twitching and itching and feeling generally irksome about tradition

Unlike a great many Protestants of evangelical conviction, the above feelings about tradition (originally in my post on Sarum Vespers) are not negative re tradition.  Rather, I find myself coming into contact with such things as:

I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold firmly to the traditions, just as I delivered them to you. (1 Cor. 11:2 NASB)

and:

So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us. (2 Thess. 2:15 NASB)

And then Christopher A. Hall, discussing St. Irenaeus of Lyon, says:

Apostolic succession . . . focuses primarily on the role of the bishop as one who faithfully preserves and passes on the teaching of the apostles, who in turn are authoritative interpreters of Christ himself.

The church, in Irenaeus’s thinking, is an inherently conservative institution.  For Irenaeus, it is not the job of the church to innovate or to create new doctrines out of whole cloth.  Whatever the church chooses to say must find its roots in apostolic sources.  If the source of a bishop’s teaching, for example, cannot be traced to apostolic teaching, that bishop’s instruction must remain suspect. (Learning Theology with the Church Fathers, p. 230)

In the above-mentioned book, Hall looks at the Church through the writings of Sts. Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Augustine.  What he finds in the Fathers is, essentially, tradition.  We are bound by tradition, by the tradition handed down to us from the apostles and through the bishops, the guardians of theology.  To make statements counter to that tradition is to abandon the apostolic teaching and, therefore the Church.  To separate ourselves from the ecclesial body of the Church because we find it an impure mixture of heresy and orthodoxy, sinners and saints, is to harm the body of Christ.

Furthermore (say I), it is tradition that gave us the Scriptures.  Both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament were gathered together (by the leading of the Holy Spirit) through the organic process of God’s people using them in worship, in devotion, in preaching, etc.  They knew, and came to this consensus about the New Testament independently, that there was a special anointing on these books.  They passed on what had come before to those who followed.

That is what tradition is, quite literally.  The handing over.

And when I look at the fractured state not only of Protestantism as a whole but even at the Anglican Communion, I see where the abandonment of tradition has led us.  Any single person’s view of Scripture is as valid as that of the community as a whole.  Whole blocks of tradition are considered unnecessary.  We have taken a minimalist view of doctrine and worship and whittled everything down to a certain set of things that must be believed and done for something to be Christian.

This produces “evangelicals” in Anglican Churches promoting hideous, painful 1960’s Baptist-style worship that eschews the beauty of the Anglican tradition in favour of something more “relevant” that is only drawing them into irrelevance.  It produces “liberals” who not only meddle with my hymns but also cut out the Nicene Creed, deny the Virgin Birth, and undermine the authority of Scripture.  It creates endless liturgical innovation with which no one is ever comfortable because nothing is ever the same — we must keep modifying the words of the liturgies to rule out any scent of heresy or papism.  It also ensures that people who have been doing un-Anglican things with the Host and the saints for a very long time will never be challenged on the fact that the 39 Articles are, in fact, opposed to their Romish ways.

Anglicanism cut itself off from the root of Tradition at some point in the last 500 years.  Is it any surprise that we are now spiralling out of control?

Liturgical goings-on this past Tuesday & in the sidebar

You shall note the appearance of the page Mediaeval Vespers — Sarum Rite under “Classic Christian Texts” off to the rite.  This is a translation I made a while ago for a potential regular “Mediaeval Vespers” to meet at the Hart House Chapel at U of T.  I decided that the Christian Classics Reading Group was more the sort of thing I wanted to do.

This Tuesday past, we used my translation of the Sarum Vespers.  The Rite of Sarum (Salisbury) was the most popular pre-Reformation rite in England (some say the whole British Isles).  There are others who know much better than I, but a likely development, as proposed by Walker in  The Services of the Church, with Rubrical Directions, According to the Use of the Illustrious Church of Sarum (London: J.T. Hayes, 188?), is that the Sarum Rite developed in England after the arrival of St. Augustine of Canterbury.  St. Augustine was told by Pope Gregory that he was to use the material he found locally as well as his own experience with the Roman Rite as he converted the pagan Saxons.

Locally, the Christians were all Romano-British Celts, including missionaries from Ireland abroad in Britain.  What Walker imagines to have happened is a merging of the Roman Rite with the Celtic liturgies over the centuries, with an accelerated Romanisation after 1066, producing a local British rite based in Salisbury.  This rite would have been the Sarum Rite.

In matters of the liturgical calendar, the Sarum Rite differs from its Continental relatives by counting from Trinity Sunday, not Pentecost, for ordinary time, something that survived in Anglicanism until the modern liturgical reforms when everyone decided to try and be the same (aka like post-Vatican II Rome).  Walker argues for the Sarum liturgical colours (I don’t have his book at hand, so I can’t tell you what they are), but most people don’t.

What we also find in the Sarum Rite is the raw material of Thomas Cranmer’s masterpiece of liturgy, The Book of Common Prayer. Thus, the Mass begins:

O God, to whom every heart is open and every desire known, and whom no secret escapes, purify by the infusion of the Holy Spirit the thoughts of our heart; that we may merit perfectly to love and worthily to praise thee: through Christ. (See The Sarum Missal in English.)

And so on Tuesday, when we found ourselves praying that liturgy over in the sidebar there, we found ourselves covering familiar ground.  About the only differences were the lack of the Nunc Dimittis, since Cranmer conflated Vespers with Compline, and the versicles weren’t quite the same.  Also, Sarum originally had prayers to saints.  Nevertheless, this is the stuff from which liturgical greatness was made.

I have been twitching and itching and feeling generally irksome about tradition lately.  Sometimes Anglicans claim to be the living link with the Celtic Christianity of the Early Middle Ages and that the Reformation wasn’t as large a break in England as elsewhere.  While that last may be overstating it a bit, I think that Cranmerian liturgics are certainly in keeping with the best of the pre-Reformation traditions; indeed, he did nothing very different from many Catholics of his day with his prayer book — he just did it in English!

A thought on theology

Anthony B. Robinson, in, “Teaching Theology in the Church“, writes:

If theology is a way of life and a lens through which life is perceived and not simply a set of propositional statements, then teaching theology in the church should involve reflection on the life of the church–on worship and sacraments, ministry (ordained and lay) and mission. How are these elements of a way of life? What aspects of the gospel do they express? Are these practices forming or transforming us in the image and mind of Christ? What happens to us as we participate in them?

Something for all of us committed to the endeavour of theology and the Church to think on.

Leave My Hymns Alone!

Sometime in the past decade or so, the Anglican Church of Canada decided to get a new hymn book; this item is called Common Praise.  In this new hymn book, a good number of the hymns have the little abbreviation next to the author’s name, “alt.”  So, you’ll see, “Charles Wesley, alt.”  This abbreviation means “altered.”  One usually imagines that “alt.” simply means, “We made human beings gender-neutral,” as though the ancient English word and suffix “man” only ever had one meaning, not two, and that one meaning was “male human being.”

We’re not going to argue about so-called “inclusive language”.  If that were all that hymn books such as Common Praise or Voices United did when the letters “alt.” appeared, I’d get over it eventually.  However, the hymn-book editors, having started to alter hymns in some ways to suit their tastes, have altered them in other ways, thus reducing the timelessness of many hymns and marring both their aesthetic beauty and theological truth.

One oddity is “Good Christians All, Rejoice!”  wherein the word ye has been removed.  Christmastide, as my wife was quick to point out, is one time when people are willing to be old fashioned.  Why get rid of a perfectly good word?  This removal forced them to mess around with the entire hymn, since every verse has ye in it.

“Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending” was missing the third verse.  The loss of the third verse was very disturbing to me, for the original runs thus:

Those dear tokens of his Passion
Still his dazzling body bears,
Cause of endless exultation
To his ransomed worshippers;
With what rapture
Gaze we on those glorious scars!

It was on a cross our Saviour died.  By his scars we are healed.  There is no good reason why a Bible-believing theologically-orthodox Christian should shy away from these words.

They decided, as well, that “Of the Father’s Love Begotten,” an ancient Latin hymn by Prudentius, ought to be “Of Eternal Love Begotten.”  Not only is this avoiding the biblical and traditional Name of one Member of the Godhead, it is also not what Prudentius wrote.  Now we see that we are smarter not only than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but even those centuries that forged our very faith.

Common Praise seems to dislike the Godhead, in fact.  In “To God be the Glory,” they removed all the masculine pronouns and put in the word “God.”  Thus: “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!  Let the earth hear God’s voice,” and so forth.  I understand the reasoning behind this move.  It is the same as that which caused the change in “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”:  God is beyond gender, beyond personality.  However, God is not less than a person.  Theologically speaking, God is three Persons, in fact.  If we are to speak about God, we should be able to use pronouns in reference to God.  Otherwise, I have a feeling God becomes less, not more, than a person.

I cannot help but think of C.S. Lewis in this moment:

A good many people nowadays say, ‘I believe in a God, but not in a personal God.’  They feel that the mysterious something which is behind all other things must be more than a person.  Now the Christians quite agree.  But the Christians are the only people who offer any idea of what a being that is beyond personality could be like.  All the other people, though they say that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as something impersonal: that is, as something less than personal.  If you are looking for something super-personal, something more than a person, then it is not a question of choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas.  The Christian idea is the only one on the market. (Mere Christianity, near the beginning of “The Three-Personal God”)

I believe that the removal of pronouns in reference to God makes Him less, not more, than us.  The best compromise I have seen is Madeleine L’Engle’s use of El, but I find it unsatisfactory.  I will continue to use “He, Him, His,” about the Divine Being, knowing that God is not male, that the Triune God does not have a penis (well, not more than one, anyway)*, that He is not a man at all, for I am a man, and I am by no means near the same sort of being that God is.

In “Joyful, Joyful,” Common Praise has marred the beautiful line, “Thou our Father, Christ our Brother”, making it, “Thou our Father and our Mother.”  Now, theoretically, since God is beyond gender, and since God, being perfect, as our divine parent carries within Himself the best of both fathers and mothers and even more and even better than they, God is theoretically both Father and Mother to us.  However, this is not cause enough to change a line that is bringing two Persons of our three-personal God into play and forcing it to reflect a modern liberal sensibility about the divine and push out one of the Persons.  God the Son has been shoved out in favour of non-traditional language about God the Father.  “All who live in love are thine”, the following line, is about those who are the FatherMother God’s, not those who are the Father’s and Christ’s.

I do not believe that editorial boards should tamper with hymns in any way other than making references to the human race gender inclusive.  I don’t even think they should do that, but I know they will.  If they must tamper with hymns, they ought to leave the theological content of the hymns alone.

We find ourselves turning to C.S. Lewis again, and his Introduction to St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.  Here, Lewis tells us that we should read old books because they give us a point of view other than our own.  By reading only new books, we are trapped by the blinders of our own age.  By singing only new songs, we are similarly trapped.  By praying only new prayers, likewise.  By tampering with old hymns, by changing their theological content, by modifying their language of God, we are saying that we know better than 2000 years of Christian tradition; we are saying that our age is the only age that knows about God, and that we therefore have the right to change the words of our forebears.  We are depriving ourselves of wisdom that the hymn-writers have to offer us simply because their words do not fit with certain contemporary sensibilities.  We are turning aside from anything uncomfortable — yet isn’t God supposed to make us uncomfortable?

Thus, if you feel that we need to sing, “Thou our Father and our Mother,” and “Of Eternal Love Begotten,” do not tamper with someone else’s art, with someone else’s view of God, with a point of view that may have great wisdom behind it that we do not see.  Write a new hymn.

And if you cannot write a new hymn, wonder what on earth our culture has lost.

*Pretty sure Jesus has a penis.  I’m just sayin’.

Review: “Leo the Great” by Bronwen Neil

I’m kind of new to book reviews, and it’s late, but I can’t sleep, so I’m writing this anyway.

Leo the Great by Bronwen Neil is the latest in Routledge’s series The Early Church Fathers.  This series is the sort of thing I like to see scholars producing.  Each volume deals with a different Church Father, giving an introduction to his life, works, and context, along with important selections from his works.  The goal of the series as a whole is to make the Church Fathers more accessible to a wider readership.

Apart from a few occasions when Neil slips and writes things that may be hard to understand for those uninitiated in the worlds of Classics/Late Antiquity and theology/Patristics (usually jargon or allusions; something no doubt inevitable in a book of this sort), this tome fulfills the goal of the series admirably.

Leo the Great was Bishop of Rome from 440-461.  This turbulent time included the Council of Chalcedon, as well as the Second Council of Ephesus, which gained its more common name from this man — latrocinium, or “den of robbers”, because of the heavy-handed tactics used by the Eutychian/Monophysite party at the Council, including the refusal to read his carefully-crafted letter, the so-called “Tome of Leo” or “Tome to Flavian.”

Neil provides us with an introduction to Leo’s life and times, followed by introductions to Leo as pastoral caregiver, theologian and opponent of heresy, heir of St. Peter, and administrator of the wider church.  She then provides a selection of his letters and homilies on those same four themes, each with an individual introduction, some in English for the first time.  The translations are readable and clear, the style appropriate to the genre of each writing, enabling the reader to enter into the thought of Leo the Great, which is what I look for in a translation.

Leo the Great was appropriately called “great” within a hundred years of his death in both East and West.  This stems primarily from his “Tome,” a letter he wrote to Flavian, Archbishop of Constantinople, condemning Eutyches’ teachings and setting forth his doctrine of the twofold nature of Christ, stating that Christ has two natures in one person, one nature being wholly divine, the other being wholly human.  In section 3 of the Tome, Leo writes:

Therefore, with the characteristic of each nature maintained and joined in one person, majesty took up humility, power took up weakness, eternity assumed mortality, and in order to pay off the debt of our condition the inviolable nature was joined to a passible nature, so that, as was fitting for our healing, one and the same mediator of God and humankind, the man Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2: 5), was both mortal in respect to one and immortal in respect to the other. (p. 98)

Although spurned by the Second Council of Ephesus, this letter was acknowledged at Chalcedon as being the official teaching of the Church and as standard orthodoxy, along with certain of Cyril of Alexandria’s letters.  This letter was the entire reason I read this book.

However, I found other reasons for Leo to have gained the appellation “Great” as I read this volume.  He was, first and foremost, a pastor, the shepherd of the church in Rome.  Writes Neil, “Leo was not writing for his own amusement (or ours!) but for the spiritual edification of his readers.” (16)  His homilies reveal this strongly pastoral character, when exhorting his congregation not to worship the Sun (Homily 27) or encouraging them to fast:

Let us spend on virtue what we take away from luxury; let the abstinence of the faster be the refreshment of the poor. (Homily 13)

In his letters, we see Leo the Administrator.  He sometimes pushes his agenda as “Heir of St. Peter,” being one of the first popes to begin an articulation of the primacy of the Roman see, but tends to be pastoral in these as well.  Priests and bishops would write to him with questions, or he would see the occurrences of abuses in the churches, and he would write to those involved, explaining to them and reinforcing the existing canons of the Church, and, where no canon existed, using the spirit of the canons to give guidance.

Much could be said about Leo, Petrine succession, and Roman primacy in light of this book, both in terms of Leo’s writings and in terms of the attitudes of his contemporaries as laid out in the introduction.  It shall go unsaid, however, in the interests of time and clear thinking.  Suffice it to say that though Leo had a clear notion of the primacy of his see, he also had a strong feeling of the collegiality of all the bishops of the Church, and these two facets played off one another in his administration of the Church and dealings with other clergy.

He also increased the role of the Bishop of Rome in civic and cultural life, a role that would only increase in the coming centuries.  This was the result of the unrest of the times following Alaric’s sack in 410 and the political vacuum caused by the residence of the Western Roman Emperor in Milan or Ravenna.  He missed the Council of Chalcedon because he was too busy going to a meeting with Attila the Hun to convince the barbarian not to sack Rome!

I came to this book seeking great theology.  This I found, especially in Letter 15 about Priscillianism, Letter 28 which is the “Tome to Flavian,” and Letter 124 to the Cyrillian/Eutychian monks of Palestine who’d been causing some violent ruckus following Chalcedon.  I also found much about the order of the church and the life of the average Christian alongside Neil’s information about this great Father of the Church.

Leo the Great is a great book about a great theologian.

Tomorrow Night: Lady Julian of Norwich

Tomorrow we’ll be looking at Lady Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century anchorite who had an anchorhold attached to the church of St. Julian in Norwich.  An anchorhold is where an anchorite would live.  Anchorites are like hermits, except they tend to have windows to the outside world so they can chat with Marjory Kempe and other people who come for spiritual direction, as well as a window to the church so they can participate in the liturgy with the community and receive the Blessed Sacrament.  They also had cats and sometimes housekeepers who lived in the anchorhold with them.

The life of the anchorhold was to hold fast to the original focus of the monastic calling, which is prayer and study of Scripture.  Through these two foci, an anchorite would draw nearer and nearer to Christ.  Thus would people come to them for spiritual direction through their little windows.

When Lady Julian fell ill, she had visions of Christ and received words from him.  These were written in her book Showings, from which we shall read.  Our readings will be from the longer version which she wrote years after the shorter version.  They are available in the sidebar.

She has a little page on this website, which you can read here.  That page contains a few links to websites related to Lady Julian and her spiritual theology.

This is the bit that washes away your sins

From an Indulgence printed by Johann Gutenberg in 1455 for the King of Cyprus.  One acquired the indulgence for fighting the Turks in Cyprus:

Form of Fullest Absolution and Remission in Life

May Almighty God have mercy upon you, and after your sins are sent away, lead you to eternal life.  May our Lord Jesus Christ, through his most holy and most piteous compassion, as well by his own authority as by that of blessed Peter and Paul his apostles and by the apostolic authority committed to me and granted to you, absolve you.  I absolve you from all your sins worn away, confessed, and forgotten, as well as from all misfortunes, excesses, crmes, and offenses however weighty they may be, reserved for the Apostolic See, and even from any excommunications, suspensions, and interdict, and from other decrees, censures, and ecclesiastical penalties promulgated by law or by man.  If you have run into such matters, I give you fullest indulgence and remission of all your sins, inasmuch as the keys of the Church of Saint Mary extend themselves in this part.  In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

And now you know what I’ve been doing with all those years of Latin!

Tomorrow Night: St. Teresa of Avila & St. John of the Cross

First: Apologies for not even posting a saint last week.  I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so my writing energies have been directed elsewhere.

Anyway, tomorrow night, we return to the mystics with the 16th-century Spanish mystics St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross.  Someone once said to me, when I was limping my way through The Dark Night of the Soul, that all you really need to do is be able to quote St. John of the Cross to look cool.  This is probably true, but our goal is not to look cool; our goal is to progress in virtue and to move closer to the vision of God.

Last week we read Luther’s Preface to St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.  We are justified by faith, and that faith, when living and active, will naturally produce good works in accordance with righteousness.  The mystics will help us keep our energies directed towards God, help us keep our faith living and active, keep it real.  They will also show us one type of the good works, the internal works of the spirit — not to neglect the external, however.

The readings will draw from St. Teresa’s Interior Castle as well as the St. John’s poem “The Dark Night of the Soul.”

Tomorrow Night: Martin Luther

This Tuesday, we’ll be moving along from the mysticism of Evelyn Underhill to the theology & exegesis of Martin Luther.  However, this is most appropriate in my opinion because we need to have a firm underpinning of doctrine & theology in our minds before we embark on the journey of contemplation and mysticism — else we end up heterodox like Origen, Evagrius, Meister Eckhart, Madame Guyon.  The life of prayer as we looked at it in Underhill is to be intrinsically connected to the life of the intellect and the reading of Scripture.

Our reading shall be his “Preface of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans.”  It’s about 14 pages long and crammed full of ideas and teachings; I heartily recommend you read it more than once.  It is online here.

If you have time, also check out the Christian History article and his 95 Theses.

Christian Fiction

Ever since Joseph and Aseneth was a runaway second-century bestseller, Christians have been writing fiction.  Some of it has been among the world’s great literature, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Evelyn Waugh’s Helena, and many more.

My recent discussion of The Shack by Wm. Paul Young and its lack of certain heresies (read it here) has set me thinking about Christian novels worth recommending.  While The Shack was entertaining and thought-provoking, it won’t be in the following list.  The books I’m going to recommend have the following benefits: not only are they good novels but they express deep truths about the universe, God, humanity, and people who aren’t professing Christians could enjoy and read them as well.  Here are five, in alphabetical order by title:

Byzantium by Stephen R. Lawhead.  This is a novelisation of the adventures of St. Aidan, an Irish monk who, in the Early Middle Ages sets off from Kells to Byzantium with a complaint about the behaviour of Western clerics on the Continent.  There are Vikings, Muslims, Byzantines, loss of faith and its recovery.  Aidan is very . . . real.  And the Vikings are fantastic (“Heya!”).

The Cosmic Trilogy by C.S. Lewis.  Many people find The Chronicles of Narnia their favourites; others applaud Till We Have Faces as a work of genius.  I’m not sure what my favourite work of Lewis’ fiction is.  The Cosmic Trilogy, however, is well worth a read.  These books centre on the adventures of Ransom, who in the first (Out of the Silent Planet) travels to Mars (Malacandra), the second (Perelandra) to Venus (Perelandra), and in the final volume (That Hideous Strength), the battle takes itself to Earth.  The stories are excellent, the characters compelling, and a whole gamut of “issues” is run throughout this trilogy.

Godric by Frederick Buechner.  This is a novelisation of the life of St. Godric, an Anglo-Saxon hermit in the Middle Ages.  This well-written novel tells Godric’s life, including Godric’s struggles and doubts, his own humility and questioning of his vocation.  It is beautiful and wonderful.

Helena by Evelyn Waugh.  This is a novelisation of the life of St. Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine.  I believe that this book captures the spirit of the Late Antique world, especially in terms of philosophy and religion.  Waugh is not trying to make a historical reconstruction but simply telling the legend of St. Helena’s life.  I believe this is a masterpiece; it was Waugh’s favourite of his works.  Loyola Classics has a snazzy edition out.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.  This, along with its companion novels, is among my favourite books.  It is a type of science fantasy, if such a genre exists.  It is about four children who set out across the universe to fight the Dark and to find their missing father; the Dark is taking over planets, extinguishing stars.  Their greatest weapon in the fight against the Dark?  Love.

Christian fiction I want to read:

All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams

Brenden by Frederick Buechner

The Pendragon Cycle by Stephen R. Lawhead (I’ve only read Taliesin)

The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

The Psychomachia by Prudentius

What Christian novels do you recommend?