Author: Douglas Knight

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How to pray 4

An exhortation and litany to be said during processions, used to pray for God’s favour during times of troubles

Let us make our prayers, and supplycations, rendrynge and gyvyng of thankes for all men, and namely for kynges, princis, and al other set in chief dignitie and high roumes, that by theyr godly governance, their true faithfull and diligent execution of justice and equitie on to all their subjectes, our heavenly father may be glorified, the common welth may be daily promoted and increased, and that we al, that are theyr subjectes, may live in peace and quietnes, with al godlines and vertue, and our christen princis & heades in unitie and concorde emonges them selfes, ever callyng uppon theyr heavenly father, whiche is the king of all kynges, and the lorde of all lordes, which shall judge without respecte of persone, accordynge to every mans doing or workes, at whose hande the weake shall take no wronge, nor the myghty man not by any power escape his juste judgement

We make prayers and supplications for kings, princes and all who have been set in authority. We can pray to God for them, and we can do so publicly, so that all who who are in authority know that this is what we are doing. And we can also make our petitions known to these princes themselves. We can petition them to provide us with what almighty God has given them for our sake. Although we may address our prayers to God at all times, we may do so in particular when no other authorities will listen to us. We can ask God to allow those he has set in authority over us to hear his Word and to hear our prayers. We can encourage them to call upon their heavenly Father for grace to give us what we need. In this way the common wealth may be daily promoted and our heavenly Father glorified.

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Processions

Ascension, procession and prayer – all somehow connected. If only someone would tell me how.

Public Christian devotions became common by the fifth century and processions were frequently held, with preference for days which the pagans had held sacred. These processions were called litanies, and in them pictures and other religious emblems were carried. In Rome, pope and people would go in procession each day, especially in Lent, to a different church, to celebrate the Sacred Mysteries. Thus originated the Roman “Stations”, and what was called the “Litania Major”, “Romana”, or “Major Rogation”. It was held on 25 April, on which day the heathens had celebrated the festival of Robigalia, the principal feature of which was a procession.

Pagans on the march? Well, we imitate them in everything else. Perhaps we Christians should also lumber to our feet? Perhaps if we just take the initial risk of taking our worship briefly out of the church building, we will discover that this is in fact the imitation of Christ. Perhaps then we will find that we can go rejoicing around the city, mark its bounds and ask the Lord’s protection on it. Maybe we should even wheel out a few bishops and get them to bless, pray for, repent and lament before the city, and then bless the city again.

Prayer and procession are connected, you say?

The word “Rogation” comes from the Latin verb rogare, meaning “to ask,” and was applied to this time of the liturgical year because the Gospel reading for the previous Sunday included the passage “Ask and ye shall receive” (Gospel of John 16:24). The faithful typically observed the Rogation days by fasting in preparation to celebrate the Ascension. A common feature of Rogation days in former times was the ceremony of “beating the bounds”, in which a procession of parishioners, led by the minister, would proceed around the boundary of their parish and pray for its protection in the forthcoming year.

Ah yes, but we Anglicans don’t do this. And you can’t make us.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has announced plans to mount an unprecedented mass walk of bishops and other faith leaders through central London during the forthcoming Lambeth Conference to demonstrate the Anglican Communion’s determination to help end extreme poverty across the globe. Rowan Williams will be joined by approximately 600 other archbishops and bishops.

Apparently we Anglicans do go on processions then. What does an Anglican procession look like? Like that, I see – everyone holding banners and singing their hearts out. Well, you will never get us Evangelicals to do that. We don’t do processions.

The March for Jesus began as ‘City March’ in London in 1987. It was formed in the seedbed of friendship amongst three church groups, Pioneer, Ichthus and Youth with a Mission, and the worship leader Graham Kendrick. Over the next three years marches spread across the UK, initially in 49 centres, which then spawned hundreds of small marches. Marches then spread across Europe and North America, and finally across the world. In 1994 the first Global March for Jesus covered every time zone and united over ten million Christians from over 170 nations. It is estimated that, by the final Global March for Jesus on 10 June 2000, over 60 million people in 180 nations had marched for Jesus.

March for Jesus? It is always us who are doing things for Jesus – lucky old Jesus. Or it is perhaps the Lord who marches in triumphal procession (Psalm 68; Eph 4.8, 2 Cor 2.14) – and if he catches us up into his procession then we are the lucky ones? With or without the Pelagianism, apparently we Evangelicals do have processions after all. We usually call them festivals – Spring Harvest, Soul Survivor – and we hold them out in the country. But then it is not really the countryside that needs praying for, is it? Perhaps London, somewhere between Abbey and Cathedral, would not be a bad place to pray and process, I mean, march, I mean, walk.

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Intra-family gifts and love

The central role of intra-family gifts
This leads us to the other essential feature of family economics, but one which Becker’s “neoclassical” theory omits. Like Adam Smith, Becker presumes that all economic transactions, including those within marriage, are essentially self-interested efforts to maximize one’s own utility or satisfaction. Now, family members do acquire their incomes mostly by exchanges with those outside the family. But the “division of labor” within the family, as Aristotle and Augustine pointed out, occurs mostly by personal and joint gifts, not exchanges. We all need to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and transported, whether or not we earn income. Our income therefore typically exceeds our consumption during parenthood and the “empty nest” (i.e. after children have left home), while consumption exceeds income during childhood and old age. This involves extensive gifts, not only from parents to dependent children but also between husbands and wives and from adult children to aged parents. … Without government social benefits, the retirement gap could be bridged only by love: a gift from someone (most often one’s adult children) whose own consumption and utility are thereby reduced.

Why do people have children?
Becker answers that children provide parents satisfaction as producer or (in modern economies) consumer durables. But this theory is not very accurate. In what I call “neo-scholastic” economic theory, parents have children for one of two reasons: because they love the children for their own sakes, and/or love themselves and expect some benefit from the children. … Becker’s theory cannot accommodate this fact, since worship, like marriage and fertility, involves another kind of sacrifice of valuable resources by the giver.

John D Mueller Demographic Winter

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Gather, walk, kneel

More from the world’s greatest living evangelical. If he wasn’t so good I wouldn’t keep quoting him.

The first action, therefore, is to gather together in the Lord’s presence. This is what in former times was called “statio”. Let us imagine for a moment that in the whole of Rome there were only this one altar and that all the city’s Christians were invited to gather here to celebrate the Saviour who died and was raised. This gives us an idea of what the Eucharistic celebration must have been like at the origins, in Rome and in many other cities that the Gospel message had reached. In every particular Church there was only one Bishop and around him, around the Eucharist that he celebrated, a community was formed, one, because one was the blessed Cup and one was the Bread broken.

The Eucharist is a public devotion that has nothing esoteric or exclusive about it.

The second constitutive aspect is walking with the Lord. This is the reality manifested by the procession that we shall experience together after Holy Mass, almost as if it were naturally prolonged by moving behind the One who is the Way, the Journey. With the gift of himself in the Eucharist the Lord Jesus sets us free from our ‘paralyses’, he helps us up and enables us to ‘proceed’.

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20: 2-3). Here we find the meaning of the third constitutive element of Corpus Christi: kneeling in adoration before the Lord. Adoring the God of Jesus Christ, who out of love made himself bread broken, is the most effective and radical remedy against the idolatry of the past and of the present.

Pope Benedict Corpus Christi 28 May 2008
Solid nourishment, these homilies.

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Concern

From its initial growth as part of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship, CCFON is now establishing itself as an independent body – complementing the work of the LCF but speaking with its own voice. Today is our first day in this new season. Today is a day of change when we commit to continue the work God has begun and to seek to take it to still greater prominence in the ‘Public Square’ in our Nation. Many of us are concerned about the state of our Nation – the instability in our social order, the breakdown of the traditional family unit and assault on historic values. This has arisen because we have abandoned God’s laws which are good for all mankind.

In abandoning God’s laws for a just and fair society we have seen the weakening of the rule of law and the rise of discrimination dressed up as equality. We call upon Christians everywhere to stand with us in the effort to win back our country for Christ.

Christian Concern for Our Nation and Christian Legal Centre – and there are resources on marriage & family – imported – since we don’t seem to have a David Blankenhorn or Douglas Farrow of our own. Here’s Iain Duncan-Smith Men are being erased from family life

I spend a large amount of time visiting housing estates and too often I find them full of young mums and no men. The local community groups always tell the same story – young men without any sense of responsibility, no family ties. With few fathers around, the young boys find other role models: the drug dealer or the gang leader. But it isn’t just young men who suffer: girls do too. Studies show that it is from a father that young girls learn about empathetic unconditional love. Without this, vulnerable girls who have no father are more likely to be flattered by male attention and to be drawn into early sex, which is often regretted and unprotected. It seems that the system conspires to break homes, then does its best to lower the life chances of those it is meant to care for. The benefits system is set so that if you are a couple living together, married or otherwise, you will have to work three times longer than a lone parent to get above the poverty line.

Have you seen Dad.Info?

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Truth is no defence

Truth has always been the journalist’s best defence as they seek to expose the failings of politicians, governments or societies leaders. Against a torrent of highly paid lawyers, journalists have always been able to rest on truth. Truth, as the Good Book says, will set you free. Except in Canada.

Those complaining don’t ever have to prove that hatred and contempt actually occurred, just that it is likely to have happened or will happen in the future. Except that due to the nature of Canada’s human rights laws, those complaining don’t ever have to prove that hatred and contempt actually occurred, just that it is likely to have happened or will happen in the future.
As if being accused of causing something that may not actually have happened is not bad enough, a recent filing by Canada’s Justice Department in another case stated quite boldly “truth and fair comment are no defence”. The fact that what you write may be true or simply be a fair journalistic comment, won’t help you fight those charges.

Free speech on the ropes

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One local church alone is no Church

If it is true that, as Tertullian said, ‘one Christian is no Christian’, then by the same token we should be able to say, ‘one bishop is no bishop’, and so ‘one local church alone is no church ‘. A bishop is not an individual who ‘represents’ the local church as if he is empowered to speak for its local identity like a politician for his constituency. The bishop is above all the person who sustains and nourishes within the local church an awareness of its dependency on the apostolic mission, on the gift from beyond its boundaries, of the Church established by the Risen Lord – and he does this, of course, primarily and irreducibly as the celebrant of the ‘Catholic oblation’. Hence, again from the earliest days, the clustering of local churches and their bishops around metropolitan sees which represented the channels through which the Gospel came to be shared; and hence the insistence (an insistence that might almost be called fierce in many instances) that bishops received ordination from their neighbours in the metropolia under the leadership of the local primate – and hence too the seriousness of communicating episcopal election by letter to the region and the severity of the sanction of removing a bishop’s name from the formal intercession list.

Primacy needs to be seen as a sign of the continuing reality of active tradition—that is, the sharing of the gift—as the foundation of each local church. So it should be exercised in the service of the further sharing of the gift; this is why it is problematic if a local church so interprets the gift it has received that it cannot fully share it beyond its own cultural home territory… reminding the local assembly and its chief pastor that it must not lose its recognisability or receivability to other communities – across the globe and throughout history.

Archbishop Rowan Williams Rome, Constantinople, and Canterbury: Mother Churches?

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How to pray 3

Praise be to the High Priest of our faith Jesus Christ, the Devout and Holy Sacrifice, Who performed purification of our sins by His own Person and cleansed the world by His sacrifice, the Good One to Whom is due glory, honor and dominion with His Father and with his Holy Spirit at this time of the celebration of this Eucharist and all feasts and seasons and at all times and forever.

O Lord God Almighty, Who accepts the sacrifice of praise from those who call upon You whole-heartedly, accept from our hands, Your sinful servants, this sweet incense and bring us near to Your holy altar. Strengthen us that we may raise to You spiritual offerings and sacrifices on account of our sins and the transgressions of Your people. Make us worthy that we become to You an acceptable sacrifice, and may Your Good Spirit rest upon us and upon these offerings that are set here and upon all Your faithful people in Christ Jesus our Lord with Whom befit You praise, honor and dominion with Your Holy Spirit, now, always and forever.

From God may we receive remission of debts and forgiveness of sins in both worlds forever and ever. Amen.

Syriac Anaphoras – Supplications

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Irenaeus

Today we celebrate Saint Irenaeus

‘So also by the obedience of one man, righteousness having been reintroduced, shall cause life to fructify in those persons who in times past were dead…so did he who is the Word, recapitulating Adam in himself, rightly receive a birth, enabling him to gather up Adam (into himself) from Mary.’ (3.21.10)
‘Luke points out that the pedigree which traces the generation of our Lord back to Adam contains seventy-two generations connecting the end with the beginning, and implying that it is he who has summed up in himself all nations dispersed from Adam downwards.’ (3.22.3)
For if He be not the God of the dead but of the living, yet was called the God of the Fathers who are sleeping, they do indubitably live to God, and have not passed out of existence, since they are children of the resurrection. But the fathers are his children for (Ps 45.17) ‘Instead of thy fathers, thy children have been made to thee’.. For Abraham according to his faith followed the command of the Word of God and with a ready mind delivered up as a sacrifice to God his only begotten and beloved son, in order that God might also be pleased to offer up for all his seed his own beloved and only-begotten Son as a sacrifice for our redemption. (4.5.4) Against the Heresies
It is a good idea to know your saints

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Economics as doctrine of providence

What is economics about? It describes from one angle what people do all day. Jesus (of all people) once noted that since the days of Noah and Lot and until the end of the world, humans have been doing and will be doing four kinds of things. He gave these examples: “planting and building,” “buying and selling,” “marrying and being given in marriage,” and “eating and drinking” : in other words, we produce, exchange, distribute and use (or consume) our human and nonhuman goods. That’s the usual order in action. But in planning, first we choose For Whom we intend to provide, which we will express by the distribution of our goods; next What goods to provide as means for those persons; and finally How to provide these means, through production and (usually) exchange. So we might say that economics is essentially a theory of providence: it describes how we provide for ourselves and the other persons we love, using scarce means that have alternate uses. Scholastic economics began in the mid-13th century when Thomas Aquinas first integrated these four elements, all drawn from Aristotle and Augustine, to describe personal, domestic and political economy. The scholastic economic system is comprehensive, logically complete, mathematical, and empirically verifiable.

Classical economics (1776-1871) began when Adam Smith tried to chop the four scholastic elements to two: dropping Augustine’s theory of utility (which describes consumption) and replacing Augustine’s theory of personal distribution and Aristotle’s theory of social distribution with the mere assumption that everyone is motivated by self-love. This is how classical economics began with only two elements, production and exchange.

Today’s neoclassical economics (1871-c.2000) began when three economists dissatisfied with the failure of classical predictions independently but almost simultaneously reinvented the theory of utility, starting its reintegration with the theories of production and exchange.

I predict that in coming decades Neoscholastic or “AAA” economics (Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas) will revolutionize economics once again by replacing its lost cornerstone – the theory of personal and social distribution.

John D Mueller The Development of Economics

There are two longer versions of the same argument in The Economist as Preacher, The Preacher as Economist (2008) and (2003).