Category: Blog

Chair in Theology, Ministry and Education at King’s College London

The Dept of Education and Professional Studies (DEPS) invites applications from scholars to join one of its most successful and expanding research cohorts – the Centre for Theology Religion and Culture. (CTRC).

Founded by Professor Andrew Walker in 1995 CTRC is a research and teaching centre dedicated to excellence in the fields of Theological Education, Professional Development in Church ministry and Religious Education in schools. The Centre is committed to a multi-disciplinary approach to religion and culture with particular emphasis on Christian theology, social science, and philosophy. The Centre continues to oversee a large and successful MPhil/PhD programme.

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

The Church — the communion of faith and love (as St. Ignatius of Antioch defined it: henosis agapis kai pisteos), the community of saints who are Christ’s own very “members” as his body and bride – is essential to our human being and life. We cannot be human beings – still less, Christians and saints – by ourselves. We need God and his wise and faithful servants. We need God’s commandments and living examples of their fulfillment. We need the Church’s scriptures, sacraments, services and saints. And we need one another. As Tertullian said centuries ago, “One Christian is no Christian.” And as the Russian proverb puts it, “The only thing that a person can do alone is perish.” Like it or not, we are “members of one another” in God. If we like it, it is life and paradise. If we reject it, it is death and hell.

If we have become convinced of anything at all as Orthodox Christians, we are convinced that human beings are not autonomous. The proclamation and defense of human autonomy is the most insidious lie of our day, especially here in North America, and in the Western and Westernized worlds generally. Humans beings are by nature heteronomous. Another law (heteros nomos) is always working in our minds and members.

This “other law” is either the law of God, the law of Christ, the law of the Holy Spirit, the law of liberty and life that can only be recognized, received and realized by holy humility, or it is the law of sin and death. (cf. Romans 7-8) When the law within us is God’s law, then we are who we really are, and we are sane and free. But when that law is the law of sin and death, then we are not ourselves, and we are insane, enslaved and sold to sin.

I am convinced that what C.S. Lewis foresaw has happened, and is still happening with ever more catastrophic consequences, in our Western and Westernized worlds. It happens that men and women who once were human are simply no longer so. They have become nothing but minds and matter, brains and bodies, computers and consumers, calculators and copulators, constructers and cloners who believe that they are free and powerful but who are in fact being destroyed by the very “Nature” that they wish to conquer as they are enslaved to an oligarchy of “Conditioners” who are themselves enslaved and destroyed by their insane strivings to define, design, manage and manipulate a world and a humanity bereft of the God who boundlessly loves them.

Father Thomas Hopko St Vladimir Seminary Commencement address

It was in this classical tradition of the Early Church that Karl Barth took his position early in his theological career. His road into it was through his struggle, begun in his Swiss parish, over the nature and content of divine Revelation, as he sought to expound the Scriptures and proclaim the Word of God. He soon realised that his own struggle was very much like that of both the Nicene Fathers and the Reformers, over the identity and primacy of God’s Revelation in Jesus Christ. In the fourth century the question at issue was the supreme truth of the Deity of Christ and the Holy Spirit, for if they were divided in being and act from God the Father, the Gospel would be empty of any divine content, and there would be no substance to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

In the sixteenth century the very same issue arose in another form over the doctrine of Grace, for if the gift of God were not identical with the Giver, then there could be no real Self-giving of God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, and the Word of the Gospel would be empty of any divine reality. Here too the doctrine of the Trinity was at stake, and with it the very foundation of Christian theology. Thus Karl Barth found himself compelled to contend once again for the truth of the Nicene Creed that the incarnate Son is of one and the same being as God the Father and that the Holy Spirit is the Lord and the Giver of life. This was the essential import of the homoousion which gave dogmatic expression to the indivisible oneness in being and agency between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and thus to the fact that precisely by believing in divine Revelation the Church believes in God himself. As Barth liked to express it: ‘God reveals himself as Lord’, ‘God is the content of his Revelation.’

Thomas Forsyth Torrance ‘Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy’ Scottish Journal of Theology 39 (1986)

Damian Thompson believes English Catholic bishops are resisting Benedict’s recent measure to allow the mass to be celebrated in Latin here in England. Here he is on ‘the shabby attempts by various English bishops to block the Pope’s liturgical reforms‘

He urges us to complain about the English bishops’ ‘disastrous attempts to block the reform‘

You do not have to be a fan of the Tridentine liturgy in order to make a protest. What is at issue here is obedience to the Pope – and truthfulness.

Benedict XVI’s apostolic letter Summorum Pontificum gives parishes the right to choose the ancient liturgy, now known as the Extraordinary Form (EF). Yet English bishops, including the Archbishop of Westminster and the Bishop of Leeds, are behaving as if power to grant permission for the EF is still in their hands.

Their unhelpful attitude (to put it mildly) is sowing confusion among the faithful and causing great distress. Moreover, there are reports that the English bishops have consulted their own canon lawyer to see how they can get round the Pope’s ruling. That’s disgraceful.

The Coming Spiritual Tsunami
Three Advent Lectures by The Bishop of London at St Stephen Walbrook

On Dover Beach
Tuesday 4 December at 1pm

The Hurricane Gathers Strength
Tuesday 11 December at 1pm

In Swept House
Tuesday 18 December at 1pm

Saturday 27th October 2007 is the 40th anniversary of the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act.

Time for Change brings together churches, professional bodies and pro-life organisations to mark this anniversary.

There will be a rally in Old Palace Yard outside Parliament on Saturday 27th October followed by a march and a service of remembrance, repentance and healing at Westminster Cathedral.

In the tenth volume in its Liturgical Studies series, A New Song for an Old World, Musical Thought in the Early Church, Calvin Stapert discusses the relationship between the emerging church and the musical culture of the late-antique Mediterranean world. Believing that Christian ideas about music have been â??truncated and twistedâ?? by naturalistic thought since the Enlightenment, Stapert seeks to persuade contemporary evangelicals to embrace the patristic heritage of liturgical music based up the Psalms. This volume is Stapertâ??s brief for a reformation of evangelical worship.

Certainly Stapertâ??s volume is timely. Itâ??s hardly news to Christians living in China and Pakistan that they live in a culture largely opposed to their fundamental beliefs, but for many Western Christians itâ??s a relatively new sensation. While the aggressive secularism and growing atheism of our culture certainly was not a characteristic of Roman antiquity, our contemporary emphasis upon â??diversity,â?? distaste for dogmatic pronouncements, and hedonism was. Romans sometimes condemned Christians as â??haters of mankind.â?? As that charge is again made today, it might benefit Western Christians to see how the Fathers urged believers to order their lives in the face of such a broad societal malediction. With music apparently an important part of the ancient world, what role did the ancient church believe music should play in private piety and public worship?

In chapters dealing with song in the New Testament, the relationship between the church and pagan society, and writings referencing music by Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Augustine, Stapert surveys the sources. Although he makes it clear that he is not an expert in this material, Stapert is skillful in assembling and referencing the work of other writers (and he is generous in his quotations of both primary and secondary sources). His chapter on Augustine is particularly well done and his observation that music for Augustine was a form of rhetoric (and a thus a subcategory of the trivium instead of its own branch in the quadrivium) is insightful and illuminative.

Stapert concludes that â??the early Christians can inspire and encourage us by their courageous and unwavering posture against the corrupt and very popular culture of their day. They can teach us that we need to draw a line, and they can encourage us to stand bravely behind that line.â?? The line for Stapert means that the â??whole Psalter with its full-orbed expressionâ?? should be the central element of Christian music, that the essential stance of the church should be countercultural, and that the Neoplatonic idea (by way of Boethius) of a musica mundana (or divine music of the spheres) should be the foundation of Christian aesthetics.

Lurking in the shadows of Stapertâ??s book is the contemporary evangelical praise service, with its â??seeker friendlyâ?? popular aesthetic, scriptural amnesia, and manipulative stagecraft. His text is a useful indictment of the genus, at least from the viewpoint of the Church Fathers.

Michael Linton A New Song from the Old World

‘Modern’ theologians do not regard biblical theology, that sets out the narrative logic of Scripture, as a respectable form of discourse. Their apologies and caution betray their fear that the hard men of critical historical biblical studies will burst in on them and pour scorn on their proceedings. But the Scriptural exegetes are genuinely not interested in what biblical theologians are saying. They have created for themselves a parallel universe that discusses the same territory in such a different idiom as to make it effectively a separate discourse. The biblical theology and Christian doctrine people have been brought up to whisper in case the neighbours bang on the wall. But they can shout all they like and will never be heard in the neighbouring department. A peace line has been built just where the first and most essential conversation should be taking place, between the Scriptures and the Church, on one side theologians without exegesis, on the other exegetes without theology. Once the particular contribution of systematic theologians was to comment on the work of the theological exegetes, but modern theology can only be a commentary on a work that never takes place. The theologians have been re-trained to give all their effort to providing reasons why theological exegesis is no longer possible, why the Scriptures and the Church, and Church and university, must never be allowed to hear from each other.