Month: December 2006

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A covenanted community

Everything about being Christian – worship, prayer, mission, fellowship, holiness, works of mercy and justice – is rooted in the basic belief that the one God who made the world has acted in sovereign love to call out a people for himself, a people through whom he is already at work to anticipate his final purpose of reconciling all things to himself, things in heaven and things on earth (Ephesians 1.10). This is what the creator God has done, climactically and decisively, in and through Jesus Christ, and is now implementing through the Holy Spirit. But this notion of God calling a people to be his own, a people through whom he will advance his ultimate purposes for the world, did not begin with Jesus. Jesus himself speaks of the time being fulfilled, and his message and ministry look back, as does the whole of earliest Christianity, to the purposes of God in, through and for his people Israel. The Gospels tell the story of Jesus as the story of how God’s purposes for Israel and the world reach their intended goal. Paul writes of the gospel of Jesus being ‘promised beforehand through God’s prophets in the holy scriptures’, and argues that what has been accomplished in Jesus Christ is what God always had in mind when he called Abraham (Galatians 3; Romans 4). The earliest Christian writers, in their different ways, all bear witness to this belief: that those who follow Jesus, those who trust in his saving death and believe in his resurrection, are carrying forward the purposes for which God called Abraham and his family long before. And those purposes are not for God’s people only: they are for the whole world. God calls a people so that through this people – or, better, through the unique work of Jesus Christ which is put into effect in and through this people in the power of the Spirit – the whole world may be reconciled to its creator.

* * *

A covenant for the Anglican Communion should reflect the memory of Anglican historical traditions and also summarise our present understanding of ‘the Anglican way’. In addition, it should provide a way forward, a way of re-committing to the whole project of an Anglican Communion understood as God’s gift and God’s commandment: a vocation to be realised rather than a fact already achieved. The covenant as a vision for mission both stresses the importance of the work to be done and binds its members to one another for greater effectiveness in accomplishing it.

Most importantly the covenant envisioned for the Anglican Communion is not static. Instead, it is a dynamic process like a marriage covenant. Just as the marriage partnership grows as it is tested by unforeseen circumstances and new situations, so the provinces of the Communion can expect to change and grow in ways they might never have expected. In a marriage, the partners grow together, walking alongside one another into the unknown future. So also in the Church ‘we walk by faith and not by sight’.

Inter Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission A theology for the life of a covenanted community

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Through our willingness to say 'no' or 'enough' we rediscover our true human place

Bartholomew I has become known as “the Green Patriarch” for his environmental leadership. More than a decade ago, Bartholomew first announced on an island in the Aegean Sea that pollution and other attacks on the environment should be considered sins.

In a widely-quoted Venice address in 2002, Bartholomew I urged Christians “to act as priests of creation in order to reverse the descending spiral of ecological degradation.” Towards that end, he did not mince words.

“We are to practice a voluntary self-limitation in our consumption of food and natural resources,” Bartholomew said bluntly. “Each of us is called to make the crucial distinction between what we want and what we need. Only through such self-denial, through our willingness sometimes to forgo and to say, ‘no’ or ‘enough,’ will we rediscover our true human place in the universe.”….

Given this growing convergence between pope and patriarch, it’s no surprise that the two men addressed environmental concerns in their Nov. 30 Common Declaration in Istanbul.

“In the face of the great threats to the natural environment, we want to express our concern at the negative consequences for humanity and for the whole of creation which can result from economic and technological progress that does not know its limits,” Benedict and Bartholomew said.

“As religious leaders, we consider it one of our duties to encourage and to support all efforts made to protect God’s creation, and to bequeath to future generations a world in which they will be able to live.”

Of course, neither man arrived at these convictions ex nihilo. They build upon the teachings of their predecessors and traditions with deep roots in their churches, which in turn reflect the clear Biblical mandate to be good stewards of creation.

John Allen

Did you know that Patriarch Bartholomew will be in London at the end of January to present the result of the last series of Orthodox – Anglican discussions? You heard it here first.

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To defend reason

As pope, Benedict XVI doesnâ??t give an inch to the preconceptions that were formed about him as a cardinal. He doesnâ??t thunder condemnations, he doesnâ??t hurl anathemas. He reasons staunchly, but serenely. His criticisms against modernity or against the â??pathologiesâ?? that he sees even within the Church are fully elaborated. That is part of the reason why he has practically silenced Catholic progressivism: not because this has turned friendly toward him, but because it is not able to reply to him with arguments of similar persuasive powerâ?¦.

It isnâ??t a stretch to say that Ratzinger is a herald of the Enlightenment, because he himself has declared that he wants to take up the defense of Enlightenment principles in an age in which few remain to defend reason. Those who expected to find in the former head of the former Holy Office a fideist paladin of dogma have been given their just deserts. For him, it is not only Jerusalem, but it is also the Athens of the Greek philosophers that is at the origin of the Christian faith.

Benedict XVI is not afraid of leveling severe criticism against the religions, beginning with Christianity, precisely in the name of reason. He wants a mutual relationship of oversight and purification to be established between reason and religion. He dedicated two thirds of his lecture in Regensburg to criticizing the phases in which Christianity detached itself from its rational foundations.

Sandro Magister Habemas Papam

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Multicultural liberality – or secular fundamentalism?

A very good spiel from the Archbishop. I think the matter needs to be pressed a little harder though.

We have a secular liberal ideology; forms of evangelical Christianity; forms of traditional Christianity (which themselves subdivide into smaller, usually acquiescent groups); and we have forms of Islam. These different groups have co-existed in our de facto multicultural society governed by norms of political liberality (with virtues of tolerance, respect, distance from those who are different such that you don’t invade their own cultural space with your ideas, etc.).

Now, what the incidents with the college Christian Unions represent, I think, is the beginning of the end of this liberal multiculturalism. And the irony is that the problem is not really with the Muslims (who are usually the ones pilloried as being the problem case). The real problem – and the biggest threat to our British ways of life – are the secular liberals.

For the secular liberals (as is reflected in their name) deliberately misrepresent themselves within the framework of multicultural British life. De facto, they remain one ‘community’ (perhaps ‘interest group’ is better) within British society, with their own values and agenda. However, they present themselves as the guardians of political liberality itself, which is to say, as the guardians of the social-legal fabric which constitutes the structure of our multicultural society itself. And what they are doing – whilst pretending to defend our multiculturalism – is in fact forcing the values of their community/interest group onto British society as a whole. Thereby forcing other people and other groups to accept (at least in public), not a standpoint of political multicultural liberality and respect, but instead the values of secular liberalism.

This, it seems to me, is what is at stake in the issue over the CUs. The right to meet in a particular public context as a public group is being denied them by secular liberals who – when they have power – will not allow communities which do not share their values to meet together as a publically recognised body.

Whilst pretending to safeguard multicultural liberality, they in fact impose their own form of secular liberalism. Essentially their argument is: ‘You are being unjustly descriminatory unless you accept our values; since you don’t accept our values, we do not permit you to exist as a public body.’

Now, let’s face it, hard-line Muslims are not going to be writing public policy; nor are they going to be voting on its acceptance in the House of Commons. But already, and over the coming years, secular liberals, with exactly the same attitudes as displayed by the student politicians who have outlawed CUs will be forming and passing public policy in Government. This is the biggest threat to our British ways of life, and its beginnings are seen quite clearly with the controversies over the CUs.

Alan Brown

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The call to communion springs from the reality of the body of Christ

The question of how, with whom, and to what end the Church makes decisions is not a secondary one; it gets to the core of the Gospel (not the only thing that does this, of course; but still it is an essential). Bp. Wrightâ??s vehemence is understandable, whether well or poorly expressed: he feels as if those with whom he has shared faith and ministry â?? â??my companion, my own familiar friend, with whom we took sweet counselâ?? (Ps. 55:14f.) â?? are now working to undermine the very vows of pastoral oversight to which he was asked to subject himself, and within which he has labored. He is a bishop for the whole church, after all. Something we have tried hard, with little effect, to tell TEC bishops. But that is part of his point: you canâ??t have it both ways, calling people to the accountability of the whole church, and then throwing that wholeness out when it doesnâ??t suit you.

â??Congregationalismâ?? does indeed bother many of us and deeply. There are, after all, real reasons why many of us are not â??free churchâ?? evangelicals; it is a conscious choice, in fact, since most free-church evangelicals are a lot better at hosting bible studies, mission outreach, church growth, and the rest than are evangelical Anglicans, and if those were our priorities before all else, we would certainly be in the wrong place. â??Communion orderâ??, however, is something we believe is biblical, Christ-called, and therefore a primary imperative. It is not something way down the totem pole on the list of â??nice things to do if you have the timeâ??. The call to communion â?? and the disciplines involved, which include the ordering of the Church life in common counsel, honesty, and mutual accountability, rather than simply declaring independence when things get rough â?? springs from the reality of the Body of Christ, and hence it is bound up with the essential doctrines of the Son of God. It is in this light that Paul writes what he does in Philippians 2:1-18, where â??being of the same mind, having the same love, and being in full accord and of one mindâ?? are images of the God who became the servant of those who are weak, disobedient, and dying, that we might exalt him as our Lord, and ourselves, in following His way and being transformed in His Spirit, may act as â??lightsâ?? in a perverse world. The forces pressing Anglicans into congregationalism are ones pressing Anglicans into a contradiction of the Apostleâ??s desire and command, and into a drifting away from Christ Jesus himself. So I believe, at any rate.

It continues to astonish me that so many conservative Anglicans think that their witness is so weak and so unsupported by Godâ??s promises that continued, ordered, and loving efforts at discerning and embodying â??one-mindednessâ?? in Christ with those who are in error, are leading people to hell. I suppose there is no guarantee that such engagement will not do damage; but there is just as good (better to my mind) reason to believe that the whole-scale throwing over of our common commitments to an ordered life in Communion is producing scandals that are ruining the faith of Christâ??s â??little onesâ??. I know of no conservative congregation that has scandalized the faithful by preaching, teaching, and witnessing faithfully, even within the Episcopal Church, or even more certainly, within the Church of England. There are good reasons people might give to leave TEC at this time, to be sure; but they tend either to be based on a firm conviction that Anglicanism itself (and not just TEC) is a failed ecclesial experiment, or on the personal and particular levels at which conflict can be tolerated. I do not consider â??Scriptural faithfulnessâ??, which Wright properly sees to be a wax nose in these kinds of polemics, to be such a reason, since in its substantive sense such faithfulness can be upheld even in the lionâ??s den.

Ephraim Radner – comment to Bishop Tom Wright’s ‘A Confused Covenant’ Titus 1.9

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Don't pretend it's Anglican

Bishop Tom Wright responds to ‘A Covenant for the Church of England’, issued by Paul Perkin and Chris Sugden and others

So to ‘action’. This is divided into five areas: mission, appointments, fellowship, money and oversight. I am delighted that this document begins with mission; one of the great gains of the last decade has been to shift the whole church into a mission focus. But the six points made under ‘mission’ seem scatty and uneven, and turn out not to be about mission as such – indeed, it has nothing creative to say about mission at all, and appears to lack any engagement with the fresh and lively thinking on the subject that has gone on in the last decade or two – but about the politics of a ‘mission’ which wants to clone certain types of churches at the cost, if necessary, of driving a coach and horses through normal Anglican life. The first point, quoting the ‘great commission’, is fine so far as it goes, though what sort of renewed force it has in our post-Christian society is not explored. If it had been, quite different things might have emerged. Instead, we are projected at once into what appears to be the real agenda of the whole document: a break away from any normal ecclesial practice and into a free-for-all. This is justified by the claim that ‘as is being increasingly recognized [by whom, we might ask?], the historic focus [clergy, buildings, etc]…is now inadequate by itself…etc’ – in other words, we can’t do what we want in the existing structures so we shall go elsewhere. The third point, which is put in quotation marks though without a reference (‘Existing ecclesiastical legal boundaries should be seen as permeable’) is not, in this context, a way of saying ‘we are working within the framework of Mission-Shaped Church, but is rather, in this context, a way of saying, ‘we intend to plant churches wherever we like and claim that they are Anglican’. This becomes clear in the fourth point: ‘there cannot be any no-go areas for gospel growth and church planting’. Here, I’m afraid – and this is not a cynical interpretation, but the reflection of a reality I have witnessed – ‘gospel growth’ means ‘the spread of our particular type of church’. The attempt to hook this agenda back into the official parlance of the contemporary church (‘we will support mission-shaped expressions of church…’) is disingenuous, as becomes clear in the final clause, ‘even when official permission is unreasonably withheld.’ The report in question was quite clear that mission-shaped church doesn’t mean ‘churches which do their own thing and cock a snook at any bishop who questions them’. But that, alas, has sometimes been the reality.

But the real shocker is the next section, ‘Appointments’. This begins with a breathtaking statement of congregationalism: ‘The local congregation is the initial and key seed-bed for recognizing, authorizing, raising up and releasing new leaders.’ Recognising, perhaps. Raising up, quite possibly. Authorizing? Not within any recognizable Anglican polity. The authors should read Article 23 once more: ‘It is not lawful for any man to take upon him the office of public preaching, or ministering the Sacraments in the congregation, before he be lawfully called, and sent to execute the same. And those we ought to judge lawfully called and sent, which be chosen and called to this work by men who have public authority given unto them in the Congregation, to call and send Ministers into the Lord’s vineyard.’ The rest of the Articles make it clear that ‘Congregation’ here cannot mean ‘the local church, doing its own thing’. The following sentences (points 2-6) concede that wider recognition and authorization are needed, but say, in effect, ‘since we don’t trust the church to select, train and ordain, we’ll do it ourselves.’ Fine, if that’s what you want to do; don’t pretend it’s Anglican, and don’t be surprised when Anglicans, including a great many evangelicals, regard you as radically out of line. It is no surprise, reading the seventh point (‘If the local Bishop unreasonably withholds authorization, we will pay for, train and commission the ministers that are needed, and seek official Anglican recognition for them’), that the two principal authors of this report were present and supportive at the irregular ordinations – with a bishop from the ‘Church of England in South Africa’, a body with whom the Church of England is not in communion – which took place in the Southwark diocese a year or so ago. Basically, this section is a way of declaring UDI and must be seen as such. Is that really what the constituency of CEEC and the other relevant bodies want? Have they reflected on the consequences of such a move – not least for those of us who don’t live in the affluent parts of the country where ‘we will pay for this’ is a cheerful, sometimes even arrogant, statement of social status?

Bishop Tom Wright A Confused ‘Covenant’

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Catholicity 9

So far I have said that, in the church, we already participate in that future complete assembly, which is the whole body of Christ. In this future body we will be relationship with all, and they will all participate in us. We will belong, not any smaller or lesser group, but to the whole, the universal or catholic entity of Christ. We are not complete, and not ourselves without them, and they are not complete without us. We will not be raised from the dead without them: they are essential to our final identity: in the resurrection body, the universal, catholic, body, when Christ is all in all, all will be in all. This means that we may now know Christ only with all whom the Father has given him. Christ prepares now them for us, and us for them.

All these people have received from Christ a piece of the future creation, and in this future creation they have also received a little bit of us. They have a piece of our own true selves that we do not yet have. They have to teach this new aspect of our proper identity to us, and we have to receive it from them. They have to give this piece to us, and we have to receive it from them, and must wait until they do. We receive ourselves only from them. This means that we must want to receive this from them: it requires that we are open and willing to receive them, and so to receive Christ, and our own identity, freely. Love makes us free to receive them. Only when we take it from them (and have learned how to do this) are we really and freely ourselves.

Christ meets us. But that meeting involve us in a search in which we look everywhere for him, even in that company that we consider ungodly. We find him where he, in his freedom, meets us. He meets us in the form of that very set of persons against whom we had most recently and most fervently been defending ourselves. Christ is there – only – for us, in the person we were trying to avoid. Christ is there at that moment turning this rival into our friend. We cannot turn away from them without turning away from the piece of ourselves that they, and only they, have to give us. We cannot turn away from them without turning away both our Lord, and our own future. We have to go the Christians we don’t like, whose doctrine and churchmanship are repellant to us, in order to meet Christ.

This means that ‘ecumenism’ is an event of repentance, reconciliation and forgiveness. The eucharist is the ecumenical event. Though an unlovely word, ‘ecumenical’ simply means communion. This communion comes through being reconciled with those who oppose us. Of course this reconciliation cannot come at the expense of truth, so ‘there must differences among you’ and forthright exchanges of view. But we must be reconciled with those who oppose us, and that most often means from those at opposite ends of the church, the ‘evangelicals’ or the ‘catholics’ or whoever’s churchmanship you regard as least acceptable.

We meet Christ in the event in which our opponent becomes our brother. We have to put into words what we hold against him, and we have to forgive him and ask him for his forgiveness. Every time we meet, we must look forward to and pray for this reconciliation and unity.

See previous ‘Catholicity’ posts

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It looks like a fear of open argument

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has defended the rights of university Christian Unions, saying that Student Union bodies should not discriminate against them simply because they donâ??t approve of their views.

“The danger in issuing sanctions against a body whose views you disapprove of is that it looks like a fear of open argument. If disagreement is to be silenced because offence may be caused, that is not good for intellectual life; it personalises and â??psychologisesâ?? all conflict of ideas and denies the possibility of appropriate detachment in debating issues.”

Writing in an article in the Times Higher Educational Supplement, to be published today [Friday 8th December 2006], Dr Williams says that the judgement that religious views ought to banned because they may cause some kind of offence damages the culture of free exchange on which so much in a university depends:

â??A good institution of HE is one in which students learn that their questions are not everyoneâ??s questions, and their answers are not everyoneâ??s answers. Simply in the fact of being alongside people who are following other academic disciplines, you learn that different people want to know different sorts of thing. You learn that your world is not the obviously right and true one just because you say it is. Whatever convictions you emerge with will have been tested by this critical exposure to other ways of seeing and other sorts of investigation.â??

Student Unions had to consider, he argued, whether their essential role was brokering between different communities from which they drew their membership, or whether they were to function in a central licensing capacity:

â??â?¦ the question that ought to be asked is what those student unions that have sought to withdraw recognition from Christian Unions think their powers are; do they see themselves as â??brokeringâ?? the business of a wide variety of bodies, many of whose views they (naturally) do not endorse? Or do they think of themselves as representing a central authority that can create or abolish associations?”

Christian Unions, he said, certainly had their own questions to answer:

â?? â?¦ some CUâ??s might do well to undertake a little hard self-examination about whether their language is vulnerable to proper challenge; they may need to affirm more clearly and credibly the distinction between declaring behaviour unacceptable and effectively passing judgement on a whole category of persons. But that does not alter the fundamental point about freedom of association. The integrity of the whole educational process in a democracy depends on getting this right, and it should not be obscured by hasty and superficial reactions to what are regarded as unacceptable opinions by the fashion of the day.”

Archbishop Rowan Williams Christian Unions should be defended

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Prayer is hope in action

In the Church, the institution is not merely an external structure while the Gospel is purely spiritual. In fact, the Gospel and the Institution are inseparable because the Gospel has a body, the Lord has a body in this time of ours. Consequently, issues that seem at first sight merely institutional are actually theological and central, because it is a matter of the realization and concretization of the Gospel in our time…

I remember, when I used go to Germany in the 1980s and ’90s, that I was asked to give interviews and I always knew the questions in advance. They concerned the ordination of women, contraception, abortion and other such constantly recurring problems.

If we let ourselves be drawn into these discussions, the Church is then identified with certain commandments or prohibitions; we give the impression that we are moralists with a few somewhat antiquated convictions, and not even a hint of the true greatness of the faith appears. I therefore consider it essential always to highlight the greatness of our faith — a commitment from which we must not allow such situations to divert us…

Augustine repeatedly emphasized the two sides of the Christian concept of God: God is Logos and God is Love — to the point that he completely humbled himself, assuming a human body and finally, giving himself into our hands as bread. We must always keep in mind and help others to keep in mind these two aspects of the Christian conception of God.

God is “Spiritus Creator”, he is Logos, he is reason. And this is why our faith is something that has to do with reason, can be passed on through reason and has no cause to hide from reason, not even from the reason of our age. But precisely this eternal, immeasurable reason is not merely a mathematics of the universe and far less, some first cause that withdrew after producing the Big Bang.

This reason, on the contrary, has a heart such as to be able to renounce its own immensity and take flesh. And in that alone, to my mind, lies the ultimate, true greatness of our conception of God. We know that God is not a philosophical hypothesis, he is not something that perhaps exists, but we know him and he knows us. And we can know him better and better if we keep up a dialogue with him.

This is why it is a fundamental task of pastoral care to teach people how to pray and how to learn to do so personally, better and better…

And from this viewpoint one perceives, in my opinion, the significance of the Liturgy also as precisely a school of prayer, where the Lord himself teaches us to pray and where we pray together with the Church, both in humble, simple celebrations with only a few of the faithful and also in the feast of faith.

In St Thomas Aquinas’ last work that remained unfinished, the Compendium Theologiae which he intended to structure simply according to the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, the great Doctor began and partly developed his chapter on hope. In it he identified, so to speak, hope with prayer: the chapter on hope is at the same time the chapter on prayer.

I think that this is the great task we have before us: on the one hand, not to make Christianity seem merely morality, but rather a gift in which we are given the love that sustains us and provides us with the strength we need to be able to “lose our own life”. On the other hand, in this context of freely given love, we need to move forward towards ways of putting it into practice, whose foundation is always offered to us by the Decalogue, which we must interpret today with Christ and with the Church in a progressive and new way.

Pope Benedict with the bishops of Switzerland Prayer is hope in action

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The hunt for theology in the UK

Second Aquinas Colloquium – Blackfriars Oxford

We are pleased to reveal that the principal speaker at the 2nd annual colloquium on St Thomas will be Professor John O’Callaghan, Director of Maritain Centre at the University of Notre Dame. Prof. O’Callaghan, author of Thomist realism and the linguistic turn (2003) will be reflecting on the concept of the soul in Aquinas.

He will be joined by two further speakers, Fr Fergus Kerr OP, Director of the Aquinas Institute at Blackfriars, and Fr Vivian Boland OP, lecturer at Blackfriars and Strawberry Hill.

Fergus Kerr will be looking at what St Augustine, St Thomas, and Wittgenstein say about our knowledge of other people’s thoughts.

Vivian Boland will be reflecting on virtue ethics in St Thomas.

Here is the punch-line:

Attendance at the colloquium is by invitation only.

Enough said?

The hunt goes on. Exciting isn’t it?