“Justification in Anglican Life & Thought: Retrospect and Prospect” began on April 19, Founder’s Day, at Nashotah House Theological Seminary. After an afternoon devoted to hearing impressive young students offering papers on the conference theme, all assembled in the chapel for the Festival Eucharist. Seminarians, male and female, the faculty, presenters and participants filled the space. The liturgy was celebrated with that deceptively easy-looking understated ceremonial that typifies worship at its best.

The broader theme of the two-part conference — the first half met in October — was “justification.” That great central doctrine of the Reformation in all its complexities came back to life, the controversies of former times revived and revisited, at this Anglo-Catholic seminary. Accompanied by these theological and pastoral issues were the people who engaged them, not an inappropriate invocation in a place devoted to the Communion of Saints. The presenters summoned everyone from Augustine of Hippo to the World War I chaplain Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy — “Woodbine Willie,” as troops on the Western Front called him.

In sequence we met Luther and Calvin and the assembled bishops at the Council of Trent, John Wycliffe, Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer, Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes, Caroline Divines and unlikely names such as John Locke, all in the shadow of John Henry Newman and his lectures on justification. No one was mentioned closer to us in time than Eric Mascall, with the remarkable exception of Bishop N.T. Wright, and that, as Fr. Ephraim Radner suggested in his concluding paper, is no accident, living as we do in an age in which justification by faith gains little traction in a world losing its communal awareness and fear of death. It was left to Fr. Radner to thrust the great teachers of the past into historical and social context, which he did with wit and clarity.

It would be invidious to single out particular presenters, some of whom were from afar, for praise or criticism. Yet I came away particularly impressed by the quality of scholarship exhibited by Nashotah’s faculty, not least in biblical studies and church history. It was thrilling to see seminarians following the lectionary in their Greek New Testaments, and inspiring to experience the hopes and confidence of these young and not so young Christians sacrificing their times and means to prepare for ministry. Despite our unhappy divisions, made manifest in the persons of faculty members and students now divided by jurisdictional confusion, unity in faith and vocation shines through. Much credit for this restored morale lies at the door of Nashotah’s dean, the Rt. Rev. Edward L. Salmon, Jr., retired Bishop of South Carolina, whose optimism, humor, and energy is a constant motivating and unifying presence.

I drove away hearing in my mind the Nashotah hymn, one I sang regularly to another tune as a boy in England. “Firmly I believe and truly, God is Three and God is One.” Obeying Newman’s instruction to venerate Holy Church as God’s creation and her teaching as my own is no easy task in contemporary Anglicanism. And yet that contentious

doctrine, justification by faith, seemingly so dated and unfashionable, draws me back to considerations of God’s grace and his unmerited love. God remains sovereign and his will is to be done on earth as it is in heaven in our lives as families, nations and the Church herself. I am grateful to Nashotah House for hosting the conference and was even more grateful to be present. Above everything I gain courage from meeting the younger participants, priests, seminarians and laity who work daily to be instruments of the Church’s revival in the midst of the years.

The Rev. Anthony Clavier recently accepted a call to oversee two missions in the Diocese of Springfield.

Image: The Rev. Ephraim Radner (left), the Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison, and Prof. David Steinmetz at Nashotah House. Gabriel Morrow photo

Shining with the Gospel
James Lloyd Breck’s Final Mission

By Ephraim Radner

James Lloyd Breck spent the last years of his ministry in the little town of Benicia, California, which is on the Carquinez Strait, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers flow into the San Francisco Bay. In the 1850s, Benicia was briefly the capital of California, and it was given the title “the Athens of California” because of all the schools that were founded there. Breck himself started a boys’ school (St. Augustine’s College, 1858) and a girls’ school (St. Mary’s of the Pacific, 1870), neither of which lasted very long, and only one small building of which remains, as a private residence. Some people think he died in part from the exhaustion of these labors, and the many that preceded them.

I grew up in the area, and my mother would drag me to Benicia regularly, as she plied the junk and antiques stores that had gathered in the depressed little downtown. Just last year, I came across an old stained-glass window. My mother had bought it in Benicia 40 years ago or more, and it had been carefully packed up after her death, and lugged around the country and stored in garage after garage. So I took it home with me to Toronto. It’s big, arched, with a simple floral pattern of blue and gold glass laid out in rows of small wood frames. It came from an old church in Benicia, probably from Breck’s day. I had a craftsman fix the frame, then carefully cleaned and painted it, and it now has been fitted into our main living-room window, where the sun comes in off the street and lays out dappled shadows on the carpet and walls.

That’s how I remember Breck. This is a rather sentimental entrée into the Prophet: “how beautiful are the feet of them that preach the Gospel of peace.” “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace and salvation” (Isa. 52:7). “How beautiful!” It’s a word in Hebrew, and in the Greek that Paul quotes for this text in Romans 10, it means just that: pleasing to the eye, comely, yes, “beautiful.”

We need to bear this claim in mind — preaching the Gospel is something beautiful. This, of course, is what Breck did, but he also died of exhaustion. He worked, and worked harder than most. It’s a great paradox. Here we are, gathered to talk about the doctrine of justification by faith — but as a Church, all we do is work. We train ourselves for work; we judge ourselves and each other on the basis of our works; we celebrate or denounce the works of others; and we organize ourselves to plan our works as forcefully and effectively as possible. Works, not grace. The Anglican Communion, it could be argued, is in the mess it is in largely because we have spent more energy trying to save ourselves than preaching the Gospel, let alone the Gospel of peace.

As I said, there’s a paradox here. To preach the Gospel is not to slide into quietism and passivity. How could it be? And there have been various ways of trying to engage this paradox truthfully. Calvin spoke of works as a form of “thanksgiving.” Thomas Aquinas and Protestants too, like Tyndale, spoke of works as the outflowing of “love.” And, of course, thanks and love both respond to grace; they do not engender it.

But here Isaiah presents us with another way of engaging the paradox: beauty. To preach the Gospel is something “beautiful”: beautiful in its depth. It is as beautiful, certainly, as the windows and the light of this or any other glorious building, carrying its colors even into distant rooms. And surely far more beautiful than that! If you want to keep to the triad of “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” you could perhaps speak of the Gospel’s truth, or the redeemed heart’s goodness — but “works,” the works we so struggle over and trip over, often to our destruction, the works of the Gospel heart, are beautiful in themselves. And if their beauty is lost or forgotten or ignored, they are deadly in themselves.

So what “beauty,” exactly? The words used in Scripture range over large territories — so word studies have only limited usefulness here. When God sees the works of his hands, in Creation, and calls them “good” (cf. Gen. 1:31), that is certainly an aspect of this beauty, which is also applied to the visage of the beloved in the Song of Songs, in various ways, and more literally in the Greek (6:4). The point is, what is “beautiful” joins together the “fairness” of something well-made and delightful and glorious to the excellence of its maker and the joy of its making. Beauty is not an ideal or a spiritual quality. It is concrete, material, the actual palpable form that truth and love take within the world.

“This is what truth,” this is what “love” “looks like”; and by definition it is beautiful. “Thou art beautiful, oh my love” (6:4).

When the unnamed woman at the house of Simon the leper in Bethany anoints Jesus with costly ointment, much to the indignation of his disciples, Jesus stops them: “she has done something beautiful to me,” he says (Matt. 26:10). Just as Solomon writes in the Song of Songs: the fragrance of your beautiful ointments draw out the love of all the maidens (1:3). Jesus himself is surely alluding to this text. Literally, Matthew calls it an ergon kalon, a beautiful deed, or a “good work” (cf. Mt. 5:16), as the same phrase is usually translated in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works — your beautiful deeds — and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” Yes, and Jesus goes on to say at Bethany that wherever “this gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (26:13). Do you see? To preach the Gospel is to fill the world with beautiful things. Mother Teresa recognized this — it was one of her favorite phrases, and became the title of Malcolm Muggeridge’s famous documentary and book about her: Something Beautiful for God.

The issue here is, as the culture likes to put it, simply “being”; but it is “being by doing.” And it is doing something particular: preaching the Gospel. To preach the gospel is to be beautiful; it is to engage in the “it is very good” of God’s created display of himself. And I press this point only because, of course, we have exhausted ourselves, as well as perverted ourselves, in all our “doing” that is not simply displaying God’s beauty in its very act, but rather “saving” and “fixing,” organizing and winning, and all the rest. None of that is beautiful. Useful; not beautiful.

There’s no point to making a cult of failure anymore than one of success. But the fact is, Benicia was Breck’s graveyard; his schools barely lasted 15 years apiece. The town is a dump, and the church — his and others — are limping along at best. Nashotah House, with all its challenges, is still here and flourishing. Neither one is the point, though. Breck’s life was beautiful insofar as he preached the Gospel. That’s all we need to know in our ministries. It is interesting to read Breck’s first sermon delivered to the Chippeway in 1852, mainly through a translator. It is, as he puts it, “the blessed Gospel” that they are “hearing for the first time,” delivered in a makeshift sanctuary of pine branches.

The sermon is a simple and short retelling of the creation, Fall, and redemption of humanity in Christ, which he describes pointedly in pastoral terms, that is, in terms of sheep, Shepherds, and a sheepfold that is “safe” within a dangerous world. “Would you make Jesus, the great and good Shepherd, rejoice? Then come to this place, and hear His words. He has left with us, in His good Book, what we are to say to you. … You will be sheep of the Good Shepherd. … And if you come to Him, Jesus Christ will say to His Father, ‘I have found my sheep which were lost.’ What sheep? You, my children — you that today hear the blessed Gospel for the first time” (The Life of the Reverend James Lloyd Breck, 1883, p. 213).

Yes, that is very beautiful indeed. Would that you and I, each day, every day somewhere and somehow, to someone — this is what we are about as creatures of the King, at least this: would that we might preach so beautiful a thing. In this we would weary not, nor fade, but shine, with Breck and so many others, like the stars of heaven.

The Rev. Ephraim Radner is professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto. He preached this sermon in April during “Justification in Anglican Life & Thought: Retrospect and Prospect,” a conference at Nashotah House Theological Seminary.

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Nashotah Conference

We offer a series of essays on “orderly counsel” to aid this vital labor — in the run-up to this summer’s triennial General Convention, and more generally as Anglicans seek to articulate and defend the properly theological foundations of an ordered, orderly Church. Starting in the present issue and extending across the following four issues, we will publish 10 loosely connected essays on a range of topics broadly within the field of Anglican ecclesiology and church government. In most cases our authors will jump off from concrete instances ready to hand in the Episcopal Church, but always press out to a larger pattern of reasoning, incorporating Scripture and the history of the Church. In this way, we hope to place a range of problems and questions — concerning mission and power, legislation and oversight, constitution and canon, episcopacy, and the nature and reality of dioceses — in a new light.

We are grateful to the fellows of the Anglican Communion Institute for suggesting the possibility of such a series and generously convening a meeting at the newly formed Cranmer Institute in Dallas, during which initial brainstorming and a lively exchange of ideas took place. The editors of The Living Church in turn conceived the series, chose the topics, and selected writers from across the church, half of whom are younger leaders, coming to grips with the challenge of wise governance at the outset of their careers. We should all redouble our commitment to faithful reform on their account and that of their children, to the greater glory of God.

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Many of you have heard that seven bishops (two retired and five active) have filed an amicus brief in support of Bishop Iker’s action currently before the Texas Supreme Court. This saddens us all for multiple reasons.

Please know that the leadership in the Diocese is exploring an appropriate response to such a shameful action by these members of the House of Bishops.

Also, please continue to remember all parties in prayer as we continue to work toward a successful resolution.

From Kathleen Wells, the diocese’s chancellor

On April 23, 2012, ten Episcopal clergy filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief with the Texas Supreme Court. The filing amici are Bishops Maurice M. Benitez (retired, Diocese of Texas); John W. Howe (retired, Diocese of Central Florida); Paul E. Lambert (suffragan, Diocese of [Dallas]); William H. Love (diocesan, Diocese of Albany); D. Bruce MacPherson (diocesan, Diocese of [Western] Louisiana and formerly suffragan, Diocese of Dallas); Daniel H. Martins (diocesan, Diocese of Springfield); and James M. Stanton (diocesan, Diocese of Dallas). Three priests also joined in the brief.

Their brief supports the efforts of former Bishop Jack Iker and his breakaway faction, after they severed ties with The Episcopal Church, to continue holding themselves out as the “Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth” and to take historic property dedicated to the mission and ministry of The Episcopal Church for the use of their new organization.

Their primary argument is that The Episcopal Church is indeed hierarchical, but only to the diocesan level. Among other things, this position ignores the numerous courts across the nation that have unanimously recognized The Episcopal Church’s three-tier hierarchy. It ignores the Episcopal Diocese’s solemn promise upon formation “to fully subscribe to and accede to the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church” and that “the several Parishes and Missions of the Diocese may be opened only for the services, rites and ceremonies, or other purposes, either authorized or approved by this Church, and for no other use.” And of course it ignores former-Bishop Iker’s past statements to several courts, including his 2002 statement to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that an “Episcopal bishop … is governed by the constitution and canons of the Church” and “must adhere to the constitution and canons of the Church or be subject to discipline.” The Episcopal Church and Local Episcopal Parties and Congregations have rebutted similar “hierarchy stops with me” arguments here [PDF] and here [PDF], for example.

The amici, a group of retired and current clergy sympathetic to Iker’s agenda, also argue that determining that the hierarchy stops with them is a straightforward process but determining that it goes all the way up to the highest levels of the Church requires a “searching” inquiry. However, the same oaths and promises of loyalty and discipline that show hierarchy between the parish and the diocese also show hierarchy between the diocese and the General Church. The inquiry is the same, as is obvious from the plain words on the face of Church documents, and as courts around the nation have unanimously found.

The sympathizing amici claim that Texas courts must defer to Iker as the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, despite the plain facts and even though all sides agree that all ties between Iker and The Episcopal Church have been severed and that Bishop Wallis Ohl is the only Bishop recognized by The Episcopal Church as the Bishop of The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.

As former-Bishop Iker warned another appellate court: “[T]o allow each diocesan bishop absolute freedom to determine who is and is not [duly qualified] would, in part, render ECUSA a loose association of independent regional church bodies. There must be some national standard by which [duly qualified] can be determined.” And as former-Bishop Iker told another Tarrant County District Court in the 1990s, in a sworn statement, a breakaway faction is “a new creation, having no relation to [the true continuing church] and no right to its property” specifically “because they have joined [a different church] and thereby have abandoned communion with The Episcopal Church” (emphasis added).

Iker’s numerous representations to other courts, along with the plain documents showing over and over the obvious three-tier hierarchy of The Episcopal Church, have been cited by the Episcopal parties at each stage of the diocesan litigation and are in the record before the Texas Supreme Court now as it considers our case.

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Moving backward in the text from Exodus 20 (Friday night’s focus), Professor Brueggemann spoke Saturday morning on the first part of Exodus and the Abraham cycle in Genesis. He highlighted the power and importance of “bringing pain to voice,” as evinced by power of the Israelites cry in Exodus 2:23–24. Then he challenged us to consider the entirety of Exodus 1–15 as a liturgy of liberation, a paradigm which was reenacted throughout Israelite history and an ongoing paradigm for the Church today. As expected, the responses of Professors Sharp and Enns were appreciative and insightful, especially at the points where they sharpened, qualified, or pushed back against aspects of Brueggeman’s position. If you want to know what was said, again, look for the review.

After a lively question and answer period, we took time off for lunch. Some folks, including Professor Sharp, walked the outdoor parish labyrinth. Others went on a church tour, including a visit to the carillon. I spend my time milling around the books and meeting some interesting folks who had come from near and far. More on them in my final post, which will focus on reactions to the conference. One minor correction, however, to yesterday’s post: the award for furthest distance traveled to the conference actually goes to an attendee from Mount Vernon, Iowa.

Professor Sharp gave the afternoon talk, presenting on the theme: “Leaving the Garden: Biblical Irony as an Invitation to Discernment.” Moving beyond the more familiar stories from Genesis and Exodus, Professor Sharp led the conversation into the prophetic and wisdom divisions of Tanakh. Again, I won’t spill too many details, but Professor Sharp certainly gave some food for thought in her sensitive literary readings of Numbers and Ecclesiastes. Again, the remarks of Professors Enns and Brueggemann built constructively on Professor Sharp’s remarks.

Today looks busy as well: 9:30 am Holy Eucharist, followed by four more lectures in the Sunday Forum: (1) Professor Brueggemann on the difficult subject of violence in the Bible; (2) Professor Sharp on “Singing the Truth: The Psalms and Spiritual Transformation”; and then a two-part treatment of the Psalms by Professor Brueggemann on (3) “Wisdom from the Prophets on Truth-Telling and (4) Hope-Telling.”

One more note before I sign off. I promised on Friday that I would reproduce some interviews with our speakers. Yesterday afternoon, both Professors Brueggemann and Sharp were kind enough to sit down with me for a few minutes and talk on a number of issues. I can’t print everything here, but I wanted to pass along at least the following anecdote, with more to come.

One of the major themes of this conference has been not only the importance of reading the Scripture, but the final end of letting Scripture read us. Fr. Gustavo Gutiérrez speaks in precisely this language in the introduction to his penetrating little commentary On Job, which was my airplane devotional on the way out here. As a nod to Fr. Guttiérez, I asked both conference speakers which books of Scripture “read them” the most. Independently from one another, both responded with the same two books: the Psalms and Jeremiah.

What was especially fascinating was that while the books Professors Brueggemann and Sharp pinpointed were the same, they had different rationales for choosing Jeremiah. For Professor Brueggemann, Jeremiah “reads him” because the centrality of anguish speaks to him. “Anyone who is not in anguish about what’s happening to us [in America] should read the book of Jeremiah.” For Professor Sharp, by contrast, Jeremiah’s appeal is not in its anguish or its vitriol, but in the multiple strata of the text, a witness to the “struggle to claim the prophetic voice” by those who followed Jeremiah. For Professor Sharp, Jeremiah’s polyvalence points to the fact that people of sincere faith continue to disagree with one another about what Scripture means. Taking that to heart remains a central task for the Church as it reads scripture together.

Both views of “being read by the book of Jeremiah” are inspiring on their own; together, they form a compelling argument that Christians stand to gain much by continuing to seek opportunities to be read by Scripture together in this kind of setting. The dialogue between Brueggemann, Sharp, and Enns in an intimate parish setting continues to be one of the highlights of the conference for me.

Image Credit: The Totally Unofficial Walter Brueggemann Page

Conference Notes

It’s a clear and crisp morning here in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. I’m on site at St. Thomas’ Church for an exciting Biblical Studies conference entitled “Making Sense of the God of the Old Testament.” For the next two days, I’ll be checking in on Covenant with some “Conference Notes,” including excerpts from interviews with Old Testament Professors Walter Brueggemann, Peter Enns, and Carolyn Sharp, as well as my host, Fr. Marek Zabriskie, rector of St. Thomas’ and founder of the Center Biblical Studies (CBS).

The Bible Challenge

What’s the Center for Biblical Studies? I’m glad you asked. Subscribers to The Living Church may remember a recent article by Fr. Zabriskie, which gave a history of the ministry. Founded only in 2011, the Center for Biblical Studies has grown precipitously in the last year and a half into an international network of dioceses and churches focused around a simple mission: to read the entire Bible in a single year. What began as a pulpit challenge from a parish rector to read Scripture together has blossomed into a Communion-wide call, involving now one thousand churches and fifteen bishops, to become re-immersed in Scripture.

The lectionary, Fr. Zabriskie observes, presents a “sanitized and censored” version of the Bible, expurgated for Sunday decorum. One could go a lifetime reading only the lectionary and hardly touch certain books and stories, especially from the Old Testament. This problem, it must be said, exists primarily in modern lectionaries. For instance, while the reading of Judges in the 1979 BCP Daily Office stops with chapter 18, the gruesome tales of Judges 19–21 are indeed included in the Calendar of the 1662 book.

The other reality faced by Anglican pastors, however, is the dwindling practice of Morning and Evening Prayer. Gone are the days when Samuel Pepys could casually report attending both services in his local parish. The reality is that many Episcopalians simply do not read the Bible other than on Sunday. The Revised Common Lectionary has made a valiant effort to restore certain narrative portions of the Old Testament to the summer Sunday readings. But even so, time simply does not allow for the kind of engagement offered by a full diet of daily Morning and Evening Prayer.

The Bible Challenge offers a practical alternative for a busier laity: simply read the Bible. This is not to remove the Bible from the context of prayer. Indeed, Fr Zabriskie notes that in working out the Bible Challege daily digest—three chapters of the Old Testament, one Psalm, and one chapter of the New Testament—he was constructing an alternative lectionary of sorts. The aim is ultimately Cranmerian, envisioning a people who immerse themselves in the Word. “The reading of scriptures is a great and strong bulwark or fortress against sin,” writes Cranmer. “The ignorance of the same is the greater ruin and destruction of them that will know it not.”

Although the Bible Challenge is formally a one year commitment, the goals of the Center for Biblical Studies are to inculcate more permanent habits. As Fr. Zabriskie puts it, the aim is not to inspire people to read the Bible in a year and then move on to other great books; rather, the Bible Challenge provides a point of entry, whose end is to foster a “lifelong, spiritual, daily discipline” in reading the unique Word of God. This seems to be working: when I asked parishioners at St. Thomas’ whether they had done the Bible Challenge, they nodded and said: “We’re in our second year.”

Making Sense of the God of the Old Testament: 27–29 April 2012

“Making Sense of the God of the Old Testament” is the first conference the CBS has hosted. Only about a quarter of the registered participants, however, come from St. Thomas’. In addition to attracting people from neighboring cities in Pennsylvania, the conference has drawn attendees from as far as Easton, Maryland; Arlington, Virginia; Hendersonville, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; South Bend, Indiana; and Mystic, Connecticut.

The theme for the conference was sparked from conversations among participants in the Bible Challenge at St. Thomas’ Church. Time and again, as Fr. Zabriskie led discussion groups called “Intelligent Talk about the Bible,” people would notice a seeming difference between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New. This prompted the inevitable question: “Do Christians worship two gods?”

The necessary answer to this question, as Professor Sharp pointed out yesterday evening, is “No”: to say otherwise would be heresy. But simply saying “No, we do not worship two gods” does not answer all the questions that a thoughtful Christian might have. Hence the need for further discussion.

“Making Sense of the God of the Old Testament” is not the first conference to address the difficult issues of God’s character in the Old Testament. For instance, the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame hosted an interdisciplinary conference in 2009 on a similar subject entitled “My Ways are Not Your Ways,” featuring talks by analytic philosophers including Bob Adams, John Hare, Eleanore Stump, Richard Swinburne, and Nicholas Woltersdorff, as well as biblical scholars Gary Anderson and Christopher Seitz. The proceedings of this conference were published in the monograph: Divine Evil?: The Moral Character of the God of Abraham (Oxford, 2010).

To my mind, however, the CBS conference stands to make an important contribution on a number of scores. I’ll highlight just two. In the first place, this conference features top-flight Biblical Studies professors, but is being held in the context of a parish. On Sunday morning, Professor Sharp, recently ordained to the priesthood, will be celebrating the Eucharist with conference attendees. On Sunday evening, Professor Brueggemann will be preaching at Choral Evensong. The integration of faith and scholarship offered by the CBS is a model for future conferences where the church may come alongside the academy and reclaim its place as both a house of prayer and a house of study.

Second, all three conference speakers, in their lectures and publishing, present a similar (though not identical!) ideological and political reading of Scripture, which holds the OT as central and indispensable to Christian faith, while also noting the problems it causes for believers. In particular, both Professors Brueggemann and Sharp have championed the polyphonic and multivalent characterization of Scripture, which renders its meaning, in the final assessment, indeterminate. Far less than presenting a monological theology, as Professor Brueggeman notes, the OT presents us with a “contest of interpretations.” This partial homogeneity in methodological approaches of the conference speakers might be regarded as a weakness to some extent, but it also lends the conference a certain coherence and means that the differences which emerge between the respective speakers will be all the more interesting to tease apart, as iron sharpens iron.

For example, in last night’s introductory lecture, Professor Bruggemann presented a provocative reading of Exod 20:1–2 which interpreted the Covenant of Sinai as an “act of counter-imagination” meant to challenge Pharaoh’s “ideology of empire.” The commands of the Decalogue (Exod 20:1–17) spell out a new system of living which is fundamentally at odds with the production ideology of Pharaoh, who in Exodus 5 repeats (ten times?) a single commandment: “make bricks.”

This is a compelling reading, which will certainly “preach.” In listening to Professor Brueggemann, however, one did get the impression that, according to his interpretation, the program of God was entirely opposed to “empire” of any kind. To which the obvious objections arise: What about God’s Covenant with King David? And didn’t Jesus preach a Kingdom? Enter Professor Enns, who, while quite sympathetic to aspects of Brueggemann’s position, noted that the New Testament in fact “ratchets up” the language of empire. So which one is it? No empire or more empire? The difference may sound subtle, but at stake are ultimately issues such as the precise role of the Davidic monarchy and the historical people of Israel in salvation history, the possibility of Christian empire, and the right use (or non-use) of military force, a major point of contention in the ongoing debate between Christian pacifists in the Origenist/Anabaptist tradition and Just War theorists walking in the steps of St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei.

Not surprisingly, St. Thomas’ already has another conference coming up on the horizon: “Emergence Christianity — What It Is, Where it Came From, Why It Matters,” 19 May 2012, led by Phyllis Tickle. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the current offering. If the next two days are anything like tonight’s discussion, then hearing the dialogue between Brueggemann, Enns, and Sharp alone will justify the time spent in study and prayer with the Church here in Fort Washington.

“These amici remain in The Episcopal Church and submit this brief solely because they disagree with the characterization of the governance of The Episcopal Church as submitted in support of the motion for summary judgment that the trial court granted in this case,” the brief says. “The amici oppose the decision by the Appellants (‘Diocese of Fort Worth’) to leave The Episcopal Church, but in its ruling against them the court has misunderstood, and thereby damaged, the constitutional structure of The Episcopal Church.

“These amici curiae support the traditional polity of The Episcopal Church founded on the autonomy of its constituent dioceses and therefore submit that the trial court erred both as a matter of fact and as a matter of law when it found that The Episcopal Church has a hierarchical authority superior to the diocese and its bishop.”

The brief names three priests as amici curiae:

• The Rev. Christopher R. Seitz, president of the ACI;
• The Very Rev. Philip W. Turner, ACI vice president;
• The Rev. Ephraim Radner, professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College, Toronto, and senior fellow of the ACI. Radner, like many seminary faculty, retains canonical residency where he served previously — in his case, the Diocese of Colorado.

The brief also names seven bishops as amici curiae:

• The Rt. Rev. Maurice M. Benitez, retired, Diocese of Texas;
• The Rt. Rev. John W. Howe, retired, Diocese of Central Florida;
• The Rt. Rev. Paul E. Lambert, bishop suffragan, Diocese of Dallas;
• The Rt. Rev. William H. Love, Diocese of Albany;
• The Rt. Rev. D. Bruce MacPherson, Diocese of West Louisiana;
• The Rt. Rev. Daniel H. Martins, Diocese of Springfield;
• The Rt. James M. Stanton, Diocese of Dallas.

“The position of the ACI/Episcopal Bishops and Clergy is that the summary judgment ruling by the trial court violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution because it necessarily immersed the court in an impermissible ‘searching’ and ‘extensive inquiry into religious polity,’” the brief says. “Under the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence, courts may constitutionally apply a deference standard only if they can identify the appropriate ecclesiastical authority without conducting such an extensive inquiry.

“In the case of The Episcopal Church, its governing constitution specifies that the diocesan bishop is ‘the Ecclesiastical Authority’ in the diocese. Acceptance of Appellees’ claim that there are bodies or offices with hierarchical supremacy over the diocesan bishop would require the Court to become embroiled in a searching historical analysis of difficult questions of church polity without any explicit language in the church’s governing instrument on which to base its conclusion. The First Amendment does not permit such a result.”

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Fort Worth Amicus Brief

The Episcopal Church’s 2003 General Convention kicked off a process for revisiting the venerable liturgical supplement, Lesser Feasts and Fasts. In 2009, General Convention authorized for trial use the fruits of this process, now called Holy Women, Holy Men. It’s fair to say that reactions to the new work have been mixed. Some people from either a conservative or catholic perspective were outraged by the book and its contents. My dominant feeling is not outrage but disappointment — so much could have been done that was not; this book was, at the end of the day, an opportunity not taken.

Lesser Feasts and Fasts was produced shortly before the authorization and publication of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Therefore it was, in a sense, still created within the paradigms set by the 1928 prayer book. But Holy Women, Holy Men was authorized 30 years later; it had the opportunity to integrate further the theology of our current prayer book — especially its emphasis upon our baptismal theology and its implications for Christian life and Christian death — and it failed to do so.

The introduction to the volume offered by former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold specifically cites two collects from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the first from the Common of Saints, the second from the Burial Office. These collects emphasize two central points: the fellowship between believers present now upon the earth and those who have gone before us, and the intercessory role of the saints. These prayer-book doctrines exemplified in Bishop Griswold’s chosen collects are decidedly absent from the rest of the book. More troubling, these doctrines flow from a common source that forms the centerpiece of the current prayer book: a recovery of the centrality of baptism.

In the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, we are baptized into the death of Christ and are raised from the waters with him, partakers in his resurrection life (see Rom. 6:3-5). We are incorporated as “very members incorporate in the mystical body” of Christ in a bond that is “indissoluble” (BCP, p. 339; cf. p. 298). Or, as stated best by St. Paul, continuing his meditation on life in Christ: “I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38,39). Paul’s words reinforce Jesus’ statements concerning the God of Abraham being the Lord of the Living and not the dead — made cryptically in the Synoptic Gospels and more plainly in the mystical heights of St. John: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:25,26). The prayer book collects these passages and more into the assurance proclaimed in the Proper Preface for the Commemoration of the Dead: “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens” (BCP, p. 382).

Thus our faith teaches that, as a result of this baptismal life, our physical death is not and cannot be the end of our life in God. Our prayer book — like our Scriptures — takes a studied reticence toward the exact mechanisms and states of those who have died in the flesh. However, in continuity with catholic teaching East and West, two broad groups are distinguished from one another in the prayers of the Church: the Church Expectant and the Church Triumphant. On one hand, we pray for the departed, asking for them “eternal rest”; on the other, we praise God for the “saints who have entered into joy” (BCP, Form III, p. 387). On one hand, there are those yet in the process of “continual growth into thy love and service”; on the other, there are those who are “partakers of thy heavenly kingdom” and who — in the fullness of that growth — “see [God] as he is” (BCP, pp. 330, 862).

No matter the current state of the faithful dead — whether they are still growing in grace or have already arrived into the full presence of God — both the Scriptures and the prayer book leave no doubt that, through baptism, they share in the same life that we live. They remain part of the “communion of the saints” that we confess in the creeds. By virtue of their life in Christ through the mystery of baptism, they are for us not historical figures but eschatological figures. The difference between the historical and the eschatological is one of timing: historical figures are beings of the past who exert influence upon us solely at our initiative, through our memories of their past deeds; eschatological figures are beings of God’s present and are therefore simultaneously past, present, and future within our human frame of reference. Furthermore, their influence upon us is based in fluid interaction like our interactions with those physically present with us now.

When we recognize the faithful departed as eschatological beings, we realize that they are full and present members within our worshipping assemblies. This is the fellowship spoken of in the collects I have cited, the same “fellowship of Christ’s Body” with reference to baptism in the collect for the Second Sunday of Easter (BCP, pp. 172-73). In their eschatological role, the alive in Christ pursue without hindrance the same ministry that they performed in the days of their physical life: “The Church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice, peace, and love” (BCP, p. 855). They continue to pray for us as we continue to pray for them and with them, maintaining the spiritual demands of fellowship.

And these are precisely the grounds on which Holy Women, Holy Men fails.

While the collects of Holy Women, Holy Men have been criticized on a number of grounds (most notably by Bishop Daniel H. Martins) as have the application of the selection criteria, my central concern is that in both of these areas Holy Women, Holy Men has fundamentally chosen to treat the saints of our church as historical figures and not as eschatological ones. It mistakes and misrepresents the relationship between the present Church Militant and the equally present Church Triumphant, constructing a vision of the Church at odds with the prayer book.

When we look across a representative sample of the new collects, a distinct structural pattern begins to appear. The collects for Anna Julia Haywood Cooper and Elizabeth Evelyn Wright and for the Mayos and Menningers are perfect examples:

Eternal God, who didst inspire Anna Julia Haywood Cooper and Elizabeth Evelyn Wright with the love of learning and joy of teaching: Help us also to gather and use the resources of our communities for the education of all thy children; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, One God, for ever and ever.

Divine Physician, your [sic] Name is blessed for the work and witness of the Mayos and Menningers, and the revolutionary developments that they brought to the practice of medicine. As Jesus went about healing the sick as a sign of the reign of God come near, bless and guide all those inspired to the work of healing by the Holy Spirit that they may follow his example for the sake of thy kingdom and the health of thy people; through the same Jesus Christ who with thee and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The pattern inherent here can be described — perhaps a bit reductionistically — as follows: “O God, we thank you for A. and B. who were great Xs. Help us to be great Xs too.” The action and the relationship described in the prayer are strictly between “us” and God; we thank God, and ask God to motivate us in particular ways. The saint or saints serve only as historical illustrations. They are neither engaged nor beseesched: within the scope of the collect, they have lost both their agency and personhood. They are historical, not eschatological.

Also troubling is the relationship between the “X” for which the prayer asks and the Christian life. In these collects, the saints are exemplars, but what we ask to imitate is their professionalism, their success at “X-ness.” The problem is that we are not trying to form professionals; we are trying to form Christians. Whether the saints were good at their jobs — however holy those jobs might have been — is not the point. Rather, the point should be that these specific people displayed the incarnate presence of Christ in their lives and were thus participants within the sacramental conversion of all creation into the life of God.

In contrast to what I believe to be its original intention, the ecclesiology of Holy Women, Holy Men as taught through these collects shrinks the effective Church to the merely visible. We may have reference to the figures of the past, but that was then and this is now. There is no sense that those who labored for Christ in ages past are yet working with us hand in hand, our prayers mutually supporting and aiding one another. While intending to display the broad array of those who have proclaimed Christ through the ages, the reduction from the eschatological to the historical level does the opposite. It reinforces the “tyranny of the visible,” the assumption that the Church is composed of the ones whom we see around us.

In one sense, this perspective does grant a sense of the Church’s particularity: that the Church is not an abstract notion, but is made up of real individuals who gather together for real reasons. But more important than this (literally) parochial perspective is the understanding that the Church is broader and wider and deeper than our local community. This is why we have things like diocesan cycles of prayer and the Anglican cycle of prayer; in our intercessions we are reminded that our praise and prayer are bound not just to those we see around us, but to all those who are bound into Christ through the miracle of baptism. Our prayer is an opportunity to name the Church, recalling those who are separated from us physically yet present with us eschatologically in Christ, whether the separation is due to geographical distance or to physical state.

When our liturgical books and services restrict themselves to the Church Militant, we are impoverished through the loss of our two additional orders: the Churches Expectant and Triumphant. In a stroke, we reduce the faithful departed to memories and histories, excluding them from our continuing communal life in Christ. Doing so distorts our understanding of the eschatological arc of the Christian life.

Treating the Church Triumphant historically also allows us to treat the faithful departed in ways that appear more problematic when viewed eschatologically. For instance, history deals with facts and ideas, not feelings. When we recognize our treasured dead as still active in our midst rather than sources of good ideas it changes how we relate to them and treat them. How do John Calvin and Karl Barth feel about being included in an Anglican calendar — especially given their own statements on the sanctoral system within their earthly lives? What do John XXIII or G.K. Chesterton think about it — particularly when they have not been so recognized within their own communion?

Alternatively, several individuals are recognized as being the first at achieving or accomplishing something. Firstness is a historical category, not an eschatological or spiritual one. What if some unknown archive were rediscovered and their “firstness” were overturned? If they became the second at their achievement would they still be remembered on the strength of their witness to the risen Christ ahead of the deserving alternatives? These questions and more lead me to ask if Holy Women, Holy Men has met the mandate asked of it in 2003: Is it truly complete, or would it benefit from further thought and revision?

Holy Women, Holy Men had the opportunity to serve as an extended parish directory for the Episcopal Church to give names, addresses, and snapshots of those who even now participate within our larger community. What we received instead is a history book filled with facts and past dates. Our eschatological partners have been reduced to historical examples. The theology of our prayer book requests more, expects more. Good work has been done here — but better work awaits.

Derek Olsen, theologian in residence at Church of the Advent, Baltimore, completed his doctoral studies in the New Testament at Emory University, where he taught courses in homiletics and liturgics. He writes about liturgical spirituality at haligweorc.

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Holy Women Holy Men

Ever been to a gift exchange where the drawing of names and dollar limits had everyone so bound up with anxiety that it felt like more you were completing middle school busy work assignments in order to keep your grade from falling?

Ever known someone — or been someone — who seemed driven by conscious to out-give everyone in the room, as if it wasn’t really a gift unless it overwhelmed any normal sense of propriety?

I think our understanding of the church in mission is often caught on one of these poles. Giving either needs to line up as quid pro quo, or else it needs to consist of a unilateral flood that refuses to entertain any return — all quid, no pro.

On Saturday of Easter Week my son and I went with a group of seminarians and parishioners from St. Julian of Norwich to help a recently retired couple who had lost their home to the Texas wildfires last Labor Day. We worked beside the homeowners, as well as the contracted workers their insurance could afford, carrying charred logs to the road for the county trucks to pick up, rebuilding a deck, digging out a drainage trench, and rebuilding a chain-link fence.

The results of the day were predictable: we laughed through our sweat, had a wonderful day, and went home tired and sore, feeling like we’d made new friends and gotten to know old friends better.

And all that is called grace, in Christian-speak. As the cheerfully long-suffering couple expressed their gratitude to us for the day of labor, we returned the thanks, trying our best to express what we all actually felt: that were going home having received beyond what we’d given.

All that is, it seems to me, exactly as it should be. “What’s in it for me?” sounds like a stock-exchange sort of question, and it can be, if we’re looking to balance our exports with our imports. But real giving, like what happened on Easter Saturday, is an excessive event in which all who participate somehow receive more than they’ve given. There was something in it for us, and we would have shut ourselves off from grace had we refused to acknowledge that. I am indebted to two homeowners in Bastrop Country, and to the contracted and volunteer workers now, just as they are indebted to me. Human beings, in so far as I understand these curious creatures, seem built for these debts of gratitude.

The giving of gifts, as my wife and my friend Doug have taught me (though I’m still learning the lesson), is a matter of great risk: to risk perceiving another, to risk naming my relation to that other with a material object. And receiving gifts is no less a risk: I become vulnerable to the one who has something to give, I risk seeing myself in the eyes of another. To receive grace like this is to surrender control of the encounter, to let the giver momentarily “exceed” me so that I can desire what she is holding out. This, it seems to me, comes very close the heart of our redemption story, and to our Eucharistic feasting. And also to what took place among the sweat and charred lumber last Saturday.

The bishops made minimal changes to the expanded plan, which was presented by the Rt. Rev. Edward S. Little II, Bishop of Northern Indiana. The new document expanded on “Caring for All the Churches,” an agreement approved by the bishops in March 2004.

“We asked ourselves, How can we create a safe place for theological minorities? That question cuts in both directions.”

The document expanded on “Caring for All the Churches,” an agreement approved by the bishops in March 2004. “We realized in the end that creating a canonical solution was too complicated,” Little said.

The bishops said the agreement works from a foundation
of greater theological heft,
gives a clearer explanation of what DEPO entails and guarantees “ministerial reproduction.”

As with the 2004 version of the document, the
revised version emphasizes that a congregation
and bishop should strive for reconciliation before considering any DEPO arrangement.

The 2012 revision gives more responsibilities to a bishop exercising DEPO, so long as a diocese’s bishop and standing committee agree to it.

“The ministry of a bishop serving under the provisions of Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight” may now include “providing counsel to the rector, vestry, or canonically designated lay leadership” and, “in cooperation with the Bishop Diocesan, collaborating in search processes when the parish seeks a new rector.”

“Theological minorities often fear that they are tolerated and that when they die out there will be no one left to represent them,” Little said.

Regarding future priests: “The bishop providing delegated pastoral oversight may also, with the consent of the Bishop Diocesan and his or her own commission on ministry and standing committee, care for persons from the parish receiving delegated oversight in the ordination process,” the expanded statement says. “Thus the person testing his or her vocation seeks ordination through the discernment process of the diocese of the bishop providing delegated oversight, and his or her formation is under the direction of that diocese.”

Bishop Little said he and the Rt. Rev. Mark Hollingsworth, Jr., Bishop of Ohio, worked together when Church of the Advent, Westlake, called its new rector. Bishop Little provides DEPO to that congregation and to three others across the country.

Bishop Little is hopeful that DEPO will fare better in the long term than the Port St. Lucie Statement of Conscience (1977), which addressed pastoral care for Episcopalians who opposed ordaining women to the priesthood.

“I think in the House of Bishops today there’s a real awareness that we did not handle that well,” he said. “We lost some very good people because they did not feel welcome.”

The full text of the expanded statement follows.

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Caring for All the Churches

The Bishop of St Asaph, Dr Gregory Cameron, who proposed a motion which was amended in the light of the Church of England decision, said, “We have given the Covenant an amber light rather than a green light but in doing so we are being honest about where the Church is today. However, I think we need to reaffirm our strong commitment to each other through the saving power of Christ revealed in the Gospels. That is what I believe the Covenant ultimately calls us to do and I hope one day the Church in Wales will be able to vote for it.”

Read the rest.