms where, if we wish, we can continue our conversation with God. Me? I simply hold on to the silence and the peace and know that in there, God is with me and I am with him.

I mentioned this recently to a friend, who said she’d never been to such a service, so I invited her to ours, and she loves it too – even if it is slightly spoiled for her by the need to drive home. It reminded me of what richness we have inherited, and how profligate we have been with it. In a world where some struggle to sleep and find peace,, our forefathers left us this perfect preparation for rest – and we have all but abandoned it. we are a strange species to be sure.

I am often put in mind of some lines from George Herbert about how our attitude to death is transformed by the knowledge that Christ died so we should have eternal life

Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust
                           Half that we have
      Unto an honest faithful grave;
Making our pillows either down, or dust.

‘Down or dust’, that is our choice, will we rise with him, or go down into that dust where we cannot praise him?

Now, all I need is to be able to get to Matins on time, and I will be able to see what effect that has on my day – and all of this is so little time too.

January 30: King Charles, Martyr

30 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Keble, poetry, Prayers

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This blog usually marks this day, the anniversary of the judicial murder of King Charles I, and Chalcedon has written on this for us here. The Book of Common Prayer once recognised this in its liturgical calendar, and as I remain an Anglican, it seems fitting to mark this day with some reflections about this commemoration, which, to many, may seem odd. Charles I was, after all, not a very successful King, and his reign ended in civil war, and with his own execution. All of that is true but beside the point, and the fact that our society does not get the point says more about it than it should feel comfortable with.

Charles I died for a principle. Had he been willing to renounce episcopacy and the Established Church, he would not have been put on trial and would have been allowed to live; this he would not do, and he died for his faith – that is what makes him a martyr. At his coronation he swore an oath to defend the Catholic Church, and that is what he did, even though it cost him his life. At the Restoration the Church he had died for recognised his sacrifice, proclaimed him a martyr and added his name to its liturgical calendar. It would be nice if one could say that the Church remained grateful to him, but that is not the way of fallen mankind, and by the early nineteenth century his cult had been all but abandoned. It was the men of the Oxford Movement who restored it. John Keble, the priest and poet, wrote movingly of the

True son of our dear Mother, early taught
With her to worship and for her to die,
Nursed in her aisles to more than kingly thought,
Oft in her solemn hours we dream thee nigh.

It was apt that it should have been the Oxford men who defended Charles the Martyr as their fire was aimed at the way in which a non-Anglican parliament was the only source of legislation for the Church and sought to pronounce even on matters of doctrine. It was, it is said, a parliamentary draughtsman who removed the commemoration of the King from the calendar in 1859, but for loyal sons and daughters of the Church, he remains there – long before there was any procedure to pronounce someone a saint, it was the love and the memory of the people which did the job. As Andrew Lacey shows in a very fine book on the King, relics were gathered and miracles attributed to their healing power.

Jane Austen, a devout Anglican with Jacobite sympathies, was familiar with the service of commemoration, and there is another literary link through George Herbert, whose family served the King, and thence to T.S. Eliot and Little Gidding:

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.

Nicholas Ferrer, Herbert’s literary legatee, founded a religious community at Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire (about ten miles north-west of Cambridge), and it was thence that Charles I resorted after his defeat at Nasbey, arriving there on the night of 1 Mary 1647. The Cromwellians destroyed the community later that year in one of their many acts of vandalism, but after the Restoration, a church was once again established, and an armorial window installed in the King’s honour:

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Charles was a man of deep personal piety, and it is the manner of his death which made him a martyr. As Marvell wrote of the execution: “He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene”. 

To an age where every political problem can be fudged, and where the only question appears to be how much someone wants to surrender a ‘deeply-held’ principle, Charles I’s act must seem quixotic, but to anyone familiar with Christian history, it is recognisable. Charles died a martyr to his Church – and it is high time, and beyond, that the Church restored this commemoration to its liturgical calendar. I asked Chalcedon whether the Ordinariate celebrated the day, but he tells me not. I suppose that if the Church for which he died won’t, it is too much to expect anyone else to. I am sure that members of the Society of King Charles the Martyr will be commemorating him, and in my own little community we remembered him at Matins and will at Compline tonight. Of your mercy, pray for the soul of the martyred King.

Saturday Jess: in defence of the Anglican Communion

16 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Anglicanism, Politics

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20120715-004741.jpgThis has been a week when most of the news in Christianity has been by the Anglican Communion. Jess has ably (as always) defended her church, and its very unwieldy mandate as the Church of England. In a very diverse country, such as England, that’s a recipe for a continuous uproar, made worse by parts of the communion being apt, in her memorable term, “to throw their toys from the pram”.

I’m always sympathetic because I was brought up in the American form of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia that hot mess that Kaiser Frederick William III of Prussia made when he force brigaded the Lutheran and Reformed churches together after the Napoleonic Wars. It too had the uneasy mission of both serving God, and being all thing to all (Protestant) people. It actually fared much the same with the same forces tearing it apart, until the second world war pretty much killed it. Remember much of Prussia is now Poland. In Germany it is now part of the  Union of Evangelical Churches, and in America part of the steeply declining United Church of Christ, an even worse product of the go-go sixties.

But the CofE soldiers on, and the baton is increasingly passing to the much more orthodox African-led GAFCON, which includes the breakaway Anglican Church in North America, which is small but growing.

But this is about Jess’ continued and continuing defense of her church, which puts her amongst probably the majority of her sensible and tolerant co-religionists. She started early as this post from 2012 shows

Anglicanism

English: Flag of the Anglican Communion

English: Flag of the Anglican Communion (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Church of England seems to attract few defenders. Some from the Catholic wing have crossed the Tiber to the Ordinariate; others on the liberal wing seem indistinguishable from secular liberals; and there is always the Archbishop of Canterbury to criticise when all other news fails. Sometimes it seems as though ‘the centre cannot hold’; and yet it does.

The Church of England is a compromise. It is not the hard-line Protestantism of Edward VI, neither is it the return to Catholicism of Mary I. To those who like firm lines of definition, this looks like a fault; to those of us who wish for a degree of comprehensiveness, it is a virtue. It reminds me of the definition  of Christ’s two natures agreed at Chalcedon. The ancestors of the Copts found it too Nestorian, whilst the Nestorians found it made insufficient concessions to their position. Any such comparison should not be pressed too hard; but the point is that any widely accepted set of formulae will have within them things which those who want sharp definitions won’t like – and that in dealing with the Infinite Mystery of the Economy of our salvation, we should beware of thinking that granularity is necessarily to be had.

Newman may have abandoned his idea of the C of E as the via media, but that does not mean he was wrong to have formulated it. Much as I admire the Roman Catholic Church, there is something in it unduly attached to legalisms and definitions, or at least that is my impression.  From experience, at least at secondhand, its approach to divorced people taking communion seems to fall into that category.  Annulments are a long and complex process, and whilst clearly designed to help deal with the tension between what Our Lord said and pastoral needs, they seem at once cumbersome and lacking in appreciation of the needs of the repentant sinner; the C of E’s  approach recognises the latter and lacks the former.

Of course to those convinced that the Catholic Church is the Church founded by Christ, these things are, rightly, secondary, but to those of us still of the view that the C of E is the branch of Catholicism practised in these islands, they give cause for hesitation.

My Orthodox acquaintances push their argument about legalism far too far in my view, almost to the point of it becoming their version of anti-Catholicism. There is much wisdom to be gained from studying the Orthodox tradition, as there is from really knowing the Catholic one. For me, one of the virtues of where I am is that I do not have to choose between them, or reject men like Wesley, who I also regard with veneration. A typical muddled Anglican? Perhaps, but a position shared by many. That does not make it right to those for whom it seems like persistence in error; but it allows me to persist in my journey, and the Anglican Church which formed me, offers me a way of love which seeks to comprehend all who will take it.