What is an Anglican?

It strikes me that there are two meanings of Anglican, as it is commonly used. It can be understood as a tradition with certain characteristics derived from a historical reality (I assayed an essay on what I think the central characteristics are a decade ago in The Anglican Triad), or more formally as the fellowship of churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, members of the Anglican Consultative Council -- there is a list of membership one can look up. By analogy, one could say that some of the "independent" catholic churches are "catholic" but not officially so from the perspective of Rome, which does recognize a number of non-Latin churches as directly relating to it, but not these "independent" bodies. In the looser sense of heritage, one could say that the Methodists are part of the Anglican tradition, and but for some accidents of history, might still be so formally, and yet may!

The problem with ACNA, as I see it, is that they violate one of the key principles that are a part of that Anglican (and indeed catholic) heritage that I laid out in the essay linked above -- the geographical and canonical notion that there should only be one Anglican jurisdiction in any one place. But neither is ACNA an official member of the Communion (in spite of their recognition by some member churches who say they are in communion with them; but the same can be said of, say the ELCA: with whom TEC is in communion, but that communion with them renders them neither Anglican nor members of the Anglican Communion. The same is true of Porvoo churches in relation to England.)

On the one-church-in-a-location issue, I think that, for a time, the "state" was a good balance point for Anglicanism, reflecting as well the settlement in Europe of cuius regio eius religio -- but that this worked best in an established church, which was the case at the time. The lack of establishment across most of the Anglican Communion today, and the increase in means of communication, have made the "national" ideal much more difficult to maintain, as people have less sense of a legal restriction (though it is still an active canonical principle) and the concept of a network is replacing that of either a pyramid or a hub-and-spoke. That doesn't mean I don't still think the nation or region to be an ideal in Anglicanism, but it may be one whose time has passed.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Why the Church?

The "deep magic" of the Church, the great mystery outlined in Ephesians as existing from before the foundation of the world, is the mystery of Unity. It is at the heart of the mystery of God the Three in One. It is reflected in the cosmos that God created in all its multiplicity, coming back into unity in Christ, with the Church being the initial beneficiary of the Incarnation (the reunion of Divinity and Humanity in one Person). If the Church is incapable of exercising its underlying unity in spite of jurisdictional divisions, it has failed in the One Task for which it exists -- as the growing edge of the emergent New Creation, the Body of Christ in which all things in heaven and on earth become One, even as God is One.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Thought for 12.12.12

Unity is not a value to be held in spite of diversity. It is a value we hold because of diversity. If we were all the same we would not need such a value.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Comprehensive Reform

for the Feast of Richard Hooker: a sermon by Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG from 2004, Church of the Intercession, New York

GRANT that we may maintain that middle way, not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth. — The Collect for the feast of Richard Hooker

There once was a vicar in an English country church of whom his congregation said, “Our Vicar is like God — he is invisible on weekdays and incomprehensible on Sundays.” I hope that I will not in my reflections today prove to be the latter.

Incomprehensible is a synonym for “impossible to understand.” Such understanding can be pictured almost in a physical sense: for to understand is to stand under, as a table stands under what is placed upon it, and so must be larger and more stable than what it holds in order to sustain or support it. To comprehend in this sense is to hold the object of knowledge on the table of ones mind.

Which is why God is incomprehensible. We cannot comprehend God because however hard we try, we cannot wrap our finite minds around the infinite God; God will not fit on the table of the human mind, however rasa our tabula, however much room we make on it, however many leaves we add, because, as the old hymn says, God is broader than its measure.

And the same goes for Truth, if we are speaking of Truth With A Capital T — not just some true things, but the whole ball of wax, the Truth as a full and complete description of All That Is — for the description must be at least as complex as what it describes. Try, for example, to describe a zipper to someone who has never seen one. And when we get to natural zippers like the string of DNA that holds us all together and builds us up at the most fundamental level, the description will take volumes — the printed listing of the human genome, a single transcribed copy of just one DNA zipper, of which we each carry trillions of the real thing in our bodies, would take 200 volumes the size of the Manhattan phone book.

To make matters worse, the truth about what is — even as it is spoken — adds to the sum of what is. If we were to write down even a mere tally of all that is, without further comment or explanation, truly the universe itself would not be large enough to contain all the books that might be written. For the books themselves would add to the substance of the world, and with every word we wrote we would be adding to the subject of our enterprise, and the bibliographers and catalogers would soon have to take up their work. As the wise man said, “Of the making of books there is no end.”

Indeed, the only way to comprehend the Truth, in this fullest sense of the word, and as appears to be the aim laid out in the Collect for this feast of Richard Hooker, is to be outside of all that is. And since only God is outside of all that is, as God is the cause of all being and becoming, so only the mind of God can truly comprehend all Truth.

We get glimpses of this outside-in structure of reality in the visions of the saints and poets — in Byzantine icons and in Dante, and in William Blake too. Perhaps it is most vividly captured in that wonderful vision God imparted to Blessed Julian of Norwich: a God’s-eye-view of the universe, as she saw in the palm of her hand a tiny thing no bigger than a hazelnut, so frail it looked as if it would cease to be in a moment. And God told her, It is all that is, and it endures because God loves it. As Blake would later write,

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

That is the God’s-eye-view that only the odd mystic glimpses.Now, in spite of the visions of the saints and poets — who are careful not to mistake these momentary experiences of God’s view of the world for their own accomplishment — most of us are wise enough to know our limits. As Hooker himself put it, “The true properties and operations of [God] are to know that which is not possible for created natures to comprehend; to be simply the highest cause of all things.” (5.53.1)

Yet in spite of this, some in the church from time to time do appear to think they have come into possession of the Truth, which usually turns out to be something far more prosaic and far less visionary — a set of right doctrines, or more commonly, right behaviors. And most of us have the good sense to realize that even this limited claim is a bit presumptuous. We have learned from the hard experience of the church’s history that what you don’t know can hurt you; and that often the church is at its most errant precisely when it claims to be most certain. It is rash for any in the church to claim the ability to see in a glass brightly: especially when the church’s rear-view mirror consistently warns us that objects are nearer than they appear — and we travel at our peril if we imagine that our view through the looking glass is either infallible or complete. Indeed, as we take that backward glance on the ecclesiastical autobahn, we see that behind us HeilsgeschichteStrasse — Sacred Story Street — is littered with the wrecks of time over which God towers in divine incomprehensibility.

Just ask Galileo, Richard Hooker’s contemporary, who set about the task of trying to record a few true things about the world, things evident to the senses, or at least to the senses aided and abetted by the telescope. He suffered the fate of being told that what was wasn’t, or at least wasn’t what he saw it was. Threatened with torture, he recanted and submitted to those who refused to know the truth of what is, so insistent were they on what they thought ought to be.

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Those on our side of the Tiber, the Anglicans, by Hooker’s day had learned their lesson the hard way. There had been enough burnings and tortures and beheadings on the scepter’d isle over mutually exclusive doctrines to satisfy the lust for certainty at least for a season. So a “settlement” to continuing vexatious matters emerged from the serendipitous arrival of a monarch like Elizabeth and a scholar like Hooker.

Now, Elizabeth, as a monarch, was probably more interested in compromise for the sake of peace than in comprehension for the sake of truth. She did not wish, as she said, to make windows into men’s souls. She knew that if she refrained from peeping into her advisors’ heads, she could benefit from the wisdom they would share around the privy council table, rather than having to commit those selfsame heads to the block and pike. As long as private opinion on divisive matters was kept in the privy closet, as long as one didn’t ask or didn’t tell, a form of peace could be maintained. Thus what Napoleon would later call the nation of shopkeepers kept the peace by means of compromise, the peaceful coexistence that falls a good deal short of true communion and community, but at least keeps heads on shoulders.

But as our collect reminds us, Hooker aimed higher. His Middle Way was not primarily a matter of compromise, but of comprehension. And the genius of comprehension lies in the breadth of its embrace, and in its confession of and willingness to live with an inevitable degree of error and ignorance. Hooker confesses that since we cannot know all things, and sometimes err in the things we think we know, we must allow room for all things, to make the table not infinitely broad (which is beyond our capacity) but broad enough to hold both the unforeseen and unexpected guest, as well as the uninvited and errant guest who shows up at the wrong party. Who knows, until the master comes, who really belongs there after all?

Hooker directs us to avoid the need for final answers on all but the minimally sufficient, and sufficiently salvific claims of the Gospel, secure truths at the heart of what it means to be Christian: centered on the existence of God, and the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ —the eternal Gospel without which there really wouldn’t be any point in continuing the discussion, but beyond which all else is more or less provisional. As he said concerning baptismal faith: “Belief consisteth not so much in knowledge as in acknowledgment of all things that heavenly wisdom revealeth; the affection of faith is above her reach, her love to Godward above the comprehension which she hath of God.”(5.63.1)

So the final answers and the definitive positions on everything and anything, so beloved both by Calvinists and Papists, would give way in Hooker’s view to a more rational willingness to withhold and reserve final judgment on all but a very few core doctrines, to realize that mutually exclusive opinions on other matters cannot both be true — and in the long run neither might be true, and the real truth might lie somewhere else altogether. To cast the net broadly, to make the table wider; to expand the breadth of charity to include all possibilities on matters for which clear and final evidence is yet to be shown: this is Hooker’s rational and charitable mission, a willingness to treat our knowledge as sufficient, rather than complete, and certain, in certain matters, only of its own uncertainty; and above all to trust that all such knowledge and love are securely centered in the depths of God, where the Spirit moves and searches, and where alone wisdom is to be found.

For when one is truly in the communion of the Church, truly united with the other members of the body — which can only truly be a body when all the members are lovingly comprehended in it in spite of differing opinions on secondary matters — Deus ibi est: God is there. Next to this transcendent unity-in-communion all other modified and restricted uses of that word, even the one called “Anglican,” must surely pale in comparison. In the truly comprehensive communion of the whole Body of the Church, the blessed company of all faithful people, we are in God, and God is in us.

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And it is in this that we come to the grand reversal, the inside-out of God. Now, generally speaking, reversible garments are notable principally for being unattractive whichever way you wear them. But the inside-outness of God is quite another matter. Here we enter the amazing world — the real world, I might add — in which the inside is bigger than the outside — as observation shows us is true of most church buildings. God’s universe, it turns out, is more like those Byzantine icons or M.C. Escher lithographs than most people are willing to allow. This truth is summed up nowhere so well as in that Johannine avalanche of prepositions and pronouns from today’s gospel.

Jesus starts first from the expected greatness of God: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” — so we are nested in God, resting in the palm of God’s hand like Thumbelina, safe in our hazelnut cradle.

But then comes the surprising reversal: Jesus prays, “I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one,” and suddenly we — made one in the mystical and holy communion of the Body of the Church, the Body of Christ, the temple to which God comes and deigns to be our guest — suddenly we hold Christ within us as he holds the Father within him, nested like a set of Russian dolls with God the Father in the innermost secret room of the human heart, the holy of holies, the privy chamber and closet of good council, and the human image and likeness become the frame to hold the true divine reality behind all that is, among us and within us always.

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And in this and this alone is the comprehension of the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth. I said earlier that God will not fit upon our mental tables; but there is one table on which God will fit, indeed, upon which God will fit in a few minutes. It’s right there in the sanctuary. In a few moments, the universe will turn inside out, the heavens will open and God will descend and condescend to be among us and with us, the Spirit will descend upon us and upon these gifts, and we will hold God in the palms our hands, and place God to our lips and, like Mary, become God’s earthly sanctuary. We in him and he in us, will become what we behold, and hold what we become.

Sanctified in this Truth, comprehended in this Body, fed with this food, may we be now and ever one, in the knowledge and the love of God, and the peace of God which passes understanding.

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This is a repeat posting, but I think it worth repeating.

The Wrong Model

How is one to address the issue of unity in the Anglican Communion, much less the church, without reference to Jesus Christ? Christ himself prayed, in the High Priestly Prayer in John 17, that those who would believe in him would be one "just as" he and the Father are one. This is an intrinsic part of the priestly office which Christ embodies perfectly: the bringing together of the community of the faithful.

But what is the nature of the "oneness" of God, the unity of the Father and Son? The unity of God is that of ontological relationship, not based on an agreement or covenant document. It is eternal and everlasting, and has no relational consequences or means of disengagement, because it is the relationships that constitute the essence of Who God Is.

How does this apply to church unity? The churches of the Anglican Communion have, up until now, enjoyed the connectedness implicit in our ontological relationship, along lines of descent from England, Scotland, and to a very large part, The Episcopal Church. This is what it means when we say, in the Preamble of our Constitution, that The Episcopal Church is a "constituent member" of the Communion -- that is, we are an essential part of what constitutes that Communion, and built it up over the years.

The Proposed  Anglican Covenant that is on the table, on the contrary, offers a bare-bones outline of some high points of Anglican theological and missiological thinking, while omitting other important points. It provides a vague conflict-management system that has consultation as its primary tool, and implicit threats of minimized relationships or participation as its primary means of discipline. To suggest that this bears any resemblance whatever to the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus seems a rather large stretch.

We need a model for the church based on Christ's prayer, and the mode of the Divine Who Is a Trinity in Unity.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Thought for 04.18.11

People who desire that all would do as they do find it hard to understand that there are people who do not wish so to impose their wills on others. They imagine that those they would control must have the same desire to control them. They live in a world of categorical imperatives run amok, a world impoverished by reflected intolerance of difference. It is a world in which all things are required rather than some being allowed, an inorganic and artificial world of uniformity and not of lively unity-in-diversity.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Topic and Illustration

Ephesians is not “about” marriage; it mentions marriage as an illustration of the Great Mystery that is its proper theme: how do the two — the Gentiles and the People of Israel — become one.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Follow the Lord

What happens to the church, or a Communion, when it takes its eyes off Christ.


The full text of the sermon.
 
TSH+

One means one

I'm getting a tad annoyed at people talking about "organic unity" when they mean "institutional unity." When I say, in the words of the Nicene Creed every week, that I believe the church to be "one holy catholic and apostolic" I mean every word. There is one church of Christ, made up in an organic union of all baptized persons with Christ as its Head. This is the official teaching (doctrine) of the Episcopal Church, and can be found in the Catechism on page 854 of the BCP.

There is one church. All of the disagreements with this doctrine are either from those who think there is more than one church, or that they constitute the only one true church, or who have confused institutional structure with ontological substance.

This is not to say that the institutional is unimportant; but it is best put in perspective. Any institution built on a foundation other than Unity In Christ will not long stand. Whether there needs to be — or ever has been or ever will be — a single institutional church coequal with the Body of Christ; or whether that foundation is wide and broad enough to support a number of more or less independent and autonomous structures, cooperating in various ways as the Spirit empowers them: these are questions the answers to which seem to me to be glaringly obvious.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Rowan's Job Description

Archbishop Williams' interview with the Times, portions of which have been cited hither and yon, portray the torture of attempting to abide by his Job description. He feels it is his task to hold the reins in keeping the carriage of the Anglican Communion from going up on the sidewalk or over the cliff, but without any apparent notion he might also take a decision as to how to steer by a particular course, even if it means taking an unlikely detour through unfamiliar byways. (The horses may well be wilder than even he imagines, and this may be an impossibility, but he appears to think it not in his scope even to try. Meanwhile, a few of the passengers have already jumped from the carriage, in a few cases with someone else's luggage). In another image, he says he does not want to put a thumb on the scale, casting himself as an honest butcher.

And so he is in the position of restraining his own perhaps deeply held theological beliefs in order to maintain a kind of status quo in keeping with the long-held views of others on the topic of sexuality. He attempts to tease out fine distinctions -- and they are distinctions, and they are fine -- between orientation and activity, between the fact of who one is as opposed to the choices one might make. He articulates the traditional POV with regard to the matters at hand, as if that tradition were in fact as uniform as some would like to portray it, and with no clue as to how his own thoughts on the subject might lead to developments in that very tradition. (Fans of Cardinal Newman, take note!)

In the Daily Office last week I was reminded of the tale of Esther, who came to a position in which she could influence for the good, not by keeping silent, but by stepping bravely forward to take advantage of the opportunity presented to her. Her uncle Mordecai warned her that her failure to do so would redound to her loss.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Witness to the Witnesses

James and I are home from the celebration of the life and ministry of the Martyrs of Memphis. The observance began with an evening concert of early music celebrating the Blessed Virgin Mary, at St. Mary’s Cathedral, performed by a quartet Voce dell’Anima: voice, organ, viola da gamba and cornetto. Beautiful singing and playing!

St. Mary’s School and the adjoining Church of the Holy Communion observed the Martyrs and we toured the facility — a very impressive institution and going great guns. We’ve enjoyed a catfish fry up lunch at the Women’s Exchange.

James and I’ve managed to squeeze in a trip to Graceland (a shrine of an entirely different sort!)

After evensong and dinner at St. John’s Church (which is adorned with spectacular murals from the early 50s) I did a presentation on icons and iconography and lead a group in a workshop on creating our own icons with crayons — conté and Crayola!

The following day I preached in the Sisters' Chapel commemorating Constance & Companions, after which we went to Elmwood Cemetery, and enjoyed a box lunch and a fascinating talk by Patricia McFarland — highlighting some of the less well known figures in the story of the 1878 yellow fever outbreak. She also gave me a copy of Charles Turner’s The Celebrant — a novel on the life of Louis Schuyler — which I look forward to reading.

We then walked in a light rain to pray at their grave(s) — the sisters are buried head to head in a pinwheel formation, and Frs Parsons and Schuyler share a grave in another area of the cemetery. We also attended Evensong at the Rev. Bindy Snyder's parish, All Saints.

On Sunday morning I had the honor of celebrating the Eucharist at the Cathedral, and enjoyed the vibrant music program — the place was alive with the spirit. It was also a great privilege to celebrate with the "Memphis Chalice" — the chalice used by the sisters during their time in Memphis, now carefully and lovingly preserved as a memento of their service. Prior to the celebration Sister Mary Grace CSM and I did an adult forum on religious life — an effective tag-team, if I say so myself!

I’m very happy we were able to gather the four sisters with James and myself to pose with the Martyrs of Memphis icon on the Cathedral’s north wall. James and I stood in for Charles and Louis, and the sisters (left to right: Miriam, Elizabeth Grace, Mary Martha, and Mary Grace) represented their predecessors in the Community of Saint Mary.

On the last day we managed to visit the National Civil Rights Museum (at the site of the Lorraine Hotel where Dr. King was assassinated) and enjoyed a lovely dinner with the sisters and brothers of the Memphis Emmaus Chapter of Rivendell, another Christian Community bearing witness to God’s love and the Spirit’s movement.

All in all a very rich experience.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

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The Difference of One

SJF • Proper 7c 2010 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
They will look on the one whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child… On that day a fountain shall be opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity.

Those of you who have seen my Christmas tree know that I am among those who can legitimately be called a “Trekker” — all of the ornaments come from Hallmark’s “Star Trek” series — though I stop short of dressing up as an alien and attending Star Trek conventions. I belong to the generation that grew up watching and enjoying the original “Star Trek”— and I’ve remained a fan of Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future through its various film and TV versions. One of the reasons I’ve done so is that“Star Trek” often deals with issues of serious social or theological significance, using the fantasy world of the distant future to hold up a mirror to our own times, in which we can see our own faults and virtues reflected, and sometimes learn a thing or two thereby. I mentioned one of these just the week before last, in reference to the character Data wanting to become fully human — an important theological theme!

Another such theme comes up in one of the early “Star Trek” movies, as the passionless Vulcan Mr. Spock sacrifices his life for the sake of the crew. As he is dying, he tells Captain Kirk, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” And he dies a heroic death to save his crewmates, one life given to save many. And, indeed, at his funeral Captain Kirk extols him as the most “human” person he had ever encountered.

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This sort of heroism, this sort of self-sacrifice, is noble and true, and you don’t have to go to the realms of science fiction or fantasy to find it. Many a soldier has performed an act of heroism to save his squad; many a doctor or nurse has risked contracting a deadly illness to continue to minister to the sick in the time of plague. And when one hero gives his or her life to save many, giving their life as a gift, then the equation makes moral sense, and we honor that giver as a hero: after all, “Greater love hath no man than this...”

But where the equation doesn’t make sense, where it all falls apart, is when the decision to sacrifice one for the sake of the many is made by someone else — is made by one of the many, instead of the one choosing to sacrifice him or herself — when someone decides not to perform a noble act of self-sacrifice, but to sacrifice someone else whom they consider expendable, or inexpedient, making them a scapegoat. Then the death of one for the many becomes the cold calculus of Caiaphas: not the free gift that shows the greatest love, but commercial capitulation to the demands of power. The high priest Caiaphas said it was better that one should suffer instead of many. He had no intention of suffering himself, of offering to sacrifice himself, of course, but to hand Christ over as a victim for the Romans to execute. Caiaphas, in doing this, rejected the teaching of his own faith in favor of the calculating philosophy of utilitarianism. For the great Jewish Rabbis had taught the supreme value of every human life. They had taught that human beings are not to be weighed by the pound in the balance of expediency; instead, they taught that “to save a single life is to save an entire world.” If you’ve seen the powerful film Schindler’s List you know just how important that teaching is.

Caiaphas chose the other way, however, and took the cold path of political prudence, turning Jesus over to be crucified, offered up as a scapegoat in order to prevent further problems with the Roman government. And ironically, his choice to reject the Son of Man, to turn him over to be killed, did indeed lead to life for many, for the death of this One was for the life of the whole world. As I’ve often noted, God can take our worst mistakes and turn them into something good.

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God through Christ was able to turn Caiaphas’ cold-blooded calculation into something positive, into the most positive thing that ever happened, something that saved the whole world. And Christ did this by accepting the cross, taking it up, and not rejecting it. Instead of being a scapegoat he became an offering — “a sacrifice of himself once offered for the sins of the whole world.” Had Jesus gone to the cross kicking and screaming, it would not, it could not, have been the means of salvation for all. Had Jesus used the power that was at his command to summon legions of angels to deliver him from death, he would never have died, and salvation would not have come. Instead, Jesus took up his cross willingly, obedient to his Father’s will that he should drink the cup of human sadness and frailty, and suffer death as one of us. And by taking it up instead of rejecting it, through his obedience, Jesus transformed Caiaphas’ selfish act into redemptive action of self-sacrifice. His life was his to lay down for his friends, and he did so — and Caiaphas and the Romans were thereby transformed into the instruments of his self-sacrifice, no more in control of the situation than the grenade upon which a hero throws himself to save his squad.

So it was that they looked upon him whom they had pierced. And three days later a fountain of grace opened as a stone rolled away from a tomb and the Son of Man was raised from the dead in glory. The one who gave himself as a ransom for many triumphed over death so that the many might not perish, but have everlasting life. Such is the difference of one, the difference one makes, the one who makes a difference, all the difference in the world.

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We are part of that many affected by that one — we gathered here today, together with all the believers who have walked this earth since the days when Jesus lived and died and was raised from death. We are the many, but we are also one in him. We who have been baptized in Christ have been clothed with Christ: we have put on Christ like a garment. Thus washed and newly dressed, our many individual differences are cleansed and covered because of the difference he made when he died for us. There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female any more, but all are one in Christ Jesus — the One who made a difference. Jesus has wiped away the old differences by which, according to the tradition, only Jewish men thought themselves special in the eyes of God.

For every day the pious Jewish man of those times would arise and say this prayer, “I thank God that I am not a Gentile; I thank God that I am not a slave; and I thank God I am not a woman” — and that’s the prayer Saint Paul was responding to point by point in his Letter to the Galatians. Paul was challenging the neat little world that the a Jewish man of those days — such as Paul himself before his conversion! — believed God had carved out for him from the rest of the world, a world of difference from all of “them” — thank God I’m not one of them, and thank God I’m not one of them, and certainly thank God I’m not one of them!

Well, Jesus upset that neat little world as surely as he wiped out the expedient politics of Caiaphas. And Saint Paul confronted that world in his Letter to the Galatians, a world in which Paul knew one could not find salvation through race or class or social position or gender, but in which salvation depends only on the one — only in God, and Christ: the one who saves us all. For with the coming of Christ, and with his “sacrifice of himself once offered,” all human beings are empowered to become the children of God, all the many to become one in the Risen Lord, the personal differences covered over with the garment of salvation, the garment of baptism, all of the individual differences covered by that spotless robe, so that it doesn’t matter any more if you’re black or white, male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek, gay or straight, young or old — none of these things make a difference any more — all have been baptized into the one Lord through the one Faith in the one baptism, a baptism whose waters spread from the fountain that opened two thousand years ago, to cleanse us and make us one in Christ.

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All that remains for each of us — for all are together, but each is called — all that remains for each of us is that daily putting on of the Christian garment, that fits each of us like a glove no matter how big or small we are, no matter how wide or narrow, or tall or short. It is the only garment on which the label reading, “One Size Fits All,” is absolutely and completely true. And the really strange thing is that this Christian garment doesn’t look like a garment at all.

It looks like a cross, a cross each and every one of us must take up anew each day — and each of us has his or her very own cross to bear — and we are not to judge how well or poorly our neighbor might be carrying his or hers. We can only answer for our own lives — our own lives that we give to God for God’s purposes — and that it more than enough to keep us busy!

It is in taking up the cross that we join Christ in his act of self-sacrifice. In Christ we transform the assaults of the world, the attacks of the devil and the thorns of the flesh, into opportunities for grace, as Christ transformed the calculation of Caiaphas into the fountainhead of salvation, by means of the cross.

This is how we too make a difference, each and every one of us. All our individual differences fade away in the light of the cross, all our personal differences fade to insignificance. When we put on that cross-shaped garment, we no longer even look like ourselves any more, but like Christ, who offered himself for us, and for the sake of the whole world. In Christ there is no east and west, no north and south, no black and white or brown or yellow or red, but only the whole humanity of the children of God. Let us rejoice in this, brothers and sisters of the faith, brothers and sisters of the cross, that we have been clothed in Christ, anointed in baptism and marked with the sign of his cross, which we take up day by day as we learn to make a difference through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to whom we give all praise and thanks, henceforth and for evermore.+

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Dueling Epistles

Much is being made of the publication of two letters from two primates of the Anglican Communion: the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Both of them are well worth reading and say important things from their different perspectives: the Archbishop properly speaking in the role and to the end for which he feels responsible: to preserve the unity of the Anglican Communion; the Presiding Bishop properly speaking for the historic and continuing independence of the Episcopal Church concerning its internal affairs, while remaining Anglican in the same way it has from the beginning. To vastly oversimplify, Rowan appears in the role of loving parent of unruly children instructed that they will have to stay in their rooms without TV until they can get along with the rest of the family. He is very even-handed in laying down what he clearly thinks is the law. Katherine’s response is a reminder and reassertion that this role-play is in itself an assumption of a power not granted in an entity not yet constructed.

So, in its own way, this epistolary exchange incarnates the larger debate on the nature of the Anglican Communion itself, and whether it should continue as a fellowship of autonomous churches or morph into a more tightly governed structure, such as that proposed by the draft Anglican Covenant.

Some commentators are engaging in a bit of revisionist history when they seek to portray in the foundation of the Episcopal Church a desire to serve as a branch or outpost of the Church of England, which indeed the colonial churches had been, answerable to the Bishop of London, prior to the War of Independence. There may well indeed have been a few individuals who thought that way at that time. However, the bulk of the evidence shows that the emerging Episcopal Church of the late 18th century wanted nothing from England but bishops — that is, they wanted bishops (to remain Episcopal) but knew the church would not be English — and indeed if they were unable to obtain the episcopate from England they were happy to go to other quarters. Indeed, it is ironic that the principled Tory Seabury ended up going to Scotland, while the Patriot White held out for England, pressing other Patriots such as Jay and Adams in that cause. But however bishops were obtained, the documentary evidence shows that it was bishops that were wanted and not any kind of continued governance from England — a cordial relationship, yes; but governance, no.

On the contrary, great pains were taken in the new land to militate against any such divided loyalty. As the preface to the 1785 Constitution of the Episcopal Church stated as its first “Whereas” — “in the course of Divine Providence, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America is become independent of all foreign authority, civil and ecclesiastical...” This language was echoed in the Preface to the first American Book of Common Prayer in 1789.

Nor were the English particularly interested in ecclesiastical entanglement with this new independent church in America, playing what is best described as an affectionately avuncular role. In witness of this, the Act of Parliament permitting Canterbury the ordination of American bishops contains this important proviso:

Provided also, and be it hereby declared, that no person or persons consecrated to the office of a bishop in the manner aforesaid, nor any person or persons deriving their consecration from or under any bishop so consecrated, nor any person or persons admitted to the order of deacon or priest by any bishop or bishops so consecrated, or by the successor or successors of any bishop or bishops so consecrated, shall be thereby enabled to exercise his or their respective office or offices within his Majesty's dominions.

Hardly a “continuation” of the Church of England, and rather a blow even to the notion of communion itself — usually understood as involving recognition and interchangeability of ministers — or to the ahistorical notion that a “bishop is a bishop for the whole church.” In fact, this proviso echos the language of the ancient canons that required bishops to confine themselves to their own sees and not meddle about extramurally.

But back to the dueling epistles: some, such as Diana Butler Bass, see this as a turning point — something’s got to give, and the Communion will never be the same. She may well be right, and I think that is unfortunate. I wish Rowan had exercised the wisdom of a truly loving parent, when from his perspective the children started acting up, to let them be, rather than to formalize their quarrels — and his Pentecost letter continues on that road of mildly vexed and punitive paternalism. It may have effect: It is so much easier to have consensus when those who disagree are removed from the conversation; but then, as with Caroline’s “ball without dancing” — it will not be near so much a conversation. Or a Communion.

Tobias Stanislas Haller

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Thought for 03.24.10

The Devil Prowls

While Jesus wills that the members of the church should be one, even as he and the Father are one (John 17:11), that likeness to God is not "something to be grasped at" (Phil 2:6) but is rather a gift from God. (2 Cor 5:18) We do not achieve unity, we accept it as we are reconciled to one another by God in Christ.

Otherwise, to seek on our own to become like God, we fall prey to something like the primal temptation from the Garden (Gen 3:5), though in form rather than knowledge.

Rather, let us accept that we are one in God through God, through the love which comes from God and transcends and encompasses and comprehends our divisions; not through our own machinations — and above all not through the reduction of our number in a mode of false unity by division and expulsion and judgment: the unity not of God, but of the Adversary.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Tempus Fidget

We appear to be in a fidgety time of impatience regarding the Anglican Communion and its afterthought Covenant. The wealth of comments at Thinking Anglicans (to which I admit to having contributed) is one indication. To read some of the comments one would think the eschaton was round the next bend.

It is good to remember, however, that actual signing-on to the Covenant, in The Episcopal Church in any case, is some time away. There is ample opportunity both to reflect on the document and consider other provinces' reactions to it e're we in TEC adopt, seek to amend, or reject it.

For many, this ambiguous state will seem intolerable. The irascible antagonists will cry for immediate expulsion of TEC, or affirm their belief that TEC cannot sign; the anxious communionists will appeal for diocesan, parochial or even individual subscription; and somewhere in the middle the rest of us will try to read the actual document with care and set aside our knowledge of motives and aims, and address the Ecclesiopolitik of what it means to express a desire to remain in communion with some who don't want to be in communion with us.

It is a difficult state to be in. As Schrödinger's Cat was heard to mew from within her thought-experimental box: "This is not a super position to be in!"

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Unity at what cost?

Those who built the tower of Babel did so as a means to promote their unity and prevent their dispersal. The problem was that God was not at the heart of their plan, but a handmade "door to heaven." Those who sought a comprehensive unity ended with mutual incomprehension.

Meanwhile, in the Great White North it seems a Girardian game of "Scape the Goat" is under way. This is a familiar scene in tea-shop and schoolyard, where a cozy feeling of fellowship and commonality (and I dare say, communion) is engendered between two parties by tut-tutting about an absent third party. Sometimes a similar dialogue takes place between a self-acknowledged sinner and her God, "I thank you, God, that I am not as bad as _______." None of these is a very pretty sight. When, after all, does community become conspiracy?

I am growing weary of the manners and morals of the schoolyard.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

A Sobering Blast from the Past

I had the very great pleasure of knowing Bishop Walter D. Dennis, Suffragan of New York, in his capacity as Visitor to the Brotherhood of Saint Gregory. He also had a keen eye for trends in the church, and often wrote about his prognostications. In the process of browsing through my library I came across the following from twenty years ago, which I think should rank him among the prophets. Archbishop Runcie, quoted herein, also has some apposite words for us, in light of the strained efforts towards an Anglican Covenant. Bishop Dennis writes:

If it turns out that unity with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches is a high priority for the new Archbishop of Canterbury [George Carey], then ECUSA, as part of the Anglican Communion, may feel obliged to sell out on some of the commitments it has already made, namely, on the ordination of women, on the issue of abortion, on the issue of theological dissent and liberation theologies, and on gay rights. Clearly, many would revolt, feeling that the price of unity is too high if it requires Episcopalians to forfeit these commitments.

In the next decade, there will be much talk about authority—jurisdiction—collegiality, and ecclesiology. In using such terms, we had better be certain that in our discussions there is common definition of each term. The Anglican Church says that the four marks of Anglican authority are: The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Lambeth Conference, The Archbishops and Primates of the Anglican Communion, and the Anglican Consultative Council. As I understand it, such authority from any and all of these are consultative, but there will be heavy discussion about whether or not this consultation is for advice or for approval or, at the very least, for consensus. Also, many people will be discussing whether the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primates as well as the Anglican Consultative Council are on the same footing with the other two, and if so, how did this authority come to be? Did autonomous churches participating in all this give approval for those two additional bodies from their National Synods and/or Conventions? Speaking of his own authority and that of Lambeth, Archbishop Robert Runcie made the following statement in his opening address at Lambeth 1988:

One of the characteristics of Anglicanism is our Reformation inheritance of national or provincial autonomy. The Anglican tradition is thus opposed to centralism and encourages the thriving of variety. This is a great good. There is an important principle to be borne witness to here: that nothing should be done at a higher level than is absolutely necessary. So Anglicans have become accustomed to speak of a dispersed authority. And we are traditionally suspicious of the Lambeth Conference becoming anything other than a Conference. We may indeed wish to discuss the development of more solid structures of unity and coherence. But I for one would want their provisional character made absolutely clear; like tents in the desert, they should be capable of being easily dismantled when it is time for the Pilgrim People to move on. We have no intention of developing an alternative Papacy. We would rather continue to deal with the structures of the existing Petrine Ministry, and hopefully help in its continuing development and reform as a ministry of unity for all Christians. [The Lambeth Conference, 1988, The Truth Shall Make You Free (London: Church House Publishers, 1988).]

“A Personal Prospectus On The Episcopal Church In The 1990s,” Walter D. Dennis, in The St Luke’s Journal of Theology, December 1990, Volume XXXIV Number 1, pages 11-12

brought to you by Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

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Incarnation (?)

The official final version of the Anglican Communion Covenant (as it is now presumptively, not to say presumptuously, called) is now available for adoption or otherwise "entering into."

I've promised some further musings on the Covenant in days leading up to now, and as the final text is abroad I suppose I must put some effort into it. Fighting the ennui of the dim days leading up to the darkest of the year, and word of an impending blizzard, I will observe, in light of the upcoming feast of the Incarnation, that the main problem I have with the Covenant is that it incarnates the very problems it ostensibly is designed to solve. It is self-fulfilling prophecy, putting into turgid church-speak the stunningly obvious fact that those who want to get along with each other will get along without a Covenant, and those who don't want to get along with each other will fail to do so even if there is a Covenant in place.

Thus this whole Covenant business is really a form of adoptionism, rather than a real new incarnation or birth — christening our crises and diagnosing our dilemma without offering any real direction for maturing growth in community or treatment for what ails us — which at this point appears to be a form of auto-immune disease.

Section Four, even after reworking, strikes me as still much too much in the world of the ecclesiastical busybodies and perfectionists, the fixer-uppers of other people's failings, even with its suggested form of DIY discipline, consisting mostly of voluntarily dropping out of participation in aspects of the life of the Communion. That hardly seems churchly, except in the worst sense of Benign Neglect which the English Episcopate brought to a high art in the 19th century. At its worst it suggests too much the other classical English solution of Partition (though voluntary in this case) and so once again paradoxically points us away from each other rather than toward each other or to Godward — the root problem of placing the focus for Communion with each other not in Christ but in our own handcrafted Instruments, on none of which is the varnish even dry.

This is not to say we have no need of institutional structures, but this proposal, for all its lipservice, seems to replace autonomy-in-communion with a kind of heteronomy-in-diffusion, with nothing to keep people together in Christ except their own weak and fallible wills and mild threats of being sent to Coventry. What is really needed, I'll say again as I've said before, is the kind of oikonomy-in-commonality enjoyed by the Benedictines — each household committed to follow a common rule, without any necessary superstructure or power from above apart from that of God's own Holy Spirit. Let the Gospel be our Rule, Baptism our commonality, and our cooperation focused on the needs of the world, not on the maintenance of our structures.

In the long run voluntary discipline doesn't work when it is completely voluntary, does it? Those who are not able or not willing to discipline themselves will not frame themselves to someone else's idea of right and wrong, especially when there are strong differences of opinion at work as to just what is right and wrong. (Appeals to the mind of the Communion beg the question entirely, as the Communion lacks any authoritative instrument to determine what that mind is. Right now it is twitching like a brainless frog. It isn't just that the center cannot hold, but that there is no center. By taking our eyes off of God and Christ in each other we have begun to drift.) And external discipline is useless if its only punitive form (excision) is seen as a reward or at least as no big whoop; and we've seen more than enough of the "you can't fire me; I quit" mentality at work in the Communion (on several sides of our several divides) over the last few years to keep us for a while.

So, in short, I don't see the Covenant "solving" anything but merely putting the seal on the ultimate collapse of the Anglican experiment — or at least this phase of that experiment. This proposal neither preserves the old nor offers something truly new; it merely fixes us in our present state of tension (or "restraint") until time's ever-flowing stream does its work and the slow movement of consensus drags Anglicanism (some of it kicking and screaming) forward a few feet into the reality of a post-Christendom world. By the time it gets there, however, the world will have moved on, and I suspect few will be interested in anything we have to say.

And so... that being said...
Should the member churches adopt it? As I hope I've made clear, at this point I don't see it as accomplishing much of anything, but not damaging too much either. It all just seems so dilatory and passive. I would much rather a missional covenant based on a commitment to work together (come what may, for better or worse in terms of what we like or don't about each other) on common human issues. I suppose I'd rather see a loose federation that accomplishes something rather than a tightly linked communion that does little but obsess over its internal issues.

But as this Covenant will allow for getting back to work once we get it out of the way, signed and filed, perhaps the best thing to do is simply sign on and then be on about our business, as long as it is God's business. It appears, if anybody gets upset with anything anyone does that is "incompatible with the Covenant," the worst that could happen is some unnamed "relational consequence" — but whatever that is could hardly be worse than the current mess of unilateral communion-breaking and interference in the internal affairs of other provinces.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Thought for 12.15.09

The surest way to become a sect is to establish something other than Christ as the focus of your unity or identity.*

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

*like a covenant, the episcopate, the chair of Peter, a confession, national boundaries, a political agenda, a program, a locale, a tradition, a language, a culture, whatever

An Aspect of the Nature of the Church

In Light of Approaching All Saints Day

There is continued discussion in some circles about the relationship between a church as a body and the various members who make it up — a discussion no doubt started by Saint Paul!

Richard Hooker once observed,

The Church is always a visible society of men; not an assembly, but a Society... Assemblies are properly rather things that belong to a Church. Men are assembled for performance of public actions; which actions being ended, the assembly dissolveth itself and is no longer in being, whereas the Church which was assembled doth no less continue afterwards than before. (Laws III.I.14)

That is, the structures of the society endure even as different individuals take part in the assembly of that society from time to time. Congress is still congress, regardless of the change in party majorities, and of the actual senators and representatives seated. And a parish is still a parish regardless of the fact that, for instance, none of the founding members of Saint James Church Fordham in 1853 are still active members!

Like the cells of ones own body, which die and are replaced, while each of us still is who we think we are as a continuing entity, a person with an identity that survives the change in our actual substance — the church goes on, living a life not entirely its own: With saints below and saints above, some having crossed the stream, some crossing now, and some with their feet unmoistened yet!

This is also why the notion of transforming our wonderful communion-in-diversity into a kind of patchwork of special-interest-chapters-in-affinity is such a terrible step backwards. The big tent is so much more, while still imperfect, a vision of what we are called to be, than the proliferation of franchise outlets (or ‘tiers’ or ‘tracks’) into which we might further devolve.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG