Two Additions to the Blogroll

I link these in keeping with the "Man-glicanism" and "Muscular Christianity" subjects to which this blog is occasionally concerned, and in opposition to the mindset, recently expressed by an Anglo-Catholic blogger, who is "not an advocate of 'muscular Christianity', and who "approach(es) (his) faith through beauty and love, through the way of the Romantics". (To his credit, he did say "enough is enough" with respect to ISIS and seems to understand the need to unleash a can of serious whoopass on these murdering barbarians.  My high Anglo-Catholic friends here in Denver are hardly anti-muscular Christians.  They drink, smoke, love women, collect firearms, shoot, and prepare.  They may wear lace at Mass, but underneath their vestments are sidearms, nerves of steel and a resolve to go "loud" if necessary.)

The Art of Manliness

Joffre the Giant: Excursions in Christian Virility

Death Hath Deprived Me

Thomas Weelkes.  Performed by Vox Luminis.

Thomas Weelkes is best known for his vocal music, especially his madrigals and church music. Weelkes wrote more Anglican services than any other major composer of the time, mostly for evensong. Many of his anthems are verse anthems, which would have suited the small forces available at Chichester Cathedral. It has been suggested that larger-scale pieces were intended for the Chapel Royal.

Hear My Prayer

Henry Purcell.

Proof there is a God.

Aussie Military Strategist: We’ll Fight Radical Islam for 100 Years

"Australia needs to prepare for an increasingly savage, 100-year war against radical Islam that will be fought on home soil as well as foreign lands, the former head of the army, Peter Leahy, has warned."

News flash: we've been fighting it for 1,400 years. It's just that the modern political elite is in denial. Political correctness keeps them there.

On a related note, it's easy for us Christians to harbor a spirit of revenge when we reflect on the atrocities ISIS is currently perpetrating against the defenseless civilian population in Iraq, which includes Muslims.  Revelation 6:9-11 reflects a righteous Christian desire for retribution, and I for one would love to see ISIS destroyed.   At a minimum, the West should to its best to arm anti-Jihadist forces everywhere. 

But we must be aware of two things:  1) the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church; and 2) there are stories emanating from all parts of the Islamic world not only of disaffection with Islam but of conversions to Christianity.  And because Christian missionary activity is not allowed in Muslim lands, Muslims are coming to Christ by reading bootlegged Bibles and from visions received from heaven.  I don't know the provenance of this video and so I'm a little hesitant to post it, but, his tears might be a sign of authenticity. Even if fake, it is reflective of what indeed seems to be happening among Muslims:

Like the Calorene solidier Emeth in The Last Battle, Muslims like the man in this video are finding Christ, though in the most unlikely of places.  God knows the hearts of his elect, like he knew the heart of Cornelius, another unexpected member of the Church who became so because of a vision received from God.  He will save them missionary or no missionary, and the current horror just might prove to be, for many Muslims, the catalyst of their salvation.

That being said, if the Lord so tarries, we will indeed be fighting radical Islam for another hundred years,   and the liberals who constitute the political elite in the Western world will have to be removed from power in order for us to effectively fight it, because they simply aren't able to man up.  Their day has come and gone.

Behold, the need for a new Crusade is suddenly upon us. 

Two Relevant Articles

The first is by Al Mohler on the Church of England's decision to open its episcopate to women.  Sound of nail being hit on head here:

This is the kind of “compromise” that pervades mainline liberal Protestantism. It shifts the church decisively to the left and calls for mutual respect. Conservatives are to be kindly shown the door. Ruth Gledhill of The Guardian [London], one of the most insightful observers of religion in Great Britain, recognized the plight of the evangelicals, though she celebrated the vote: “In the last 69 episcopal appointments, there have been evangelicals but not a single conservative one.” In this context, “conservative” means more concerned with doctrinal matters and opposed to a change in the church’s teachings on gender and human sexuality. But, as Gledhill recognized, “This wing of the church is where so much of the energy is, giving rise not just to growth, but also that necessary resource, cash.”

Yes, there is another pattern to recognize — evangelicals have the growth and the cash, just not the votes. The talk about mutual flourishing is really an argument to remain in the church and keep paying the bills.

Ruth Gledhill is profoundly right about another aspect of Monday’s vote as well. It won’t stop with women bishops. “Now the church can move into the 20th century, although perhaps not the 21st,” she wrote. “A change on gay marriage would be needed to do that.” Well, stay tuned, as they say. The same church now has bishops living and teaching in open defiance of the church’s law on sexuality as well.

There is a very real sense in which Monday’s vote was inevitable. Once the church had decided to ordain women as priests, the elevation of women to bishop was only a matter of time. But the Church of England explicitly claims apostolic succession back to the earliest years of the church, traced through bishops. That is why virtually every major media outlet in Britain acknowledged, at least, that the vote reversed 2,000 years of Christian tradition. They also tended to note that the vote came after 20 years of controversy.

Evidently, 2,000 of years of tradition was no match for 20 years of controversy.

The second article is one from Carl Trueman on Reformed theology for a church in exile.  I discern a bit of synchronicity in the way these two articles appeared almost at the same time.  When I read them, they make me almost wish orthodox Presbyterian churches would create their own Anglican Ordinariates.

Almost.  I intend to die an Anglican, but I agree with Trueman's article and its applicability to the future of Anglicanism, if it is to have much of one.  At ACNA's first Inaugural Assemby in 2009, then-OCA Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen addressed the crowd in an ecumenical capacity.  Jonah had a number of recommendations for the new church, all of which predictably amounted to "become Orthodox."  A principal recommendation, pontificated Jonah: lose your Calvinism and your other "Reformation heresies."  No surprises there, but I think our own particular, historical brand of "Calvinism" is exactly what we need to find, or exile may be the least of our worries.

One Picture; A Thousand Words

                

Story and additional photos of interesting array of clerical dress here. 

Commentary:  "Church of England.  Why do you ask?"

Contra Mundum Redux

Mark Tooley on St. Athanasius' steady and unrelenting defiance of the Powers That Be.  Words for today, as traditional Christians will be, and even now are, facing Antichrist's onslaught both in the secular realm and the ecclesial one.  I don't know about you, but these things don't depress me;  they only make me relish the fight.

And we have a hero in this regard in the person of the venerable and indefatigable orthodox bishop of Alexandria. 

Lent and the Academic Theologian

"The danger of being an academic theologian is two-fold. One, you’re an academic. Two, you’re a theologian." To be read in conjunction with this post.

Related article by Rod Dreher + combox discussion:  Where Are The Conservative Academic Theologians?

Kings and Presidents

           

I Wish I Had Read This Book as a Young Seminarian

A Little Exercise for Young Theologians.  Please see the editorial and customer reviews to get a sense of what Thielicke was trying to communicate to men being groomed for ministry.  Though I wasn't being groomed for the ministry back in the early 80s, I developed exactly the same kind of mindset the author warns against.  Thank God the church was protected back then from the likes of me, and thank Him as well that both the years and the school of hard knocks have instilled in me a different mind.  Now, at age 60, I am finally fitted for ministry.  Or so that's what I think I've discerned, anyway.  The church has to discern it as well.

Throughout the years I have encountered a number of young theology students who either lost sight of what theology was supposed to be about or had never gained it in the first place.  Unfortunately, some of them have become pastors.  I pray they won't end up doing too much damage to themselves, their flocks and/or to the wider church, and that as they mature in their ministry they will develop better minds, being of course not a reference to what they know or their intellectual horsepower, but how they employ their knowledge pastorally. 

Anyway, I found a great review of Thielicke's book, which I am compelled to republish in its entirety.  It's from a Presbyterian blog called Ordained Servants Online, and if this article in any indication of the blog's spirit, the blogger has ordained servanthood down:

A Little Exercise for Young Theologians

Gregory E. Reynolds

When I think back on my brashness as a young theologian, I shudder; and whenever that same brashness rears its ugly head today, I shudder still; but age and Christian experience have at least taught me to recognize this monster within.

Very early in my Christian life, while still considering a call to the ministry, I came across a little booklet first published in 1962 by Eerdmans entitled A Little Exercise for Young Theologians.[1] I recognized the author, Helmut Thielicke (1908–86), from my reading of his Encounter with Spurgeon[2] in Bible school in 1972. I have exercised myself with this sage booklet at least once a decade ever since, and never without profit, since the demon of pride is ever in need of being exorcised.

While avoiding the dangerous dichotomy of setting the Christian life over against doctrine, Thielicke doesn't confuse the two by eliding doctrine into life. One without the other is a sign of spiritual illness. Thus, he addresses his seminary students like a wise father:

You can see that the young theologian has by no means grown up to these doctrines in his own spiritual development, even if he understands intellectually rather well the logic of the system ... There is a hiatus between the arena of the young theologian's actual spiritual growth and what he already knows intellectually about this arena.[3]

Thielicke goes on to liken early theological training to puberty, during which it is as unwise to unleash the novice on the church as a preacher, as it would be to let the young singer sing while his voice is changing.[4]

Furthermore, time spent in the lofty realms of truth makes the novice susceptible to the "psychology of the possessor," in which love is sadly absent. "Truth seduces us very easily into a kind of joy of possession."[5] "But love is the opposite of the will to possess. It is self-giving. It boasteth not itself, but humbleth itself." But when "truth is a means to personal triumph,"[6] the young theologian returns home with a keen sense of membership in an esoteric club, displaying his rarefied tools to the annoyance of all and the hurt of some. Thielicke observes, "Young theologians manifest certain trumped-up intellectual effects which actually amount to nothing."[7]

The only cure for this malady, insists Thielicke, is an active faith that cultivates love, that is, living one's faith out of love for God and those around us. Our theology must be worked out in the life of the church,

We must also take seriously the fact that the "subject" of theology, Jesus Christ, can only be regarded rightly if we are ready to meet Him on the plane where he is active, that is, within the Christian church.[8]

and it must be worked out in light of eternity,

A well-known theologian once said that dogmatics is a lofty and difficult art. That is so, in the first place, because of its purpose. It reflects upon the last things; it asks wherein lies the truth about our temporal and eternal destiny.[9]

and it must be worked out in spiritual battle,

Thus it is possible to become an eschatological romanticist ... Such a person nevertheless has not comprehended a penny’s worth of what it means to live on the battlefield of the risen Lord, between the first and second coming, waiting and praying as a Christian.[10]

Thielicke knew the true exercise of a theologian's faith in spiritual battle. In 1935, he was refused a post at Erlangen due to his commitment to the Confessing Church, which opposed National Socialism, and in which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was famously active. In 1936, he became professor of systematic theology at Heidelberg. But he was dismissed in 1940 after repeated interrogations by the Gestapo. He went on to pastor a church in Ravensburg, and in 1942 began teaching in Stuttgart, until the bombing in 1944, when he fled to Korntal. After the war ended, he began teaching at Tübingen, and finally in Hamburg, where he pastored the large congregation of St. Michaelis.

Finally, Thielicke warns the young theologian—older ones need this, too—to beware of reading Scripture only as a matter of exegetical endeavor rather than God’s "word to me." He urges a "prayed dogmatics,"[11] in which theological thought breathes "only in the atmosphere of dialogue with God."[12] "A person who pursues theological courses is spiritually sick unless he reads the Bible uncommonly often."[13]

While we will not agree with Thielicke's theology at every point, the gist of his message to young theological students is so pointed that there is nothing quite like it in English. Within our own tradition, Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield delivered an address at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1911 entitled "The Religious Life of Theological Students."[14] In the strongest possible terms, Warfield pleads for a godly and learned ministry: "But before and above being learned, a minster must be godly. Nothing could be more fatal, however, than to set these two things over against one another."[15] He sums this emphasis up nicely, "Put your heart into your studies."[16]

No exercise in the young theologian's or minister's life is better calculated to keep him humble than regular contact with God himself. Warfield cautions his students:

I am here today to warn you to take seriously your theological study, not merely as a duty, done for God's sake and therefore made divine, but as a religious exercise, itself charged with religious blessing to you; as fitted by its very nature to fill all your mind and heart and soul and life with divine thoughts and feelings and aspirations and achievements. You will never prosper in your religious life in the Theological Seminary until your work in the Theological Seminary becomes itself to you a religious exercise out of which you draw every day enlargement of heart, elevation of spirit, and adoring delight in your Maker and Savior.[17]

We are, after all, called to be warriors; but the kind of spiritual warrior that Scripture calls us to be is not the gladiator seeking personal victory and glory, but rather the soldier of the cross who seeks to magnify the person of his Savior and Lord. J. Gresham Machen captured this spirit well in his sermon "Constraining Love." Christian militancy should never be confused with sectarian belligerence, hubris, or meanness of spirit. But pride can also move us to shrink in cowardice from defending the truth of the gospel. Machen made this clear in his sermon to the second general assembly of our, then, new church. How many movements, he asked,

have begun bravely like this one, and then have been deceived by Satan ... into belittling controversy, condoning sin and error, seeking favor from the world or from a worldly church, substituting a worldly urbanity for Christian love. May Christ's love indeed constrain us that we may not thus fall![18]

If Christianity teaches us nothing else it must teach us the value of the cross—the chief expression of God's constraining love for sinners. If we learn nothing else from the cross we must learn humility—a humility that clings to the Savior who died to save us. As we minister, whether young or old, we must always remember that "we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us" (2 Cor. 4:7).

Endnotes

[1] Helmut Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, trans. Charles L. Taylor (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962).

[2] Helmut Thielicke, Encounter with Spurgeon, trans. John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1963).

[3] Thielicke, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, 10.

[4] Ibid., 12.

[5] Ibid., 16.

[6] Ibid., 17, 19.

[7] Ibid., 11–12.

[8] Ibid., 23.

[9] Ibid., 27.

[10] Ibid., 29–30.

[11] Ibid., 33.

[12] Ibid., 34.

[13] Ibid., 40.

[14] Benjamin B. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1970), 1:411–25.

[15] Ibid., 412.

[16] Ibid., 416.

[17] Ibid., 417.

[18] J. Gresham Machen, "Constraining Love," in God Transcendent and Other Sermons, ed. Ned Bernard Stonehouse (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 141.

Ordained Servant Online, February 2012. 

The Prayer Book: It's History and Significance

 A talk by Fr. Ken Robertson of the Colorado Anglican Society.

Mainstream Anglicanism is Dead. Long Live Anglicanism.

When the lights go out.  Al Mohler on the Church of England.

“I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”

A Canterbury Tale: Gone Anglican

A Presbyterian swims the Thames. 

Videos on the History of the English Bible

Courtesy of Truth Remains.

The commentary is slanted by the theological perspective of The Master's Seminary, which is free church Evangelical, Reformed and, alas, dispensational, but the videos are worth watching nonetheless.

Announcing. . .

Colorado Anglican Society.

Will probably get involved.

Bridge Church?

What Peter Leithart Wants

Could it be. . .

ANGLICANISM!?

Alleluia, Alleluia!

Surrexit Christus Hodie!

If anyone is devout and a lover of God, let them enjoy this beautiful and radiant festival.
If anyone is a grateful servant, let them, rejoicing, enter into the joy of his Lord.
If anyone has wearied themselves in fasting, let them now receive recompense.
If anyone has labored from the first hour, let them today receive the just reward.
If anyone has come at the third hour, with thanksgiving let t...hem feast.
If anyone has arrived at the sixth hour, let them have no misgivings; for they shall suffer no loss.
If anyone has delayed until the ninth hour, let them draw near without hesitation.
If anyone has arrived even at the eleventh hour, let them not fear on account of tardiness.
For the Master is gracious and receives the last even as the first; He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour, just as to him who has labored from the first.
He has mercy upon the last and cares for the first; to the one He gives, and to the other He is gracious.
He both honors the work and praises the intention.
Enter all of you, therefore, into the joy of our Lord, and, whether first or last, receive your reward.
O rich and poor, one with another, dance for joy!
O you ascetics and you negligent, celebrate the day!
You that have fasted and you that have disregarded the fast, rejoice today!
The table is rich-laden: feast royally, all of you!
The calf is fatted: let no one go forth hungry!
Let all partake of the feast of faith. Let all receive the riches of goodness.
Let no one lament their poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed.
Let no one mourn their transgressions, for pardon has dawned from the grave.
Let no one fear death, for the Saviour's death has set us free.
He that was taken by death has annihilated it!
He descended into Hades and took Hades captive!
He embittered it when it tasted His flesh! And anticipating this, Isaiah exclaimed: "Hades was embittered when it encountered Thee in the lower regions".
It was embittered, for it was abolished!
It was embittered, for it was mocked!
It was embittered, for it was purged!
It was embittered, for it was despoiled!
It was embittered, for it was bound in chains!
It took a body and came upon God!
It took earth and encountered Ηeaven!
It took what it saw, but crumbled before what it had not seen!
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?
Christ is risen, and you are overthrown!
Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and life reigns!
Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in a tomb!
For Christ, being raised from the dead, has become the first-fruits of them that have slept.
To Him be glory and might unto the ages of ages.
Amen.
(Paschal sermon of St. John Chrysostom)

Cranmer's Ambiguous Legacy

The observations of Diarmaid MacCulloch in this article are consistent with the findings of two books I recently read by scholars of the English Reformation, Straightening the Altars: The Ecclesiastical Vision and Pastoral Achievements of the Progressive Bishops Under Elizabeth I, 1559-1579 (Scott Wenig, with whom I attended seminary in the early 1980s) and Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Nicholas Tyacke).  All three authors paint a picture of an English Reformation not fully realized (meaning not fully realized as the Reformers envisioned it, not as the Puritans did).   Thus, the English Reformation is one that was short-circuited by various political, theological, ecclesiastical and ideological forces, which largely explains Anglicanism's "identity" problem today.  MacCulloch speculates about what may very well have happened without the early interventions (and not all of them would have been desirable in my estimation):

Archbishop Thomas Cranmer died at the stake in 1556, a martyr for the English Reformation; but did he die a martyr for the Church of England or for Anglicanism? If we examine Cranmer's career after he parted company in the early 1530s with the Catholicism of his first forty years, we find a man of international perspective, who sought to move England into the path of the wider European Reformation: in particular towards the Reformations to be found in the churches of south Germany and Switzerland. After Cranmer's death, most of these churches would be labelled 'Calvinist' or 'Reformed'. He would not have recognised these descriptions, but if he had lived, it is very likely that he would have done his best to take the English church in the same direction. . . .

Archbishop Cranmer, living to his allotted three-score years and ten or beyond, could produce a third version of his two earlier Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552, in the light of friendly criticism from continental reformers whom he respected, like Peter Martyr, Johann Heinrich Bullinger and Calvin. He would be succeeded as archbishop by Nicholas Ridley or Robert Holgate, with energetic younger. reformers like Edmund Grindal ready to make their mark and pick up good ideas from the best reformed churches of Europe. The Scots immigrant John Knox, mellowed by an increasingly successful career in the Church of England, would be appointed Bishop of Newcastle, benevolently taking no notice of the advanced congregations in his diocese who received communion sitting; this was a practice in any case increasingly common throughout Jane's Church, despite Cranmer's grumbles. Cranmer's cherished reform of the old popish canon law would be achieved; the primer and catechism published at the very end of Edward's reign in 1553 would become the standards; the Forty-two Articles would have been unmodified by Elizabethan hesitations about relegating the significance of the sacrament of Holy Communion to that merely of a symbolic repetition.

Out in the parishes, metrical psalms in the style of Geneva would quickly have spread: these were the best secret weapon of the English Reformation, making its public worship and private devotional practice genuinely popular throughout increasing areas of the kingdom. This congregational music would also take over in the cathedrals, now devoid of choirs or polyphony, and with their organs (where they survived) used mainly for entertainment in the Dutch fashion. The conservative nobility would continue the sullen public compliance with religious change which they had shown under Edward VI, their private celebration of ceremonial worship tolerated as eccentricity, like the Lady Elizabeth's patronage of choral music in her own chapel.

The traditionalist higher clergy would gradually die off in senior church offices and the universities, with no possibility of like-minded replacement: since the universities produced no major haemorrhage of exiles in the 1560s, the Jesuits and other religious orders would find it difficult to recruit potential clergy to train for their attempt to treat Jane's England as a mission field. England would have become the most powerful political player in the Reformed camp, with Cranmer a cordial if geographically distant partner with John Calvin. It is powerfully symbolic that it was Cranmer's son-in-law Thomas Norton who translated Calvin's Institutes into English, and Cranmer's veteran printer Reyner Wolfe who published it. With a Cranmer-Calvin axis, the profile of Reformed religion across the whole Continent would have been changed, and with the help and encouragement of Bishop Knox, the Reformation in Scotland might have followed a close path to the Reformed Church of England.

That is the history that never happened. . . .

Today Anglicanism makes much of its position as a 'middle way' (via media) between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Standing as he did in the developing Reformed tradition of Europe in the 1550s, Cranmer's conception of a 'middle way' in religion was different. The middle ground which he sought was the same as Bucer's: an agreement between Wittenberg and Zurich which would provide a united vision of Christian doctrine against the counterfeit being refurbished at the Council of Trent. For him, Catholicism was to be found in the scatterered churches of the Reformation, and. it was his aim to show forth their unity to prove their Catholicity.

Leithart: Too Catholic to Be Catholic

Here.

My Protestantism, my reformed catholicity, isn’t at all in conflict with that passion for church unity.  There is no tension at all.  On the contrary, it’sbecause I am so passionate to see the church reunited that I, not grudgingly but cheerfully, stay where I am.  My summary reason for staying put is simple: I’m too catholic to become Catholic or Orthodox.

I agree with the standard Protestant objections to Catholicism and Orthodoxy: Certain Catholic teachings and practices obscure the free grace of God in Jesus Christ; prayers through Mary and the saints are not encouraged or permitted by Scripture, and they distract from the one Mediator, Jesus; I do not accept the Papal claims of Vatican I; I believe iconodules violate the second commandment by engaging in liturgical idolatry; venerating the Host is also liturgical idolatry; in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, tradition muzzles the word of God.  I’m encouraged by many of the developments in Catholicism before and since Vatican II, but Vatican II created issues of its own (cf. the treatment of Islam in Lumen Gentium).

I agree with those objections, but those are not the primary driving reasons that keep me Protestant.  I have strong objections to some brands of Protestantism, after all.  My Protestantism – better, reformed catholicity – is not fundamentally anti-.  It’s pro-, pro-church, pro-ecumenism, pro-unity, pro-One Body of the One Lord.  It’s not that I’m too anti-Catholic to be Catholic.  I’m too catholic to be Catholic.

Here’s the question I would ask to any Protestant considering a move: What are you saying about your past Christian experience by moving to Rome or Constantinople?  Are you willing to start going to a Eucharistic table where your Protestant friends are no longer welcome?  How is that different from Peter’s withdrawal from table fellowship with Gentiles?  Are you willing to say that every faithful saint you have known is living a sub-Christian existence because they are not in churches that claim apostolic succession, no matter how fruitful their lives have been in faith, hope, and love?  For myself, I would have to agree that my ordination is invalid, and that I have never presided over an actual Eucharist.  To become Catholic, I would have to begin regarding my Protestant brothers as ambiguously situated “separated brothers,” rather than full brothers in the divine Brother, Jesus.  To become Orthodox, I would likely have to go through the whole process of initiation again, as if I were never baptized.  And what is that saying about all my Protestant brothers who have been “inadequately” baptized?  Why should I distance myself from other Christians like that?  I’m too catholic to do that.