Confessing Evangelical

Today's headlines ("Bin Laden to US voters: Your fate is in your hands" - Daily Telegraph) irresistibly called to mind one of the great counter-productive election slogans, from the February 1974 UK General Election.

The Conservative Government was beset by industrial problems, in particular a prolonged strike by the miners. The Prime Minister, Ted Heath, responded by calling an election with the theme, "Who runs the country?"

Inevitably, when presented with this question, the response of the electorate was to say, "Um, actually, now you put it like that...not you", and Ted was out on his ear. Let's hope Osama's intervention is just as counter-productive this time round.

In the face of this, perhaps John Kerry this weekend needs to take inspiration from another 1974 British election slogan, my favourite of all time by some considerable margin.

The February 1974 election led to a hung parliament, resulting in a second election that October to resolve the resulting stalemate. The Liberal Party, having been left holding the balance of power in February, sensed that they could be in a position to make an historic breakthrough that would reverse over 50 years of marginalisation and decline for this once-great party.

So, come October, they ran on the following magnificent slogan, as vivid as it was unsuccessful: "One more heave!"

Well, it certainly beats "Hope is on the way"...

Update: Listening to the radio this morning, I realise I misquoted John Kerry's election slogan in that last sentence. Should have read, "Help is on the way". My goodness, that's even worse.

For some time now I've been interested in the parallels between pre-Reformation Lollardy and contemporary evangelicalism. As an introduction for a post I'm preparing on this subject - and as some (hopefully enjoyable) weekend reading for y'all - I thought it would be useful to provide a brief(-ish) overview of Lollard teachings.

Wyclif and the early Lollards

The Lollards had their origins in the teachings of John Wyclif (1324-84) who (like all the best people) was a Yorkshireman educated at Oxford University. Dickens describes the essence of Wyclif's message as follows:

He accepted the Bible as the one sure basis of belief and demanded that it should freely be placed in lay hands ... [He] restricted the true Church to those persons whom God had predestined to salvation. He rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation as a historical novelty and as philosophically unsound, urging that the body and blood of Christ were present in the sacrament not corporally but sacramentaliter, spiritualiter et virtualiter. In some passages he seems even to approach receptionism ...

Upon the Papal Supremacy Wycliffe had long cast doubts; he likewise advocated clerical marriage, denounced monasticism and placed fanatical emphasis upon the need to disendow a rich and mundane clergy ...

Perhaps the only major doctrine of the sixteenth-century Reformers which Wycliffe cannot be said to have anticipated is justification by faith alone. (pp.41f.)

The term "Lollard" was first used to describe Wycliffe's followers in 1382. By 1395, a group of Lollard partisans had emerged in the House of Commons, which in that year presented the "Twelve Conclusions", "the first manifesto of what had now become far more than an academic heresy." (p.43). Dickens describes the content of the Twelve Conclusions as follows:

It condemns the subordination of the English Church to Rome, together with transubstantiation, clerical celibacy ... prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, images and the excessive preoccupation of the Church with the arts and crafts. In addition it denounces the work of prelates as temporal rulers and judges, declares all forms of warfare contrary to the teaching of the New Testament and denies that confession to a priest is necessary for salvation.

The Twelve Conclusions are a list of reform-demands and hence fail to stress the two chief positive teachings now axiomatic to Lollard partisans - that the clergy should emphasise preaching rather than the sacraments and that the vernacular Bible should be freely placed in the hands of the laity, learned and unlearned alike. (p.44)

The heart of Lollardy

Dickens characterises the basic character - and appeal - of Lollardy as follows:

It zealously sought to recover from the Scriptures an authentic sense of the person and spirit of Jesus. It argued with force that the materialism, the pride, the elaborate ritual and coercive jurisdiction of the Church found no justification in the lives of Christ and his disciples as recorded in the New Testament. It made a special appeal to the underdogs of feudal and ecclesiastical society by permitting them a far more active role in the management of their religious lives. In short, it had many of the lively features which characterised the English sects of the Stuart period. (p.45)

Patrick Collinson confirms this picture of "what the religious experience of being a Lollard may have been really about":

Not only or principally the negative and intrinsically barren denial of orthodox Catholic belief and structures ... but a newly discovered New Testament "feeling" of what it was to be a Christian, even the experience of being born again ... It seems unlikely that [Lollardy] consisted only of sterile denials of the efficacy of baptism, or of the eucharist, or of going on pilgrimage. More likely it meant a reappropriation of the religious world of the New Testament. (Collinson, p.220, emphasis added)

The Lollards were a notably proletarian movement, as evidenced by diocesan records of those tried as Lollardy heretics:

All save a few belonged to the common people - weavers, wheelwrights, smiths, carpenters, shoemakers, tailors and other tradesmen ... A small number of secular [i.e. non-monastic] priests, an odd friar and a schoolmaster also appear. (Dickens, pp.51f.)

Lollardy and the English Reformation

Dickens describes the numerous contacts between Lollard groups and early Lutherans, especially through book agents supplying Lutheran books and (following its publication in 1526) Tyndale's translation of the New Testament. Dickens reports one encounter between the Essex Lollard, John Tyball of the magnificently-named village Steeple Bumpstead, and Robert Barnes (Augustinian friar and, later, Lutheran martyr), who upon seeing the Lollards' battered old manuscript-Bible promptly sold them a realistically-priced copy of Tyndale's version (pp.56f.).

Lollard groups and ideas survived for several decades into the Reformation era and beyond:

The former Lollard areas of Buckinghamshire tended to resist both Anglicanism and Calvinism during the days of Elizabeth; instead they proceeded to evolve a congregational dissent bearing the suggestion of local continuity from the medieval past. In various parts of East Anglia and South-Eastern England, even in the North at Halifax, a strongly Puritan or dissenting tradiition seems to show continuity of growth from local mid-Tudor radicalism based mainly on Lollardy ...

The Lollards demonstrably provided reception-areas for Lutheranism. They preserved, though often in crude and mutilated forms, the image of a personal, scriptural, non-sacramental, non-hierachical and lay-dominated religion. For good or ill, those emphases were prophetic. (Dickens, pp.59f.)

Both opponents and supporters of the Reformation at the time were aware of the links between Lollardy and Protestantism. Bishop Tunstall referred to "the old and accursed Wycliffite heresy, and along with it the Lutheran heresy, foster-daughter of Wycliffe's" (Dickens, p.61). And Protestant propagandists - not least Foxe - realised "the usefulness of a religious pedigree, especially one of an all-English character" (p.62), and were thus keen to paint the Lollards as proto-Protestants. It was, as Collinson describes it:

the knockdown answer to the question, "Where was this church and religion forty years ago, before Luther's time?" If the Lollards had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them. (Collinson, p.225)

From Lollardy to Protestantism

But despite the sociological, geographical and doctrinal continuities between Lollardy and Protestantism, and despite the direct links between late Lollards and early Protestants, Protestantism still had a decidedly different character from Lollardy. In particular, Collinson identifies the "new and dynamic conviction" that Protestants represented "the true Church", and the existence for the first time of "a clear and confessional divide between the two different versions of the Christian religion" (p.230):

With the adoption of "Protestant", the religious map of England was redrawn for ever. What the source of this conviction is a matter for speculation. But a likely candidate is the distinctively Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, mediated especially through the print of Tyndale's New Testament and its critical and polemical apparatus, the principal vehicle by which Lutheranism entered England. For it was the sharp sword of Luther's "by faith alone" which made a more definitive schism in western Christendom than any of the would-be reformers or heretics who had preceded him, the Englishman John Wyclif and his Lollard disciples not excepted. (Collinson, pp.230f.)

So the key point of difference between Lollardy and Protestantism was justification by faith alone which, as we have already seen, is described by Dickens as "the only major doctrine of the sixteenth-century Reformers which Wycliffe cannot be said to have anticipated. As Collinson says earlier in his essay:

Historians of the English Reformation are agreed that what was exotic, that is to say Lutheran, and what distinguished the new Protestantism from the old Lollardy, was justification by faith. And from Lutheran solifidianism followed, logically, a reinvigorated Augustinian doctrine of predestination. This was the shibboleth which divided "orthodox" Protestants from the Freewillers who in their sternly moralistic, antidogmatic Pelagianism, merely perpetuated the no-nonsense old-time religion of the Lollards... (Collinson, p.228)

There seems to be some dispute still over how strong the true continuities between Lollardy and later Protestantism - particularly English Non-Comformity - may have been, though there do seem to be some strong geographical and sociological affinities between the Lollards and later Dissenters.

However, whatever the causal links may be, it is still intriguing to observe the parallels between Lollardy and some tendencies in contemporary evangelicalism, particularly in the UK. I will look at this in my next post on this subject.

Sources

Patrick Collinson, "Night schools, conventicles and churches", from The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall & Alec Ryrie (pub. CUP 2002)

AG Dickens, "The Abortive Reformation", from The English Reformation (pub. Fontana)

Whatever you may think of him as a political commentator - I love 'im, but then I'm a trainee warmongering neocon - Mark Steyn is without doubt a superb cinema reviewer, fulfilling the critical (geddit?!?) functions of being readable, illuminating and above all reliable. In this week's Spectator, as well as writing what could turn out to be one of his last-ever political columns - "If Bush goes, I go" - Steyn reviews Saved!, which is released (or perhaps that should be, "escapes") in the UK today.

He didn't like it.

Saved! is the new comedy based in a Christian (chortle!) high-school. Steyn observes that it sank without trace in the US, and he doesn't expect it to do much better in Britain. It sounds to be yet another of those films, plays, books, whatever, that gets labelled as "daring" and "challenging" while not actually daring to challenge any of its target audience's actual preconceptions:

USA Today called it ‘irreverent’ and ‘subversive’. Au contraire, if you wanted to be irreverent and subversive, you’d have set it at American Eagles Wahhabi Madrassah and had great sport with the pseudo-hip imam. But, though deriding Christians is obvious and risk-free, it still depends for its effectiveness on a passing acquaintance with the subject-matter, and there’s little evidence of that from Brian Dannelly (writer-director) and Michael Urban (co-writer) ... It’s hard to be genuinely funny when you’re so determined to patronise your own characters.

After briefly summing up the plot (so lame it's scarcely worth warning you about the "spoilers" - girl meets boy, boy thinks he's gay, girl sleeps with boy to try to "de-gay" him, girl falls pregnant, boy meets boy, and in the end everyone becomes more tolerant of single mothers and gay people, except for those evil Christians who are unmasked as judgmental hypocrites, yada yada yada), Steyn continues:

It may well be the case that some religious groups are judgmental and convinced they’re better than everyone. But it’s hard to expose that when you’re even more judgmental and certain that you’re better than the people you’re sneering at for thinking they’re better. A film mocking ostentatious religiosity would be more persuasive if it weren’t so lumberingly preachy itself.

This applies in particular to the "concluding homily" about how "no one fits in a 100 per cent... Why would God make us all so different if He wanted us to be the same?"

As Steyn points out:

Well, that’s not quite what the Judaeo-Christian God is saying. ‘What is man that thou art mindful of him?’ wonders the Psalmist. ‘For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels...’ God asks us to rise above our nature and our appetites: that’s the difference between us and the beasts of the field; that’s what puts us a little lower than the angels. But, as Hollywood sees it, whatever’s your bag, God’s cool with it and these uptight Christians need to get with the beat.

After 90 minutes of this film’s dozy condescension, you can only marvel at Hollywood’s near-total ignorance of a large chunk of its local audience. No wonder they thought The Passion would flop.

Finally, just to return for a moment to Steyn's threat to quit political writing if Bush loses (any chance we could get Michael Moore to make a reciprocal promise for if Kerry loses?), he sounds like he means it, though he also clearly doesn't expect it to happen:

Were America to elect John Kerry president, it would be seen around the world as a repudiation not just of Bush and of Iraq but of the broader war. It would be a declaration by the people of American unexceptionalism - that they are a slightly butcher Belgium; they would be signing on to the wisdom of conventional transnationalism.

Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work - Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert ‘Mister Robert’ Fisk, etc., - and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate.

My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else - organising coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.

Voters of America: you now know what is at stake...

My post from earlier this week on the "three phases of civilization" has tidied itself up, combed its hair and generally made itself look respectable, and can now be found on Old Solar under the title "Let's Do Lunch": A Hitch-Hiker's Guide to Contemporary Religion.

Do be sure to visit Old Solar regularly - there's some great stuff appearing on there. Some recent highlights include Craig Donofrio's wonderful piece, "A Bunch of Do Do", as well as Rick Ritchie's comments on recent developments in Anglicanism, "The Windsor Report Feels Your Pain".

I particularly enjoyed this observation from Rick Ritchie's article, in which he captures the tone of the Windsor Report perfectly:

Imagine if the letter to the church at Thyatira was written by the same people who wrote the Windsor Report. Instead of "I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess," we would read "Many in your congregation are bewildered by the nature of sexuality in our broken world. We have heard the emotions of alienation of both Jezebel and those who feel alienated by those who tolerate her. We call for a healing process where all can move on a journey together of discovering what communion means."

As Rick points out:

Perhaps this sounds more Christian that the Revelation to some. But there is a danger in trying to be more Christian than Christ.

As for Craig Donofrio's piece, this has already been linked to by Bunnie, but it's still worth highlighting here, as it is simply essential reading. Donofrio describes listening to Christian radio on a snow-bound Sunday morning, and describes it as "a bunch of do do":

As I listened to preacher after preacher including the "pope of the Protestants" Billy Graham, all I heard was how the Christian needs to do this or that or do some other thing in order to be pleasing to God. I heard about how I had to be more giving of myself to others, how I needed to have a love for justice, and how I just need to appropriate God’s forgiveness with my decisions and or public professions.

He contrasts this the Gospel message of the cross of Jesus Christ, in which we hear proclaimed to us "not do do, but done done". His conclusion refers to Christian radio, but could pretty well refer to sermons, books, magazine articles, or even blogs for that matter:

Next time you listen to Christian radio, ask yourself, is this a bunch of do do or is this done in Christ?

If it is do do, turn it off for nothing is more harmful to the soul than this sort of, well, as Martin Luther would gently put it, well… lets keep this PG-13, shall we?

The BBC reports that Jesus Christ has been named the top black icon by New Nation, "Britain's No.1 Black Newspaper".

Without wanting to sound flippant, I always thought He was Jewish, myself. And the description of Him as having been black does seem to be based on some slightly strange theories (lost Nigerian tribes, for example). But then, these suggestions are probably rather less strange than the prevailing assumption in Western iconography that our Lord was a blue-eyed white European. (To judge from our shelves at home, this remains the firm consensus among illustrators of children's Bible stories).

And I did like New Nation's additional evidence to support the claim that Jesus was black: "He called everybody 'brother', He liked Gospel, and He couldn't get a fair trial."

Read the full article here. While it is a light-hearted article (and horribly formatted, presumably to fit a pop-up box), it does provide striking evidence of how Christian influences remain stronger within black communities in the UK than in the majority white population, mainly thanks to Pentecostalism.

However, in all this, as in any other question about "the historical Jesus", it should be borne in mind that, as the Pontificator points out today, "Jesus is not a dead person hidden in the past. He is the living Lord of the Church."

Read the BBC report, and their obituary, and an assessment of Peel's huge impact on music.

Very sad. I've always been a big fan of John Peel, though I must admit that his Radio 1 show has tended to come into what is sometimes called the "Panorama" category - i.e., I never actually listened to it, but it was nice to know it was there.

In memory of the great DJ, there will now follow 25 minutes of impenetrable Polish industrial techno music...

(Note for US readers: "Panorama" is the BBC TV's long-running current affairs strand, generally perceived as a worthy-but-dull programme which the typical British viewer never actually watches, but whose existence they find a reassuring guarantee of the BBC's public broadcasting ethos).

The history of every major civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.

For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'"

- from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams' three phases of civilization strike me as a very useful means of understanding the current religious situation in the West - certainly more useful than many of the learned books and articles written in the past few years about The Church In The Postmodern Age.

There was a time when Western religion was firmly in its "How?" phase - whether that's, "How can we persuade God - or the gods - to give us an abundant harvest?", or "How shall I find a gracious God?".

With the coming of the Endarkenment, between the late 17th century and the tail-end of the 20th century, we entered the "Why?" phase, as the Christian faith came under sustained attack (not least from its own supposed adherents) and religious belief ceased to be something "unquestioned". (As Peter Berger has pointed out, we are all now "heretics", since none of us can shake off the memory of religious faith as something which - on a human level, at least - we have chosen, rather than as an unquestioned "given").

And what better way to characterise the religious supermarket of today than as the "Where shall we have lunch?" phase of religious development (you'll notice I don't say, "religious progress").

Developing this line of thought further - or stretching it to breaking point; whichever you prefer - ISTM that a civilization in the religious "How?" phase is probably the most fertile ground for the Gospel, not least because it is asking the right questions: "How can we worship God?", "How can we find a gracious God?", "How can we escape sin and death?". The Law's job is to bring these questions to the forefront of our minds, and the Gospel then answers them with a word (or rather, a Word): Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

In the "Why?" phase, things can get trickier for the Gospel, because people are assaulting the foundations on which its proclamation rests. In the past three centuries, the church has had major problems with "friendly fire", as its theologians and pastors forsake their true vocation and join in with - or even launch - the attacks on the biblical and apostolic faith of the church. But at least people in the "Why?" phase can be reasoned with, and persuaded to reconsider their position in the light of biblical teaching.

However, people in the "Where shall we have lunch?" phase can be very difficult to reach, since they will listen and nod politely as we proclaim the Gospel, before saying, "Well, that may work for you, which is great, but it just doesn't work for me" and turning away to see what else is on the menu. Or worse, they will appear to be reached, they will profess belief and join the church, but in reality they have just added Jesus to their internal pantheon of "gods". And the church is tempted to pursue a "pragmatic" approach in which what is true is set aside in favour of what "works" for people "where they're at".

Anyway, enough of this - I'm off out for lunch.

(Note: alert Hitchhiker's fans will have noticed a slight edit in the quote that opens this post. The original reads, "the history of every major Galactic Civilization". The reason for this omission is simple: I didn't want SF-haters to switch off after the sixth word...)

Mark Shea summarises the essence of Roman Catholic social teaching:

If you want the very short primer on what constitute the core of Catholic social teaching, it's simple: If it's good for the family (i.e. Mother and Father in lifelong monogamous union, committed to love of one another and children) it's good. If it harms that, it's evil...

Family, family, family. Not the individual. Not the state. Not the corporation. Family. That's the key. And that, of course, is because the Trinity is at the core of the Church's teaching.

His Trinitarian emphasis is a healthy reminder that a lot (though by no means all) of "Catholic social teaching" is also catholic social teaching, from which other Christians with a heartily Trinitarian faith, including Lutherans, can learn a great deal.

I'd question Shea's suggestion that American "rugged individualism" can be blamed solely on Calvinism, rather than on the type of personality that is, of necessity, going to come to the fore during the founding and building of a society like the US.

Equally, as someone living in the EU it is far from obvious that the principles of "Catholic social teaching" are wholly beneficial in practice: the corporatism and high-regulation ethos of the EU owe a great deal to the influence of Catholic social teaching.

To give just one example: in France, it is famously difficult to make employees redundant, thanks to the requirements for consultation with trades councils, hefty redundancy payments etc. Of course, the flip side of making it difficult to fire people is that companies are therefore extremely reluctant to hire people in the first place. From a family-centric perspective, that is great for those families whose earnings are protected - so it gets "two thumbs up" from proponents of Catholic social teaching - but not so great for those families who are left struggling in a situation of chronic unemployment.

A flexible labour market may seem (and often be) harsh and cruel to those who find their jobs have been "flexed" out of existence, but there is at least a genuine case for arguing that, by encouraging job creation and economic dynamism, overall it ends up being more beneficial for families than the corporatist approach.

Then there's also the question of whether the proposition "x must be done" (where x is, say, treating employees with fairness and respect) automatically translates into the proposition, "the state must do x, or ensure that it is done". We no longer expect the state to enforce Christian teachings on adultery, for example, so why is it necessarily the role of the state to enforce Christian teachings on fair treatment of employees?

But for all that, Shea is undoubtedly correct in praising the Catholic vision (and, I would say, catholic vision) which:

...sees the Person (who is always in relationship) made (along with the Family) in the image of the Trinity of Love ... [and which] sees us not as Darwinian Individuals in atomized isolation, but as members of a family made in the image of God who is himself a sort of Holy Family.

We sang a wonderful pre-communion hymn at church yesterday morning, "At the Lamb's High Feast We Sing" (#126 in Lutheran Worship). I'm posting vv1-4, which are the verses we sang yesterday (vv5-8 are more specific to Easter, though of course Easter hymns are really suitable for any Sunday).

At the end of the second verse, my wife and I glanced at each other in amazement and delight at what we'd just had the privilege to sing:

At the Lamb’s high feast we sing
Praise to our victorious king,
Who has washed us in the tide
Flowing from his pierced side.
Alleluia!

Praise we him, whose love divine
Gives his sacred blood for wine,
Gives his body for the feast,
Christ the victim, Christ the priest.
Alleluia!

Where the paschal blood is poured,
Death’s dread angel sheathes the sword;
Israel’s hosts triumphant go
Through the wave that drowns the foe.
Alleluia!

Praise we Christ, whose blood was shed,
Paschal victim, paschal bread;
With sincerity and love
Eat we manna from above.
Alleluia!

We really must be turning into proper Lutherans, to be enjoying something quite as "full on" as this :-)

Cracking tune too: Sonne Der Gerechtigkeit.

Another visual delight from the Pontificator, this time some gorgeous modern stained glass. Worth reading the George Herbert poem, "Away despair!", which accompanies it.

For those of you who follow Anglican news, you may or may not be aware that David Virtue's Virtuosity site has a site feed so that you can subscribe to it using Bloglines (or another news-reader). Actually, it's pretty clear that people aren't aware of this, since I'm the only subscriber to this feed on Bloglines so far.

That may be because of Virtuosity's recent change in home-page address (following a trade mark dispute), or it may be because the URL is a little counter-intuitive: http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/backend.php.

CS Lewis' "excuse" (to use his word) for writing Reflections on the Psalms despite having no theological qualifications, seems to hold equally well as a justification for "theo-blogging". Lewis writes in the introduction to his book:

It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. When you took the problem to the master, as we all remember, he was very likely to explain what you understood already, to add a great deal of information which you didn't want, and say nothing at all about the thing that was puzzling you. ...

The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago that he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in such a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren't.

And thus Lewis' basis for writing his book (and one suspects he also has all his other theological writings in mind here) forms a pretty good "mission statement" for us laypersons who presume (in flagrant disregard for Psalm 131:1 and James 3:1) to blog on theological issues:

In this book, then, I write as one amateur to another, talking about difficulties I have met, or lights I have gained ... with the hope that this might interest, and sometimes even help, other inexpert readers. I am "comparing notes", not presuming to instruct.

Certainly in my case, when I was exploring Lutheranism in the past 12-18 months, I probably gained the most help in dealing with my questions from (i) blogs (especially the Fearsome Pirate) (ii) Luther Quest and (iii) "The Spirituality of the Cross" by Gene Veith, who could justifiably be called "the CS Lewis of confessional Lutheranism", being an English professor who is also an accomplished lay theologian and apologist.

"Archaeologists in Germany say they may have found a lavatory where Martin Luther launched the Reformation of the Christian church in the 16th Century."

Read it all.

Don't miss the discussion on "what the great reformer may have used in place of toilet paper" ("We still don't know what was used for wiping in those days", reports "theologian and Luther expert" Dr Martin Treu).

A dangerous note of journalistic caution creeps in towards the end:

...while it is probable that the inspiration that led to Luther's reforms occurred on this toilet, it is impossible to prove it beyond doubt...

Shh! You're undermining the whole basis for this "news story"!

A postscript to my series on worship (1; 2; 3; and, just posted below, 4), in case anyone's wondering why I feel so strongly on this issue.

A couple of weekends ago, my wife went with a couple of friends to a "women's convention" at the Sydney-style, conservative evangelical church I've mentioned before. The title of the convention was, "Women With Attitude" (referring to Philippians 2:5), and one of the seminars was on "Our attitude at church".

The message that was drummed into the women attending this seminar was, "you don't go to church to receive; you go to give". Emily's friends attended separate versions of the same seminar, and each found this message distressing since, for very different reasons, neither of them feel able to "give" much more at the moment, and both of them find they actually need a place in which they are able and permitted to do a bit of receiving for a change. (One of them attends this church, the other attends another church in the same town).

That was my own experience at this church last year: the horizontal aspects (their version of "the Peace" was, "Turn to the person on your left and talk to them for two minutes!") might be great if you're feeling socially confident and on top of things, but if - like I was at that time - you're run ragged by work and emotionally at a low ebb, and just not up to perky two-minute conversations with a nice person you've never met before and probably never will again, it can be a horribly dispiriting and exhausting experience.

Church should be one place where we are allowed to be weak, vulnerable, needy. A place where we can come first and foremost to receive. If, having done so, we are then in a position to give something back to the life of that church and to those around us, then that's great. But to tell people that they are being selfish by expecting to "receive" rather than "give" when they come to church is a terrible message that denies the Gospel to which this church is otherwise admirably faithful.

In my previous posts, I've contrasted the "Sydney Anglican" approach to worship with the Lutheran concept of worship as Gottesdienst, God's service to us in Word and Sacrament.

The Sydney Anglicans (and other, non-Sydney conservative evangelical Anglicans such as Vaughan Roberts, whose book True Worship is an excellent presentation of this approach to worship) are right to emphasise our need to serve God during the whole week, and to emphasise Romans 12:1 in this regard. However, the problem then becomes how we fit what we do at church within this framework. At times it seems as if church is the only place at which we're not engaged in worship!

And as we've seen in my previous post, even some Anglican Evangelicals have difficulty with this ultra-low church, liturgy-lite approach to worship. But what the Sydneyites and Dean Zahl's (sadly dwindling) band of liturgical evangelicals have in common is a tendency still to conceive worship as sacrificium, as being about what we do (though, to be fair, both would very strongly emphasise that we worship God as a response to His grace, not as a good work to earn salvation). The difference is that Vaughan Roberts and the Sydney(-style) Anglicans locate this sacrificium in our daily lives of service before God, whereas Dean Zahl locates it in the upward-looking verticality of our formal-liturgical worship.

But when we see worship as being first and foremost beneficium, as being about what we receive from God, then this allows us to reconcile the verticality of the historical patterns of Christian worship (busily being ditched by the disciples of Sydney) with the horizontality of our service of God in daily life. We can then see how we go to church primarily to receive, and above all to receive the forgiveness of sins as proclaimed and distributed to us in Word and Sacrament.

Worship is vertical, but it is primarily a downward vertical from God to us. As Norman Nagel puts it, "The rhythm of our worship is from Him to us, and then from us back to Him" (see earlier post; emphasis added). Finally, at the end of each service "[God's] blessing moves us out into our calling, where His gifts have their fruition."

This dynamic - of beneficium in worship followed by sacrificium in our vocations - is what is in view in that favourite verse of the Sydney-style worshippers, Romans 12:1:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Yes, the whole of our lives is to be a living sacrifice, and this constant presentation of ourselves to Him is our "spiritual worship". But this is all done in the light of the mercies of God, the Gospel message which Paul has set out in the first eleven chapters of Romans.

Furthermore, it is not the Gospel "in the abstract" with which we have to do, but the Gospel as encountered in the public ministry of the church: as proclaimed to us in the preaching of the Word (Romans 10:14-16) and applied to us in the Sacraments (Romans 6:1-4).

That's the pattern of Romans: first we receive (beneficium) in worship, then we serve (sacrificium) in our vocations. This pattern puts the public ministry of the church at the heart of our worship, where it belongs, but it also maintains the right emphasis on the need for us to be serving God throughout the week.

As a pro-liturgy Anglican evangelical, Paul Zahl (see previous post) is in excellent company. JC Ryle, "the Evangelical Bishop" (this being quite a novelty in 1880!), was a great admirer of the Book of Common Prayer, and wrote as follows on "the vexed question, whether public prayers in the congregation should be liturgical and pre-composed, or extemporaneous":

My own mind has long been made up. If all ministers prayed extempore always, as some ministers pray sometimes, I should be against a liturgy. But considering what human nature is, I decidedly think it better both for minister and people, in the regular, habitual, and stated assemblies of the Church to have a liturgy.

With all its imperfections I am very thankful for the Book of Common Prayer. It may have defects, because it was not compiled by inspiration. But for all that, it is an admirable and matchless manual of public devotion. I would not impose the use of it on a brother's conscience for a thousand worlds. But I claim the right to use it myself unmolested.

(From a footnote in the essay "Worship", in Knots Untied by JC Ryle).

Having looked at the "Sydney Anglican" approach to worship and contrasted that with the Lutheran perspective of worship as Gottesdienst, as being primarily God's gift to us (beneficium) rather than our service to Him (sacrificium), it's worth noting that there are Anglican evangelicals who have difficulty with the ultra-low church, liturgy-lite approach associated with the Diocese of Sydney.

Paul Zahl, the new Dean of the Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry (one of the last-remaining orthodox seminaries in ECUSA) has written a great article on "Bible-Based Verticality" (hat-tip to Daniel), in which he puts forward an evangelical defence of "formal-liturgical worship". He writes:

We are concerned here with formal and liturgical worship. We are thereby also concerned with vertical worship. Vertical worship looks up first, before it looks out. It is transcendent before it is horizontal. It is faced north before it looks around. This means that it is not pastor- or preacher-centered. It is, or ought to be, Word-centered. It is not "man/woman"-centered, nor is it concerned, in the initial situation, with community. It does, almost always, engender family feeling. The worship of which I speak is, to use the expressive German, senkrecht nach oben: straight up and down, looking right up.

The first principles then, of formal-liturgical worship, are its setness, its givenness, and its direction. It is not informal, it is not non-liturgical, it is not horizontal. Nor, however, is it cold. Nor is it confining. Nor is it excluding, or non-user-friendly.

Indeed, as Dean Zahl argues, the only way to prevent liturgical worship from lapsing into cold formality is to ally it to what he describes as "broadly evangelical" (in the sense of Christ- and cross-centred) preaching:

I wish to affirm that formal-liturgical worship relies on a broadly evangelical pulpit; a dignified service focused on the object of worship (i.e., God and Christ Jesus) rather than on the subject of worship (i.e., the pastor/minister); a warm and sincere interest in the lives and souls of the worshippers; and a conscientious simplicity that subordinates unfailingly the symbols of Christianity to the realities they symbolize.

Like the State of North Carolina, our motto as formal-liturgical Christians has got to be, and remain, "Not To Seem, But To Be."

He also has some acerbic comments to make on the "Canterbury Trail" of former non-denominational evangelicals joining the Episcopal Church for its liturgical worship:

Protestant Anglicanism, with its yoking of Sacrament and Word, with its priority of Word over Sacrament, will not satisfy your itch, if it is an end to pastor- or sermon-centeredness you want. Better pass "Go" and sprint straight to Rome, or, idiosyncratically, to Constantinople.

Much the same thing could be said about the smaller numbers who join the "Wittenberg Trail" for similar reasons.

I think the main difference between Dean Zahl's "Bible-based verticality" and the Lutheran perspective is that Zahl's "vertical" is going in the wrong direction: upwards from us, rather than downwards from God ("Vertical worship looks up first, before it looks out"). This is in many ways a small difference, but still quite a crucial one, since it means worship is still seen as sacrificium rather than beneficium.

My next post will therefore conclude this brief series on worship by looking at how the Lutheran concept of worship as beneficium is able to reconcile the best aspects of both Dean Zahl's "Bible-based verticality", and Sydney's emphasis on how we are to live the whole of our lives in worshipful service before God.

A visual treat from the Pontificator, who has posted a beautiful icon of St Julian of Norwich on his site today.

From the Anglican Stand Firm blog, reporting on the sorry saga of (il)liberal ECUSA bishops using the ownership of church property to bully orthodox congregations: is this the best blog headline ever?

A much-missed former denizen of the Lutheran Blogosphere(TM) has emailed me about to warn about the phenomenon of ex-blogs having their names co-opted after the original owner deletes them.

For some reason, people who quit blogging often seem to find it necessary to deprive the rest of us of their valued archives (mentioning no names, Josh). If you delete your blog altogether, though, that does leave the name available for anyone else to use.

In some cases, the new use can be highly appropriate, even inspired (as in the case of the hijacking of the Fearsome Pirate's former vessel). The examples I've come across in the Lutheran Blogosphere appear fairly harmless so far, but it's only a matter of time before something highly inappropriate is installed under a familiar Lutheran blog address (perhaps even something as appalling as this).

So if you must delete your blog (rather than simply leaving it dormant) then it is probably a good idea to leave a "blank blog" up under the same name, at least for a few months.

Here endeth the public service announcement.

David Brazeal, editor of Cross+Wise, is circulating the following acrostic poem, inspired by similar "Holy Alphabet" rhymes which are apparently doing the rounds, but intended to be more Christ-centred, with God "driving the verbs" rather than us. It's pretty good:

All have sinned and fallen,
But though we're corrupt,
Christ came down from heaven--
Died to raise us up.

Eucharistic body,
Faith-sustaining blood,
Gives us perfect mercy,
Helps us through life's flood.

Innocent, He suffered.
Just because of me.
King became a servant,
Lifeless on the tree.

Mercy everlasting,
Never-ending love
Offered to us freely--
Poured out from above.

Quenching water drowns us,
Raises us to life;
Saves us as He promised,
Tends to us in strife.

Unto life eternal,
Vict'ry He does win--
With the Father always
X-ing out our sin.

Yahweh's good beginning, Yahweh's perfect end.
Zion's Lamb and sinner's interceding Friend.

Update: Bunnie has posted the whole of David Brazeal's email, including Brazeal's comments on the original verse to which his is a response.

OK, so here's some of the better stuff from the Moore College Christian Worship course book (see previous post), courtesy of one Martin Luther. The chapter on "Continental Reformation Liturgies" refers to Luther's German Mass of 1526, and the Latin Formula Missae which preceded it in 1523, and describes how:

Luther made a distinction between worship as sacrificium - a sacrifice offered to God - and worship as beneficium - a gracious gift of God to His people.

It continues with a quotation from Bard Thompson's Liturgies of the Western Church:

The error of sacrificium was manifold. Not the least of its evils was the implication that God was an angry God who demanded to be appeased. Moreover, as an act of propritiation, it presented itself as one of the chief good works, by which righteousness could be got. Nor did it require the presence of communicants to be effective. This led to the private Mass and overcame the very act of Communion. Finally, the sacrifice of the Mass involved a real denial of Christ's one all-sufficient sacrifice on Calvary.

For all of these reasons, Luther deemed the Medieval conception of sacrificium to be against the gospel: it could no longer be tolerated. All of worship, and the Mass in particular, must be viewed as a beneficium of God, "who gives but does not take" - who gives freely out of pure mercy for the undeserving, asking only to be confessed and glorified.

This Lutheran emphasis on worship as God's gift to us - as Gottesdienst, Divine Service, in the sense of being God's service to us rather than our service to God - has been one of my favourite discoveries in becoming a Lutheran. A classic modern expression of this concept is found in Norman Nagel's introduction to Lutheran Worship:

Our Lord speaks and we listen. His Word bestows what it says. Faith that is born from what is heard acknowledges the gifts received with eager thankfulness and praise. Saying back to him what he has said to us, we repeat what is most true and sure. Most true and sure is his name, which he put upon us with the water of our Baptism. We are his. The rhythm of our worship is from him to us, and then from us back to him. He gives his gifts, and together we receive and extol him. We build each other up as we speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Our Lord gives us his body to eat and his blood to drink. Finally his blessing moves us out into our calling, where his gifts have their fruition.

I've loved this passage ever since I first came across it. But I hadn't realised how directly this perspective came from Luther himself. Nor had I come across the sacrificium-vs-beneficium terminology.

It strikes me that this perspective on worship as Gottesdienst provides a means of preserving what is good in the modern conservative evangelical emphasis on how "all our life is worship", while avoiding the "horizontalising" effects of this: sermons reduced to lectures in biblical theology, church services conceived merely as gatherings for mutual encouragement sessions, a downgrading of the sacraments, a general spirit of informality verging on irreverence. But that's for another post.

I'm currently studying the Christian Worship module of the correspondence course run by Moore Theological College in Sydney which I've been doing for the past couple of years. My reason for doing the course is just personal interest, rather than any qualification, since basically the course only qualifies me to become a lay reader in the Diocese of Sydney. In other words, a type of ministry (unordained preacher) which I don't really hold with, in a denomination of which I am no longer a member, in a diocese on the other side of the world.

On the plus side, some of the actual material has been pretty good (certainly streets ahead of the equivalent courses for laypeople in the Church of England), and the examiners are quite tolerant of Lutherans: my best marks have come in the exams where I most let rip with dodgy Lutheran views on, say, the sacraments. For example, in the exam on Romans - yes, that's right, an entire module just on Romans; now you see why I'm still doing this course - they asked, "What does Romans 6:1-4 teach about baptism?" So I told them. :-)

However, the current module is the most "difficult" so far: not because it is academically more challenging, but because the issue of "worship" - what it is, and how we are to worship God - is precisely the issue on which I ended up parting company from "Sydney Anglicanism". In particular, the course content reflects the "horizontalising" tendency among Sydney Anglicans and their followers elsewhere in the world, in which the sacraments and liturgy are downplayed, and worship is seen primarily as being about obedient service in our daily lives, with church gatherings being principally for the purpose of edification and mutual encouragement, rather than "worship" as such.

I've described before my experience of attending a few services - oops, sorry, gatherings - at a very Sydney-influenced Anglican church near my home last year. That experience left me feeling I had no home left in Anglicanism. I subsequently discovered that that was because I'd actually been turning into a Lutheran without realising it :-)

But all this does make the Christian Worship course rather a trying experience at times. A particular low-point came on p.52 of the course book:

It is tragic that the Lord's Supper, which ought to be an expression of Christian unity, has been the source of so much division and conflict amongst Christians throughout the centuries. One reason for this is that too much significance has been given to this rite, also known as the Eucharist, the Mass and the Holy Communion.

But then, certain Moore College theologians have apparently been known to argue that Jesus never instituted such a thing as "the Lord's Supper" in the first place: when Jesus spoke what we call the "words of institution", at the Last Supper, He was simply talking to the disciples present at the time. "Take, eat" meant "Take this now, eat this now". Not "Take this every Sunday for the next 2000 years".

So anyway, my approach to this part of the course is basically to grit my teeth, get through it and move on to the next module, which looks a bit more encouraging ("Doctrine 2: An entire term on the centre of our faith, Jesus Christ. Who was He? What did He do?"). However, there is some positive material in the Christian Worship module - courtesy of Herr Doktor Martin Luther of blessed memory - and I'll cover that in my next post (which, in contrast to my recent lamentable record of actually completing follow-up posts, has already been written).

The disappointingly feeble Windsor Report reminds me of the comments made a few years ago by Phillip Jensen, the ever-diplomatic Dean of Sydney, explaining why so many evangelical ministers prove to be a disappointment when they are made bishops.

Jensen referred to the point in the consecration service when all the consecrating bishops gather round the priest who is becoming a "made man":


"You know why the other bishops gather round him in a circle like that?" Jensen asked. "It's so they can remove the guy's spine."

This isn't all that far from the truth: when George Whitefield was causing a stir with his outdoor preaching in the 18th century - what really riled people was his forthright proclamation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone on account of Christ alone - the suggestion was made that the best way to neuter Whitefield would be to make him a bishop...

Update: A friend has drawn my attention to the exchange of letters in the Sydney Morning Herald in response to Phillip Jensen's remarks about which I posted recently. One correspondent writes:

In accusing the Archbishop of Canterbury of theological prostitution for denying the clear teaching of scripture, Dean Jensen has stated no more than the bleeding obvious. Give the man a medal.

Another fine contribution there from the University of Woolamaloo Department of Philosophy:


And let's not forget the faculty rules: "Rule one - no pooftahs."

Actually, that's probably quite appropriate for the Diocese of Sydney ;-)

I enjoyed this story, from a letter to this month's issue of The Briefing:

A preacher got up to preach on Exodus 13:17ff. After finishing his introduction in which he recapped the story, a woman at the back of the congregation shouted out, "Praise God who brought the Israelites through the Red Sea!"

The preacher met this with a prolonged excursus on the ins and outs of the latest liberal hypotheses about the crossing not being such a great miracle as it was only the Reed Sea and the water wasn't very deep.

He was slightly perturbed to be met by another shout from the woman:

"Praise God who did the even greater miracle of drowning the whole Egyptian army in a few inches of water!"

"There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions. And he called him and said to him, 'What is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.'..."

1. A "problem parable"

The parable of the dishonest manager (Luke 16:1-9) was the Gospel reading last week (10th October), but our pastor chose to preach on the psalm for the day, Psalm 119:33-40. It was a good sermon, but he then found himself being buttonholed by several members of the congregation (including my wife) about why he'd not preached on the gospel passage, since this parable is one they've always found difficult, and they would have appreciated a sermon on it. So, "by the desire of the inhabitants", our pastor preached on the passage yesterday instead.

It's easy to see why this parable causes such consternation. Is Jesus really commending the behaviour of this dishonest manager as an example for Christians to follow? Even once you've satisfied yourself that this isn't the case, and that Jesus is instead teaching that Christians should be aware of the potential for using money for good, rather than being superspiritual and naive about its power (see vv.8,9), it's still difficult to see why it needs such a stark and shocking parable to drive that message home.

For all we can attempt to smooth out the rough edges, Jesus certainly sounds pretty positive about the manager's behaviour, and hearing it read out as the Gospel reading brought home with fresh force just how jarring a story this is. I was therefore greatly looking forward to our pastor's sermon yesterday.

2. Interpreting the parable

Our pastor began by looking at the cultural background against which Jesus told the parable (basing this on Ken Bailey's treatment of the parable in his book, Poet and Peasant, which our pastor described as the best book on the parables he's ever read).

A manager of the type described in this parable would have acted as the landowner's agent, with authority to negotiate and conclude contracts with the tenant farmers (the "debtors" in the story). The manager would have held and maintained books of account on behalf of the landowner. To understand the parable, we need to have these three figures in mind: the manager, the landowner, and the farmer/debtor, as well as the crucial issue of the manager's authority to act on behalf of the landowner (as a commercial lawyer, this was all music to my ears!).

Our pastor then analysed the parable as follows (again, freely acknowledging his debt to Ken Bailey; also, this is a summary of the argument rather than a transcript, and any defects are my responsibility rather than our pastor's):

1. Your boss accuses you of stealing from him, and demands to see the books so he can check the position. How do you respond?
   
   Answer: by protesting your innocence, whether truthfully or as a smokescreen to attempt to deflect the allegations. But the manager says nothing. He's accused of stealing, but is not reported as making any attempt to defend himself against the allegations. So, basically, as of that moment, he's fired. The landowner tells him to go and get the books.
   


2. Having caught you stealing, what would you expect your boss to do?
   
   Well, for starters, you'd expect him to fire your sorry behind (I paraphrase), which is indeed precisely what happens to the manager. But then you'd also expect either criminal or civil proceedings to punish you and/or recover the money. But that isn't what happens: the landowner simply requires the manager to hand back the books. This is a surprisingly merciful course of action.
   


3. Why do the farmers go along with the manager's scheme?
   
   This is a pretty crude fraud, and if the farmers were party to it they'd face being thrown into jail themselves. At the very least, they'd gain nothing because the landowner would simply reverse the changes.
   
   The fact is that, by being sent off to collect the books, the manager has been given a window of opportunity. As far as the debtors are concerned, the manager is still in position: even though his actual authority to act on behalf of the landowner has now ended, he still has "apparent authority" (to use the modern legal term). So the farmers are assuming that the landowner has unilaterally decided to reduce their debts. And who are they to argue?
   
   But the manager has to act fast ("sit down quickly...", v.6), since his ploy will only work so long as the debtors believe the manager still to be acting on the landowner's authority. In a small rural community, the manager probably has only a matter of a few hours in which to act.
   


4. Once the fraud comes to light, what is the landowner to do?
   
   Remember, the farmers believe that it is the landowner who has reduced their debt. They think all their Christmases have come at once, and they're busy celebrating their good fortune - and probably singing the landowner's praises to anyone who'll listen.
   
   The landowner has only two options. First, go to the still-partying farmers and rain on their parade, saying that it was all a terrible mistake, the manager was acting outside his authority, and the original debts still stand. Well within his rights, but not a pleasant course of action from anyone's point of view.
   
   The only other option the landowner has is to grit his teeth and swallow his losses. And that is what he decides to do. And so he commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness, recognising that the manager - sly old dog - has put him in a cleft stick.
   


5. So why does the ploy work?
   
   This is the question that is easily overlooked. Why is the manager described as "shrewd"? Because he understands the landowner.
   
   The whole scheme was entirely dependent on the landowner accepting the illicit write-offs, rather than playing hardball with the farmers. If the landowner had insisted on the full debt being paid, that would have put the manager in an even worse position than he had feared: certainly no danger of being received into people's houses (v.4) after that.
   
   In other words, the manager had to bet on the landowner being merciful to the farmer/debtors. And what gave the manager such confidence that the landowner would show mercy to his debtors? His own merciful treatment at the hands of the landowner (see para 2, above).
   

So there we have it: the manager receives mercy from the landowner, and is then able to relate to other people on the assumption that the landowner will extend the same mercy to them. That is why he is commendably shrewd.

And that's the message to us from this parable: we have received mercy from our heavenly Father. We were facing ruin - eternal ruin - for our sin, left speechless by the Law's condemnation; but rather than demanding from us the debt we owed, God showed us mercy. In the same way, we can now relate to other people on the assumption that God will show them mercy, too. That's the "shrewd" way for Christians to act.

3. So what's all this got to do with money, then?

My hesitation about all this yesterday is that it didn't really seem to address the context of the parable in Luke 16, and in particular the question of how we use our money as Christians. In particular, our pastor did not address v.9 in his sermon, which seems to be pretty clearly linked with the message of the parable:

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth [i.e. "mammon"], so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.

But reflecting on it since, I think the answer (in part) is this: v.9 is not so much a summary of the parable's message, as an application of it.

Recall how the manager's behaviour was only "shrewd" because he acted in the light of his master's mercy. By analogy, the "shrewd" way for Christians to act is to assume that God will show the same mercy to those around you as He has shown to you.

How does that translate into how we use our money? Simple: we must recognise that money, while not righteous in itself ("unrighteous wealth"), can be used for the promotion of the Gospel. We are to spend our money on the assumption that God will show mercy to other people as He has to us.

Now, it's easy to do that in a rather "hair-shirt" way: deep down we know it's a bit of a waste of money, but giving money for the proclamation of the Gospel at least demonstrates our trust in God to provide for our own financial needs, and provides good training to wean us off our selfish acquisitiveness.

But this parable tells us something more than this, something we might otherwise have overlooked: giving money for the Gospel is a great investment, because God desires to show mercy to other people just as He has to us.

Betting on God's mercy is a "shrewd" spending decision. By using our money to promote the church's Gospel ministry, we will "make friends for ourselves" as people become Christians. These "friends", our fellow Christians, are then the people who are in a position to "receive [us] into the eternal dwellings".

OK. Here's what I reckon you need to know about the Windsor Report of the Lambeth Commission set up to report on how the Anglican Communion should react to the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire and proposals to allow same-sex blessings:

1. +Robbie gets to keep his pointy hat (as Chris Johnson might put it), but if individual churches don't want to recognise him, that's fine (para 133).
   


2. ECUSA should say sorry about the way it went about appointing him (but not, note, about the appointment itself) (para 134).
   


3. The bishops who consecrated +Robbie should think really hard about whether they want to turn up to Anglican Communion events, but on the other hand if they still want to, that's cool (para 134).
   


4. ECUSA should solemnly promise Not To Do It Again (para 134), because next time it acts in flagrant disregard for Scripture, tradition and the stated will of almost the entire Anglican Communion, there really will be trouble, do I make myself clear?
   


5. ECUSA's convoluted and temporary Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight programme for disaffected orthodox congregations is perfectly sufficient, can't see what people are complaining about (para 152).
   


6. Bishops and primates outside the USA should butt out, apologise for daring to get involved, and leave the orthodox Anglican congregations to sink or swim (para 155).
   

I paraphrase, but that's the gist of it. Very, very disappointing indeed. My heart goes out to those orthodox parishes, dioceses and individual Christians who, when it comes to actual concrete action to help them (rather than statements of concern and sympathy), appear, on an initial reading, to have been badly let down.

Update: David Virtue has some early analysis of the report. Basically, he's unimpressed, and suggests that it may prompt the Global South to walk away from Canterbury in disgust. Well, let's wait and see. But it's hard to see how the likes of Peter Akinola or Greg Venables could be satisfied by a mere "apology" and vague promises of better behaviour in future.

Further update: The Scotsman reports that the Church Society has attacked the Windsor Report as "toothless", while the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement has praised it as "a document we can work with, ... a Church we want to continue to be a part of". That suggests the Report fails the basic legal principle that a good settlement is one that leaves both sides feeling unhappy.

For further updates, see the CaNN website, Titus 1:9 and Virtuosity. And I'm sure that the Midwest Conservative Journal will have some words to say on the subject, once Chris Johnson has picked himself up off the floor.

Mark Steyn's column didn't appear in the Telegraph on Tuesday, apparently because he was "away". In fact, it's because it was spiked. Steyn has posted the article, The Quality of Mersey, on his website, and it's well worth a read. Equally, I can see why the Telegraph spiked it. If I were the editor of the Telegraph, I wouldn't have touched it with a barge-pole in the current atmosphere following the murder of Ken Bigley (you'll notice this post does not quote the article at any length).

But while the tone of Steyn's piece is rather intemperate, and the timing suggests that a columnist based in New Hampshire is not best placed to judge the mood among his readers in the UK, much of what Steyn says is probably correct - which is precisely why it would have been so inflammatory to print it. In particular, Steyn's assertion that the jihadists have played the British government and public like a violin, and "will have drawn many useful lessons from the decadence and defeatism on display" in Britain during the past few weeks.

Worth comparing this article with Al's excellent post in February this year on the recent British tendency to indulge in "recreational grief". We all feel sad about the death of Ken Bigley, or anyone else who dies in such horrible circumstances, but it's self-indulgence to pretend that we are "mourning" him in anything like the same way as his family and friends are.

The Church of England is advertising for nominations for the next Archbishop of York. Think I'm going to start a write-in campaign for the job to go to Phillip Jensen, especially given the recent news report in the Guardian in which he was misreported as describing Rowan Williams as a prostitute. That would liven up Primates' Meetings and General Synod no end.

(BTW, I know what you're all thinking: "The Guardian? Engaging in hostile and tendentious misrepresentations of evangelicals? Whatever next?" But then, the Guardian's style-guide entry on evangelicalism tells you all you need to know about how well-informed and fair-minded the Guardian is about evangelicals).

Speaking to one of my wife's relatives on Monday, it appears that the word on the (Roman Catholic) street is that the current Archbishop of York's retirement to parish ministry in Ilkley is a means of enabling him to swim the Tiber more discreetly when (there's no "if" about it) the Church of England approves the consecration of women bishops.

For Reformed Christians, who believe that the regenerate can never fall away from faith, this is the only available explanation when someone falls away from (apparent) faith and never returns: they obviously never really had saving faith in the first place.

I used to believe that myself, and (to my shame) several years ago I even said as much to a friend of mine who, to my very considerable surprise, revealed that in his teens he had been quite an enthusiastic (sic) member of a charismatic/evangelical church near his house in London, and had taken part in the first March for Jesus in the late 1980s. Upon going to university in 1991, he had taken the opportunity to abandon the faith. I told him he'd obviously never really believed in the first place. I think he found that reassuring. :-(

So I found this thread on Luther Quest quite interesting. One respondent pointed out that the argument is circular (those who "seem" to fall from the faith never really had it in the first place), and more seriously:

Ultimately ... it's a message of doubt in God's word, since - according to their logic - we can never know for sure that God has saved us, and that is a hard kernel of doubt to live with in hard times, in temptation, or at our death.

But we know of the surety of God's love and grace, NOT out of some misplaced presumption, but out of the objective, external gifts given us by the Holy Spirit: Baptism, the Holy Supper, the preached word, and the word of absolution. This is the beauty of Lutheran theology, that the gifts are given freely, and given outwardly, not "in a corner," to use St. Paul's statement.

We need not look for some inner light or hidden meaning in our heart, but stand assured of the goodness and love of God toward us. For that, we thank and praise Him, and pray daily that God would keep us, too, from falling.

Great stuff, particularly on the vital difference between looking for some "light within" for comfort, versus looking to the objective, external promises of God's love and forgiveness that are given to us in the public ministry of Word and Sacrament in the church.

But another reply gives an even more succinct riposte to the "they never really had faith" argument:

This sounds like a bad case of Monday morning quarterbacking.

Quite.

Having sorted out the English-language liturgy (see previous post), perhaps the Pope could now move on to issuing an encyclical about Roman Catholic architecture, especially since the Second World War. Alice Thomas Ellis once claimed that the easiest way to find the Roman Catholic church in any English town was to stop a random passerby and ask them to direct you to the ugliest building in town. Sad to say, she wasn't far wrong - the rule certainly held good for the Roman Catholic church at which my wife's grandfather's funeral took place on Monday.

(Though whether a member of the ELCE is in any position to throw stones, I'll leave you to judge, by browsing through the photographs in our church directory).

Here's one honourable exception to that rule, though: the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool (a.k.a. "Paddy's Wigwam", a.k.a. "the Mersey Funnel"). I love this building:

     
Click here for a virtual tour of this wonderful (if slightly jerry-built - they ended up having to sue the architects over the leaking roof) cathedral.

Interesting article by William Oddie in this week's Spectator, "Whose rite is it anyway?", on recent developments in Roman Catholic liturgy.

Oddie begins by describing the process in the 1960s and 70s by which, in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches:

...a new kind of liturgical English - bare, sparse, apparently wilfully lacking in elegance or sonority — gradually replaced both Cranmer’s English and the Latin of what became known as the old Mass.

Particular liturgical crimes highlighted by Oddie include the "fearsome, jingly new settings" in place of Elizabethan plainsong, the "bouncy new version of the Gloria [which] can be sung to the Eton boating song", and, of course, the replacement of "And with thy spirit" with "And also with you", which Oddie describes (rightly, in my view) as "graceless and pedestrian".

He then goes on to report how the Roman Catholic Church, at least, may now be recovering lost ground with proposed revisions to the Missal. The changes are being made in response to a papal document issued three years ago, Liturgiam Authenticam, in which the Pope called for more accurate liturgical translations from the Latin.

Fr Bruce Harbert, the liturgist who is leading the project to producte the new English translation, has argued that the current texts (as well as being of poor literary quality) are also theologically flawed. Oddie quotes an article from 2001 in the Catholic Herald, in which Fr Harbert wrote:

"Our current English texts ... repeatedly overestimate the value of human effort and undervalue the role of divine grace in human life, that is, they tend towards the Pelagian heresy."

Oddie goes on to say that:

One notorious sign of the Pelagian tendency of the old translation was in its inclination to remove any sign of humility before God. The idea of God as being our superior (fairly fundamental, one would have thought), conveyed traditionally by the use of the title "Lord", was frowned on, and wherever possible, "Lord" tended to be "translated" as "Father". Any note of supplication tended to be downplayed...

One particular example given by the chairman of the committee revising the liturgy is replacement of the "somewhat peremptory" words:

"And so, Father, we bring you these gifts. We ask you to make them holy by the power of your Spirit"

with the more ringing (and apparently more accurate translation of the Latin):

"Therefore, Lord, we humbly implore you: graciously make holy by the same Spirit these gifts we have brought to you for consecration..."

Setting to one side the theology of these statements, this move towards more stirring and memorable - not to mention more humble and supplicatory - language seems a positive development. And it's certainly an improvement on the drift in recent Anglican liturgies towards what Francis Schaeffer used to call "connotation language", focusing on stirring up our inner feelings ("reader-response"), rather than on the words actually having meaningful content. (One particular low-point that springs to mind is the line, "all your works echo the silent music of your praise", from one of the new eucharistic prayers - indeed, one of my first-ever blog posts was on this subject).

It also makes me wonder how this change in direction compares with the new Lutheran Service Book being adopted by the LCMS. Confessional Lutheran liturgy seems to have been less affected by the negative trends in the 1960s and 70s which William Oddie describes (I know Lutheran Worship has its detractors, but it's positively Cranmerian next to the Church of England's Alternative Service Book 1980). However, I wonder if the LSB's language will come to feel a bit "functional" in places, particularly where it has adopted liturgical texts which the Roman Catholics may now be moving away from (eg for the Gloria in Excelsis).

(Update: Architecture comments now moved to a separate post)

As Calvin once said, "Weirdness begins at home"*. Actually, it turns out that weirdness pretty often begins in the mind of the great William Shatner. Having bequeathed the world his ... um ... unparalleled version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" in the 1960s, he has now burst back onto the popular music "scene" with his cover of Pulp's Common People (click link for an online version).

Sadly, my PC at work has audio/video content disabled, so I haven't yet been able to hear this, but one listener describes it as leaving him "feeling vaguely uncomfortable and slightly dirty"...

Thanks to Daniel for the link.

(* That's Calvin as in "Calvin & Hobbes", in case you were wondering.)

An admirably bonkers letter in Thursday's Daily Telegraph from Richard Porter, a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery in Doncaster, on the subject of projected improvements in athletes' performances. It starts out innocuously enough:

SIR - The Oxford team of scientists has described the improvement in sprinting over the past 70 years, which fits a straight line on a graph with no evidence of reaching a plateau. This is true also for the mile record, which has continued to fall steadily since 1922.

OK, with you so far, Prof Porter. So what's your explanation for this?

One explanation for this improvement has not been discussed: that time, as we measure it, may be slowing down.

A retardation in both cosmic and quantum motion, with a stable biological clock, will provide more time in the 10 seconds to run 100 metres and a few spare seconds in which to run the four minute mile. It is not impossible.

Mind you, I suppose it's no more dubious a suggestion than the actual research team's assertion that women will be outrunning men by 2156 (according to a basis of calculation which suggests that by the year 3000 or so, athletes will be finishing the 100 metres before they start...)

I'm not altogether sure what I think about the case of Charlotte Wyatt, the 11-month old baby whom the High Court has ruled should not be resuscitated, though she should continue to be cared for fully until the need for resuscitation arises.

On the one hand, I can see why the judge ruled as he did. Sitting here in the cold light of day, with an unbroken heart, my feeling is that if one of our children were in such a desperate situation, I would probably reach the same decision as the judge, given how aggressive and damaging the process of resuscitation is. But that's the point: my wife and I would be making that decision as the parents. To see that decision taken away from oneself and made by other people - doctors, judges - must surely be one of the most crushing and dehumanising experiences imaginable.

My concerns about the likely effects of this judgment were only increased by the leading article in today's Independent, which came out with one of the most chilling comments I've heard in a long time: "[the decision] gives the professional judgement of the doctors precedence over the highly personal appeals of the parents". Is that really a world we wish to live in?

(That reminds me: I must look up the chapter in Gene Veith's Modern Fascism, entitled "Life not worthy of life", where he looks at how modern, "liberal" views on euthanasia have a strong resemblance to, and indeed share a common origin with, fascist views on the subject. Watch this space).

Tom Utley in today's Daily Telegraph writes on how "The baby Charlotte judgment has put us on a slippery slope". The subeditor who came up with that headline is behind the times - we've been skidding down that slope for some time already. The wedge, thin end and all, had been driven at least half, if not two-thirds of the way down before poor Charlotte was even born. But Utley makes some good points in the article itself.

While making it clear that he is not "accusing anybody [involved in the case] of wickedness", and despite the careful nuances of the judgment given by Mr Justice Hedley (himself a Christian, like Charlotte's parents), Utley says:

I see great dangers in the judge's decision to overrule Charlotte's parents and allow her doctors to let her die. Rightly or wrongly, it will be seen to have established the principle in English law that some lives are worth saving, and others aren't ... The idea has been sown in the minds of money-conscious NHS trusts that it is up to them to decide who should live or die, according to a doctor's assessment of his patient's "quality of life".

Now, of course, doctors "have been making this sort of decision since the dawn of medical science", and Utley writes movingly of his own father's death from cancer, which was undoubtedly hastened (by a matter of hours) by the high doses of painkillers given to him by his doctors:

The point is that it was not in order to hasten my father's death that the doctor prescribed the painkillers (although she would have known that they would probably have that effect). She did it in order to ease his pain. This may sound like a pedantic distinction, but it strikes me as a very important one.

Utley continues by saying "how very sad it is that the High Court has become involved", and that these things are best settled by agreement between the parents and doctors (as, to be fair, they are in the vast majority of these cases):

The only hard-and-fast principle that I would recommend is: when in doubt, opt for life.

He quotes the American lawyer Alexander Capron:

"I never want to wonder whether the physician coming into my hospital room is wearing the white coat of the healer or the black hood of the executioner"

and goes on to describe what has happened in the Netherlands, following the Dutch parliament's vote four years ago to legalise euthanasia (after years of it being "winked at"):

One immediate effect of that was that it fundamentally changed the relationship between doctors and their patients. Thousands of Dutch people began to carry documents, begging their doctors not to kill them if they fell ill. [...]

Another effect of the Dutch legislation has been the decline of palliative medicine in Holland. Far less effort is made now than before to keep old people alive and comfortable. Meanwhile, it has become practically a rule that no attempt should be made to revive babies born after only 23 or 24 weeks of gestation [one report today even suggests there is a legal requirement not to resuscitate babies born at or before 25 weeks] - even though medical science offers more and more of them a good chance of survival.

The Dutch law, framed with the noble intention of relieving the suffering of the terminally ill, has had the effect of devaluing human life for everyone in Holland.

He concludes:

I realise that there is an important distinction between allowing doctors to kill their patients and merely permitting them not to revive them. But it is a slippery slope that we are treading. I wish that Mr Justice Hedley had opted for life.

On balance, so do I.

Finally, it astonishes me that Arthur Hugh Clough's couplet, "Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive/Officiously to keep alive" has become an almost universally-accepted moral principle, given that it comes from a satirical poem called "The Latest Decalogue", which also includes lines such as, "Thou shalt have one God only; who/Would tax himself to worship two?", and "Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,/When 'tis so lucrative to cheat".

The last of my posts for National Poetry Day, and (while I said this wasn't an exercise in posting "my favourite poems") this last poem certainly is a contender for that title. TS Eliot again, but this time wiping his eyes after another raucous read-through of "Macavity", and saying "Now, let's be serious".

Again, you really should read the whole of this poem (Christmas Eve is a good time to do so, as it's a wonderful antidote to all the Christmas froth), but here are the first and final stanzas, just to whet your appetite:

The Journey of the Magi

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed,
refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the
terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet. [...]

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Read the whole thing here.

The opening lines are based on a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes, whose writings were apparently instrumental in bringing about Eliot's conversion to Christianity. Andrewes' 1622 sermon on Matthew 2:1-2 includes the following:

Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali, "the very dead of winter".

I also read some helpful notes on the poem a few years ago which I may try to find again (think this may be it), which made some particularly interesting points on a couple of lines in the penultimate stanza. First, it suggested that the line "...And three trees on the low sky" symbolises the crucifixion. Secondly, the line "...it was (you may say) satisfactory" is a reference to Christ's coming to the atone for our sins: for those of us who come after the Magi ("you may say"), the coming of Christ was indeed "satisfactory", in the sense of His making satisfaction for our sins.

If you think that's a bit of a stretch, then bear in mind that TS Eliot does have "previous" for including blatant, if slightly oblique, Christian references in his poems, and then denying all knowledge of it. For example, the following stanza from The Wasteland:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

According to Eliot's notoriously unhelpful notes to the poem, these lines "were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted." So, nothing to do with the road to Emmaus at all. No, sir-ree.

Similarly helpful was his response when he was asked what he had meant by the baffling line (from Ash Wednesday) "Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree". Eliot replied, "I meant, 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree'". Cheers, Tom.