Author: Douglas Knight

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Law and Islam

The Lawyers Christian Fellowship and Christian Concern for our Nation are holding a day conference on 28th January

The legal challenges faced by Islam: How should the church respond?

Democracy in the UK and worldwide is being challenged by a new force – that of militant Islam. This conference will look at some of the issues involved in how national and international law can confront this issue, as well as what the appropriate response of the church should be.

Speakers include:

Baroness Caroline Cox – president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide

Dr Sam Solomon – Global expert on Islam and sharia law.

Paul Diamond and Charlotte Thorneycroft

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Liturgy shapes Christians

Christians shape the liturgy, but the liturgy shapes Christians.

The classical model of formation, paideia, understood formation to be the drawing out of the person. Placed alongside the Christian experience of vocation, it can be seen in terms of our becoming, in community with others and in communion with God, the person that God is calling us to be. In baptism we are made a child of God; in giving ourselves to praise we discover something of the liberty of the children of God, and through Christ’s self-gift at communion, we again ‘become what we receive’ (Augustine of Hippo). This is why worship is the most intense, though not the exclusive locus of Christian formation, and for this reason liturgical formation and education should be given the highest priority within a ‘learning church’. The desired outcome of a programme of liturgical formation is a closer engagement of worshippers in the liturgy of the Church, and its corollary is the realization of the expectation that liturgy will transform us.

Transforming Worship: Report of the Liturgical Commission

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To suffer out of love is fundamental for humanity

To suffer with the other and for others; to suffer for the sake of truth and justice; to suffer out of love and in order to become a person who truly loves — these are fundamental elements of humanity, and to abandon them would destroy man himself.

Are we capable of this? Is the other important enough to warrant my becoming, on his account, a person who suffers? Does truth matter to me enough to make suffering worthwhile? Is the promise of love so great that it justifies the gift of myself? In the history of humanity, it was the Christian faith that had the particular merit of bringing forth within man a new and deeper capacity for these kinds of suffering that are decisive for his humanity. The Christian faith has shown us that truth, justice and love are not simply ideals, but enormously weighty realities. It has shown us that God —Truth and Love in person—desired to suffer for us and with us. Bernard of Clairvaux coined the marvellous expression: Impassibilis est Deus, sed non incompassibilis — God cannot suffer, but he can suffer with. Man is worth so much to God that he himself became man in order to suffer with man in an utterly real way.

Benedict XVI Spe Salvi (39).

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Refusal to meet – refusal of the cross

How then should the Lambeth Conference be viewed? It is not a canonical tribunal, but neither is it merely a general consultation. It is a meeting of the chief pastors and teachers of the Communion, seeking an authoritative common voice. It is also a meeting designed to strengthen and deepen the sense of what the episcopal vocation is.

Some reactions to my original invitation have implied that meeting for prayer, mutual spiritual enrichment and development of ministry is somehow a way of avoiding difficult issues. On the contrary: I would insist that only in such a context can we usefully address divisive issues. If, as the opening section of this letter claimed, our difficulties have their root in whether or how far we can recognise the same gospel and ministry in diverse places and policies, we need to engage more not less directly with each other. This is why I have repeatedly said that an invitation to Lambeth does not constitute a certificate of orthodoxy but simply a challenge to pray seriously together and to seek a resolution that will be as widely owned as may be.

And this is also why I have said that the refusal to meet can be a refusal of the cross – and so of the resurrection. We are being asked to see our handling of conflict and potential division as part of our maturing both as pastors and as disciples. I do not think this is either an incidental matter or an evasion of more basic questions.

Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advent letter

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Many jurisdictions in one territory

These three ecclesiologies are, in order of their historical appearance, riteâ??based ecclesiologies (Catholic), confessional ecclesiologies (Protestant), and ethnically based ecclesiologies (Orthodox).

These three ecclesiologies, are essentially of the same nature: that is, they are established according to aggressive, almost militant, principles. Moreover, they have dominated Church life since their appearance and also determined the statutory texts that regulate the existence and functioning of all Churches since that day.

We are now in a position to reâ??examine the causes that brought about these ecclesiological deviations. While very different in their origin and outlook, they resemble one another, and also continue to coexist, though without creating any communion or unity between them. A key common denominator is what I shall call â??coâ??territoralityâ??, i.e.: separate Churches sharing the same territory. This is an extremely serious problem found throughout the second millennium â?? the same millennium that has faced numerous insoluble issues of an exclusively ecclesiological nature. By contrast, the first millennium, which had to deal with Christological issues, resolved most of them. In other words, when Christological problems appeared during the first millennium, the
Church was able to engage with them and resolve them in a conciliar manner, but we have not been able to do the same with the
ecclesiological problems that have arisen in the second millennium.

These three divergent ecclesiologies, which developed from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, have essentially led the Church into a postâ??ecclesiological age, in which we now live. We seek superficial solutions, whether through Councils like Vatican II, which proposed an increase in ecumenism, or through increasing efforts to federalise the Protestant Churches, or even by the fruitless attempt to summon a panâ??Orthodox Council, which has been in preparation, to no avail, for almost half a century. It is certain that the true solution will neither be ritualist, nor ecumenist, nor confessional, nor federal â?? and it will certainly not be ethnic and multiâ??jurisdictional. It can only be ecclesiological and canonical, and this is perhaps why it seems to be so distant (if not utopian) in todayâ??s age of of Christian modernism that remains woefully nonâ??ecclesiological and multiâ??jurisdictional.

Archimandrite Grogorios Our ‘Post-Ecclesiological’ Age

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Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the Mount and Christian Ethics – a conference 5th-7th September, Wescott House, Cambridge

Presenters include:

Oliver O’Donovan
Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology
Edinburgh University

Glen Stassen
Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics
Fuller Theological Seminary

Susan Parsons
President, Society Study of Christian Ethics
Editor, Studies in Christian Ethics

Carolyn Muessig
Senior Lecturer in Medieval Theology
University of Bristol

Richard Bauckham
Professor Emeritus of New Testament
University of St Andrews

The conference committee invite short papers related to the theme of the event and more general outlines of work in progress

For further details and booking arrangements will appear at:
www.ssce.org.uk

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In communion

Christians have a relationship of direct and personal familiarity with the Church and the saints. The relationship involves our entire being. Yet when someone lights a candle or makes an offering, you will often hear the remark that such an action is meaningless if that person is not thinking the right set of thoughts. But we must be clear that it is not our thoughts that make everything what it is: what is significant is that we have left home and come to Church to meet with the saints. The liturgy is simply the realization of our relationship to God, to the whole communion of his saints and to the entire world. Its purpose is not simply to grasp something intellectually or arrive at some state of mind, for the mind will follow in its own time.

When the congregation signs themselves with the Cross each time a saint is mentioned this shows that, even if they are not keeping up with the sermon, they enjoy a living relationship with that saint. But while the Christian is in church to keep up their relationship with the saints, the preacher, always searching around for the identity of the Church, is unable to resist telling others what they should be thinking. The Church can judge and teach the world, but it also needs to clear away the confusion that hides its own truth.

John Zizioulas Lectures in Christian Dogmatics

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The displacement of ancient and established communities

I have been particularly concerned at reports of the decline in the proportion of Christians in the [Middle East] region and the displacement of ancient and established communities. The effects of this tragic situation, about which I have spoken here in the UK as well as in the region on several occasions, are felt not only in the individual lives so deeply affected but also in the threat to some of the core values that underpin healthy societies. Not only will individual nations in the Middle and Near East be immeasurably poorer should they lose viable Christian communities, but the wider international community is likely to suffer as a consequence too.

Archbishop of Canterbury’s message to the General Assembly of the Middle East Council of Churches

Core values? Like civil society and rule of law, perhaps? Only the presence of Christian communities prevents these countries from becoming Islamic totalitarianisms, perhaps?

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Saint Nicholas

Each version of the modern day Santa Claus derives in fact from the same historic person: the Bishop Nicholas from the city of Myra (an ancient city of modern day Turkey), who lived in Asia Minor between the III and IV century, during the Emperor Constantineâ??s reign who is said to have regularly given gifts to the poor.

Now it seems that the Saint, who distinguishes himself from the others by his generosity, justice, and capacity to intervene decisively and fairly, has performed a â??miracleâ??. With great joy and satisfaction on behalf of the entire Orthodox church, the ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew I, after five years of patience and insisting determination towards the authorities of Ankara has now been granted permission to celebrate the Eucharistic liturgy in the church of the Saint.

The meeting last year in Ankara between the patriarch and the new Minster of Culture was the turning point. The Minister said, â??I earnestly want every citizen in this country to be able to freely celebrate their own religion in the place seen as most important for worship.â?? And the proof that he did not want to go back on his word was that not only did he allow the mass to be celebrated in Saint Nicholas in Demre, but he also gave forty-thousand Turkish Lira (twenty-five thousand euros) for the completion of the basilicaâ??s makeover. Especially in the winter and in the spring, the basilica is submerged under rain water because it is three meters under the street level damaging the mosaics and the frescos found in the crypt of the sarcophagus of the Bishop Nicholas.

A mass for Saint Nicholas

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If we give up talking of truth power has the last word

In our own country, it seems to be assumed by many that if we could only get the relation between ‘faith communities’ right, social harmony would inevitably follow. And conversely, any expression of a belief that one’s own religious loyalty is absolute, any statement of the belief that I, as a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist or whatever, am speaking the truth, is regarded as threatening and unacceptable. Surely the problem lies with this contest over the truth; surely, if religious people would stop speaking about truth and acknowledge that they were only expressing opinions and conditional loyalties, we should be spared the risk of continuing social conflict and even violence.

But what this hopeful fantasy conceals is an assumption that talking about truth is always less important than talking about social harmony; and, since social harmony doesn’t seem to have any universal self-evident definition, it is bound to be defined by those who happen to hold power at any given time – which, uncomfortably, implies that power itself is more important than truth. To be concerned about truth is at least to recognise that there are things about humanity and the world that cannot be destroyed by oppression and injustice, that no power can dismantle. The cost of giving up talking of truth is high: it means admitting that power has the last word. And ever since Plato’s Republic political thinkers have sought to avoid this conclusion, because it means that there is no significance at all in the witness of someone who stands against the powers that prevail at any given time; somehow, political philosophy needs to give an account of suffering for the sake of conscience, and without a notion of truth that is more than simply a list of the various things people prefer to believe, no such account can be given.

Archbishop of Canterbury Lecture given at the Building Bridges Conference in Singapore