laudable Practice

As a teller and writer of ghostly tales, I celebrate Halloween with enthusiasm. Every October 31, as many as 400 trick-or-treaters have found their way to our tall Italianate house in a decayed village in Michigan these past two decades, and we have both tricked and treated them, to their dreadful joy - Russell Kirk . Even apart from the traditions of All Hallows' Eve, during the season of long, dark nights, as A Clerk of Oxford reminds us, it is "natural enough to associate winter darkness with the eerie and unearthly".  It is "a time strongly associated with ghost stories".  All Hallows' Eve provides a focus for the eerie, the spooky, the unearthly.  As Andrew Brown states in an excellent article in today's Guardian , the rejection by some evangelicals of this aspect of the customs and traditions of All Hallows' Eve undermines a wider cultural recognition of the supernatural: because if the supernatural does not have an edge of terro...

Because religion is about mediation, it naturally refuses any duality of nature and culture. Reality, as the true nature of things, is sacred, but it must be mediated by particular human relations and practices - John Milbank . If the Church - as suggested in yesterday's post - is "to retrieve, revive and confidently celebrate the festival of All Saints", this necessarily means more than liturgy.  Yes, the liturgical celebration may be at the heart of All Saints' Day, but it also requires a cultural presence - mediation - which reflects and embodies the reality that we are cultural beings. In the absence of such cultural practices, it is difficult to see how the celebration of All Saints can truly resonate, for then the liturgical celebration fails to be embodied in the cultural fabric of our lives. To again quote Milbank , "mission is impossible without a strong cultural mediation and presence".  Within classical Anglican theology, there is sig...

The passage of the year is obvious at this season.  The days grow colder, the nights longer, leaves turn brown and fall, gardens, parks and countryside quieten. It is a liminal time, an evocative time.  And in this liminal time, the Church celebrates the feast of All Saints' Day.  There was great theological and pastoral wisdom at work in determining that All Saints should fall at this time of the year, this liminal time. In the words of Dover Beach : Our pre-Christian forebears had it right: there is a wistful quality about autumn that makes us mindful of the passing of things, and that reminds us that there are relationships which are stronger and more enduring than death. The good news of the feast of All Saints is that, in the Church, we are given hope by the example of the Saints who, beset by the same sins and infirmities as we are, were made righteous by God and now enjoy Him forever. The good news of the feast of All Saints is that, even when t...

This Sunday is the feast of Saint Simon and Saint Jude, Apostles.  As such, it is one of those days in which the BCP 1662 provides for the saying of the Athanasian Creed at Mattins .  Enlightened Anglican opinion, of course, has long been uncomfortable with this Creed, particularly its damnatory clauses - what the TEC online ' Episcopal Dictionary ' describes as "its anathemas against those who would deny its doctrines".  In his Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles , however, Browne emphasises that these clauses - rather than being a cause for embarrassment in polite, enlightened society - actually capture something of the significance of the Gospel.  In other words, they are a creedal expression of dominical teaching, an unfolding of the affirmation in the Apostles' and Nicene Creed that "he shall come to judge the quick and the dead". Even then, if some people may think the damnatory clauses, as they are called, unduly strong; yet the occurrence...

What are we to make of yesterday's report - ' Cathedral Statistics 2017 ' - that CofE cathedrals witnessed a 3% increase in worshippers during Christmas 2017, with the highest overall figure since 2000? Amidst other statistics amongst Anglican and Episcopal churches in North Atlantic societies apparently indicating inevitable decline, the report is a significant reminder that decline is not inevitable.  To put it slightly differently, the secular society is nowhere near as robust as it seems - as it seems both to secular opinion and some Anglican/Episcopal opinion. Charles Taylor's description of the 'buffered self' of the secular age - contrasted with the 'porous' nature of pre-modern society - can be its very weakness.  Why? Because the 'buffered self' is a cold, uninspiring, brittle myth, incapable of satisfying heart and soul.  As Taylor puts it, there is "a wide sense of malaise at the disenchanted world, a sense of it as flat, ...

What does Calvin's commentary on Matthew 12:46-50 and its parallels suggest concerning a Reformed Marian piety? Firstly, it re-affirms Augustine's declaration: it means more for Mary to have been a disciple of Christ than to have been the mother of Christ. It means more for her, an altogether greater blessing, to have been Christ's disciple than to have been Christ's mother. Calvin's restatement of this understanding leaves little room for mistaking its inspiration: for it was of vastly greater importance to be regenerated by the Spirit of God than to conceive Christ, according to the flesh, in her womb ... the highest happiness and glory of the holy Virgin consisted in her being a member of his Son. This was to be repeated by Jewel in controversy with Harding: "to be the child of God it is a great deal greater grace than to be the mother of God". So, we begin here - the Reformed critique of the medieval Latin cultus...

The Church of Ireland doth receive and approve The Book of the Articles of Religion, commonly called the Thirty-Nine Articles ... The Church of Ireland's 1870 Declaration makes @benjamindcrosby 's Twitter poll on the Articles straightforward for me - it's 'Yes' to each and every Article.  And if we need clarity as to what "receive and approve" might mean, then the Declaration for Subscription required of all those who receive Orders in the Church of Ireland provides such clarity: I assent to the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion ... I believe the doctrine of the Church of Ireland, as therein set forth, to be agreeable to the Word of God. What then of the poll results on Article XXI? Thus far in the poll, it is the first Article to face such a large 'No' vote - with the 'Yes' vote barely ahead.  The focus for discontent was the opening sentence of the Article: General Councils may not be gathered together without the commandment ...

The Bread and Cup are His Body and Blood, because they are causes instrumental upon the receipt whereof the participation of His Body and Blood ensueth - Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity V.67.5. In 1855, in a profound break with the Old High Church tradition, Keble - in On Eucharistical Adoration - rejected Hooker's Eucharistic doctrine.  The Old High Church tradition had, in continuity with Hooker, affirmed Virtualism .  For Keble, a more 'advanced' Eucharistic doctrine was required: Hooker himself, after deprecating "the exercise of our curious and subtile wits" on the holy Eucharist, propounds in the very next paragraph an explanation of the words of institution, which, whether it be more or less correct than the Roman, is surely not less "curious" or scholastic ... Hooker was biassed by his respect for Calvin and some of his school, in whose opinions he had been educated, and by sympathy with the most suffering portion of the foreign R...

In recent times I have been reflecting on my affection for the 1662 Order for the Administration of Holy Communion .  Not in terms of an analysis of its doctrinal and liturgical aspects, nor even in terms of the rhythms of its language.  Each of these, of course, has deep significance.  In eucharistic doctrine deeply catholic, robustly reformed, the 1662 rite has great richness.  Regarding its language, Alison Milbank has well summarised its strength: One reason why people hold to the BCP is that it is rhythmic, written for speech. As a priest I have only presided using it for the last three years at a rate of about once a month and already I know it off by heart (from an unpublished paper by Alison Milbank, 'Common as Muck: Why we need Common Worship'). It was composed to be remembered, inviting us to inhabit its rhythms, shaping and forming us in prayer. But these points do not quite explain my affection for the rite - why I find it so emotionally satisfy...

All Ecclesiastical Persons having Cure of Souls, and all other Preachers and Readers of Divinity Lectures, shall to the utmost of their Wit, Knowledge and Learning, purely and sincerely (without any Colour or Dissimulation) teach, manifest, open and declare, four Times every Year (at the least) in their Sermons, and other Collations and Lectures, That all usurped and foreign Power, (forasmuch as the same hath no establishment nor ground by the Law of God) is for most just causes taken away and abolished: and that therefore no manner of Obedience or Subjection within his Majesty’s Realms and Dominions is due unto such Foreign Power - Canon II 'The King's Supremacy in Causes Ecclesiastical to be maintained', the Church of Ireland Canons of 1634 . And here we first recognise the important principle, involved indeed in the very nature of all good government, that all orders of men affected by the laws should have a voice in framing them. Accordingly, no a...

Yesterday's commemoration of the martyrdom of Bishops Latimer and Ridley neatly embodies a key dividing line between the Old High Church tradition and the Anglo-catholicism which emerged from the Oxford Movement.  When plans for a memorial to the Oxford martyrs - Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer - emerged in 1839, the opposition from Newman and Keble scandalised the High Church tradition.  Nockles quotes Keble writing to Pusey in early 1839: anything which separates the present church from the Reformers I should hail as a great good . The contrast with the High Church tradition is starkly highlighted when we consider the words of an exemplar of that tradition - Bishop Henry Hobart , speaking in 1814 on "the origin [and] general character" of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America: We boast then of our origin from a Church, which, in renouncing the despotic claims of the Church of Rome, tempered, with such singular felicity, zeal and ard...

The sanctification of days and times is a token of that thankfulness and a part of the public honour which we owe to God for admirable benefits - Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity V.70.1. In his defence of 'celebrating festival days', Hooker again and again emphasises that it is natural to observe such days.  They have "natural causes" (V.69); they reflect how "nature bringeth forth time" (V.69.2); "the causes being natural and necessary for which there should be a difference in days" (V.69.3); they give expression to "the most natural testimonies of our rejoicing" (V.70.2); and "even nature hath taught the heathens" the significance of festive days (V.70.4); they are based on "the very law of nature itself" - and this "all men confess to be God's law" (V.70.9). Hooker's defence of festival days also provides reason for the Church to mark Harvest Thanksgiving - whether in the festival of that name...