Yes, it is 'after Easter'

God's singular bounty hath advanced some days to a superlative brightness.

On Easter Day I quoted from a Restoration era Easter sermon by John Torbuck, part of a collection of his sermons for feast days under the title Extraordinary Dayes. In the preface to the collection, Torbuck defended the practice of observing festival days on the basis that God "hath made some days twice" through some signal and peculiar mercy". Such, he says, "are the Festivals of Christs Incarnation, Resurrection, Ascension, &c.".

He notes that such "days above days" are grounded in "Articles of our Creed". These days, in other words, set before us the redemptive events which have secured our salvation. This is why these days have "a superlative brightness".

Torbuck's account of the festival days is suggestive of why it is good liturgical practice to describe the Sundays of Eastertide, contrary to conventional contemporary Anglican practice, as 'after Easter'. To term these Sundays as 'after Easter' embodies the recognition that the Easter proclamation and the Church's faith in the Lord's Resurrection are grounded not merely in the experience of the first disciples but, rather, in a - the - salvific event.

The phrase 'after Easter', then, centres the Church's Easter proclamation on the event of the Resurrection. As Rowan Williams stated in Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, reasserting the significance of the empty Tomb amidst the theological confusion afflicting the Church of the England in the early 1980s:

And for all four Gospels, the story which identifies the ultimate source of this disorientation [i.e. amongst the witnesses to the Resurrection] is that of the empty tomb. This, at least, provides a clear basis for what is on any other showing very hard to explain, the primitive confession that Jesus was raised 'on the third day': the process of appropriating the Easter gospel has a definite, even dateable beginning ...

The story as it stands also provides a very clear ground for the primitive sense of the resurrection gospel as a message from outside ...

Something must have provided a first stimulus and, more importantly, a structure of presuppositions within which subsequent experiences could be organized. The empty tomb tradition proposes just such a stimulus and structure.

... we do well never to forget that the object and ground of the community's faith is not its own life, but that to which its life is an answer: the 'word from beyond', the message from the tomb.

By contrast, suggesting an equality between Easter Day and the Sundays of the Easter Season e.g. 'The Second Sunday of Easter', can be taken to imply an equality between the event of the Resurrection and the apostolic experience of encountering the Risen Lord. This, we might suggest, runs contrary to Paul's creedal affirmation in which "and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures" stands apart from "And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve".

Likewise the Church's Creeds each proclaim not the experience of those encounters but the source of Easter faith, the empty tomb:

The third day he rose again from the dead (Apostles' Creed);

And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures (Nicene Creed);

rose again the third day from the dead (Athanasian Creed).

As Williams states, the fact that the apostolic community assembled on the first day of the week indicates "that 'the third day' meant exactly what it said":

There is a definable beginning to the process of resurrection encounter, and it is the discovery of the absence of Jesus' corpse.

One way of giving liturgical expression to this - to the foundational nature of 'the third day' for the Church's proclamation of the Risen Lord - is order the Sundays of the Easter season as 'after Easter'. That is, as dependent upon and flowing from Easter Day and the event of the Lord's Resurrection, witnessed to by the empty Tomb 'on the third day'. To use Torbuck's phrase, this recognises the "superlative brightness" of Easter Day. The brightness of the Sundays after Easter is entirely derivative, just as the apostolic experiences of encountering the Risen Lord entirely derive from the saving truth that on 'the third day he rose again from the dead'.

Why I support the ordination of women: a High Church reflection

A number of commenters on this blog have asked about my occasional expressions of support for the ordination of women to all three orders. With some hesitation, I have decided to post a summary of my own views on this matter. The hesitation is because I have sought on this blog to focus on issues and themes which can unify those who identify with or have respect (grudging or otherwise!) for what we might term 'classical' Anglicanism (the Anglicanism of the Formularies and - yes - of the Old High Church tradition). Some oppose the ordination of women (and I have friends and colleagues who do so, Anglo-Catholic, High Church, and Reformed Evangelical). Some of us support it (again, friends and colleagues covering a wide range of theological traditions). Below, I have organised my thinking around 5 points (needless to say, no reference to Dort is implied). 1. The Declaration for Subscription required of clergy in the Church of Ireland states: (6) I promise to submit ...

How the Old High tradition continued

Charles Gore's 1914 letter to the clergy of his diocese, ' The Basis of Anglican Fellowship ', can be regarded as a classical expression of the Prayer Book Catholic tradition. A key part of the letter - entitled 'Romanizing in the Church of England' - addressed the "Catholic movement", questioning beliefs and practices within it which tended to "a position which makes it very difficult for its extremer representatives to give an intelligible reason why they are not Roman Catholics". Gore provides the outlines of an alternative account and experience of catholicity within Anglicanism, defined by three characteristics. What is particularly interesting about these characteristics is their continuity with the older High Church tradition. Indeed, the central characteristic as set out by Gore was integral to High Church claims over centuries: To accept the Anglican position as valid, in any sense, is to appeal behind the Pope and the authority of t...

1928 practices and the 1979 book: unthinking conservatism or popular piety?

Those responsible for Earth & Altar - a new blog emanating from a group within TEC - are to be congratulated for an excellent contribution to wider Anglican discussion and debate. The commitment to "an expansively conceived credal orthodoxy as fully compatible with LGBTQ inclusion, gender equality, and racial justice" is an important part of a wider retrieval of creedal orthodoxy within what we might call the post-liberal generation. It is in this spirit that I want to respond to a recent post on the site by Andrew McGowan , Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Professor of Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School. Against the background of another round of "ill-defined" liturgical revision in TEC, he understandably urges that a fuller reception of the 1979 BCP should occur before further reforms. In doing so, however, he takes aim at what he describes as "clinging to the ritual structures of 1928" while using the text of 1979. We ...

laudable Practice

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