Captain Yips Secret Journal

Quote of the Day

If we question the reality of "original sin" in the individual, we are fairly driven to admit its presence in the nation, where the egoism of which few men will dare to boast on their own account is consecrated as the supreme virtue against which it is dangerous to blaspheme.  Yet self-assertion in the community is nothing but the self-assertion of the individual writ large. - "From whence come wars and fightings among you?" asks the Epistle of St. James.  "Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?"  The divided and disorderly world does but reflect division and disorder in the self.  The general malady of society, the sickness which sets us at odds with one another, is the product as well as origin of the sickness in ourselves.  And the root of the evil, the thing which necessarily divides us, is the fact that each of us is not only the centre of his own world, the point round which all else revolves, but also the owner of rights to be defended, the claimant who constantly insists upon recognition, the plaintiff determined to "have the law" on some other. - John Burnaby, Christian Words and Christian Meanings, 1955

A Passing Thought

While doing lots of other things this morning, this - insight?  thought?  impression? - barged through.

At some time, probably during the 1960s and 1970s, it became assumed that the Church - however defined or denominated - was supposed to be engines of social change.  This somehow became a dominant definition or outlook, and eventually became the purpose without any theological mooring at all.  I'm not sure St. Paul, for example, was terrifically interested in social change:  his message was the risen Jesus and His Kingdom, and that message overwhelmed other concerns.  Rocking the social boat, maybe, just led to distraction from the Big Picture.  

On the other hand, Christianity certainly led to immense social change over a very long baseline.  We shouldn't be injustice or social problems when we find them.  But the priority is that same Big Picture. 

Of course, there have been plenty of times and places where the Church has been an instrument of the status quo, and that's been unhealthy too.  There really has to be a medium between the Rev. Mr. Collins and   - the TEC bishop of your choice.

Ain't Ready for Reform

I always knew the 1829 Act was just the thin edge of the wedge.  "Bobby," I said, "give them an inch and they'll take the whole kingdom.  I don't like what I hear coming out of Oxford these days.  Don't do it."  But would he listen?  Now look what's happening.  Whole bishops crossing the dam' Tiber. 

But seriously, folks, our Roman friends are happy, various degrees of gloom spread across the Anglican world, and tempests in teapots abound.  "The Anglican Experiment is over," says one: pretty typical language for Anglicans who take that plunge.  Visions of red hats trouble the sleep of Anglo-Catholic clergy of all degrees . . .

Is this the hugest thing since 1534?  Oh, probably not.  Will it help, somehow?  Maybe.  Anglicans have lost definition and confidence, and waiting round the next turn in the twisty road might be - the next Bishop Jewel.  Now that would be fun. 

The Archbishop's Spine

Like Mr. Price, in the comments to Mr. Johnson's post here, I have been perplexed by the fury of the EpiscoLeft to the Vatican initiative.  Suze's rather intemperate rant is here: the somewhat less enraged Mark Harris, here: the ever-moderate Swan of Newark, here.  Their rage is perplexing.  The Pope's action, however eventually structured, is likely to drain at least a few more of their opponents out of what's left of TEC:  why complain?  My only guess is that they're worried that the shock of this action might serve to wake ++Rowan from his slumbers, as well it might. 

Another, not necessarily excluding, explanation is that they cannot tolerate any opposition at all, from anyone, and must attack it when it comes along.  That's not a very pretty picture, which I would prefer not to believe.

What happened?

About a year ago, one of my fellow parishioners asked a question about the Nicene Creed that launched me on a course of reading that I'm still following.  The question itself was minor and simple, but I realized that I could know more about the Creed, and set about doing something.  I was also increasingly irritated by those Anglicans who seemed to put more value on being "evangelical" or "Anglo-Catholic" than in forging a Christian response to the crises of our time. 

The disorganized reading put out extensions, and pretty soon I had a tidy library of works from 20th Century Anglican teachers - Michael Ramsey, Austin Farrer, Henry Chadwick, and John Burnaby chief among them.  The more I read, the more I wondered, "What happened?" 

Ramsey, of course, was the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, ex York, ex Durham.  Farrer is probably best know to Americans as a friend of C.S. Lewis, but he was an active teacher of Christianity at the popular level as well.  Burnaby, comparatively little known now, was Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in the post World War II period. He wrote a couple of books that had some popularity in their time, including The Belief of Christendom, about the Creed, and Christian Words and Christian Meanings.   Chadwick, the youngest of the crowd, was the fabulously learned historian of the early Church, biographer and translator of St. Augustine.

What I have found in all is immense learning which each could communicate without intimidating the reader.  Chadwick had an especial facility to show how the debates and arguments of antiquity live on.  In Ramsey and Farrer especially their learning was joined to a warm spirituality that reminds the reader of the purpose of learning.  They all demonstrate an ability to engage new questions from the foundations of solid Christian learning and life.  In Ramsey's work I found some themes that are later revived by Tom Wright.

So what happened?  The 60s and 70s, I suppose, and, in America, Integrity's coup.  The American Church certainly had its scholars and teachers, but the emphasis here was maybe too much on doing things and not quite enough on why do them.  I dunno.  There are times that I wonder if TEC has been in any practical way an Anglican church for quite some time, despite outward appearance.  There's a certain lack of clarity about what Anglican might mean, and lack of clarity that the EpiscoLeft has used to make it seem that "Anglican" can mean anything.  There will be a great deal of work to clear away the dust and debris.

Addendum.  Left off the concluding paragraph.  That'll happen in a small house with a new baby.  When she gets up in the middle of the night, we all get up.  And Grandpa's brain gets mushy.  Anyway, all this study has shown that not all that long ago, the best Anglican thought and teaching was deeply rooted in the Bible, in the early Fathers, and informed by a lively and warm spirituality.  It was a relational orthodoxy, if you will.  These guys could go toe-to-toe with anyone, at any level, and do it without condescension. 

Afterlife

It looks like Northwestern has turned the former refectory at Seabury "We're not dead yet" Western into a lounge with burgers and pizza. 

Grammar

Let me take an analogy and beat it til it whimpers.

Any living language has more than one dialect.  There are differences in pronunciation and grammar, sometimes very great.  Most of the time, speakers of different dialects of the same language manage to understand each other.  And, people being people, it’s not unusual for some folks to declare that their pronunciation and their grammar is the standard, and all other uses are wrong.  If they have sufficient power in their society, they may try to impose their views on everyone else.  Bernard Shaw wrote an entire, somewhat tedious, play about the interaction of language and class.  And France has made usually useless efforts to prevent the incursion of “foreign” influences into the pristine wonder that is Parisian French.

Similarly, there are those who insist that Christianity can only be spoken one way, with a Roman accent and structured according to approved Roman grammar.  Well, a Greek accent might be acceptable (*sniff*), but anything else is right out.  Some other folks are more at ease with variations of usage and diction.  Anglican Christianity has a lot of dialects, to the point that it must seem Babel-ish to those who want one accent, one usage.  And, alas, in some places within Anglican Christianity, the language spoken now resembles that spoken in Pandemonium.

It’s never going to happen that everyone will agree with that there is only one way to speak Christianity.  I’m not even sure that is supposed to happen.  New and powerful expressions sometimes emerge from irregular usage. 

Enough of that analogy.

I don’t dismiss Rowan Williams as easily as some: one of these days, I’ll do an in depth review of Tokens of Trust to explain why.  On the other hand, his leadership of the Anglican Communion during the crisis caused by TEC is, if not actually abysmal, incomprehensible.  He seems never to have understood that the great majority of the Anglican Communion would have followed, had he led.  He chose not to lead.  It’s no surprise that the Pope is ready to pick up some of the pieces.

Getting Crabby

It seems to me that if there was anything to the original impetus of the Reformation, it lay in the perception that the late medieval Church from which it arose had accreted so much around the kernels of Christian Faith as to be an obstacle, rather than a guide.  Matters such as papal monarchy, Transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, and a host of others seemed to be human elaborations whose time, if any, had passed.  It's probably also true that in every form of Christianity, at every time, there has been a tendency to think that we are saved, not by Jesus, but by what we think about Jesus.  John Burnaby wrote,

We must treat the historic rulings of the Church as signposts along the Christian way, marking for us the points at which the Church has warned her members that by-roads and short cuts have in experience been found to lead nowhere, to endanger and not to aid our approach to the knowledge of him who is the Way.  And we must never forget that human thought and language will always be too feeble to comprehend and contain him who is the Truth and the Life.

The Protestant, maybe especially the Anglican Protestant, is willing to accept a degree of cloudiness in return for a clearer focus on God.  My first reflection of today's Vatican action about personal ordinariates for Anglicans is that this is the result of the loss of confidence in the Protestant impetus, the dissipation of momentum into side channels, and the growth of intellectual and spiritual vapidity.  Whatever else the Vatican possesses, it has immense self-confidence.  In contrast to the spiritual timidity the pervades Western Protestants, that self-confidence is an asset.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether these personal ordinariates outlive this generation.  I somehow doubt it. 

Weirdness

I don't have the slightest idea what today's announcement of some sort of provision for the most Catholic of Anglo-Catholics to find some sort of home in Rome may mean.  The details are not yet available, and those will be pretty important.  It's intriguing that this provision came as a surprise to ++Rowan (Word document - not even time for a pdf):  in Rowan-Speak, the phrase in his letter "I attach a copy of the Joint Statement that I agreed to make alongside the Archbishop of Westminster, the President of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales" appears to mean, "they sandbagged me good, and I haven't had time to figure it out." I suppose this may offer a refuge for a certain type of clergyman and some layfolk.  More must await the details.

All is Made Clear

The Spongster is flogging a new book.  Which, appallingly, people are buying.