laudable Practice

Reflecting on the suggestion made in the post on Epiphany Eve, that Anglican piety particularly rejoices in the Epiphany as the feast of grace fulfilling, not destroying, nature, of nature ordered towards grace, I turn to Jeremy Taylor's meditation on the Magi in The Great Exemplar : As it was an unsearchable wisdom, so it was an unmeasurable grace of Providence and dispensation which God did exhibit to those wise men, to them, as to all men, disposing the ministeries of his grace sweetly, and by proportion to the capacities of the person suscipient. For God called the Gentiles by such means as their customs and learning had made prompt and easy. For these magi were great philosophers and astronomers; and therefore God sent a miraculous star to invite and lead them to anew and more glorious light, the lights of grace and glory. And God so blessed them in following the star, to which their innocent curiosity and national customs were apt to lead them, that their custom was changed t...

On laudable Practice we have been journeying with the early and mid-19th century Anglican parson Richard Warner since July of this year.  Our journey now concludes with words from his final sermon in   The Sermon on the mount; in five discourses  (1840), five sermons preached "on several successive Sunday afternoons".  What has struck me about Warner is how his sermons capture both the pastoral wisdom of Anglicanism and the reasonable (i.e. non-Weird) nature of its experience of the Christian life. It is this which encourages and enables a living out of Christian faith amidst our ordinary, natural duties and responsibilities - surely a pastoral, evangelistic, and catechetical imperative for the contemporary Church in a context in which religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is routinely condemned as 'A Bad Thing'.  In this final extract, Warner addresses the Lord's exhortation " Take therefore no thought for the morrow": The divine discour...

Another example of Richard Warner - in the first volume of his Old Church of England Principles Opposed to "New Light" - critiquing in Hookerian fashion excessively radical accounts of Original Sin and expressing the characteristically Anglican affirmation of and gratitude for signs of goodness and virtue in common life: I purpose, my brethren, to shew you, in the remaining part of my discourse, that all such notions as these are contrary to common sense and common experience, to the principles of the Established Church, and to the gospel of Jesus Christ; and, consequently, that all who teach them are neither reasonable, nor orthodox, nor scriptural preachers. These notions are, first, contrary to common sense and common experience. If mankind were nothing but a mass of corruption and wickedness, and had no other inclinations but such as are malignant and devilish, what would become of human society? or how could human beings exist all together? In that case, the hand of eve...

This was not a post I expected to be writing, not least because in the past I have been critical of Creationtide. My change of mind has been partly occasioned by reading some other critiques of the 'Season of Creation' and realizing that I fundamentally disagreed with the theological reasoning at work in those critiques.  I have also accepted that my previous view - a purist 'We have Rogationtide, Lammas, Harvest, and Ember Days, we don't need Creationtide' approach - has little relevance in a pastoral context in which, outside of Harvest, these observances have little practical significance. This is not to say that there are not weaknesses with Creationtide.  Some of the teaching and ecclesiastical commentary for Creationtide lacks theological depth and appears to be little more than an echo of particular political concerns.  The liturgical provision has often been - to put it charitably - poor.  The collect, for example, provided by the Church of England for a Ser...