The Old High Churchman

The Tractarians and the Liturgy

2011-06-19T11:54:00.000-07:00

The Oxford Movement or Tractarianism often gets the blame for certain things which were not part of their original programme. One of these is the profusion of Missals and other unofficial devotional manuals that grew up in the late nineteenth cnetury. These are really products of the second phase of Ritualism than of the Oxford Movement proper. Tractarianism was first and foremost a theological, not a liturgical, movement. Keble, for example, never introduced Eucharistic vestments, or even the use of the stole, at Hursley in his thirty-odd years of ministry there. Like any other Church of England clergyman of the time of his ordination (1816) he stood at the north end in surplice, tippet, and hood. On the whole, liturgical innovation beyond what had already been done by the Caroline Divines and the Non-Jurors belongs not to Tractarianism, but to Ritualism.

The whole of the liturgical programme of the Oxford Movement could be encompassed by a single phrase - "taking the Prayer Book at its word." Thus the goals of the Oxford Fathers in terms of liturgy were to follow the Book of Common Prayer faithfully in their parishes. The acid test of Tractarianism in te early days was public recital of the Daily Offices. This never completely died out in the Church of England, but by the 1830s very few parishes took the title of the offices in the literally. As you will doubtless recall, it says "The Office of Morning/Evening Prayer daily throughout the year." The first Tractarian to reintroduce the daily Office was the Rev. Thomas Keble, John's younger brother, at Bisley c.1836. This was a completely inoffensive innovation - except perhaps to the parish clerk, who suddenly found himself much busier - and a sign that the Tractarians were serious about the liturgy.

The Tractarians also wanted to reintroduce weekly Communion, and fasting Communion. To do this, they picked up an idea that had already been introduced by Daniel Wilson, the Evangelical Vicar of Islington, who had introduced a regular 8.00am celebration of the Lord's Supper for the 'serious' members of his congregation. The Tractarians embraced this with some enthusiasm, and it soon became a characteristic of 'High Church' worship as understood by them. So much so that it became identified with them to the extent that folks thought they invented 'the early celebration.' It should be noted that the Tractarians did not encourage non-communicating attendance at Holy Communion, and as a result Tractarian parishes tended to retain Morning Prayer, Litany and Ante-Communion as the main Sunday service. The non-communicating High Celebration (few Anglicans used the word Mass in the 19th C.) was another Ritualist innovation.

Another aspect of Tractarians and the liturgy was its architectural setting. Although they were essential conservative in their attitude towards the dress of the clergy and the forms of service, they did want to see the architectural setting of Anglican worship improved. From about 1840 onwards, they put into practice the less controversial recommendations of the Cambridge Camden Society or Ecclesiological Society as it was later called. The tall box pews of the 17th and 18th centuries were abolished. The three-decker pulpit was split up into pulpit, reading desk, and lectern, all copied from the 'proper' mediaeval forms. Chancels were fitted up with choir shalls, and low walls or full blown rood screens to separate them from the nave of the church. By the 1890s there was hardly a church in England that had not had its proper Ecclesiological Society inspired restoration. Some were extremely sympathetic, others were rebuildings in disguise, but no matter how extensive they were they tended to result in what we think of as the proper Anglican/Episcopal church interior. The pews consist of several low islands divided by a centre alley and possibly alleys along the walls or side aisles. The pulpit and lectern stand left and right at the front of the nave. Beyond them is the chancel containing choir stalls, and a very prominent altar at the east end of the building raised on several steps and railed off. This plan was very successfully adopted in the USA where architects tended to feel less bound by mediaeval proportions even when using the Gothic style. They tended to widen the central nave and the chancel, thus making the building more of a hall, which fitted in with the requirement of Prayer Book services to be heard as well as seen.

The final aspect of Tractarian liturgics I want to look at is the hymn. The old High Churchmen had been a bit suspicious of hymns, which were then mainly an Evanglical thing, and tended to be rather subjective in their content. As a result, the High Churchmen stuck with metrical psalms, only slowly adopting hymns. The first locally printed hymnal used in the parish church in my home town had the whole of the New Version of the Psalms (Tate and Brady) but only a few dozen hymns. However, the Tractarians had a more positive attitude to hymns, mainly because they produced a lot of poets. The best selling book of religious verse in the nineteenth century, with around one million copies sold, was John Keble's 'The Christian Year' which provided a poem for every Sunday and Holyday in the BCP, and as meditations on other topics, such as Baptism and Holy Communion. Isaac Williams and John Henry Newman also wrote poetry, as did William and Fanny Alexander. Fanny Alexander was also a skilled translator of old Irish texts, whilst J. M. Neile did the same service for many Latin texts. The natural result was that the Tractarians began to compile hymnals, the best known of which was the original version of Hymns Ancient and Modern, first published in 1861.

The Tractarians were also enthusiastic about the choral service. Books containing the Psalms and Canticles pointed for Anglican Chant, and collections of Chants appeared. The old plainsong setting for the responses was also revived, and slowly but surely, the sung service was introduced into parish churches, even, eventually, making its way into Evangelical circles. In my home church our copies of the Parish Psalter were very dog-earred, especially in the section containing the canticles. Merbeck's setting of the Communion Service was rediscovered and adapted to the 1662 BCP, and was sung at the monthly late Communion service in many a parish, even sometimes at 8.00am on special occasions.

Lastly, I would note that singularly little liturgical, as opposed to theological, controversy attached itself to the Tractarians. They were conservative about the Prayer Book fearing that further revision would be in the wrong - i.e. a rationalist direction, though they did occasional suggest that improvements in the correct direction could be made. On the other hand, it seemed to be generally understood that their programme was simply one of obedience to the Book of Common Prayer even if it was not exactly popular with everyone. My home parish developed much along the same lines as many another parish with a Tractarian incumbant. When the Rev. George Hogarth arrived in 1858 he found Morning and Evening Prayer estaloshed at 10.30am and 3.30pm respectively; Holy Communion celebrated once a month, and a morning service every Thursday. He increased this immediately by establishing daily Morning and Evening Prayer; moved Sunday Evensong to 6.30pm; introduced Sunday School and Catechism at 2.30pm on a Sunday afternoon; gradually introducing a weekly Communion service, and improving the standard of music in the parish. By the time of his retirement some twenty-four years later, the parish had daily Matins and Evensong, and Communion on Sundays and Holydays, weekly Sunday School and Catechism, and a new organ. His successor introduced regular midweek Communions and a surpliced choir, continuing the Tractarian trajectory started by Hogarth. What my home parish never had was the late morning non-communicating High Mass. The 10.30am slot was occupied by Mattins, and briefly alternated with a Sung Eucharist before both Matins and the Sung Eucharist became weekly events in the early 60s.

One thing that is slightly disconcerting today is the number of parishes with elaborate services with ceremonials and rites not authorized in he BCP, but do not even observe the appointed Holydays, never mind have daily Morning and Evening Prayer. The structure of daily Offices and Sunday and Holyday Eucharists is one that we inherited from the Early Church, and we should do our utmost to sustain and restore it. I know this is often difficult to do today as many Continuing Anglican priests are bi-vocational, but difficulty should not exempt us from at least trying. At the very least, we should have Morning Prayer before our Sunday morning Eucharists, then move slowly forward restoring the full pattern as our parishes and missions develop. Remember that this pattern of sustained and regular worship, praise, prayer, and sacrament is the great powerhouse of the Church, and we should teach our eople to love the Daily Offices as well as the Eucharist.

The Future of Anglicanism

2011-05-31T10:15:00.000-07:00

The seeming collapse of attempts to start an Anglican Ordinariate in Canada following some unfortunate remarks by Archbishop Hepworth have got me wondering about that old question - whither Anglicanism? It seems to me that yet again, no matter how hard the Anglo-Catholics try to make themselves acceptable to Rome, they are still met with the same response - convert! I hope that those Anglo-Catholics who sincerely believe that the Pope is the Head of the Church on earth do convert, because it will simplify matters back here in Anglicanland.

In the USA it seems that there are three strands to the Continuing Anglican movement that I would loosely characterize as being Moderate Evangelical, Old High Church, and Anglo-Catholic, though I suspect that a lot of folks would not use my labels, but there you go. To a greater or lesser extent all three depend on the Church as whole having a strong ANGLICAN identity with which to interact, and react. However, Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics tend to emphasize only those elements that they like - basically the Articles in the case of the former, and the BCP and the appeal to the Fathers in the case of the latter. Old High Churchmen have the fault that they tend to be rather insular and self-sufficient - but maybe that is not altogether a bad thing.

So, in what does the Anglican identity lie?

First and foremost, the Anglican identity is an expression of the Church Catholic - that congregation formed by Jesus Christ through His Apostles to be His Body. In terms of defining what that body believes we rely on the Bible, the Creeds, the Councils of the Undivided Church. This appeal has been one that has been made by Anglicans right from the beginning. Archbishop Matthew Parker told his clergy to interpret he Articles and Injunctions 'in the most Catholic sense.' Hooker, te Caroline Divines and the High Churchmen of the eighteenth century all wrote with one eye fixed on the Early Fathers. The Oxford Movement also appealed to the Father, as did the more learned of Anglican Evangelicals. Unfortunately, modern Episcopalianism seems to regard the Fathers as some dead dude who wrote about Chrstianity a long time ago, and only reference them when it suits ther revisionist agenda.

To me, the second plank of the Anglican identity is Common Prayer. In the sequence of Reforming measures introduced between 1534 and 1553 the first BCP comes third or fourth. The idea was to put the liturgy into English; to simplify it so everyone could participate; and to cleanse it of those elements at variance with the Scriptures and the Fathers. Unfortunately, during the second phase of the Catholic Revival, some began to argue that the BCP was incomplete when compared to the modern Roman Liturgy which in their minds had become normative. This led to them adding to the BCP on their own authority - something which, from the catholic point of view, was strictly a no-no. These additions were eventually codified in the form of the English, American, and Anglican Missals, to which the Bishops wisely did NOT authorize for the use of the whole Church. At the end of the day the Catholic Liturgy of that branch of the Church Catholic denominated 'Anglican' is the Book of Common Prayer in the edition authorized by the General Synod or Convention of the Province involved.

Thirdly, the Articles of Religion. Now I know a lot of Anglo-Catholics reach for the gin when I mention the Articles, but there are one of the defining documents of the Anglican Reformation. Unfortunately, some of us have been conditioned to reject them without making a serious examnation of their contents. The major roblem comes from the fact that they dea with the controversies of the mid-sixteenth century, and their theological currency is one that we use little today, but they are none the less instructive. The first thing thing that has to be remembered is that they do not explicitly deny any doctrine maintained by the first Seven Councils. Secondly, the Church has always demanded that, like the BCP, they be interpreted in 'the catholic sense.'

Fourthly, the Anglican Continuum preserves the Apostolic Ministry of (male) deacons, priests, and bishops. Like the Roman Church we can trace the mainline our orders back through the centuries to the fourteenth century - which is a couple of hundred years further back than Rome. Furthermore we have no evidence to suggest that there was a break in the succession then, or, as the Romans allege in 1559. We can therefore regard it as reasonably certain that our Orders go back to the days when the Apostles prayered over and then laid hands upon the men they sent out as overseers, elders and servants of the Church, just as they in turn had received the Holy Spirit and been sent out by Christ Himself. However, I would at this point like to remind you that you can have the most impeccible Orders in the world, yet it is worthless unless you also believe, live and preach that Catholic and Apostolic faith that was committed to your keeping at your ordination.

What I am suggesting here is that Anglicans have an inherently Catholic identity that is not to be found in its imitation of that eccentric Communion headquarted in the Vatican, but in its own Liturgy and Articles. The future for Anglicans lies not in becoming something, but in being what we already are - the English reform of the Catholic Church. This concept of Reformed Catholicism is one that was dear to the Reformer, the Caroline Divines, the Georgian High Churchmen, the Tractarians, and to good churchmen and women in every period of the Church's history. Reformed Catholicism is also the key to our future as one strand of the Church Catholic. We need to give up being embarrassed by our Anglican-ness and proclaim that which we have received.

If I have a vision for the coming Continuing Anglican Church it is that we stop looking over our shoulders and start looking only on Jesus Christ. Less poetically, we need to stop worrying about the fact we are different to Rome or Orthodoxy and just get on with being the Catholic Church of the English (-speaking) People. Of course our apeal is wider than that, and we must always be ready to embrace those who share the Reformed Catholic ideal whatever their language, but we need to be aways mindful of the fact that our roots lie in the Church of St Patrick and St Augustine; the Venerable Bede and Alcuin; of Cranmer and Laud; Simeon and Keble, and the untold millions who have found the most perfect expression of Catholicism to lie within her walls.

After four hundred years in which we have been in some sense "the Establishment" either by law or by culture, or in both, we are now in an era where we have to make our way by our profession of the Faith once delivered to the Apostles. We need to become a Missionary Church and an Evangelizing Church that exalts Jesus Christ - 'the way, the truth and the life' - in all that we do and teach. Cleaving more closely to Christ is the only way in which we can hope to overcome the challenges posed to the Truth by both secularism and Islam.

General Convention

2011-05-14T17:52:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are interested there is a report on the 10th General Convention of the UECNA posted at http://www.uecpb.angelfire.com/GC10.html

What does not come across very well in the report is the focus that we had on Mission and Evangelism at this Convention. I believe that there are two factors behind this. The first is that there are quite a few younger clergy in the UECNA who are mission-minded, rather than maintenance-minded. This represents a major shift from three years ago. Then the 'mission-minded' felt sufficiently marginalized that a number of them left the UECNA for the REC shortly after the 9th GenCon. Secondly, I think there is a general realisation in the UECNA that being God's chosen frozen is no longer enough, we have to grow in order to survive, and that this involves a measure of adoption. Please note, that I use the word adaption not change.

In 1978, when the first bishops were consecrated for the original ACNA, secularism and media technology was still only in their first flood. Since then a lot has changed, and the tide has risen much higher. The attacks made by the tiny secularist minority in the USA have grown ever more strident, and the media - especially TV - has promoted a entertainment culture that discourages serious thought - especially about the state of one's immortal soul. This does not apply only to religion. When did you last here a politician talk in a comprehensible way about issues?

Also unhelpful has been the mega-church phenomomen, which, whilst preaching a form of Christianity, tends to eschew the intellectually difficult, and fall into step with the entertainment culture. I suspect this strategy is successful with baby-boomers who at least received a veneer of 'real religion' before the entertainment culture really began to take over. For them, the spoon feeding works, and keeps them active Christians. However, it does not tend to promote profound commitment, though there is a certain element of the Walmart effect.

However, I think those who study Christianity are beginning to realize that the mega-churches, whilst having tremendous influence do not make deep disciples. Certainly a an unscientific survey of what I loosely refer to as 'Christian spam' seems to reveal an obsession on the part of Church growth gurus with deeping discipleship. Some of the big tin shed preachers I have talked to freely admit that only 5 to 10% of their people do more than turn up on a Sunday morning. This tells us that at the moment American Christianity is probaby more characterized by its quantity than its depth. That is not necessarily a bad thing, having lived in both the UK and the USA I have to say that even a veneer of Christianity makes for a far freer society.

I suspect therefore, that there is a significant group of believers and potential believers who want to connect with something deeper than entertainment religion. This bears some superficial resemblance to the situation as American Anglicans found themselves in during the 1820s and 1830s. At that time, there was a significant group of Christians who had been touched by the Second Great Awakening, but wanted something deeper. This was precisely the era when Evangelical Episcopalianism grew expontentially within the Protestant Episcopal Church. Why?

Well, the short version is that Evangelical Episcopalian offered a heart-felt religion that did not neglect the intellect, nor tip over into mere emotionalism. It was orderly and reverent, by contrat to the extremes of revivalism. It also learned to use 'the culture' against itself. Evangelical Episcopalians made use of Prayer Meetings and Street Preaching, but they centred it all in the worship of the Church, and in faithful preaching of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. They connected the religious sentiment of the day, and harnessed it to something deeper - a presentation of Christianity which was deeper being not just Biblical, but Biblical, Creedal, and Liturgical. Anglicans are uniquely placed to supply the 'something deeper' - what we are less equiped to do is tell people about it.

So far, Continuing Anglicans have tended to remain stuck in the defensive mindset that they adopted in 1977, and have made no concerted effort to Evangelize. The prevailent belief is that we just need to continue doing what we have always done until the world comes to its senses and returns to us. Unfortunately, that is a very poor mission strategy, and something that the UECNA has decided it can no longer afford to do. Over the next six months we will be looking long and hard at Mission, and seeing where we as a church have been going wrong, and how we can do better. Hopefully that will produce a plan that we can begin to impliment next year.

One last note. As always, the UECNA GenCon was more of a family get together than a meeting. I think that we are very blessed as a church to have this freedom from rancour, factionalism, and Church politics. Long may it continue!

Cranmer - an Appreciation

2011-03-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

It seems inappropriate to let the 455 anniversary of Cranmer's execution pass without saying something about his achievements as a reformer, a liturgist, and as a theologian. Today, Cranmer and his vision of what Anglicanism should be is deeply unpopular even with those who describe themselves as 'traditionalists.' I suspect this neglect of Cranmer by many who venerate tradition are only interested in preserving "the revolution before last," which, in the case of Anglicanism, is the Catholic Revival of the late nineteenth century.

Cranmer's family had lived for several generations on the border between Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Cranmer was born in 1489 in Aslockton, Notts., then as now a small village, not far from Grantham. Cranmer's father was a yeoman farmer, a class that had grown economically important since the Black Death, and was to remain the backbone of English society until the industrial revolution. These men passed on their farms to their eldest sons, but there was little they could do for their other sons than give them a good education.

Thomas Cranmer ended up at Cambridge where he came to embrace the principles of the Reformation cause at some point in his mid-30s. Already married and widowed, Cranmer had received major orders c.1519, and was pursuing an academic career in one of the University's lesser colleges. However, the ideas he heard discussed at the White Horse Inn converted him to the reforming cause, and providence - I cannot think of a better explanation - arranged his career so that he was in an unequalled position to push the cause of reform.

Cranmer first came to the notice of Henry VIII during his attempts to secure an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Cranmer suggested putting the matter to the Universities of Europe, thus bypassing the Papcy and the Curia which were both under the control of Catherine's nephew Charles V. In return for being useful, Cranmer was made Archdeacon of Taunton, and was sent as one of Henry's representatives to the German princes. He settled in Nuremberg in 1531, and shortly afterwards married. This was an unusual step for a cleric from Catholic England, but natural enough in Lutheran Nuremberg where it seemed Cranmer anticipated spending the rest of his life. I think we can all imagine his surprise, and concern when he was recalled to England in 1533 to succeed William Warham as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Not surprisingly, Cranmer tended to lead quaite a retired life away from Court. He favoured his more rural residences as this made it possible to lead something close to a normal family life with his wife, Margaret, and their increasing brood of children. Meanwhile at Court, Thomas Cranmer did his bit as a faithful royal servant implementing the Acts of the Reformation Parliament which severed England, Ireland and Wales from the Papal obedience. He also signed off on Henry's annulment and crowned Anne Boleyn as Henry's consort in 1533. The one blot on Cranmer's career was his complicity in Henry's matrimonial adventures. However, one suspects that this was not something Cranmer lost too much sleep over given that Henry's lawyers could usually give his position an air of legal respectability.

Cranmer's ability to pilot through reform was limited whilst Henry lived. The smash and grab raid on the monasteries did not originate with Cranmer, but with Thomas Cromwell who wished to reduce the amount of property, and with it the power and influence of the Church. Cranmer's hand can be seen in the establishment of the New Foundation cathedrals - Gloucester, Chester, Peterborough, Bristol and Oxford - whose statutes placed a far more stringent requirement for preaching on the Dean and Chapter than existed in the Old Foundations. Also when it came time to reconstitute the Chapter at Canterbury - a former cathedral prior - he insisted on creating a college of preachers, funded from the old monastic revenues, which doubtless he intended to be the shock troops of the Reformation.

Cranmer's first hesitant steps towards a new liturgy came with the Litany of 1544, and his decision to make the Sarum Use standard throughout the Province of Canterbury, and possibly the whole of England in either 1534 or 1543. After Henry's death he formed a small committee to assist him with first 'The Order of Communion' which was to be inserted into the Latin Mass, and then with the first version of the Book of Common Prayer. The 1549 BCP became mandatory throughout England on June 10 1549 and marked the complete abandonment of Latin in the liturgy. However, it is a rather conservative looking document, even though on serious inspection, one has to dismiss the claims of Bishop Stephen Gardner, and modern Anglo-Catholics that the Communion service therein supports transubstantiation or consubstantiation as bogus. Cranmer's work endured mainly because of his masterly use of the English language and sound theology. It is interesting to note that those groups within Anglicanism keenest to abandon Cranmer's liturgy have also been the one's most eager to abandon Creedal Orthodoxy.

Cranmer revised the BCP again in 1551-2 this time into a more clearly reformed structure, but the actual wording changes are few and minor. The most significant being the replacement of the old words of administration with 'Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and be thankful." Cranmer's book on the doctrine of the Lord's Supper shows that he held to what he described as the doctrine of the 'true presence' as opposed to transubstaniation. Through his reading of Ratramnus and the Early Fathers, and the arguments of Nicholas Ridley, he had come to a doctrinal position close to that of Calvin - that is to say 'Receptionism.' He also gained much from his friendship with other Reformed moderates such as Martin Bucer.

Cranmer also has a measure of influence on the educations of Edward and Elizabeth, ensuring that they received a series Christian Humanist, and Protestant leaning tutors. Edward seems to have become a dedicated reformer, who doubtless would have developed into a definite Calvinist. Elizabeth, who was Cranmer's God-daughter, seems to have embraced rather more of Cranmer's outlook except in ceremonial matters.

Towards the end of his life, Cranmer's mature theology trod a via meia between Lutheranism and Calvinism. On most issues - Predestination, Baptism, the ministry, Church-state relations - Cranmer seems to have remained broadly Lutheran, but in terms of the Eucharist he had adopted a position similar to that of Calvin. Both the Forty-two Articles of 1553, which are directly Cranmer's work; and the Thirty-nine Articles of 1571, which were revised by Cranmer's protege, Matthew Parker, reflect this middle way between Lutheran and Calvinist. Cranmer's theological position can also be seen in his contributions to the Book of Homilies - a compendium of officially approved sermons - set forth in the reign of Edward VI as part of the ongoing programme of Reform.

After the accession of Mary in 1553, Cranmer's arrest and trial were to be expected. In order to secure his recantation he was placed in solitary confinement and was also a witness to the burnings of his close friends Latimer and Ridley. This has the neccessary effect on Cranmer, who broke under the strain and signed his recantation. Under normal procedures, Cranmer would have saved his skin by such a recantation, but Mary could not forget his part in the proceedings that had secured the annulment of Henry's marriage to her mother. As a result Cranmer was led out to burn on March 21st 1556 his final public act being to recant his recantation, and affirm his Protestant faith.

Cranmer is not in the ordinary sense an heroic figure, and is all the more interesting because of that. Whatever you may think of his role as a Tudor civil servant - an occupation that always makes the practicioner aquainted with forty shades of grey - one cannot fail to realise that Cranmer was one of the major architects of Anglicanism. In his reform of the liturgy, and his careful steering of a course between the competing Protestant ideologies, Cranmer laid the foundation for a national, liturgical, episcopal, Reformed Church that took its theological cue from this or that school of modern writers, but from the Scriptures and the Four Latin Doctors.

On the Fourth Day of Christmas...

2010-12-27T18:30:00.000-08:00

...we chuck out the tree and take down the lights.

Or at least that seems to be the way it is around here. This seems to me to be a pity, but I suppose it is inevitable given that most folks have been celebrating Christmas - or that great euphemism "The Holidays" since sometime around Thanksgiving. I have a suspicion a lot of people are 'Christmassed-out' long before the 25th. I sometimes wonder whether our delightfully full churches on Christmas Eve, and the relatively empty churches thereafter until the New Year are a reflect the fact folks feel they have reached the climax, and can now have a little break.

However, Christmas in the Church's calendar is a far more complicated thing. For a start, like Easterit has its time of preparation; the four Sundays of Advent in which we investigate the different ways Christ was proclaimed - for example, in Scripture and by St John the Baptist. During Advent the dominant themes are the need to reflect and make ready for the coming of the Saviour. The antipation is cranked up even further by the nine Advent antiphons ending with "O Virgin of Virgins" on the 23rd.

Then there are the two Christmas Eucharists - the early one reflecting on the historical circumstances of His birth, and then the main Mass at which St John invites us to meditate upon the mystery that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."

The next three days - St Stephen, St John Evangelist, and the Innocents Day - all have a particular connection with Christ. St Stephen was the first to give his life for the Gospel after the Resurrection; St John of all the evangelists sees deepest into the mystery of the Incarnation; and the Holy Innocents whose blood was shed because of the rage and fear of Herod who had heard that a new king, the true king, had been born.

The fact that two of three Holydays immediately associated with Christmas should concern martyrdom is a reminder that the the incarnation happens under the shadow of the Cross. Whilst the birth itself was a time of unalloyed joy, the Gospel accounts place it between two somber warnings. Firstly, if you cast your mind back to the Annunciation, the angel proclaims to the Blessed Virgin Mary that a sword shall pass through her own heart, that sword she felt almost 34 years later when she sees her Son crucified at Golgotha. Secondly, shortly after His birth the Magi bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh - the last being particularly associated with death.

The feast of the Nativity itself is followed immediately by the Martyrdom of Stephen, and then three days later by the account of the murder of the Innocents. Even the 'white' feast of St John in between is not completely untouched by persecution for the sake of the Gospel. John was exiled to Patmos for the sake of the Gospel, and there is an old tradition that someone tried to kill the Evangelist by poisoning the chalice.

In the context of our prayers on St Stephen's Day we remembered before God in our Eucharistic intentions the Nigerian Christians murdered as they attended Christmas services. A sobering reminder that men still fear and hate the Good News of Christ. The reason folks fear the Gospel so much is because it faces them with some Absolute Truths - particularly our need of God, and for the salvation that comes through Christ alone. People find it difficult to accept that they are sinners who need the grace of God, and in their denial of His grace, they are often driven to persecute those who live by His Gospel.

The Octave of Christmas closes on New Year's Day closes with the feast of the Circumcision. Modern liturgists tend to run scared from the Circumcision mainly, one suspects, because it brings them a bit too face to face with both the humanity and the Jewishness of Christ. It is a day on which one needs to remember both the fulfilment of the Old Covenant, which was so much of Christ's mission, and also give thanks for the his Holy Name, which proclaims or Salvation.

Some Thoughts on Episcopacy

2010-11-14T18:41:00.000-08:00

November 14th is the anniversary of Samuel Seabury's consecration as the first Bishop of Connecticut in 1784. He is also accorded first place in the sucession of the American Church though he did not align with the Protestant Episcopal Church until 1787.

Back in the eighteenth century, Episcopal consecrations were semi-private occasions. Seabury's took place in the large room over the bank in Aberdeen High Street which then served as St Andrew's Episcopal Kirk. The consecrations of White, Provoost, and Madison all took place in the relatively small Chapel in Lambeth Palace. This creates quite a contrast to the sort of consecrations we have seen in TEC recently - the jamboree that accompanied Ms. Glasspool's consecration in an LA area arena would not have been further from the semi-private affair at which Seabury was consecrated. The eighteenth century conception of a bishop was that of a 'Lord Spiritual' whose authority derived as much from the complicated web of rights and privileges accorded to him by law and custom as to his spiritual authority. Certain bishops - Canterbury, York and Durham, and Armagh - were great territorial magnates - who were expected to act in the government interest, and to be in London (or Dublin) during the Parliamentary season. Their spiritual functions tended to reduced to being 'Confirming and Ordaining machines.' It was not uncommon at the beginning of a bishop's tenure for him to have to make up the backlog left by his ailing predecessor, and confirmations at which several hundred candidates were presented to the bishop were not uncommon. However, above all else bishops were administrators licensing clergy, enforcing residence, administering clerical and moral discipline, and at time, cajoling vestries to repair churches.

The sort of Episcopate that Seabury, White, Provoost and Madison embarked on was different to that of both the Established Churches of England and Ireland, and that of the disestablished Scottish Episcopal Church. They lacked both the political clout of the English and Irish Bishops, and the absolute spiritual authority within their dioceses that the Scottish bishops enjoyed. They also had to work out what it meant to be a Bishop within a constitutionally governed Church.

As is so often the case, the role of an American bishop was defined by the familiar logical device of thesis; antithesis; synthesis.

The thesis seems to have been postulated by Seabury, who embraced the Scottish pattern of Episcopacy. Unlike say Pennsylvania where there was a State Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church that included both clergy and laity, Connecticut simply had an advisory council of priests. Seabury saw Church governance as a purely clerical responsibility, and acted accordingly by barring laymen from church councils. The flip side of his high view of the clerical office was that he devoted a good deal of his time to administering the neglected ordinance of Confirmation, and to examining candidates prior to ordination.

The antithesis was provided by both White and Provoost, both of whom acted much like the Commissaries of the Colonial Era. They saw themselves first and foremost as administrators, except that they did not just license clergy, they also ordained them. Confirmation would be administered to any who sought them out, but as yet they did not feel it incumbant upon them to go out on confirmation tours like their brother in New England. In addition to their clerical style, there was also a difference in the way in which they governed the Church in the States where they were bishops. White ran the Church in Pennsylvania in co-operation with the State Convention. Policy would be agreed and then implimented. Periodically, White would tour parts of his diocese ascertaining its general state, but his duties as Rector of Christ Church & St Peter, Philadelphia, kept him at home for long periods. However, he gradually embraced the more actie style of Episcopacy developed by Madison and later by Hobart.

The synthesis was provided to some extent by James Madison, Bishop of Virginia, who until his health began to decline in the late 1790s combined a little of both the Seabury and White approaches to the Episcopate. Madison toured a distinct area of Virginia each summer visiting parishes and administering confirmation. He also managed to work reasonably harmoneously with a Virginia Convention dominated by the FFVs. These landed gentlemen were hostle to 'too much bishopping' - which is probably why they chose the already overly busy Madison as their bishop. However they could accept Madison as he was one of their own and understood the complex elaionship between Church, Gentry and State in Virginia. Unfortunately for Madison, the disendownment of the Church in Virginia denied his diocese necessary funds and a serious decline set in during the mid-1790s. As his health declined, Madison largely gave up travelling, and this has led to the myth of his being a 'failed' Episcopate. It was left to the High Church Bishop Hobart and the Evangelical Bishop Richard Channing Moore to develop the Madison model of Episcopacy into the norm for the American Episcopal Church.

The traditional American model became one of the Bishop first and foremost as the chief sacramental minister of his diocese, but also as the one who put into effect the diocesan policy agreed between himself and and the Diocesan Convention. The bishop was expected to be the leader, but not a tyrant. Most of the great American bishops - the two Bishops Potter of New York, Manning - also of New York, several successive bishops of Pennsylvania during the early twentieth century, William Lawrence of Massachusetts, etc., understood this complex relationship between monarchical Episcopacy and Constitutional government and were able to bring to a high pitch of efficiency.

Sadly, today, the view of the role of bishop has changed again. The old understanding of the bishop as the 'chief priest' of the diocese has been replaced by a more secular model - that of the business world. Whilst the church, in the administration of its finances does need to embrace sound business practices, it should not allow secular management principles and ethic to become too entrenched in matters relating to mission and ministry. Sadly, the corporate church, with its boards, committees, and focus groups has become the dominant influence on the life of man dioceses. It is said of eighteenth century governments that 'politics was essentially personal' today, the personal often gets lost in amongst all the politics. I fear that the impotence of the Anglican tradition in the new mission fields of the West stems from the fact that we have organised the life out of the Church by creating so much dead bureaucracy.

The other great danger for bishops is - to borrow a word from sixteenth century polemic - 'prelacy.' The church has always had a few bishops who spent too much time standing on their dignity and paying too much attention to the outward trappings of their office. Sadly, that tendancy seems to be more marked today than ever. The world weary observation that "power corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is as true of bishops as any other class of men. As the office of a bishop has increasingly been aligned to the secular model of a CEO, so the stories of petty episcopal tyranny - the ecclesiastical equivelent of the Office horror story - seem to multiply. Bishops, especially in TEC, though we have had (more than) our share in the Continuum too. There seems to be a certain class of bishops who seem to regard it as ethical to either intimidate priests who disagree with them personally, or have their assistants do it for them. To act in such arbitary ways, often in defiance of centuries of Church tradition, seems to be a paticular malaise in those dioceses that have lost any real sense of mission.

I suspect that what the church needs now is a little dose of realism, and a return to that concept of the episcopate laid down in the Ordinal and the Constitution and Canons of the Church. The language of the Ordinal, which is largely that of Cranmer's 1553 revision, sees the role of a bishop as being that being a preacher of God's Word; a teacher and guardian of the Faith; a governor of the Church; and one to whom the work of raising up fit and proper persons for the ministry is specifically entrusted. The Constitution and Canons of Church give a framework to enable that work to be done. I suspect that any bishop who gives himself to conscientiously to fulfil those tasks will have his hands very full indeed. The words Cranmer uses to accompany the presentation of the Bible to a newly consecrated bishop are particularly important to understanding the true task of an Anglican bishop:

"Give heed unto reading, exhortation, and doctrine. Think upon the things contained in this Book. Be diligent in them, that the increase coming thereby may be evdent unto all men; for by doing them thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee. Be to the flock of Christ a shepherd and not a wolf; feed them, devour them not; hold up the weak, hal the sick, bind up the broken, bring again the outcasts, seek the lost. Be so merciful that ye be not too remiss; so minister discipline that you forget not mercy; that when the Chief Shepherd shall appear, you may receive the never-fading crown of glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

First Steps

2010-09-24T20:12:00.000-07:00

I want to take a moment and look at the mechanics of bringing together the various strands of the Continuum. I tend to see this in terms of clearing the site and laying the foundations for a reunited Continuum, and unglamourous though it is, it is essential if we are ever going to get over the past.

The first thing we need to do is deal with past grudges and unfortunate incidents. There is a lot of clinging to the past done in the Continuing Anglican world. Much of it is good in terms of hanging on to traditional theology and liturgy, but there are a lot of old grudges that are still being trotted out whenever half a dozen clergy and a bottle of gin get together. All of the Continuing Anglican jurisdictions have made mistakes in the past, and we need to 'man up' and accept our jurisdictions role in the disintegation of the original Continuum. We also need to forgive and forget the various 'sins' that the assorted jurisdictions have committed against each other. Once we have done that we can get down to the nuts and bolts of what it is going to take to get us all back together.

I see the first stage as being what I call CABC - the Continuing Anglican Bishops Conference - consisting of the bishops of those jurisdictions closest to the St. Louis Congress, and gradually expanding to incorporate more and more groups as various misunderstandings are cleared up. The first name I came up with was the Standing Conference of Anglican Bishops - but, as a former Union man, SCAB seemed, well, inappropriate. This would have a dual role. Firstly it would act as a clearing house for discussion about and actions towards unity. Secondly, it would act as a clearing house to allow clergy to transfer between jurisdictions without it causing mutual recrimination, and also impose discipline across jurisdictional lines. Too often bishops and clergy have escaped the consequences of their actions by quietly slipping away to another jurisdiction. This process has done little to promote mutual trust. Thirdly, it would facilitate joint action on matters of mutual concern, and be a forum for the bishops of the various jurisdictions to get to know one another. Nothing breeds fear and mistrust better than being strangers to one's colleagues.

There will also be a need to come up with a common Constitution and Canons. This will help dispel the notion that one jurisdiction is swallowing another. One difficulty which will have to be resolved is the balance of authority between the various Houses of Synod. At present, there are slight differences of emphasis among the various major Continuing groups, though in the final analysis we all function in much the same way.

The third string is mutual cooperation. UECNA already cooperates with the ACC and with the APCK in a number of areas, and this has helped to draw the various layfolks, clergy and bishops involved closer together. Last weekend I ordained a deacon for the UECNA, who will also serve in an APCK parish in San Diego. I am pleased to note that the local APCK clergy turned out and some old friendships were renewed. I for one, would like to see much more of this inter-jurisdictional cooperation, but there are still 'pure pond' Continuers who let their own worries and concerns (many of which are legiimate, but not important) get in the way of reunion.

The goal for the Continuum should, for the time being, to do everything together that we do not absolutely have to do apart from one another. In the meantime, let us pray, and pray hard for unity, making sure that the devil gets as little opportunity as possible to plant the seeds of mistrust. The Right Rev. Maurice Wood, C of E Bishop of Norwich back in the 1970s, used to warn his ordinands that they were "all marked men in the Devil's book." In much the same way, the Anglican Continuum is marked in the devil's book because we seek to proclaim Jesus Christ and Him crucified without compromising with the prevailent political correctness of the age in which we live. As a result of this faithfulness to Christ, our infernal adversary will do his best to make sure that we remain fragmented and disorganised. Do we really want this to happen? If not, then we need to work for unity among ourselves that the fullness of the Gospel may be proclaimed, and souls saved to the Glory of God.

The Politics of Fear

2010-09-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

I am often asked, "Why is the Continuum such a mess of different jurisdictions?" I think in the final analysis the situation is was created by two differing understandings of what it means to be a 'Continuer' and it is perpetuated by the 'politics of fear.'

As I have written about the two different approahes before I won't bore you with a reprise other than to say that the initial divisions grew out of the suspicions that grew up between the "Middle to High Church" and Anglo-Catholic factions, and could have been avoided with better leadership. The Continuing Church became divided for much the same reasons that the Vikings never built an Empire. We had leaders, but, in the case of three of the original four, leaders who pulled in different directions. This led to the creation of the UECNA, APCK and ACC. The first tends towards a 'business as usual' interpretation of the Affirmation of St Louis within the context of a predominate "middle of the road" churchmanship . The Anglican Province of Christ the King has a similar tendancy, but within the context of a more Anglo-Catholic tradition coming from its founderers many of whom were associated with the American Church Union. The Anglican Catholic Church bridges the two in terms of worship tradition, but underwent an extensive revision of its Constitution and Canons which closed a lot of legal, jurisdictional and procedural loopholes, but left other matters, such as the status of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, studeously vague. All of this backroom work was done in the context of a church which was trying to establish congregations, acquire property, and establish a diocesan structure. To my mind, much of the work on the Canons (as opposed to the Constitution)could and should have been postponed until the church had achieved a measure of organisation stability. With hindsight (which as the song says 'is always 20-20) it seems to me that there was some significant misdirection of effort in the period 1979-1984 which may, and I stress, may have helped divide the Continuum. (I should perhaps add at this point, just so that you are all absolutely clear on this, that I have absolutely no animus against the ACC, especially as presently constituted. I was ordained in the ACC and only left because the Bishop of the Diocese in which I served had a high peculiar interpretation of the ACC Constitution and Canons.)

Having arrived at the point where the Continuum was divided, then the 'politics of fear' very largely took over. Although attempts at reconciliate were made, ultimately, what took over, and continues to divide the Anglican Continuum is what one might call "the fear of the other fellow." This is the down side of the sort of self-reliance that the Continuum has bred, and it tends to stop all attempts at union with negotiation sooner or later.

As a whole, the Continuum needs to get away from the 'politics of fear', and it will only do so if the bishops of the UECNA, APCK, and ACC meet on a regular basis. Unfortunately, that is not happening, and I think it is time that the bishops took note that, on the whole, the laity move between parishes in the different jurisdictions quite happily. They only note only that St. B's is a bit higher or lower, or a bit bigger or smaller, than St A's where they normally worship. Anecdotally, quite a few of the laity don't know which group their parish is in without looking it up. They are 'Anglicans' - they know who their bishop is and that is about it.

The paranoia about "the other fellow" seems to be largely a clergy thing. Though in all fairness I should perhaps note that there have been enough 'inter-jurisdictional incidents' for this paranoia to have some basis in fact. However, we need to forgive and forget, and in some cases a few well chosen words of apology would not go amiss either.

For the Continuum to survive into its third and fourth generations we to achieve a jurisdictional unity which reflects our unity of faith. That is the great task - after Mission and the Re-evangelisation of America - that faces us in the next ten years.

The Unity Problem

2010-07-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

I have to be quite honest and say that, in human terms, I do not see there ever being a unified Continuing Anglican Church mainly because of the lack of agreement about what constitutes Anglicanism. This problem actually predates the emergence of Continuing Anglican in the 1960s and 70s, and probably goes back a century before that to when the "Rits" and the "Rats" were fighting for inclusion within the Anglican and Episcopal Churches.

Prior to 1833 there was pretty broad agreement as to the doctrinal position of the Church of England and its descendents. Anglicans were, to borrow a phrase from Lutheran historiography "Evangelical Catholics." The Evangelical party placed emphasis, obviously, on the Evangelical side of that inheritance, and the "High Church" party on the Catholic. The old Low Churchmen, the Latitudinarians, were really concensus protestants who, for political and theological reason chose ot to push Anglican distinctiveness and represented the main challenge to orthodoxy, but since the 1760s they had slowly declined into insignificance.

The real fun starts in the 1850s and 60s when the Ritualists and Liberals start to gain a following. The early Ritualists were, for the most part, traditional High Churchmen who wished to revive disused ceremonies. They had not yet developed the "advanced" notions of full-blown Anglo-Papalism which copied post-reformation Roman Catholic devotions to "tart up" the rather dowdy reality of Anglican worship.

On the other hand, the Victorian Liberal was an optimistic beast who believed that religion could be made scientific provided rigid adherence to the old Orthodoxies were not insisted upon. Chief among the leaders of Victorian Liberalism was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster in the 1860s and 70s, who believed that in order to be credible, Anglicanism had to slough off superstition and outmoded orthodoxies, and embrace a sort of religious Darwinism. Dean Stanley was also aware of the fact that the "superstition" of Ritualism could be used as a Trojan Horse to encourage Parliament to loosen the terms of subscription so that Liberalism could grow within the Church.

Stanley's "sotto voce" campaigning among the political elite achieved its aim in 1871 with the so-called "Shortened Services Act." This made some inconsequential changes to the 1662 BCP, but also went along with a measure that loosened the terms of subscription. Before 1871, ordinands had to subscribe that the Articles as being "agreeable to Scripture" i.e. that the Articles of Religion reflected Biblical Christianity. After 1871, ordinands were required only to "affirm" that they contain nothing contrary to Holy Scripture. This loosening of the terms of subscription was a far more effective way of undermining the authority of the Thirty-nine Articles than the tortured logic of John Henry Newman's Tract XC, and the looser terms of subscription did indeed make the Church safe for Liberalism.

One paradoxical result of this loosening of the terms of subscription was that as Ritualism morphed into modern Anglo-Catholicism. The extremists began to abandon the traditional Anglican standards of the Book of Common Prayer and the Articles of Religion. The BCP was overlaid with devotions imported from contemporary Roman Catholic practice, and the XXXIX Articles were increasingly seen as "an historical document" that could be largely disgarded, except as a civil requirement for those being ordained. The Bishops pretty much blew their chance of containing Anglo-Catholic disobedience to the Canons of the Church of England by going along with Disraeli's "Public Worship Regulation Act, 1873." This attempted to strangle Ritualism by legal means, but its major flaw was that it set up a semi-secular court to adjudicate ritual cases. This gave the Ritualists, who stood for their own peculiar version of the separation of Church and State, the perfect excuse for ignoring the new Court. The new court, which replaced the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was seen as a seculiar court that was meddling in affairs beyond its competence. Unfortunately, so far as ritual (more accurately, ceremonial) matters were concerned, that level of competence was pretty low. The new court even managed to reverse some of the decisions of the Judicial Committee had made on the basis of the Ornaments Rubric, and Caroline practice. Prior to 1867, the Judicial Committee as successor to the old Court of Delegates had been pretty successful in keeping the liturgical peace if only because the Ritualists recognized that it was a Church Court of sorts. Two or three bishops usually served on the Judicial Committee when ecclesiastical cases came up, so they could not dismiss it as a mere secular tribunal. The worst result of the Public Worship Regulation was that it made "white martyrs" out of Ritualist priests who would rather go to prison for contempt of court than give up their ceremonial. As a result, this attempt at governmental enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline broke down entirely. Needless to say, a good deal of liturgical chaos followed.

Eventually, Archbishop E. W. Benson stepped in and used his authority as Primate of All England to take one particularly controversial case - that against the Bishop of Lincoln, Edward King - into his own jurisdiction. Benson's decision was to put an end to the use of the Pubic Worship Regulation Act. The PWR Act was quietly repealed a few years later, but by then it was impossible to repair the damage done to ecclesiastical discipline. However, Archbishop Benson's methodology had proved correct. Anglo-Catholics might question his decision, but they could not, without betraying their own principles deny his authority to make it.

In the end, Benson's judgement was all but an acquital for the Bishop of Lincoln, but it came too late to prevent the radicalization of the Anglo-Catholic movement. By the 1920s, Anglo-Catholicism had embarked on a programme to remodel the Church of England. Bishop Frank Weston called on his fellow Anglo-Catholics to "fight for their Tabernacles" but a more sinister development was the gradual replacement of the official Book of Common Prayer by the English Missal, and the Anglo-Papalist parishes where children were taught the 'Penny Catechism' not the Catechism of the Church of England. To many moderate churchmen, Anglo-Papalism was the cuckoo in the nest, but ecclesiastical discipline had so thoroughly broken down that there was little the bishops could do except boycott disobedient parishes and grumble about those priests under their authority who were "more Roman than the Pope." The Anglo-Papalist priest who said his Mass in Latin, ignored his Bishop, and tried to be as Roman as possible often had his bacon saved by a church patronage system that allowed laymen to appoint parish priests of their own choosing. This gave them considerable protection for episcopal attempts at discipline.

The PECUSA had nowhere near the same problems with Ritualism as the Church of England. Being an unestablished Church, American Anglo-Catholics could not argue that PECUSA's ecclesiastical courts were "secular tribunals" with no authority in church disciple, and after 1885, having seen severalattempts at placing Canonical restrictions on ceremonial fail. The Bishops then seem to have adopted a policy of trying to kill Anglo-Catholicism with kindness. Only the worst offenders ever got into trouble with the Bishops, and sometimes, when faced with Anglo-Catholic disobedience, the bishops would turn a blind eye, or seek to find a compromise. Generally speaking, even though Anglo-Catholics did occasionally feel they got a raw deal from their bishops, there was nowhere near the level of acrimony there had been in England. The Episcopal system of parishes electing their Rectors, rather than having them appointed by the Bishop or a Lay Patron as was the case in England, also served to damp down controversy. It was only when a parish unsuspectingly called a Ritualist that there was a "flare up."

However, American Anglo-Catholicism still developed in a way that made it a church within the Church. Anglo-catholics supplemented the BCP with unofficial prayers and devotions. This process finally culminated in the production such unofficial liturgical books as the American Missal, the Anglican Missal (American Edition), and the Anglican Breviary. These came to supplant the official Book of Common Prayer in the more enthusiastically Anglo-Catholic parishes. American Anglo-Catholicism also increasingly ignored not just the XXXIX Articles, but much of the Anglican theological tradition. Francis Hall's "Dogmatic Theology" represents this progressive rejection of the Protestant tradition in Anglicanism, and presents Anglican theology as being a species of Old Catholicism in which the achievements of the Reformers are often damned with faint praise.

Predictably, when the wheels fell off the Episcopal Church's Wagon in the radical sixties there were two differing versions of conservative Anglicanism looking for a way to perpetuate themselves. Both could agree on the centrality of Scripture, the three Creeds, and the Early Fathers and Councils, but were at odds about the degree to which the Reformation tradition should be perpetuated. One group, believing that the Elizabethan Settlement had failed, wanted to perpetuate traditional Anglo-Catholicism with only limited accomodation to those who were not prepare to go along with the whole programme. The other wished to perpetuate a pre-1960s Episcopalianism that would be mainly Central Churchmanship, but would encompass Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical minorities.

Sadly, after the St Louis Congress, these competing visions failed to coexist within the new church. Eventually schism resulted, and the situation was further complicatated by the existence of pre-1977 Continuing Anglican groups that had been largely ignored by the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen at the time of the St Louis Congress.

Inspite of the fact that there are now six major and several dozen minor Continuing Anglican jurisdictions within the USA, there are only really two versions of Continuing Anglicanism. The first step to unit has to be getting all the jurisdiction that share "Vision A" together, and likewise all the churches that share vision "B." After that has been achieved we can then explore the potential for vision "A" and vision "B" to come together in one church. At the moment, we are wading through alphabet soup and not dealing the different visions that produced it in the first place. Too often in the past we have tried to ignore the theology and treat our Continuing Anglican divisions as being purely political. As a result, we have had even more divisions. So let's get real here. We need need to first get to grips with what we mean by Anglican and Anglicanism, and then deal with the political stuff.

In the final analysis it may well be that the two visions of what Continuing Anglicanism are indeed incompatible. If that proves to be the case, let us be honest, and have two continuing churches which love and respect one another, rather than attempt a forced marriage between ultimately incompatible visions.

The Scottish Influence on American Anglicanism

2010-07-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

The first thing that I have to say is that this is not just another "Samuel Seabury and all that" article, though he will feature later on. The Scottish influence on American Anglicanism is wider and deeper than that mainly due to the political forces at work in Scotland, and the difficulty of recruiting clergy for the Colonies.

When the Bishop of Edinburgh declined to give allegiance to William of Orange (ironically, I am writing this on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne) he left the door open for the replacement of Episcopalianism with Presbyterianism as the form of governance for the Church of Scotland. Although in some places the old Episcopalian clergy could fly under the radar and retain their parishes, in other places, especially in the Lowlands they were "rabbled out" by the Presbyterians. Some went underground, some went to England, and others to America. These became the first wave of Scottish Episcopal clergy to come to the aid of the Church in the American Colonies.

Perhaps the best know of this first wave is the Rev'd James Blair, the Bishop of London's Commissary for Virginia 1689-1743. Blair was born and educated in Scotland and ordained in the Episcopal Church. He gained the confidence of Henry Compton, the Bishop of London, and was sent out to Virginia to act as the bishops agent in that Colony. His major influence came not so much through the Church as through his Presidency of William and Mary College where he had a hand in the education of several generations of Virginia ordinands.

Three other names among the early Commissaries suggest Scottish origins. These are Alexander Garden, Jacob Henderson, and Archibald Cummings, but I have not yet got around to tracking down any biographical information about them.

The second wave of Scottish Episcopal clergy probably came to America in the wake of the 1715 Rising - a period when things were made very difficult for Scottish Episcopalians due to their known Jacobite sympathies. However, the evidence here is harder to track. It was in this period too, that a pair of Non-Juring Bishops were sent to the American Colonies in the hope of creating an independent Anglican presence in bishopless America. Unfortunately for them, American Anglicans preferred bishopless legitimacy to a Non-Juror Episcopate.

The third generation of Scottish clergy included men like William Smith of Maryland, who were the descendents of Scottish colonists. There were also some Scottish clergy who found it convenient to leave for America after the 1745 Rising. It seems that some of these dispossessed Episcopalian clergy joined the ranks of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel's Missionaries in New England spreading the Scottish version of the High Church tradition there.

Although the numbers of Scottish clergy serving in the American Church was never large, it was enough to create an awareness of the fact that - firstly, it was possible for Anglicans to survive without the Establishment; and secondly, that there was an independent Church in Scotland with bishops. Also, there was just enough Scottish influence in New England to give a distinct High Church edge to the Anglican Church in those parts, and to create an indigenous High Church party with followers in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.

So, what happened to the Scottish Episcopal Church in the meantime?

After years of proscription under William and Mary, Queen Anne granted toleration to the Scottish Episcopalians early in her reign. This put the Scottish Episcopalians under the same disabilities as English Dissenters, but it was a step forward. A few years later, in 1712, the UK Parliament passed an Act allowing the creation of "Qualified Chapels" in Scotland which would allow Scottish congregations to use the 1662 BCP under the ministry of English or Irish ordained clergy.

On the other hand, the Jacobite element accepted their second class status, and maintained both their independence and their links with the English Non-Jurors. Unlike the Qualified Congregations, there was little, at least at first, to distinguish the Scottish Episcopalians from their Presbyterian neighbours when it came to worship. The "Piskies" service consisted of metrical psalms, a reading, a prayer, and a sermon like that of the Kirk, but unlike the Kirk, they used the Lord's Prayer and the Doxology every week.

After about 1700, the English BCP began to gain ground among Scottish Episcopalians, but they did not feel bound to observe it strictly. Thus, they were able to participate in the liturgical experiments of their Non-Juror colleagues in England. The first Non-Juror "Scottish Liturgy" or "Scottish Communion Office" appeared around 1717, with updated versions appearing in 1746 and 1764. These were printed as "wee bookies" to be used alongside the English BCP - a tradition that continued until the Edwardian era. The main feature of the Scottish Liturgy was the long Canon based on Eastern Orthodox models, consisting of both he Eucharistic Prayer and the Prayer for the Church. The Scots also included an epiclesis - an Invocation of the Holy Spirit - in the Prayer of Consecration.

However, inspite of their liturgical creativity, they were fighting a loosing battle. The limited Toleration granted in 1706 was diminished after both the 1715 and 1745 Risings. Under George I there was also a very real attempt to promote the erection of Qualified Chapels to syphon away middle class Episcopalians from the Non-Jurors. A tactic that was reasonably successful in the Lowlands. However, the Non-Juring Scottish Episcopalians survives - especially around Aberdeen.

Where Episcopalian Meeting Houses were built in the eighteenth century they were made to look like barns, or cottages so that they would not attract unwelcome attention from government troops. On the whole this worked well, but when Butcher Cumberland's troops were making reprisals after Colloden, Episcopal meeting houses were a favourite target. A large number of Episcopal priests were imprisoned on, often trumped-up, charges of sedition, and several were executed for acting as chaplains to the Jacobite Army in the '45.

When grudging toleration returned again following the 1745 Rising it was under very restrictive conditions. Just as the Government tried to ban the kilt and the Great Highland Bagpipes, they also tried to make Episcopalianism impossible. For example, no Episcopal Minister could preach to a congregation of more than four people outside of his own family. This led to a new form of creativity - how to dodge the regulations! In many places Episcopalians met in a cottage with the minister and his family in the hallway, and the rest of the congregation gathered in the other rooms listening through the doorways. In others, the chapel was divided with glass and wood partitions so that each pew was a "room." No matter how hard the Hannoverians tried, the Episcopalians would not conform, though, by the 1780s it was reduced to a mere four or five bishops, forty clergy, and a similar number of congregations mainly in the northeast of Scotland.

After trying unsuccessfully to obtain consecration in England, Samuel Seabury (1729-1796) came to Aberdeen looking for the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Some accounts say that he did this on the advice of either Dr. Horne (later Bishop of Norwich) who was sympathetic to the Scottish Church, others on the then young Dr. Routh, but scholars today seem to agree that this was the agreed "Plan B" before Seabury left Connecticut.

The Scottish Bishops drove a reasonably bargin with Seabury. Before his consecration he agreed to labour behind the scenes to introduce the Scottish liturgy into America. Seabury was also to push the case for the American Episcopal Church to recognise the Scottish Episcopal Church. Therefore, Seabury's consecration took place on 14th November 1784 in St Andrew's Church, which was housed over a bank in Aberdeen High Street. Bishops Skinner, Kilgour, and Petrie acting as his consecrators.

On his return to Connecticut, Seabury organised his diocese along Scottish lines. Seabury toured his diocese periodically, he called clergy-only Synods to determine policy, and replaced the English Communion service with his own version of the Scottish Liturgy. He also entered into tortuous negotiations with the Protestant Episcopal Church organising in the Mid-Atlantic and Southern States. A dialogue which was not made any easier by Seabury's Tory past, and clericalist outlook.

It was probably providential that the Right Rev. William White of Philadelphia was the dominant influence in the new PECUSA. The other English consecrated bishop, Provoost of New York, hated Seabury's guts, and if he had been the Presiding Bishop we might have ended up with regional Episcopal Churches. Eventually Bishop White brokered a deal whereby the Diocese of Connecticut and its bishop could come into the General Convention on generous terms. White encouraged the replacement of English Prayer of Consecration by that of the Scottish Liturgy in the new American BCP. He also revised the PECUSA Constitution to incorporate an Episcopal veto - which was a further accomodation to Seabury's views. Lastly, White pushed for recognition of the Scottish Church alongside the Estabished Churches of England and Ireland as fellow Protestant Episcopal Churches. White also agreed to seat Seabury in the House of Bishops, despite Provoost's strident objections to the propriety of accepting his Seabury's Non-Juror orders. On the other hand, Seabury remained uncomfortable with the presence of the laity in the General Convention, and with the democratic nature of the new Church.

Such had been the depth of Seabury's objections to the proposed Constitution of the Protestant Episcopal Church that he had attempted to get further bishops conscrated in Scotland. This would have enabled him to "go it alone" by forming a New England Church independent of that of the Middle and Southern States. However, the Scots, following the death of the Young Pretender, were in the process of making their peace with the British Government. The Scots' refusal to consecrate more bishops for America finally gave Seabury a powerful reason to make peace with the Protestant Episcopal Church.

One final point that has to be ade is that William White and William Smith were not altogether without Scottish influences. For example, one characteristic White decision - to create a House of Bishops with a Presiding Bishop rather than an Archbishop - finds its precedent in the Scottish House of Bishops presided over by the Primus. White was also open to making real changes, not just political ones, to the English BCP. One suspects that it was this openness on the part of Bishop White and Dr. Smith that allowed the American BCP to develop as a compromise betwen the English and Scots traditions.

Oddly, the Scottish Episcopal Church also had to make its own compromise with Church of England influences in order to achieve peace. In order to have the Penal Laws removed, the Scottish Episcopal Church had to agree to pray for King George. Later they accepted the English BCP and the Thirty-Nine Articles to allow the Scottish Church to absorb the Qualified Chapels. So like the Episcopal Church in America, the Scottish Episcopal Church found itself reconciling Scottish Non-Juror and English influences to produce a reinvigorated local Church.

One enduring legacy of the relationship between Seabury and the Scottish Bishops has been the bonds of affection that have existed between Scottish and American Episcopalians. It is sad to see both churches sobadly infected with liberalism today, but it remains the case that the old Episcopal tradition, as it stood before the invasion of secular humanism from 1960 onwards, is a strong a vigourous expression of Reformed Catholic Christianity. In order for Continuing Anglicanism to survive it is extremely important that Continuing Anglicans return to that tradition, rather than that of Revivalist Protestantism, or Rome.

A Broad Church

2010-07-02T13:09:00.000-07:00

Growing up in the UK, I got quite used to the idea of Evangelicals, Central Churchmen and Anglo-Catholics rubbing along in a certain sort of creative tension. Anglicans were used by the Thirty-nine Articles, the BCP, and the form of ministry, and although there were times when the Evangelicals and the Anglo-Catholics were on screaming terms rather than speaking terms we respected each other even when we thought the other chap was barking mad. Unfortunately the last thirty years have been so traumatic that the Church has become fragmented, and as a result, we need to learn to live toether again.

The Revisionist agenda - women's rights, gay rights, theological revisionism - has polarized the Anglican tradition Revisionist and Conservative camps that really have very little to say to one another. They do not have the same way of doing the theology. Conservatives look at Scripture, then with the help of the Early Fathers and Reason fathom out what is orthodoxy. The more extreme Revisionists start from the position that there is no orthodoxy, but God speaks anew to every generation, and that Scripture, the Fathers are relics of the past that need to be reinterpreted (rewritten?) to reflect modern understandings. It is very difficult to have a debate when you cannot even agree on the rules of engagement.

To my mind, the more sinister is the wedge that has been driven between the Evangelical Anglican and Anglo-Catholic traditions. Both groups accept the authority of the Canonical Scriptures, the Creeds, the historic male Episcopate, and the first four Councils; both are theologically conservative, and both are profoundly concerned with the salvation of souls. This has increasingly pushed them into differing strands of extra-mural Anglicanism - Evangelicals into AMiA, and Anglo-Catholics into the Continuum. For me, the Central Churchman, this is a disaster because in order to be fully itself Anglicanism needs to breath with both lungs - the Catholic and the Reformed. The Evangelicals need to the Anglo-Catholics to hold their feet to the fire about the Fathers, Councils, and Apostolic Ministry, and the Catholics need the Evangelicals to remind them of the centrality and sufficiency of Scripture. When each of the three strands of Anglicanism tries to live on its there is always a danger that it will become a parody of itself.

The fact that we have to some extent grown apart and become astranged means that bring conservative Anglicans back together is going to be a long process. In the mean time, even though we choose to work in different jurisdictions, we should perhaps seek out those from other traditions within Anglicanism and listen to them; not to be converted to their position, but to allow their insights to broaden our perceptions. There is an old adage that "the Church that lives by itself will die by itself," and there is a very great danger that by abandoning the "broadness" of the Anglican tradition we Continuing Anglicans will all somehow cease to be Anglican. So often Christianity - especially Anglican Christianity - is about living with the paradoxes, the greatest of which is the paradox of grace - we are sinners, yet justified. Anglicans live with another paradox - we are "reformed and yet catholic," or, if you prefer, "catholic, yet reformed." This tension between Catholic and Reformed is what has made Anglicanism so creative, and so attractive to so many people. You do not have to choose between the insights of the Reformation and the Catholic tradition, you can embrace both - provided that you can cope with the mess that that sometimes creates.

The Irish High Church Tradition

2010-06-23T22:51:00.000-07:00

It might come as a surprise to those who know a little about the Church of Ireland to know that there was a High Church tradition in Ireland. The main reason for this has to be the post-disestablishment Canons which clamped down on all and any attempt at making ritual innovations. However, due to its lack of liturgical hang-ups other than following the BCP, Tractarianism found a home in Ireland.

The best know exponants of the Tractarian tradition on the Irish bench were Richard Chenevix Trench 1807-1887 (Archbishop of Dublin 1861-1886) and William Alexander 1824-1911 (Derry and Raphoe 1867-1894; Armagh 1894-1910). Both were minor poets, and both had picked up the "high seriousness" of Tractarianism during their times in the English University. Of the two, William Alexander seemed to connect more easily with Irish Clerical life. His ministry at Fahan in Co. Donegal, his happy marriage to hymnodist Cecil Frances Alexander, and sunny nature made him very popular. The more "English" Trench was somewhat disliked in Dublin, where the majority of enthusiastic Churchmen would have preferred an Evangelical. Both worked quietly to broaden the outlooks of their dioceses, though it has to be said that Trench was the more successful in promoting "Church Ideals."

Trench's time in Dublin saw the establishment of three "Anglo-Catholic" parishes - St Bartholomew's, Dublin; and St John's, Sandymount; and to a lesser extent, Christ Church, Leeson Park; which joined All Saints', Grangegorman, as exponants of the Tractarian tradition in Ireland. All three had daily Communion, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer whilst keeping just inside the ceremonial restrictions then current in the Church of Ireland. They maintained the North end position at Holy Communion; lit the altar candles only for the purposes of giving light; but also scheduled Confession. Periodically one of them would "get brave" and challenge the interpretation of the rubrics, but such attempts usually resulted in a case being brought in the Court of the General Synod.

This brings me to the most influential of Irish High Churchmen - John Allan Fitzgerald Gregg (1873-1961) a member of the firm of "Gregg, Son and Grandson, Bishops to the Church of Ireland!" His uncle and grandfather were Evangelicals, but J.A.F. was born and educated in England and picked up Tractarian and Anglo-Catholic ideas both at Bedford School and at Cambridge. However, rather than stay in England and become a "spike," he decided to go to back to his family's native Ireland where he was ordained in the Diocese of Down and Connor, and Dromore. Curacies in Ballymena and Cork ensued, then a spell as Rector of Blackrock 1906-11, then four years as Divinity Professor at TCD before election as Bishop of Ossory, Leighlin and Ferns at the early age of 42. Translation to Dublin followed in 1920; then to Armagh in 1939, where he stayed until his retirement in 1959, aged 85.

One painful aspect of his ministry in Dublin was having to adjudicate the cases brought against two of the High Church parishes in Dublin. The first involved St Bartholomew's, Dublin, where C. B. Moss (yes, that C. B. Moss!) was Curate Assistant, and the second involved St John's, Sandymount. In both cases, Archbishop Gregg upheld the Canons of the Church of Ireland whilst conceeding lesser points to the rectors of the respective churches. Gregg himself thought the Canons too restrictive, but with his respect for law, he was not going to engage in any sort of prophetic activism.

Known to his clergy as "The Marble Arch" Gregg appeared in public to be aloof and self-contained. This was a by-product of the Tractarian seriousness that he absorbed school and university. In private he could be a warm and approachable man - especially in his later years. He was probably at his best when dealing with clergy. Despite his austere appearence and manner, he was often very compassionate with his clergy who experienced difficulties, and he took a great deal of time and effort with his ordinands, as one of my own mentors could testify.

Gregg's variety of High Churchmanship resembled that of Gore and the "Lux Mundi" school. He was prepared to accept the positive contribution of Biblical Scholarship and acknowledge the role of history in shaping the theology and institutions of the church, but was unyielding in his adherence to the Sacraments, to the Apostolic ministry, and to Tractarian spirituality.

He was particularl vehement in his defense of the apostolic ministry and led the charge against Archbishop d'Arcy's attempts to reconcile Anglicans and Presbyterians in 1934. Later, in 1948, he was also distinctly cool towards the Church of South India Scheme. For Gregg, the integrity of the Apostolic ministry of bishop, priest and deacon was non-negotiable, and he was not ariad to take an unpopular position in order to maintain it.

Gregg was twice considered for English bishoprics. Firstly in 1938 as a serious candidate as successor for Hensley Henson as Bishop of Durham, and less seriously as a candidate for York or Canterbury in 1942 and 1945. It is unlikely that Gregg would have accepted such a promotion, as, after some initial pangs for academic life in Cambridge, he had become so much part and parcel of the Irish Church. However, it also shows the seriousness with which English Churchmen and politicians regarded him.

Gregg finally retired from Armagh in 1958 and was succeed by the well regarded, James McCann of Meath. In 1969 George Simms, another High Churchman with a fascination for literature succeeded to the primacy, and finally managed to liberalize the ceremonial Canons that had caused Gregg so much heartache forty years earlier.

Because of the sober tradition of the Irish Church, Anglo-catholicism there has always been a matter there of belief not ceremonial. This is completely in accord with what the Tractarians believed and taught, but confusing to those who are tempted to mistake the right vestments for the right beliefs. At the end of the day what really matters is what one believes.

Why the Big Fuss about 1549?

2010-06-12T21:03:00.000-07:00

This week past saw the 461st anniversary of the First BCP, that of 1549. It was used for a mere three years and five months before being replaced by that of 1552, which in all essential respects, is the one still used by the Church of England today. At least, in the odd places that have nt substituted "Comic Washup" - oops, I mean, Common Worship!

Whilst the anniversary is an important one, I do not quite understand the modern Anglo-Catholic enthusiasm for it. For a start, if they think that Cranmer's 1549 BCP allows more mediaeval teachings about the Eucharist than its successor then they are mistaken, it is just as clear in its repudiation of mediaeval Eucharistic theology as its successor. On the other land, the 1549's structure is more traditional; more obviously derived from the Sarum Missal, which preceded it. Its real strength, from the Anglo-Papalist point of view, is that the 1549 BCP can be more successfully "spun" than its successors, as Cranmer himself soon realised.

This brings me to what is now a half forgotten controversy - that between Stephen Gardiner, the Henrician Catholic Bishop of Winchester, and Cranmer himself about Eucharistic doctrine. This developed into a pamphleteering slug-fest that occupied the leaders of both the conservative and reforming factions of the Church of England throughout 1550 and 1551. Gardiner saw the 1549 as being capable of traditional interpretation, accepting the BCP whilst pushing the mediaeval Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the Mass. Cranmer, nettled firstly by what he saw as Gardiner's erroneous doctrine, and secondly, by his "bending" of Cranmer's own BCP to support his teaching, delivered a weighty defense of the Reformed Eucharistic doctrine.

The early English Reformed doctrine of the "true Presence" was based on the writings of Ratramnus - a ninth century monk of Corbie - via Nicholas Ridley, and emphasized the presence of Christ in the Supper, at the expense of his presence in the elements. Also, pushed onwards by the (mainly) constructive criticism of his Reformed colleagues, Cranmer also began to prepare a revision of the Book of Common Prayer. This appeared at All Saintstide 1552 and gave more explicit litugical form to Cranmer's Eucharistic theology.

McCullough in his biography of Cranmer, argues convincingly that the 1549 was meant to be transitional. However, I still suspect that its replacement's preparation was accelerated partly because of the controversy with Gardiner, and possibly because of Edward VI's declining health. One thing that is very prominent in the second book of 1552 is revised structure of the Communion service. Gone is the quasi-traditional structure of the 1549, and in its place comes a service which is clearly focussed on the act of Communion - to the point of actual interupting the Eucharistic Canon so that priest and people can receive. Whilst this layout is highly unorthodoxy liturgically, it is extremely effective at a service at which most of the congregation receives Communion. Hearing the prayer of Oblation after Communion having received the gifts, and with the elements on the altar table, makes one acutely aware of being both a partaker of the offering and also of being offered as part of the "reasonable, holy and living sacrifice." Cranmer's doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice, rather than being absent as some reason, took the form of the Eucharist being a memorial of the one perfect, all-sufficient sacrifice, and also an offering up as ourselves and our lives, sanctified by Christ's sacramental Body and Blood, as a sacrifice to God. This offering of "ourselves, our souls and bodies" is the response of faith-filled hearts to the love of Christ.

The two subsequent English BCPs - 1559 and 1662 - retained the 1552 as their basis, but introduced more traditional wording and ceremonial. The 1559 prefixed the 1552 words of administration with the traditional "The Body (Blood) of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life," and allowed the use of the traditional Eucharistic vestments and wafer bread. The 1662 revision reintroduced the offertory with both the alms and the bread and wine being presented at the altar. In Ireland, where the 1926 revision of the BCP chose to retain the 1552/1662 form of the Communion service, a further restoration takes place in the form of a rubric allowing both the prayers of Oblation and Thanksgiving to be said after Communion. This approach was also adopted by Archbishops Fisher and Garbett in their "Shorter Prayer Book" of 1948. These revisions served to balance the Memorial, Communion, and Sacrifical elements of the BCP Commnion rite.

Apart from a few Anglo-Catholic parishes and the odd historical reenactment, 1549 remained pretty much a dead letter. However, 1549 did influence the Scottish BCP of 1637, the "Durham Book" revision of 1661, and the eighteenth century Non-Juror revisions where it plays second fiddle to Eastern Orthodox influences. However, inspite of having received a decent burial in the archives, it was exhumed in 1949 just in time for the liturgical revisions of the 1960s, and the controversies of the 1970s.

As a result, it found its way into the Affirmation of St Louis, perhaps as part of the "Anglo-Catholic Ecumenicism" that also led to the seven councils and seven sacraments provisions in that document. Perhaps it was felt that it might be more acceptable in some future reproachement with Orthodoxy than 1662 or 1928, but in truth, Western Rie Orthodoxy has tended to work from the American BCP or the Non-Juror Liturgy of 1712.

I cannot help thinking that the "canonizing" of the 1549 BCP alongside the American 1928, which embodies both the Scottish and Anglo-Irish traditions whilst favouring the former, and the Canadian 1962, which also compromises between the Scottish and Anglo-Irish traditions whilst favouring with the latter, was yet another piece of invisible mending intended to force the Continuing Movement into a "Catholic restorationalist" path than maintaining Classical Anglican/Caroline High Church line of development. It would certainly have been more in line with the historical mainstream of Anglicanism to have "canonized" the 1662 BCP, or, if the Black Rubric really is that much of a problem and not just a shibboleth, the 1559 version of the same. Certainly, the adoption of the 1549 BCP had the effect of shutting the door of the Continuing Church Movement to mainstream Anglican Evangelicals, as well as proving to be an unwelcome additional burden to those of us who hold to the Caroline tradition.

Let me be clear, I am not proposing that we repudiate the Affirmation of St Louis, I am suggesting that we see it for what it truly is, a flawed document. The Affirmation both successfully defines the central points of Continuing Anglican Movement by repudiating the modernist errors that destroyed ECUSA, but also attempts to redefine the Anglican tradition by embracing mediaeval Catholic elements rejected at the Reformation and by the Caroline Divines. In choosing to retain subscription to the 1928 Book Of Common Prayer and the Articles of Religion, the United Episcopal Church of North America returned to something close to the tradition Church of England (and for that matter, Ireland) manner of defining itself. I also believe it may also have been a tacit protest against the revisionist elements within the Affirmation of St Louis.

Some thoughts about Morning Prayer

2010-05-29T21:07:00.000-07:00

The last forty years have seen the almost complete disappearence of Morning Prayer as the principal act of public worship in Anglican Churches. It was almost as though the Liturgical Movement, which in Anglican circles tends to be dominated by Liberal Catholics, had set up Morning Prayer and Holy Communion in opposition to one another rather than as complimentary acts of worship. The battle cry of the "Lord's service on the Lord's Day" was a very seductive one for the marginalized clergy of the 1970s who embraced a more sectarian understanding of the Church as it was pushed out of the mainstream of society.

At one time I used to think that the thought process behind the Liturgical Movement's replacement of early Communion and mid-morning Matins by Parish Communion or "Slow Mass" was unassailable, but I have come to revise my opinions somewhat. The Parish Communion or "Slow Mass" attempts to combine the elements of a substantial Liturgy of the Word with the Eucharist. As a result the traditional Fore Mass was expanded by the addition of an Old Testament Reading and a Psalm, and the intercessionary element was frequently expanded. As a result the usual hour's service on a Sunday morning consisting either of Matins with a fairly substantial sermon, or a Sung Eucharist with a more modest homily was replaced by a protean monster of a service that tries to do everything in one go, or alternatively by a Sung Eucharist which ends up being light on Scripture and preaching. With the Slow Mass/Parish Communion arrangement heaven help you if Aunt Aggie of "praying the newspaper" fame, and a baptism coincide; chances are you are in for a two hour session which ultimately is somewhat liturgically incoherent.

Anyway, to get back to the point, I have come to the conclusion that parishes need to provide both Eucharistic and non-Eucharistic worship in order to prosper. Please note, I am not suggesting that we neglect the Eucharist, but rather suggesting that we do not put all our eggs in one basket and reach out to those who are not yet ready for Communion.

The first concern that I have about the "Slow Mass/Parish Communion" as the only service is that it creates something of a closed congregation. Part of the reason for this is that, except for a few very Anglo-catholic parishes, Anglicans have an engrained aversion to non-communicating attendance at Holy Communion. Semi-churched Anglicans are at a distinct disadvantage in parishes where the Holy Communion is the main or only service simply because they feel they ought not to be there. In short, they are accidentally excluded and this creates a much sharper distinction between the churched and the unchurched, which is a mixed blessing in a missionary situation.

Secondly, Morning Prayer is a very Evangelical service. For a start, it has a very heavy Scriptural componant. Even with the rather limp-wristed lectionary of 1943, it includes one medium length or two short psalms, and two fairly substantial lessons, one from each Testament. In addition to this there is quite a bit of Scripture in the liturgy itself. It also gives room for a more substantial, expository sermon than can usually be preached at Holy Communion. I generally find that twelve minutes is about your whack at "Slow Mass" if you want toretain any hope of finishing within an hour and a quarter or an hour and an half, but it is perfectly possible to go 20-25 minutes without going much over the hour at Morning Prayer.

Thirdly, not everyone is the same in their approach to the sacrament of Holy Communion. For example, some of us have a strong preference for fasting Communion, which becomes difficult if the celebration of Communion occurs at an hour later than 9.00am. Inspite of all the Liturgical Movement propaganda I have digested over the years, I still prefer to go to an early celebration and receive fasting, then come back later in the day for Matins or Evensong and an expository Sermon rather than put myself around a condemned breakfast and go to a mid-morning Eucharist. Others prefer the "Slow Mass" format. Others still, the old-fashioned Sung Eucharist. What I am saying is that one size does not fit all, and that priests need to listen to their people, and the people need to be open with their clergy about what they think will build up the Body of Christ in their particular parish.

In the old days, Morning Prayer and Communion were often combined. In the Church of Ireland the usual format was Matins to the end of the second canticle, then the Communion service with the non-communicants being prayed for and allowed to depart after the Prayer for the Church Militant. This occured monthly, and on the other Sundays Holy Communion was celebrated early. By the way, the 1928 American Prayer Book allows this too. If you think I am romancing look it up, or read "A Prayer Book Manual" (Boston, MA, 1943) where it is mentioned as one of the options for integrating MP and the Eucharist. Other parishes tackled the need for both Eucharistic and non-Eucharist worship by having a mid-morning Sung Communion and a late Morning Prayer, as was the case in my home parish in the 1960s and 70s. Still others has ealy and late said celebrations either side of Morning Prayer. Wherever one was, experiments were made, or at least the local pattern for worship was allowed to evolve to meet the demands of both the existing congregation and those of evangelism.

I guess what I am asking is for the parish clergy take seriously the need for non-Eucharistic worship, and also appreciate the need for flexibility in scheduling the parish's worship. I am also asking both clergy and laity to appreciate the breadth and the richness that exists in both our Eucharist and Morning Prayer Liturgies and allow both the opportunity to draw folks to Christ. One size does not fit all, and our attempts to make it so has lost Anglicanism a lot of support and membership down the years. The Anglican Way is both Reformed and Catholic and as a result we have to make room for both expository peaching and sacramental worship in our spiritual lives. The Reformers hoped to combine both within the Communion Service, but in all reformed traditions - Lutheran, Reformed, Presbyterian, and Anglican - the tendancy from about 1600 onwards has been for the two to inhabit different time slots and different services. Our belated attempts to re-realise the Reformers aspirations have not been altogether successful, so I would hope that we will have the courage to re-evaluate the teaching of the Liturgical Movement.

An American Use?

2010-05-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

Some years ago the Anglican Society published a little booklet that outlined a ceremonial to be used with the 1928 BCP Communion service which they entitled "An American Use." In outline it was somewhat similar to the forms set forth by the Alcuin Club and by Dr Dearmer in the Parson's Handbook. It was also vocal in its defense of the integrity of the Anglican Rite, something which I fear many Continuers fight shy of because they have been taught that, when it come to liturgy, the Rome of Pius V and Pius X is right. This is the product of that unfortunate tendancy to look to Rome as the sole standard of Catholicity. And that, to put it mildly, is a mistake.

However, given the history of the Continuing Anglican Movement, I feel that one needs to be subtle about reintroducing the bulk of Anglicans to the idea that their liturgical tradition has an integrity and a ceremonial of its own. After all, we do not need another series of divisive liturgy wars. The tide has been running in favour of the Romanized version of Anglicanism for some fifty to sixty years which is about as long as the "Ritual Notes and Water" approach has been dominant. That said, I cannot help but feel that the times are changing.

Firstly, I think the Roman Catholic Anglican Ordinariates are going to syphon off the more enthusiastic and active Anglo-Papalists to Rome. This will be healthy for them, as it will enable them to realise the full logic of their position. Secondly, this will tend to make the unhypenated Anglican identity stronger within the Continuum, but this constituency will need to be educated. Thirdly, thanks to the late Peter Toon and others there is a greater awareness of "Classical Anglicanism" than there was at the end of, say, the 1980s. So what are the implications of this for the liturgy?

The first thing is to train more of the clergy to allow the BCP to be the BCP. In other words, we need to teach them a ceremonial that fits the BCP and does not cram it into the straight-jacket of someone else's ceremonial. The second step should be for some parishes to opt for being very definitely - even narrowly - BCP in their liturgical Use, though I hope that the Bishops and Rectors involved will use their collective loaves and authorize some suitable additional resources for minor holydays and Holy Week - for example "Lesser Feasts and Fasts, 1963" and the 1967 Scottish "Lent and Holy Week" booklet. Thirdly, there needs to be a concerted effort to reclaim the "Prayer Book Catholic" liturgical tradition from the taint of moderation and liberalism it has picked up in both the Church of England and TEC.

In order to get the ball rolling, so to speak, I want to conclude this posting with a few notes on the Scottish/American Prayer of Consecration.

1. Origins.
The Canon or Prayer of Consecration used in the 1928 BCP derives from that of the Non-Jurors as revised by Bishop Rattray in 1746 and 1764. The structure of the prayer is modelled on the Pseudo-Clementine Liturgy, which exerted a great fascination on early eighteenth century Anglican. In Pseudo-Clement, the Words of Institution are placed before the invocation of the Holy Spirit. However, much of the detailed wording derives from Cranmer's text of 1549 as modified in 1552 and 1637.

2. Structure.
The opening words of the 1764/1928 Prayer of Consecration are intended to follow on from the Sanctus. It is therefore best not to intrude the "Benedictus, qui venit" between the Sanctus and the Prayer of Consecration as the "Glory be to thee, O Lord Most High" of the Sanctus is echoed in the "All Glory be to thee" at the beginning of the Canon. After a brief passage stating the basis of the sacrament, the prayer passes first to the words of Institution; then to the Amnesis, which states what we commemorate by this sacrament; and then to the Invocation of the Word and Holy Spirit, which represents the climax of the consecratory monologue. This is then followed by the Oblation of ourselves as sanctified by the Eucharistic gifts to be a "reasonable, holy and living sacrifice." The prayer closes with a doxology.

3. Ceremonial.
After removing the cover from the Ciborium and the Pall or folded Corporal from the Chalice, the celebrant begins the Prayer of Consecration in a clear, loud voice opening and raising, then closing and lowering his hands at the opening words. He then continues with his hands in the "Orans" position until he reaches the words "until his coming again." He then performs the manual acts as prescribed in the BCP making sure that he lifts the large wafer to about face height to perform the fraction then replace it on the paten. He should also briefly raise the chalice to about face height at the words "he took the Cup." In the next paragraph he may elevate the paten and chalice together to about shoulder height at the words "which we now offer unto thee." This is a well attested Non-Juror custom that was preserved in the Scottish Episcopal Church until late in the nineteenth century. At the Invocation the celebrant should first join his hands and bow at the words "we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father." He should sign the cross over the paten and chalice together either once or thrice at the words "bless and sanctify with thy word and Holy Spirit." The priest then continues with his hands extended in the Orans position. At the end of the prayer he bows at the words "through Jesus Christ our Lord" then elevates the paten and chalice together whilst he recites the rest of the doxology. After the "Amen" he replaces the paten and chalice on the Corporal, bows (or genuflects) and then says the introduction of the Lord's Prayer.

By the way, it should be noted that in the above notes I took it for granted that the priest will join his hands and bow at the name of Jesus. This bow at the holy Name is required by the 1604 Canons, and is one of the few ceremonial gestures ever mandated by Anglican Canon Law. I should perhaps also add that one should be careful about changing existing ceremonial customs. If done at all, it must be done slowly!

Hopefully, that will get you thinking...

Prayer Book Catholicism

2010-05-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

"Prayer Book Catholic" is not a term one hears very often these days. I have a suspicion that that may have something to do firstly with the disappearence of the Prayer Book in England, and partly because the liturgical revision has led to a drawing together of the mainstream A-C and Prayer Book strands in the Church of England. However, the term still has some relevance when talking about Anglo-Catholicism in the Continuum, even though "Prayer Book Catholic" has been a term little used in the USA.

One great characteristic of the American Continuum is that it is overwhelmingly a "small-c catholic" endeavour. Even the "Low Churchmen" can tick all the basic Anglo-catholic boxes - belief in the authority of Scripture, in the three Creeds, in the importance of the Early Fathers and Councils, in the apostolic origin of Holy Orders, in the Real Presence, etc.. The areas of dispute tend to lie in areas that are not core doctrine, such as what should we believe about the Blessed Virgin Mary and how important are Counter-Reformation devotions such as Benediction, the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Thus, within the Continuing environment "Prayer Book Catholicism" represents a sort of middle ground, firmly rooted in the Prayer Book tradition of worship on the one hand, and firmly catholic in doctrine on the other.

Prayer Book Catholicism seems to have had its origin in the Bisley School of Tractarianism, and among those Ritualists who thought that being Anglican was at least as important as being Catholic. Doctrinally, it tended to have a more of an interest in the Early Fathers than it did in modern Roman Catholic theology and placed a strong emphasis on Scripture as the test of what should be dogma. This basic theologial emphasis will give you an idea of where and how moderate Anglo-Catholic theologians differed from Rome. The obvious areas of dispute are those dogmas, doctrines and disciplines of the Roman Church that deviate from the practice of the first eight Christian Centuries. This resulted in a strongly Biblical expression of Catholicism that, in practical terms, valued the integration the sacramental Christianity into the personal commitment to Christ and a striving after holiness characteristic of the old Evangelicalism.

In ceremonial terms Prayer Book Catholicism developed along two paths. The slightly older appraoch is the "English Use" which is a deliberate attempt to revive the such late mediaeval ceremonies as are necessary to the Prayer Book liturgy. This approach was first explored in the mid-nineteenth century, then again c. 1900. It was always most popular in the UK, but, apart from a brief vogue in the 1920s and again in liberal Catholic circles c. 1950, the English Use never really caught on in the USA.

The characteristic Anglo-Catholic approach to ceremonial in the USA, where there is no Ornaments Rubric to point us to the "second year of King Edward the Sixth" has been what I call either "Fortescue and Water" or "Ritual Notes and Water." This approach, adopting and adapting the Tridentine Roman ceremonial in celebrating the Prayer Book services, dates from around 1875 and became popular due to the availability of mass produced items for this style of liturgy. Strangely this led to one of the more visible characteristics of American "Prayer Book Catholicism" - when Roman Usage and the BCP came into conflict, the BCP usually won. That said, there are some widespread additions to the BCP Communion service of which Prayer Catholics are guilty. The most popular of these have been the use of some of the personal prayers of the celebrant, and the addition of the Benedictus, and the Agnus Dei to the Communion office, and less frequently, the use of the Ecce, Agnus Dei before Communion. Also some of the commoner visual elements peculiar to the older Roman Rite - "the big six" on the altar, tabernacles, genuflection, the major elevations, cassocks and cottas for servers have been widely adopted.

Some folks have been tempted to label this Romanizing, but I think it represents the evolution of an American version of Catholic Anglicanism. It is also so firmly entrenched that to launch a new series of liturgy wars aimed at making everyone English Use would be a sinful waste of time and energy when there are souls perishing for want of the catholic Gospel of Christ. There is also a level on which it seems a little odd to tie a country and culture that evolved Post-Reformation to a mediaeval aesthetic. On the other, we should not allow our adoption and adaption the Baroque liturgical aesthetic become a simple ape-ing of 1750s, 1850s or 1950s Rome.

At the end of the day, what Prayer Book Catholic need to be careful to do is be "Bible" or "Evangelical" Catholics. This approach requires our expression of Catholic theology to be rooted in the Scriptures (as expounded in the Early Fathers) and for our worship to be sacramental, dignified, beautiful. Concern for the outward in worship is an extension of the incarnational principle in Christian theology. God-made-man teaches us that the created world special to God and also reminds us that man is made in God's image. It also says something very important about the sacredness of the physical world which was, after all, created by God. This leads us to conclude that the use of human talent, beautiful art, vestments and music, and the engagement of the senses in worship all reflect the incarnational approach to Faith and are an offering acceptable to God. The incipient puritanism of much of American Protestant worship reflects as sort of muted dualism where the physical is "bad" whilst the spiritual is the only true good. This can lead to other disconnects - not just between faith and art, but between religion and morality, faith and conduct, etc.. The common repudiation of art, good music, ceremonial and ritual in worship reflect a religion that over emphasizes the Atonement at the expense of the Incarnation, or more dangerously, especially in the liberal circles, places too much emphasis on Jesus the Great Exemplar and Social Reformer, and not enough of Jesus God Incarnate, our Redeemer, the Christ.

As Christianity becomes marginalized by the Secular Progressive movement (and if you do not believe that is happening look at Western Europe) it becomes increasingly important to take a holistic approach to religion. Christianity should affect every part of the believer's life, not just Sunday mornings and Holydays of Obligation. Christianity should be taught not just as a religion, but as a way of life, a culture, an integrated system. Detaching Christianity from life - which is the logical consequence of teaching it as "just a religion" - actually plays into the hands of the secular progressives as it makes it far easier for them to portray Christianity as irrelevant to daily life - pie in the sky when you die.

When I talk about holistic religion, that naturally brings to mind another word that derives from the same Greek root - catholic. The essence of the catholic faith is both redemptive and incarnation. It values the physical as well as the spiritual as God-made. It is a culture as well as a religion. Thus in our teaching of the faith we need to teach ot just Christian theology, but Christian morality, Christian Liturgy, Christian Art, Christian Culture. If the Twenty-first Century is going to be the twenty-first Christian Century the Church is going to have to teach the fullness of Christianity in order to resist the in-roads of the Truth's two great enemies Secularism, and Islam. They are not shy about (mis)representing their errors as integrated world view; and we should be forceful in our declaration of Christian as the way, the truth, and the life.

Calendar for late May/June

2010-05-14T22:26:00.000-07:00

The following Calendar derives chiefly from the Book of Common Prayer of 1662

MAY

16. SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION - W; PP
17. Of Octave - W; PP
18. Of Octave - W; PP
19. Of Octave (St Dunstan) - W; PP
20. Octave Day of Ascension - W; PP
21. Feria - W
22. Feria - W

23. WHITSUNDAY - R; PP
24. WHIT-MONDAY - R; PP
25. WHIT-TUESDAY - R; PP
26. Of Octave & Ember Day (St Augustine of Canterbury) R; PP
27. Of Octave (Venerable Bede) R; PP
28. Of Octave - Ember Day - R; PP
29. Of Octave - Ember Day - R; PP

30. TRINITY SUNDAY - W; PP
31. Feria - G

JUNE

1. St. Nicomede, Martyr - R
2. Feria - G
3. Feria - G
4. Feria - G
5. St Boniface - R

6. TRINITY 1 - G
7. Feria - G
8. Feria - G
9. Feria - G
10. Feria - G (1928 PBCP - Corpus Christi - W)
11. ST. BARNABAS - R
12. Feria - G

13. TRINITY 2 - G
14. Feria - G
15. Feria - G
16. Feria - G
17. St Alban, Martyr - R
18. Feria - G
19. Feria - G

20. TRINITY 3 - (Edward, K. Wessex) - G
21. Feria - G
22. Feria - G
23. Fast - V/W
24. NATIVITY OF ST JOHN BAPTIST - W
25. Feria
26. Feria - G

27. TRINITY 4 - G
28. Fast - V/R
29. ST PETER - R
30. Feria - G

It should be noted that any day named in CAPITALS should have both a first and second Evensong. Lesser feasts have only a first Evensong. The lesson for the Lesser Feasts should be taken from the Common provided in the Proposed BCP of 1928.

The Varieties of Anglo-Catholicism

2010-05-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine once quipped that Anglo-Catholicism comes in more varieties than Heinz's sauces! In the UK there was a very definite "party system" within the Catholic Movement in the Church of England. The basic division was between those who put the Anglican tradition first, and those who regarded their membership of the Church of England as being an historical accident, and therefore tend to look to Rome for authoritative guidance. In the UK we referred to the former as "Prayer Book Catholics" and the latter as "Anglo-Papalists."

The archetypal "Prayer Book Catholic" parish used the 1662 BCP, but made a few, uncontroversial additions, such as the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei at the Eucharist. They would also give pride of place in the worship schedule to what was increasingly referred to as the "Sung Eucharist." Eucharistic vestments, and a ceremonial patterned on that of "the second year of King Edward VI" - or less frequently a very diluted version of Roman practice - were the norm among Prayer Book Catholics in Britain. In terms of theology, they aligned with figures such as Charles Gore, Claude B. Moss, and later Michael Ramsey.

The Anglo-Papalists favoured the English Missal or the Anglican Missal for the Mass. Most parishes continued to use the BCP for Matins and Evensong, and for the occasional offices, but the unofficial Missals were the rule for the Eucharist. However, Missal could cover a multitude of sins - anywhere from a mildly enriched BCP service through to the Tridentine Mass in English. Anyone who wants an idea of how this worked out in practice need only look at the Ninth Edition of Ritual Notes (Knott, London, 1946) which makes provision for both approaches to celebrating the Mass. Theologically, when they were not using Roman Catholic text books they drew on works such as those of Darwell Stone, Frank Weston, and Fr Carleton of "King's Highway" fame.

In truth, most Anglo-Catholic parishes fell somewhere between the two poles. For example, All Saints' Margaret Street in London was very "Roman" in its externals, but for most of its history they used a rite which was recognizably Prayer Book. As one of its Vicars (Fr. Cyril Tomkinson, if remember aright) noted "the rule here is music by Mozart, decor by Comper, choreography by Baldeschi, but, my dear boy, libretto by Cranmer." This underlines the underlying loyalty to the Anglican tradition, as enshrined in the BCP, felt by many in the Anglo-Catholic mainstream. In short - Roman in externals did not necessarily mean Roman in doctrine.

This final point was even more true of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the USA. Of course, there were, and are, parishes that are traditionally Anglo-Papalist - such as St Clement's, Philadelphia, and Church of the Resurrection, NYC. On the other hand, the "English Use" Prayer Book Catholicism so often found in the UK never got a lot of traction in the USA. Instead there was an indigenous form of Prayer Book Catholicism that drew on Rome for its externals, but generally kept close to the 1928 BCP in liturgy.

However, there was one thing that united Anglo-Catholics and that was the opposition they faced from Low and Liberal Churchmen. In a sense it was this common feeling of being somewhat "up against it" that provided the glue that kept the Anglo-catholic Movement together. Many of the problems that Anglo-Catholicism in the Continuum has encountered in the past thirty years have come from the fact that Anglo-Catholics are no longer the minority, but rather the dominant party within a much smaller church. This has led to some unfortunate behaviour with the formerly oppressed behaving as oppressors of those who do not share their views on theology and liturgy.

After thirty years of being Continuing Anglicans rather than Episcopalians there are signs that things are beghinning to settle down a little. Some of the shrillness that used to come from being a minority within the Episcopal Church has departed, and with it some of the liturgical preciousness has gone. Both of these developments are undoubtedly healthy ones, as they reduce the tendancy for "churchmanship" to be a point of division between Anglicans in the USA. However, our continuing, uncompromising commitment to Catholic Faith and Order in its Anglican expression do create some difficulties.

The first difficulty is that our commitment to ancient Catholic Faith and Order make ecumenism with Rome difficult. Our default position would be the Patristic Consensus that evolved after A.D.500 but before the theological "hardening of the arteries" that occurred under the influence of scholasticism. The modern tendancy of Rome during to make dogma things that are not Biblical constitutes a major bar to unity, and one that is not easily resolved.

Secondly, there are difficulties in our ecumenical contacts with Orthodoxy. The greatest of these seems to focus on what I call the cultural element. There is little conception of within Orthodoxy of a western orthodoxy. To the Greek Orthodox especially being Orthodox means being Eastern Rite, and if possible a Greek or a Slav. The old joke is that whenever a westerner converts to Orthodoxy he has to become Russian or Greek in order to fit in.

The third difficulty that has to be dealt with is our relationship with "neo-Anglicanism." The principal representative of this neo-Anglican perspective in the USA is the ACNA. In terms of doctrine there is potentially little that divides us, though I have to admit that the charimsatic and neo-evangelical elements in ACNA fill me with a mild form of dread. However, there is a truly major problem when it comes to ACNA's understanding of the doctrine of orders. In effect they try and embrace two contradictory positions, then compound the difficulty by treating Holy Orders as a secondary doctrinal issue when in truth, any matter that concerns the integrity of the sacraments is of the first important doctrinally speaking. Whilst the majority in ACNA would agree with the St Louis Continuum in saying that women cannot be admitted to Holy Orders, and influential minority continues to ordain women to the priesthood and diaconate. Even among those who reject the ordination women within ACNA their acceptance of the ancient three-fold ministry seems to be dependent on historical precedent, and not upon its Apostolic institution. Of course, I think I can assume that the Anglo-Catholic minority would accept the traditional view, but they are not in the driving seat in ACNA. When it comes to those in ACNA who ordain women to Holy Orders, they have to realise that this was the decisive issue which marked the Episcopal Church's departure from Catholic Faith and Order, and led to the departure of the original ACNA (now ACC, APCK and UECNA) from ECUSA. The new ACNA also has to realise that until it resolves its doctrine of Orders in favour of the traditional point of view it is impossible for the St Louis Continuum Churches to enter into full Communion with them. However, I have to make it clear that I wish them well, and pray that they return to the fullness of Catholic truth instead of trying to compromise with modernism and revisionism.

The Continuum's major task is to find a way of being a unified church not only in doctrine, but in organisation. This will not be an easy task, as we have become used to operating apart, but I would like to see the creation of a standing conference of Anglican bishops in the USA that will faciliate open channel communication between the three St Louis Churches, and begin to dissolve the distrust that has built up thanks to twenty-five years of sometimes ill-considered unilateral actions. Our major mission remains to be faithful witness to the Gospel of Christ and to the Catholic Faith and Order that he gave to His Church. Beyond that we should have no agenda.

Easter Even - the Triduum Part II

2010-04-18T23:19:00.000-07:00

Easter Even begins with Morning Prayer, which is read very simply with the Venite and the Glorias omitted. The church is then prepared for the Vigil, and Evening Prayer is read privately.

The Vigil, after many years of being celebrated on the morning of Holy Saturday, moved back to the evening in the 1950s. Unfortunately, the traditional rite was dismantled at this time and replaced by the present unsatisfactory mess. The 1967 Holy Week Booklet follows the 1956 Pian Rite, but it avoids, or does not legislate some of the less satisfactory forms such as the "temporary stand" in the centre of the sanctuary.

The ministers are vested in violet, with folded chasubles for the deacon and subdeacon, at the start of the Vigil. This old custom was maintained in the 1951/52 editions of the revised Roman Holy Week rite, but dropped in 1956. This year I finally got a satisfactory "New Fire" by turning a coffee can into a brazier and filling it with paper and dry juniper sticks. With a little encouragement from the liturgical "Bic" it burned hot and bright in the evening air as we blessed the new fire. We then ignited coals for the thurible and blessed the candle before lighting it from the New Fire. The candle is then carried in procession to its candlesick on the north side of the High altar with three stations being made, one at the back of the Church; one amidships, and the last just in front of the altar steps. The deacon then reads or sings the "Exultet" before changing back into violet vestments and taking his place while two robed readers read the four prophecies. After each prophecy a collect is read.

At the end of the prophecies the sacred ministers process in the proper order to the font. The font is then blessed using the form in the 1928 BCP, then the congregation renews its baptismal promises and holy water is sprinkled over the congregation. For this I use the same bundle of twigs that I used for the washing of the altar on Maundy Thursday. A Litany and a hymn then follow as the sacred minsters return to the altar.

The remainder of the service consists of a fairly standard Sung Eucharist, but the Creed is omitted. The church bells are run during the Gloria in Excelsis to greet the Lord's Resurrection.

The 1967 order for the Easter Vigil has the usual issues associated with the Pius XII reform. The Exultet really works best when the Hastar or Trident is used and the candle is blessed in its stand by the altar and the five grains are blessed and stuck into the candle at the appropriate point in the prayer. However, the renewal of Baptismal Vows, though excoriated by traditionalists, works well.

Easter Sunday sees the usual Morning Prayer, said Holy Communion, and sung Holy Communion. Our Easter festivities conclude with a potluck lunch. After that it is time for the clergy to take a well earned rest - provided they are back again for Matins and Mass tomorrow.

The Triduum - Part 1

2010-04-06T00:04:00.000-07:00

The Triduum gets off to a dramatic start with the Maundy Thursday. The morning office is somewhat sombre as we follow the tradition of omitting the glorias at Morning and Evening Prayer during the Triduum. This is not strictly BCP, but was widely tolerated in even Low Church dioceses in times past. The major liturgical function of Maundy Thursday is the Eucharist. However, this differs from the standard Roman/Anglo-Catholic model in that English liturgical tradition, as represented by Sarum, does not have separate Chrism and "evening" Masses, but rather a single Eucharist that covers both, which, in former times was celebated in the morning, with Vespers occuring straight after communion.

In accordance with the older custom, I took the option of focussing on the institution of the Lord's Supper. The Gospel is the shorter of the two Gospels appointed in the 1928 BCP which focuses on the "new commandment." The older rites do not incorporate the foot washing into the service; that was part of a separate function in the chapter house in the old Roman Rite and in the Sarum Use.

For the most part the Maundy Mass is a standard 1928 BCP Solemn Eucharist. As the Bishop is the celebrant, we use white, rather than the festal red prescribed by Sarum for a priest celebrant. With our relatively slender resources the altar party consisted of the bishop, deacon, subdeacon, thurifer, and crucifer. Standard High Mass ceremonial as per the English Use is followed, but things begin to "go wrong" at the end of the Prayer of Consecration when we came to the blessing of oils. In the absence of any authoritative guidence, I followed the old custom I stopped after the words "and pardoning our offenses" to bless the oil of the sick; then, after the Lord's Prayer the Oil of the Catechumens and the Chrism are blessed before Communion. After Communion, the Eucharist concludes with the Prayer of Thanksgiving, the Blessing and the sacrament for tomorrow's Mass of the Pre-Sanctified being reserved in "the accustomed place."

Evening Prayer then follows, with the Gloria Patri omitted as in the morning. The sacred ministers then go to the sacristy and remove their outer vestments. They then strip the altar while Ps. 22 was read. Lastly the bishop washes the altar with water and vinegar. The church is left stripped and bare for Good Friday.

The Good Friday begins with Morning Prayer with its three proper psalms. Again there is no Venite, no glorias, and with Ps 51 as the first Canticle. This latter touch is "borrowed" from the proposed English BCP of 1928. Unlike many places which, incorrectly, wear only cassocks, normal choir habit is worn by the clergy. Being a bishop, I wear rochet and black chimere, but on Good Friday I omit the usual signs of Episcopal jurisdiction - the ring and the staff. Mattins is followed with the Litany, and concludes with Ante-Communion and a short address.

The afternoon service is that appointed in the 1967 Scottish Holy Week booklet. For this service the celebrant wears an alb and either back, or a dark red chasuble, the deacon alb and stole, and the subdeacon an alb. A lay reader in an alb takes the place of the third "passion" deacon. I favour dark red as the colour for Good Friday as that is more in keeping with English tradition.

The 1967 Booklet provides an outline into which BCP elements are fitted rather than a complete service. At St Paul's the service begins with the three Good Friday collects. This is followed by three lessons - Hosea 6, Hebrew 10, and St. John 19 interspersed with Ps 31, 1-6, and Ps 140. The Passion is read by the deacon, subdeacon, and reader. A short address then follows. The service continues with the nine solemn collects, which in our case consist of a long bidding read by the deacon followed by a suitable prayer from the BCP read by the priest. This arrangement is similar to the modern Roman Rite, but commended itself to me not for that reason, but simply because it is practical.

When the nine solemn collects are completed, the celebrant removes his chasuble and goes to the sacristy to collect the Cross. As he brings it in he makes three stations at the rear of the nave, "amidships," and just in front of the altar steps. Each time he lifts up the cross and says "Behold the wood of the Cross, whereon hung the world's salvation" and the congregation makes the response. The cross, rather than being individually venerated, is placed on its bracket above the altar and the service proceeds with the Reproaches from the English Hymnal ending with the hymn "Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle."

After this the reserved sacrament is brought from the side altar. The celebrant washes his hands and the service proceeds with the General Confession, Absolution and Comfortable Words, Lord's Prayer, Prayer of Humble Access, and Agnus Dei before communion is administered. The ablutions are taken in the normal manner, and there is a closing collect. The ministers leave in silence, and remove their vestments. The reader extinguishes the candles and removes them from the altar, and the linen cloth is also removed. The clergy then put on choir habit and return to church for Evening Prayer which is said in the usual form for the Triduum. This placement of Evening Prayer immediately after the principal liturgy is an adaption of the mediaeval custom of saying Vespers "infra missam" to the rubrics of the BCP.

This series of blog entries will conclude with the next post, which describes with ceremonies of Easter Even, and the Vigil.

Holy Week at St Paul's

2010-04-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

Holy Week has to be both my favourite time of year, and the most exhausting part of the Church Year for anyone with the time to really engage with the Church's Liturgy. St Paul's is not a particularly big parish - we have about forty families - but we have a pretty full Holy Week. Unfortunately, the BCP provision for Holy Week is a bit limited, but thanks to the various official and semi-official supplements produced over the years one can have a pretty full Holy Week without resorting to the Missals. This is the way in which we work things at St Paul's. For us, the basic texts are the 1928 BCP and the "Ash Wednesday and Holy Week" Booklet that was issued by the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1967. Experience has shown that this combination work very well together.

Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, which celebrates the entry of Christ into Jerusalem, but, in the traditional rite, also sees the first reading from the Passion Gospels. Our first two services are not much different to normal. Morning Prayer is said with the Benedictus es, Domine and the Benedictus as the Canticles. The short form of the blessing of Palms and their distribution preceed the 9am said Communion. The "big one" on Palm Sunday is the 10.30am Sung Eucharist.

This begins at the high altar with the Palm Liturgy. I have slightly expanded the 1967 Scottish form to include the old Prophetic lesson from Exodus and the old Gradual. After that there is a longish blessing of the palms, and then Ps. 24 is read during the distribution. When this is completed we move off in procession singing "Ride on, ride on in Majesty." We do a lap of the parish hall, then return to the church doors to find them closed. The subdeacon knocks three times with the base of the processional cross, and then we enter singing "All Glory, Laud and Honour." There is a final collect before the altar, and then the Solemn Eucharist begins.

This year the clergy did the whole function in violet vestments. I would have preferred Passiontide red, but we St Paul's does not have enough dark red vestments to make this possible. I will never be able to work out why the Roman Church messed up Palm Sunday quite as badly as it did. The 1956 Rite is a mess, especially as it introduces a vestment change at the same time as eviserating the traditional Palm liturgy. I think our abridgement of the traditional order works far better.

By comparison to Palm Sunday the next three days are quiet. Morning Prayer and said Holy Communion being the only liturgical functions. I have to confess to taking a liberty with the BCP in that we read the Passions in a slightly different order to that appointed. Mark is read on Monday and Tuesday; then the whole of Luke on Wednesday leaving Thursday clear for the Maundy Gospel. It would actually make better sense to read Mark on Wednesday and Luke on Monday and Tuesday, but there is a very definite limit to how much I will muck about with the BCP.

I only see a handful of folks at the services on the first three days of Holy Week, but it is a gradually expanding handful. The real meat of Holy Week begins with the Maundy Thursday Mass. Here I follow the old English tradition and bless the Oils and Chrism at the same Eucharist as we commemorate the institution of the Lord's Supper and undertake the stripping of the altars. However, I will save the account of that long and elaborate liturgy for my next post.

The Need for a Strong Centre

2010-03-23T09:48:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid four out of five parishes were "Central Churchmanship." The acid test was to walk in and ask the retired military looking chap stood dishing out hymnals and prayer books whether the parish was High Church of Low; the more puzzled he looked, the more "Central" it was. Doubtless our puzzled friend knew perfectly well what High Church and Low Church meant, but he was having great difficulty seeing how they had anything at all to do with his parish.

So far as he was concerned the "C of E" took its theology from the Authorized Version, Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer in just the same way as he took his political cue from the Daily Telegraph. This dependence on the BCP was the essence of "mere Anglicanism" and when the Prayer Book began to be undermined by the various alternative liturgies the whole thing came unravelled. The Prayer Book had been a great bulwark against liberalism on the part of the laity because they absorbed its memorable prose from childhood and it had become engrafted into their souls.

The Church in the 1970s suffered from Revisionists to both right and left. The destruction wrought by those to the left-wing revisionists is pretty easy to see, but the damage done by those to the right is more difficult to assess. However, the consequences of "right-wing revisionism" are something that those of us in the Continuing Anglican Movement have to live with every day.

The major problem with right-wing revisionism is that it attempts the relocate the "centre" of Anglicanism much further on the Catholic side of things than any of our forefathers in the faith since the Elizabethan era would have found acceptable. Their vision of what they call "Anglicanism" is not the real thing that grew out of the 1559 Settlement, but a fanciful reconstruction of early Edwardian Anglicanism. The latter is basically Henrician Catholicism, plus the 1549 BCP and married clergy. It's major advantage for the catholic revisionists is that it avoids the whole issue of the Thirty-nine Articles of 1571 and their precursor, the Forty-two Articles of 1553.

Unfortunately, this church never existed in history. The Church of England of Edward VI's reign was an ideological battleground. The conservative, led by Stephen Gardiner, favoured the continuation of the national Catholic Church of Henry VIII's reign. The reformers wished to push forward with their plans to being England into line with the moderate reformed states of the Rhineland. Neither would have been satisfied with what eventually emerged under Elizabeth I; Gardiner would have found it too radical; Cranmer might well have found it too conservative.

The Church that emerged after 1559 was Reformed Catholic. Elizabeth's Archbishop (Parker) favoured a return to the 1552 BCP, but with the traditional vestments. The Articles, which emerged from the Archbishop's theological circle, committed the Church of England not to Calvinism or Lutheranism, or any other "ism" but to a Christian humanist reading of Scripture guided by the writings of the Early Fathers - especially the Four Latin Doctors. This, of course, placed the Church of England in the same family as the Lutherans and the Reformed, but it did not commitment them to any of their more extreme theological opinion.

Of course, being somewhat open ended theologically, the mainstream of Anglican thought has moved around a bit, depending on what was perceived as the most authentically Patristic theology. Naturally this led to the High Church Calvinism of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean bishops, the English Arminianism of Charles I; and the "beign and comfortable air of liberty and toleration" favoured by the High Churchmen of the Hanoverian Church.

In Victorian era, the mainstream of old High Churchmanship developed not into Tractarianism or Anglo-Catholicism, but into the old Central Churchmanship of the 1870s to the 1960s. Their respect for Scripture, the early Fathers and the Anglican Settlement made them the stabilizing influence within the Church of England. In some respects, the Central Churchmen held the Liberals, Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals in creative tension with each other. Now that the Central Churchmen have declined, the other parties have developed into separate, increasingly incompatible, traditions.

One major failure for the Continuum has been its failure to uphold this central tradition. Bishop Doren tried, in vain, to steer the infant ACC towards Central Churchmanship, but in the end, the Catholic Revisionist tendancy proved to be dominant, at least at that time, leading to the breech that led to the creation of the United Episcopal Church of North America. This failure to continue the Central Anglican tradition has limited the appeal of the Continuum - driving away middle-of-the-road and Low Church Anglicans and Episcopalians, and creating a Church, which is at least as Revisionist as TEC, albeit without the liberal revisionist heresy and goofiness.

In order to halt the revisionism, Continuing Anglicans need to return to our inherited tradition. Our central tradition is based on the Bible, the Early Fathers, the Articles of Religion and the Prayer Book. We need to be very careful about how much we borrow from other traditions. It is a little difficult to take seriously a parson who appeals to the uniqueness of Anglicanism whilst borrowing heavily from the ceremonial customs and theology of Rome or Geneva. It is time to stop being embarrassed about Classical Anglicanism, and return to our foundations.

First Evensongs

2010-03-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

One thing that one encounters in the BCP Lectionary is the provision for Sundays and Major Feasts to have a "First Evensong" as we used to call it in England. The liturgical day, like the Jewish day, begins at sunset which means that, in effect, Evensong can belong either to the day ending and the day commencing.

Usually the 1928 BCP treats the Evensong as belong to the day that is ending, but in the case of major feasts the older custom is followed and a "First Evensong" is provided. Most of these are to be found in the Table on pages xliv and xlv of the 1928 BCP. Others, such as that for the Eve of Ascension Day are to be found in the main lectionary.

In the notes I gave in my last Blogpost, two days are affected by this provision; March 24th, when Evensong is not that of the Wednesday after Passion Sunday, but that the First Evensong of the Annunciation, and April 24th when Evensong is not that of the Saturday after Easter III, but First Evensong of St Mark.

Sundays have a little complication of their own. Although the Psalms and Lessons usually come from the daily lectionary table and follow on from those of the previous day, the rubric on page 90 allows the collect of the Sunday to be used on Saturday night, or on the eve of a feast. This is a relic of the old custom of having first Vespers for Sundays.

Although Sundays and Feasts have first Evensongs, Ferias - ordinary days - do not. Thus Ash Wednesday, a privileged feria, has no First Evensong.

The question of whether minor feast days have a one or two Evensongs is a bit vexed. The older custom is that they do, so some unofficial books like "The English Office" make provision for commemorations when feasts follow one after another. For example, this week saw St Patrick on Wednesday, St Cyril of Jerusalem on Thursday, and St Joseph today. So it appoints the collects as follows:

17th Morning Prayer
1. St Patrick
2. Ash Wednesday

17th Evening Prayer
1. St Cyril of Jerusalem
2. St Patrick
3. Ash Wednesday

18th Morning Prayer
1. St Cyril
2. Ash Wednesday

18th Evening Prayer
1. St Joseph
2. St Cyril
3. Ash Wednesday

19th Morning Prayer
1. St Joseph
2. Ash Wednesday

19th Evening Prayer
1. St Joseph (which EO treats as a major holyday)
2. Ash Wednesday

In old-fashioned Anglo-Catholic handbooks, such as Ritual Notes 9th edition, "Simple Feasts" had only a First Evensong. Dearmer, in as much as he addresses the ssue at all, seems to favour this position too. However, many today follow the custom of the 1960 Breviary and 1962 Missal, and grant first Evensongs only to Sundays and Major feasts. This would seem to be the strict letter of the 1928 BCP, but in that case it has to be remembered that no provision was made for Black Letter Days at the time of publication. By the time the first "Lesser Feasts and Fasts" appeared in 1963 minor feasts were being understood as running from midnight to midnight like ordinary days.

I instinctively follow the older, more complex, custom; but then I would! As a result I treat the liturgical day as running from sunset to sunset. Sundays and Red Letter Days have both a First and a Second Evensong, and black letter days only a first Evensong. However, the second part of this usage finds little or no justification in the rubrics of the 1928 BCP, but is simply a taking over of the older custom contained in the Sarum Missal and Breviary.

The Prayer Book Calendar

2010-03-19T11:02:00.000-07:00

I am surprised by how many folks have difficulty with understanding the methodology behind the Church Calendar. I usually explain it this way:

Sundays come in two varieties - Greater Sundays which take precedence over any feast, and Lesser Sundays do not.

In the 1928 BCP these greater Sundays are:
The Four Sundays of Advent
The 'Gesimas
The Six Sundays of Lent
Easter Sunday
"Low" Sunday
Rogation Sunday
Sunday after Ascension
Whitsunday
Trinity Sunday

All other Sundays are, of course, Lesser Sundays.

The Church's Holydays are divided into Greater (Red Letter) Holydays and Lesser (Black Letter) Holydays.

The Greater Holydays include all the feasts of Our Lord, including Ascension and Transfiguration, the feasts of the Apostles and Evangelists, St Stephen, Holy Innocents, St. John Baptist, St Michael and All Angels, and All Saints' Day.

All other holydays are minor holydays.

The "Joker in the Pack" so far as the classification of Sundays and Holdays is concerned is the small number of Privileged Ferias - weekdays with a special status. In the 1928 BCP they are Ash Wednesday and the weekdays of Holy Week. These take precedence over Red Letter Holydays. The other special category are the two Privileged Octaves of Easter and Whitsunday.

So, the order of precedence in the 1928 PECUSA BCP is:

Greater Sundays
Privileged Octaves
Privileged Ferias
Greater Holydays
Lesser Sundays
Lesser Holydays

This table of precedence is neccessary because the Church's Calendar has to reconcile a lunar based Calendar that controls the date of Easter with the Solar based Calendar that controls the date of Christmas and Saints' Day. Because the date moves with the lunar calendar, Easter can occur anywahere between March 22nd and April 25th according to the aspect of the Moon.

So how does all this work out in practice.

The month or so that surrounds Easter is usually the most complicated of the Church's Year. So, using the lesser or "black letter" holydays from the 1963 Lesser Feasts and Fasts to supply the minor Holydays absent from the 1928 BCP I have worked out the Calendar from today until the end of April. Hopefully I have not incorporated any goofs!

MARCH

Fri 19th - St Joseph
Sat 20th - St Cuthbert

Sun 21st LENT V (Bl. Thomas Ken, suppressed)
Mon 22nd - James De Koven
Tue 23rd - Gregory the Illuminator
Wed 24th
Thu 25th - ANNUNCIATION - Proper Preface
Fri 26th
Sat 27th

Sun 28th - PALM SUNDAY
Mon 29th - Monday in Holy Week (Bl. John Keble - suppressed)
Tue 30th - Tuesday in Holy Week
Wed 31st - Wednesday in Holy Week (Bl. John Donne - suppressed)

APRIL

Thu 1st - Maundy Thursday (Bl. F. D. Maurice - suppressed)
Fri 2nd - Good Friday
Sat 3rd - Easter Eve (Richard of Chichester, suppressed)

Sun 4th - EASTER - Proper Preface (Ambrose, suppressed)
Mon 5th - Easter Monday - Proper Preface
Tue 6th - Easter Tuesday - Proper Preface
Wed 7th - Of Octave - Proper Preface
Thu 8th - Of Octave - Proper Preface (Bl. William Muhlenberg - suppressed)
Fri 9th - Of Octave - Proper Preface (Bl. William Law - suppressed)
Sat 10th - Of Octave - Proper Preface

Sun 11th - EASTER 1 - Proper Preface (St Leo - suppressed)
Mon 12th - Bl. George Selwyn
Tue 13th
Wed 14th - St Justin Martyr
Thu 15th
Fri 16th
Sat 17th

Sun 18th - EASTER 2
Mon 19th - St Alphege
Tue 20th
Wed 21st - St Anselm
Thu 22nd
Fri 23rd
Sat 24th

Sun 25th - ST MARK (EASTER 3 is commemorated)
Mon 26th
Tue 27th
Wed 28th
Thu 29th
Fri 30th - St Catherine of Siena

By the way, commemoration in the Anglican tradition is confined to the use of the Collect of the Day which is replaced by the feast is used after that of the feast. It should also be noted that the Collect for Advent is used everyday from Advent Sunday toChristmas Eve; that of Ash Wednesday daily from Ash Wednesday to the day before Palm Sunday, and that for Palm Sunday on the first three days of Holy Week. Those of the major feasts with Octaves - Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Whitsunday, and All Saints' Day - are used throughout the Octaves

In the next installment we shall discuss "Fast and Abstinence."

To my Friends in the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC)

2010-03-12T19:41:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, I was a priest in the Traditional Anglican Communion for some ten years, and thus have a certain familiarity with the way in which that body evolved between 1994 and 2007.

When I first joined the TAC back in 1994, it was pitched to us as a broad and welcoming Anglican Church where traditional Anglo-Catholics, Central Churchmen, and Evangelicals were equally welcome and equally esteemed. The English province was allowed to accord the Thirty-nine Articles a higher status than the Affirmation of St Louis, and no-one seemed to bat an eyelid at the fact that we had English Missal and lace at St Agatha's, Portsmouth; surplice, tippet and North end at St Paul's, Liverpool, and the English Use somewhere else. In other words, the TAC was the old church without the heresy and goofiness, and the various churchmanships were welcome to coexist within the one Church.

I first became aware of a change in outlook about 2001. It was clear that the House of Bishops was stepping up the pressure for the TAC to assert a more definitively catholic identity. This was accompanied by various rumblings about contacts by our bishops with the Roman Curia. Fair enough, thought I, we do, after all, live in an ecumenical age. By 2004, it was clear that the Primate and his representatives were in serious conversations with some folks in Rome, and that he had hopes of us being granted by Rome what I can only call Uniate status. We were asked not to discuss or speculate, but to await the result of the discussion.

Finally, in 2007, almost all of the TAC's bishops and vicars-general signed the Roman Catholic Catechism saying, in effect, that "this what we believe." Partly in response to this offer to submit by the TAC and to the pleadings of FiF(UK) and others, we have the Papal Letter announcing the potential for the creation of the Anglican Use Ordinariates within the Latin Rite of the Roman Catholic Church. The Anglican Catholic Church of Australia and the Anglican Church in America have already responded favourably to the Papal initiative, but I am sure there must be a minority in both churches who wish to continue as Anglicans.

Like me, their quest since leaving "the Lambeth Communion" has been to stay with what Peter Toon called Classical Anglican. When the TAC House of Bishops signed the Roman Catholic Catechism, I took that as the signal that it was time for me to move on. I had been deeply impressed by the stance of the United Episcopal Church in proclaiming itself to be "the old Episcopal Church cleansed of heresy." This, of course, was the very thing that had been offered when I had first joined the TAC in 1994, and had slow disappeared thereafter.

So where does the UECNA stand?

The United Episcopal Church of North America stands for Classical Anglicanism. An Anglicanism that is based on the Holy Scriptures, the three ancient Creeds and the doctrinal decrees of the first seven Ecumenical Councils. The UECNA also regards the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the thirty-nine Articles of Religion as essential parts of our Anglican heritage. Both our commitments to both the Church of the Seven Councils and to the Anglican Reformation are written into the UECNA Constitution and cannot be changed, or bartered away, without the consent of the whole church at two successive General Conventions. We have no ceremonial tests, and equally welcoming Broad Churchmen, Anglo-Catholics, and Low Churchmen.

I would love to welcome some of my former colleagues from the Anglican Church in America and the Traditional Anglican Communion into the United Episcopal Church. We are the old Church without the heresy and goofiness, and although we are small, we can offer a safe and assured future for those who wish to maintain their Classical Anglican identity. I can also promise that the bishops will be honest and up front with their clergy, and allow them their proper share in the governance of the Church.

If you are interested in the UECNA please contact me either at my office (928) 778-6018, or by email revpdr@msn.com

Loyalty to the Prayer Book

2010-03-08T21:03:00.000-08:00

Anglicanism involves a series of loyalties, not just to an institution but also to a certain way of understanding and doing things. If one does not grasp that about Anglicanism then one is likely to fall into the same trap as the TAC, which, in its effort to make peace with the Papacy, has got into the habit of treating Anglicanism as nothing more than an ethnic variation of Catholicism - like the Irish or Hispanic Roman Catholic Parish up the street. This reductionist view of Anglicanism is historical hogwash, not to mention theologically dubious.

When the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1871 it chose four epithets to describe itself - Catholic, Apostolic, Reformed, Protestant. It chose these words because it felt each one of them conveyed an important concept in defining the Church's character, outlook, mission, and purpose. I propose to look at each one of these terms in turn, and draw out a little of their theological and historical meaning.

Catholic - comes from the Greek for "the whole" or "universal." Anglicans have retained both the universally accepted Scriptures - Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha - but also maintained the traditional understanding of how Scripture is to be read. Article 7 makes it clear that not only is the Old Testament not contrary to the new, but that it also preaches Christ. The Articles in accordance with the teaching of St Jerome, also grants a particular status the the Apocrypha - that it is inspired, but not to be used on its own to estabish doctrine. This point of view is consonant with the teaching of both the Eastern and Western Churches from the fourth century down to the Council of Trent when the Roman Church gave the Apocrypha full Canonical Status. The Anglican tradition also accepts the three Catholic Creeds - the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. It also retained the universally accepted ministry of Bishop, Presbyter/Priest, and Deacon, and the Dominical Sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion. At the same time it acknowledges the sacramental character of confirmation, penance, marriage, unction, ordination. All of this is in line with the Church's teaching in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The use of word Apostolic makes two associations in my mind, and both of them were probably in the thoughts of the framers of the Church of Ireland Constitution. The first association is that an Apostolic Church is one founded on the principles of the Apostles, if not by the apostles themselves. This asserts the Anglican claim to have returned to the faith of the primitive Church. The second is that it also reminds us of the doctine of Apostolic Succession in which the transmission of Holy Orders is associated with the preservation of an orthodox (rightly glorifying) Faith in the Blessed Trinity.

The next two terms unfortunately make certain modern Anglicans cringe "Reformed" and "Protestant" but nonetheless, it takes a revisionist historian on something stronger than good port to argue that they are not part of the Anglican heritage.

The first of these "Reformed" was doubtless agreed upon because it reflected a High Church - Low Church consensus that we have since lost. High Churchmen of the period would have seen Anglicanism as reformed when compared to the relatively unreformed Church of Rome. To this Low Churchmen (Evangelicals anyway) would have added their understanding that Anglicanism at least tolerated the tenets of Reformed Christianity including Predestination, Receptionism, and Charitable Presumption attitude to the doctrine of Baptism Regeneration, all of which would have been questioned by Protestant High Churchmen.

Finally, there is the term Protestant. This historically has its origins in the Protestatio of the Evangelical Princes against the Emperor Karl V's attempts to reimpose Catholicism in Germany. It also carries the sense of a Protest in favour of reform, the sufficiency of Scripture and a return to the Christianity of the Patristic Age, which is what both Luther, and the later Anglican Reformers were trying to achieve. Perhaps it is William Van Mildert (1767-1836) who summed up this positive reformation best when he wrote that, "at the Reformation the Church of England became protestant in order to become more truly and fully catholic."

Another thing to which Anglicans adhere is the liturgy. The Book of Common Prayer represents the reformation of the liturgy as surely as the Thirty-nine Articles and the Homilies represent the Reformation of doctrine. The Prayer Book revised and condensed the service of the mediaeval Church with some definite objects in mind. For a start, the liturgy was put into English (and at a later date Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Jerrais, Manx and a host of other languages) so that worship would be in a language "understanded of the people." It also removed Prayers to the Saints - whilst acknowledging the Communion of Saints through the Calendar - and also removed all legendary material. Just from this rather casual enumeration of the principles behind the Prayer Book one can see why Bishop Manning of New York and Bishop Nichols of California both slammed the relatively moderate American Missal as "misrepresenting" the Prayer Book. It is also notable that until the 1960s English clergymen promised to use the official liturgy of the Church - the 1662 BCP, and the 1928 BCP is part of the doctrine, disciple and worship of the Church which American clergymen give their oath to uphold.

It is absolutely no coincidence that the Thirty-Nine Articles are placed in the back of the Book of Common Prayer. The two of them together are a sort of Anglican "here I stand." A repudiation of either is really a repudiation of Anglicanism itself. I believe that for Anglicanism to prosper in the twenty-first century it is neccessary to return to our Anglican heritage, and that without dissimulation or special pleading.

The Importance of Liturgy

2010-02-17T10:04:00.000-08:00

One thing that often makes me uncomfortable is the fact that a sizeable minority of the clergy seem to think that the liturgy is a drag, or worse still, their play thing. This attitude seems to communicate itself to the "professional laity," and before you know it, the parish has degenerated into the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Innovation, or St Mildred Wassupnow.

Much of this attitude was encouraged by the liturgical "reforms" of the 1960s and 70s, which made liturgy a moving target. Unfortunately, much of what was thought to be "ancient" in the 1960s has been debunked by further improvements in liturgical scholar in the 1980s and 90s. Unfortunately, the sixties version of liturgical good pactice has been canonized in many seminaries and parishes, and even in the Continuing Churches, the chief liturgical texts are Dix's "Shape of the Liturgy" and Jungmann's "Mass of the Roman Rite."

Neither Dix, nor Jungmann were friends to the accustomed way of doing things, and their seminal works laid the foundation for the deconstruction of the liturgy in the 1960s. However, whilst I think they both would have approved of the reformed Anglican and Roman liturgies, I do not think that either of them would have approved of the horizontal emphasis of so much modern worship. The unarticulated focus of much modern Eucharistic liturgy is that the community gathers around the altar and celebrates itself. The tendancy of the 1960s liturgical reform was to remove the mysterious and the beautiful in favour of the didachtic. The eastward position was ditched in favour of facing the people; traditional language was replaced by often banal modern language; and there was a massive simplification of the ceremony that accompanied the Eucharist. Add to this the inevitable burlap banners and polyester vestments in exchange for the embroidery and brocade of former times, and there is a visible "cheapening" of the setting of the liturgy.

The major problem with the modern liturgies is their artificiality. They are not the products of organic development, but of a very deliberate pruning and reshaping of our worshipping tradition to conform to an academic theory. Of course, that criticism could also be levelled at the BCP, but after four hundred years of use it had developed its own organic tradition. I really should say traditions, as Anglican liturgy was divided between those who followed Cranmer's 1552 BCP and those who followed the Scottish Tradition. The major criticism of Cranmer's 1552 BCP from a Patristic point of view has usually been the dismantling of the Canon. Cranmer undoubtedly did this to get rid of the mediaeval notion of the Sacrifice of the Mass, but it was a change that undoubtedly had served its purpose after a couple of generations. As early as the 1610s, some of the "English Arminians" - the proto-High Church party that gave birth to the later Caroline Divines, Non-Jurors, and "Orthodox" - were reasembling the Canon by saying the Prayer of Oblation after that of Consecration. This change, along with others, was incorporated not just into the Scottish BCP of 1637 but also into the "Durham Book" of 1661. It was only the immoveable conservatism of Clarendon and Juxon that prevented the English Church from adopting the Scottish type of Communion service in 1662.

Dissatisfaction with the Cranmer Eucharistic liturgy was expressed from time to time throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but it was generally muted. High Churchmen feared what the forces of liturgical rationalism might unleash, and parliament was far too busy financing fighting the French to worry about the Church. As a result it was not until 1928 that a serious attempt was made to reform the English BCP, and this was again along Scottish lines. Inspite of twice being defeated in Parliament, the English 1928 BCP did in fact enter use in many parishes and remained in use until the 1960s and 70s when it was gradually replaced by the Alternative Services. During this long period of time, the various BCPs had built up a sort of performing tradition that had reconnected them to the historic line of liturgical development. There the reforms of the 1960s were as much of a break in continuity for Anglicans as for Roman Catholics.

Dix's "Shape of the Liturgy," in common with its RC counterparts, advocated reshaping the Anglican liturgy to conform to the model of the sixth century Roman Liturgy. However, this reshaping incorporated a host of later developments, so that the whole thing ended up being a mish-mash. This process was made all the more messy by the stripping of revived ceremonies of their traditional forms, and a reform of the liturgical calendar that can only be described as crass vandalism.

Most traditionalists and nearly all introverts detest the Peace, and rightly so. Although the Peace is an ancient liturgical ceremony, the authentic form of which - a stylized and orderly passing of the Pax Domine through the clergy and congregation - had been preserved in the monastic tradition. Unfortunately, rather than restore that orderly use to parochial liturgy, the liturgical professionals (a.k.a. "Litniks") gave us the dreaded gab and grab-fest that passes for the peace in so many parishes today. This perhaps shows us why the passing of the Peace was replaced by the use of the pax-bede, or banned altogether in parish churches by the 13th century.

However, far more serious than my time honoured gripe about the Peace are the following two criticisms. The reform of the liturgical year, and the "removal" of the Canon.

The Liturgical Year as given in the Tridentine Mass and the 1662/1928 BCP had survived little altered from the seventh and eighth centuries. The one major change, the addition of the feast of the Holy Trinity on the Octave of Pentecost had affected the Curial and Sarum Uses differently, but otherwise, the two were closely related as they passed through Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, the 'Gesimas, and so forth. Both Anglicans and Roman Catholic observed Octaves, quite a few of which were common to both traditions, so that the calendar as mch as anything else demnstrated the essential continuity between the Catholic Church of Rome, and the reformed catholic Church of England. In spite of the fact that it went back to the Golden Age of the seventh century to which the Litniks often appealled, it was swept away and replaced by a scheme which usurped one of the traditional functions of the daily office, that of the orderly reading of Scripture. However, the first victims of the Reform were some of the ancient octaves of the Church, so that during the 1960s Anglicans were observing more Octaves than Roman Catholics, and then with the new Missal of 1969, and the Series Three lectionary whole seasons, such as the 'Gesimas and Passiontide went missing, or were remodelled. Also the traditional series of Sunday lections was replaced/reorganised. The effect was another radical discontinuity.

Another ancient principle which went by the wayside in the 1960s was that of each liturgy should have a single fixed Eucharistic Prayer, called the Canon (rule). I express it this way because the Eastern Orthodox have three liturgies, but each has but one Canon. Furthermore the Liturgies of St Basil and St John Chrysostom are used at stated times of the year, so in no sense can they be called alternative liturgies. By contrast, the modern concept of liturgical variety led to the Roman Catholic Church introducing three alternative Eucharistic Prayers in 1968; and the Episcopal Church included multiple Eucharistic Prayers with the Zebra Book in 1973. The Church of England maintained the idea of one Eucharistic to each liturgy until the late 1970s.

The trouble with the reform of the 1960s and 1970s was not only that it introduced clergy to the idea of perpetual liturgical innovation, but that it led to the dismantling of the ancent liturgical tradition of the Western Church - both Roman and Anglican. Rome has been trying to call a halt to this process for the last thirty years - since soon after John-Paul II's election. Benedict XVI's liberalisation of the conditions under which the 1962 Roman Missal can be used has to be seen as part of an attempt to reconnect Roman Catholicism to its ancient liturgical tradition. Some call this "reform of the reform." On the other hand, mainstream Anglicanism continues to churn out alternative and new liturgies - many of them of little merit, and even less use.

Continuing Anglicans have largely resisted the temptation to indulge in the liturgical fidgets, and continue to regard the last traditional BCP of their former Province, as their liturgical norm. Unfortunately, we have had to suffer through the liturgy wars between those who use the Altar Service Book and those who refer the Missal. A process which I am sure has turned many people off Continuing Anglicanism. I would have thought that after thirty years of banging our heads against that particular brickwall we might agree to disagree and move on.

However, the real point of this point is to reiterate Alcuin's old adage that "the law of prayer is the law of belief." The theological and liturgical turmoil of the last fifty years have to some extent fed off one another. In order to move forward as Continuing Anglicans we need to maintain our liturgical stability because it is a sign of our theological orthodoxy. I would also note that we should always celebrate the liturgy with dignity and reverence, preferring a modest service done well to an elaborate one done badly. Reverence is caught not taught. If our services are slovenly; then we should not be surprised if the people do not value the liturgy as they should.

The Affirmation of St Louis - Some Thoughts

2010-02-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

The Anglican Catholic Church, the Province of Christ the King, and the UECNA all list the Affirmation of St Louis among their important founding documents. However, there have always been difficulties about how it should be used and interpreted. The major disagreement has been whether it is a prism for the understanding of the older formularies - the Articles, Homilies and the BCP - or their replacement. None of the three "St Louis Churches" has ever come down in favour of one view or other. In the absence of any official pronouncement, we must look at the Affirmation itself, and the Anglican theological tradition for guidance.

The Affirmation of St Louis came about in response to a theological emergency. The complete abandonment of the Apostolic Ministry and partial abandonment of the Christian morality by the Episcopal Church had left orthodox Episcopalians without a spiritual home. As a result the St Louis Congress of Concerned Churchmen was held, during which the Affirmation was accepted as a basis for a revived Anglican body in North America. The framers of the Affirmation of St Louis were also far sighted enough to see that the Episcopal Church's support for abortion "rights" and the ordination of women to the diaconate and priesthood would lead to a whole string of theological and moral innovations. These have led, in an absolutely logical progression, to the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the blessing of homosexual unions as revisionist notions of social justice has replace divine justice as the animating spirit of theological discourse in the Episcopal Church. In the face of this particular manifestation of zeitgeist, the framers of the Affirmation of St Louis wished to preserve the theological and moral integrity of the Anglican tradition. In order to do so they affirmed the Church's traditional theological understanding - the centrality of the Bible, the Creeds and Councils, and the Anglican tradition. They also affirmed traditional Christian moral values such as the sanctity of human life, and the sanctity of (hetrosexual) marriage. Read with unprejudiced eye, the intent was to maintain the Anglican Tradition whilst linking it unequivocably to the faith of the Church before the disunion of East and West.

In terms of 1970s Ecumenical thinking, that meant that the Thirty-nine Articles, Prayer Book, and Homilies had to be read within the context of the Seven Ecumenical Councils. However, it is possible to make far too much of this provision. This appeal to antiquity does not compromise the integrity of the Anglican theological tradition, even though Anglican theologians have often been uncomfortable with the Seventh Council. Archbishop Parker and other Anglican theologians from the 1550s onwards have always maintained that the Anglican Formularies be read "in the most catholic sense," an idea continued in the provisions of the Affirmation of St Louis. Jewel, Parker, Andrewes and Laud - like the framers of the Affirmation of St Louis - had appealled to the witness of the Ancient Church, of the Bible, Creeds, Early Fathers, and Councils against the innovations of the modern Church. This appeal to antiquity has been an abiding theme in Anglican theology since the beginning and it remains part of our inheritence as Continuing Anglicans

Sadly, the Affirmation of St Louis has been misused to attempt to re-engineer Anglicanism into a species of old Catholicism. This has always been a tendancy with some Anglo-Catholics, but in the cotext of post-1977 Anglicanism it has been even more decisive than it had been in the Episcopal Church. The three provisions that they have fastened on to most often have been the requrement that the Church adhere to the first seven Councils, the inclusion of the idea of the seven sacraments in the Affirmation, and the provision that the 39 Articles and the BCP be read in accordance with the provisions of the Affirmation of St Louis.

Of the three, most use has been made of the provision that the Articles of Religion, etc., be interpreted "according to this Affirmation" as a Trojan Horse for the re-engineering of Anglicanism within the Continuum. This is especially ironic given that it the provision itself reflected Caroline thinking on how the Articles and BCP should be read. Instead of continuing the old practice of reading the Articles within tradition, a concerted attempt has been made by some to interpret this as making the Articles, etc., redundant. This is a piece of wishful thinking, as any provision that requires one to interpret existing documents in accordance with it is acknowledging the continuing relevence and authority of those formularies. On the other hand, given the sort of logic chopping that the Articles have been subjected to, there was a need to establish a standard of interpretation in accordance with the traditional Anglican principles. The appeal made by the Affirmation is to the Catholic and Apostolic faith of the first eight centuries, which perfectly in accordance with the principles laid down by Bishop Jewel and Richard Hooker back in the sixteenth century.

This appeal to antiquity has always been a central plank of the Anglican repudiation of both Papalist additions and Puritan subtractions from the Faith. It now also serves as an essential defense against liberal revisionism. On the whole, the tone of the Affirmation of St Louis is that of continuity, not innovation. The main thrust of the Affirmation is to restore and maintain the connection between Anglicanism and the Catholic faith of the first centuries - a connection that had been continually made by the Reformers, the Caroline Divines and other mainstream Anglican theologians. To read the Affirmation of St Louis in any other manner is to do violence to, even betray, the whole idea of the Continuing Anglican Movement, but that has not stopped people from making the attempt. If the Continuing Anglican movement is to achieve lasting unity, it needs to get away from the desire to innovate, and place all its energy into maintaining and continuing the Anglican tradition that has its roots in the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church.

The Beatles Are Not The Only Thing You Need To Know About Liverpool

2010-02-11T09:24:00.000-08:00

J. C. Ryle was not a Liverpudlian by birth, but he spent the last twenty years of his life as the Bishop of the newly created Diocese of Liverpool. This diocese consisted of the busy port city of Liverpool and the nearby towns of Warrington, Wigan, and Southport. In case you think it was a wholly urban diocese, there were rural areas around Ormskirk and Crosby, but for the most part, Ryle's problems were those of the city and the slum.

Ryle was born 10th May 1816 in Macclesfield, Cheshire, then a smallish town. J. C. Ryle had gained a first at Oxford and had also been a cricket blue. He passed up the opportunity for an acadmeic career, and instead studied law and business in his father's office. Also while he was at Oxford he found his faith, having been converted in 1838 at the age of 21 when he found the words of Ephesians 2 striking home into his heart. He had been going through a period of what I suppose we would today call "Student Angst" and his new found faith gave him a purpose and direction he had lacked before. A second crisis was provoked by the failure of his father's bank in 1841, and the 25 year old Ryle took Holy Orders, not as an escape from financial failure, but as the result of a sense of vocation that had been nagging away at him for some time. He was ordained by the Right Rev. C. R. Sumner, the evangelical Bishop of Winchester.

Ryle served his curacy in the diocese of Winchester and showed himself to be an energetic and competant curate. His talent was rewarded, rather strangely, not with a busy London parish church or proprietary chapel, but with an obscure parish in Suffolk. It was here that Ryle's children were born, and here that he employed his ample spare time as a writer and controversialist. He had the popular touch, and his name became known to those who were not naturally much interested in Church affairs. As a result of this he received two appointments in the course of 1880. The first was as Dean of Salisbury, but that was replaced by the offer of the new diocese of Liverpool by out-going Disraeli government. Disraeli saw Ryle as a safe Evangelical choice, but the plan also appealled on the grounds that it thwarted incoming Gladstone's desire to appoint a High Churchman to Liverpool.

For Ryle, this piece of party political infighting was not an auspicious start, but he was so obviously fitted for the task that no-one held it against him. As a rural dean and one of the leaders of the Evangelical Party he had already demonstrated his administrative ability, and he turned all his gifts as a teacher, preacher, pastor and administrator to the work of a bishop. Ryle was not a bricks and mortar man, and his first decision was to defer the building of a cathedral until there was adequate church provision for the 400,000 souls in his diocese. He secured mission rooms and divided parishes into more manageable districts, appointing a clergyman and a scripture reader to each to build up a new congregation. He also ensured that the clergy received a living wage and make provision for clergy retirement - he was one of the first bishops to do this. His ability to get things done is reflected in the numbers. When he was appointed bishop there were 170 parishes; this was increased to 204. At the start of his episcopate there were 120 assistant clergy, by 1900, there were 240. He also encouraged the use of Scripture Readers and other lay workers to build up the diocese's network of spiritual support for the laity, and as a result Liverpool became one of the best run and most forward looking of English dioceses.

Ryle was able to work alike with Evangelicals, Central Churchmen, and High Churchmen. His displeasure was confined to the small Anglo-Papalist faction within the diocese of Liverpool, who he occasional embargoed, and more often ignored. Unlike some other bishops whose Episcopates were mired by controversy because of their opposition to Ritualism, Ryle, whilst expressing his displeasure, did not allow it to overshadow more important and worthwhile tasks. Unlike many bishops who feel that they have to face both ways to be effective, Ryle remained loyal to his Evangelical beliefs, but managed to be the bishop of the whole diocese.

He finally retired in January 1900, and died a few months later. He was spoken of as "a man of granite with the heart of a little child" which neatly describes both the essential simplicity of his faith, and the ruggedness and determination he showed in fulfilling his ministry.

Am I alone in thinking that the Church needs more Ryle-like people to counter this era of spiritual "anythingarianism" in which we live? As the line goes in a country song "if you don't stand for something; you'll fall for anything." That, unfortunately, has been all too true of western Anglicanism for the last forty years.

More Thoughts on Central Churchmanship

2010-02-09T11:30:00.000-08:00

The key idea for Central Churchmen is the idea of being loyal to the Anglican expression of Christianity in theology, worship and discipline. So I am going to look at each of these areas in turn. In my next Blogpost, if nothing intervenes, I am going to put together a bit of a reading list that might begin to give you a fair idea of what it means to be "Central." As is usual for me the approach is going to be historical, but with the idea of outlining the basic principles involved.

Theology for Central Churchmen is very much a continuation of the old High Church,or as some folks called it, orthodox, tradition. We begin first and foremost with the idea that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to Salvation and it corrolary - that orthodox Creedal Christianity can be proved from the Bible. Therefore it is not neccessary to waste much time here discussing the Being and nature of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, Atonement, etc., as Central Churchmen are all in full accord with the traditional teaching on these matters. When it comes to what makes Anglicans different, Central Churchmen basically follow the line of development that begins with Jewel, the wanders its way through Hooker to the Caroline Divines, and then on to eighteenth and nineteenth century High Churchmen like Daniel Waterland, William Van Mildert, Harold Browne, Christopher Wordsworth, etc.. Central Churchmen tend to be mildly Arminian in outlook, believe that baptism confers regeneration, and believe that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist. They also hold with a mild form of the doctrine of Apostolic Succession.

English Arminianism is a little different to that of the Dutch. Theologians such as Lancelot Andrewes objected not to the idea of Predestination as such, but to the doctrine of double Predestination promoted by some Calvinists - for example, Perkins. They argued that this, to borrow Archbishop Laud's phrase, "made God the most unjust of tyrants" and they saw double predestination as inconsistent with a loving and merciful God. They also regarded Predestination as preached by some of the Puritans as being anti-sacramental, and the Caroline Divines seem to have held with the idea that Christians exist in a state where we are both saved and being saved. This notion also explains the strong sacramentalism of the Caroline High Churchmen, and of their modern successor of the Central stripe.

Baptismal regeneration as a doctrine can be grossly misunderstood, but in the "saved and being saved" context of the old orthodox Anglican theology it makes perfect sense. Central Churchmen hold that in the absence of any positive will to the contrary on the part of the minister or of the person being baptised, Baptism confers regeneration; the child or person receiving baptism is born again of water and the Holy Spirit, and is made a child of Christ. If they continue in the profession and practice of the Christian Faith they will be saved. It is the duty of parents and godparents (and by extension of the whole Church) to ensure that the child or person baptized is brought up in the Faith. The one thing we have to be quite clear about though, is that Baptismal Regeneration is not some "hocus-pocus" that works independently of the faith of the Church and the faith of the individual, but part of the economy of salvation left to us by Christ Himself.

The Real Presence is something that Central Churchmen believe, but tend not to define. Some Central Churchmen would hold to a position similar to the "high receptionism" of Calvin. Others hold to Virtualism that teaches that whilst there is an objective change in the status of the bread and wine, their natural substances remain, but they become in virtue, power and effect, the Body and Blood of Christ. This protects the notion that Christ is really present, but avoids the murky waters of mediaeval philosophy and the concept that the Eucharistic bread and wine, undergoing some sort of change of substance. Central Churchman also tend to fight shy of too strong a conception of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. It has, however, sacrificial aspects. The first is that it is a commemoration (amnesis) of the one perfect sacrifice once offered, and the second, it is our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for Christ's saving work. The offering of ourselves in Christ's service is also part of this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.

Apostolic succession is a doctrine that has been much over emphasized by some in the Anglican Church. A fact that makes many Central Churchmen a little uncomfortable. That said, there is no denying that Anglican Orders derive from a continuous sequence of ordinations stretching right back to Apostolic times. In some circles there has been far too much made of this physical continuity of hands on heads, and not enough made of the "other" Apostolic Succession - that of doctrine. Most "middle Anglican" wroters on the subject refer to both aspects. They admit that the concept of Apostolic Succession was first and foremost one relating to the need for the Church to continue in "the Apostles' doctrine and teaching" and the ordination was both a commissioning by the church to administer the sacraments and preach the Word, but also an attestation to a man's orthodoxy. Thus in the early church Apostolic Succession was a matter of both ordination and maintenance of the faith once delivered. It was only in the High Middle Ages that a certain hardening of the theological arteries took place and Apostolic Succession became more of a matter of hands on head than rightness of doctrine.

In all of the categories above Central Churchmen reflect the old moderate High Church tradition, so I suppose the next issue that has to be addressed is what differentiates Central Churchmen and Prayer Book Catholics. I think the difference really lies in the attitude of Central Churchmen to the cult of the saints. Central Churchmen certainly revere the saints, but they do not venerate their relics nor invoke them in prayer. Both practices are a bridge too far in the direction of Rome for Central Churchmen. Prayer Book Catholics, on the other hand, find it hard to disapprove of either practice, but point out that neither is to be found in the public liturgy of the Church as laid down in the Prayer Book, and are therefore a matter of individual piety. Prayer Book Catholics and Central Churchmen tend to work together easily because they have a common loyalty to the Anglican tradition. There can be significantly more discomfort when Anglo-Papalists and Central Churchmen come into contact with one another, simply because the former are always looking over their shoulder at Rome - either modern Rome, or that of Pius X. However, so deep was the Central Churchmen's commitment to "the benign and comfortable air of liberty and toleration" that in the twentieth century Anglo-Papalists only got themselves into the doghouse with Central Churchmanship bishops for doing something completely outrageous such as dropping the BCP in favour of the Latin Breviary, Missal, and Ritual. I personally suspect that this tolerance was a calculated policy in that it denied the Anglo-Papalists the glamour of "mild martyrdom" and slowed the growth of practices not to be found in the BCP.

That attitude to the Anglo-Papalists brings to mind another element in the Central Churchmanship ethos - that of continuity. Central Churchmen were generally committed to the BCP and to allowing worship styles to evolve gradually. Whilst the more committed Anglo-Catholics frequently alienated people by changing the usual Matins and Sermon into a non-communicating High Mass, Central Churchmen stuck with the accustomed format adding Communion services in the early morning, and after Matins, then eventually having a Communion service mid-morning oncea month leaving Matins undisturbed the other three Sundays. For much of the twentieth century the usual Central Churchman parish had three services on a Sunday - an early celebration of Holy Communion, Matins and Sermon mid-morning, and Evensong in the early evening. Generally speaking Central Churchmanship parishes adopted the less controversial ideas of the Tractarians in reviving the full use of the BCP. They often had daily Morning and Evening Prayer, and a midweek Communion. The observance of Saints' Days was a bit hit and miss, but a parish would probably see a celebration of the Eucharist if the parson thought he would have a congregation.

Central Churchmanship as a whole seems to have been only moderately enthusiastic about Prayer Book revision. The proposed English BCP of 1928 garnered wide support from Central Churchmen, but neither the Broad Church Randall Davidson of Canterbury, nor the Prayer Book Catholic Cosmo Lang of York really wanted the 1928 BCP. When their successors, the Central Churchmanship Archbishop Fisher and the High Church Archbishop Garbett put forward A Shorter Prayer Book in 1948, the Communion service was very largely that of 1662, with material from the 1928 being confined to the ante-communion, Morning and Evening Prayer, and the occasional offices. It was only in the 1960s under the influence of the Parish Communion Movement that Central Churchmen moved towards Communion as the main Sunday service and the adoption of a new Eucharistic liturgy. As a rule, Central Churchmen initially alternated BCP Matins with Parish Communion according to the alternative liturgy, before settling on the latter as the usual Sunday service. The early service and Evensong remained BCP until well into the 1980s in most places.

When it came to vestments and ceremonial, Central Churchmen were not innovators. Seasonal altar frontals and two candles usually appeared on the altar late in the 19th century, as did the surplice choir; the stole gradually replaced the tippet at Communion services, baptisms and marriages; whilst bowing to the altar entering and leaving church, and after receiving Communion became widely accepted among lay people, with the clergy bowing perhaps a little more frequently in the course of the liturgy. Fasting Communion and receiving at te early celebration were the norm from about 1890 through to the 1950s, but it was not as rigidly enforced as in Anglo-Catholic circles. Central Churchmen parishes generally chanted Matins and Evensong on Sundays, and settled on the mildly High Church Hymns Ancient and Modern as their favoured hymnal. The Communion service generally remained said, though there was a tendancy to use Merbeck's setting when it occurred as the main service on Sundays, and on Christmas, Easter and Whitsunday. In short, the Anglican ethos of the mid-twentieth century as reflected in litierature was very much the creation of the Central Churchman.

In a Central Churchmanship parish, church life in its widest sense was important. Most Central Churchmen would have felt they were letting the side down if they did not promote various societies within their parishes. The old favourites, in addition to Sunday Schools, were the Mother's Union for women, the Church of England Men's Society for men, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel - for mission work. Many Central Churchmen were also keen on Scouting with troops of both Scouts and Guides being attached to many town parishes. Large parishes often had attached to them a roster of local groups - knitting circles, youth groups, etc. - which although not specifically Church related used the parish plant as their meeting point. This provided an interface between the wider community and the parish church that kept the Church at the centre of village and small town life. It has probably been the case that disappearence or complete secularization of many of these groups that has done most to marginalize Christianity in England.

As I have said before, Central Churchmen stood for historic Christianity in its Anglican guise. They relied on the Bible, the Early Fathers, and the Caroline Divines, along with a hearty dollop of commonsense in doctrinal matters. Worship was according to the BCP, which they generally regarded as the best liturgy in Christendom, but one not incapable of improvement. Ceremonial was deliberately moderate, with the traditional Laudian idea of the beauty of holiness being given moderate rein. The overall ethos was one of orthodoxy, duty and devotion tempered by an abhorance of fanaticism, the usual British reserve, and a fear of appearing Pharasaical.

Broad and Central

2010-02-05T08:13:00.000-08:00

I often describe myself as "a Central Churchman," a term readily intelligable in the UK, but a bit out of the way for Americans, whose nearest equivelent is Broad Church. This, however, carries some connotations of Liberalism to my English ear, perhaps because in using the term "Broad" Americans are actually covering what the British would consider to be two distinct parties - the Liberals and the Central Churchmen.

In England, Broad Church, is now an out of date useage. It was applied in the mid-nineteenth century to English liberals, such as the Very Rev. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley and F. D. Maurice, who were both middle of the road in ceremonial, and liberal Protestants in theology. However, their liberal protestantism was nowhere near as "liberal" as that of mid-nineteenth century Germany, as it remained creedal, and rooted in traditional theological categories. However, it was not dismissive of either Biblical Scholarship, nor of Darwinianism and Social Reform in the Victorian Liberal's sense of those words. Broad Churchmanship as a distinct party was around from the 1850s through to the 1920s when it morphed into a more definite liberalism under the influence of R.C. modernism. They liked to think of themselves as the thinking man's party within the Church of England, but in fact, their influence was mainly among the clergy and educated laymen. Broad Churchmanship flourished to some extent due to the patronage of Queen Victoria, who tended to be a Bible-based, but distinctly liberal in her religious views due the liberal Lutheran influences of her governess and her husband. As a result, quite a few senior Victorian ecclesiastics came from the innocuous liberal tradition of Broad Churchmanship including A.P. Stanley, Valerian Wellesley, A.C. Tait, and Randall Davidson.

Central Churchmanship seems to have been more or less a self-renaming on the part of the younger generation of Old High Churchmen c. 1875 as the term "High Church" was increasingly applied to the Anglo-Catholics. When casting around for a representative name for the Central Churchmanship position in the late nineteenth century I am inclined to think of E. Harold Browne, Bishop of Ely, then of Winchester from 1873-1891. Browne would have considered himself a High Churchman, but his commentary on the Thirty-nine Articles was much favoured in Central Churchmen until the 1920s. What characterized Central Churchmanship was a fairly conservative view of Scripture, an adherence to the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles, the teachings of the Early Fathers; in short, what has come to be called in the last 30 years "classical Anglicanism." This placed them midway between the Evangelicals and the Anglo-Catholics theologically, and this tended to come out in their ceremonial too. Central Churchmanship was inclined to dignity and restraint in worship, and making innovations only when the broad spectrum of opinion was behind them. When thinking of Central Churchmanship, one name, that of the Most Rev. Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury 1945-61 almost automatically springs to mind. His emphasis on continuity, on making the Church of England work, and his avoidance of theological extremes was typically "Central." He also represents the fact that for much of the twentieth century Central Churchmanship was the dominant party in the Church of England because it was the default position for a broad segment of the Church.

Unfortunately, as the 1950s and 60s progressed, it was increasingly clear that the new liberalism was making some significant gains among the ranks of what had once been the Central Churchmen. There was a feeling abroad that the old theology of "Classical Anglicanism" was no longer equipped to deal with the challenges of the twentieth century. As a result, the teaching staffs of what had once been mainly Central Churchmanship theological colleges - for example, King's College London, Wells, Lincoln, and Salisbury - tended to embrace a more liberal theological position. This filtered through into a liberal drift on the part of the Church of England. That said, the vast majority of parishes would still describe themselves as Central Churchmanship, but their theology now has an element of liberalism to it that would have been absent fifty years ago.

So how do I cope with the American tendancy to lump everything middle-of-the-road under the "Broad" banner. Well, I cop out and describe them as Conservative Broad (the English "Central") and Liberal Broad (the English "Broad" or Liberal) and that seems to get the point across! However, there is another point that I need to get across, and that is the need for someone in the Continuum to stand unequivocably for the Central Churchmanship tradition. At the moment, the Anglican world is dividing into three noisy armed camps - one Revisionist, one Angl-Catholic, and the other Evangelical which neglect the essental balance and moderation of the Anglican tradition. I am not sure we can do much about the Revisionists as they seem to be passing out of Christianity altogether into some sort of new age mish-mash, but there is a need for the old Central Churchmanship with its belief in a reformed catholicism that encompasses both High Churchmen and Evangelicals to act as the glue to hold Anglicanism together. In order for Anglicanism to survive as a witness to the totality of the Gospel and the real fullness of the undistorted Anglican tradition there remains a need for that least fashionable of beasts - the Central Churchman.

There are Evangelicals and Evangelicals

2010-01-09T08:59:00.000-08:00

One of the things that mildly amuses and distresses me is the way in which the term Evangelical has been hijacked in the America; first by the Revivalists, and then by the modern Charismatic Movement. At the risk of "teaching Granny to suck eggs" I think I ought to point out that Evangelical simply means "of the Gospel" - i.e. a person or church that holds fast to the chief teachings of the New Testament and of the Gospels in particular. I would hope that all churches would be "small-e" evangelical, unfortunately some get diverted off into preaching Socialism via an inadequate version of the social gospel, others overlay the evangelical message with all sorts of denominational and sectarian distinctives.

So what do I mean by Evangelical? Well there is both an historical and a theological reference here.

The historical reference is to two groups of people. The first group are the sixteenth century Reformers - Luther, Bucer, Calvin, Cranmer, etc.. The second group, at least within my Anglican context, are what the Right Rev. J. C. Ryle (1816-1901) described as the "Christian Leaders of the Last Century." This group included George Whitefield, Augustus Toplady, William Grinshaw, John Beveridge, Daniel Rowlands, Henry Venn the elder, all of whom were both Evangelical and Anglican; though the intransigence of the Hannoverian episcopate sometimes forced them to stray outside the parish churches in order to preach the Gospel! Between them they began a great movement within the Church of England that soon spread to other denominations and traditions. So what was their message?

First and foremost, they preached that man was very far gone from his original righteousness, that we are in need of the Saviour, and that that Saviour is Jesus Christ. In order to be saved, you needed to repent, have faith in Jesus Christ, and follow Him. Theologically, they held to the five "solas" of the Reformation - Christ alone, Scripture alone, Grace alone, Faith alone, to God alone be the Glory - and the majority held to a moderately reformed (mildly Calvinist) understanding of Christianity; though one or two, such as William Fletcher, were mild Arminians. They all held, unlike the Finneyite Revivalists, that conversion was the work of God, and could not be stimulated by purely human means. Therefore they preached with conviction the Good News, and let the Grace of God do its work.

Although they shared their basic tenants with the Wesleys, with the exception of Whitefield, the Anglican Evangelicals were rooted within the parochial ministry, though most would occasionally go on preaching tours to collect their neighbours straying sheep, as Beveridge might have looked at the matter. As a result, their ministry was conducted within the context of the Anglican liturgy - the Book of Common Prayer. Without exception they spoke highly of its structure and content. My own belief is that that they thought so highly of the BCP because it gave liturgical form to reformation theology, and provided a balanced diet of prayer, praise and sacrament to feed the soul.

Unfortunately for both Evangelicals and Anglicans, the connection between Evangelicalism and Prayer Book liturgy has been lost, and with it the tendancy for the BCP to be a unifying force between Evangelicals and Protestant High Churchmen. Without the Evangelical impulse the tendancy of High Church Anglicanism is to either look towards Rome, which is a hostile and unscriptural system, or to become the "frozen chosen." For Evangelicals, the loss is one of objectivity. The Prayer Book, with its retention of the traditional Christian year, forces a conscientious preacher to preach the whole counsel of God, not just the bits he likes. It demands order and balance, which is one of the characteristic virtues of traditional Anglicanism.

Priorities

2009-12-19T22:22:00.000-08:00

One of the less exciting things about being a bishop is that one has to deal with ecclesastical politics. Now I freely confess that there was a time in my life when Church politics had their appeal, but when I saw what they could do in terms of destroyed ministries and shattered churches I decided that the best policy was to watch, but not get involved. I have far more important things to do.

St Paul wrote, "Woe to me, if I preach not the Gospel!" and he wrote that because he felt impelled to use the whole of his wit and energy to proclaim the saving good news of Jesus Christ. St Paul had walked away from fame and renown to become a preacher of the sect of the Nazarenes, a proclaimer of the Way, as Christianity was then called. Why? Because he knew it to be the truth. That should give us a clue as to what we should be about. Our priority is to preach the Gospel.

So far as I am concerned that preaching of the Gospel has to include some fairly unfashionable statements.

Firstly, that human beings are very far gone from their original righteousness.

Secondly, that we are called by God to repent of our sins and accept Christ as our Lord and Saviour.

Thirdly, that Christ has died that "all those who believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Fourthly, that God's grace, not our works, make us "right" before Him and bring us to eternal life.

Fifthly, that those truly called will persevere in the Faith.

I have never been able to determine for myself whether I believe those propositions in a Calvinist or an Arminian sense, but I am very aware of the fact that I have been called and baptized, and am therefore participating in the process that will, by God's grace, bring me to eternal salvation. In that journey I am sustained by God's Word, the Sacraments, and Prayer, and give evidence of my faith by good works. I am also called, as a Minister of Word and Sacrament, to proclaim that good news - as is every other bishop, priest or deacon of the Church.

From my anle, one of the problems with the Church today is that we are not clear enough about sin being the problem and Christ being the answer. We waffle. Why? I do not know. Perhaps that we are afraid of offending people? Well, if we are, then God is offended at us. St Paul was not afraid of offending people with the truth, so let us say with him,

"Woe to me, if I preach not the Gospel."

Continuing Passivity

2009-11-07T09:18:00.000-08:00

One of the things that greatly concerns me is the general passivity of the Continuing Anglican Churches. There are times when I am tempted to refer to the whole movement as the Anglican Recusant Movement because they display the same sort of "if people want the true Faith; they will come to us" mentality as English Roman Catholics did in the eighteenth century. They perhaps had some cause, as the Hannoverian Jackboot was apt to come down on religious minorities such as English Roman Catholics and Scottish Episcopalians, but so far as the USA was concerned that threat was removed by the Treaty of Paris.

The great and common enemy of all orthodox Christians are secularism and indifferentism. Secularism starts with the marginalization of religion on the basis that man is now "grown-up" but ends up by persecuting religion. Indifferentism teaches that all religions are basically the same, and none is any more or less true than another. The former is the credo of the self-appointed American intellectual elite, but they have been pretty successful in spreading the second error to the mainline Protestant Churches and to "Spirit of Vatican II" Roman Catholics. It has certainly undermined the desire and the ability of mainline Christian denominations to evangelize.

Continuing Anglicans have a slightly different problem. We are not much geared towards Evangelism, which seems to be a by-product of the "anti-Evangelical" stance taken by many Broad and High Church Episcopalians. There was an old quip in the West that the Baptist and Methodist missionaries arrived by mule train; the Presbyterian missionary by stagecoach; and the Episcopalian missionary by Pullman Car. Unfortunately, we still have a bit of that Pullman Car Evangelism attitude today; doubly so when you consider that the churches that survive the next fifty years will be those that Evangelize an increasingly secular culture.

However, Evangelism does not have to be a noisy in-your-face venture. A good, Bible-based preaching ministry, a preparedness to welcome strangers, and a willingness to reach out to the wider community are three factors that tend to lead to growth. There is a high interest in Christianity in American society as a whole, and there will always be those who are interested enough to seek out teachers. Being a teaching church that takes people's intellects seriously has always been one of the strengths of Anglicanism, but we need to translate that into something that has a positive Evangelical thrust. Unfortunately, as a life-long Anglican, I am not sure how one does that. Until I figure it out I will teach, and encourage my congregation to be as welcoming as possible, and trust that being a Church that stands unequivocably for the Gospel of Christ will encourage visitors to become members.

Law and Gospel

2009-11-02T19:58:00.000-08:00

The two words "Canon Law" often get you one of those glazed looks, even at clergy gatherings where most folks should know better. However, it is a "true saying and full worthy of all acceptation" that no human institution of any size can survive without some sort of Law for its governance. In the case of Canon Law, this administrative function is coupled to the higher function of preserving the Sacraments and Ministry from profanation and irreverence.

Canon Law was something that evolved slowly over the centuries. Ecumenical Councils and Provincial Synods, and at times Diocesan Synods, legislated for the Church with the result that a vast body of Law, broadly similar in many of its principles, but varying in detail grew up over the centuries. From c.1200 Rome's role as an appeal court for the western Church helped to give Canon Law a more uniform basis, but it 1917 before a unified Codex of Canon Law was published.

In England, Wales and Ireland, quite a lot of Canon Law was absorbed into Common Law, and is only now being rooted out in the name of Secularism. The result of this Common/Canon Law over lap was that at the Reformation the basic purview of Canon Law was the clergy and the sacraments, church buildings and how they were used and furnished; those elements of Canon Law which dealt with marriage and property were part of Common Law. Also, things like the due form for appointing a bishop were part of Statute Law, so much was the Church bound up with the Establishment.

The inertia of the Establishment meant that a lot of the tensions that could lead to schism were absorbed in the late mediaeval tangle of rights and privileges that protected clergy from bishops, bishops from the clergy, and the clergy from the laity. The Church of England did suffer schisms, but they were departures of people who basically did not share its theology and ethos - the Congregationalists, Presbyterians and Baptists to name three. The Non-Jurors, loyal High Churchmen though they were, departed over what was essentially a political principle. The Methodists were lost through a mixture of inertia and misunderstanding, coupled with the desire of the Methodist preachers to govern their own house. On the whole, the Church of England and the Church of Ireland rubbed along quite happily as part of the Establishment in a compaitively homogenous cultural and spiritual environment.

In Scotland and America things developed differently. The Scottish Episcopal Church developed a fairly comprehensive Canon Law to govern its internal affairs. This was couple to a great respect for the function of the College of Bishops as the final court of appeal. The Scottish love of Logic did the rest, and apart from the "English Episcopalians" of the mid-1840s, the SEC stayed together fairly well and was even able to absorb the old "Qualified Congregations" into its busom.

The American Church's Constitution and Canons provided an excellent framework, but an inadequate one. It required some very careful handling from Bishop White (PA 1787-1836) to stop disputes between bishops escalating into open schism. Eventually, the House of Bishops was large enough for most trivial disputes to get lost in the mix. The major disputes between Evangelical and Catholic tendancies took place against the background of mutual loyalty to the Protestant Episcopal Church. The PECUSA only suffered two significant departures, that of Bishop Cummins and a few dozen his Evangelical clergy friends in 1873, and of the Anglican Church of North America (Episcopal) following the St Louis Congress in 1977.

Both the REC and the 1977 ACNA(E) suffered in their early days from both lack of experienced leadership, and some pretty strong personalities in the top slots. There were times in the early days when the Chicago Synod and the Philadelphia Synods of the REC were at each other's throats (the REC in England actually split), and the history of the Continuum has been fraught with dispute and schism. Much of this was due to three factors:

1. No clear method of resolving disputes within the College of Bishops
2. A failure to appreciate the need for a clear Canon Law to resolve disputes and provide guidance on how the church should be governed, coupled with a preparedness to set aside Canon Law in the name of political expediency.
3. The dominance of Churchmanship over loyalty to the denomination.

It was these factors that lead to the break-up of the original College of Bishops. However, human beings tend to learn from their errors, (except for Socialists) so in order to see what the future of the Continuum might hold, we have to ask the question who has learned from the mistakes of the early days?

Without a shadow of a doubt both the Anglican Catholic Church and the Anglican Province of Christ the King have both learned the lesson. Both jurisdictions go to great lengths to obey the provisions of their Canon Law Codes. Of course occasional mistakes are made, but these usually do not usually compromise the integrity of the Church.

The only serious split that the ACC has experienced since it internationalised its Canon Law took place because a group of bishops put their own interests above the Law of the Church. Although this may seem like a failure, the rule of law within the ACC still allowed the damage to be limited, and in the UK, many of the parishes that were syphoned off by the departing bishop have returned to the fold. It is also becoming evident that the ACC's stability is becoming attractive to an increasing number of Continuing Anglican not just in the USA, but in the UK, Africa, and Australia.

APCK has displayed a similar tendancy towards stability encouraged and enforced by the rule of Law. However, the more uniform Churchmanship - a product of Archbishop Morse's thirty years as bishop and of its reliance on its own seminary - have tended to set boundaries to internal disputes. As a result there have been very few major departures from APCK; the two that have occured have been over issues on which their Canons do not speak clearly - the ordination of divorced and remarriage men, and Ecumenicism.

Of course, even though Law can help prevent disputes and provide for the administration of the Church, it should never blind us to the need for the Church to be committed - first and foremost - to preaching the Gospel. A shared vision of the Catholic Faith and a broad and tolerant understanding of the orthodox Anglican tradition is the surest way of preventing schism. The two working together will eventually produce a strong and unified Church which will be able to successfully combat the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil and show forth the glory of the Gospel.

The ACC Provincial Synod

2009-10-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

Denise and I spent the bulk of this week (Oct. 27th to 30th) at the Anglican Catholic Church's Provincial Synod in Richmond, VA. From my own point of view, it was a case of "and a good time was had by all" - especially as it was a meeting without rancour.

I was ordained in the ACC some fifteen years ago at a time when the Original Province was experiencing appreciable turmoil. Being an old ACC man, the Synod enabled me to renew some old friendships, and meet in person several folks from the ACC whom I have come to know well via the Internet. It was also very good for me spiritually to worship with a large group of Anglican clergy and layfolks not just from all-over the USA, but also from the UK, the Sudan, India, South Africa, South American and the Carribbean.

What was also interesting to me was the way in which the Anglican Catholic Church had matured in the years since I left. Whatever surface disagreements there may be are now underpinned by a much stronger loyalty to an organisation that has stood the test of both time and schism. The ACC was founded in 1977, and has now survived some thirty-two years. More importantly, it has also survived two messy schisms. The first, in 1991, occured when three domestic dioceses left to join the Anglican Church in America. More painfully, the newly created Traditional Anglican Communion chose to realign with the ACA rather than the ACC. In the reorganisation that followed, the remnant of the Traditional Anglican Communion that chose to remain with the ACC was organised into the Original Province, which then served the USA, Australia, and a few clergy in Canada. The ACC Province of India serving India, Pakistan and Burma suffered prolonged litigation at the hands of the Church of India bishops who had chosen to go with the new TAC. This was not resolved until 2002. A second schism followed in 1997 when a dispute in the College of Bishops escalated out of control and significant portions of five diocese left the ACC and reconstituted themselves as two small jurisdictions, one known as the Holy Catholic Church (Anglican Rite) and the other as the HCC(Western Rite); neither of these bodies have prospered. This coincided with a period in which three successive Metropolitans - Oliver Lewis, Dean Stephens, and John T. Cahoon - died in quick succession.

It has now been twelve years since the ACC was last afflicted with schism, and this period of stability has seen expansion. Firstly, the church has consolidated its position in the USA. Secondly, the ACC has experienced considerable growth in Southern Africa to the point where the division of present Missionary Diocese has been approved. The ACC has also received the Diocese of Aweli, Sudan, and has begun work in Rwanda and Kenya. The Province of India has also experienced a period of stability, and it recently elected a new Metropolitan, the Most Rev. John Augustine. This, coupled with the election of Bishops for the Diocese of the United Kingdom and Missionary Diocese of Australia and New Zealand has put the ACC back to where it was in the mid-1990s.

The ACC is often criticized by outsiders for its extensive Canon Law and procedures. However, it is difficult not to attribute some of the Church's present stability to the clarity of its Canon Law Code. It certainly avoids many minor disputes, and provides clear solutions to others. The meetings of both the full Synod and of the various houses of Synod were free from any sort of rancour, and I was impressed with the way in which even the budget - a controversial matter in any church organisation - was dealt with efficiently. Archbishop Haverland proved to be an excellent chairman - good humored and occasionally witty, who dealt with the usual procedural wrangles light-heartedly, and with grace. On the whole, I have to say that it was one of the most hopeful, and purposeful meetings of a Continuing Anglican Church that it has been my privilege to attend.

The Canterbury-Rome Bypass

2009-10-22T19:24:00.000-07:00

Before starting on the meat of this article I would like to say that I have not had access to the full text of the Apostolic Constitution, and so my comments are based on the press coverage and synopses that have been published in the last forty-eight hours. I would also like to add that the views herein expressed are my own, and not UECNA policy.

October 21st's announcement of a new deal for Anglicans converting to Roman Catholicism was really no great surprise. It had been buzzed about for several months by the Vaticanistas that an official response to the approaches of Forward in Faith and the Traditional Anglican Communion was going to be forthcoming. I think most religious commentators had decided that the practical effect of the Roman response would amount to "Yeah - that and a subway token'll get you a ride down town!"

In spite of the hooplah, there is actually nothing here that is new. What is innovative is the way in which different provisions have been brought together to allow Anglo-Papalists to convert to Roman Catholicism and retain something of their liturgical inheritance within a quasi-diocesan structure.

The two major provisions that have been brought together are:

1. The "Pastoral Provision" promulgated in 1982 to allow groups of American Episcopalians - in this context former members of ECUSA, as it then was - to convert, and have their own liturgical use which retained elements of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and the Psalter from the 1928 BCP. Over the last 27 years this has led to the formation of approximately ten parishes, and a similar number of missions. These are served by former Anglican priests reordained in the Roman Church, and use a version of the 1979 BCP in which the Episcopalian Eucharistic Prayers have been replaced by those from the Roman Missal. A couple of these Anglican Use Roman Catholic parishes have been very successful, but it is not path that many traditionalist Anglicans have felt called to follow.

2. The examples of the "Military Ordinariate" or "Apostolic Administration" have been used to create the model for a special Ordinariate for the Anglican Use of the Latin Rite. The two models both contribute something. Military Ordinariates are effectively non-geographical dioceses for RC military personnel and their families. They were created because the Military has its own demands and culture. A parish of former Anglicans will similarly have its own culture and ethos which is not easily accomodated within the mainly Hispanic and Irish Catholic culture in the USA, or the Irish and Polish Catholic culture of the UK and Australia. The other model would be the Apostolic Administration of Campos, which placed a diocese that refused to impliment the Novus Ordo reform of the liturgy directly under Rome giving it a protected status under Roman Catholic Canon Law. In a similar way, the special Ordinariate for the Anglican Use will give it a protected status within the wider Latin Rite.

In bringing these two provisions together Pope Benedict XVI has created a mechanism whereby the Anglican Use is, to some degree, independent of the local RC Episcopate. It will therefore be free of the wider diocesan and cultural policy considerations that have often caused RC bishops to close down or refuse to create Anglican Use parishes. This will be particularly useful in England and Australia, where the Pastoral Provision has not previous been available. If one may take refuge in stereotypes for a moment, one cannot imagine bishops raised in the Low Church Irish Catholic culture of English-speaking Roman Catholicism being sympathetic to the Anglicized culture of a bunch of ex-TAC High Churchmen.

Apart from the Traditional Anglican Communion, I suspect that the beefed-up and internationalized "Pastoral Provision" will attract only Anglo-Papalists. These are Anglicans who are essentially RC in doctrine already, but who, for various reasons, have not yet swum the Tiber. For Anglo-Papalists, accepting the new arrangement is a golden opportunity for them to normalize their position by going into a part of the Roman Catholic Church that allows a liturgy with far more familiar elements in it - such as Evensong - than the standard Roman Rite.

For those who are already married bishops in the TAC there is also an outside chance that after reordination as Roman Catholic priests, they might be accorded the title of Monsignor. This has already happened in the case of the former Anglican Bishop of London, Msgr. Graham Leonard, who converted in the mid-1990s. It is also not too fanciful to imagine that they might be given faculties to confer confirmation, as is already the case with some RC priests. It is also just conceiveable that they might receive "ordinary jurisdiction" over the parishes of their former dioceses. Of the package that goes with being a bishop, they have lost only a funny hat, some jewelry and the authority to ordain.

Practically speaking, I think it is far more likely that Rome might ordain as bishops two or three celibate former Anglican priests reordained under Pastoral provision. These bishop will then become the ordinaries for the beefed-up Anglican Use. For those who were married former Anglican bishops, the likeliest outcome is that they will be reordained as Roman Catholic priests and given some sort of "Papal Attaboy" for converting in the cause of Christian Unity. I certainly do not expect to see Rome ordaining a married man to the Episcopate as that would put the cat among the pigeons with the Orthodox, who are also being courted by Benedict XVI.

However, for most Continuing Anglicans the new Apostolic Constitution will be simply an interesting development that demonstrates that Rome has given up on the Lambeth Communion. Sorry, Rowen! What it effectively grants is the opportunity to convert to a culturally sympathetic part of the Roman Catholic Church, because organic unity between Canterbury and the Papacy is no longer perceived as being possible. As a result there is no attempt to address the doctrinal issues that separate Catholic Anglicans and Roman Catholics in the Apostolic Constitution. I think the realists amoung us will see that it would be unrealistic to expect Rome to make any obvious doctrinal concessions to a disunited Lambeth Communion. After all, Rome cannot err in matters of faith - or so they believe!

The Catholic Anglicans and High Churchmen who make up the bulk of the continuum, when they discuss what it means to be "catholic," echo Bishop Thomas Ken's words by defining what Anglicans believe as "the Catholic faith professed before the disunion of East and West, free from all Papal additions and Puritan subtractions."

For most traditional Anglicans those "Papal additions" are areas of deep doctrinal disagreement with Roman Catholicism. At the very least, the areas of disagreement include,

1. The Supremacy, Universal Jurisdiction and Infallibility of the Pope

2. The status and scope of the Marian doctrines

3. The doctrine of the Eucharist

4. Certain disciplinary issues such as compulsory confession and clerical celibacy

Those of us who were reared in the older school of High Churchmanship would add

5. The doctrines of Justification and Sanctification

6. The Supremacy and Sufficiency of Scripture

7. The status of the Deutero-Canonical Books
So far as we know, none of these issues has been addressed in the new Apostolic Constitution.

As I stated above, what the new Apostolic Constitution seems to be offering is the opportunity to convert to Roman Catholicism, but retain a Romanised version of the 1979 BCP, and have one's own Rome appointed Anglican Use bishop. Whilst I can sincerely wish those who want to go that route "bon voyage," I cannot and will not go with them, because, in the end I prefer the Christianity of the Bible, the (traditional) Book of Common Prayer, and the Articles of Religion to that of Rome. I firmly believe that our Anglican Reformation brought us closer to the faith of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church, and that to embrace the errors of modern Rome is to depart from the faith delivered once for all to the saints.

So basically - "Thanks, but no thanks! - Oh, and by the way - nice try! But you haven't even chosen the right Prayer Book!"

The Credibility Gap

2009-10-09T16:23:00.000-07:00

The various Continuing Anglican Churches come in for a great deal of criticism, and even the most optimistic supporter of the movement has to admit that some of it is justified. At times there has been just a bit too much of the "ecclesiastical Brigadoon" about the whole enterprise for folks outside the Continuing Anglican Movement to take it seriously. I am not just talking about the propensity of some towards elaborate titles, "bells and smells; lace and tat" bit about a more serious deficiency - a credibility gap that results from the willingness of some to set aside Canon Law to gain temporary advantages.

It is a commonly acknowledged fact that no society can function effectively without laws which are respected and observed. In secular society law exists to protect the life, well-being, rights and property of the individual, and to create an atmosphere in which men and women can live together in peace. In the Church, Canon Law exist to protect the Church from heresy, the sacraments from irreverence, the priesthood from unworthy men, and so forth. One of the first things that the new Anglican Catholic Church did after the Denver consecrations was set about revising and clarifying Canon Law, and other bodies have been similarly keen to be seen as churches that not only have clergy and congregations, but a structure and Canon Law.

However, none of us who have been in the Continuum more than five minutes can pretend to be blind to the fact that nearly every jurisdiction has, at some point in its history, been subject to the whims of bishops. Such senior clergy have been prepared manipulated rather than administered Canon Law in unspiritual attempts to empire build within the Church. We all know that when law is manipulated rather than administered the respect for the law inevitably declines and the eventual result is either schism or anarchy or both. The commonest problems with regards to Canon Law in the Continuum are, not surprisingly, associated with the clergy; their selection, discipline and preferment. Every jurisdiction has clergy of dubious quality who found their way into the ranks because someone failed to follow the proper procedure or owed some a favour. Most jurisdictions can also point to incident where bishops have been created in dubious circumstance - usually to pay back a political favour, or to avoid the election of a man who might prove troublesome to various vested interests. In one jurisdiction I heard the "Military Ordinariate" of one jurisdiction described as "the open back door to the episcopate" because it was controlled by the House of Bishops and was used to make bishops of men who were felt to be "owed a mitre."

In all these cases, it is the laity who suffer. Unsuitable and incompetant clergy empty churches, and, in the worse case scenario, turn people away from Christ. Unsuitable bishops destroy dioceses and sow schism. If the Continuum wants to be taken seriously it needs to get away from ecclesiastical politics and "doing favours" and adhere strictly to its own Canon Law. The bottom line is that if bishops want to be trusted by their clergy, they should be humble enough to play by the rules; if the clergy wanted to trusted by the laity, they too should have the humility to obey Canon Law. I suspect that the overall effect would be to create an atmosphere of trust and regularity that would help to heal our divisions, and bridge the credibility gap that leads so many dispossessed Anglicans to dismiss the Continuum as a sort of ecclesiastical Brigadoon.

I hope that those of us in Continuum now have the maturity to realise that if a canon is bad, it can be changed. Yes, it takes a little time, but to "finesse" our way around it only gives force to the arguments of those who would dismiss the Continuum irrelevant and self-serving. Likewise I would hope that the era of back room deals is passed, and that we need to do business openly and according to our own Canons. The hard truth here for all Continuing Anglicans is that if we want to be taken serious we need to follow our own laws honestly.

The Thirty-Nine Articles today

2009-09-07T12:27:00.000-07:00

What is the proper role of the Thirty-nine Articles today?

Well, I am tempted to answer that question by saying "more than the Anglo-Papalists desire, and less than the Evangelicals want!"

Anglo-Papalists would really like to forget about the Articles of Religion altogether and shut them off into the "historical documents" category, if not loose them altogether. They recognize, quite rightly, that they are a road block to remaking Anglicanism in the image of 1930s, 1950s or modern Roman Catholicism.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, want to make the Articles into a narrow and binding Confession of Faith. This has a bit more justification behind it than the Anglo-Papalist position, but it still has its problems:
Firstly, Anglicans have never regarded the Articles as a Confession of Faith in the narrow sense, but rather as a broad affirmation to the Biblical version of Christianity. We have been required to subscribe to the Articles as "containing nothing contrary to Scripture" rather than asked to bind ourselves to a particular version of Biblical theology. This is a fair, logical, and Evangelical way of making one's subscription, as it commits us not to the personal opinions of a group of sixteenth century theologians, but to the doctrine of Scripture.

Secondly, I would also like to point out that the Articles have never been a stand-alone document. Not only do they refer not just to the Scriptures, but to the Early Fathers (specifically Jerome), and to the Book of Homilies, but we have always been bidden - for example, by Abp. Matthew Parker - to interpret them in the most catholic sense.

Thirdly, theology did not stop in 1563. The development of culture and society in history throws up new challenges to orthodox Christianity from time to time. The Articles do not answer these questions, but they do give us a theological method with which to approach new challenges. This method begins with Scripture, and looks to the Early Fathers and Councils of the Church to guide us as to the authentic teaching of Scripture. Private opinion has little or no place in our tradition.

Anglicans are first and foremost "Bible Catholics." Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, we teach that all doctrine necessary to Salvation is to be found in the Canonical Scriptures. We also take a distinctly Pauline and Augustinian approach to the doctrines of Justification and Sanctification. However, we also embrace the Catholic tradition of the Church that is rooted in the Fathers and the Councils in so far as it is compatible with Scripture.

The Articles of Religion are therefore part of a wider theological tradition built on the Bible, that includes the ancient creeds, the Early Fathers, and the Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church. They are not a stand alone document. Anglican tradition also affirms the principle of "adiaphora" and also affirms the need for dignity and beauty in worship, following traditional Catholic Uses in so far as they are not contrary to Scripture. Anglicans should reject all Papal additions and Puritan subtractions from the Faith of the (Early) Church. Unfortunately there are enthusiasts on both sides who will not be content unless we embrace the errors of Rome - or for that matter Geneva. As we are bound by truth and not expediency, we cannot in good conscience do this, but must remain faithful to the Bible, the Fathers and Ancient Councils, and our liturgical tradition as it is enshrined in the historic BCP!

A Distinctive Anglicanism

2009-08-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

The distinctive character of Classical Anglicanism was forged between 1559 and 1688. The Elizabethan Settlement had left the church with its old Catholic hierarchy intact, a moderate Reformed Confession of Faith, and a more or less Lutheran Liturgy. Anglicanism's distinctive flavour came from how this broad structure worked out in practice.

The first major controversy that shaped Anglicanism was the Vestarian Controversy of the 1560s and 70s. A considerable number of clergy had spent 1554-59 in exile in the various Protestant enclaves in Germany and Switzerland. Many of these churches had rebelled against vestments and a strict liturgy, as well as adopting Reformed theology. These men came home with a strong desire to "complete" the reformation by sweeping away whatever remained of the old ceremonial. The first serious outbreak of this radicalism came in London in 1560. The Queen saw the scruples of the newly returned exiles as simple disobedience and told Parker to sort it out. In the middle of all this, Parker and Elizabeth evidently must have decided that some sort of compromise was necessary. Parker therefore required the use of the surplice in parish churches, and the surplice and cope in cathedrals and collegiate churches. The vestments were those traditionally associated with the daily Office (the surplice) and processions (the cope) rather than the Mass. Resistence continued, but constant pressure from the civil and ecclesiastical authorities ensured a large measure of outward compliance.

The next phase centred on the Episcopate. Those who had been in Geneva and Strassburg during Mary's reign strongly favoured a more intensive form of church disciple, and the modification or abolition of the Episcopate in favour of a Presbyterian system of Church government. John Whitgift (1530-1604) was the strongest advocate of the Anglican position and wrote extensively in defense of Episcopal government, the liturgy, and the use of vestments. However, Whtgift shared the strongly Calvinist theology of his opponants. The conflict was really between High Church and Low Church Calvinists.

Whitgift's rather rough and ready defense of the Anglican position was later expanded by Richard Hooker (1554-1600) in his "Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity" which gave a theological rationale to compliment Whitgift's polemics. However, one has to be very careful to read Hooker on his own terms not through his nineteenth century High Church, or twentieth century Liberal editors. He was a man who believed passionately in the supremacy of Scripture, but saw reason and tradition as being the best keys to unlocking its meaning.

Whitgift's theological Calvinism led him to disciple Baro and Barrett, two Cambridge theologians who questioned the Calvinist orthodoxy of the Church of England in the 1580s and 90s. Whitgift sought to put an end to the controversyby issuing the unequivocably Calvinist "Lambeth Articles" (1595) but the Queen refused to give them Parliamentry Authority. Although Baro and Barrett quickly disappeared from the scene, they had influenced a generation of churchmen who were to become influential in the last years of Elizabeth's reign.

The oldest of them were Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) and Richard Neile (1562-1640). Although this group was often called "the (English) Arminians" they did not share the theology of the Dutch Arminians except in so far as they sat loosely on the doctrine of Predestination. More important to the English Arminians, formed an ecclesiastical "Court Party" that valued an orderly and beautiful liturgy, divine right Episcopacy, and a strong sacramentalism. This put them at odds with a strong "Parliamentry Party" of Puritans who valued preaching, a more democratic mode of Church government, and austerity.

As the differing values of Court and Parliament came increasing into conflict not just over religion, but over politics, taxation, foreign policy, and the role of parliament. Charles' religious and political traditionalism eventually precipitated the English Civil War, which Charles lost. However, the Parliamentarians were unable to "win the peace" by establishing a stable form of government to replace the old monarchy. As a result, Charles II was swept back into power by General Monck and a political elite weary with the experimentation of the Cromwellian interlude.

Inspite of the attempts of the "hot heads" in both Church and State to turn the clock back. The eventual shape of the Settlement in both religion and politics was essentially "business as usual." The King reconciled the middle classes by promising triennial Parliaments, and the Bishops tried to conciliate moderate Presbyterians by some minor adjustments to the Prayer Book. The old Calvinist fires were to a large extent banked though not extinguished, and the High Church bishops had their hands full repairing the physical damage caused by Civil War and the temporary proscription of Anglicanism under Cromwell.

The final convulsion that shaped Anglicanism was the Glorious Revolution of 1688. James II & VII had tried to extend civil rights to his Roman Catholic co-religionists by rewriting civic charters, hand picking the judiciary, and raising a standing army. These were all measures that alienated the ruling class with the result that they invited James' son-in-law - Wiliam of Orange - to invade Britain. The revolution turned out to be a bloodless one so far as England was concerned.; though Scotland and Ireland were not so fortunate. However, the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim settled the issue in favour of William III and Mary II. The Calvinist William replaced the Jacobite Episcopal, with the Williamite Presbyterian, as the Established Church in Scotland, but otherwise, it was business as usual.

In terms of the Church of England and the Church of Ireland, the 1688 Settlement led to the toleration of Protestant dissent, and another attempt to bring moderate dissenters back into the Established Church. The Non-Jurors, the High Church radicals, left, and there was a desire to follow a moderate "middle way" that an eighteenth century describe as "a benign and comfortable air of liberty and toleration." The combination of a tolerant Biblical orthodoxy, Episcopal Government, and Liturgical worship was now established as the Anglican Way, and it continued to be the mainstream of our Church until the 1970s.

A Conservative Reformation - Part IV

2009-08-20T17:16:00.000-07:00

There have been persistent attempts to sideline the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion (hereafter "the Articles") in recent years mainly from advocates of Liberal theology. As a result, most Anglican clergy have not looked at the Articles quite as closely as perhaps they should have done. The attiude of many seems to be that either that they are irrelevant or that of Oscar Wilde, who when asked to subscribe to the articles when he got to university said, "I'll subscribe to forty if you like!" More moderate folks do at least have the wisdom to see that the Articles have to be read in context. That context is, of course, the theological atmosphere of the fifty years preceeding 1563.

In some respects the English Reformation came rather late in the day, so in some senses it is derivative. The creative thinking was done elsewhere - in Germany and Switzerland - so the English contribution to the English Reformation was that of commonsense and moderation. The basic framework of both Lutheran and Reformed theology was set before the theological Reformation for underway in England, so it is possible to see where previous Confessional statements influenced the Articles.

So from whence do the Articles derive?

The format of the Articles follows that of the Confession of Augsburg (1530) in that it consists of a series relatively short statements either upholding traditional Catholic theology, or explaining where the Church of England differed from it. So let us begin with the basic structure of the Articles, which divide up as follows:

1 to 8 deal with the Fundamentals - the Holy Trinity, the Scriptures and the Creeds
9 to 18 with "the Doctrines of Grace"
19 to 24 with the nature of the Church
25 to 31 with the Sacraments
32 to 39 deal with various disciplinary and civil matters

So keeping this format in mind, let us work through the Articles seeing where they derive from, and their similarities and differences from other Reformation era Confessions.

The first five Articles deal with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and are in line with Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed teaching on this point. The wording, on the whole, echoes that of the Augburg Confession, though it is somewhat expanded. It also bears some resemblance to the Scotch Confession of 1560, which itself was influenced by the 42 Articles and the Helvetian Confession. Articles 6 to 8 follow the broad consensus of Lutheran and Reformed thought on Holy Scripture and the Creeds.

A similar consensus approach continues as the Articles address the subjects of justification, the role of good works, and predestination. To summarize the position taken by the Articles

1. Justification is by grace through "Faith Only."
2. Good Works play no part in our justification, but, after justification, they are acceptable to God, and are evidences of a living faith.
3. Article 17 asserts that Anglicans, in line with St Paul's teaching in Romans, believe in "predestination to life."

All of this is in agreement with the Lutheran Confessions and with the earlier less radical views of Bullinger, Calvin, and their generation of "Swiss" Reformers.

The Articles take a slightly more independent tack when it comes to the sacraments. The Article on the general theology of the Sacraments, and that on baptism are very much in line with the views of the Lutherans and the Helvetian and Heidelberg Confessions. In other words, Baptism conveys regeneration which is susequently manifested by a life lived in accordance with God's Commandments.

The Articles on the Lord's Supper are perhaps the most ambiguous part of the Thirty-nine. They only seems to absolutely preclude the mediaeval doctrine of transubstantiation, and the "Low Reformed" teaching of Memorialism. However, they tend to favour a High Calvinist understanding of the sacrament. Basically, Christ is present "in an heavenly and spiritual manner" and we receive him "by Faith." This is essentially a receptionist point of view, but one with a high degree of objectivity. On the other hand, the Articles pronouncements are not watertight, and it is perfectly possible to hold the Lutheran doctrine of Sacramental Union, and still subscribe to the Articles.

Articles 32 to 39 declare the need for an ordered and authorized ministry, the lawfulness of oaths, and that the civil authorities are part of the Divine Order. The Articles presume that the ministry of the Church will be episcopally governed and will consist of bishops, priests and deacons ordained in accordance with the provisions of the Anglican Ordinal. The Articles also insist that the rites and ceremonies of the Church, provided they contain nothing contrary to God's Word, may be regulated by the Bishops under the oversight of the Prince to ensure that God's people are duly edified - a clearly Lutheran position, and very different to the "regulative principle" beloved of later generations of reformed theologicans.

On the whole, the Articles are a moderate and temperate document which generally fall into line with the historic Reformed Confessions, but they leave the door a little bit open for those of Philippist and Lutheran views on the Lord's Supper. In a sense they are a broad and inclusive document, but that does not mean that they lack substance. Their inclusiveness derives from a studied vagueness on those point that were contested between Lutheran and Reformed theologians. The aim of the 39 Articles was to build a nation Protestant consensus on which to found a Bible-based, reformed Catholic Church.

It is the subsequent history of Anglicanism, rather than an inherent flaws in the Articles themselves that have led to the diminishing of their authority. Seventeenth century theologians rebelling against the double-predestinarian orthodoxy of Dort tended to sit lightly on Article 17. However, the Caroline Divines established a new, High Church Protestant orthodoxy which remained dominant for over a century. Then in the nineteenth century both liberal Broad Churchmen and Anglo-Catholics sought to diminish the authority of the Articles so that they could the more easily promote their own reworkings of Anglicanism. It was this later, Victorian phase in the remaking of Anglicanism that laid the groundwork for the theological chaos and moral relativism that took of the Anglican Communion in the second half of the twentieth century.

A Conservative Reformation - Part III

2009-08-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

The two key pieces of the Elizabethan Settlement were the 1559 revision of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, and the Articles of Religion. The two of them set the theological tone for the English Reformation by providing the Liturgy by which the church prayed daily, and the doctrinal standard to which the clergy were expected to subscribe and adhere.

Of the two, the BCP is ultimately the more important in terms of the daily lives of ordinary English Christians. They heard it Sunday by Sunday and at Holyday, market day, and weekday services throughout their lives. By such frequent hearing and repetition it slowly carved its way into the language and culture of England, so much so that even in the last twenty years, an English Novelist (P.D. James, I think) has written a series of novels that used phrases from the BCP as their titles - for example "Devices and Desires" which comes from the General Confession. Slightly revised in 1604, and again more extensively in 1662, but in essence the 1552/59 Prayer Book remains the official, if sometimes hard to find, liturgy of the Church of England.

In his liturgical methodology Cranmer seems to have preferred the "invisible mending" of the Lutheran Church Orders. Thus is revision of the Breviary into Morning Prayer (Matins) and Evening Prayer (Evensong) was more along the lines of an abridgement than a radical reworking, with the legendary material and short Scripture Readings of the old Rite being replaced by roughly four chapters of the Bible each day. Cranmer's 1549 Lectionary starts with Genesis 1 and Matthew 1 at the beginning of January and works through the Old Testament and much of Apocrypha once; the New Testament, except for Revelation three times, and Revelation was read once. The old Canticles were retained, as were some of the Preces - responses - that were so much a feature of the old Office.

The original 1549 BCP "Order of Holy Communion commonly called the Mass" was even more conservative than Luther. Although the offertory and private prayers of the celebrant where removed in accordance with Lutheran think, the old Roman Canon was replaced by a new Canon, or Prayer of Consecration incorporating both the actual consecration, but also the Prayer for the Church and a Prayer of Oblation. This was composed to replace the Gregorian Canon of the Roman Mass, which seemed very disjointed when translated into English. A translation of the Gregorian Canon survived from c. 1548 which has been attributed to Miles Coverdale, which may have been a working draft for the 1549 BCP. However, it seems inconceivable that Cranmer ever intended to use the Old Canon in the new "Mass."

Even with Cranmer's reworking of the Canon into the Prayer of Consecration, the Communion service of the 1549 BCP received some unfortunate friends, and some stinging criticism. Stephen Gardiner (1500-55), Bishop of Winchester under Henry VIII, who was a non-Papal Catholic in theology, said that it preserved the essentials of the Latin Mass; an assertion that led to a lengthy pamphlet war between he and Cranmer. Martin Bucer, the moderate Reformed former Pastor of Strassburg, criticized it strongly in his "Censura." Many of Cranmer's revisions seem to have been made in answer to Bucer's criticism, but it is clear that in any case, if Diamaid McCulloch is correct, the 1549 was intended as only an "interim rite" anyway.

Cranmer's rearrangement of the Order for Holy Communion was pretty radical, and when finished it lay somewhere between Luther's 1526 "German Mass" and the Reformed orders of Strassburg and Geneva in format. The running order of the 1549 service had been:

Lord's Prayer
Collect for Purity
Introit
Kyrie
Gloria
Collect of the Day
Collect for the King
Epistle
Gospel
Creed
Sermon
{Offertory}
Sursum Corda
Preface
Sanctus-Benedictus
The Canon - consisting of the Prayer for the Church, the Prayer of Consecration, and the Prayer of Oblation
The Lord's Prayer
Fraction and Peace
Short Exhortation
General Confession
Absolution
Comfortable Words
Prayer of Humble Access
Agnus Dei
[Communion]
Prayer of Thanksgiving
Blessing

Cranmer modified this to eliminate any impression that there was any "oblation or sacrifice" in the Lord's Supper. This was mostly achieved by breaking up the Canon of the 1549 BCP. Therefore the 1552 Lord's Supper had the following running order:

Lord's Prayer
Collect for Purity
Ten Commandments interspersed with the Kyrie eleison
Collect of the Day
Collect for the King
Epistle
Gospel
Creed
Sermon
Scripture Sentences whilst the alms are collected
Prayer for the Church
Exhortation
General Confession
Absolution
Comfortable Words
Sursum Corda
Preface
Sanctus
Prayer of Humble Access
Prayer of Consecration ending with the Words of Institution
[Communion]
Lord's Prayer
Prayer of Oblation, or
Prayer of Thanksgiving
Gloria in Excelsis
Blessing

More radical still was what Cranmer did to the physical setting of the Eucharist. The 1549 service was still celebrated facing east with the priest in alb and chasuble or alb and cope. In 1552, Mass vestments were swept away and replaced with the surplice. The wooden table set up like an altar of 1549 is moved out into the middle of the chancel, set lengthways with its ends east and west, and the communicants knelt around it. Even this radical rearrangement was too conservative for some.

The revised form of the Prayer of Consecration consisting of just a brief explanation of why we celebrate this service and the Words of institution is still more Lutheran than Reformed in feel, but on the other had the words said to the communicant when given the Bread and Wine indicated that Cranmer was now in the "true presence" camp of Bucer, Bullinger, and Calvin, rather than the "real presence" camp of Luther, Melancthon, and his uncle by marriage Osiander. In place of the traditional formulars used in 1549, Cranmer orders the following "Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving" and "Drink this in remembrance that Christ's blood was shed for thee" speak of a concept of the Eucharist where the presence of Christ is not in the elements but rather in the celebration. However, the eleventh hour intervention from Hooper and Knox resulted in the assertion of the so-called "Black Rubric" which denied that there was any "real and essential" presence of Christ in the elements, and made it clear that kneeling was a sign of thankfulness(!) for the Christ's work. Cranmer's final change was to put the Gloria in Excelsis after Communion; a move probably inspired by St Matthew 26.30.

This rather long diversion is necessary in order to better explain what happened to the 1552 BCP when Elizabeth and her advisors got hold of it in 1559. It is pretty clear from what happened to the BCP that Elizabeth and her advisors intended to draw back a little from the Religious Settlement of 1552. For a start, Morning Prayer was now prefaced by two rubrics (instructions) the first of which commanded that "chancels shall remain as in times past" and the second required that the ornaments of both churches and ministers should be those allowed "by authority of Parliament in the second of the reign of King Edward the Sixt." This effectively authorized altar-like Communion Tables and Eucharistic vestments, but stopped short of allowing holy water, ashes on Ash Wednesday, and the old procession of Palms on Palm Sunday all of which had been abolished in 1548. The legislation also restricted the use of candles to two placed on the altar.

The next piece of invisible mending came in the Communion service where the words of administration for the Bread are altered to "The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your heart by faith with thanksgiving." The words said for the administration of the the Chalice now said, "The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that Christ's Blood was shed for thee and be thankful." This resulted in a formular which was much more Lutheran or Philippist than Reformed. The other important change to the Communion service was the removal of the "Black Rubric" which was offensive to Lutherans, and indeed anyone else who believed in the real present of Christ in the Eucharist. It was not restored until 1662, and even then it is significantly modified.

The other changes were mainly a minor importance. The lectionary was modified so that the New Testament was read twice not thrice, and the petition against the Pope was removed from the Litany, so as not to offend those who might have a lingering affection for the Papacy. There was also quite a large number of minor corrections to the Epistles and Gospels which were then largely drawn from "The Great Bible" of 1538.

Had the ceremonial provisions of the 1559 BCP not become dead letters within eighteen months of the book's publication the services of the Church of England would have possessed a certain resemblance to those of the Lutheran Churches of northern Germany, Denmark and Norway. As it was, there was a fairly widespread rebellion against the vestments required by the new BCP. As usual the flashpoint was London where a lot of the Protestant exiles who had waited out Mary's reign in Zurich, Strassburg, and Geneva accumulated.

An early sign of the trouble that vestments were to cause had been the attitude of Parker's consecrators. Only Barlow, the principal consecrator was properly vested. Hodgkin wore a surplice, and Coverdale a grey gown! The bishops soon found that parish clergy lately returned from Germany and Switzerland were no more receptive than Hodgkin and Coverdale. Parker had to fight hard to enforce the use of the surplice, and so far as London was concerned Eucharistic vestments were a dead letter. On the other hand there is a little evidence that in some rural parishes they may have continued in use for some years until the Puritanism or age caught up with them, and there are occasionally records of albs being used down to the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Even with the later concessions with regards to the use of vestments, the 1559 revision of the Book of Common Prayer placed the Church of England between the Lutheran and Reformed traditions in its liturgical practice. The BCP had some strong resemblances to the Lutheran Church Orders, but there had been far more Reformed influence on the Communion Service than one would find in most of Germany. On the other hand, the daily Offices had a far more important role in the life of the Church of England than they had in Germany or Scandanavia. Here the English retention of "choir obligation" with its consequent duty for deacons, priests and bishops to say Matins and Evensong daily, if possible in public, led to daily public services in the cathedrals and larger parish churches. The preservation of full-time professional choirs and organs in the great churches soon ensured that large scale church music was produced for the daily Office. This led to that peculiarly Anglican achievement the daily choral offices of Matins and Evensong.

In the next installment I propose to spend some time looking at the Thirty-nine Articles, and how they tread a middle course between Wittenberg and Geneva.

A Conservative Reformation (Part II)

2009-08-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

On her accession in November 1558 the three most pressing issues for Elizabeth were - an empty treasury, an incomplete and inconclusive war with France, and the settlement of Religion. The first and second of these took care of themselves. Hostilities had ceased with France, and the treasury began to refill from the Queen's ordinary revenue. This left religion as the thorniest problem.

Elizabeth's own religious convictions do not seem to have been a major force in her life by the standards of her time, but it is nonetheless clear that she preferred Protestantism. She had, after all, been educated by reform-minded Christian humanists like John Cheke, and she had dissimulated on the subject of religion, as only Elizabeth could dissimulate, throughout her half-sister's reign. Even if she had had a less protestant education, given that the Roman Church had declared her mother's marriage invalid, and her a bastard, she was not predisposed to remain under the Papal obedience. It therefore became clear that as soon as possible she would reinstate the Act of Supremacy as the first step towards a religious settlement. England quickly broke with Rome with Parliament declaring Elizabeth "Supreme Governor... on earth" (not as is popularly supposed 'Supreme Head") of the Church of England. Then comes a curious lull of several months as Elizabeth takes soundings, and allows the renewed break with Rome sink in. There seems to have been some neccessary delay, firstly, for Parliament's Christmas recess, and secondly, to allow Elizabeth and the Privvy Council to fill the bishoprics left vacant as all but two of Mary's bishops resigned or were deprived of their livings.

The clearest sign of where Elizabeth's religious policy was going was the Westminster Conference that took place early in 1559. This set piece was intended to signal a move back to Protestant camp. At the same time the second Prayer Book of King Edward VI began to reappear in some key parishes, and some hot heads began cleansing churches of "idols" until the government forbade such wanton destruction.

A few months later, when the Act of Uniformity appeared it was a basically a restoration of the status quo as it had existed in 1552/3, except that Elizabeth and her Council made several conservative amendments to the 1552 BCP. Firstly, "chancels were to remain as in times past;" secondly, the traditional vestments were restored; thirdly, the BlackRubric was removed and the words "The body (blood) of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given (shed) for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life" were added to preface the more Reformed form of 1552; and finally, the condemnation of the Pope was removed from the Litany. All of these changes moved the Church away from a more strictly Reformed position to make it possible to reach and accomodation with the English Lutherans.

For her Archbishop Elizabeth choose Matthew Parker. Born in Norwich in 1504, Parker had been Ann Boleyn, and later Henry VIII's chaplain. He had been Dean of Stoke by Clare from 1536-1546, but after the college was dissolved in the latter year he married and moved back to Cambridge. He was know to be a moderate advocate of the reformation, but after being removed from his Ecclesiastical offices in 1553 he was allowed to remain quietly on his farm in Suffolk through Mary I's reign. Parker was a moderate, but convinced Protestant, who had had a scholarly career at Cambridge and was a friend of both Peter Martyr and Martin Bucer. Elizabeth and Cecil had to work on Parker in order to get him to agree to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, but he eventually agreed and was consecrated on Dec. 19th 1559.

Parker did not have much time to get his earings as Archbishop as within a few months, he and his brother bishops issued some interim injunctions modifying the provisions f the 1559 BCP regarding vestments. Elizabeth also gave orders the restoration of some fifty minor Holydays to the calendar - without making liturgical provsion for them - forbade controversial preaching and limited the number of licensed preachers. Parker also laboured on making the cumbersome machinery of the Church of England work for a reformed Church.

Phases 1 and 2 of Elizabeth's settlement - the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity - seem to have met with little opposition, and not much enthusiasm. In the past ten years there had been four changes of religion, so most folks were prepared to go to their parish churches and take what was offered. Elizabeth and Parker's careful implimentation of the settlement had kept both the Lutherans and Reformed on board by pursuing a "Via Media" between Wittenberg and Geneva. However, there was still a need to produce some sort of doctrinal statement, and this was achieved at a join session of the Convocations of Canterbury and York in the winter of 1562/3.

It seems almost certain that Archbishop Parker was the guiding light in the reworking of Cranmer's Forty-Two Articles as the Thirty-Nine Articles. In this he was assisted by Edmund Grindal, Bishop of London. Things had moved on a bit in the preceeding nine years as the Anabaptist threat had receded and the Council of Trent was finally drawing to its close. Parker's redrafting of the Articles removed many of the references to the Anabaptists, whilst responses to some of the already issued decrees of Trent were incorporated into the text. The final draft was presented to a Convocation that was in a Reformed and reforming mood. A measure to remove organs from churches had been only narrowly defeated, so it must have come as a surprise when the Thirty-Nine Articles came through the neccessary debate relatively unscathed. The Queen, however, suppressed Article 29 as being offensive to Lutherans and others who held the traditional doctrine of the Real Presence, before they were issued in 1563. This may have irritated some of the more ardent spirits on the Reformed wing but it was a short-lived annoyance as it was restored in 1571 as the influence of Lutheranism waned in England, and there was less need to appease "Church Papists."

The 39 Articles as they emerged from the 1563 Convocation are an interesting document. Parker was going for consensus, and for the most part the Articles seem closer in spirit to the Augsburg Confession than to the various Swiss Confessions of the preceeding thirty years. The Lutherans lost out on with the (briefly suppressed) Twenty-ninth Article which takes a clearly Reformed position. On the other hand, the Lutheran concept of Adiaphora - that ceremonials not clearly contrary to Scripture may be regulated by the church - is firmly entrenched in the Articles, which marks a serious defeat for the Calvinist party.

The Articles really mark the end of the legislative phase of the Elizabethan Settlement. In theory the Church of England had a reformed liturgy, but with the traditional vestments still in use. Church interiors should have been changed only by the removal of altars, roods, rood lofts, and superstitious images, the last named were to be replaced with illuminated sentences a scripture painted on the church walls. Its doctrine was Protestant, treading a middle path between Lutheranism and Reformed positions. It government remained in the hands of Bishops in the Apostolic Succession, and the old cathedral establishments and church courts continued as before. In practice, there were compromises.

For a start, the unofficially cleansing of superstitious objects from churches often went beyond what was strictly neccessary. Organs had been removed from some churches, and were no longer used in others. Sacred music was at a low ebb. The churches were increasingly used as two rooms - the nave for Matins and Evensong, and the chancel for the Lord's Supper. Vestments - other than cassock, surplice, cope, tippet and hood - seem to have disappeared in many areas and did not reappear until modern times. Some ministers - particularly those of what was soon to be called a Puritan persuasion - omitted parts of the Prayer Book Services to make more time for preaching. Parker moved against these abuses in a variety of ways.

Firstly, he made it clear that simple church music in English was to be encouraged. This provision was, after some hesitation, embraced with enthusiasm and gradually the large scale choral services that we associate with Anglicanism developed as composers such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd write grand music for the cathedrals and Elizabeth's Chapel Royal. Parker also promoted the compilation of the "Old Version" of the Psalms of David in Metre, and incident that led to the Church of England being "psalmody only" in many places until c.1800.

Secondly, he and Archbishop Grindal of York ordered that Morning Prayer, the Litany, and the Communion service were to be read as one in parish churches. This made it easier for magistrates to spot omissions. It also led to the characteristic Anglican "Dry Service" of Matins, Litany and Ante-Communion ending with a sermon. Due to the inertia of the faithful and the reformation's "no Mass without Communicants" rule, celebations of Holy Communion declined to once a month, once in two months, or once a quarter depending on the size of the parish. A few big city parishes and the cathedrals still maintained weekly celebrations.

Thirdly, in an attempt to secure uniformity in ceremonial, he required the use of cassock, surplice, tippet and hood at all services in parishes churches. He also required the use of the Cope in cathedrals and collegiate churches. Eucharistic vestments were allowed to quietly disappear, but remained legal.

Gradually, this Via Media Anglicana settled down to being the religion of England, though for the next century - until after 1662 - there was persistant agtitation for a further reformation of religion to put England in the Reformed or Calvinist camp.

A Conservative Reformation - Part I

2009-08-08T08:34:00.000-07:00

There has been a pretty concerted attempt over the last 175 years by one party within the Anglican Church to deny the Protestant heritage of orthodox Episcopalianism. This has generally taken the form of either a deliberate misreading of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, (for example J. H. Newman's "Tract XC") or, more recently, an outright denial that they have any relevance to the modern Church. Whilst I would strongly disagree with the arguments contained in Tract XC, it is true to say, that you have to put the Articles into their historical context in order to fully appreciate what Archbishop Matthew Parker and the Convocations of Canterbury and York were trying to do back in 1563.

Theologically, the Protestant Reformers brake down into three groups. For the sake of argument let us call them conservative Biblicists, moderate Biblicists, and radical Biblicists. The Conservative Biblists were headed by Luther, and include other big names such as Melancthon, Bugenhagen, Olaus Petri, and most of the earlier English reformers - Barnes, Tyndale, etc.. The Reformers consist of the moderate Swiss and Rhineland reformers such as Calvin, Bucer, Oecelampadius, Peter Martyr, and Bullinger. The radical camp consists of people like Carlstadt and Michael Servetus who ultimately started rethinking the Creeds. The radical camp eventually painted themselves into a corner and survive only in radical Biblicist groups like the Amish, and the Mennonites. They have a distant mainstream cousin in the form of the various Baptist Churches, but on the whole their tradition has ended up being pretty marginal. On the other hand, the conservative and moderate Biblicists were to form the mainstream of the European Reformation.

The reason for this is that the various State Churches fell broadly into two groups. The Conservative Biblicists conducted their own form of the Reformation in North Germany and Scandanavia giving those countries a Evangelical Lutheran heritage. The Swiss soon abandoned some of the more extreme positions of Zwingli and conducted a moderate "Bible exclusively" Reformation in the Swiss Cantons, spreading it to Strassbourg, various Rhineland States, the Northern Netherlands, and Scotland. The English Church went its own way somewhere in between the two camps, giving some truth to MacCauley's old jibe about the Church of England. To modify MacCuley in the interests of accuracy it would be fair to say that Anglicanism ended up with "a Catholic hierarchy; Bucerian Articles; and a Lutheran Liturgy." Why was this?

In the 1530s and early 1540s it looked as though England was eventually going to embrace a conservative form of Lutheranism, akin to that of Sweden. Archbishop Cranmer was a Lutheran, and so were most of the Reform minded folks with influence. However, about 1545, Reformed ideas, mainly coming from Strassbourg and the Rhineland rather than directly from Geneva and Zurich, began to gain ground. Nicholas Ridley (1500-55), the "bright young thing" of the reforming movement seems to have embraced the Reformed Eucharistic theology after reading a ninth century tract by a monk called Ratramnus. He eventually convinced Latimer and Cranmer that the Lutheran position on the Eucharist was incorrect, and the stage was set for the Edwardian Reformation to proceed along moderate Reformed, rather than Lutheran lines.

Inspite of its conservativism, and favour with modern Anglo-Catholics, the 1549 BCP was carefully framed within a Reformed theological framework. However, Cranmer, who was a believer in gradualism, framed the service in such a way that Henrician Catholics would not be overly shocked by it, and that the Lutheran mainstream of the Reforming party could accept it whole-heartedly. By all accounts he did the job a bit too well, resulting in a lengthy debate with the Henrician Catholic bishop Stephen Gardner (1500-55), who believed that the 1549 Eucharist was capable of Catholic interpretation, and on the other front it was heavily criticized by Martin Bucer, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, who produced his "Censura" of the First BCP in 1550. Cranmer, who increasingly identified with the Reformed camp, went back to the drawing board, heavily modified the Communion service, and stripped away much of the ceremonial left in 1549.

The 1552 BCP marked the high water mark of Reformed thinking when it came to the liturgy of the Church of England. Edward VI died within a year, and the Accession of Mary Tudor (1516-58) made it dangerous to be a Protestant as she formally returned the country to the Roman obedience. However, Mary's ill-advised policy of burning prominent Protestants like Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Hooper, Taylor, and various other important members of Edward's hierarchy did not play well with the general population. If she had lived longer Queen Mary would probably have been successful in returning England to the Catholic fold, or more likely, have pitched the country into Religious War, but as it was she died in November 1558 leaving a country stuck between the Old and New Religions.

Her successor, her half-sister Elizabeth (1533-1603) had been educated by John Cheke, and had had Matthew Parker as her chaplain at one stage. She therefore lent towards Protestantism, but was relatively uninfluenced by Continental trends being a partisan of neither Lutheranism or Calvinism. Matthew Parker (c.1504-1575), her choice for Archbishop of Canterbury, was also a proponant of the insular version of Protestantism and relatively uninfluenced by foreign disputes, whilst being full aware of all the issues. Sir William Cecil, her chief advisor, was also no fan of foreign fads, though perhaps a little more inclined to Calvinism than the Queen. With these three in charge of policy the stage was set for a moderate, "pan-Protestant" religious settlement, reflecting the government's need to bring all three streams of English Protestantism within the national Church. Elizabeth, Cecil, and Parker therefore set out to comprehend Lutherans, Bucerians, and Calvinists within one National Church. Paradoxically, what started off as a matter of political expediency ended up producing what John Wesley described as the "best reformed Church in Christendom."

In the next article we are going to look at how this was brought about and why it is so important for Continuing Anglicans to preserve their Reformed Catholic heritage.

GenCon 2009

2009-07-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt about, but GenCon 2009 was the end of the line for Conservatives in the Episcopal Church; just as GC 2000 was "the end" for Catholics in ECUSA. Measures calling for the full inclusion of the LGBT candidates in the ordination, and authorizing the Liturgical Commission to draw up rites for Same Sex Unions effectively mean that the policy of radical inclusion has reached its logical conclusion, which, paradoxically is the "radical exclusion" of Classical Anglicanism, Evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism from TEC.

Of course, the demise of the last remnants of traditional Anglicanism in TEC will not be immediate. However, there is no disguising the fact that the remaining conservative parishes are now pockets of resistence in a foreign land, and that there is no hope of a counter-revolution. They should be able to circle the wagons and survive within TEC until their present clergy retire - then they can expect to be "radically included."

However, the new TEC is not that new. It began in the 1960s with the decision of the House of Bishops not to discipline Bishop Pike for his anti-Trinitarian views. Then it continued with the ordination of women (1976); censuring of Bishop Chambers for his support of Continuing Anglicanism (1978); the first woman bishop (1987); and the removal of the conscience clauses (2000) for those opposed to Women Ordination. All of these events are landmarks on ECUSA's road to rejecting Biblical theology and morality in favour of a New Religion.

We should be very thankful for those who had the vision to see where it was all going, and created the Continuing Anglican Church. The St. Louis Congress of Concerned Churchmen (1977), and the Denver Consecrations (1978) marked a new beginning for Anglicanism based up its four fundamental:

The Bible
The Ancient Creeds
The Two Dominical Sacraments, and
The traditional threefold (male) ministry of deacon, priest, and bishop

They also had the wisdom to go a little beyond traditional Anglican doctrine and clarify the position of the Church on issues such as the number of Ecumenical Councils we accept, and where the church stands on, among other things, the sanctity of human life, and the sanctity of marriage.

Organizationally, Continuum is far from perfect, as we have become divided on secondary issues, but we have at least retained "the Faith once delivered to the Saints." After thirty years, the Continuum is reaching maturity, and seeking to work beyond the mistakes of the past - which were entirely political, not theological.

The three jurisdictions that came out of the Denver Consecrations - the Anglican Catholic Church; the Anglican Province of Christ the King, and the United Episcopal Church of North America, are sharing ministers and resources and are slowly moving forward on the issue of achieving an institutional unity that will reflect our unity of faith. I hope that those Catholic Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics who have finally run out of room in TEC will look seriously at the Continuum and realise that the Faith of their Fathers (and mothers!) is alive and well in that little church down the road.

Apostolic Succession in the UECNA

2009-07-14T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Succession list given on the United Episcopal Church's website follows a line that incorporates English, Scottish, and Old Catholic lines of Succession. As a result it wanders around the houses a little. The most direct line is as follows:

STEPHEN C. REBER (PB IV, UECNA), who was consecrated in 1996 by

JOHN GRAMLEY (PB III, UECNA), who was consecrated in 1991 by

ALBION KNIGHT (PB II, UECNA), who was consecrated in 1984 by

C. Dale. D. DOREN (PB I, UECNA), who had founded the United Episcopal Church of North America in December 1980. He had been consecrated as Anglican Catholic Bishop of the Midwest on 27 January 1978 by

A. A. CHAMBERS, who had been consecrated as Bishop of Springfield, IL in 1962 [2] by

ARTHUR CARL LICHTENBERGER (PB, PECUSA 1958-1964), who in 1951 had been consecrated as Bishop of Missouri by

HENRY KNOX SHERRILL (PB, PECUSA 1946-58), who in 1930 had been consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts by

JAMES DEWOLFE PERRY (PB 1928-1937) Bishop of Rhode Island) who had been consecrated in 1911 by

DANIEL SYLVESTER TUTTLE, (PB 1901-23) Bishop of Missouri, who had been consecrated as Missionary Bishop of Montana in 1867 by

JOHN HENRY HOPKINS, (PB 1861-67) Bishop of Vermont, who had been consecrated in 1832 by

WILLIAM WHITE, (PB 1787-1789; 1796-1836) Bishop of Pennsylvania, who had been consecrated in February 1787 [1] by

JOHN MOORE, Archbishop of Canterbury 1783-1805

[1] Both the English and Scottish lines of succession derive from the Rt. Rev. Gilbert Sheldon, Bishop of London 1660-63, who consecrated bishops for the Church of Scotland in 1661. In 1678 he consecrated Henry Compton as Bishop of London. Archbishop Moore's orders derive from Compton.

[2] Old Catholic orders enter this line of succession through Horace B. Donegan, who as Bishop of New York, was one of the co-consecrators of A. A. Chambers. A Polish National Catholic Bishop had taken part in the laying on of hands at Donegan's consecration in 1948. In the case of the line of succession published on the UECNA website they enter through Bishop Hulse of Cuba who was consecrated in 1912.

I am not usually one who gets obsessed with Apostolic Succession lists, but just so that you know, your unworthy blogger was consecrated 10 January 2009 in St Louis, MO, by the Most Rev. Stephen C. Reber (PB IV UECNA), assisted by the Rt. Rev. D. Presley Hutchens, Bishop of New Orleans, Anglican Catholic Church, and the Rt. Rev. William Wiygul, Bishop of the Southeastern States, Anglican Province of Christ the King.

The Influence of Tractarianism

2009-07-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

It is extremely difficult to gauge just how much influence Tractarianism has had in the Anglican world. At the very least, the modern revival of weekly Communion as the main service, a greater interest in liturgical science and a greater and more widespread understanding of Catholic side of Anglicanism should attributed to Tractarianism. However, how much else? We cannot really tell.

The main reason for this is that the Oxford Movement once it escaped from its university setting was not a sharp edged organisation. On the one hand its more moderate followers were ultimately little different to the "Central Churchmen" and on the other it was pretty difficult to decide whether someone was a Prayer Book Catholic, or a mainstream Anglo-Catholic. The boundaries are very vague. Then, of course, the Anglo-Papalists took the ball and ran with it - to all sorts of interesting and unusual places.

All this means that Tractarianism's influence is far more widespread and defuse than one might suspect. However, it was to the Tractarians themselves, and to their assertion of the Catholic character of Anglicanism that I was drawn, formed my theology, and ultimate led me to all sorts of interesting and unusual places.

The first priest I encountered who was a fully paid up member of the Catholic movement was the Rev. E. F. L. Brown (1915-94) who was retired from a ministry spent largely in the diocese of Chelmsford and acted as the assistant priest at my local parish church. Fr. Brown was a member of various Catholic societies, loved Walsingham, and had a way with a 1662 BCP Communion service that had to be seen to be believed. He had grown up at the London end of Essex, and had been accepted for training before World War II, and had arranged to go to Chichester Theological College. However, Hitler intervened and he spent the war in the Army. After demob in 1946 he went to Edinburgh Theological College (intending Chichester men went there for a couple of years after 1945 as the Royal Navy was still using the College buildings) and was ordained in 1948 as Assistant Curate at Inverness Cathedral. He married while still a curate and moved South again after his time at Inverness ending up as Vicar of Foxearth near Sudbury. A quite and unremakable ministry of some 37 years. What he communicated to me was first of all, that the Catholic Movement was a deeply serious one seeking holiness through prayer, worship and sacrament.

The seriousness of Tractarianism is something that was fully absorbed by all branches of the Catholic Movement in the Church of England - Prayer Book Catholic, Anglo-Catholics, and Anglo-Papalists. This seriousness stems from the awareness that human beings were made by God to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him in the next. OK - I know that's the Baltimore Catechism, but it make the point! Thus the spiritual life is the highest calling of humanity, and this cause the Tractarians to stress the old Benedictine (and New Testament) ideal of Conversion of Life. I'll be writing more about this in a later Blog entry.

The other thing that Fr Brown communicated was the idea that the Catholic Movement was fun. The British glory in eccentricity - provided it does not go too far! The Catholic Movement has produced more than its share. Anyone who has been around the Catholic Movement for a while has a story or two about the priests of yesteryear who were characters. One of my favourite stories is about Fr. Colin Stephenson, who was an extreme Anglo-Papalist. He once asked Fr. Cyril Tomkinson if he could celebrate a private Mass at All Saints, Margaret Street, and he replied,

"No, you'll only use that horrid Roman book! The rule here is music by Mozart, decor by Comper, choreogaphy by Fortescue but (wagging his finger) - libretto by Cranmer!"

Another aspect of the "fun" is the liturgy itself. Even in Prayer Book Catholic worship the senses are involved in worship by music, colour, and ceremonial all of which fire the imagination, feed our faith, and foster a sense of mystery, the otherness of God. Even today, there is something about catholic Anglican worship that can lift the worshipper to heaven, and allow us a glimpse of His glory.

It is that mix of orthodox theology, transcendant worship, deep seriousness and a sense of fun that has kept me loyal to the catholic side of Anglicanism for the last 25 years. I hope it is something that I can pass along to the next generation just as Fr. Brown passed it on to me.

"At the Reformation...

2009-06-29T22:58:00.000-07:00

the Church of England became Protestant in order to become more catholic"
William Van Mildert, Bishop of Durham 1826-36

Van Mildert was a traditional High Churchman, steeped in the theology of the Early Fathers and the Caroline Divines. At first glance his statement looks paradoxical, but what he is getting at is the method of reform. That at the Reformation the Church of England used protestant ideas from the continent to slough off the accumulated abuses of the Middle Ages. Then, interpreting her new formularies in, as Archbishop Parker phrased it, "the most catholic sense" established a national Church which was reformed Catholic in character.

The Anglican Reformation was, in some ways, rather messy, and it owed rather a lot to some of the key players - Elizabeth I, Matthew Parker, and Lord Cecil. They crafted a broadly based Protestant Settlement of Religion that was governed by a conservative revision of the Book of Common Prayer, and from 1563 by the 39 Articles Although the Book of Common Prayer held up very well under pressure, apart from its provisions about vestments being ignored, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (hereafter XXXIX) were soon found to be capable of wide interpretation. The philosophy driving the Elizabethan Settlement was that of making a national Protestant and Episcopal Church. Doctrinally they had tried to comprehend both the Reformed (Calvinist) and Lutheran positions. The result was that the XXXIX largely reflected Lutheran theology except on the topic of Holy Communion where they veered towards the "spiritual presence' views of Cranmer's friend Martin Bucer (1491-1551).

For the first fifty years after 1559, most senior churchmen were High Church Calvinists, and interpreted the XXXIX in that way. They were basically Reformed in theology, but accepted the discipline and liturgy of the Church of England. However, after about 1585 there was a dissenting minority, who, once they became a discernable party, were called Arminians, and later High Churchmen, whose theology was more Patristic in inspiration. They gradually abandoned the Predestinarian theology of the Reformed party, and began preaching the doctrines of Free Wil, Baptismal Regeneration, the Centrality of Holy Communion, and the Divine origin of Episcopacy, all of which they found in the Fathers of the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries. In the later years of James I and in the reign of Charles I they gradually came to be the dominant party in the Church of England, and after the brief Puritan victory of Cromwell's Commonwealth (1644-1660) they were triumphant in the Restoration Church.

The Patristic influenced "Reformed Catholic" theology that they developed and propagated was a dominant school of Anglican thought from the 1660s to the 1840s. From the Caroline Divines, the torch passed to the Non-Jurors, to High Church Whigs like John Potter and Edmund Gibbon, then to the "Orthodox Party" under George III and the Regency, and to E. Harold Browne, and the Wordsworth brothers who were the last major exponants of the tradition. This tradition was absorbed and radicalized by the Tractarians and the Prayer Book Catholics. The older moderate tradition also continued, at least in the UK, and gradually came to be known as Central Churchmanship.

Tractarian Worship

2009-06-29T22:09:00.000-07:00

I think a lot of folks confuse Tractarian with Anglo-Catholic. The two are certainly related but they are not identical, but Anglo-Catholicism represents a further radicalization of the High Church Tradition that the Tractarians had themselves tweeked.

In the UK, where I grew up, Tractarianism was generally regarded as having split into two schools in the mid-nineteenth century. These later gave rise to the two dominant twentieth century strains of High Churchmanship - Prayer Book Catholicism and Ritualism/Anglo-Catholicism. Around where I grew up there were far more parishes that took the Prayer Book Catholic approach than the Anglo-Catholic, and the parish that I grew up in was one of them.

The basic principle of Tractarian liturgical theology was that one "took the Book of Common Prayer seriously." This meant, among other things, that

1. Holy Communion should be celebrated every Sunday and Holyday
2. Morning and Evening Prayer should be said every day - publically in church if at all possible.
3. That opportunity for private/auricular confession should be given to those whose consciences demanded it
4. That the rubrics (instructions) in the Book of Common Prayer be followed.
5. That the occasional offices - baptism, marriage, etc. - be performed in a dignified manner and in accordance with Canon (Church) Law.

It does not sound a very ambitious programme, but for parish churches of the time it was almost revolutionary. Indeed, it would be a bit of a stretch for a lot of our parishes today - for example, how many have daily Mattins and Evensong? I know my parish does not manage it! This simple programme of reform soon produced its own worship schedule, as exemplified by my home parish. In 1890, the services were as follows:

Sundays -
8.00am Holy Communion
10.30am Morning Prayer, Litany and Sermon
12noon Holy Communion (1st and 3rd)
2.15pm Sunday School/Catechism
6.30pm Evensong

Weekdays:
8.00am Holy Communion (Holydays)
10.00am Morning Prayer
10.30am Holy Communion (Thursdays)
5.30pm Evening Prayer (6.30pm Evensong on Fridays)

Later (1925) this changed a little:

Sundays:
8.00am Holy Communion
10.30am Sung Holy Communion (1st and 3rd) 10.30am Morning Prayer (2nd, 4th and 5th)
2.15pm Sunday School/Catechism
6.30pm Evensong

Weekdays:
7.30am Morning Prayer
8.00am Holy Communion (Holydays)
10.30am Holy Communion (Thursdays)
5.30pm Evening Prayer
6.00pm Confessions (Saturdays Only)

You will notice from both schedules that the accustomed Morning Prayer and sermon was allowed to remain in place unchallenged as the main service, whilst the missing elements of the Prayer Book schedule were slowly introduced.

Finally when I was a kid, the parish briefly attained something close to the Tractarian ideal:

8.00am Holy Communion
9.30am Sung Communion
10.30am Mattins
6.30am Evensong

On weekdays MP was at 9.00am and EP at 5.30am. There were to additional Eucharists on Tuesdays at 7.30am and Wednesday 9.30am.

Strictly speaking, the Sung Communion should have followed Mattins, but MP had ben at 10.30am since the eighteeenth century, but otherwise all was as it should be.

The ceremonial was pretty simple. Eucharistic vestments were used for the Holy Communion, but there was no elevation or ringing of bells at the consecration, and reverences ere confined to bows. A couple of Readers assisted at the main Sunday Eucharist as Chalice Bearers, Epistoller, and server. Incense was reserved for the three great feasts of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday. Mattins and Evensong saw the officiant in traditional Anglican choir dress - cassock, surplice, tippet and hood. Everything from "O Lord, open thou our lips" to the end of the third Collect except for the lessons was sung or chanted with the sermon rounding off the service before the blessing. Sometimes these services would be left to the Readers, with the priest giving just the absolution and the blessing.

Tractarian worship focussed on faithful adherence to the provisions of the BCP. Complicated ceremonial and sacristy histronics were not part of the tradition. However, no-one had any doubt about the fact that the Church exists first and foremost to worship God, celebrate the sacraments and preach the Gospel, and not as a source of entertainment.

Reformed Catholicism

2009-06-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

There have been at least two attempts to rename a portion of the Protestant Episcopal Church as the Reformed Catholic Church. The first came in 1861 when the newly formed Protestant Episcopal Church of the Confederate States met to discuss its constitution. Bishop Green of Mississippi suggested the name, only to have to withdraw it when the strength of Virginia's opposition became known. The second came at the General Convention of 1889, and failed by only three votes!

Why the fascination with the name "Reformed Catholic?"

Anglicans - even the ones who if pushed would call themselves "protestant" - feel a certain discomfort with the term. The source of that discomfort is the fact that the word "Protestant" means not only someone who protests against the errors and innovations of Roman Catholicism, but it also covers a multitude of denominations that have chucked out any concept of being "Catholic" in favour of Radical Biblicism. However, inspite of being used with a capital-R to cover Calvinism, the term "reformed" better encapsulates what Anglican feel happened in their reformation. The Anglican Reformers took the existing Church and reformed it. As one Anglican apologist retorted to a Roman Catholic who asked "Where was your Church before the Reformation?" - "Where was your face before you washed it this morning?"

Anglicans understand their church to be Catholic because of its continuity. After all, almost all Anglican bishops have both William Wareham, the last but one RC, and Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury in their Apostolic succession. Anglicans also have the Bible, the Creeds, a reformed Liturgy, the Sacraments, as well as that threefold Apostolic ministry. Anglicans have also stated in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral that they believe the Scriptures, Creeds, Sacraments and Episcopal Ministry to be the marks of the Church.

So "reformed Catholic" reflects a great deal of the Anglican self-understanding as being in origin the Catholic Church of England reformed according to Scripture. Also, it isn't really a party label, the High Church Protestants of the eighteenth century used, as have some modern Anglo-Catholics, and in recent times, the Evangelical Scholar, Dr Peter Toon. The fact that it has been accepted as a describer for Anglicanism by men of various parties shows what a widespread appeal it has as a definer for Anglicanism.