laudable Practice

Our  Advent series of Marian reflections from Jeremy Taylor's The Great Exemplar concludes with the Nativity. Taylor draws us to behold the intimacy of Nativity, implied in Saint Luke's words, "And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn": She had no ministers to attend but angels, and neither her poverty nor her piety would permit her to provide other nurses; but herself did the offices of a tender and pious parent. She kissed him, and worshipped him, and thanked him that he would be born of her, and she suckled him, and bound him in her arms and swaddling bands; and when she had represented to God her first scene of joy and eucharist, she softly laid him in the manger, till her desires and his own necessities called her to take him, and to rock him softly in her arms. And from this deportment she read a lecture of piety and maternal care, which mothers should ...

In an 1851 sermon preached in Westminster Abbey on the feast of the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin, ' On a Recent Proposal of the Church of Rome to make a New Article of Faith ', Christopher Wordsworth - a leading figure in the Old High tradition, Bishop of Lincoln 1869-85 - addressed the process which led to the Bishop of Rome promulgating the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. In this extract, Wordsworth expounds how refusal to accept this doctrine is rooted in the Scriptural proclamation and creedal confession of the Incarnation. Not only is the mystery of the Incarnation not aided by the doctrine Immaculate Conception. In fact, as Wordsworth emphasises, the mystery and grace of the Incarnation is more faithfully acknowledged by a recognition that the Blessed Virgin is, with us, entirely dependent upon the Redeemer. This also points to the grounds for what Wordsworth terms "the true honour of the Blessed Virgin", her overshadowing by the Holy Spi...

While no doubt principally written to address Orthodox concerns, the recent statement from the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith,  Mater Populi Fidelis , provides significant confirmation of a central feature of the Christological confession shared by the Roman Catholic Church and the Churches of the Reformation. The Dicastery's judgement that the application to the Blessed Virgin Mary of the titles 'Co-redemptrix' and 'Mediatrix' is "always inappropriate", despite such titles being invoked by some popes, including John Paul II, led to the document robustly affirming "Christ's unique salvific mediation": Given the necessity of explaining Mary’s subordinate role to Christ in the work of Redemption, it would not be appropriate to use the title “Co-redemptrix” to define Mary’s cooperation. This title risks obscuring Christ’s unique salvific mediation and can therefore create confusion and an imbalance in the harmony of the truths of the Chr...

Continuing with extracts from a sermon by Bishop Bull (d.1710) entitled ' The Blessed Virgin's low and exalted condition ', on the text Luke 1:48-49, having established the grounds for Reformed reverence of the Blessed Virgin, Bull now turns to examples of "extravagant honour" towards her, refused and rejected by the Church of England: I will mention some few instances of extravagant honour which the Papists give, but we of the Church of England utterly refuse to yield, to the blessed Virgin , out of a true zeal to the honour of God. We will not give her lavish and excessive attributes, beyond what the Holy Scriptures allow her, and the holy men of the primitive Church afforded her. We will call her "blessed," as the mother of our Lord, in the sense above explained. But we dare not call her "queen of heaven," "queen of Angels, Patriarchs, Prophets, and Apostles," "source of the fountain of grace," "refuge of sinners,...

At the Parish Eucharist on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 24.12.23 Luke 1:26-38 “The angel said to [Mary], ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you’.” Every Christmas, we hear it at our carol services: “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary”. Every Christmas, we sing about it in our carols: ‘Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child’, ‘Late in time behold Him come, Offspring of a Virgin's womb’. Every Sunday, when we gather for the Eucharist, we declare it to be part of the Church’s faith in the Nicene Creed: ‘was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary’. At Baptism, at Confirmation, and daily at Morning and Evening Prayer in the Church of Ireland, we profess our faith in it, in the summary of the Christian faith that is the Apostles’ Creed: ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the ...

In The Great Exemplar , when reflecting upon the Annunciation, Jeremy Taylor echoes the long-established tradition that the Blessed Virgin Mary was at prayer when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her: "she was in her oratory, private and devout". The illustration which accompanied Taylor's reflections (pictured) was also clearly based on the equally long-established iconography of the Annunciation. Here, then, is a deeply traditional Marian piety within a reformed context (for Taylor, as a good Laudian son of the Church of England would not countenance prayers invoking Mary).  What then follows is profoundly beautiful meditation on the "quiet religion" of the Blessed Virgin, with Mary a model for the vast majority of Christians in a way that is not and cannot be so with Saint Paul. What is more, Taylor here presents the Blessed Virgin as a contemplative, encouraging us in a "quiet and silent piety", in "those graces which walk in a veil and silen...

'Mary is for life, not just for Christmas' It was an Anglo-catholic response on 'X' to an evangelical asking, when about to address a gathering of pastors on the theme of preparation for Christmas, "what would be the most helpful thing for me to say to the pastors?". After smiling at the online ecclesiastical humour, the phrase did strike me as a very good description of the Marian piety of Prayer Book Anglicanism. This day on which we commemorate the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a particularly appropriate occasion to deliver an Old High affirmation of 'Mary is for life, not just for Christmas'. The role of the blessed Virgin - the title for Mary used in Article II of the Thirty-nine - in the mystery of the Incarnation is confessed twice daily, morning and evening, in Prayer Book Matins and Evensong.  Every day of the year, we confess in the Creed "born of the Virgin Mary", a recognition that our redemption in and through the Lord...

Continuing with extracts from John Shepherd's A Critical and Practical Elucidation of the Morning and Evening Prayer of the Church of England (1796), we turn to the alternative to the Magnificat at Evensong, Cantate Domino. Shepherd notes that it "is rarely used". This, interestingly, contrasts with earlier commentators . Sparrow, for example, encourages the use of Cantate Domino (and Deus Misereatur) in the penitential seasons and when the first lesson "speaks of the enlargement of the Church by bringing in the Gentiles into the Fold of it". Secker, writing in the mid-18th century, says of Cantate Domino that it "may be used, and in some places it frequently is". The difference between Shepherd and these earlier commentators is probably due to local practice, rather than a more widespread move away from use of Cantate Domino. It certainly was not the case that Shepherd disapproved of the use of this canticle. Even while stating that it "is rarel...

Where ever Mary is venerated, and devotion to her takes place, there the Church of Christ does not exist. This quote from Barth's Church Dogmatics received some attention recently on Twitter . It is, at best, a foolish statement, profoundly uncharitable to very many in the Body of Christ. Upon first encountering the statement, my thoughts turned immediately to a local Roman Catholic Benedictine community, the brothers ending Compline each night with an anthem to the Blessed Virgin, before her icon.  To say that this prayerful, grace-filled community is not the Church of Christ - constituted by Word and Sacrament - is, frankly, blasphemous.  In historical terms, the statement is similarly deeply foolish. It excludes from the Body of Christ vast numbers of the baptised in East and West over centuries. To suppose that the grace of God in Christ, proclaimed in the Scriptures and ministered in the Sacraments, could not justify and sanctify because of exaggerated, or even erroneous...

Anthony Sparrow's Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer  (first published in 1655, re-printed numerous times thereafter) was the standard Prayer Book commentary in the Restoration Church of England.  In his notes on the feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sparrow points to "the Antiquity of this day", echoing a wider Restoration theme of " primitive Christianity revived ".  There is also more than a hint of this when he explains why the Church of England only retains the Marian feasts of the Purification and Annunciation, not the Assumption and her Nativity: "Our Church keeps only the Purification and Annunciation which are common to her and our Blessed Lord".  This roots the Prayer Book's Marian feasts in Christology, reflecting what would have been regarded as distinctive patristic Christocentric Marian understanding, in contrast with later developments. Sparrow's commentary, in other words, pointed to the Prayer Book...

Diarmaid MacCulloch ends his essay ' The Virgin Mary and Protestant Reformers ' by referring to the emergence in the 1620s of "hints of a different voice within Protestantism".  I am not at all convinced that the examples offered by MacCulloch - "cultured Protestant noblemen" in England displaying "Scriptural scenes from the life of Our Lady in their private chapels", a work by French Protestant divine Charles Drelincourt, and "the clerical party fostered by Lancelot Andrewes" - equate to a "different voice".  In each case, the key doctrinal commitments of the Reformation regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary were affirmed and maintained.   What is more, as has recently been discussed regarding Cranmer's Christmas collect , the Reformed Marian piety of the Lutheran and Zurich Reformations found quiet but earnest expression in the Book of Common Prayer.  That said, perhaps MacCulloch, while certainly overstating matters, rightly ...

Amongst the Festivals listed in the Church of Ireland BCP 2004 is the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 8th September.  Missing, however, from the Calendar is the now widespread Anglican practice of observing a feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary on 15th August (as, for example, in Common Worship, TEC 1979, and Canada's Book of Alternative Services).   There is good reason for the Church of Ireland's refusal to conform to current Anglican practice.  When the dogma of the Assumption was proclaimed by Pius XII in 1950, the bishops of the Church of Ireland issued a superb pastoral letter which made "our public protest against the defining, as part of the divinely-given Faith of Christ, of a doctrine ... resting as it does on no scriptural authority or historical evidence, and not even on any support from the writings of the most ancient fathers".  The pastoral letter was, indeed, a classic expression of High Church teaching, noting that the dogmatic definition of t...