laudable Practice

Now I saw in my dream, that the highway up which Christian was to go, was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was called Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back. He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and upon that place stood a cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said, with a merry heart, "He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death." Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him, that the sight of the cross should thus ease him of his burden. He looked therefore, and looked again, eve...

These and many more evils, and the perpetual unavoidable necessity of sinning by much talking, hath given great advantages to silence, and made it to be esteemed an act of discipline and great religion. St. Romualdus upon the Syrian mountain severely kept a seven years silence; and Thomas Cantipratensis tells of a religious person in a monastery in Brabant that spake not one word in sixteen years. But they are greater examples which Palladius tells of; Ammonaz who lived with three thousand brethren in so great silence as if he were an anachoret; but Theona was silent for thirty years together; and Johannes, surnamed Silentiarius, was silent for forty-seven years. But this morosity and sullenness is so far from being imitable and laudable, that if there were no direct prevarication of any commands expressed or intimated in scripture, yet it must certainly either draw with it, or be itself, an infinite omission of duty; especially in the external glorifications of God, in the institution...

Below, another example  offered by Richard Warner - from a sermon in the third volume of his  Old Church of England Principles Opposed to "New Light"  (published in 1818) - of the vitality of sacramental and liturgical life in the pre-1833 Church of England: The blessings and benefits, also, which we receive from the Holy Ghost the Comforter, are alike numerous and inestimable; and, in the same manner, ought to excite our thankfulness, and lead us to holiness and virtue. His blessed operation is experienced by the faithful, in all the offices of their religion, and in all the situations, and circumstances, and accidents, of their lives. Her regenerates us in baptism; enlightens us at our confirmation; and comforts our souls, and strengthens our inner man, at the blessed sacrament. With such warm and vital expressions of the sacramental and liturgical life, Warner's sermons stand as an indictment of the Tractarian historiography which portrayed Georgian Anglicanism as supp...

In the third volume of his 1818 collection of sermons - Old Church of England Principles Opposed to "New Light" -  Richard Warner refutes, in Hookerian fashion, excessively radical accounts of Original Sin which denied the place of reason, natural law, and virtue in the ordering of common life, the natural knowledge of God, the moral obligation to obey the Commandments, and the call of the Christian to co-operate with grace.  This Hookerian vision - rooted in the classical affirmation that Grace does not destroy Nature - is in many ways the foundation of the Anglican experience's routine and consistent rejection of sectarianism, and underpins the modesty, caution, and patience of its pastoral approach . They "prophesy falsely", then, who describe human nature, and every branch and faculty of it, as utterly and entirely corrupted by the transgression of Adam; as an unleavened mass of malignity and sin, incapable of any good thought, amiable feeling, virtuous aff...

A recent interview with thoughtful post-liberal thinker Adrian Pabst - published on the Together for the Common Good site - provides an interesting example of the limitations and contradictions of postliberal thought.  The interview is significantly entitled ' How Christian is Postliberalism? '.  This should alert us to the importance of theological and ecclesial consideration of postliberalism because it is indeed being presented as a renewal of a Christian tradition of political thought. What is perhaps most striking about the interview is Pabst's admission that all is not well within postliberalism.  His insistence that "the post-liberal alternative is emphatically not authoritarian populism" and the reference to "some self-styled post-liberals" immediately alert us to this.  He then distances himself from those postliberals in the United Kingdom and the United States who have explicitly presented the governments of Poland and Hungary as expressions...

Is it the case that those of us who - faithful to the Reformed Catholicism and classical Prayer Book tradition of Anglicanism - did not celebrate the Assumption on Sunday past have a 'low' view of the Blessed Virgin Mary? The question comes to mind after I saw the above illustration shared on Twitter.  The illustration, needless, to say, entirely ignores the Reformed tradition's reverence for the Blessed Virgin.  (And, we might add, it is hardly a convincing depiction of Roman Catholic teaching.)  Leaving that aside, the idea that the Assumption is somehow necessary in order to have a rich and reverent understanding of the Blessed Virgin is, at the very least, odd. It is odd because the participation of the Blessed Virgin in redemption does not in any way require the Assumption for that participation to be profoundly and deepy glorious, what the Apostle proclaims as "the riches of the glory of this mystery".  The Blessed Virgin participates in the hope of the Lord...

On Friday it was Jeremy Taylor.  Today the Church of Ireland commemorates another of its post-Reformation 'worthies',  Charles Inglis , first Anglican bishop in Canada. Inglis was born in Ireland, his father a parson in the Church of Ireland diocese of Raphoe (in County Donegal). In his first  Visitation Charge to the clergy of Nova Scotia in 1788 , Inglis set forth a vision of Anglican order, liturgy, and sacramental life suggestive of the vitality of the pre-1833 High Church tradition. Noting that the extension of the episcopacy to North America was necessary in order "complete the Polity of the National Church in this country", Inglis also emphasised the ordained ministry as of divine institution, with "the intention of our Lord in appointing these different orders" being "to promote the salvation of souls". In light of this, "Theology is the subject which should chiefly engage a Clergyman's time and attention", with particular att...

On this commemoration of Jeremy Taylor, and the final day of Jeremy Taylor week, words from a Taylor sermon illustrating the characteristic Anglican desire to avoid disturbing the Church's peace with controversies and contentions, instead promoting ecclesial peace and communal concord, "unity and godly love", through "the natural and amiable simplicity of Jesus, by plain and easy propositions". Do not trouble your people with controversies: whatsoever does gender strife, the apostle commands us to avoid; and, therefore, much more the strife itself: a controversy is a stone in the mouth of the hearer, who should be fed with bread, and it is a temptation to the preacher, it is a state of temptation; it engages one side in lying, and both in uncertainty and uncharitableness; and after all, it is not food for souls; it is the food of contention, it is a spiritual lawsuit, and it can never be ended; every man is right, and every man is wrong in these things, and no m...

On this Thursday of Jeremy Taylor week, words from a Taylor sermon on how "the duties of religion", and the right ordering of our natural domestic and communal duties, do "the work of Heaven", slowly, through natural means. And now the first part of this duty is to make religion to be the business of our lives; for this is the great instrument which will naturally produce our growth in grace, and the perfection of a Christian. For a man cannot, after a state of sin, be instantly a saint; the work of Heaven is not done by a flash of lightning, or a dash of affectionate rain, or a few tears of a relenting pity: God and his church have appointed holy intervals, and have taken portions of our time for religion, that we may be called off from the world, and remember the end of our creation, and do honour to God, and think of heaven with hearty purposes and peremptory designs to get thither. But as we must not neglect those times, which God hath reserved for his service, ...

On this Wednesday of Jeremy Taylor Week, words from a Taylor sermon showing that it is he and not - contrary to Diarmaid MacCulloch - Richard Baxter who exemplifies what it is to be a "Catholick Christian".  Despite MacCulloch's rather odd claim (Baxter, after all, refused to conform to the rather minimal standards of episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer) it is not Baxter who embodied the latitude of Anglicanism. As seen in this extract, it is Taylor who, in succession to Hooker, exemplifies the modesty, latitude, and charity of the catholic spirit of the ecclesia Anglicana . And if we can, by any arts of prudence, separate from an evil proposition, and communicate in all the good, then we may love colleges of religious persons, though we do not worship images; and we may obey our prelates, though we do no injury to princes; and we may be zealous against a crime, though we be not imperious over men's persons; and we may be diligent in the conduct of souls, though...

On this Tuesday of Jeremy Taylor Week, words from a Taylor sermon emphasising that the Christian life is defined not by an experiential event but the slow work of growing in "a godly, righteous, and sober life", "in the ways of thy laws, and the works of thy commandments", "in love and charity with your neighbours". And I pray consider; can there be any forgiveness of sins without repentance? But if an apostle should preach forgiveness to all that believe, and this belief did not also mean that they should repent and forsake their sin, the sermons of the apostle would make Christianity nothing else but the sanctuary of Romulus, a device to get together all the wicked people of the world, and to make them happy without any change of manners. Christ came to other purposes; He came 'to sanctify us and to cleanse us by His word', the word of faith was not for itself, but was a design of holiness, and 'the very grace of God did appear' for this ...

In this week when the Church of Ireland calendar of 'worthies' commemorates Jeremy Taylor, who died on 13th August 1667, laudable Practice will each day be sharing extracts from Taylor's sermons.  Each extract will seek to illustrate how Taylor gave expression to defining aspects of the Anglican experience.  Today, how Grace does not destroy but perfects Nature. Which principle divers fanaticks, both among us and in the church of Rome, misunderstanding, look for new revelations, and expect to be conducted by ecstasy, and will not pray but in a transfiguration, and live upon raptures and extravagant expectations, and separate themselves from the conversation of men by affectations, by new measures and singularities, and destroy order, and despise government, and live upon illiterate phantasms and ignorant discourses. These men 'they belie the holy Ghost': for the Spirit of God makes men wise; it is an evil spirit that makes them fools. The Spirit of God makes us ...

In a recent tweet , theologian John Milbank referred to John Colet (d.1519), the humanist scholar and Dean of St Paul's, saying "We need his spirit now. Christian Platonism. So crucial to Anglican tradition".  My response was to post a picture of Benjamin Whichcote, a reminder of how the Cambridge Platonists ensured that this tradition of thought continued in the reformed Church of England.  Milbank recognised this with his reply "the candle of the Lord", a reference to the characteristic motif of the Cambridge Platonists. It was rather appropriate that the exchange occurred just prior to the Transfiguration, a feast replete with Christian Platonist themes.  In his sermon 'Our Conversation is in Heaven' (1651), Whichcote unfolds our participation in the Transfiguration. Here in this world, there is the salvation of grace, which for the substance, is the same with the salvation of glory. Spiritual life is always before eternal life ... 'At the appear...

The vision of Laud's insularity and indifference to the foreign churches, whether protestant, catholic, or Orthodox ... Thus did W.J. Tighe - in his ground-breaking 1987 article on Laudian encouragement for a Grotian vision of a " Union of the Churches of the Northern Kingdoms " - summarise a criticism of not only routinely levelled at Laud but also at the wider Old High Church tradition.  Ecclesiastical nationalism and 'splendid isolation', it is often suggested, characterised (and, the charge implies, continues to characterise) the High Church - as opposed to Anglo-catholic - tradition. Tighe's research pointed to a significant rebuttal of this charge in the Laudian openness to a union with Scandinavian Lutheranism.  What is more, the affinity with Lutheranism indicated in the proposal of a 'Union of the Churches of the Northern Kingdoms' was not merely a passing feature but, rather, represented an enduring characteristic of the High Church traditio...

In his 1817 description of how the grace of regeneration in Holy Baptism is to be followed by what other authors routinely termed 'renovation', Warner summarises what we might term the Anglican pastoral ethos, an abiding character of Anglicanism, in which 'enthusiasm' is distrusted as ineffectual distraction, with the slow, sober work of grace identified as the means of ongoing conversion: Hence it appears, that the change which takes place at Baptism can take place only at that time, and in consequence of that rite; for, as a wise and holy man (Jeremy Taylor) observes, "we are but once to change our whole estate of life, from the power of the Devil and his entire possession, from the state of sin and death, from the body of corruption, to the life of grace, to the possession of Jesus, to the kingdom of the Gospel; and this is done in the Baptism of Water, and the Baptism of the Spirit, when the first rite comes to be verified by God's grace coming upon us...

Over the years, laudable Practice has regularly critiqued many aspects of late 20th and early 21st century liturgical revision.  Frequently, the Church of Ireland's Book of Common Prayer 2004 and The Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer 1979 have been the targets of such criticism. This post seeks to provide some balance to those criticisms.  As previously stated, counter-revolution is not conservative , and that includes liturgical counter-revolution .  1979 and 2004 are now settled parts of the Episcopal/Anglican experience in the United States and Ireland: a counter-revolutionary rejection of 1979 and 2004 would not be authentically conservative or traditional.   What is more, in the same way that my personal experience of officiating and participating according to 2004 has shaped my critiques of it, so too that experience has also provided a basis for valuing aspects of 2004.  Likewise, those times when I have worshipped in TEC have been accordin...