laudable Practice

From a 1619 Lenten sermon by Donne.  Note again the reference to the Lenten fast and - as in the 1624 sermon - the understanding of this fasting as preparation for receiving the Sacrament at Easter. ... the Lord's day, of which the whole Lent is the vigil, and the eve. All this time of mortification, and our often meeting in this place to hear of our mortality, and our immortality, which are the two real texts, and subjects of all our sermons; all this time is the eve of the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. That is the Lord's day, when all our mortification, and dejection of spirit, and humbling of our souls, shall be abundantly exalted in his resurrection, and when all our fasts and abstinence shall be abundantly recompensed in the participation of his body and his blood in the sacrament; God's chancery is always open, and his seal works always; at all times remission of sins may be sealed to a penitent soul in the sacrament.

From a 1624 Lenten sermon of Donne: That which God commanded by his Word, to be done at some times (that we should humble our souls by fasting) the same God commands by his church, to be done now: in the Scriptures you have preceptum , The thing itself, what; in the church, you have the Nunc , The time, when. The Scriptures are God's voice; the church is his echo; a redoubling, a repeating of some particular syllables, and accents of the same voice. And as we hearken with some earnestness, and some admiration at an echo, when perchance we do not understand the voice that occasioned that echo; so do the obedient children of God apply themselves to the echo of his church, when perchance otherwise they would less understand the voice of God, in his Scriptures, if that voice were not so redoubled unto them. This fasting then, thus enjoined by God, for the general, in his word, and thus limited to this time, for the particular, in his church, is indeed but a continuation of a grea...

From a 1621 Lenten sermon of John Donne, on the text 'The last Enemy that shall be destroyed, is Death' (I Corinthians 15:26): This is a text of the resurrection, and it is not Easter yet; but it is Easter eve; all Lent is but the vigil, the eve of Easter: to so long a festival as never shall end, the resurrection, we may well begin the eve betimes. Forty years long was God grieved for that generation which he loved; let us be content to humble ourselves forty days, to be fitter for that glory which we expect. In the Book of God there are many songs; there is but one Lamentation: and that one Song of Solomon, nay some one of David's hundred and fifty Psalms, is longer than the whole book of Lamentations. Make way to an everlasting Easter by a short Lent, to an undeterminable glory, by a temporary humiliation. You must weep these tears, tears of contrition, tears of mortification, before God will wipe all tears from your eyes; you must die this death, this death of the ...

No change has been made in the formula of Ordination of Priests, though desired by some;   for, upon a full review of our Formularies, we deem it plain, and here declare that, save in the matter of Ecclesiastical censures, no power or authority is by them ascribed to the Church or to any of its Ministers in respect of forgiveness of sins after Baptism, other than that of declaring and pronouncing, on God's part remission of sins to all that are truly penitent, to the quieting of their conscience, and the removal of all doubt and scruple; nor is it anywhere in our Formularies taught or implied that confession to, and absolution by, a Priest are any conditions of God's pardon; but, on the contrary, it is fully taught that all Christians who sincerely repent, and unfeignedly believe the Gospel, may draw nigh, as worthy Communicants, to the Lord's Table without any such confession or absolution. These words from the Preface to the Church of Ireland's 1878 Revision of ...

Yesterday, Quinquagesima, I was again struck by the power of the penitential rite at the beginning of Mattins and how it ensures that we are 'shriven' before the beginning of Lent.  Sentences of Scripture, Exhortation, General Confession, Absolution, and Lord's Prayer combine as a searching, weighty rite of penitence which, as Hooker declares, has no material difference from private confession, such "that any man's safety, or ghostly good should depend upon it" ( LEP VI.4.15). Richard Mant's Notes on the BCP (1820) - gathering commentary from Laudian sources of the 17th and Old High Church sources of the 18th centuries - provides a superb insight into the significance of Cranmer's addition of this penitential rite to Mattins and Evensong in 1552, and its importance in the life of the parish, ensuring that Confession and Absolution is routinely experienced by the ordinary congregation and the ordinary parishioner as a means of grace. Sentences ...

From John Bramhall's  The Catching of Leviathan or the Great Whale   (1658).  Bramhall here critiques Hobbes's assertion that the civil laws are the ultimate standard of good and evil, invoking against it the natural law written on Adam's heart "by the finger of God".  Without this natural law, goodness and justice - fundamental to the flourishing of the commonwealth - become "empty names without any reality", a description which resonates in our contemporary cultural context. Flatterers are the common moths of great palaces, where “Alexander's friends” are more numerous than “the king's friends;” but such gross palpable pernicious flattery as this is, I did never meet with, so derogatory both to piety and policy. What deserved he, who should do his uttermost endeavour to poison a common fountain, whereof all the commonwealth must drink? He doth the same, who poisoneth the mind of a sovereign prince. Are “the civil laws the rules of good and ...

From John Bramhall's The Catching of Leviathan or the Great Whale (1658), a critique of Hobbes.  Here Bramhall describes Hobbes's "trim commonwealth" as leaving humanity "in the wilderness", stripped of natural law and its 'thick' account of our obligations to God and neighbour: Yet, to let us see how inconsistent and irreconcileable he is with himself, elsewhere, reckoning up all the laws of nature at large, even twenty in number, he hath not one word that concerneth religion, or that hath the least relation in the world to God. As if a man were like the colt of a wild ass in the wilderness, without any owner or obligation. Thus, in describing the laws of nature, this great clerk forgetteth the God of nature, and the main and principal laws of nature, which contain a man’s duty to his God and the principal end of his creation. Perhaps he will say, that he handleth the laws of nature there, only so far as may serve to the constitution or settlem...

Despite the deeply inaccurate portrayal of Burke's Anglicanism ("semi-detached adhesiveness") in Peter Stanlis's  Edmund Burke and Natural Law - a view that owes something to the fanciful, unstable imaginings of the extreme Tractarian Froude - this description of his vision of Natural Law coheres with J.C.D. Clark's magisterial account in which Burke's defence of the Anglican settlement in Church and State is an expression of classical Anglican political theology: Certainly Burke's interpretation of the Natural Law was identical with the Catholic principle, taught by all the Scholastic philosophers, that sovereignty lies in God's reason and justice, rather than, as the Calvinists held, in His private will and power.  On this essential point Burke was in the mainstream of the High Church Anglican tradition of Hooker, Laud, Lancelot Andrewes, Bramhall, Jeremy Taylor, and many other seventeenth-century Anglican divines. As John Milbank emphasises,...

In the Preface (6) to   The Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgy , Jeremy Taylor provides this description of the English Reformation: For to the churches of the Roman communion we can say that ours is reformed, to the reformed churches we can say that ours is orderly and decent; for we were freed from the impositions and lasting errors of a tyrannical spirit, and yet from the extravagancies of a popular spirit too; our reformation was done without tumult, and yet we saw it necessary to reform; we were zealous to cast away the old errors, but our zeal was balanced with consideration and the results of authority: not like women or children when they are affrighted with fire in their clothes; we shaked off the coal indeed, but not our garments, lest we should have exposed our churches to that nakedness, which the excellent men of our sister churches complained to be among themselves.  We might describe this as a Burkean account of the English Reformation. ...

... the first form of king Edward's service book was approved with the exception of a very few clauses, which upon that occasion were reviewed and expunged, till it came to that second form and modest beauty it was in the edition of MDLII. Jeremy Taylor in The Preface (9) to The Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgy .

When we consider the texts from the Prayer Book tradition's Holy Communion that have been lost in the process of liturgical revision, what comes first to mind?  The Prayer of Humble Access is often enthusiastically mentioned by those in the pews.  The Comfortable Words were a significant part of popular Anglican eucharistic piety, while the Words of Administration - dismissed as too wordy and clumsy by liturgical revisers - rather beautifully captured the balance of Prayer Book sacramental teaching. We should also, however, consider the Prayer for the Church Militant.  It has been entirely lost in liturgical revision, replaced by vague, general directions, the content of which is normally at the whim of the person leading the intercessions.  This has been a loss of both the experience of common prayer and the theological vision which the Prayer for the Church Militant embodied, a theological vision of church, commonwealth, parish, and this "transitory life". In...

Jeremy Taylor in Ductor dubitantium ,  Book II.II.i & ii on how the laws of the commonwealth are to be an expression of natural law, and thus integral to our flourishing and the common good: For all good laws, and all justice, hath the same reasonableness, the same rules and measures, and are therefore good because they are profitable, - and are therefore just, because they are measured by the common analogies and proportions: - and are therefore necessary, because they are bound upon us by God mediately or immediately. And therefore Cicero defined virtue to be "perfecta et ad summum perducta natura," or "Habitus animi naturae modo, rationi consentaneus," "The perfection of nature,” or “a habit of mind agreeing to natural reason" ... And there is a proportion of this truth also in all the wise laws of commonwealths. The reasons of which are nothing but the proportions of nature, and the prime propositions of justice, common utility, and natura...

Speaking of "the High Church divines ... from Andrewes to Gibson", G.W.O. Addleshaw in his classic The High Church Tradition (1941) points to the Convocation Book (1606) - the work of the Convocation of the Church of England, addressing 'the Government of God's Holy Catholic Church, and the Kingdoms of the Whole World' - as "the most useful exposition of their views" on the ecclesiastical and civil polities.  The extract below (Book II.ii) grounds the civil polity in natural law and the Augustinian-Thomist insistence that grace does not destroy nature, an insistence shared by Hooker when he declares "that grace hath use of nature" ( LEP III.8.6).  This vision of the commonwealth has significance in both delivering the Church and the Christian proclamation from, in the words of John Hughes , "an overly angelic anthropology" and in rightly ordering common life in the polity towards the Good and the True. It is a certain rule in D...

I do not wonder that, though your limbs are chilled by age, your heart still glows with patriotic fire. I admire this, and, instead of grieving, I rejoice to learn that you not only remember, but by your life and practice illustrate, the maxim that there is no limit either in measure or in time to the claims which their country has upon the care and service of right-hearted men - Augustine,  Letter 91 , to the pagan Nectarius. Augustine's exchange with Nectarius provides an insight into how love of country was regarded as praiseworthy by this great Doctor of the Church.  What is more, Augustine emphasises that contrary to the critique of the Church articulated by pagan accounts of the virtue of love of patriam , it is Christians who are the authentic patriots: Consider now whether you would prefer to see your country flourish by the piety of its inhabitants, or by their escaping the punishment of their crimes; by the correction of their manners, or by outrages to which ...

The observation of these days and the weeks following appear to be as ancient as the times of Gregory the Great. The design of them is to call us back from our Christmas feasting and joy, in order to prepare ourselves for fasting and humiliation, in the approaching time of Lent; from thinking of the manner of Christ's coming into the world, to reflect upon the cause of it, our own sins and miseries; that so, being convinced of the reasonableness of punishing and mortifying ourselves for our sins, we may the more strictly and religiously apply ourselves to those duties when the proper time for them comes - Wheatly on Septuagesima, quoted in Mant's Notes . Wheatly's description of Gesima-tide summarises the wisdom of setting aside these weeks before Lent in preparation for the time of fasting and penitence, so that "we may the more strictly and religiously apply ourselves to those duties when the proper time for them comes".  If the discipline of Lent is to be...

I recently came across this post on 'Stuart Anglicanism' by the admirable W. Bradford Littlejohn (of the equally admirable Davenant Institute ).  Amidst some excellent points about the nature of conformity in the Jacobean and Caroline Church, it was noticeable that the old myths about Laudianism were perpetuated: They ... saw their church as something of a via media between mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism. They carried the enthusiasm for liturgical ceremony and episcopal polity considerably further than the Ceremonialists, turning ceremony from an adornment of worship to its main focus, and developing strong jure divino claims for the institution of bishops.  Each of these points can be challenged.  The notion of the ecclesia Anglicana as a via media between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism is a later Tractarian myth, not evident at all amongst the Laudians who regarded their Church as the jewel amongst the Churches of the Reformation and definitively...

... it was a vote against all that liberalism has wrought and all that liberalism has brought: a world of rampant social, economic, and cultural insecurity. This is how Red Tory thinker Phillip Blond has summarised recent years in UK politics, beginning with the Brexit referendum and leading to December's general election.  The liberal order of Free Market and Autonomous Individual has made a cultural desert and called it peace.  This has provoked a search for solidarity, evident in the politics of Left and Right over the last decade.  While the desire for solidarity is affirmed in the classical Christian political theology of Augustine, Thomas, and Hooker,  it is also recognised that solidarity within the polity can be a disordered love. This means that the current political and cultural context also carries with it the potential of grave spiritual dangers.  The empty banality of the liberal order can, in other words, be replaced by fouler, darker visions....

Do read Ben Crosby's recent Earth and Altar post on the Articles of Religion highlighted the modesty of the Articles as a "chastened but firm construal of orthodoxy – one which does not arrogate to itself claims of perfection". The post brought to mind an August 1625 letter to the Earl of Buckingham from three bishops - Buckeridge of Rochester, Howson of Oxford, and Laud of St Davids - amidst the controversy surrounding Richard Montague , the avant-garde conformist cleric whose A New Gag for an Old Goose (an apologetic work responding to Roman claims) led to allegations of 'Arminianism'. The Church of England ... when it was reformed from the superstitious opinions broached or maintained by the Church of Rome, refused the apparent and dangerous errors, and would not be too busy with every particular school-point.  The cause why she held this moderation was, because she could not be able to preserve any unity amongst Christians, if men were forced to subs...

Is God a populist?  The question is a title from a new book , a partnership between Theos and the Norwegian Christian think tank, Skaperkraft .  One of the book's chapters, by Jurgen Moltmann , has been posted on the Theos website.  The book's purpose, of course, is to provide a theological challenge and refutation of populism.  To be clear, populism - like any ideology - must be subject to theological critique and contradiction.  If, however, the Moltmann chapter is any indication of the rest of the book, it radically fails to do so.  Rather than providing a meaningful theological critique of and engagement with populism, the Moltmann chapter merely offers a theological justification for an exhausted liberal order. Rather disturbingly, Moltmann begins by seemingly blaming the events of 1989 for the emergence of the new nationalism: Gorbachev wanted to keep socialist internationalism alive, but Yeltsin won and a new Russia with a new brand of Russian...