Author: Douglas Knight

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The assurance of friendship

One of the most chilling things on this journey to the Holy Land was the almost total absence in both major communities of any belief that there was a political solution to hand. So step back from that for a moment and ask, â??What do both the communities in the Holy Land ask from us â?? not just from that convenient abstraction, the â??international communityâ??, but from you and me?â?? Both deserve the best; and the best we can give them in such circumstances is at least the assurance of friendship. Go and see, go and listen; let them know, Israelis and Palestinians alike, that they will be heard and not forgotten. Both communities in their different ways dread â??with good reason â?? a future in which they will be allowed to disappear while the world looks elsewhere. The beginning of some confidence in the possibility of a future is the assurance that there are enough people in the world committed to not looking away and pretending it isnâ??t happening. It may not sound like a great deal, but it is open to all of us to do; and without friendship, it isnâ??t possible to ask of both communities the hard questions that have to be asked, the questions about the killing of the innocent and the brutal rejection of each otherâ??s dignity and liberty.

Archbishop Rowan Williams The Poor deserve the best Christmas sermon

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Ten theses on the Significance of the Episcopal Office for the Communion of the Church

Thesis One:

The Bishop serves the koinonia of the gospel into which the baptised are incorporated by God the Holy Spirit

Through the gospel God calls all people into relationship and establishes a covenant of love, mercy and justice. By baptism the people of God become participants in the visible body of Jesus Christ. The bishop is called to serve this new fellowship by actively fostering the koinonia of the Body of Christ. Just as the eucharist is the focal event which connects communities of faith together so the bishop is the focal person who links communities of faith not only to one another but to the wider Church. As a result the bishop has a universal and ecumenical role. This fundamental theological truth challenges all parochial conceptions of the episcopate that fail to transcend ethnic, social, and cultural realities in which the episcopate is, by nature, necessarily embedded.

Bishops of the Anglican Communion have primary responsibility for Anglicans. However, the nature of the episcopal office means that bishops are called to lead the Church towards a deeper koinonia amongst all God’s people, and in so doing represent the wider Christian community to the diocese. This universal and ecumenical ministry belongs to the bishop’s role as a symbol of unity. Yet this symbol is ambiguous because the Church is divided and torn. In this context the bishop is a sign of a broken Church looking to its Lord for healing and hope through the power of the Spirit.

Inter Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission The Anglican Way: The Significance of the Episcopal Office for the Communion of the Church

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The Word became flesh and lived among us

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

For to which of the angels did God ever say, â??You are my Son, today I have begotten youâ??? Or again, â??I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a sonâ???

And again, when he brings the firstborn into the world, he says, â??Let all God’s angels worship him.â?? Of the angels he says, â??He makes his angels winds, and his ministers a flame of fire.â??
But of the Son he says, â??Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. 9 You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness;
therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions.â??

And, â??You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands; they will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment, like a robe you will roll them up, like a garment they will be changed. But you are the same, and your years will have no end.â??

Hebrews 1.1-12

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

The Gospel of John 1. 1-14

Saint Mary Stoke Newington

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How Should We Worship?

Because it is often all too obvious that historical knowledge cannot be elevated straight into the status of a new liturgical norm, this archaeological enthusiasm was very easily combined with pastoral pragmatism: people first of all decided to eliminate everything that was not recognised as original and was thus not part of the “substance”, and then they supplemented the “archaeological remains”, if these still seemed insufficient, in accordance with “pastoral insights”. But what is “pastoral”? The judgments made about these questions by intellectual professors were often influenced by their rationalist presuppositions and not infrequently missed the point of what really supports the life of the faithful. Thus it is that nowadays, after the Liturgy was extensively rationalised during the early phase of reform, people are eagerly seeking forms of solemnity, looking for “mystical” atmosphere and for something of the sacred. Yet because–necessarily and more and more clearly–people’s judgments as to what is pastorally effective are widely divergent, the “pastoral” aspect has become the point at which “creativity” breaks in, destroying the unity of the Liturgy and very often confronting us with something deplorably banal. That is not to deny that the eucharistic Liturgy, and likewise the Liturgy of the Word, is often celebrated reverently and “beautifully”, in the best sense, on the basis of people’s faith. Yet since we are looking for the criteria of reform, we do also have to mention the dangers, which unfortunately in the last few decades have by no means remained just the imaginings of those traditionalists opposed to reform.

I should like to come back to the way that worship was presented, in a liturgical compendium, as a “project for reform” and, thus, as a workshop in which people are always busy at something. Different again, and yet related to this, is the suggestion by some Catholic liturgists that we should finally adapt the liturgical reform to the “anthropological turn” of modern times and construct it in an anthropocentric style. If the Liturgy appears first of all as the workshop for our activity, then what is essential is being forgotten: God. For the Liturgy is not about us, but about God. Forgetting about God is the most imminent danger of our age. As against this, the Liturgy should be setting up a sign of God’s presence. Yet what happens if the habit of forgetting about God makes itself at home in the Liturgy itself and if in the Liturgy we are thinking only of ourselves? In any and every liturgical reform, and every liturgical celebration, the primacy of God should be kept in view first and foremost.

How Should We Worship? Preface to The Organic Development of the Liturgy by Alcuin Reid, O.S.B. by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

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Theological scrutiny in service of the Communion

Anglicans value being part of a world Communion, but successive controversies have made it increasingly unclear what it is that they have in common. The contention of this document is that Anglican ‘communion’ will be maintained and nurtured, not just by preserving existing ecclesiastical structures but through a renewal of the theological tradition which brought the Communion into being.

To speak in this way of ‘renewal’ does not mean just a reinforcement of that tradition. As will be seen as the argument progresses, Anglicanism has developed by way of faithful responses to the gospel by churches facing concrete challenges in particular circumstances. At critical moments in their history they have been inspired to draw resources from their theological and spiritual inheritance which enabled them to address seemingly new situations in new ways. Such moments of renewal were eventually judged to be consistent with the tradition from which it was drawn, and generally won recognition and support from others who shared its patrimony. It is that sort of response which is required by the Anglican Communion at the present point of its history, as it faces circumstances threatening to disrupt its life and call into question the tradition itself….

A covenant, which rehearses the theological tradition from which Anglicanism has developed, and establishes clear commitments for the way it can maintain its cohesiveness, seems the most likely way to secure its communion for the foreseeable future. The one thing that Anglicans cannot permit at this time is for disputants to refuse to allow their opinion to be submitted to theological scrutiny. Those involved in disputes must not only listen to each other, but also attend to the wisdom of the wider Christian community.

The Anglican theological tradition cannot be content with any claim to communion which separates the gospel of Christ from the reality of his Church.

Inter Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission Summary Argument from the IATD’s ‘Communion Study’ October 2006

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Blogged

Sorry. What with the grind of term and the excitement of events this autumn I never got around to doing any actual blogging. I haven’t posted anything of my own since August. It takes me much longer to post something I have written that to post a couple of paragraphs, already polished and published, by someone else. There is no limit to the number of times I can change what I have written, and a day later it will still look like gibberish to me – to you too probably. I wasn’t born to blog, being neither spontaneous nor self-controlled enough.

But I have enjoyed everything I have posted here, in particular that Regensberg moment, but also all the rest of Pope Benedict’s wonderful teaching that the secular or public sphere depends on the church, and reason and the possibility of truthful discourse depends on the gospel. I was amazed that the British media, and British evangelicals, failed to see what was at stake here. So once again:

Fellow members of the British public square: Benedict is arguing for the public testing of ideas and all the other good practices required for rationality and society.

Fellow evangelicals, Benedict is a Christian. It may be that this Christian is being hammered by the media because the world sometimes opposes the gospel; the extent of the world’s opposition may even be indication of the depth of the gospel he is holding out to it. When the mob is giving some Christian a kicking, joining that mob may endanger your salvation.

You phenomenologists, Benedict is intellectually far more rewarding than all of the the epigones of Heidegger put together.

Benedict produces wonderful, insightful evangelical teaching. His output, written and apparently off the cuff is extraordinary. I enjoyed his visit to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Constantinople for a brief reprise of the ‘two lungs’ of the Church. The unity of the Church is all the evidence of his power and love that God offers the world. No part of the church catholic will grow without finding the humility to examine the teaching and perhaps even accept the discipline of the rest of the Church.

There have also been a good number of pieces from Archbishop Rowan Williams, on the church, public sphere, university and Christian calling, and from Oliver O’Donovan at Fulcrum on how to we may learn the skills of judgment, and so learn how to make decisions on the vexed questions of church order and sexuality, and how to live together within those decisions. I am staggered by how slow we are in the UK to take up the material provided by Williams, O’Donovan, and even more provided by the Church’s own councils. About the discussions of the future of the Anglican church and covenant, I refer you to the Windsor process and covenant discussion documents. I find it extraordinary that there is no theological discussion of these thoroughly theological documents in any academic theological setting, in London or the UK. Let me know if you hear of any.

There is a mountain of work in front of me, almost none of it paid, but I am going to enjoy it anyway. There are books on their way, and still more rumours of books, that will delight readers of Colin Gunton and of John Zizioulas. It is good to see the emergence of some serious scholarship on the theological revolution represented by Zizioulas’ eschatological ontology. Of course, since this is a theological revolution, is also just a recovery of what we should never have forgotten. So get yourself a copy of Communion and Otherness for a happy new year. Meanwhile brother webmaster is building a content management system for a renewed ‘Resources’ website, with new buttons to click on, but one that I will be able to work this time, he thinks. When that is done, I will mend broken links to Zizioulas’ work.

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The first truly post-Christian generation

Who would have thought that, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the most vibrant and serious field of Christian study would be the Church Fathers? But it is true. They are returning.

We certainly need their help. I teach at a Catholic university that employs hundreds of professors, and the evidence is plain to see. Only two or three scientists seem willing or able to speak about the relation between the truths of faith and the hypotheses of science. Nobody studies or teaches Dante. The extensive modern tradition of Catholic social teaching has no role to play in political science. The history department employs no one to teach the Middle Ages. Administrative initiatives consistently emphasize â??diversity,â?? and the practical effect, whether intended or not, is a slow reorientation of faculty and curriculum away from a collective focus on the Western Christian intellectual tradition. The retiring professor who specialized in Dryden and Pope is replaced by a young Ph.D. whose interests run to gender studies and postcolonial theory.

If this is happening at a self-consciously Catholic university, imagine what the situation is like at Yale and UCLA. Intellectual life is now dominated by the first truly post-Christian generation. A friend of mine at Yale two decades ago wrote his senior paper on James Joyce. He was fascinated by Joyceâ??s use of trinitarian language. Ignorant of Christian doctrine, he set out to find a faculty member who might provide guidance. I remember his dismay when he told me that he could not find anyone who could explain to him the classical Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

The situation has only gotten worse in the intervening years. A student at Princeton and Harvardâ??or Georgetown and Boston College, for that matterâ??now studies with teachers who have no knowledge of Christianity other than the crude caricatures long retailed by progressive illuminati. Christianity no longer exists as an integrated worldview that shapes the education and mental habits of modern people in the West. The loss is significant: None of us can reinvent a Christian literary imagination, political theory, scientific culture, or systematic theology on our own, because a Christian intellectual culture is a collective, multigenerational project.

It is not the case, however, that we must live alone in the ruins of Christendom. The poverty of the present need not cut us off from the wealth of the past. One of the most important new facts about Christian theology in North America is the sudden popularity of the theologians and pastors, monks and bishops, martyrs and missionaries, who first fashioned a Christian culture nearly two thousand years ago. The Church Fathers are returning as agents of renewal, guiding us toward the biblical source of a truly Christian culture.

R.R. Reno The Return of the Fathers

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Catholicity 10

We cannot know other people in a full sense without love. We have want to be in relationship with them, and be recognised by them. We must look for their response, and respond to it gladly when we receive it. The highest form of recognition is mutual recognition in friendship, fellowship and love. Any other form of knowledge, may effect to keep its object just an object and no more. If it refuses to allow it its proper context and purpose, it may prevent that object from reaching its telos and becoming fully a creature.

All things become themselves as they participate in Christ. Christ draws them into this participation. What starts solely his act, and always remains his act, also becomes their act. From his life and his relatedness to all other persons and things, their life and relatedness to all others grow. They participate in his communion with the Father and in the freedom of God that this involves. In Christ knowledge and being are inseparable – God’s word and act are one.

Christ’s knowledge is the giving, taking and returning again of the proper final identity of all creatures – as creatures of God. The participation of his people in the life of God means that they participate in Christ’s act of creation and reception of creation. They receive all creation, each creature, person and thing, from Christ, by giving their public acknowledgement of the origin and destiny of that creature. In giving this acknowledgement, and so in some measure returning this creature back to God, they have a relationship with this creature, but neither they nor the other creature is solely defined by it. This relationship does not become necessary to either of them, so they remain free in it and they survive when it changes.

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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.