tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72941805089471360862024-03-12T00:12:02.370-04:00The Old High ChurchmanSome thoughts about Anglicanism - Continuing and otherwise - from an old-fashioned High Churchman.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-54935647306281359712023-02-20T10:30:00.000-05:002023-02-20T10:30:03.498-05:00Evangelicalism in the PECUSAI think it would give a lot of American Anglicans a bad attack of the vapours if you told them that there was once a very influential Evangelical Movement in the Protestant Episcopal Church. Certainly, given that history tends to be written by the victors, its contribution to the life of the Church has been all but air-brushed out by the Anglo-Catholic, and Broad Church historians that have produced the standard works on the history of the Episcopal Church. Curiously, apart from the early chapters of Allen Guelzo's "For the Union of Evangelical Christendom" and Diana Hochstedt Butler's "Standing Against the Whirlwind" (OUP 1995), the subject has not been much studied, so much of what I have to say here is gleanings from either 19th century publications, such as "The Life of Alfred Lee, 1st Bishop of Delaware," or from books which focus on wider Evangelicalism.
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Traditional church historians tend to date the start of the Evangelical Revival in the Episcopal Church to 1811 which saw both the consecration of Alexander Viets Griswold (1766-1843) as Bishop of the Eastern Diocese - a grab bag of New England States unable to support their own bishop - and the ordination of William Meade (1789-1862) to the diaconate. This is more of a matter of convenience than anything else, as there had been Evangelicals in previous generations starting with the Great Awakening of the 1740s and 50s. Perhaps the best known of these are Isaac Milnor, who had originally been a Methodist, but was ordained by Bishop White in 1789, and Richard Channing Moore (1762-1841), who was originally a doctor, but was converted in his early twenties and sought ordination in the Episcopal Church, achieving prominence, first as a New York Rector, then as Bishop of the Church in Virginia. Moore's ministry reflected the activist streak in Evangelicalism, as he spent the winters preaching at the Monumental Church, Richmond, and then rode circuit in the summer, confirming, and preaching in courthouses, lent churches, and in abandoned Anglican structures. Assisted by the like of William Meade, and W.H. Wilmer, the PEC in Virginia began to rise from its deathbed. However, Virginia was not the only beneficiary of Evangelical activism. After a spat with the High Church Bishop Hobart of New York, Philander Chase moved to Ohio and organized the Church there, serving as bishop for fifteen year, before resigning and moving on to Michaigan and Illinois. These pioneers saw their function as to found the basic institutions needed to sustain the Church - school, college, and seminary - and as a result Virginia Seminary, and Bexley Hall came into being to support the Evangelical cause in the Mid-Atlantic States and Ohio respectively.<br><br>
If the 1810 and 1820s were seedtime, then the 1830s were a time of harvest. The consecration of William Meade as Assistant Bishop of Virginia, Charles McIllvaine as Bishop of Ohio, B.B. Smith as Bishop of Kentucky, Leonidas Polk as Bishop of the Southwest, and Stephen Elliott as Bishop of Georgia meant that third of the bishops consecrated in the 1829-41 were Evangelicals, and this trend was to continue through the 1840s, and into the 1850s. Predictably, the Evangelicals concentrated on the four Cs of Evangelicalism - Christ, the Cross, Conversion, and Causes - producing a version of Episcopalianism that accorded well with the sensibilities of the American middle class, and this in turn produced steady, even spectacular growth. However, it wasn't to last, not just because of the rise of Tractarianism, but because there was an incidious threat to Evangelicalism from within the Protestant tradition. Higher Criticism of the Bible.<br><br>
Higher Criticism had developed in Germany around 1800, and it applied a whole battery of philolgical, historical, and literary techniques to the Bible. However, the dominant note was that of rationalism - a mindset where if it seemed improbable, it was improbable, and had to be either explained or explained away. American Evangelicals who had grown up in a pre-critical bubble were ill-equiped to face this. The usual response was to either accept the German theories about the origins of the Old Testament, and later, the New uncritically, or else to flee to fundamentalism, though Fundamentalism with the capital-F did not develop until the 1920s. The rot set in for the Episcopal Evangelicals in the 1860s when some of the next generation of leaders, such as Phillips Brooks, embraced Higher Criticism, and increasingly, the Social Gospel with the result that the old moderate Calvinism of Evangelical Episcopalianism was slowly eroded. Evangelical-leaning seminaries such as Episcopal Theology School, Bexley Hall, and Philadelphia Divinity School increasingly embrace the liberal stance on the Bible, with only Virginia Seminary lagging behind. The departure of some strong conservatives such as G. D. Cummins and James Latané to the Reformed Episcopal Church in the mid-1870s also did not help, but it was not decisive. Episcopal Evangelicals, assaulted by Tractarianism, Ritualism, Schism, and Higher Criticism, increasingly look like yesterday's news in a religious environment which increasingly valued form over content in line with the consumerism of urbanizing America.<br><br>
However, Evangelicalism did not die out, though it was increasingly of the liberal sort having affinities with the less confessional sections of Lutheranism accepting, but not really embracing, the insights of Higher Biblical Criticism whilst still preaching Christ, the Cross, and Conversion, and retaining the same old commitment to causes. Perhaps the best known of these 'liberal' Evangelicals in the mid-twentieth century was the Rev. Samuel Shoemaker, whose landmark ministry at Calvary Episcopal Church, New York, has largely been forgotten in favour of his work with Alcohols Anonymous.<br><br>
Unfortunately, what calls itself "Evangelicalism" in the Anglican/Episcopal Churches in the USA today is not really a linear descendent of the old Evangelicalism, or even of mid-century Liberal Evangelicalism, but rather it is the product of the interaction of Low Church Episcopalianism and the Charismatic Movement in the 1970s and 80s. This makes it 'wobbly' when compared the old Evangelicalism as exemplified by some of the 'conservative woke' elements in the ACNA and elsewhere.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-17920085620038220292020-01-22T08:02:00.001-05:002020-01-22T08:02:24.754-05:00Is Anglicanism Reformed?The very title of this post will give some folks the vapours, as they have been brought up in the Post-Tractarian World in which, if Anglicanism is seen as Reformed at all, it is with a small 'r' that is immediately followed by the word Catholic. No-one on the Reformed side of Anglicanism would actually disagree with this, but they would define Reformed in more stringent terms than merely knocking a few mediaeval barnacles off the ark of salvation.
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The argument that Anglicanism belongs to the Reformed family of Churches starts with the nature of the English Reformation itself. Unlike many of the German principalities, England had a slow reformation - lasting from approximately 1533 to 1604, though the main phase ended in 1571 with the publication of the final version of the Articles of Religion. However, before we run off with the idea that the Articles had fundamentally changed their character, it has to be remembered that the 1563 version of the Articles was also in the Reformed camp, as were the Forty-two Articles of 1553 which preceded them. You would have to go back to the unpublished Thirteen Articles of 1537/8 before you found a Lutheran statement of faith produced by English Churchmen, and even then it is very hesitant, being the product of Thomas Cromwell's pro-German policy in the run-up to the Cleves marriage.
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If one looks at the two main confessional documents of the English Reformation, the (39) Articles of Religion, and the Book of Common Prayer, a series of proposition emerges that definitely put the Church of England into that strand of the Augustinian Theological tradition which we call "Protestantism" and furthermore, to put it into the subset known as "Reformed." So let us spend some time looking at these formularies in turn.
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<b>The Articles</b><br>
The 39 Articles have a fairly extensive pre-history in that Cranmer had been working on a confession for the English Church on-and-off since 1536. However, one factor one has to contend with is that Cranmer himself evolved theologically throughout his adult life from a humanist Catholic, to a 'Lutheran' to someone who held a theological position that may be labelled 'Reformed.' The question when looking at statements of faith, sermons, and other documents that come from his pen is 'when?' Cranmer was cautious in his public pronouncements avoiding make controversial statements until he thought he had the full support of those in authority over him. It seems likely that Cranmer moved from the Lutheran to the Reformed camp somewhere before 1545, but as late as 1548, in response to the need for a reformation catechism, he allowed the publication of the Catechism of Justus Jonas, a Lutheran work. However, the 1549 BCP show the influence of Bucer and Melanchthon so that, even though the format is very conservative, the doctrinal passages, such as the exhortations in the Mass, already show the influence of the Rhenish Reformers. Cranmer certainly seems to have openly favoured the Philippist/Reformed camp during Edward VI's reign. With Peter Martyr, Martin Bucer, Fagius, and Jan Laski all active in England together with native Reformed sympathizers such as Nicholas Ridley, John Hooper, Rowland Taylor, Hugh Latimer, Miles Coverdale, and Cranmer himself, the Edwardine Church took on a markedly Reformed hew. This move certain left its mark on the Forty-two Articles of 1553. The 39 Articles of 1563/71 differ little from the 42 Articles of 1552 except for a slight softening of the wording of certain articles, and the removal of certain references which had lost their topicality by 1563. In principle, the Articles of 1563 are best described as being concerned firstly in establish the broad catholicity of the English Church (Articles 1-8); its acceptance of Augustinian theology (Articles 9-18); its Protestant critique of Rome (Articles 19 to 24); its acceptance of the Reformed variant of the Augustinian theology of the Sacraments and Ministry (Articles 25-33); and finally with the particular concerns of the English/Anglican Church in terms of the relationship of Scripture and Tradition, and Church and State (Articles 34-39). In many respects it is the influence of Bucer, Bullinger, and Melanchthon which is strongest, rather than that of Luther or Calvin. I would basically describe the Articles of Religion as being 'moderate Reformed' meaning that have a positive and dynamic understanding of the sacraments, which aims to maintain the positive aspects of sacramental teaching without getting bogged down in scholastic speculation. It is actually in its teaching about the Lord's Supper that the Articles show their moderate Reformed pedigree most clearly in that they affirm the 'Real, Spiritual Presence' or 'Virtualism' of Bucer, Calvin, and Melanchthon, rather than the more subjective views of say Bullinger, or the realist version of Sacramental Union with its dependency on the concepts of <i>communication idiomata</i>, and <i>ubiquity</i> a beloved of Lutheran Orthodoxy, though it is perhaps closer to the latter in intent. In other respects, such as their position on Justification, Election, and the Authority of the Church the Articles walk a line between the Reformed and Lutheran positions in the hopes of building a Protestant Consensus.
In most respects, though, the Articles of Religion line up theologically with their Reformed contemporaries, the Belgic Confession, and the Second Helvetian Confession. However, their spirit is alien to the Rationalist theology of the eighteenth century as they require the reader to engage positively with concepts such as Predestination to Life, Baptismal Regeneration, and the Spiritual, Real Presence, which were common in the later sixteenth century, but were nonsense to the Rationalist and Latitudinarians. Modernists find their high view of Scripture difficult to take, whilst Anglo-Catholics find them insufferably Protestant and either try and explain them away (Tract XC), or more honestly, simply apply a razorblade to them.
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<b>The Book of Common Prayer</b><br>
If, theologically, the Church of England was more-or-less at one with the German strain in the Reformed tradition, she showed a good deal of independence in her liturgy. One suspects that the Puritans were correct in their assessment that if Bloody Mary had not come along Cranmer would have made further changes, but God in His providence ordained otherwise, and what the Puritans 'got stuck with' was a modified version of Cranmer's second BCP of 1552 which suited Elizabeth I's purpose of creating a Protestant National Church. Before I get into the details I think we do need to dispose of some myths.
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The first of these is that the 1549 BCP still 'catholic' whilst the 1552 is 'protestant.' On the face of it this would seem to be true, but it has to be remembered that the Exhortations were an integral part of the Liturgy as conceived by Cranmer, and therefore the 1549 already contains the 'True Presence' Eucharistic theology which the mature Cranmer had embraced at some point prior to 1549. Cranmer also abolished the Gregorian Canon, the Offertory and the major Elevations which were seen as the underpinnings of Transubstantiation and the Sacrifice of the Mass by the Reformers. In a very real sense 1549 is a Protestant liturgy that tries to hide the fact, whilst 1552 makes its Reformed and reforming credentials much more apparent.
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In the last 30 years a consensus has emerged that the old story that Elizabeth I would have preferred the 1549 BCP to be reintroduced in 1559 has largely been disposed of. The minor changes in the 1552 were intended to reconcile "Lutherans" and cultural conservatives (to import a modern concept) to the Settlement. Thus the Queen and Council agreed to a temporary retention of Mass vestments and much of the old paraphernalia of worship to reconcile conservative laymen to the Settlement. In the end, Elizabeth was perhaps forced to move faster than she intended, and the net effect of the policy decisions of 1558-1565 was to create the two worship traditions within Anglicanism - the Court tradition which governed worship in the Chapel Royal. the Cathedrals and Collegiate Church, and a more obviously Reformed parish church tradition. These two traditions were to coexist for the next 300 years until major elements of "Cathedral" worship were imported into the Parish Churches in the mid-Victorian period.
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The 1552, 1559 and 1662 BCPs both blend Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed elements. Much traditional material was retained for the old service books even though it was often reworked, so for example, the Breviary was abridged and reworked into Morning and Evening Prayer, whilst the traditional Latin Litany was reworked, along the lines of Luther's Litany into the version we have in the BCP today. Cranmer was very often the 'filter' through which continental ideas were incorporated into English practice, and in particular he seems to have drawn on a variety of Lutheran and moderate Reformed texts. Most folks are familiar with the idea that Cranmer and his Committee used the 'Simple and Religious Consultation' drawn up for Archbishop Herman von Weid by Martin Bucer and Philip Melanchthon as one of his major sources for the 1549, and I also believe it is well-known that both Martin Bucer, and Peter Martyr Vermigli offered critiques of the 1549 which did much to guide the 1552 revision. However, Cranmer did not allow his own sense of what was 'proper' to be overwhelmed by his advisors, and at least so far as Morning and Evening Prayer were concerned apart from the addition of a penitential introduction the conservative tone remained. The Baptismal Office received some adjustments such as the omission of chrism and the Chrisom (christening robe) but the most radical changes were to the Communion Service.
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The 1549 had preserved much of the old structure of the Mass, the only significant omissions being the Gradual, the Offertory prayers, and the old Canon. This relatively traditional service had had inserted into it the 1548 Order of Communion immediately before the reception of the sacrament. This consisted of an Exhortation, General Confession, Absolution, Comfortable Words, and that masterpiece of Cranmer's, the Prayer of Humble Access. The Order of Communion had contained most of the Reforming material in the 1549 Communion Service, but in 1552 a far more radical approach was taken with Cranmer and his associates taking the traditional material and blending it to produce a new service similar in shape to the sort of Reformed Liturgy that Bucer had produced in Strasburg in the 1530s and early 1540s with features of Bucer's Reformed service, such as the Decalogue, now appearing in the English BCP. I will examine the relationship between the Liturgical work of Cranmer and that of Bucer in a future post, but for the time being I will be content with the following observations.
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The Traditional Fore-Mass is considerably rearranged. Instead of the Collect for Purity, Introit, Kyrie and Gloria we now have the Collect for Purity, the Decalogue with an expanded Kyrie as the response to each Commandment. The traditional Collects, Epistles and Gospels are largely retained as they had been in 1549, the Creed and Sermon follow in their accustomed place, and then after the collection of alms, the Prayer for the Church Militant occurs, reflecting both the custom of the Mozarabic Rite, and, closer to hand, the practice of the Reformed Church in Strasburg. On most Sundays the service could conclude at this point with one or more collects and the blessing. As the people were unaccustomed to frequent communion, and the rule was now 'no Mass without Communicants' this meant that weekly celebration of the Eucharist soon became the exception rather than the rule. As a result it became necessary to give warning of when there would be a Communion, and two exhortations are provided for this purpose, one of which originally appeared in 1549.
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When the Lord's Supper was celebrated the next item was an exhortation to self-examination and worthy Communion. This fencing of the Table was typical of Reformed practice, though Cranmer's exhortation owes as much to Lutheran sources as to Reformed. Then comes the Invitation and General Confession followed by the Absolution and Comfortable Words. Cranmer makes one of his rare literary slips here reversing Bucer's order by putting the Absolution first. The Preface survives as was common in Lutheranism, as does the Sanctus. Then follows the Prayer of Humble Access which in this position becomes very obviously a prayer for worthy participation in the mystery rather one directed towards worthy reception of the elements. The Eucharistic Prayer then follows, and consists of little more than a brief statement of why the church does this, and the Words of Institution. In 1552 and 1559 there were no manual acts. Communion followed by the Lord's Prayer then follows. The Eucharistic Prayer is completed by either the Prayer of Oblation or the Prayer of Thanksgiving, then the Gloria in Excelsis is said, and lastly the priest dismisses the congregation with a blessing. One thing that is truly notable about Cranmer's Eucharistic rite is that it places communion in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer to further reinforce the idea that it is first and foremost a <I>communion</I> service, and to emphasize that the real presence is not localized in the bread and wine, but is actualized through faithful participation in the mystery. It was actually a bit of a master stroke when the 1549 and 1559 words of administration were combined in 1559, as its balance of realist and symbolist language neatly expresses the Bucerian understanding of the Eucharist that Cranmer had embraced in the 1540s.
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It can be seen from this that the principal reason that Anglo-Catholics of all stripes have done their best to either abrogate, or remodel and reinterpret the Eucharistic rite Cranmer left the Church is that its view of the Eucharist falls into the Reformed type. Structurally it shares similarities with the Dutch and German Reformed liturgies which are just too obvious to deny; however, these similarities are obscured by the removal of traditional elements such as the Preface and Sanctus from continental forms.
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I have not yet sufficiently researched the Baptismal Office, but my preliminary investigations have shown that the sort of very positive language that one sees in the Prayer Book concerning baptismal regeneration is anything but foreign to mid-16th century Reformed theology. Bucer, Bullinger, Calvin, and Vermigli all had a high view of baptism - perhaps so high as to surprise their 21st century followers if they were to investigate the matter. However, I shall have to leave this aside for a future article.
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It may be seen from the above notes that the two main forms we have inherited from the Reformation period, the Articles of Religion, and the Book of Common agree theologically with the German-Swiss and Rhenish Reformed traditions, though they are to some degree at odds with the Scottish tradition. In the main the differences between the late sixteenth century Church of England, and the Reformed Churches of Zurich, Basle, the Rhine Palatinate, etc., were of governance and custom not theology. Therefore, all attempts to "unprotestantize" the Anglican tradition are by definition unhistorical in their basis.
+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-75684919901782227912019-12-30T21:26:00.004-05:002019-12-30T21:26:56.932-05:00Theological Foundations - The Articles of ReligionThe theological foundations of Anglican were long accepted to be the Bible, the Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal. To a greater or lesser extent modern Anglicanism, even in some of it relatively conservative manifestations, often bypasses or radically reinterprets several or all of these. As a result Anglicans have become very confused about their identity. The Articles are probably subjected to more revisionist treatment than the other three put together simply because a lot of modern Church-people think they are irrelevant, or have definite reasons for not wishing to accept that Anglicanism ever held the theological position held by framers of the Articles, so perhaps it is time for me to give a page or two to the History of the Articles of Religion (AOR).
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The text of the AOR that you have in your 1662 BCP is that of 1571 when the Articles reached their present form. The version used in the USA is a very light revision of the 1571 text made in 1801. This, apart from the omission of Article XXI - Of the Authority of General Councils and the deletion of the Athanasian Creed from the text of Article VIII, do not differ theologically from the Articles of 1571. This suggests that at the very least the leadership of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1801 were prepared to accept the theology of the English Reformation as it was then understood. The years immediately after 1801 saw an upswing in Evangelicalism (the old sort, not what passes for Evangelicalism today) which if anything strengthen the adherence of the Protestant Episcopal Church to the Reformation by creating a party that consciously sought to maintain and propagate Reformed theology. There can be little doubt that for most of the nineteenth century the dominant theology of the Evangelical Party in the PECUSA was that of Old Princeton, and that tradition was carried on well into the twentieth century by the Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Philadelphia. Whilst Princeton theology is at some distance from the Reformation - it represents a sort of early nineteenth century redaction of Reformed Scholasticism - it was a good deal nearer the mark than the Latitudinarian theology of the eighteenth century. But what about the Articles in their original context?
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It may be stating the blindly obvious but the Articles had a long gestation. The first attempts to write an English Confession of Faith come within a couple of years of Henry VIII's break with Rome with the Wittenberg Articles, the Thirteen Articles leading to the Ten Articles of 1538, which attempt to take a middle road between the Humanist influenced by conservative Catholicism of Henry VIII and the Augsburg Confession, and these Articles probably represent the high water mark of Lutheran influence in England. The Ten Articles lasted less than two years before being replaced by the reactionary Six Articles of 1540, and there matters official rested until after Henry's death in January 1546/7, though the pressure on Protestants eased somewhat after the crisis of 1542/3. After Henry's death Cranmer and his circle produced "some Articles" in late 1547 that were intended to pave the way for reform, but it was not until late 1552 that a full English Confession was produced in the form of the Forty-Five Articles that Cranmer submitted for comment and revision, and which were approved by Parliament in June 1553 by which time their number had been reduced to forty-two. The ink scarcely had time to dry on these before Edward VI died, and the full scale reversion to Catholicism often referred to as the Marian Reaction takes place.
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The Articles that were produced in 1552 were very similar to those produced ten years later, though they contain several articles specifically condemning in Anabaptist heresy, which were felt to be unnecessary at the later date. They are organised in the way that had been traditional since the time of Peter Lombard in that they begin with the doctrine of God. Gerald Bray in "The Faith We Confess" divides the Articles into the following sections; the Catholic Articles - 1 to 9; the Protestant Articles 10 to 34; and the Anglican Articles 35 to 39. I would go a little further and divide the Protestant Articles into those which apply to all Protestants - basically 10 to 23; and those which are more specifically Reformed 24 to 34. Not every article fits neatly into its assigned category, for example, all protestants would accept the teaching contained in Article 32 - Of the Marriage of Priests, but at least this scheme gives us pegs on which to hang the structure of the Articles.
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The Articles themselves are very largely a product of the interplay between domestic and continental reforming forces. In the end, the teachings of Wycliffe only find a place in the Articles in as far as they reflect the ideas of later Reformers. Wherever possible Cranmer and his colleagues avoided taking sides in the dispute between the followers of Luther and those of Zwingli, Bullinger, and Bucer. For example Article 17 - Of Predestination, uses language that would not have been unacceptable to Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, or Bullinger. When considering the sacraments, the Articles commit themselves to the Swiss camp, but not vehemently so. Bucer's language about a spiritual real presence is there, as is language reminiscent of Bullinger's understanding of the Baptism. On the whole they are conciliatory without loosing sight of the fact that the principle influences with England were committed to Reformed theology, but from whence did they get this reformed theology?
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There can be very little doubt that Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Holgate, and the other protestant minded clerics of the 1530s and 1540s were a pretty independently minded bunch. Unlike the Scots who soon traded the Scots Confession of 1560 for the admittedly superior Second Helvetic Confession, the English Church seems to have displayed a certain insularity whilst still being engaged with the European mainstream of Protestant thought. We are told that Cranmer read slowly with a pen in his hand ready to mark any passage that caught his eye, and there is evidence of the same thoroughness in the other Reformers. Yet at the same time as they were engaged in their own studies of the Scriptures and of the early Fathers, they were reading the current Reforming literature, and corresponding with Reformers in Germany and beyond. The reign of Edward VI afforded Cranmer the opportunity to invite a number of these theologians to take shelter in England in the wake of the Schmalkaldic War. Bucer, Fagius, Laski, Occhino, and Vermigli all spent time in England and Fagius and Bucer were doomed not to survive the cold winters of Cambridge. Datheen, the Dutch Reformer also spent one of his periodic exiles in England 1551-53, and a number of lesser lights passed through England in the hopes of gaining patronage and employment during these years.
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This all came to an end quite suddenly in July 1553 when Edward VI died of tuberculosis. The botched attempt to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne implicated Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley in treason to a greater or lesser extent, and these architects of the Article of Religion perished in the flames of Mary's persecution of Protestantism. Some of the rising generation of evangelical leaders laid low in England during Mary's reign, such as Matthew Parker and John Whitgift. Others scattered to the Low Countries, Germany, and Switzerland with appreciable numbers settling in Basle, Emden, Frankfurt, Geneva, Strasburg, and Zurich. This enabled the Reform-minded Englishmen, and women, to see the Reformed Church at work at close quarters. The preference for Reformed cities indicates the degree to which by 1553 Lutheran influence had waned in England. Men like Barlow, Coverdale, Cox, Grindal, Sandys, and Whittingham were already familiar with Reformed ideas before their exile, and tended to gravitate towards the cities where these ideas were practiced. Bucer's influence made Strasburg attractive, whilst Bullinger's made Zurich the natural home for others. Geneva attracted a small but vocal exile contingent which included John Knox, Pilkington, and Whittingham. Knox, of course, went back to his native Scotland to provide the moral and intellectual leadership to the Reformation there, whilst Pilkington and Whittington, along with Scory and Coverdale, to some degree provide the link between the exiles and Puritanism.
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Bloody Mary died in November 1558 and was succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth. Attempts have been made to depict Elizabeth as everything from a closet Catholic to an agnostic, but in as much as she had any strong religious views they were the product of the circle that educated her which included Sir Thomas Cheke and William Grindal (brother of the later Archbishop.) Both Cheke and Grindal were sympathetic to Reformed theology, and indeed, Cheke eulogized Bucer after his death in 1551. Matthew Parker, another member of the Bucer circle at Cambridge, also seems to have had an association with Elizabeth that predates her accession. It would reasonable to assume from her education and associations that she favoured the sort of moderate Reformed settlement that emerged between 1558 and 1571. Elizabeth's choice of Bishops seems to confirm her preference for moderate men. Matthew Parker went reluctantly to Canterbury; Thomas Young to York; Edmund Grindal to London where he was reluctant to discipline the proto-Puritan element among the clergy; Robert Horne to Winchester; and James Pilkington to Durham where he did his best to push Protestant views in an Catholic-leaning environment. Other prominent sees went to men like Richard Coxe, who had led the Prayer Book faction in Frankfurt, and Nicholas Bullingham who seems to have been a reliable upholder of the settlement even though he was a lawyer not a theologian by training.
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After re-establish the use of the BCP in 1559, and cleansing churches of much of their remaining Popish imagery from 1560 onwards, official attention then turned to the establishment of a confession of faith. Cranmer and Cheke's 42 Articles of 1553 were the obvious starting point. Of the 42 three were removed as being redundant, and Article 7 re-written with most of the 'donkey work' of revision falling on Matthew Parker and John Jewel. The combination of Parker and Jewel ensured there would be no radical alterations in the Articles. Parker had lain low during the Marian reaction, whilst Jewel had ended up in Zurich. Elizabeth I suppressed Article XXIX as being offensive to Lutherans until 1571 at which point the present English text, albeit without Charles I's somewhat peculiar preface of 1628, became the primary summary of the Church of England's teaching. In theology and outlook they smack more of Bucer's Strasburg, or Bullinger's Zurich than either Wittenberg or Geneva. They avoid speculative points wherever possible, and it is only by close comparison to the First (1536) and Second (1564) Helvetic Confessions, the Belgic Confession (1561), and the Scots Confession (1560) that their moderate Reformed tone can be detected.
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The Articles have proved a remarkably enduring document, and have been endlessly interpreted, misinterpreted by way of commentary down the centuries. Although large parts of the Anglican Communion have decided to relegate them to the category of an historical document, some provinces, for example, Nigeria continue to regard them as important in defining the nature of Anglicanism. Although some Continuing Church, such as the ACC have bypassed the Articles of Religion, other continuing Churches such as the United Episcopal Church, and the Reformed Anglican Church continue to see them as significant statements that encompass the basic framework of Anglican theology.
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+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-50877200066084292242018-10-17T21:11:00.001-04:002018-10-17T21:11:22.425-04:00The Old High Church EthosEthos is a word that seems to have been popularized, at least in Church of England circles, by the Rev. John Keble. It refers to that combination of ideas, principles, practices, and precepts that guide an organisation or individual very often as an unspoken or unwritten code which everyone seems to follow, but cannot quite define. Although the word was popularized by a Tractarian, it is without doubt that there was an ethos guiding the Old High Churchmen as well. At its worst, it was not much more than seemliness, at best, it could provide the basis for a very deeply felt religious experience, but not one that wore its heart on its sleeve. Much of this stemmed from where the old High Churchmen were educated, and where they liked to 'hang out.' They were creatures of the older Public School, the Oxbridge College, and the Cathedral Close created an atmosphere where public worship and private devotion were valued, but display was very decidedly not welcome. Even in the country vicarages to which they were preferred after completing their University careers and serving their curacies, they cultivated the same conservative principles with the same reserve and seemliness that had been so much part of their environment growing up. You could almost say that they originated by their way of living the jibe, "Change? We're Anglicans, we don't do change!"
The fact that they were Establishment Men was both a blessing and a curse to the Old High Churchmen. The curse side of it was that they were too much associated with Toryism, but in a sense that was a defect of a virtue. The Old School Tories were paternalistic, and at least in theory, believed firmly that the rich a responsibility to the poor, and that every man was bound together in a mutual interdependence in which every man in his station contributed something to the stability and prosperity of the nation. Unfortunate in the 1820s and 1830s this made them look like agent of repression, as the new industrial middle class started to want to claim their share in the government of the country. This dismantling of the Anglican Parliament in 1828/9 followed by the Reform Act of 1832 put High Churchmen rather too publicly in the position of being the opponents of Reform, and this brought down a good deal of hostility on the Church. However, the wisest of them realised that the Church needed to put their house in order before the Whigs did it for them. As a result, a series of Ecclesiastical Commissions led principally by Charles Blomfield, the Bishop of London, piloted through a series of moderate reforms, equalizing the income of the Bishops, making provision to equalize the population of the various dioceses, streamline cathedral chapters, and making arrangements for the augmentation of the income of the poorest parishes, whilst at the same time making it easier for the Bishops to divide overly large parishes, and build new churches. The Tractarians for the most part opposed this sort of common sense reform, not so much because they opposed reform per se, but because the Old High Churchmen chose to do it through Parliament, rather than wait for the creaking machinery of Convocation to be revived and reformed. It took them a while to adjust to the consequences of the Reform Act, and a government that was no long theoretically, as well as practically, Anglican. In the end they compromised with the new realities, sighed for the old certainties, but made sure that the new were as little inconvenient as possible.
They also believed that the State was by definition Christian, and in the case of England, Anglican. When it came to their faith, they took it from the Bible, the Prayer Book, and the Articles of Religion, seen through the writings of men like Daniel Waterland, all of which tended to inculcate a rather studious, sturdy, and sacramental Protestantism. That does not mean to say that they were not unaware of the Catholic roots of Anglicanism. Van Mildert was probably the man who made Charles Lloyd aware of how much the Prayer Book owed to the Breviary, and he in turn passed that knowledge on to the Tractarians. Van Mildert also believed that the English Reformation had made the Church of England Protestant in order that it 'might be more fully and properly catholic.' For the Old High Churchman the Reformation was both a rediscovery of Biblical theology - a theology which was supported and illuminated by reference to the Early Fathers, and also a time when the abuses of the Middle Ages were sloughed off. They shared the Latimer and Ridley as heroes with the more Evangelical brethren, but they also revered Laud and Charles I as high principled, if occasionally wrong-headed, martyrs to the cause. The eighteenth century had shorn services of some of the Beauty of Holiness that the Laudians had insisted upon in the 1620s and 30, and their Caroline Successors had revived at the Restoration in 1660. Copes had fallen into disuse except at Westminster Abbey by the late 1760s, and had the occasional use of incense to sweeten church buildings had disappeared by the 1780s, but old customs such as bowing at the Holy Name (in the Creed, at least, if not elsewhere), at the Gloria Patri, and to the Holy Table when entering and leaving the Church still survived widely. High Churchmen tended to cultivate Church Music, though they were often somewhat hampered by the life tenure customarily extended to organists and lay clerks, and they made some early, if ill-advised attempts to put their cathedrals into better repair. They also restored parish churches. Both churches in my home town received considerable attention in first two decades of the 19th century long before the rage for church restoration hit c. 1850, and it is not unusual to see significant work done in the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars.
Where it is hardest to pin down High Churchmen is on the subject of what constituted their personal religion. In one sense the proverbial archetypal Georgian sermon text "To fear God, and to keep His commandments; that is the whole duty of man" would cover the greater part of it. They were brought up as Christians, they believed it was their duty to be Christians, and to that end they worshipped, prayed, and gave alms. They even gave thought to missionary work through SPCK and SPG, and the education of the poor through the National Society. In that respect, their religion had a very practical cast but even this was hidden behind a shield of reserve. They hoped that folks would be led to a more sincere profession of Christianity by quiet example, rather than by preaching, exhortation, and that favourite Evangelical weapon, the tract. Perhaps illustrative of the difference of attitude is the shock of the then Evangelical J. H. Newman at seeing his new friend, the High Churchman, John Keble slip a copy of 'The Whole Duty of Man' into a draw rather than leaving it around to do people good. Although both went on to other things, most famously, the Tracts for the Times, the incident is illustrative of the difference between the Evangelicals and the Old High Churchmen in the 1820s, and also the basically unassuming, and reserved cast of the Old High Church spirituality.
+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-48356470483161028462018-02-17T18:58:00.000-05:002018-02-19T11:50:24.870-05:00It Has Been a WhileLooking at the blog schedule it seems that it was June when I last ran off at the fingers, and it is not mid-February. A couple of posts have been started and forgotten about, so perhaps I have not had anything compelling to say. Certainly, last year was an exciting one, in that we moved to Virginia and settled in the Shenandoah Valley. This was an extremely good move for both of us because although we both loved the wide open spaces of the west, we also hated the wide open spaces of the west, so the time had come to move somewhere a little more densely populated, but not too densely populated. The Shenandoah Valley with small towns every five to ten miles fitted the bill wonderfully, and we are very happy here. Perhaps the lack of blogging is a sign that I now have people to talk to - not in depth, but those random everyday contacts that make us human - which was something a bit lacking where we lived before.
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I have to admit that even though it is the beginning of Lent I do not have anything that is particularly setting my fingers in fire. We have had the annual Facebook debate on what colour to use in Lent, and I had a happy time up in the peanut gallery proving that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Basically, the conclusion of the matter, at least for me, has long been that the great colour debate is a nineteenth century, first world problem that we are still rehashing. So far as Lent is concerned there is plenty of precedent even within the relatively straightened confines of England for violet (Exeter), ash (Sarum), or black (Lichfield, and Post-Reformation use), so you pays your money and takes your choice! We have also had the 'to ash, or not to ash' debate, which is solved in the UECNA by allowing the use of the 1967 Scottish Episcopal "Ash Wednesday, Lent, and Holy Week" materials, so you can either follow the BCP and not, or use the Booklet and do ashes. It also serves to remind us of how good we Anglicans are at arguing about adiaphora - to borrow a useful Lutheran word - and not considering the weightier matters of the Law, or rather Gospel.
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Lent is a penitential season, and although being of the Reformation Tradition we talk far more about repentance than penance, the state of mind rather than the act, there is no getting away from the idea that Lent is a time in which we need to slough off old bad habits, and take on new good habits. This is all through the Grace of God, of course. The greatest dangers to Christian living today seem to be much the same as ever - being so busy that we forget God, or being so lazy that we do not get to Him. We are also, as a society, intolerably distracted. We seem to give too much attention to a lot of little electronic devices with small screens that seemed to be designed to suck our brains out! Certainly the idea of an electronics fast has been gaining popularity in recent years, and some of my more interesting online friends seem to disappear about this time every year. It certainly is a reminder to me that "anti-social media" takes up a lot of our lives these days.
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So what about Lent? I guess it is the usual - cuss less; eat less; spend less time watching telly, Facebooking, texting, whatever... and also prayer more, read Scripture more, attend Communion as often as we can, show Him forth in Good Works as a sign of justifying faith. Lent is a time to be mindful of God, so let that be out goal through the coming forty days.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-55092956305956719922017-06-26T10:06:00.000-04:002017-06-26T10:06:06.162-04:00Low ChurchmanshipIt occurred to me the other day that the term 'Low Church' is just as much of a putty nose as 'High Church.' Over the centuries it has been used to describe those who were for the exclusion of James, Duke of York from the English throne, and minimized the differences between Churchmen and Dissenters; it has been used for the 18th century Latitudinarians; 19th century Evangelicals; and early 20th century Liberals - at least here in the USA - or the so-called Virginia Churchmanship. In the later 20th century, Low Church began to reacquire some of the Evangelical connotations it had before, but this time tinged with the Charismatic Movement. That said, the neo-Evangelicals do tend to use the Evangelical label for themselves, rather than the old Low Church label - perhaps because the older leaders of ACNA and AMiA still remember when "Low Church" meant liberal. In the UK, where I grew up, Low Churchmanship could mean either mild Evangelicalism, or what I have heard described as "Liverpool Low" a sort of Prayer Book Protestantism that still has a memory of being Evangelical long ago, which one also used to find quite widely in parts of Ireland.
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In the last 50 years, liberalism has generally drifted higher in churchmanship, with ceremonial replacing doctrine as Liberalism has drifted further from historic Christianity. In most dioceses in the USA, the old Low Church liberals have been replaced among the clergy by women and men who are largely broad in ceremonial, and Revisionist in theology with "the culture" having at least as much influence as Scripture, Tradition, and Reason in the formation of their theological opinions - or the lack of them. However, the old Liberalism still respected Scripture, whilst accepting open inquiry as to its history, origins, and meaning, and could say the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds with more-or-less a straight face. This is a long way from where a large part of the Episcopal Church is today. There liberalism of a William Lawrence or a Henry Knox Sherrill is a long way from that of a Frank Griswold or a Catherine Jefferts-Schori, not least because it accepted the fundamental validity and rightness of Western Christian culture, and of a Classical education. Today's liberals seem to be locked into the tyranny of Relativism, and a major collective guilt-trip about being white, wealthy, and western to the extent that they seem to want to commit theological, cultural, and economic suicide.
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Personally, I tend to view Low Churchmanship in terms of what it owes to both "rational orthodoxy" and, at a distance, Evangelicalism. Please note that when I say 'Evangelical' I mean the religion of Moore, Meade, and Ryle - a moderate, evangelizing, Calvinism based upon the Bible, the Articles, and the BCP - NOT American style revivalism. This makes a huge difference because it means that it is a form of Evangelicalism that is not dominated by subjective feelings with a limited theology based upon the Bible, but the evangelical expression of the great Augustinian theological tradition in its Calvinistic variant. In short it is Evangelicalism with a fully developed theology, which although it encompasses the Biblicism, Crucicentrism, Activism, and emphasis on Conversion that is common among all Evangelicals, it has a solid theological foundation. In some respects this preoccupation with theology has been both the glory and the curse of old-school Anglican Evangelicalism. A lot of people seem to live on their emotions, and as a result of this the order and restraint of Anglicanism seem foreign, but on the other hand, this orderly approach to Evangelicalism has produced some great "saints" such as William Wilberforce, John Newton, Henry Martyn, and a host of others who strove valiantly for the cause of Christ.
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One thing that seems more needful today than ever is an Evangelicalism that is theologically rooted. Much of what passes for Evangelical, or more accurately Revivalist, religion in the USA today is not in any meaningful sense Christian even though it claims the name. Joel Olsteen, Benny Hinn, and many of the popular TV revivalists pedal a religion which embraces one of more of the major Christian heresies of the first Four Centuries, and is as much theatre as anything else. I guess one can say it is a case of zeal without discernment, and certainly without theology. It is the religion of emotion, and that religion of emotion will not survive well when the inevitable intellectual conflict with Islam arises in our local communities. Ill-catechised Christians will be easy meat for Islamic proselytizers, just as they are for the door-knockers Mormon and Jehovah Witnesses. I wonder how long it will be before I get someone on my doorstep who introduces himself as 'Bubba Ali' and tells me that he is from the Staunton Mosque and would like to talk to me about Jesus...
+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-58827965641654875652016-11-04T02:00:00.001-04:002016-11-05T22:08:19.681-04:00Well, Your Grace, How Should It Be Done?That question appeared recently in the comments to a recent article on this Blog, and I have to say that I do not have a simplistic answer. The main thing is to assert an honestly Anglican identity, which means we look firstly to the Book of Common Prayer in its entirety, then to the Canon Law of the Church, and lastly to the preferences of the congregation that we serve. Unfortunately, we cannot do this without both a certain amount of historical knowledge, and a certain amount of unlearning of common custom which has often grown up as 'window dressing' rather than meaningful ceremonial incorporating elements at variance with the genius of the BCP.
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For my own part, I would have to say that Anglican ceremonial has to fall between two poles. On the Protestant end one has to acknowledge the authority of the 1604 Canons, and that whilst they are no longer binding in the USA, they do provide us with a brief summary of what was considered the minimum in the Church during the days of what some authors call 'The Puritan Aggression.' Although much was allowed to fall by the wayside, it has to be remembered that the Communion Table was to be covered with a frontal that went down to the ground - hence the Laudian fall which envelops the altar - and covered with a fair white linen cloth for the Communion. Surplice, tippet, and hood were required in parish churches, and the use of the Cope was not to be omitted in cathedrals for the Eucharist. A proper pulpit and font were to be provided, along with service books, a chalice and paten, and registers. As for ceremonial, the sign of the cross, and the ring are explained, and bowing at the Holy Name of Jesus is required. The result ceremonial is austere, but reverent. On the Catholic end is the Ornaments Rubric of the 1559 BCP which was reiterated in 1662. This particular rubric is a bit of a mystery wrapped inside of a riddle, but the Royal Commission of 1906 seems, for very good reasons, seems to have concluded that the 1559 BCP's rubric was intended to reinstate the vestments used under the 1549 BCP, though if you take its wording literally, you will discover that the 1549 BCP was actually introduced in the third year of King Edward the Sixt. However, in addition items mentioned above, the alb, chasuble, and cope are legal, along with the bishop's crozier, mitre and almuce.
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Whilst I tend to prefer a simple liturgy, I have no quarrel with those who prefer the Alcuin Club, and Percy Dearmer, called the 'English Use.' This adapted late mediaeval ceremonial to the Book of Common Prayer (note order of priority) taking into account the decisions of the competent courts. In some respects, the most enthusiastic adherents of this approach were the cathedrals, and the greater parish churches simply because it stood for ENGLISH or Prayer Book Catholicism against the values of that eccentric communion with its headquarters on the Vatican Hill. Certainly, in places like Lincoln Minster in the 1980s, the ceremonial used had a certain massive dignity, but it was not fussy. The altar party entered in albs, and apparelled amices, with the celebrant, deacon, and sub-deacon in copes. Other cathedrals used chasubles, dalmatics, and tunicles, but at Lincoln it was the cope. On arrival at the altar all bowed with the celebrant going to north side of the altar, and the deacon going to north side, and subdeacon to the south side of the broad step now inhabited by the Novus Ordo coffee table of more recent usage! The celebrant would read the service at the altar facing East, first at the north side, then from the middle; with the subdeacon and deacon stepping out to read their own particular elements of the liturgy, the Gospel being accompanied with lights and cross. Little more was done in the Prayer of Consecration than to do the manual acts prescribed by the BCP, and everyone retired again at the end of the service in good order. Matins and Evensong appeared rather more austere - I used to refer to the 'off duty' clergy as the 'Black Pudding Club' as they would attend in cassock and gown, not cassock, surplice, and tippet - and the officiating clergy kept their movements to a minimum. The overall impression was one of the BCP being done decently, and in order.
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On the other hand, I do tend to think that Low Churchmen can drop into sloppiness if they do not watch it. I tend to prefer "Central Churchmanship" in parish churches, even though I think something a bit more elaborate is appropriate for cathedrals. Surplice and stole or a simple set of Eucharistic vestments for the Communion service, and surplice and tippet for Matins and Evensong is my usual comfort level, but I am not really that hung up on ceremonial, except that my "Anglo-Irish" ancestry gives me a hearty aversion to ceremonial exuberance. What I am hung up on is loyalty to the Book of Common Prayer as written. Unless one's bishop has authorized additions such as the Benedictus qui venit, they really should not be used, and even then, there is a lot to be said for following the BCP as written, not least of which is that it cuts one free from the liturgical fidgets. Certainly, when I encounter an (over) elaborate service where the former Congregation of Rites has as much, if not more, influence than the BCP, I am inclined to want to cross the threshold again. We had a Reformation, and the rite which was reformed was in many respects much simpler than that of 16th century, never mind 19th century, Rome, to which some folks spend so much time and energy trying to approximate the reformed rite of the BCP.
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I really do not want to be prescriptive about ceremonial, but I do think we need to keep two ideas before us. Firstly, we are Anglicans, not wannabe anything elses. Secondly, the function of worship is to offer glory and praise to God, so every time we approach the altar or the reading desk we need to remember "I must decrease; He must increase!" That means that the church's ceremonial should minimize the individuality of the priest, and take him into the liturgy as an integral part thereof as the 'minister' and not the focus of public worship. For this reason I object in the strongest terms to the westward facing position at communion, and to the practice of individualizing or omitting the accustomed vestments. The minister should stand at the Lord's Table or the reading desk not as Pastor Bob or Fr. Jim, but as just another minister of Word and Sacrament.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-67095847814136545822016-10-14T13:57:00.001-04:002016-10-14T13:57:42.559-04:00The Nineteenth Century Revolution in Public WorshipI have before me is an 1820s pew plan of my home parish church. It was drawn just after a reallocation of seats in 1823, and a partial re-seating of the church. Visible in the minds eye are the groined plaster vault added in 1803; the high backs of the box pews, some of which incorporate mediaeval bench ends; the three decker pulpit attached to the second nave pier almost halfway down the nave; a few memorials and benefaction boards, along with some painted texts showing through later coats of whitewash; and the lower part of the chancel arch is filled with a good 15th century screen with the Royal Arms. The Decalogue, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostles' Creed, are on boards at the east end of the chancel, where there is a wooden communion table with a marble top (no worries in those days about stone altars!) surrounded on three sides by a rail. The chancel has two pews in it for the families from the two big houses on this side of the parish, and the rest with benches for the Communicants at the monthly communion service. Velvet cushion adorn the pulpit and a frontal of the same material covers the Communion Table. There are candles and candlesticks on the Holy Table, but they are never lighted. The whole impression is one of both the dignity and the sleepiness of the late Georgian Church.
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Barton was a High Church parish, or at least so the parsons liked to think. Matins, Litany, Ante-Communion and a sermon were offered in one church in the morning, and Evening Prayer and a Sermon in the other in the afternoon every Sunday. Morning service was also offered on Tuesdays and Fridays, presumably a sort of echo of the Wednesday and Friday services required by early Georgian visitation articles, with the resident gentry of Barton providing the attendance for these service. Unusually the church has an organ - a small two manual instrument without pedals - which is sited in the western gallery, with the singers and accompanies the metrical psalms, the occasional new fangled hymn, and the limited number of rustic anthems familiar to the St Peter's musicians. As services alternate between the two churches, both are probably used four times in two weeks, with the curate living in the little double fronted vicarage in front of the Church. Within a couple of years the curate will be the nephew of the Vicar, who will move to the more palatial surroundings of the former Rectory, Bardney Hall, on his accession to the incumbency, and let the Vicarage to his aging mother.
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Morning service would have been a fairly sombre affair. The bells would start ringing at 10.00am, and would give the countdown to morning service. If you lived on the Waterside you had better grab your hat and go as soon as you heard the bells, as it is fully a mile to the parish church. Closer residents could wait for the 15 or even 5 minute signals. Just before 10:30am a voluntary would be played by the organist, and the clerk and minister would take their places on the lowest, and middle levels of the three decker pulpit and begin wait to begin the service. The minister would give out a sentence or two of Scripture, read the exhortation at the beginning of Matins, lead the General Confession, give the Absolution, and then the Lord's Prayer would follow. Matins proper would begin with "O Lord, open thou our lips" and it is likely that few besides the clerk would make the response "And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise." And so it would continue through the Venite, the Psalms, the first lesson, the Te Deum, the second lesson, and so on, until the third collect. At which point the service may have been punctuated with a Metrical Psalm. After that, the Litany, another Psalm, and then the ante-communion ending with a psalm during which the parson changed from surplice to gown, the sermon, and another psalm or hymn before the blessing, after which another voluntary was hear from the organ, and all departed.
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Once a month, the minister would go to the altar after the sermon, where bread and wine had been placed before the service. Whilst this took place, most of the congregation would exit, with the Communicants gathering in the chancel for the Communion service. The minister would return to the vestry and exchange gown for surplice, and then stand at the north end of the Table to lead the Communion. He would lead the congregation in the general confession, with the first rail of communicants already knelt at the rail, then after the Humble Access he would remove the linen cloth from the elements, move them a little to the north end of the altar, and whilst reading the Prayer of Consecration, perform the manual acts. The communicants would then receive the consecrated leavened bread, and the undiluted port before being dismissed with a sentence of Scripture and returning to their seats. The ceremonial would be simple, even bare, with the communicants departing quietly after the blessing. The services had been this way for a hundred years, maybe longer, and although parsons came and went in their generations, folks thought that things would continue pretty much the same way forever.
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If we return to the same church, fifty years later (1873), the place had been revolutionised! Parson Hogarth has been there some 15 years, having arrived hot foot from the Tractarian fever swamps of London. When he had arrived in 1858, he inherited a restoration programme that had completely altered the church inside. Dear, kindly, affectionate, ineffectual Parson Holt had decided to have the church made over more-or-less according to the Ecclesiologists principles, and the leading men in the town had raised funds for this to happen. A London architect had been consulted, but he wanted London fees, so the work had gone to a Cuthbert Brodrick, a Yorkshire architect with offices in Leeds and Hull. Out went the plaster vault, the box pews, the gallery, even the old altar, and organ, and in came the new. The pews were uniform in design and height, which had led to the destruction of all but one of the surviving mediaeval bench ends. The organ now stands at the east end of the north aisle behind the newly minted choir stalls, and the reading desk and pulpit have been split and now stand south and north of the chancel arch respectively. The local builders had knocked out the bottom panels of the fifteenth century screen, whilst beyond the old red clay pavers, and white wash have given away to three colours of glazed tiles, with some almost convincing pseudo-mediaeval choir stalls for the Communicants. The old stone and wood communion table has been replaced by an altar table raised on two steps, whilst the east end has encaustic tile up to widow bottom level. The new five panel reredos contains the Lord's Prayer, Commandments 1 to 4; a sacred symbol in Gothic Letters; Commandments 5 to 10; and the Creed, whilst underneath it runs the legend - again in tile "THIS DO IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME." All very different to 1823, and moreover, there is now gas lighting in the church in the form of trident burners over every third pew, so service can be held in the evenings.
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The services have also changed. Communion is now twice a month, and it is also twice a month at the Waterside Mission. Matins, Litany, and Sermon follow at 10:30am and Evensong and Sermon at 6:30am. Services are also held morning and evening at the Mission room. The services themselves have also changed. Metrical psalms have largely gone, replaced with Hymns Ancient and Modern. The first attempts are being made at chanting the services, somewhat marred by the raw voices of the choir. However, parson Hogarth moved too far too fast when he first came to the parish, so has been forced to revert to celebrating at the north end after a premature experiment with the eastward position. His celebration of Holy Communion in association with the burial of the dead five years since had also proved to be 'too far; too fast' for the locals, and prompted some of the locals to join the Church Association, or transfer their allegiance to the Methodists, not to mention the adverse articles and letters in the newspapers of the time under headings such as "Ritualism in Barton." However, being a canny Scot, the Rev. Mr. Hogarth has abstained from pushing his luck since then, and the Vicarage his home to him, his wife, and their brood of children, one of whom, David, is to become an archaeologist and associate of T. E. Lawrence. Curates come and go, and doubtless he discusses various plans for the future with his wife, and curate, but for the time being, things will remain as they are. He can rest content that having introduced daily offices and more frequent celebration of Communion he has made a good beginning at bring Barton into line with Tractarian ideals. It will be up to his successor, Canon Moore, to complete the revolution that Hogarth started. By the end of the century, the other church, St Mary's, will have been restored, and there will be two celebrations of Holy Communion on Sundays, a celebration on Thursdays, and also on Holydays. A surplice choir will have appeared, and a new organ will have been installed in both churches. By 1914, Eucharistic vestments will have been introduced, but Matins and Evensong will remain the main services down the 1960s when the Parish Communion Movement comes to Barton to effect the next revolution.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-84425080539296302562016-02-20T01:23:00.001-05:002016-02-21T22:28:01.320-05:00The View from the North EndQuite a few years ago, someone was making a bit of a to-do about celebrating Holy Communion from the north end of the Communion Table claiming that it had not been done since before 1914. I pointed out that that situation was peculiar to the USA, and that, as it happened I had celebrated at the north end regularly in England, using the 1662 BCP, until moving the USA in 1999. I think you could say he was surprised to find out that there are still places where the north end was the norm!
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<b>Origins</b><br>
The actual rubric in the 1552, 1559, and 1662 Books of Common Prayer says that the priest shall stand at the north <i>side</i> of the Table. Between 1560 and 1645, most parishes would have been able to take this literally as the Communion Table was placed down the length of the chancel, with the ends east and west, and the communicants knelt around it, often in the old choir stalls. This method of proceeding was recommended by Parker's 'Advertisements' of 1564, though the Chapel Royal and some cathedrals continued to use the Eastward position. However, from about 1615 onwards, the fashion grew for leaving the Communion Table at the east end of the chancel, with its ends north and south, and railing it off. This meant that the 'north side' rubric could not be obeyed as originally intended. Two solutions were adopted. A few adopted the custom of standing before the altar on the gospel side, facing east, and this arrangement can be seen in a Restoration era print, but seems to have faded out of use by shortly after 1700. More commonly, priests took to the north end of the Table and celebrated from there.
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The Restoration Settlement reiterated both the Ornaments Rubric, and the 1604 Canons. This essentially led to a return of the situation that had obtained in the 1630s. Communion Tables were very generally arranged altar-wise at the east end, and when Communion was celebrated, the priest took his place at the north end of the Table after the sermon, if he were a Low Churchman, and at the beginning of the ante-communion, if he were a High Churchman. Communion Tables in those days were usually about 6 feet by 3 feet, and were placed inside a railed enclosure, and furnished with a 'Laudian' frontal that completely enveloped the altar, a white linen cloth for the communion, and an alms basin and a pair of candlesticks. Altar crosses were uncommon before about 1865, and candles were not lit unless required for the purpose of giving light. The Communion plate of those days consisted of a large paten - usually on a stem, a pair of chalices, and a flagon usually made of pewter or silver, though some fine old gold plate sets still exist.
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On the whole the heyday of the North end was from 1660 through to about 1900-1920, when the Eastward position became generally acceptable. However, in Ireland, in the Free Church of England, and among Conservative Evangelicals the north end position remained the norm right down to the 1990s, and even today. In England today it is probably most commonly seen in the North, especially in the Yorkshire Bible Belt, but is probably unknown in Wales and Scotland. In Ireland, north ending is commoner in Ulster than in the other three provinces, mainly due to the North's Evangelicalism. Sodor and Man had a high proportion of north enders down to the 1990s, but the trend now is to bring the Table forwards and stand in a cramped space behind it.
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<b>In the USA</b><br>
North end was the norm through the colonial period and down to the 1840s, though from 1831 the BCP rubric said "right side" not "north side." This somewhat ambiguous direction seems to be a reference to the position of the vestry behind the altar in many churches, a position that would make the "north" side the right-hand side of the altar. As with England the earliest cases of eastward facing celebration occur in the late 1840s with the innovators doubtless arguing the 'right' meant 'correct' in this context. However, the major change over to 'ad orientem' celebration seems to occur between 1890 and 1914 as the old Evangelical Movement collapses. Some REC churches maintained the use of the North End, but within PECUSA it was pretty much gone by 1925. Indeed, the "before the holy table" rubric in the 1928 American BCP implicitly forbids the North end position, so its use should really be confined to the English and Canadian books.
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<b>Mechanics</b><br>
I am going to assume that the Church is arranged with the Communion Table in the usual position at the end of the chancel, with the ends north and south, and that there is a credence Table. The priest is assisted by a deacon, there is no music, and the rite is that of 1662.
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Before the service, the sufficient bread and wine are placed in the paten and chalice for the anticipated number of communicants, and placed in the middle of the Holy Table and covered with a linen cloth. Alternatively, the elements are placed on the credence together, together with some additional bread, a cruet of wine, and the collection plate or alms basin. There are Prayer Books on stands at either end of the Table, one for the priest, the other for the deacon. The clergy will be vested in cassock, surplice, tippet, and possibly hood. The surplices will be long and full.
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The priest and the deacon enter, go to the rail, and pause without bowing before entering the sanctuary. The priest goes to the north end, the deacon to the south. The priest reads the Lord's Prayer, and the Collect for Purity with his hands together in prayer facing south. He then takes the book and turns to the people to rehearse the Commandments with the response being said after each commandment, or after the 4th and the 10th only.
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The priest then turns back to the Table and says 'Let us pray' and reads the Collect for the Queen, and the Collect of the Day again facing south. The deacon then takes his service book and faces the congregation and reads the Epistle. Alternatively, he may go down to the chancel gates or lectern and read from there. If the celebrant is preaching, he then goes to the pulpit to read the Gospel, as the deacon returns to the sanctuary and sits in his chair on the south side of the Holy Table. The Gospel is read from the pulpit, and is followed by the Creed, notices, and sermon. At the end of the sermon, the priest reads the offertory sentence, and then returns to the Holy Table whilst the sidesmen take the offering.
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The alms are presented at the altar, the deacon having collected the alms basin from the Credence before handing it to the priest who puts it on the Epistle side of the Table. After this the celebrant removes the cloth from the elements, and assisted by the deacon makes any adjustment to the quantity of bread and wine that may be required. (If the paten and chalice containing the elements were placed on the credence, then the deacon brings them to the Holy Table at this point.) The priest goes to the north end, turns to the congregation, and says 'Let us pray for the whole state of Christ's Church militant here in earth.' He then reads the Prayer for the Church. The exhortations are usually omitted, and then priest will turn to the congregation and read "Ye that... meekly kneeling upon your knees" before kneeling and letting the deacon lead the people in the General Confession. The priest then stands and raises his hand without making the sign of the cross whilst he gives the absolution. The deacon reads the Comfortable Words, after which the priest says the dialogue beginning 'Lift up your hearts,' before turning to the Table at "It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty..." The congregation joins in at either "Therefore with angels and archangels" or at "Holy, holy, holy" and recite with the minister until the Amen at the end of the Sanctus. The minister then kneels for the Humble Access, which he usually reads alone. A brief pause then follows whilst the elements are transferred to the north end of the altar for consecration. The prayer of consecration is read somewhat carefully by the priest facing the Table (i.e. south) at the north end with only those manual acts mentioned in the 1662 BCP being performed. At the end of the prayer all say "Amen" and then the clergy receive communion, followed by the laity, the priest administering the bread, and the deacon the Cup. Very often communion is administered by tables with everyone remaining in place until the minister dismisses that rail/table with a verse of Scripture.
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When all have received, the remaining elements are placed in the middle of the Table and covered with the linen cloth. The clergy return to the ends of the Table, and the priest leads everyone in the Lord's Prayer. He then reads the Prayer of Thanksgiving, before all join in the Gloria in Excelsis. Lastly he gives the blessing facing the congregation with his hand or hands raised. The remaining consecrated elements are consumed after the service.
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There are quite a few variants, but that is the basic format of the north end celebration. When music is used, the most common sections to be sung are the responses to the Commandments, and the Sanctus. As for hymns - at the beginning, between the lessons, before the sermon and at the collection of alms, during communion, and at the end of the service were fairly common. Also, in Evangelical parishes, it was pretty common to start the Communion service at 'Ye that do truly...' when it follows Matins or Evensong.
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<b>Final Thoughts</b><br>
The north end celebration sounds a little awkward, but in fact works very well. My own point of view is that it has the advantage of allowing the people to see the manual acts without awkwardness on the part of the celebrant. It also avoids placing the presbyter 'centre stage' as happens with celebration facing the people. It emphasizes the ministerial aspect of the presbyterate, with the clergyman standing to the side, and letting the action of the Eucharist be seen. The disadvantage is that it arose by accident, and is without ancient precedent, but when celebrating the 1662 BCP Communion office it represents a valuable, historic Evangelical alternative to facing the Holy Table.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-85357597482507291852016-02-14T00:17:00.001-05:002016-02-14T00:17:16.295-05:00PrioritiesThe latest bought of meaningless oecumenicism between the Bishop of Rome and the Patriarch of Moscow got me thinking about what it means to be an Old High Churchman. At the end of the day I believe it comes down to the following priorities, some of which are theological, and others ecclesiastical, and may explain to those who are not familiar with the old High Church position why at some points it sounds Evangelical, and at others Anglo-Catholic.
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<b>I. The Scriptures</b><br>
Of necessity, the first priority for the Old High Churchman is the Bible. It is God's revelation of Himself to humanity, recorded by human authors for the permanent edification of God's people. The Articles of Religion give quite a bit of attention to the importance and nature of Scripture starting with Article VI, which affirms its sufficiency as the source of dogma, then going on in Article VII to affirm the unity of Scripture maintaining, as the ancient Fathers did, that Christ is preached both in the Old Testament and in the New. The old High Church view of Scripture is a High one. We believe the Bible to be God's Word written, and any attempts to undermine the authority of Scripture needs to be examined critically. This was not even a topic for discussion for our 18th and 19th century High Church forefathers, but in the modern context we need to give some thought to Higher Criticism of the Bible. It almost seems to be the liberal orthodoxy in the USA to proclaim that the New Testament is both late and heavily Hellenized, but neither of these claims really stand up to scrutiny at the bar of history. Certainly, there is an Hellenizing element as there was in all Judaism in the first century AD, but this is neither as extensive as some claim, nor as influential as we are sometimes led to believe. It was as much as result of intellectual convergence as the clash of cultures. The dating issue is also a less serious matter than it might seem. An extremely good - I would say compelling - case, largely reassembled by liberal scholar J A T Robinson, for re-examining the dating of the New Testament. J A T Robinson did this most noticeably in 'Redating the New Testament' (1981) and the 'Priority of John' (1984) which argue for dates between 45 and 70AD for the bulk of the New Testament - i.e. between 15 and 40 years after the Resurrection.
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This acceptance of an early dating for the New Testament has consequence for our understanding of Christ. If the NT was written within a generation or so of the crucifixion, then the portrait of Jesus given in there has to be accepted as being authentic. Leaving aside William Paley's argument that the Apostles would not have faced dungeon, fire, and sword for a lie, one has to accept that much of the New Testament is not a Hellenized secondary account, but the writings of a group of men, who were contemporaries of Jesus, and in many cases eye-witnesses to the events described in the New Testament. Accepting the Bible as God's Word written has some consequences for the way in which we do theology. If the Bible is the reliable, authentic record of God's dealings with man, then our dogmatic theology must necessarily be based on those same Scriptures. This in turn commits us to Biblical theology, which, not only commits us to be Biblical picture of Christ, but also, if we take St Paul seriously, means we also need to accept the five 'Solas' of the Reformation as an essential part of our theological framework.
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<b>II. The Fathers, the Creeds, and Councils</b><br>
Scripture alone, does not mean Scripture only. In fact those who preach Scripture only are a bit of a menace because they exclude the witness of the Early Church, especially the Sub-Apostolic Fathers - i.e. those who had known the Apostles personally, the Apologists, the remaining Ante-Nicene Fathers, and the Doctors of the Church - as to what was taught in the first three centuries. They are essentially left with what is in the Bible, and that which is under their hat, which is necessarily of variable quality. However, we need to be a little bit cautious not to set up the Fathers as a rival to Scripture, but rather we need to use them as witness to the content of Christian teaching in the first centuries. On the whole, the old High Church scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth century attached the most importance to the Ante-Nicene Father, and particularly to the Sub-Apostolic Fathers. For example, John Kaye, Bishop of Lincoln 1827-53, was chiefly noted for his edition of Justin Martyr, the second century Father of the Church, whilst Dr. Martin Routh (1755-1854) worked on the writings of a series of minor second and third century Bishops and theologians. The emphasis on this period came about because the old High Churchmen believed that these writers gave them access to the best witnesses to the preaching and teaching of Primitive Church.
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The Creeds were also an important element in the Old High Church position. Archbishops Moore and Markham rebelled at the Latitudinarian exclusion of Nicene Creed from the 1786 draft American BCP, and sent it back for further revision. A similar refusal to compromise on the Creeds led to the old High Churchmen taking the lead in the fight to retain the use of the Athanasian Creed in 19th century Ireland and England. For the OHCs the Creeds were very much as declaration of belief, and a test of orthodoxy. Bull's defense of the Nicene Creed, and the works of Waterland defending Nicene orthodoxy against the Arians of early eighteen century Oxford and Cambridge were touchstones of the old Protestant Orthodoxy. This high regard for the Creeds was further reinforced by their Biblical basis, and their Patristic composition and approval.
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The Ecumenical Councils of the Church also figure largely in the thinking of the old High Churchmen, with the first four being the usual benchmark of orthodoxy. However, we need to be a little cautious in assuming that they did not attach weight to later councils such as the second and third Councils of Constantinople, the Council of Orange, and so forth, down to about 1000AD. However, it has to be stated that the most importance was attached to the witness of the first five centuries, and so the first Four Councils were the most extensively quoted and referenced.
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<b>III. Sacraments</b><br>
The old High Churchmen were strong, if not very demonstrative, sacramentalists. Baptismal regeneration, often understood in a covenantal sense, was a key plank of their platform. They understood Baptism as firstly regenerating the individual by means of water and the Holy Spirit; and secondly, as incorporating that person into Christ. The relationship was also seen as being covenantal with the faithful individual receiving the assurance of sin forgiven, grace bestowed, and eternal life vouchsafed. To my mind, the OHC position is not dissimilar to that of Orthodox Lutheranism, but this particular 'kite' needs to be investigated further.
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The OHCs also took a High view of Holy Communion requiring proper preparation for worthy reception of the Lord's Supper, as per the first Exhortation in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. This exhortation, slightly modified, is to be found on page 86 of the 1928 BCP and requires of the intending communion serious self-examination; repentance; and the assurance of forgiveness of those who come to the Lord's Supper, and also provides for those who cannot quite their consciences by the usual means, the ministry of penance, though confession to, and spiritual counsel from, a priest. As a result of their rigor, celebrations of Holy Communion tended to be somewhat infrequent in traditional High Church circles with four or five times a year being the norm in rural parishes, and monthly in market towns.
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In terms of their understanding of the sacrament, old High Church thought divided between those, the majority. who accepted that Christ was present in the celebration of the Eucharist, but not specifically in the elements, and was received by faith by the worthy Communicant; whilst a small minority accepted that the consecrated elements were 'in virtue, power, and effect' the Body and Blood of Christ. In so much as there was a sacrificial element to OHC Eucharistic doctrine it revolved around the offering of alms, the offering of ourselves to Christ's service, and a commemoration of Christ's saving work, especially His one sacrifice of Himself once offered upon the cross. The setting for Eucharistic worship was very simple. The communion table would be set with the necessary vessels; leavened bread and undiluted port would be the elements, and celebrant would very generally conduct the service from the north end of the Table in surplice, tippet, and hood. However simple it may have been, the Lord's Supper was a source of awe to the Old High Churchmen, and the covenant of Grace renewed.
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<b>IV. Episcopacy</b><br>
There is no shying away from the fact that the old High Churchmen believed firmly in the Apostolic, if not Divine origins of the threefold Ministry, and especially of Episcopacy. Start from Cranmer's statement that the Church has had bishops, priests, and deacons since the Apostles' time, they thoroughly investigated the origins of the threefold ministry connecting it to the Old Testament priesthood, the Syngogue, Our Lord's commission to His Apostles, and the evidence contained in the New Testament. In short, for the Old High Churchman, the Episcopal form of Ministry was the only Biblical form, though they were not as quick as the Tractarians and the Anglo-Catholics to pronounce judgement on the ministries of those National Churches which had lost the historic Episcopate. That said, they were usually dead set against any sort of English Dissenters.
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<b>V. The Prayer Book</b><br>
The Old High Churchmen were also warm supporters of the Book of Common Prayer, often referring to it as "our incomparable liturgy." This tribal adherence to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer was very largely a product of two things. Firstly, the old High Churchmen were formed by the Book of Common Prayer. Daily Morning and Evening Prayer at college, and in the cathedrals; the weekly canter through Matins, Litany and Ante-Communion, and Evensong in the parish church; Bishop Gibson's family devotions were their devotion guides and produced a piety which was reasonable, but did not minimize the seriousness of man's sin, nor the abundance of God's Grace. Secondly, the BCP was revered as a product of both the Reformation and the Restoration, both of which were seen as providential events for the restoration and preservation of true religion. The odd OHC might have had the warm fuzzies for the 1549 BCP, but in the main the English branch of the movement supported the 1662 BCP; whilst their Scottish and American cousins liked to point to the influence of ancient liturgies upon their Eucharistic rites. It is also noticeable that in both Scotland and the United States, the adoption of the Articles of Religion as a confessional stand (in 1804 and 1801 respectively) was led by the anti-Latitudinarian High Churchmen.
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Strange as it might seem, the four principal areas with which the Old High Churchmen were concerned find their way into the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (CLQ) which defines the Catholic and Apostolic Church by the Scriptures, the Creeds, the Dominical Sacraments, and the Episcopate. However, it is often forgotten that whilst the CLQ is a statement of what Anglicans believe the Church to be, it is not an adequate statement of the beliefs of the Anglican branch of that Church. For that one must look further - to the Early Fathers, the Ecumenical Councils, the Articles, the Homilies, and the BCP.
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There is a sense in which the Old High Church appeal to the Bible, the Primitive Church, and the Reformation is both as relevant today and also deeply obsolete. In a Twenty-first century seems irrevocably committed to sound bite theology, theological shortcuts, ignorance of history; and intellectual laziness, Classical Anglicanism, of which the Old High Churchmen are the chief representative, provides an intelligent approach to Christianity which is neither liberal, nor in thrall to the traditions of men. It seems to me that Classical Anglicanism, which respects the Bible, the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church, and the intellect is perhaps more necessary today than ever. The propaganda from our deeply old-fashioned Progressives is that faith is not intellectually respectable, and Fundamentalism relegates itself to irrelevance by both failing to engage rationalism, and by embracing its literalism. In a sense we need a Christianity which teaches both culture and Christ. Folks have fled the mainstream churches, very often for Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox (which have other problems) very largely because we have stopped teaching. We need to reverse that trend, and also do something very uncharacteristic for High Church Anglicans, and reach out to those who are seeking after Truth. To echo Bishop Andrewes:
<br><i>One revelation in two Testament; three Creeds; Four Councils; and five centuries; that is our rule of faith</i>
+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-8412546854951706232016-02-07T23:50:00.000-05:002016-02-08T22:50:19.692-05:00The Accidental DissenterFor whatever reason, the habit of my political and religious thought is a mild species of Toryism - I am basically an instinctive Church and King man. Of course, that makes me a dinosaur, and I have spent a good deal of my life dealing the consequences of being a member of an endangered species - leaving the Church of England, because I held to its old theology made me an accidental dissenter. I have also become progressively more disillusioned with contemporary politics, and like many of my generation I have had to face the fact that, unless there is something close to a counter-revolution occurs, I may well live long enough to write the epitaph of classical Western Culture. However, being a Christian, I do tend to be an indefatigable optimist mainly because the Bible teaches us that God is Sovereign, and that ultimately His Will will prevail.
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However, no matter how much I would like to talk about political theory and culture, I am first and foremost a Churchman, and it has been with some fascination - no, that is too strong a phrase - mild interest that I have been watching the Anglican Realignment playing out through the inevitable series of meetings, handshakes, and photo ops. Much of what is taking place is, frankly, unimportant and intended to demonstrate that 'we are doing something' whilst it is pretty much 'business as usual' behind the scenes. So let us have a look at some of what has been going on...
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<b>The Primates' Meeting</b><br>
I got conflicting signals from this one. The fact that Archbishop Foley of the ACNA was present and an active participant in the debate was encouraging in that it seems to indicate that Canterbury is prepared to listen to conservative voices, even if he won't listen to orthodox ones. It was also encouraging in that TEC did receive a suspension from the ACC and the ACO, but I suspect that this was not so much for heresy and unorthodoxy, but for moving further and faster than the political centrists Anglican Communion as a whole are prepared to go. In sum, the net result of the meet was to mildly rebuke TEC, and kick the can down the road another three years, which gives the Revisionists among the political centrists in the Anglican Communion another three years to spread the pro-gay word. However, I suspect that GAFCON, although it has largely caved on the ordination of women, will not give in on homosexual practice and same sex unions, and in three years time my theory is that they - the GAFCON Primates - will be even less willing to kick the can down the road.
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<b>Continuing Shuttle Diplomacy</b><br>
At the moment the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Church in America, the Anglican Province in America are engaged in a goodly measure of shuttle diplomacy, and it would seem that full communion and the M-word (merger) are very much in the air these days. I suspect that much of this stems from the fact that the Episcopates of those three bodies are largely Anglo-Catholic in outlook, and therefore find their common ground in the Affirmation of St Louis rather than in Classical Anglicanism, makes this process and the exchanges that go with it much easier. Certainly some of the old bugbears, such as the San Diego and Deerfield Beach re-consecrations have been laid to rest, so the politics of what was very largely a political dispute have very largely been put to bed. Some observers are speculating that the Anglican Catholic Church may be positioning itself to absorb (the ACC does not in any real sense "merge" with anyone) the reunited ACA-APA at some point in the future, but I think they are getting rather ahead of themselves in saying that. I would be surprised if the ACA-APA merger makes any further steps forward before 2017, if then, and that any further moves will be to some extent timed with an eye to the improving relations with the ACC.
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The wild card in all this has been the visits between Bishop Stephen Scarlett (ACC-Holy Trinity) and Bishop Royal Grote (REC) which has sparked a good deal of speculation. Some folks are talking about this as the great apostasy, and others as signs that the REC is coming from the cold (I am tempted to ask, what cold?) depending on their churchmanship and allegiances. Personally, I think that it is far too tempting to read far too much into this development, and we are bidden to resist temptation. However, it has given the optimists and the conspiracy theorists something to talk about, and as usual, the theory is that the Anglican Continuum is about (i.e. over the next 10 years) to coalesce into a single jurisdiction which is based on the Affirmation of St Louis. A phrase containing the words 'fat lady' - 'over' - and 'sings' springs to mind far too readily.
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<b>The Three Streams</b><br>
Even though I follow ACNA and CANA with some care on the internet, I have to admit to not having a clue what is going on with those jurisdictions. I think I would have to presume that it is very much business as usual, though they seem to have their growing pains associated with Catholics versus Charismatics, and the inherent instability of the three steams approach to Anglicanism. However, ACNA is still managing to keep its internal discussions about Women's Ordination and their new BCP as discussions and not heated debates, and are displaying a degree of maturity that was sadly missing from the 1977 Continuum at this stage of its development. I cannot help thinking, though, that ACNA in particular relying a little too much on the 'three-streams' approach to diffuse (or should be defuse) any identity conflicts within the broader organisation. However, I still cannot help thinking that that theory that lies behind the three streams is more Methodist than Anglican because, through the Charismatic stream it adds 'experience' to Scripture, tradition, and reason, creating a theological wild card which could be used to liberalize ACNA long term.
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<b>Classical Anglicanism</b><br>
With the "Affirmationers" and the "Three Streamers" making most of the running, it seems that what Peter Toon and others dubbed "Classical Anglicanism" has not been much thought about, let alone discussed, in the latest round of shuttle diplomacy. I think the idea of returning to the old Anglican datum points of the Bible, the Creeds, the male threefold ministry, the BCP, and the Articles is currently out of favour because the current philosophy is that Anglicanism needs to be fixed. On the other hand, there probably isn't that anyone really rejects any of these traditionally Anglican markers - well, perhaps the Articles of Religion - but there seems to be general desire for closer definition. That is precisely where lies a very definite danger that whatever one's well meaning reforms might produce, it may well not be Anglicanism but a distinct tradition of its own.
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Anglicanism is at its best when it is both Catholic and Evangelical. We need both the discipline and the sacramentalism of the Catholic Church, and the Biblicism of the Evangelical Reformation in order thrive. The danger of the catholic tradition is that it become impersonal and 'churchy' - to use a vague perjorative of yesteryear, and that the influence of Christ becomes lost in the shadow of the Church. Evangelicalism can easily become too individualist and degenerate into 'me and my Jesus feel-goodery' where sacraments and intellectual rigour disappear on a tide of emotion. Catholics and Evangelicals need each other in order to stay intellectually and spiritually honest, and when the two cross fertilize, as they have often done in the Anglican tradition, what is produced is a very glorious with the beauty of holiness. However, how do we put this into words?
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Back in 1870, when the Church of Ireland was abandoned to disestablishment, they were left with the task of defining who they were, and in the preamble to their Constitution and Canons they described the Church of Ireland as being 'the ancient Catholic and Apostolick Church of Ireland' but also referred to it as a 'Reformed and Protestant church' which sought to return to the faith and practice of the Primitive Church. The former reflects the interests of Tractarians such as Richard Trench of Dublin and William Alexander of Derry; whilst the latter reflects pro-reformation thinking of the Evangelicals such as Bishop John Gregg of Cork, and leading laymen such as Benjamin Lee Guinness. I often think that the Preamble and Declaration adopted by the 1870 General Convention of the Church of Ireland represents a very good working definition of what Anglicanism should in that it positively affirms both the Catholic and Evangelical streams within Anglicanism. My big fear is that somewhere in the wash, this combination of Catholic and Evangelical will be the sock that goes missing. If we do loose that balance of Word and Sacrament, Catholic and Reformed, Apostolic and Evangelical, then will have lost much of that which made Anglicanism appealing.
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In the current atmosphere of rumours about big things I have this quiet fear that I may once again become 'The Accidental Dissenter' by refusing to accept the redefinition of the Church that I love - at times 'warts and all.' It is always easy to make changes, but it is far less simple to correct an error once it has been made, and I fear that where Anglicanism is concerned the cures being proposed may be almost as bad as the disease!+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-12850012946243994422015-12-07T14:15:00.000-05:002015-12-07T15:23:17.895-05:00Bo GiertzI think all of us have books that he have seen quoted, or have heard about so often, that we <i>think</i> we have read them. One of those books for me was Bo Giertz's 'Hammer of God' which he describes as 'A Novel of Pastoral Ministry.' It consists of three related stories, the first set in 1810-11; the second about 1870-1880; and the third in the 1930s. All three deal with the relationship between Pietism (in the UK, Evangelicalism) and the Church, which was a particular concern of Giertz himself, and the pressing need to reconcile the two.
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Giertz was born in 1905 on the Swedish island of Öland. His father was a doctor, and a professed atheist, and his mother an agnostic, but they had their son baptized, and for traditional/cultural reasons confirmed. Giertz's father was converted to Christianity whilst attending the compulsory church services associated with his son's confirmation, whilst Giertz himself, as medical student at Uppsala, increasingly saw the disconnection between his own moral sense, and the behaviour of his fellow atheists. As a result he began attending lectures by a lay Evangelist, Natanael Beskow, who convinced him of both the existence of God, and the historicity of Jesus. As a result, Bo Giertz switched majors, from medicine to theology, and actively pursued his vocation to the priesthood. His theological mentor was the Norwegian-born Professor of Theology at Uppsala, Anton Fridrichsen, who had reacted strongly against Bultmann's attempts to demythologize Christianity, and he emerged from University in 1932 as a member of the High Church wing of the Church of Sweden.
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From 1932 to 1935 he was a travelling lecturer on Christianity for the Church of Sweden's High School Students Association, and was ordained in 1934. He then went to Östra Husby parish where he encountered the sort of Pietism that had been popularized by Carl Rosenius, a mid-nineteenth century lay evangelist who was loosely affiliated with Methodism, and with the work of 18th century Swedish Pietist Henric Schartau. Unlike the High Church methods of pastoral care which tended to be purely formal and liturgical, Schartau placed great emphasis on the centrality and reality of Justification by Faith alone, encouraging his follows to abandon formalism and legalism, and embrace the historic teachings of the Church about justification and sanctification whole-heartedly. His Church-based form of Pietism became deeply entrenched in Western Sweden in the late 18th century, and laid the foundations of Church life there for the next century. In this he was influenced by Gösta Nelson (1890-1958), who had put the study of Schartua and his revival movement onto a proper historical and theological footing during the late-20s and early 30s. Like most Swedish Revivalists, the 'method for revival' was not the histrionics favoured on the American frontier, but a reengagement with the Bible, and with Reformation era writings such as Luther's <i>Postils</I>.
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After Östra Husby, Giertz moved to Ekeby (1937/8) for a vacancy pastorate, and then as Assistant Vicar of Torpa, just outside of Gothenberg from 1938 to 1949, when he was elected Bishop of the diocese. Giertz's election was unusual in two ways. Firstly, Giertz was unusually young (43) and secondly, unlike most bishops-elect, was neither a senior diocesan clergyman, or academic. However, he was well-know as a writer, not just of 'Hammer of God' (1941,) but of 'Christ's Church' (1939), 'Faith Alone' (1943), and 'The Battle for Man' (1947). It would also seem that his long time interest in Schartauism also played well in the diocese, connecting with the dominant revival movement in the diocese.
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Giertz served as Bishop of the Diocese from 1949-1970. During this time the Swedish Government pushed the Church of Sweden to start ordaining women, which occurred in 1958, and there was also a revision of the liturgy, which restored some traditional elements to the Mass, including an expanded Eucharistic Prayer. Giertz vehemently opposed the ordination of women, and founded the <i>"Association for the Scriptures and Confession"</i> to uphold the traditional view of the Church. On the other hand, he welcomed the conservative revision of the Swedish Church Order, and did much to promote "High Church" practices such as weekly Communion, and the Daily Office.
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In retirement he continued to write, preach, and give leadership to the High Church Movement in Church of Sweden, passing away in 1998.
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From my point of view, the importance of Giertz lies in his ability to reconcile the Confessional Orthodoxy with Pietism; the two major movements within the Lutheran tradition, which, since the late 17th century had so often had been at war with one another. To my mind, Anglicanism shares with Lutheranism this tendency toward Evangelical Catholicism, which means that we too face the problem of reconciling the Evangelical with the Confessional. However, if Anglican (or Lutheranism for that matter) is to be fully itself we have to be both Evangelical in our concern for souls, and Catholic is our regard for Scripture and Sacrament. The renewal of Anglicanism lies not so much in the muddy three streams theory which tries to reconcile Anglo-Catholicism, Evangelicalism, and the Charismatic Movement, but in a whole hearted return to the Bible, the Sacraments, and Confessional Documents, along with a proper Evangelical concern for souls.
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As to whether or not I had read 'Hammer of God' or merely thought I had, the answer to that was that I had read the first of the three stories...+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-30447597878182912852015-02-27T00:09:00.000-05:002015-02-27T00:09:03.323-05:00Rabbit TracksOne of the figures that I keep running across in my reading is Thomas Wilson, 1663-1755, Lord Bishop of Sodor and Man from 1697/8 to 1755. The eighteenth century was not an era of hard and fast party divisions, and there were some bishops of decidedly independent mind, such as Wilson slightly younger contemporary Thomas Potter, the High Church WHIG who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1737-47, or Edmund Gibson, the Canonist, who seems to have been independent of ecclesiastic affiliation. Wilson himself seems to have been exceedingly difficult to pigeon hole, being admired by early Evangelicals and Tractarians alike. Indeed, the Evangelical, Charles Simeon (1759-1836) learned the doctrine of substitutionary atonement from a short tract Wilson had written on Holy Communion, but the standard biography of Wilson appeared from the pen of no less a Tractarian than Keble himself almost a century after his death. Wilson also appears on a lot of the Rabbit Trails of eighteenth century Church history. He was a collaborator with Oglethorpe in the foundation of the colony of Georgia. Wesley respected him greatly, and there is some evidence that Law was also favourably disposed to the good bishop. His tracts were republished by SPCK long after his death, and word that one of his Sermons in Manx was to be read in one of the Island's parish churches was sure to draw a good congregation.
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So what do we need to know about Thomas Wilson?
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Firstly, it is important to remember that Wilson was a farmer's son, born at Burton on the Wirral Peninsular in 1663. He was educated by the local grammar school. His family could scrape together just enough money for young Thomas to attend Trinity College, Dublin, then much favoured by folks in the Northwest of England as a cheaper alternative to Oxford and Cambridge, and he graduate A.B. in 1683, and then studied medicine for a while before being ordained, with the express permission of the Archbishop of Dublin, to the diaconate at the age of 22 [1]. After a brief period in the ministry of the Church of Ireland, he returned to Lancashire as tutor to the sons of the Earl of Derby, who was also Lord (earlier, King) of Man [2]. He appears to have served as a tutor to the Derby family for some years, but was given the Vicarage of by them in 1694. He served there for a few years, but the death of the Baptist Levinz, the largely non-resident Bishop of Sodor and Man in 1694 changed the outlook.
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The Earl of Derby was in no hurry to fill the post, but after an interval of eighteen months he offered it to Wilson, who promptly refused. He tried again a year later and received the same answer, and it was only when William III (Dutch Billy) became interested in the matter - telling Derby that if the Earl did not appoint a bishop he would - that Wilson finally accepted the offer of the Diocese of Sodor and Man. Wilson was consecrated as a Bishop in 1698 by the Archbishop of York, and set off to take possession of his diocese.
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Sodor and Man was the smallest Diocese in the Church of England - just 17 parishes - and also the poorest - it brought in about three hundred and fifty pounds a year. Both the compactness of the diocese and its poverty was due to the northern end of the Diocese - the Western Isles of Scotland, Kintyre and various other odd bits of Argyll - having been spun off into the Diocese of the Isles in the 15th century by the King James II of Scotland. The transfer of the Western Isles to Scotland from Norwegian suzreignity also had the effect of removing the diocese of Sodor from the ecclesiastical Province of Nidaros (Trondheim) but like the Diocese of the Isles, which quickly became part of the Province of St Andrew's, Sodor remained without a Provincial affiliation until Henry VIII placed under Canterbury in 1534, then transferred it to York in 1543.
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In the 150 years after the Reformation, Sodor had become something of an ecclesiastical backwater - not that it was ever really in the mainstream. The Bishops had even started to add 'and Man' to the title because they were now uncertain that the old term Sodor included the Isle of Man or not. This process was helped along by the fact that the Isle of Man was an independent Lordship for which homage was owed to the King of England, but was ruled by the Stanley Earls of Derby. Most of the population spoke Manx, not English, and most of the clergy were home-grown, and, if they received a university education at all, received it at Trinity College, Dublin, not Oxford or Cambridge. Wilson's installation as bishop was a typically Manx affair. Wilson had yet to acquire any Manx, the Archdeacon and most of the clergy were uncomfortable in English, so the service was conducted in Latin and the sermon preached in Manx. Wilson discovered that his cathedral lacked some essential amenities - like a roof; the Episcopal house - Bishopcourt - was showing signs of only irregular occupation; and to cap it all, the provision of churches on Man was inadequate and those there were needed repair.
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Wilson set about his task as best he could. His first two problems to address were the state of the Bishop's residence, and the lack of church accommodation in Castletown and Douglas. Payment of the arrears of royal bounty owing to the diocese (about seven hundred pounds) allowed him to restore Bishopcourt, and also fund the construction of St Matthew's Church, Douglas, on a constricted sites by the Market Place to replace a small chapel built a generation or so earlier. Funds from friends in England, and some surplus episcopal revenues allowed him to construct a new church in Castletown - St Mary's - to save the residents the longish walk out to Malew Parish Church - which still stands in splendid isolation at a crossroads about midway between Castletown and Ballasalla. Wilson also set about learning Manx so he could read the service and preach in the language of the people. He seems to have acquired enough competency in the language that his Manx sermons were still popular a century later. An analysis of Wilson's style reveals a preacher who was keen to lay the basic truths of the Gospel before his hearers. He was not afraid to preach about original sin, man's true condition, our need for a Saviour, and the salvation offered to mankind through Jesus Christ. This was a contrast to the dull moralism that was so often characteristic of Anglican Preaching between the Glorious Revolution and the Evangelical Revival.
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Wilson also took practical steps to reconcile Dissenters to the Church of England. There were very few Popish Recusants on the Island, but there were a number of Presbyterian. The Bishop's approach here was twofold. Firstly, he did not insist on small points of ceremonial. One or two clergy had scruples about the surplice, so he insisted only that it be worn by them some times. Some lay folks had scruples about kneeling, so the bishop did not insist upon it with the result that in time most conformed to the Church. Wilson also had the good sense to address a usual Presbyterian complaint about Anglicanism - its lack of discipline. In addition to the usual cases of bastardy, matrimonial cases, failure to receive the sacrament; non-payment of tithe, and so on and so forth, the Bishop was not shy to rebuke gossips, and those who circulated scandalous books, especially those that attacked Protestant orthodoxy. His outspokenness resulted in a stretch of imprisonment in Castle Rushen during a dispute over the conduct of the Governor's wife. The imprisonment was harsh enough to leave the Bishop with only restricted use of his right arm, suggesting that he may have had a minor stroke during his incarceration.
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Wilson continued as Bishop until his death in 1755. He was revered by High Churchmen and Evangelicals alike, but in his later years he had to deal with some reversals. The Governor's Household and the garrison increasingly claimed exemption from ecclesiastical discipline, with the result that Wilson's careful maintained system of oversight of religion, morals, and manners began to break down. Church attendance remained high on the island, however, and there are signs that to some extent Church life was far more 'lively' than on the neighbouring islands of Britain and Ireland. It was not until long after Wilson's death that Methodism gained a foothold on the island, and Dissent did not find its way to the Isle of Man until around 1800. The Methodists themselves did not become dissenters until 1812, but the practice of dual affiliation - to the Parish Church and to the Wesleyan meeting continued for many years. In some respects, the Wilson combination of disciple and piety made it easy for Manxmen to transition to Methodist once dull orthodox descended on the Church during the reign of Bishop Cornelius Criggan, and the unpopular George Murray. It is perhaps fitting to record that when the Bishop died, he was buried outside Michael Church in a coffin made from an elm tree he had planted when he first came into the diocese in 1698. His funeral, it is said, was attended by every able bodied male on the island, it being the custom of the islanders that women did not attend funerals.
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Wilson stands out for his combination of piety, discipline, and common sense in an era when all three were in short supply, and rationalism and formalism prevailed. He preached the Good News of Jesus Christ. He took advantage of the freedom allowed by the Isle of Man's status outside of the United Kingdom to make necessary reforms, and thus reconcile tender consciences to the Church. He was also strict, but loving disciplinarian, opposed to both error in religion and viciousness of manners in an era when Church discipline had all but broken down. He seems to have been in some measure sympathetic to the Wesleys and their efforts at methodical religion, seeing it, perhaps, as a mainland counterpart to is maintenance of the old ways in his island bishop. Perhaps it would have been good for the Church of the Augustan Age if there had been a few more like him.
[1] Canonical age for ordination to the diaconate is 23 in Ireland.
[2] The title King of Man, or King of Man and the Isles disappears around 1509 to avoid unpleasantness with Henry VIII. + Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-81879571435726290682015-02-17T13:09:00.001-05:002015-02-17T13:09:34.419-05:00The Middle WayOne of the problems that Anglicanism faces today is that no-one is quite sure what it is. Even among those of us who self-describe as orthodox or conservative; some try to make it into Catholicism with married priests; others into 'Western Orthodoxy;' a few more into the English version of Calvinism; and so on and so forth. In many respects, it is almost easier to say what Anglicanism is NOT, but I suspect that might have to do with both the 16th century need for a broadly based, national, Protestant Church, and subsequent pressures towards an inclusive orthodoxy, rather than anything inherently vague about the formularies. Certainly in the initial phase after the Marian Reaction, Elizabeth and her counsellors could not afford to exclude anyone except the diehard Papists, and the initial settlement reflected this, with the Supremacy, and the BCP being restored in 1559, but the drawing up of a confession was postponed until 1562/3, and even then it was to be 1571 before the Settlement attained the shape it was to very largely retain until modern times.
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However, in order to understand where "the Settlement" came from, one needs to take a quick look at the development of the three major formularies of the English Reformation - the Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Homilies. Not one of the three falls simply into a Lutheran or Reformed model, and the three of them track slightly different developmental paths, so naturally, we have to ask ourselves what was going on in each case.
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I have long since come to the conclusion - after reading both Harold Browne and W H Griffith-Thomas' commentaries on the Articles - that, because of their ancestry in the Ten Articles of 1537, and the unpublished Thirteen Articles of 1539/40, the Articles of Religion are first and foremost a descendent of the Confession of Augsburg. However, whilst the Articles follow Augsburg closely in matters such as the authority of Scripture, Baptism, Predestination, Clerical Celibacy, and Church ceremonial, they can and do strike off on their own occasionally, such as in Articles 28 and 29 concerning the Eucharist, which are clearly Reformed. Much of this has to do with the fact that when the Forty-two Articles were being drafted in 1551-53, Philippism (which sought the middle ground between Luther and Calvin) was influential, as the Gneiso-Lutheran reaction had not yet set in, and the theological tide seemed to be set in favour of Geneva at least on the issue of the Lord's Supper; an area where Calvin was at his most positive and creative. When the Forty-two Articles were revisited in 1562/3, the Convocation text promoted a High Calvinist doctrine of the Eucharist within what is otherwise an Augsburg derived document. To complicate matters further, Elizabeth I, and some of her Bishops, particularly Ghest and Cheney, were not yet ready to go that far, so Article 29 was suppressed from 1563 to 1571 in order to accommodate the 'Lutheran Tendency.' Even after 1571, the Articles cut their own path between Wittenberg and Geneva being closer to the former on Baptism and Predestination, and the latter on the Lord's Supper. Later attempts by Archbishop Whitgift to move the position of the Church of England closer to that of mainstream Calvinism fell foul of, first, Queen Elizabeth I, and then after his death of James I's reluctance to accommodate the Puritans, and Charles I's Arminianism. This left the Church of England with a confession which is Lutheran in some respects and Reformed in others.
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The Book of Common Prayer presents a slightly different picture. It is true to say that it draws heavily on mediaeval texts, but more often than not, there is a Lutheran model that assisted Cranmer and his assistants in perfecting the English form of the liturgy. Matins and Evensong have clear Lutheran precedents in the form of the Schleswig-Holstein order of 1535, and in germ, in Luther's comments about the usefulness of the daily Office for scholars and clergy made in the mid-1520s. The Communion Office also has a good deal of the Lutheran about it, with even the Decalogue having a precedent in the form of the Frankfurt order of 1537. Other elements, such as the thanksgiving after Communion, derive from the Nuremberg Order of the early 1530s behind which lay Luther's 'Formula Missae.' Another major influence on the 1549 and 1552 BCPs was Archbishop Herman's 'Cologne Church Order' of 1545 - which would have been pretty much hot off the press when Cranmer was working on the Order of Communion in early 1548. The Orders for Baptism and Confirmation also have unmistakeable signs of Lutheran influence. However, many of the alterations made in 1552 came at the suggestion of Peter Martyr and Martin Bucer, and have a more clearly Reformed pedigree. However, the 1559 revision tended to play up the moderate side of the settlement, with its requirement that traditional vestments and ornaments be retained, but this proved to be a passing phase as the returning exiles were in no mood to retain chasubles, and other such manifestations of traditional religion.
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The Book of Homilies is a far more frustrating creation in that it has all the hallmarks of a collection of sermons that has not been edited to produce a uniform whole. Doctrinal inconsistency, within a basically Protestant framework is its hallmark. Just to give one examples. The Homily of Justification is clearly leans more to the Lutheran than the Reformed understanding of the doctrine, not that the space between them is that great. On the other hand, the homily on 'the Peril of Idolatry' seems to come from a hand that has accepted the Reformed, rather than the Lutheran understanding of that topic. This seems to be the character of the whole work, with each writer riding his hobby horses without regard to the opinions of his fellow homilists. On the whole it is a very uneven collection, which ends up having a slight predominance of Reformed over Lutheran voices. This is probably a very accurate reflection of where the intellectual life of the Church of England stood in 1548-50.
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In the end one has to accept that the Church of England, and thus the churches of the Anglican tradition, if they are going to be true to the historic formularies of the Church, have to concede that the core doctrinal position of the Church is Augustinianism, and lies somewhere between confessional Lutheranism, and confessional Calvinism in its particulars. In many respects the Articles of Religion in particular lean towards the Lutheran position, but in respect to the Lord's Supper, the Articles avoid the sort of realistic understanding of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist which is characteristic of Old Lutheranism, and lean more on the 'non-realist' passages from St Augustine's writings. Modern attempts to reconstruct Anglican orthodoxy along other lines have to be understood as exercises in Revisionism, not the Revisionism of the Episcopal Liberals of the 1960s and 70s, but that of the nineteenth century 'Catholic Revival.' In one respect, the Catholic Revival was a blessing in it delivered the Church from the rather arid Pietism and Rationalism of the late 18th century, but ultimately it had little use for the Church's historic formularies hence the attempts to downgrade the Articles into an historic document, and revise the BCP to eliminate, or at least mute, its Reformed content.
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Folks often lament the fact that there is not one 'Continuing Anglican Church' but the fact of the matter is that there cannot be one church when there are (at least) two theologies. The history of Churches that have a double standard, or fail to enforce their formularies - such as the Old Prussian Union, the Episcopal Church, the Church of England, ELCA, etc. - is that they end up being, at best, a group of theological parties in search of a Church, or they lapse into liberalism, and then material heresy. However, one has to set against that the fact that over much confessional rigour tends to result in churches where the overall atmosphere is 'you and I are the only true Anglicans - and I am not too sure about you!' The best chance for Anglican union is for the Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer to be used as focuses of unity, accepted because they reflect the doctrine of Scripture, not on their own merits. This is usually referred to as <i>quia</i> subscription. This makes a range of views possible, because Scripture is open to a certain amount of interpretation, but not to the extent that one has seen in modern times in the Episcopal Church, and other liberal provinces of the Anglican Communion. The general approach to theology suggested by the English Reformation is one based upon Scripture alone, but Scripture seen through the lens of the four Latin Doctors, the Early Fathers, and the first four Ecumenical Councils. The BCP and the Articles echo this position, which Bishop Andrewes summarized in his well-known definition of Anglicanism's rule of faith as One Revelation; Two Testaments; Three Creeds; Four Councils; Five centuries. Unfortunately, even among self-proclaimed traditionalists there is a move away from that theology today.
+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-64509037292908185332014-11-08T23:31:00.001-05:002014-11-08T23:49:11.360-05:00The Revolution Before LastOne of the persistent problems for the traditional Anglican Movement has been the cleavage between the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic understandings of the Church, and the fact that is rather difficult for the two sides to find a mutual accommodation, especially given the determination of some Anglo-Catholics to make sure they are never just a 'tolerated' opinion within the Church. The opposition between the two positions stems from the fact that Evangelicals focus on the Bible, the Creeds, the Articles of Religion, and the Homilies understood in their natural and grammatical sense as their sources of doctrinal authority, with the Early Fathers and Councls being understood through the prism of the Reformation. On the other hand, Anglo-Catholics tend to want to side-line, if not totally ignore the Reformation era, and use a new declaration strongly supporting the idea of the Seven Councils as the teaching standard after Scripture as a way of placing Anglicanism into the context of Catholic Ecumenicism. Being the product of catholic-leaning Broad Churchmen and Anglo-Catholics, the Affirmation of St Louis, declares the new Anglican Church to be one that accepts the Seven Ecumenical Councils as authoritative, proclaims the Mass to be a sacrifice, teaches that there are seven sacraments, and subordinates the Thirty-nine Articles to the Affirmation of St Louis. The present Forward-in-Faith, North America declaration also goes beyond what an Evangelical can sign in good conscience, not just in referencing the "Seven and Seven," but also in using the word 'substantial' to describe the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. That provision also locks out some old-fashioned Churchmen, such as myself, who firmly believe in the real presence, but do not accept that it needs to be based on Scholastic understanding of physics, which is why I had to disassociate myself from FiFNA in the summer of 2013 following their decision to alter their Declaration!
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I suppose it is not surprising that the Continuum has taken this rather catholic turn, given that it seems to be increasingly defined by the Affirmation of St Louis, rather than the Articles of Religion, and the Book of Common Prayer. The basic difficulty of the Affirmation is that the two major influences behind it - conservative Broad Churchmanship, and Anglo-Catholicism - both had a large measure of influence from the Tractarian Movement which to a certain extent wished to suppress the Evangelical side of Anglicanism in favour of the Catholic. This particular version of Anglicanism got an awful lot of traction in the USA where the Episcopal Church was not just a minority Church, but in some senses a counter-cultural church - aristocratic in a populist society; formal in a society that favours spontaneity; surrounded by a mediaeval glow in a country which always espouses modernity more than tradition. This predisposed many American Churchmen, already influenced by the Romanticism of the early 19th century, to accept the Tractarians more readily than was the case among English Churchmen. As a result, apart from a few enclaves of (liberal) evangelicalism in places like Virginia, the Episcopal Church generally divided between those who were Liberal thinkers (both Low Church and Broad Church) and those who were Catholic minded (both Broad Church and High Church.) This had the inevitable result that when the Affirmation was framed it left no place for traditional Evangelicalism, which was, as I have noted, all but dead in ECUSA and in the Anglican Church of Canada.
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This brings me to the title of my post 'the Revolution before Last.' There is a very real sense in which the St Louis Congress took the path of "canonizing" the revolution before last - the "Catholic Revival" - as being the norm for Anglicanism. The Affirmation of St Louis very much reflects the position adopted by the conservative wing of ECUSA in the 1950s and 60s, which was Reformed Catholicism with the accent on the Catholicism. This should have played out well in the USA and Canada had it not been for two factors which I mentioned above - the determination of the Anglo-Catholics to have some measure of control over the new body that went beyond a veto, and the fact that the orthodox Broad Church element recognized that Affirmation of St Louis had moved Anglican teaching a long way to the catholic side of things. The break up of the original version of the Anglican Catholic Church into three jurisdictions in 1981-84 is very much a product of this awaken to the implication of what had been done at St Louis coupled to a leadership which had only limited experience and some considerable internal animosities. Deeply regrettable though this is, it was pretty much inevitable given the circumstances of the time. Some Low Church and Broad Church types felt they had been hoodwinked, whilst some Anglo-Catholics felt that the Broad Churchmen were not being sincere in their support for the ACC, or were not "real" Anglicans. As a result, the Continuum persisted in having two streams which find unity difficult to achieve mainly because neither side really wants to capitulate, though I suspect a genuine compromise <i>might</i> work.
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Although I am quick to point out the historical bloopers in the Affirmation of St Louis, and to express my irritation as to its subordination of previous Anglican formularies to the newer text, ninety percent of it really is very good, and addresses issues that were only just beginning to present themselves in the mid-1970s. This is especially true of the paragraphs on, for example, human responsibility, marriage, and the sanctity of human life. Quite frankly, out of forty plus paragraphs in the Affirmation only three or four of them are controversial, and I am not sure that clarifying them to give a higher status to the Articles of Religion, etc., would really require the Anglo-Catholics to give up anything of any real substance, whilst opening the doors to moderate Evangelicals. For example, would altering the provision 'all previous Anglican formularies to be interpreted in accordance with these principles' to 'all previous Anglican formularies to be interpreted in accordance with the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church' - wording which Matthew Parker would have approved, in my opinion - be too high a price to pay for unity? Only time will tell.
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At the end of the day, there is a sort of regret on my part that the process of reform that began in 1977 got out of hand and led to schism. Certainly, the interim period spoken of in the Affirmation of St Louis should have been much longer. I think the United Episcopal Church took a wise course in taking the Affirmation of St Louis with a grain of salt, and not incorporating it into its Constitution and Canons. The Affirmation certain represents a value position paper when it comes to affirming the central tradition of Western theology, morality and ethics in an increasingly secular and hostile world, but I do not think we should revise, reinterpret or dispense with the Articles of Religion, or the Book of Common Prayer in order to satisfy the agenda of the St Louis Congress. Anglicanism has always had an Evangelical tradition, and any document with stifles that needs to be looked at carefully, especially at a time when we are clearly moving into a post-Christian age in both North America and Western Europe.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-69676949263021106292014-09-01T00:42:00.000-04:002014-10-01T23:43:18.901-04:00North Transpennine ElectrificationWe are going to take a little break from matters ecclesiastical, partly because I need to write about something else for once, and secondly, because I need to vent.
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Northern England is straddled by a belt of fairly large cities - Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford, Sheffield, and Leeds - with an appropriately dense rail network. At the east end this fans out to serve a series of smaller cities and towns on the East Coast - Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Scarborough, Hull and Grimsby-Cleethorpes, along with the significant rail/industrial centres of Scunthorpe and Doncaster. These have been linked for over a century by a series of well defined routes which collectively formed what was franchised as "Transpennine Express" when the operation of the railways system was privatized in the late 1990s.
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<b>The Traditional Route Pattern.</b><br>
The main routes across northern England are products of the Victoria explosion of railway construction. In order of construction they were:
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* The Manchester and Leeds railway, via Rochdale and Wakefield which became the core of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway (1841).
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* The Manchester and Huddersfield Railway, which linked Manchester and Leeds via Huddersfield and Dewsbury, and quickly became part of the London and North Western Railway. This so-called "Diggle Route" opened in 1845.
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* The Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway became the first railway to link Manchester and Sheffield directly via Penistone in 1845. This route, usually called "Woodhead" after the mountain pass it used to pass into Yorkshire.
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* Lastly, there is the Hope Valley Route, opened by the Midland Railway in 1898 to link their lines in South Yorkshire with Manchester, and Liverpool.
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Prior to 1948 most Transpennine services were jointly run by two railway companies. Latter this was the London, Midland and Scottish to the West, and the London and North Eastern to the East following the 1923 Grouping of Britain's Railways. Prior to 1923 the pairings had been more complex, producing the rather notorious situation in Hull where three Liverpool trains left via three different routes within half an hour each morning.
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The three routes from Hull to Liverpool were the North Eastern and LNWR route via Selby, Leeds, Dewsbury, and Huddersfield to Liverpool Lime Street; the Lancashire and Yorkshire via Goole, Wakefield, Rochdale, and Oldham to Liverpool Exchange; and the Great Central via Doncaster, Sheffield, Penistone, Manchester, and Warrington. Newcastle to Liverpool traffic tended to run via Sunderland, Stockton, Northallerton, and Harrogate to Leeds, then via Diggle and the LNWR to Lime Street; whilst Scarborough was served by good connections at Leeds.
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The other Transpennine route was from New Holland (later Grimsby) via Brigg, Gainsborough, and Retford to Sheffield and Manchester, with a few trains passing over the Cheshire Lines Committee to Liverpool Central.
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After the grouping, the Hull-Manchester-Liverpool traffic remained competitive with routes via Leeds (ex-NER/LNWR) and Sheffield (ex-GCR) retaining service. Grmsby to Manchester and Liverpool via Sheffield continued little changed, and the old NER-LNWR route between Newcastle and Liverpool saw a steady increase in the number of trains running over it, with some travelling via York and the ECML rather than via Ripon. AND, this was to remain very much the pattern until the late 1960s.
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<b>British Rail's Rationization.</b>
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Writing in 1965 the author of 'The Future of Britain's Railways' commented that the Beeching Plan "seems to believe there was one city in Yorkshire, namely Leeds, and one in Lancashire, namely Manchester." Maybe this comment got through because when the Modernisation Plan deal with the Northeast to Lancashire long distance services in 1966/7 the new route structure turned out to be more diverse than originally though. Trains from the Northeast and Scarborough were funnelled along the old LNWR route from Leeds, through Hudderfield, to Manchester Victoria before taking the historic Liverpool and Manchester Railway into Lime Street. Services from Humberside operated from Hull (5 trains a day) and Grimsby-Cleethorpes (4 trains a day) via Sheffield to Manchester Piccadilly, and then, increasingly, over the CLC route via Warrington to Liverpool Lime Street. The Hull/Cleethorpes to Manchester service were augmented by a limited number of trains from the East Midlands and East Anglia and the Northwest to give an hourly service between Sheffield and Manchester/Liverpool. This was, in 1970, transferred from the electrified Woodhead route to the slower Hope Valley line so that all passenger trains in Sheffield could serve the Midland station. However, a series of improvements to the Hope Valley line has reduced the journey time from 63 minutes to 52, and allowed Stockport to be served via the Hazel Grove curve. This period also saw the transference of mainline trains from Grimsby-Cleethorpes from the old mainline via Brigg and Retford, to the newer, more heavily populated, but slightly slower route via Scunthorpe and Doncaster.
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Subsequent developments have built on this plan, but with a couple of significant changes.
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Firstly, Hull-Liverpool trains were cut back to Manchester and diverted to run via Leeds in the mid-1990s. This was accompanied by an increase to an hourly service as part of a three trains per hour service from Leeds to Manchester introduced by Regional Railways during Sectorization. The other two trains were an hourly Scarborough-York-Leeds-Manchester train, and an hourly Newcastle-Darlington-York-Leeds-Manchester-Liverpool train. At the same time all long distance trains were diverted to Manchester Piccadilly station, with Victoria being downgraded to mainly suburban status.
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Initially Grimsby-Cleethorpes lost its through service to Lancashire with the Sheffield - Manchester - Liverpool service being provided by the hourly East Anglia to Nottingham - Sheffield - Manchester and Liverpool service. However, the advent of the Manchester Airport rail link led to an hourly Grimsby-Cleethorpes - Scunthorpe - Doncaster - Sheffield - Manchester Piccadilly - Manchester Airport service being introduced in 1998.
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On the NTP route, a fourth Leeds - Manchester service was added in 2000, with the addition of a Middlesbrough - Northallerton - York - Leeds - Manchester train running via what was left of the old Leeds Northern Railway between Northallerton and Eaglescliffe.
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<b>Electrification</b>
<br>With its extremely dense service over the Pennines, the route between Leeds and Manchester has been an obvious candidate for electrification for many years. However, the spread of services at the eastern end making an economic case for this has been difficult due to the high cost to benefit ratio of wiring to York and possibly Hull. Rather than break the traditional cross-Pennine links, electrification has been deferred repeatedly, until now.
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With increasing pressure to make the railway "greener" two projects have become very attractive to the long term planners. The first was the Northwest Electric scheme to wire the routes from Manchester to Liverpool; and Manchester to Bury, Bolton, and Blackpool. This would allow the conversion of Liverpool-Manchester, and Liverpool/Manchester to Blackpool, Glasgow, and Edinburgh services to electric traction as well as a nest of suburban services. The second scheme that was attractive was York-Leeds-Manchester which would allow Transpennine to go electric, but this scheme has come with a hefty price tag in terms of dislocating existing traffic patterns, though undoubtedly, electric traction will be a major boon on the steeply graded route over Diggle.
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In the UK, Railway investment schemes need to meet an hypothetical 8% cost to benefit ratio in order to get government approval, and whilst the Leeds - Manchester core meets this criterion handsomely, the feeder routes at the east end have difficult producing an economic case. Once the ECML was electrified, the Leeds to York section was a shoo-in mainly due to it allowing the conversion of the key Newcastle to Liverpool service to electric traction. Fringe benefits include offering better access to Leeds for East Coast trains, who could run some Northeast/Scotland trains via Leeds to offer an improved Leeds to Scotland service. It was also felt that the relatively under used Scarborough service could be switched to the ex-L&Y line via Rochdale without generating too much ill-feeling. However, the Hull Line was a different matter.
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Hull-Leeds loadings are fairly healthy, and with the addition of Hull to London 'Hull Trains' services it was felt that there was a chance that the ministry would say 'yes' to Hull electrification, especially with the fringe benefit of "free" Leeds to Selby suburban electrification. However, with the less rosy economic climate post-2007, the man from the ministry said 'no' so that only the main Manchester-Leeds-York electrification, plus a short additional stretch from Micklefield to Selby for West Yorkshire PTE will go ahead. This has necessarily caused a complete rethink of Trans-Pennine services.
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Instead of the present fork-like route structure, it seems likely that the new pattern with be:
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2tph Newcastle-York-Leeds-Manchester-Liverpool
2tph York-Leeds-Manchester-Manchester Airport
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Hull-Manchester trains will be diverted via Sheffield, which produces about the same end-to-end timing as Hull to Manchester with a change in Leeds. There will be a connecting service to Leeds, but the real loosers are Middlesbrough and North Lincolnshire, both of which will loose their through service to Manchester, and Manchester Airport altogether. Additionally, there is a strong chance that Grimsby will loose its through through service to Sheffield in favour of changing into the Hull-Sheffield-Manchester service at Doncaster, or worse still, the Sheffield service will become an extension of the all-station Sheffield to Scunthorpe service operated by Northern Rail for South Yorkshire PTE. Admittedly carryings from west of Sheffield to east of Doncaster (and vice versa) have never been as high as anticipated, but the Grimsby-Meadowhall/Sheffield traffic has always been fairly brisk. In spite of what some pundits believe, adding another train crossing from East Coast Mainline from Northeast to Southwest at Doncaster does not seem to be an option, even though there will shortly be a third fast Manchester-Sheffield path available. So Northern Lincolnshire looses out again, having lost its through services to the East Midlands and London with privatization in the 1990s, and North Transpennine Electrification proceeds as the usual 'bean counter project' within the <sarcasm>great tradition</sarcasm> of British electrification schemes.
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<b>Electrification in England</b><br>
Suburban electrification in England has a long history starting with the Tyne electric scheme in 1904-06. This was followed by a host of small scale projects around Liverpool, Manchester, and London between 1907 and 1930. However, mainline electrification was slow in coming mainly due to the complex traffic patterns in Britain, and the inherent conservatism of railway managers.
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The first major project was the main Sheffield - Manchester line over Woodhead was proposed for electrification by both the GCR and the LNER, but was only approved at the third attempt in the late 1930s. It was electrified on the 1500V DC system, as the first stage of a much bigger project, but it was 1954 before this project was finished. The original intention had been to follow this up with the electrification of the East Coast Mainline south of York, but that scheme was shelved during WW2, leaving Woodhead isolated as the technology moved on.
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By the time the Woodhead project was completed, Britain was in the process of adopting 25kV AC as its standard overhead electrification system as being both cheaper and more efficient than 1.5kV DC. After the initial pilot schemes between Morecambe and Lancaster, and London and Shenfield, the first major 25kV scheme was the London - Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool scheme of the early 1960s. This was expanded to Preston in 1972, and Glasgow in 1974, but this scheme was done somewhat on the cheap, with no wires for the routes taking train north out of Manchester and Liverpool to Scotland - a parsimonious policy that was to be followed on all subsequent electrification scheme.
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Wires on the East Coast followed in 1991 again with some notable gaps, then to Norwich in 1994, with various small fill-in projects taking place. Extensive suburban electrifications have taken place in Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham, but there are still large areas of Britain with dense traffic where diesel is likely to be the main traction source for at least another generation.
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The present NTP scheme seems to follow in this penny-pinching tradition, but it is to be hoped that within a few years pressure from Hull and East Riding Councils, Hull Trains and rail users in the area will bring about an add-on electrification between Selby and Hull. In the meantime, they are in the process of creating an enormous dog's breakfast for medium and long distance travellers between the Northeast, North Lincs., Yorkshire, and Lancashire.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-83834640559462022732014-06-18T01:19:00.000-04:002014-06-18T01:19:05.066-04:00The Anglican IdentityOne of the difficulties with being an Anglican in the first quarter of the twenty-first century is that of identity. I cannot help but feel that the last four decades have been somewhat of a wild ride during which a number of Anglican identities have evolved which bare some sort of resemblance to historic Anglicanism. However, it is arguable whether any of them actually <i>is</i> historically Anglican. One is reminded somewhat of the attempts of early mediaeval kings to attach something of the grandeur of Rome to their petty kingdoms.
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On thing that is pretty clear is that fifty years ago, Anglicanism already had something of a problem. The Catholic, Evangelical, and Liberal streams had been interacting for over a century without things going critical, but with the development of both the 'God is Dead' theology of the likes of Don Cupitt, and the siren song of liturgical revision it was clear that something was going to happen, and it was not going to be good. By the 1960s Anglicanism increasingly identified itself not by the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles, and the Episcopate, but by the looser standard of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (CLQ) of 1884/88. The snag with this is that the CLQ was never intended to be an internal definition of what Anglicanism is, but a document governing Ecumencial encounters and inter-church relationships. The trouble with this looser formula - adopted to try and contain the pressures building between Catholics and Liberals - was that it was just too loose. It said something about what it meant to claim an heritage from the early church, but there was nothing specifically Anglican or Catholic about it, and herein lay the rub. Without a strong centre Anglicanism gradually devolved into a loose alliance of national, episcopally governed, Protestant Churches, several of the more influential of which had a pronounced liberal Revisionist bent.
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The train wreck when it came was a double collision. From the point of view of the laity, the more frustrating angle was the liturgical fidgets that developed from the early 1960s onwards. The Church of England, which fully embraced the process, set forth new liturgies in three series starting in 1961, 1967, and 1972 respectively; and this was followed by the Alternative Service Book in 1980, which was supplemented by 'Patterns for Worship' about ten years later, and completely replaced by 'Common Worship' in 2000-2007. Ireland, which was relatively unenthusiastic about liturgical reform, produced an alternative Eucharistic liturgy in 1976; the Alternative Prayer Book in 1984; and a new "BCP" in 2004. ECUSA was initially rather keen on the idea of revision - with the Green Book appearing in 1967; the Zebra in 1973; and the first draft of the 1979 BCP in 1976 pending final approval three years later. This would have registered more as a nuisance than a disaster had it not been for the fact that the Ordination of Women debate was raging at the same time, and the ECUSA was revising its positions on abortion, contraception, divorce, and remarriage, and discover that in some case, like civil rights for homosexuals, that it actually had a position for the first time in its history. The result was considerable unsettlement, and it was inevitable that there would be protest movements both internal and external.
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However, there has been a tendency for the cure to be almost as bad as the disease. The older Continuing Anglican groups tended to summarize their "grievances" in the form of a Solemn Declaration, and/or Declaration of Principles. The former had been pioneered by the Church of Ireland and the Church of Canada at the time of the dissolution of the union to the Church of England. The latter came from the Reformed Episcopal Church, which had draw its version up to protest Tractarianism in 1873. For the most part, these early efforts affirmed their believe in the authority of Scripture, the three ancient Creeds, the two Domincial Sacraments, and the Church in question's Anglican heritage whilst specifically repudiating modern errors concerning Holy Orders, and Morality. For the Broad Church majority of lay continuers this was sufficient, but there was a feeling - at least on the Catholic leaning wing - that something more systematic was needed, and that appeared in the form of the Affirmation of St Louis in 1977.
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I have written about the Affirmation several times in this blog, so I am not going to bore you with a reiteration of my observations, except to say that it went somewhat beyond a restatement of the traditional Anglican position. Certainly many of its provisions have common sense on their side - such as the provision that a 'non-political' method of electing bishops be found. However, what seems to have slipped by, almost totally unobserved, was a small provision which if consistently followed would revolutionize the Church. It is the simple provision that all pre-existing formularies be interpreted in accordance with this Affirmation. On the face of it, this is a very simple and sensible declaration, but its implementation effectively side-lined the Reformation inheritance of Anglicanism by justifying and making normative the Anglo-Catholic rejection of the Articles and Homilies. It also created a second, Catholic, string of revisionism within the Anglican tradition, and led to enormous conflict within the new Continuing Church as it became clear that although diversity of liturgical practice would be tolerated - at least for the time being - the theology was going to be Anglo-Catholic, and those who held a differing point of view could put up or shut up.
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For those whose roots were more in the "orthodox middle" of Episcopalianism the new situation was a difficult one, and it was clear that not all would remain within the new Anglican Catholic Church. The United Episcopal Church was the initial fruit of the post-1980 brake up of the St Louis Continuum, which in some respects is a heavy burden to bare. However, the UECNA hit upon a middle course - more by accident than design. A return was made to an only slightly modified version of the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church as they had stood in 1958, the only significant change to which was a specific protest in favour of the Articles of Religion in declaration of Conformity, coupled with a tendency to accept the moral and polity provisions of the Affirmation of St Louis. This neatly side stepped the "Catholic Revisionist" element of the Affirmation, but also committed the UECNA to the broad framework erected at St Louis.
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The legacy of the 1960s and 70s remains with us in form of a great deal of unclearness about what constitutes Anglicanism. The worst aspect of this is that in addition to Liberal and Catholic Revisionists; we know have three streams Anglicans; Confessional Anglicans, and a half dozen other variants. At the end of the day, what we need more than anything else is a return to "mere" Anglicanism, an awareness of where we came from historically that can inform where the church should be going in the future. One of the beauties of Anglicanism has always been how it manages to be simultaneously both Catholic and Evangelical, and I suspect many of us are acutely aware of just how close we have come over the last forty years to loosing that side of our inheritance. Anglicanism, even orthodox Anglicanism, is always going to be a little bit frustrating for "Pure Ponders" who cannot cope with mess and differing ways of doing things, but it is that very messiness that makes Anglicanism so appealing for so many. Even in the days of rigid orthodoxy, Anglicanism always allowed different schools of thought to survive, even thrive, and it is that acceptance of a broad orthodoxy that we need to recover once more in order to thrive.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-85669587413948739232014-03-08T22:08:00.000-05:002014-03-08T22:09:56.479-05:00Thou shalt not steal!I have no objection to anyone reading my articles on the internet, but I do object to folks copying material that I have published on the interest and turning it into book form so that they can make money. So for the time being there will be no further articles on this blog until I have had the opportunity to clarify the issues involved including whether the publisher of the book that bears my name has broken Google's T&Cs and U.S. Laws concerning intellectual property by reproducing my articles without permission.
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Peter D. Robinson + Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-16418845507670148302014-02-24T14:59:00.000-05:002014-02-26T00:59:02.120-05:00High Churchmen as EvangelistsThe fastest growing diocese in first forty years of the 19th century was that of New York. There was a combination of factors in play. Benjamin Moore began the practice of the bishops going upstate to visit the parishes along the Hudson Valley, and as the population was following the river routes northwards, new congregations began to be formed to supplement those from colonial times. A second factor was 'cold hard cash' - Trinity Wall Street had plenty of it, and could afford to make grants to new churches as well as pay wages to the Bishop, as rector of the parish, his assistants, and support a number of Chapels in New York City. The remaining factor was a series of remarkable men who held the post of Bishop of New York. Provoost may have been unorthodox, but he was well connected and not prepared to see the Church decline. Moore, his successor as Bishop and Rector of Trinity, began to cautious push the church forward, no doubt encouraged by his able assistant John Henry Hobart.
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Hobart was a remarkable figure. His portrait tends to show him as a youngish, slightly rotund man, with spectacles - he always puts me a little in mind of Schubert - yet there was no doubt as to his sheer ability. He had studied theology under William White, where he learned the dry orthodoxy of the mid-eighteenth century, and then the Cutler, who introduced him to High Church Principles. Now we have to remember that this is the old High Churchmanship, with its strong emphasis on the efficiency of the two Dominical Sacraments, its enthusiasm for Episcopal governance of the Church, and its love of the Book of Common Prayer. However, Hobart was not a conventional High Churchman. For a start, High Churchmanship had a reputation for being three parts starch, one part morals, and one part theology. Hobart was not like that. If anything, he shared the activism of the early Episcopal Evangelicals, but unlike them he chose not to participate in non-denominational efforts, but created various societies for Episcopalians - such as "the Bible and Prayer Book Society" because he wished to use them to advance the cause of Anglicanism. He was also a stirring preacher, turning his affliction - he was myopic - into an advantage, as finding it difficult to read a manuscript in the pulpit, he largely memorized his sermons, giving him a freer more spontaneous style of preaching. Yet for all the Evangelical form, there was a small but significant shift towards more 'churchly' uses. The word diocese begins to appear. Under Provoost, the diocese had always been styled 'The Protestant Episcopal Church in/of the State of New York. Hobart favoured churches which placed the altar at the east end, and had a separate chancel area for the Communion service, rather than making the Table an adjunct to the three decker pulpit. The pulpit was placed at the head of the nave, dominating that part of the church, and effectively dividing it into two room - one for the Office, the other for the Lord's Supper. He also systematized Episcopal visitation and confirmations so that the Bishop became a presence in the whole diocese, not just in the City of New York and the down state counties. This made his final attribute essential - he had a lot of energy, and although he alternated between feverish activity, and moods of depression where he retired to his country residence in New Jersey, he carried the heaviest work load of any Episcopal bishop, without assistance, for almost 20 years.
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However, although 'the Hobart Effect' was considerable, it was aided by the presence of many able men in the diocese. Richard Channing Moore, an Evangelical, had built up a considerable ministry at St Stephen's which, until his departure to Virginia in 1814, was the hub of the Evangelical Movement in NY. Hobart was lucky in his assistant at Trinity - B. T. Onderdonk - a clever, plodding, fastidious man, who was more than able to hold the home front when the Bishop was upstate. The advent of General Seminary in 1817 also aided the diocese, though Hobart was a bit suspicious of it at first as it was not under his control, and it was becoming evident that a lot of the success of the diocese lay in its institutional strength, and the quality of the men that Hobart could attract into the ministry. Basically, through his ministry the Church in New York was energized, and as Episcopalians went up the Hudson, and along the Erie Canal they vowed to take the Church with them. They could be sure that when they did get upstate and organize their Grace Church or Trinity Church among the woods and hills of upstate New York, it would not be too long before a rotund man in glasses arrived to preach to encourage and to confirm their children.
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Hobart's heavy workload eventually killed him. In the late spring of 1830, he headed upstate once again on another cycle of preaching, visiting, and confirming, which was to take him through the whole summer. Three months later, feeling low and feverish he tied up at a Rectory in Upstate New York in early September 1830. At first there were considerable hope for recovery, but as the condition of the worn out man declined, his friends prepared for the worst. Almost as an after thought, the rector celebrated Holy Communion for the dying man, who passed on 12th September 1830, just two days short of his 55th birthday.
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As was so often the case in Hobart's later life, his assistant Benjamin Treadwell Onderdonk (1791-1861), stepped in to do what the Bishop could no longer do. He was elected to follow Hobart by the Convention of PEC in NY. B. T. Onderdonk was of Dutch descent, and his clergy said he could also be 'a bit Dutch' - stubborn, difficult, and inclined to waste too much time on trifles. However, the Diocesan Convention's choice was absolutely sound, as Onderdonk was committed to following his old chief's principles. He may have fussed about the size of the bread cubes for the Communion service, prescribed how much wine would be needed for each two dozen communicants. He may also depreciated the classical architecture of so many New York Churches and pressed the Gothic revival style on unwilling vestries, but he had the redeeming quality of being a plodder.
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Now plodding is not usually considered a virtue, but when compared to his old boss Hobart, Onderdonk comes across as the consummate plodder. His fussiness was the down side of this painstaking personality - the vice of a man who did things well (not brilliantly) and thoroughly. Undeterred by his old chief's death through fever brought on by poor sanitation and overwork, Onderdonk followed the same routine as his predecessor spending the cold months in or close to New York City, then heading north each summer to visit the upstate parishes. In those days there was no New York Central railroad, never mind a Freeway or Turnpike to speed you on your way, you took to the riverboats, and worked your way upstream at a steady three or four knots calling at each town and village in turn. The river boats were also noted for their vice and gambling, but even though respectable men, especially the Protestant Episcopal bishop, may have preferred to avoid their pernicious influence, they were the only practical and economic way to travel upstate. When the river system ran out, then the Bishop had to take to the stage coaches, and jolt his way at so much a stage across country until he reached his destination. It was an exacting life, but one which B T Onderdonk sustained for some 15 years, no doubt reading some of the new 'Tract for the Times' out of Oxford, England, which his friends would have sent to him from time to time. Sadly, it was these Tracts that were to ignite the conflict that brought down Bishop Onderdonk. However, he was to have his moment of triumph first.
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At the time of his consecration in 1830, the diocese of New York had around 130 clergy, 68 parishes, and probably a 110-120 missions. Unlike his three predecessors, Onderdonk was not Rector of Trinity Church, but although this somewhat lightened his load, the slack was soon taken up by the demands of the largest diocese in the Protestant Episcopal Church. By 1837, the plodder was shepherding 239 clergy in 232 parishes, which was a test of even his stamina. This made the division of either Episcopal authority, by the appointment of an assistant, or of jurisdiction by a division of the diocese essential. Onderdonk plodded his way through this, like he did everything else, smoothing the way in the diocesan convention; then making the necessary approaches to the House of Bishops and the General Convention. There was a lot of controversy, as the dioceses were then all co-terminus with the states they served, and this division was seen as crossing some sort of great organisational rubicon. In the end, the state was divided almost equally with both dioceses containing about one million people and 21,000 square miles of land. The new diocese contained 40 parishes, 50 missions, and not quite a hundred clergy, and Onderdonk had the pleasure of presiding over its first diocesan convention and of seeing the election of William Heathcoate DeLancey as its first bishop. He was probably less happy about the name "Western New York" - as a High Churchman he undoubtedly would have preferred to have the diocese named after one of its major cities. This small caveat aside, the division of the diocese of New York is a testament to Onderdonk's administrative ability, but unfortunately, it proved to be the calm before the storm.
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Doubtless there had always been a little bit of grumbling among Evangelicals about Onderdonk's High Church views and - shall we call it - attention to detail, and I imagine everyone got a little 'bent out of shape' when the bishop was being a tadge difficult, but there was no major explosion until the Carey Case in 1843. Young Arthur Carey was a student at the General Seminary, who held what might be politely called 'advanced views.' With the aid of the Tracts he had travelled a long way along the road to Rome, and some of his professors had expressed concern about this. Onderdonk listened to the objections, but was determined to ordain him anyway. Instead of waving aside the opposition as Hobart would have done, he got drawn into the controversy, and this in turn stirred up further opposition. In the end it devolved into the first out-and-out faction fight in the diocese of New York and in the PECUSA as a whole, and it was to make Benjamin Onderdonk some very determined enemies.
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Onderdonk was to have another year of relative peace, then rumours began to circulate of indecent conduct with a variety of women. Those long unaccompanied journeys had caught up with him in an unexpected way. The trouble was that Onderdonk was a 'touchy-feely' in an age when such familiarity could be regarded as a breach of social etiquette at best, and as a downright liberty at worst. In Onderdonk's case, it was viewed as conduct unbecoming of a clergyman, and seized upon by his enemies, resulting in a trial before the House of Bishops. The trial was a nasty tempered and rancorous affair which ended in a pretty much party line vote of 11-6 against the Bishop, who was accordingly suspended. Sadly, Bishop William Meade of Virginia, leader of the Evangelical opposition to Onderdonk, having tasted blood, decided to try for the double and take down Henry U. Onderdonk, Benjamin T's elder brother, and the second Bishop of Pennsylvania. The elder Onderdonk had been prescribed laudanum to alleviate chronic pain, but as laudanum is nothing but opium dissolved in brandy, Benjamin T's elder brother soon found himself faced with allegations of intemperance from certain Evangelicals in the diocese. Again the trial was a nasty display of party feeling, ending with a down the line vote convicting the Bishop leading to his serving an 11 year suspension from the exercise of his ministry. No-one won any advantage from these actions. The Evangelicals garnered a reputation for intolerance and partisanship which weakened them greatly later in the century. The dioceses of New York and Pennsylvania were majorly disrupted for a decade, and the High Churchmen found they had to circle the wagons in order to survive, leading to a period when High and Low were often at loggerheads with one another.
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However, we still need to answer the question, why were these High Churchmen successful as Evangelists?
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In the first instance, emigration into New York was still largely a British affair in the 1820s and 1830s. This meant that many of the new Americans were at least nominally members of the Church of England. However, that was only a slight 'leg-up' - far more determinative was the fact that these High Church preached the Gospel of redemption through Cross and Passion of Jesus Christ, and they also gave to the men and women that heard them the means of grace. They may have laid their emphasis on the sacraments, and virtues not far removed from the old Benedictine principles of poverty, stability and conversion of life, but in doing so they taught people how to be holy. In an age when folks were looking for salvation this thoroughness and lack of individualism could be a great strength for those looking for an identity in the New World. A further factor was cultural. Romanticism as a literary movement, with its appeal to mediaevalism, was at its height, and the Protestant Episcopal Church with its fine buildings, and solemn (rather than elaborate) ceremonial, and history fitted in perfectly with the cultural priorities of the time, just as in a sense we should be able to fit in with the counter-cultural priorities today. In short, the Protestant Episcopal Church was every bit as "romantic" as Roman Catholicism, but without its disadvantages. The time was ripe for the Church, and the men were there who God had ordained for the task! + Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-41187154953351244422014-02-23T23:52:00.000-05:002014-02-24T00:10:01.434-05:00Revisionists on Both SidesOne of the things that has become increasingly evident to me during my almost 20 years of ministry in the Continuing Church is that not all the Revisionists are liberal Episcopalians. One of the reasons why the Continuing Anglican Movement has preformed relatively weakly is that at least two of the major jurisdictions, the Anglican Catholic Church and the Traditional Anglican Communion have had a significant element within them who wished to reform, and not just continue Episcopalianism. They are hostile to the very notion of a broad Scriptural orthodoxy, under the traditional threefold male ministry, which would be inherently part of a simple continuation of the old PECUSA, and as a result they have tended to try and narrow the boundaries.
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One major motivation behind this has been the desire to prevent Anglo-Catholics ever being a 'persecuted minority' within the Church. Now whilst I would freely admit that Anglo-Catholics occasionally got the dirty end of the stick, by-and-large they gave as good as they got. Certainly, much of the run-up to the formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church was set against the background of activist High Church and Anglo-Catholic opposition to what they perceived as Evangelical irregularities, and they were not shy about using the ecclesiastical courts to enforce their point of view. Conversely, the Evangelicals had not been too "nice" about their methodology when they had gone after Henry Onderdonk, Bishop of Pennsylvania, and Benjamin Onderdonk, Bishop of New York in the 1840s. The charge against Henry of Philadelphia, one of intoxication, was particularly difficult to prove, especially as he had been prescribed laudanum following a painful, and his eventual conviction owed more to party-feeling and a well-orchestrated smear campaign, than the actual merit of the allegation. There seems to have been a little more substance to the allegations of improper conduct against his brother, but even then it seems that the fact that he was a High Churchmen, sympathetic to the Oxford Movement, seems to have been the actual crime. The sentences imposed on both men seem excessive. Henry U. was suspended for 11 years, and his brother until his death in 1861. Both the diocese of Pennsylvania, and that of New York suffered a serious setback because of the limbo into which the suspension of their respective bishops placed them.
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Unfortunately, the party spirit that the trials of H.U. and B.T. Onderdonk, or for that matter the Rev. Mr Cheney in 1868, demonstrated has never wholly departed from the Anglican Tradition, and we can all point occasions when party spirit has got the better of common sense. Episcopal elections seem to be one of the most frequent manifestations of this tendency, and I do not think any of us can honestly say that it strengthens the Church - unless, of course, we believe that the survival of the Church depends on our party surviving.
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The Rev. Sydney Smith (1773-1845) famously defined orthodoxy as "one's own doxy" and heterodoxy as "another man's doxy" - a verdict which earned him no friends among the more theologically rigid. However, there are times when one is tempted to take Prebendary Smith's words as having more than a grain of truth to them. Clergymen seem to be very good at this type of argument, even when the preponderance of the evidence is against them. I never cease to be amazed by the number of Anglican priests I encounter who hate the Reformation, reject the Thirty-nine Articles and will fight to the death to retain the 1928 BCP only if they never have to use it, not do I ever cease to be amazed by those who swear by the Articles, but have little use for the BCP or clerical dress. Neither side seems to appreciate the balance inherent in the Anglican position.
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I took the time not so long ago to listen to the tape recording made in 1977 of the proceedings of the Congress of Concerned Churchmen held in St Louis in September 1977. Most of recording were as boring as only Church meetings are apt to be. There were a lot of expressions of hope about the new Anglican Church, and a great deal of distaste expressed for the direction the Episcopal Church had been going in since 1964, but there was no call for a complete overhaul of what it means to be Anglican. If anything, most of the speaker wanted the Affirmation of St Louis to serve as a minor corrective to the ambiguities that had crept into PECUSA in the years since 1945 by reiterating the Church's commitment to the Scriptures, the Fathers, the Early Councils, and the traditional understanding of Holy Orders. However, there was an opening in the Affirmation of St Louis for a form of Orthodox revisionism to take place, mainly through its provisions for alternative liturgies, and a thorough revision of the Constitution and Canons.
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There is an old adage about 'give them an inch, and they'll take a mile' and the Revisionist element among the Continuers took their opportunity to do just that. Unfortunately, in doing so they fostered strife and division. The Constitution and Canons that emerged from the revision process proved unacceptable to three dioceses of the new Church for a variety of reasons. Some protested that the provisions on doctrine "undid the Reformation" others grumbled about over-elaboration, and centralization. However, their complaints came down to the same essential contention - that the new Church was not the old one without the heresy and goofiness, but something subtly, yet radically different. At that point, the Continuum entered its winter of discontent from which it is only slowly emerging. However, we need to be very careful about how this occurs.
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At the Victoria Conference, at Brockton later in the same year, and in subsequent discussions, it became evident that the agenda for the 'united Continuum' is very largely being set by those who embrace the Anglo-Catholic Revisionism of the late 1970s. If their interpretation of Anglicanism prevails, what will emerge out of the reunion of the various Continuing Jurisdictions will not be recognizable as the old Episcopalianism, but will be an exotic hybrid of Old Catholic theology with Anglo-Catholic liturgics that rejects two-thirds of the Anglican inheritance. Anglican theological dialogue has rested since the time of Richard Hooker (1554-1600) on the notion that Scripture, tradition, and reason work together to maintain orthodoxy. However, it is very important to understand that Hooker has been glossed by the Tractarians as placing equal weight on each of the three-legs of the stool. This misreads Hooker in a significant way, because for Hooker Scripture was supremely important and eclipsed the other two. The analogy I often use is that of a child's tricycle, with Scripture being the big wheel at the front providing the power and direction, whilst tradition and reason are the small wheels providing stability.
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Unfortunately much of modern Anglo-Catholicism has also absorbed an increasing amount of high mediaeval and modern RC thought, and along with it practices such as Marian devotions, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and the cultus of the saints, though at least, so far, they have stopped short of Purgatory and the Treasury of Merit, though a few rattle-on about "the intermediate state." Its theological tradition is not so much Anglican as Henrician. Now Martin Luther used to call Henry VIII Hanswürst, and poked fun at him for his matrimonial adventures, and making himself his own Pope. The worst sort of modern Anglo-Catholicism often resembles this "Hanswürst Catholicism." It is not the real thing, neither is it really Anglicanism, but a synthetic creation dependant on what certain folks choose to cherry pick from the history of the Anglican Church, its doctrinal statements, and liturgical traditions to create its own plastic Pope. The approach that it promotes is certainly is not the same as Matthew Parker (1504-1575) - Elizabeth I's first Archbishop of Canterbury's advice to the clergy to interpret the 39 Articles and the third Prayer Book in the most catholic sense according to the Scriptures, and the writings of the ancient Fathers.
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Before you run away with the idea that I am hostile to Anglo-Catholicism I must point out that I grew up in a largely "modern Catholic environment" and was involved in the early days of the ACC in England. Later on I was a member of the Priestly Fraternity of St Martin, which was dedicated to upholding the English Catholic/Prayer Book catholic tradition in Anglicanism. However, the Catholic Movement within the Continuum needs to be very careful about guarding its Anglican identity, or it will end up going the same way as Hunswürst's bishops. Many, such as Cranmer and Latimer completed their journey into Protestantism becoming the fathers of the moderate Protestant Anglicanism of Queen Elizabeth I. The others - like Gardner, Bonner, Stanley, and Pursgrove returned to the old religion and died in communion with the Pope.
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I would therefore make the plea, that as we seek a united future as traditional Anglicans we return to our roots, not engage in further revisionism. I would suggest that instead of committing ourselves to theologies that are partial, and Constitutions and Canons that have proved divisive we look once again at the old Anglican tradition. I have always been particularly impressed by the way in which both the Church of Ireland (1871,) the Free Church of England (1876,) and the Church of England in Canada (1892) dealt with the question of theological identity. That model, with a protest against modern innovations such as the ordination of women, and in favour of the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of human life, would prove far less divisive than adopting lock, stock, and barrel the programme of the revisionists to the right of us.
+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-49233181198153729562014-01-02T22:46:00.002-05:002014-01-09T13:36:27.928-05:00Anglicanism and EpiscopacyI am constantly surprised by the degree of hostility that the idea of Episcopal governance of the Church still arouses with some folks. Whilst I can understand people getting a little exercised about the Papacy's claims of universal jurisdiction and ex cathedra infallibility, it really takes minimal effort to discover that the office of Bishop has its origin in the Bible, and that until the 1520s, with the exception of a few heretical sects, all churches were governed by some form of Episcopacy. One of the problems that one encounters is that the proponants of Episcopacy can often do it as much damage as its opponants. The major problem seems to be that having proved the historical case, they then go on to make extravagant spiritual claims which have little support in Holy Scripture.
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Firstly, the Prayer Book ordinal's assertion that
<blockquote>It is evident unto all men, diligently reading holy Scripture and the ancient authors, that from the Apostles' time there have been these orders of ministers in the Christ's Church; Bishops, priests, and deacon</blockquote>
says about as much as can incontrovertibly asserted about the New Testament pattern of ministry. The existence of these three orders is amply attested to in Scripture. Firstly, there is the account of the Apostles setting apart the seven deacons in Acts 6. St Paul's Pastoral Epistles - 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus - contain the required qualifications for overseers - bishops; elders - Presbyters; and deacons. This demonstrates that the three orders were already an established part of Apostolic practice within 25 years of the Resurrection. However, the amount of information that we have about the roles these three orders had in the first century is pretty limited, so we have to take a quick look at extra Biblical sources including contemporary Jewish practice, and then look at the Sub-Apostolic Fathers for more detail.
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That said, we are not working in a vacuum, as in many respects the Early Church had "baptized" an existing institution. First century synagogues had an 'overseer' and 'elders' who ran the affairs of the congregation, but I am afraid that I could not tell you to what degree the offices of overseer and elder overlapped with that of rabbi in the first century. This model was taken over, adapted and given an Apostolic mandate. What is very apparent though is that the ministry of Word and Sacrament rapidly became attached to these offices once the church had grown to the point where the Apostles themselves could no longer over see every congregation. By the time St Paul was writing to Titus in Crete, most Gentile Churches would have been familiar with the threefold ministry, and this pattern was to become universal by the mid-second century and remain so for some 1400 years. Writing in 1843, Christopher Wordsworth comments in 'Theophilus Anglicana' that the overwhelming major of Christians live under some sort of Episcopacy and that it is the Presbyterian and the Congregation systems that are of late invention, though he is prepared to concede that in some cases they were necessary due to the refusal of the existing hierarchies to accept reformed doctrine.
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What about the functions of the three orders? How did they develop?
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It seems that from very early on the fullness of the Ministry of Word and Sacrament was seen as laying with the Bishop. Bishops were the rulers of the local churches, the usual celebrant at the Eucharist, and the principle public teachers of the Faith. Presbyters exercised these functions when the Bishop was absent, or when asked to by the Bishop. The Deacons remained the 'welfare offices' of the Church, but acquired liturgical functions in that they waited on the Lord's Table, taught the youths, and prepared folks for baptism, as well as at the daily distribution to the widows and orphans of the Church. It seems that the relationship between presbyter and bishop was one of degree rather than order in some provinces of the Early Church. There is some suggestion that in both Rome and Alexandria, the Elders elected one of their own number as Bishop and set him aside for his new functions by the laying on of hands. On the other hand, in Ephesus and Antioch bishops were treated as the fundamental order, and presbyters had only certain ministries delegated to them. In the end, probably no later than 200AD, it was the Antioch pattern that won out.
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As a result of this process and the increasing number and variety of heresies, the Church decided that there was a need to regulate the ordination of Bishops, by legislating that the consecration of a bishop be undertaken by several (usually three) bishops. This was to prevent one bishop, who had gone off the rails theologically, going off and ordaining a slug of new bishops and starting his own church in competition with the Catholic and Apostolic variety. On one level, this was nothing mystical, it was a 'quality control' exercise. The basic idea was that if the bishops of a province could accept as orthodox the man elected to be consecrated Bishop then the orthodoxy of the Church would be preserved. These early Canons also allowed Bishops to signify their consent in writing. The whole process was codified in the Canons of the I Council of Nicaea - along with the Canon of the New Testament. Apart from the importation of a good deal of Roman administrative machinery into the Church to help it cope with being a large scale institution, the mechanics of the ministry remained all but fixed for over a thousand years.
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This was so much the case that the abandonment of Episcopacy in the Middle Ages was always an adjunct to abandoning Creedal Christianity. The Bulgars, Cathars, and Albegensians all created their own forms of ministry to replace that of the Church Catholic, and to better fit their concept of the Church being divided between the Perfecti and the Hearers. The acceptance of non-episcopal ministries by Creedally orthodox Christans is a relatively late development forced upon Martin Luther by the failure of the Bishops to accept the Reformation. Luther's solution was to effectively put the Episcopal Office into commission. The jurisdictional functions of the Bishop passed to the Prince, and the ministerial to a Consistory made up of ministers. Calvin also had to deal with this problem, he did so in a more systematic manner creating a whole system of Church Sessions and Presbyteries to administer the Reformed Church. However, both Luther and Calvin allowed Episcopacy to survive wherever it adapted to the Biblical theology of the Reformation. Scotland retained the office of Bishop alongside the Presbyteries from 1570 to about 1592, and the historic episcopate was reintroduced under the Articles of Perth in 1610. The Lutheran Church of Sweden retained the historic Episcopate, whilst the Office of Bishop survived in Denmark-Norway, and the Baltic States.
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In the Church of England and the Church of Ireland, episcopacy continued because enough of the Bishops accepted the Reformation for the Historic Episcopate to continue. Matthew Parker was consecrated in 1559 by four Bishops consecrated under the old Ordinal back in the reign of Henry VIII, or just at the beginning of Edward VI's. A casual glance down the succession list will show that the Church preserved the historic Episcopate and made it a tool for maintaining Reformed doctrine in the Church of England. Early English Protestants believed that Bishops existed either for the 'well-being' (for example Jewel) of the Church, or as part of the fullness of the Church's ministry (Whitgift and Hooker.) That Episcopacy "makes" the Church was not an idea that gained much currency in the Church of England until the time of Charles I, and even then Archbishop Laud was furious when his tame historian could not "prove" the de jure divino argument. By the 1660s, most Anglicans were convinced that Episcopacy was normative, but not essential. This meant that when the Scottish Church was cut off without a shilling by William III, they made every effort to maintain Episcopal worship and ministry in Scotland, but by the same token, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was happy enough to use Danish Lutheran missionaries in the Church of England's missions in India.
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However, whilst a spirit of cooperation remained in the mission fields of India, the situation in England was somewhat different, and a broad distinction was made between English Dissenters, and Foreign Protestants. English dissenter were regarded as not having valid ministries because they dissented from the Church of the land. Any English Presbyterian minister who conformed was therefore ordained from scratch when he came into the Church of England. On the other hand, foreign protestants were allowed to minister in the "Stranger's Churches" in London, Canterbury, and elsewhere without any objection being made by the Church of England. This was because they were the accredited representatives of their respective National Churches. However, the was largely a matter of discipline, not doctrine. It is only in the late-17th century that some High Anglicans begin to un-Church those who have no bishops. After 1689, this position was associated principally with the Non-Jurors, and "High-Fliers" like Henry Sacheverell. That said, mainstream Anglican theologians, such as Daniel Waterland, definitely had a high view of Episcopacy, though it is difficult to decide whether their views were the "plene esse" of Whitgift, or the "esse" of the more radical Caroline Divines. However, the Caroline Divines were far from uniform in their view, so, for example, John Cosin was perfectly happy to receive communion from Huguenot ministers when in exile in France.
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This exclusivist tendency becomes even more marked in the 19th century with the rise of Tractarianism, and especially so in the USA where the assertive High Church Movement of the 1870s used Episcopacy <i>de jure divino</i> as a wedge to unprotestantize the Protestant Episcopal Church, and claim a basic identity with Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy that negated the basically Reformed nature of Anglicanism. So extreme did this insistence on manual transmission of Episcopal Orders become that the institution of the historic episcopate became divorced from Apostolic doctrine, and an apostolic succession of hands on heads became more important than the doctrine taught. The ultimate manifestation of this peculiar understanding of Apostolic Succession is the un-churching by those who according to Scripture and the Early Fathers are no bishops of those who teach the doctrines of Scripture and the Early Church but have no bishops. This is a complete negation of the idea that an man ordained into the historic threefold ministry of the Church should be a teacher of Apostolic doctrine. In short, it is a reversal of the proper order of things which would be laughable if it were not so sad.
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Anglicans adhere to Episcopacy not as an end in itself, but as a Biblical institution, However, it is not a bit of good unless the faith which is taught is that of the one Catholic and Apostolic Church as contained in those same Holy Scriptures and taught by the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church. Furthermore, given our history, and our right to exercise commonsense, I believe that Anglicans should refrain from unchurching those who teach the Faith, but have no bishops. Episcopacy is a good thing, if it accompanies sound teaching. On the other hand, if a bishop teaches error he misleads the Church, and is the worst sort of false teacher. We need, therefore, to heed the advice of St Paul, and select as Bishops (and clergy in general) only those who 'rightly divide the word of truth.' + Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-84364023260685055912013-11-17T23:40:00.002-05:002013-11-17T23:58:20.504-05:00Why I cannot accept the Redefinition of MarriageIt will be May before the House of Bishops can meet and issue a formal statement on the topic of marriage, but I think I can 'in the safety of my own blog' do some of the preliminary reasoning ahead of the discussion. There is absolutely no doubt that the UECNA will come down in the orthodox camp, but the "hows and whys" may well get left out of the final statement.
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The first reference to marriage in the Bible is in Genesis in the second account of creation. God makes the animals and beings them to Adam and he names them, "but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him." (Gen. 2.20) So God causes Adam to fall into a deep sleep, he removes one of his ribs, and makes woman. Adam is delighted with the result
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"And Adam said, 'This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man.' Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." (Genesis 2. 23-24)
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God bids the Man and his wife to be fruitful and multiply. St Paul's references to marriage are rooted in the doctrine of marriage expressed in Genesis - so this is important!
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At this point I need to bring is Noah. Now this may seem a bit surprising, but there is a reason for this (underlined by the fact that this evening's OT at Evening Prayer was Genesis 19) having to do with the commands that God gives to the descendants of Noah. Now remember that according to Biblical history, Noah is the common ancestor of all those now living. This makes God's instructions too him very important in that God's moral requirements of Noah and his sons are binding on all humanity i.e. the Gentiles. Noah is given seven 'commandments' forbidding among other things idolatry, the taking of meat with the blood, theft, and sexual immorality. It is this last which ties into story of Sodom, where sexual mores seem to have been lax to say the least. Noah and his sons, like Adam and Eve before them are bidden to be 'fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.' (Gen 9.1)
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The third aspect takes us back to Adam and Eve once more, and it comes from his delighted comment, "At last, bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh...." St Paul makes a lot of this in his references to marriage. For a start, let's look at what is taken as one of the classic "anti-woman" passages in his Epistles - Ephesians 5.22. Now if you are still listening after St Paul's initial exhortation "Wives be subject to your husbands" what you actually have is an extraordinary passage (Ephesians 5, 22-33)in which Paul glories in the mutual interdependence of husband and wife. His key exhortation is "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church and gave himself for it. This points to a very high doctrine of marriage indeed, even though St Paul is usually portrayed as being anti-woman!
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Now you may be wondering where I am going with this...
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In the 1789 preface to the Book of Common Prayer we are assured that 'this Church is far from the intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline or worship; or further than local circumstances require." (1928 BCP page vi)
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Sadly, the 1789 Marriage Office is a bit anaemic, mainly because the causes of Matrimony contained in the revisions of 1549, 1552, 1559, and 1662 are omitted. These ran as follows:
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"First it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and the nurture of the Lord, and the praise of his Holy Name.
"Secondly, it was ordained as a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ's body.
"Thirdly, it was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that one ought to have to the other, both in prosperity and adversity."
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Now these points are echoed elsewhere in the service, so I assume, based on the disclaimer above, that the omission of the causes of matrimony was to make the service shorter. Certainly there was no desire on the part of the Church to alter the nature of the institution of marriage.
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The State has a different appreciation of marriage. If you look at Roman Law, marriage is about property, legitimacy, and inheritance. The two institutions - the sacramental relations of Holy Matrimony and the State's marriage contract - coalesced into a single institution. This, I firmly believe, tended towards the greater stability, integrity and morality of society, but I believe we need to be clear what belongs to which aspect of the institution of marriage.
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So far as the Church is concerned marriage is routed in Genesis. Man and woman are complimentary and help meets the one to the other. Marriage is instituted - and here the BCP makes a sideways reference to Genesis - "in the time of man's innocence" for the procreation of children, the avoidance of sin, and the mutual help and comfort of the one to the other. These causes of Matrimony - which are contained in the inerrent Word of God constitute an immoveable bar to the Church redefining marriage. Holy Matrimony is what it is. No amount of judicial activism will alter this, and if this means that the Church no longer can accept the State's definition of marriage, then so be it. Christians answer to God, not man!
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Like I said, these are preliminary thoughts, and have yet to be systematically worked out. With not quite a third of States allowing "Gay Marriage" I thought it was time to lay out the bare bones of the argument that undergirds the traditional - that is, God given - position on what constitutes Marriage.
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+PDR + Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-5773659818602706102013-07-27T15:08:00.001-04:002013-07-31T15:20:27.799-04:00Evangelicals and the Prayer BookUntil my teenage years, no church was as surely Prayer Book in England as an Evangelical parish. The Alternative Services were looked upon with suspicion (and rightly so) as introducing theology that was not entirely that of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and were generally suspected of either theological liberalism or Romanizing. Evangelicals stuck with the tried and the true, the liturgy of the Reformation, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the second revision of Cranmer's 1552 book. They were often criticize for being 'wooden' and unimaginative in the way they used the BCP, but in a sense that lack of imagination was a blessing. The main reason for the Evangelicals' faithfulness to the old liturgy was that it reflected their theological preoccupations and their emphasis on the doctrines of Grace. Funnily enough, the old High Churchmen's insistence on the BCP was rooted in the same sort of preoccupation, but in their case it was because the BCP embodied their own peculiar emphasis on Baptismal Regeneration and the Spiritual Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
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The positive side of the Evangelical insistence on the old BCP was that their services remained firmly rooted in the Anglican tradition. At that time, before the Alternative Liturgies were embraced by the Evangelicals, the Matins and Evensong were chanted, traditional hymnody was used, and the sermon was very firmly set in its liturgical contect. Visually, Evangelical services remained very much rooted in the mid-Victorian era. Most Evangelical parishes had adopted the typical Ecclesiological Society layout of open bench pews in the nave, pulpit, lectern, and minister's seat as separate pieces of furniture, and the choir stalls in the chancel. The Communion Table would be against the East wall, but it was often a little shorter than usual to allow the Lord's Supper to be celebrated at the North end. The minister would wear surplice, tippet and hood for all services in church.
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The down side was that they often took liberties with the appointed services. Their chief victim in this respect was the Communion Service where everything that is before 'Ye that do truly and earnestly repent...' was omitted. The Lord's Supper became an appendage of Morning or Evening Prayer giving rise to the old joke that the Church of England - or at least its Low Church wing - had three services - Matins, Evensong, and Stay Behind! However, it was the Evangelicals that introduced the long popular 8am Communion service, which the Rev. Daniel Wilson added to the schedule at St Mary's Islington in c.1820. The drive behind this, so far as the early 19th century Evangelicals were coencerned, was to provide an opportunity for Serious Christians to receive Communion away from the noise and fuss of the later service. It also has to be said that it allowed the morning service - which then consisted of Matins, Litany, and the Ante-Communion - to be somewhat shortened in order to make time for preaching.
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However, it should not be thought that the old Evangelicals were in anyway flip about Holy Communion. It was a serious business that required proper preparation in the form of self-examination and prayer. Some early Evangelicals, such as William Grimshaw of Haworth in Yorkshire, were noted for the large attendances at Communion. In the late 1740s Haworth is recorded as having twelve hundred (1200) communicants, about a quarter of the population, and the Lord's Supper was celebrated monthly - three times as often as the usual rural quota of four times a year. This seriousness about the Sacrament marked out the Evangelicals from the vast majority of ordinary Churchgoers.
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Sadly, many Evangelicals have now abandoned the Book of Common Prayer. One lamentable feature of the present alternative liturgy in the Church of England (and also the Church of Ireland) is that allows for a 'Service of the Word.' Whilst this requires the incorporation of certain elements, somewhat in the manner of the 'Articles of Perth' which James VI & I imposed on the Kirk in 1610, it is pretty much a free form service. This, sadly, places the congregation very much at the mercy of the Minister and his theological prejudices. This may be acceptable if the clergyman involved is a model of orthodoxy, but all too often they allow that which interests them to upset the balance not just of their preaching, but of the congregation's worship and prayer. At least in the old days of the BCP one got a balanced diet of praise, prayer and thanksgiving. Whilst the seventeenth century language of the BCP may not be acceptable to many Evangelicals today, I would make a plea that they consider using a version of the 1662 Prayer Book rendered into modern English. This would enable them to remain faithful to the legacy of the English Reformation and also act as a corrective to theological eccentricity.
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There is also another point still to be made. The Book of Common Prayer provided one of the bonds that held Anglicanism together, and with its abandonment one of things that held Evangelicals and Protestant High Churchmen together has disappeared. If we are indeed to witness effectively to the Reformed Catholicism of the Anglican tradition, Evangelicals and High Churchmen need to work together as without its two lungs - one Evangelical, the other Catholic. The tendancy in modern times has been for the one to try and live without the other and the result as been a certain 'shortness of breath,' or, in some cases, a state of suffocation. The society that we live in today needs the faithful witness of a Church that is rooted in the Bible and the Creeds, is Sacramental, and also Reformed. This is the version of Christianity which Anglicanism is uniquely equipped to provide. It is only by being faithful to the Bible and to traditional Christian values that we will be able to roll back the tide of the new Paganism that is overwhelming society. The advantage of the BCP is that it gives Scriptural doctrine a liturgical form, and by praying it each week it enters deep into our souls to strengthen us against 'the world, the flesh, and the devil.'+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-16670528308852769582013-06-24T21:45:00.001-04:002013-06-24T21:45:36.458-04:00The Old EvangelicalismOne of the things that strikes me when I read the sermons and addresses of the old school Evangelical Anglicans is the degree to which they place emphasis on three things - the need for conversion, sanctification, and faithfulness to the (Anglican) Church and her teaching. When one is talking to American Anglicans one often gets the feeling that Evangelicalism is an alien growth so far as they are concerned, and not something that by rights belongs in the Church. However, I have long since learnt that what most Americans mean by 'Evangelicalism' is what those of us born on the other side of the Atlantic would call revivalism.<br />
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The major problem with Revivalism is its doctrinal content - or rather the lack of it. The old Evangelicals started from the doctrinal standpoint of the Thirty-nine Articles, and they preached the need for faith, for conversion of heart and conversion of life. This appeal was made on the basis of the Doctrines of Grace contained in Articles IX to XVIII which set out certain the key doctrines.<br />
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The first of these Articles deals with the doctrine of Original Sin. The story of Adam and Eve should be reasonably familiar to the all Christians, but I think a lot of the time we forget that it explains the basic tragedy of man's situation. Man, due to the rebellion of Adam and Eve, lives in his natural condition in a state of rebellion against God. As you will recall, humanity is tempted by the serpent's appeal that 'ye shall be like God's knowing the difference between good and evil' and the desire for greater knowledge and power, which we can see as a manifestation of the sin of Pride, leads Adam and Eve to rebel. Genesis then goes o to explain how Man, because of this rebellion becomes astranged from God (i.e. is thrown out of the Graden of Eden) and is punished for his sin by toil and death. Humanity's fall also robbed him of any natural or inherent ability to "get right" or justify himself with God.<br />
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However, as Genesis moves swift along, it soon becomes pretty clear than God is not finished with humanity, and much of the rest of the Old Testament deals with the struggle of man to find peace with God, which is the subtext of the story of God's ancient people the Jews. The solution to Man's predicament is, in the fullness of time, resolved by God Himself. God sens His Son, born of a woman, to reconcile man to God. This is a really big deal because at the culmination of the Gospel narrative we have two earth shattering events. Firstly, the God-Man is crucified for the sins of humanity, that all through Him have the potential to be forgiven their sins and be reconciled to God. Secondly, that same God-Man, Jesus Christ, rises from the dead 'the first fruits of those that sleep' so that man does not only receive a means of escape from God's wrath through the crucifixion, but also has the potential for eternal life. So how does man access these gifts of Grace? How does humanity "get right" with God?<br />
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The solution to that problem is found in Article 11. St Paul in Romans and elsewhere speaks of man as being justified (made right with God) by Grace through Faith. Our Lord, when he speaks to those who have been brought to him 'tied and bound by the chain of their sins' often says 'your faith has made you well.' It is quite clear that God offers us the chance of being made right with Him by Faith. Faith is an active consent to the God's promises. We often talk about this 'belief' as being a passive intellectual assent, but it goes deeper than this. In Old English 'belief' involved doing or living something, and so not only does our aceptence of God's promises involve a change of mind, but also a change in our lives. Christianity is not a series of intellectual propositions but a life(style.) This idea of Christianity as a lifestyle as well as a faith system brings us neatly to the next major tenant of the old Evangelical theology.<br />
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If we are justified by Faith, then where do Good Works fit in. Well, if faith justifies, then God Works are the fruit of that faith. They represent a part of that process of sanctification (becoming holy) which is the response of a converted person to the gift of God's grace. Unfortunately, far too many people even today see Good Works not as evidence of a converted heart, but as a means of building up the balance in their spiritual bank account. This is salvation by works, and that was condemned as a heresy about 1600 years ago, and neither God nor His Church have changed their minds in the interim. Instead, Cranmer echos Our Lord's words about discerning between good and bad trees to underline the fact that good works are works of faith by which a Christian man's faith may be discerned, and are, because of our faith, acceptable to God.<br />
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The last plank of the old Evangelical position was the doctrine of Predestination. Now folks really don't like the doctrine of Predestination today because it really cuts away at Man's pride. However, I think this is one way in which we can see that it is indeed a true and godly doctrine. Humanity's pride is what got him into trouble in the first place - remember Adam, Eve, that cunning serpent, and how he got them to partake of forbidden fruit? The basic premise of predestination is that God has called a certain number of people, known to Him alone, to respond to Him in faith and accept Christ as their Lord and Saviour. The major advantage of the doctrine is that it is an antidote to any form of spiritual pride, as they most we can say (along with St Paul) is that 'by the grace of God, I am what I am,' and it also makes it very clear that salvation is a gift of God, not a work of man. Classical Arminians, and Calvinists agree that salvation is the gift of God, but disagree on the ability of man's ability to resist or reject God's call. The overwhelming majority of Anglican Evangelicals have held fully to the reformed position, with a minority embracng the Wesleyan variation on Arminianism.<br />
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Historically, the mainstream of Anglican Evangelicalism has been a moderate form of Reformed teaching as represented by J C Ryle in the 19th century, and Packer and Stott in modern times. The priorities of Evangelicalism very much derive from the theology of the English Reformation, and are part and parcel of the theology of the Book of Common Prayer, which give liturgical form to the Reformed Faith.<br />
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In part 2 of this series of blogposts we are going to look at the Prayer Book and Evangelicalism.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7294180508947136086.post-73509211623146598382013-05-23T15:11:00.002-04:002013-05-23T15:11:52.365-04:00The Deposited Prayer Book of 1928The deposited, or proposed BCP of 1928 was probably the best Prayer Book Anglicanism never officially had. Prayer Book Revision had been initiated in 1906 with the Royal Commission on Ritual which had concluded, somewhat unsurprisingly, that the then liturgical law of the Church of England was 'too narrow for the present generation.' This opened the door to a revision of the BCP more extensive than the new lectionary and rubrical tinkering of 1871. The atmosphere in 1906 was a bit more conducive to this sort of effort than it had been ten years before. Edward VII, when Prince of Wales, had been known to frequent All Saints' Church, Margaret Street, and although one might suggest that it appealed a little more to his taste for the flambouyant than his theological convictions, it was definitely a sign that he was not locked into his mother's Pietism. The fact that moderate Anglo-Catholics and their sympathizers were making it to the Bench of Bishops also helped.
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The initial phase of the revision process was more or less a case of private enterprise. Evangelicals, liberals, and Anglo-Catholics all published proposals for the reform, with the Evangelicals making the fewest - as they basically accepted the 1662 BCP as it stood - and the most radical coming from the liberal element. However, none of the suggestions was terribly radical. A tidying up of the daily offices, the removal of some archaic language, some additional propers for Holydays included in the 1662/1871 Calendar all made their way uncontentiously through the revision process. Even the revision of the Communion Service, which was very largely opposed by the Evangelicals, went through against only muted opposition. Much of this unanimity was achieved at the price of allowing the unaltered 1662 form to remain alongside the 'alternative' Offices drawn up for the 1928 revision. The revised BCP was passed by huge majorities in the Church Assembly, and then went to Parliament.
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The result was a disaster. Although the new Book of Common Prayer had the support of a majority of Churchmen, it received only dutiful support from the two Archbishops. Randall Davidson was probably lukewarm about the extent of the revision. He probably would have referred the sort of 'light makeover' of the 1662 BCP that occurred in Ireland in about 1871-77 and 1926. Lang of York probably would have preferred something more catholic in outlook - such as the 1549 BCP which he had authorized for use in Lord Halifax's private chapel. Both spoke in favour, and the neccessary Act of Parliament passed the Lord's. The Commons was a different matter, however, and under the able leadership of Joynson-Hicks, who saw the provisions for reservation and Communion from the Reserved Sacrament as undermining the Protestant Character of the Church of England, the Evangelicals and Liberals in the House of Commons - both those of the Anglican tradition, and non-Conformist, managed to vote down the Act authorizing the replacement of the 1662 BCP with the 1927 revision.
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The Church Assembly did some fancy footwork over the einter of 1927/8 to revise the Proposed Book, but to no avail. Joynson-Hicks' posse managed to get the book voted down by a wider margin in the Commons. The reaction from the Church wa snot far short of panic. Herbert Hensley Henson, the liberal Bishop of Durham flipped his lid and went from being the most establishment of Bishops to being the most outspoken proponant of Disestablishment. Most other Bishops did a good deal of handwringing, and a stop gap solution was found in the House of Bishops' motion that the 1928 Deposited Book would be taken as representing the maximum amount of deviation from the 1662 BCP that would be tolerated by them. In more Catholic dioceses, such as London and Lincoln, the 1928 Proposed BCP became widely used, and became the de facto standard in most Central and High Church parishes.
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On the whole, it is a great pity that the 1928 Revision was voted down in England. The Communion Service is particularly strong, not only restoring the Canon, but the Benedictus, Pax and Agnus Dei. The fuller form of the Prayer for the Church was also a welcome change, as was the reposition of the Prayer of Humble Access between the Comfortable Word and the Sursum Corda. The addition of Compline to the daily round of the Office; the provision of Collects, Epistles and Gospels for Lenten ferias and minor holydays were also welcome enrichments. When liturgical reform at last got underway in England in the late 1950s, it was a slightly modified version of the 1928 Proposed BCP that prevailed in the form of <i>Alternative Services Series One</i> some parts of which are still authorized today. The sad part about the whole 1928 fiasco is that it enshrined 'liturgical anarchy' as being normal in the Church of England, rather than as being a temporary crisis that ended in BCP revision. As a result one can attend adjacent C of E parishes today, and their is little resemblance between them. One might have a dignified catholic rendering of the current Eucharistic rite with the sacred ministers in the ancient vestments; the next a 'song sandwich' led by a praise band, and a minister in chinos, shirt and tie! On the whole in America we have survived much better partly because of our narrow identity as Anglicans, which comes from being a minority tradition, but also because the process of revision has not been hampered by the restraints of Establishment. One thing we do need to be careful about is that we remain loyal to our Anglican traditions, and do not allow the Missals - that familiar Tridentine-BCP hybrid - to become the norm for the Eucharist. Not only is it not a particularly elegant beast, but its theology is not always full consonant with the Ancient Fathers and Councils due to its way too vigorous assertion of Eucharist sacrifice and the cultus of the saints.+ Peterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15593635840263637835noreply@blogger.com1