6.  Real Truth: Experience and Reason

      In a classic experiment in perceptual psychology, the subject, usually a student, is asked to retrieve something from an attic by a professor.  The professor, who is also the experimenter, warns the student to be very careful while moving through the attic because of its infestation by rats.

      As the wary student enters the darkened attic and fumbles for the light switch, the professor, sitting at a control panel below, causes the lights to flicker on and then off.  The most common outcome is a speedy retreat by the student, often accompanied by a yelp of fear, and a report of having caught a glimpse of an exceptionally large rat waiting in the middle of the attic floor.

      But there is no rat, as the professor proves to the reluctant student by leading him back to the attic.  With the lights fully on, the student can see that what he had thought to be a rat is only a crumpled brown paper bag.  There never were any rats, except for the expectation of seeing rats that had been planted in the student’s mind by the professor.

      The usual justification given for this bit of practical sadism is that it helps to prove that “seeing” is more than a simple matter of physics, and that human beings “see” as much with their minds as with their eyes.  The scientists who constructed this experiment were also trying to illustrate that the common sense aphorism “seeing is believing” cannot be extended to include either “what is seen is what ought to be believed” or “ what is seen is objectively true.”

      The psychology textbooks usually go on to explain that the results of this experiment can be applied to human “experience” in general, but what they routinely miss in their focus on “the individual human organism” is the role that the professor played in the experiment’s outcome.  The student did not misinterpret a brown paper bag as a giant rat in isolation.  He did so because the professor prompted him to, demonstrating the social dimension of experience and illustrating the great power and the great weakness of experience as a means of interpreting or discovering objective reality.

Experience and Reality

      Experience can be vivid, compelling, and quite convincing.  Nevertheless, experience can also be convincingly wrong in its perception of reality, vulnerable to false expectations, and open to being manipulated by others whose purposes have nothing to do with what is objectively real or true.

      Relativists of various sorts may protest at this point that there is no objective reality or truth, but only that which each of us independently perceives to be real or true.  But an object cannot be both, or alternatively, a brown paper bag and a rat.  If this were the case, an exterminator would need only to “perceive” a pack of rats as a pack of brown paper bags to save himself a great deal of effort and mess.  An even simpler disproof of relativism comes every payday.  Leave out a mere “zero” from a relativist’s paycheck, reducing his wages from one thousand dollars to one hundred dollars, and he will suddenly become quite objective and demand that the difference be made up.

      While reality is not created by observation, reality is a social experience.  Otherwise, no one would ever bother telling a story about what he had seen or done, and telling lies would not be a sin worthy of a particular commandment to forbid it.  Even the isolated observer of an event, like the student in the attic, brings with him the language and expectations that he has shared with other people.  When the professor explains the experiment to his student, he also shows us that the sharing of superior knowledge in the broader content of many people’s experience can rescue us from individual error and liberate us from baseless fears.

      Taking reality seriously, moreover, requires the humble admission that reality is greater than our personal capacity to comprehend or explain it.  We are not God, so we are not the masters of reality.  We submit to God, and in so doing we submit to reality as He creates it and knows it.  God’s reality is revealed to us, not only by our imperfect daily observations, but perfectly by His own action in special experiences of Himself that He has delivered to men and women of His own choosing.  The Holy Scriptures are the record of those revelatory experiences, which are unique because God is the primary actor in them, as recounted by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost.

      The Church is a Body of experience, as well as a Body of grace.  The very vocation to write down the Word of God puts God’s seal on certain fixed truths by which all other experience must be judged and interpreted.  The content of the Scriptures is God’s superior knowledge of all things, providing as well the broader context of two thousand years of His engagement of His Chosen People.  By that knowledge, and in that context, Christians are rescued from individual error and the misinterpretation of their own experiences.  Their fear of the unknown is taken away, as the Almighty and transcendent God makes himself known in history.

      The Christian context also includes the experience of the Church herself in living and preaching the Truth revealed in the Scriptures.  Of particular importance are the first five centuries of the Church’s undivided life, the final element in Lancelot Andrewes’ 1-2-3-4-5 of Anglican authority.  The visible unity in doctrine, discipline, and worship that we claim to be our present goal was the unique experience of the patristic Church in those first five centuries.  Our experience, then, must not only be judged by the experiences of people now living on this earth, but by the experience that we have inherited from those united and faithful Christians who live today with Jesus Christ as the saints in light.

Worship of “the here and now”

      Often in Asia and Africa, the greatest challenge to the authority of the Christian Bible, and thus to the Lord Jesus Christ, is the holy book of Islam, the Koran.  This book, passionately revered by millions, proclaims a comprehensive “way,” “truth,” and “life” different from that of Jesus Christ; and in the world of objective reality the Christian Bible and the Koran cannot both be right about God’s identity and His purposes for mankind.

      The Islamic challenge, however, comes from outside the Church, and it is explicitly directed against Christianity, which Islam holds to be a false faith.  No matter how painful the effects of this challenge may be, it is easy for the faithful Christian to see and to understand what it is all about.  Christian theologians have been answering claims made on behalf of the Koran since the eighth century, when the Orthodox Church of the East confronted the new and aggressive expansion of Islam.

      In contrast, for many Christians in the secularized West, the challenge to God’s Word Written in the Holy Scriptures comes not from another book distinct from the Bible, but rather from a culture committed to the vague but powerful reality of “what we all know day by day,” which it has labeled “Experience.”  This, of course, is not the sort of potentially constructive and clarifying experience discussed above, which includes the possibility of a context greater than an isolated individual’s or an isolated era’s perceptions of reality.  It is, rather, a religious belief in “the present,” and an idolatrous worship of “the here and now” as the best of all possible times, inhabited by the most advanced of all possible people.  In practice, this means the acceptance of certain aspects of modern life as a new revelation from God, making all prior revelation obsolete or outdated.

      This denial of the value of all previous experience, including the unique experience of Divine Revelation, proceeds in part from a confusion between refinements in technology and “human progress.”  Yet, it matters little to a murder victim whether he is killed with a sharp stick or a laser beam, and the industrialized slaughters of the twentieth century speak against the “moral development” of the human race.  Nonetheless, there are those who persist in the assumptions of post-Enlightenment thought, namely, the inevitability of human progress and the sovereignty of human reason.

      The doctrine of inevitable progress has led to the claim that mankind is “come of age,” and able through the use of reason to decide all matters of truth for itself.  Inherent in this stance is the repudiation of the Christian doctrine of the Fall, since the perfectibility of man is seen as something which is to be accomplished solely by man.  Also intrinsic to this position is the rather circular claim that what is not reasonable to the mind of man, based on man’s understanding of reality, is not real.

Evolving Divinity

      In contradiction of the Prophet Malachi’s “I am the LORD, I change not” (3:6), God is said by certain of today’s liberal Christians to reveal “Godself”: the fluid, ever-changing, and developing identity of “the divine.”  Humanity, then, is the creative expression of this evolving divinity, made manifest through human history, culture, social movements, and personal experience.

      In consequence, for example, the representatives of this evolving divinity view the social liberationist movements that began in the 1960’s as divine revelations, in and of themselves, with little or no reference to the moral pronouncements of the Almighty God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  If anything, the God of the Bible and His eternal moral law are considered obstacles to be overcome in the empowerment of certain classes of human beings identified as downtrodden or disenfranchised according to their personal sensibilities.  Justice, therefore, is no longer God’s revealed will for all of His children, but their will for women, minorities, or any other subdivision of humanity that they have chosen to select and bless.

      This religion of the “Godself” has confused morality with the results of human politics.  There are genuine wrongs that Christians must address in God’s holy Name, and these may be addressed politically, in part, by the faithful; but not if their faith is transferred from God to their own political action.  Earlier generations of Christians knew that “human rights” are the duties that God’s righteousness demands of all men, rather than the transitory demands of diverse groups of human beings at odds with the God of the Bible and their neighbors.

      Human will reveals only human will.  And yet, the political success in both Church and State of “social liberation” has led to a redefinition of God as the “Just Liberator,” whose “justice” is determined by the will of political activists, and not by an objective liberation from sin, Satan, and death on the basis of the Holy Scriptures.  Thus, the results of “liberation” as pressed in the Churches are celebrated.  The ordination of women, the ordination of active homosexuals and lesbians, the marriage of same-sex couples, and the freedom of women to choose whether or not to have abortions are all seen as indications of the way in which the evolving divine will is being revealed, manifested, and expressed in the Church today.  Isolated modern “experience,” and not the teaching of the ancient Scripture and of traditional sexual morality, is seen as the source of divine teaching on modern issues in the secular world.

      Once this new source of authority is in place, other changes in morality and doctrine seem naturally to occur.  One obvious change is the naming and addressing of God in ways that make a modern Western person, disconnected from the Holy Scriptures and the experience of the rest of the human race, feel comfortable with the demands of “sexual liberation.”  Such language must not support what sexual activists pejoratively call the old patriarchalism, androcentrism, and sexism.  They mean to attack, of course, more than the various sinful abuses of God’s created order of man and woman.  The object of their scorn is the very economic order of ontologically equal men and women revealed by God in the Scriptures.  God, therefore, must become equally “Goddess,” and is to be addressed in either feminine or masculine terms, as long as these terms do not include “the King,” “the Lord,” “the Father,” or “the Son.”

      Once such changes in discourse concerning the Deity are in place as the “moral requirements” of the new religion, then the Scriptures, the liturgy, and hymnody must also be adapted to express the revised order of things.  Further, the only major heresies for the new religion and within its moral order are the major beliefs of the old order.  One may no longer be permitted to hold that God is the eternal Father, or that while male and female are equal in being there is in their economic relation a divine order, first male then female.

Experience and Authority

      When we look closely at what is being claimed today under the general heading of a redefined and very circumscribed “Experience,” it becomes obvious that we are dealing with a concept of God that comes under the general heading of “pantheism.”  From the Greek for “all” and “god,” pantheism suggests that God is in all things and beings, and that God lives and is experienced through all things and beings.  There is, then, no separation of God and creation, which share an essentially indivisible identity. In “spiritual” terms, this is a form of “monism” (“one-ism”), where all is one and one is all.  God may be perceived as dynamic, as the pulsating energy of the universe, but he/she/it is hardly transcendent, holy, glorious, or Personal.  God may be perceived as the spirit of culture, which moves us on from issue to issue in search of justice and peace, but again he/she/it is merely the spirit of the age.

      And with pantheism comes a contemporary form of polytheism where, in the last analysis, each human person becomes divine and each human person’s self-fulfillment, self-expression, and self-direction are held to be the end of real religion.

      Individual human experience, limited by time and space, and by our fallen human capacities within this fallen world, cannot be a source of authority for the Anglican Way, let alone a definitive authority or source of divine revelation.  Whether defined psychologically or in the ideological way of modern man, experience cannot replace or contradict the “thus saith the Lord” of divine self-revelation, or seize the initiative from God in revealing or defining the Truth.  Experience cannot transform each of us into a tiny, independent “Christ” with His own way, His own truth, and His own life.

      Nevertheless, if the Anglican life is to be a true expression of the Household of God the Father and a true exhibit of the Body of Christ, the genuine experience of God – friendship with God, through communion with the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit, within the communion of saints – must always be an aim of the Anglican Way.  To enjoy and to glorify God forever is what the Anglican Way is all about.  It is what the local churches that remain loyal to this Way seek to put before all people as their true vocation and goal, and to this end the historic Anglican Way provides them with all the means of grace they need to move forward into this maturity and perfection.

      Each day in the offering to God of the Daily Offices, and each day/week in the celebration before God of the Holy Communion, there is provided by the grace of the Holy Trinity an experience of the Lord Jesus for all to enjoy, and in which to rejoice.  “His Spirit witnesses with our spirits that we are the children of God and heirs of eternal life” (see Romans 8:16).  This holy and eternal witness is given to the faithful as they hear the Word of God, sing the praises of Almighty God our heavenly Father, and receive the sacramental Body and Blood of our once crucified and now exalted Lord.  Certainly obedient hearts are often “strangely warmed,” to use Wesley’s phrase, in the fellowship of God’s people before the Table of the Lord as they participate in the Banquet of heaven on the Lord’s Day.

      This experience of fellowship with God and one another in Jesus Christ is precious and wonderful to those who are called according to the purpose of God.  Yet what they receive is not Revelation from God, in the sense of the disclosure of new truth.  Rather, it is the experience of the love of God, which is shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given unto them, so that they may be the Temple of God wherein He is worshipped and adored.  The Truth set forth in sacred Scripture is confirmed in and for the faithful, and they know the Truth as it is in the Lord Jesus, in a deep and profound way, because they are moving into a closer union with the same Jesus Christ, who is filled with grace and truth.

      To sustain such a corporate experience of the living God, the Church must, as the apostle Paul declares, “preach Christ and him crucified” (see 1 Corinthians 2:2).  Put another way, the Church must preach the risen Lord as the One who was once crucified for our sins, but who is alive for evermore.  We must recall that a quarter of the material in the Four Gospels is dedicated to the story of the final week of the ministry of Jesus, to His Passion and His crucifixion.  And there is great emphasis and clarity in both the Book of Common Prayer and in the Thirty-Nine Articles concerning the centrality of the Cross of Christ, as the place where the decisive act of our salvation was wrought.

Three Legs?

      We often hear in Anglican circles of the “three-legged stool” of Scripture, tradition, and reason, which is usually traced to the writings of the Reformation divine, Richard Hooker.  However, in modern usage this “stool” is misunderstood in describing the various levels of authority and methods of theology in the Anglican Way.

      The image would be relatively innocuous, if it meant simply that Anglicans doing theology should pay attention to Scripture, tradition, and reason.  However, if we push the image too far and too literally, the problem arises of a practical stool’s need for three same-sized legs.  Do these, then, convey the idea that Scripture, tradition, and reason are three co-equal and independent sources upon which Anglican theology may draw at will?

      The assumption behind this way of thinking about theology seems to be the notion that a person (e.g. a theologian, pastor, or individual church member) stands facing the various bodies of data, scrutinizing them objectively, and then making a free choice of those data which he deems to be useful and relevant for his task.

      In justice to Hooker, it should be noted that, since he did not share the modern obsessions with equality and engineering, it is most unlikely that this confusion of authorities is any of his doing.  He was offering a simple functional analogy, according to which the One Truth of God is supported in three ways.  It is upon this One Truth that the Church of God rests, and Hooker certainly was not suggesting that there are “three truths.”  We must also remember that “reason” for Hooker and the other Reformers mean “right reason”: human reason informed and shaped by the Word of God, through the study of the Holy Scriptures.

      Being fair to Hooker, however, does not entirely solve our problem of how the “three-legged stool” is misunderstood and misapplied today.  We cannot think without language, and we are dependent for language upon our human environment.  Nor can we think without axioms, which we must accept on faith, and from other people – such as that which goes on in my brain/mind is related to what goes on in the world I observe.  And then there are various aids to thinking, such as traditions in every discipline that exempt us from needing constantly to re-invent wheels, and which focus our attention on the data which are useful and relevant, and away from other data which are not relevant or even misleading.  What the mathematician ate for breakfast is information, but it is not pertinent to the validity of his equations.

      Bearing in mind the complexity of human thought, we recognize that Scripture, tradition and reason are not distinct and discrete jars from which we may freely select our theological materials to create our theological systems.  Rather, each one of them represents a necessary component of theology, each distinct and unique, with a particular relation to the others.  Not one of them is to be confused with any of the others, as if they were all identical legs of a stool.  And, obviously, Scripture, because of its divine origin, has the pride of place, especially with respect to “all things necessary to salvation” (Article VI).

      We are grateful to Dr. Fairfield of Trinity School for Ministry in Pittsburgh for proposing an alternative metaphor that perhaps comes closer to describing what really happens when we do theology as faithful Anglicans.  He uses the story of the Magi in the East, whom God calls to contemplate the Star of Bethlehem.  There are four parts to his image: the Star, the astrological tradition, the Magi’s eyes, and their hearts.

      The Star was the Magi’s datum: the thing outside of themselves, the object and idea that they contemplated.  For Christians, the Star represents the Holy Scripture, God’s revelation to the world.  They look at Scripture intently, contemplating the God who is presented on its pages.

      But how did the Magi know that the Star was telling them something important?  And how did they begin to grapple with what it meant?  The Magi needed all their astrological scrolls, all their conversations with older astrologers, to certify to them that the heavens were worth scanning and to suggest what such a Star as this might signify.  They needed their astrological tradition.

      Likewise, for Christians (as we have suggested above in various contexts), tradition focuses and informs our attention to Scripture, helping us to grasp its meaning.  Without tradition, as in the Creeds and in the Catechism, we wouldn’t know how to approach Scripture, what to look for, or what the things that we see there mean.

      And then there were the Magi’s eyes, which saw the Star that the Tradition directed them to contemplate.  Their eyes received the light of the star, and in the complex way in which vision operates, their eyes transmitted representations to their minds of that object in the heavens.  The Magi’s eyes stand in this analogy for Reason, the human receptor and processor of the data to which Tradition guides our attention.  The two eyes of each Wise Man represent two complementary ways of receiving and processing data.  Each of the Magi could contemplate the Star intuitively and holistically, appreciating its position in the heavens, grasping its importance, and responding to its brilliance effectively.  At the same time, each Wise Man could study the Star analytically, separating its brightness, color, distance, and size into discrete categories.  Just as in normal three-dimensional vision “sight” is a mental composite of the perceptions of both eyes from their slightly different perspectives, the “eyes” of the Magi remind us that human knowledge consists of both Faith and Reason, both intuition and analysis, both “right brain” and “left brain” activities as they are described today.

      Anglican Christians use both “eyes” when they study Scripture.  Holistically and intuitively they affirm the authority and the importance of the biblical narrative.  Analytically and discursively they seek to understand what the sacred text means as they apply its truth to their lives.  As in all systems of thought, so also in Christianity, what has been called bifocal Reason serves as the indispensable processor of the data which tradition guides us to examine.

      Finally, the Magi had their hearts as well, and it was the hope in their hearts that sustained them during those cold nights as they scanned the heavens, and as they made their long caravan trek to Jerusalem.  When the Star appeared, their hearts’ love fixed upon that significance which their intuitive “right-brained” way of knowing had grasped.  And so they saddled their camels and set out on the road that the Star above them beckoned them to follow.

      In the same manner, the Church today contemplates the Truth of God in Scripture, with the guidance of tradition and through the use of human reason, in order to find God’s Beauty and to love It.  The Anglican Way to the Truth of God in Christ is neither an invasion of heaven nor an imposition of the human will, but a humble pilgrimage to God, who provides the way and the means of our coming to His splendor.

Part Three

7.  Celebrating Life in Christ

      Thomas Comber’s Short Discourses upon the whole Common Prayer (London, 1684) begins with an “emblematic frontispiece”: a picture of a parish priest and his people at prayer.  This seventeenth-century engraving is “emblematic” or “symbolic” because it attempts to portray, at one and the same time both the physical and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible reality of corporate Anglican life under the discipline of the Book of Common Prayer.

      The priest kneels in his ordinary surplice, hood, and tippet before an altar upon which a symbolic fire burns to receive the sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving offered by the united people of God.  He holds in his upraised hands a censer in the shape of a burning heart, and the smoke of its incense, the making visible of the prayer that the priest offers on behalf of all of his parish, rises and commingles with the smoke of the sacrificial fire.

      The ascending prayer and sacrifice of this local church then disappear as they are taken up into a cloud of glory, where cherubim and seraphim surround and worship the Shekinah, the abiding presence and glory of God.  As we look even more closely, we can see that the fires of the church’s prayer and sacrifice were not kindled by the priest or by any other man, but by rays of light, like lightning bolts of power and grace, emanating from the Presence of God among His chosen and holy people.

Life in the Covenant of Grace

      The power of this illustration is not its juxtaposition of the earthly and the heavenly, but in its assertion that the heavenly has come to earth to claim and make a people for God.  It is not a liturgical diagram describing the correct way to perform a particular service, but a picture of the Covenant under which the worship of the Anglican Way is ordered and sustained by the grace of God in even the humblest parish church.  This is the New Covenant that perfects and fulfills the Old, made in Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, “God with us.”  The glory of God no longer abides in the holy of holies of the one Temple in Jerusalem.  Now, wherever two or three are gathered together by the power of Jesus Christ’s Name, the crucified Son of God, who has offered himself in the Holy of Holies not made with hands, is present to establish communion between God and man, in himself, with the Father, and by the Holy Ghost.

      That wonderful word “Shekinah” also demonstrates the great scholarship of those days.  It is not an Old Testament word, but a word taken from the rabbinical Targums (paraphrases of the Hebrew text) that preached the Covenant given by an Almighty God.  In the Targum of Onkelos the word “Shekinah” replaces “name” in Deuteronomy 12:5: “To the place which the Lord your God shall choose that his Shekinah may dwell there, unto the house of his Shekinah shall you seek” (Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, IV, 317).

      The canonical text of Deuteronomy continues:

And thither ye shall bring your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, and your tithes, and heave offerings of your hand, and your vows, and your freewill offerings, and the firstlings of your herds and of your flocks: And there ye shall eat before the LORD your God, and ye shall rejoice in all that ye put your hand unto, ye and your households, wherein the LORD thy God hath blessed thee.  Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes.  For ye are not as yet come to the rest and to the inheritance, which the LORD your God giveth you (12:6–9).

      The Shekinah that abides with our seventeenth century priest and his flock demonstrates that in Jesus Christ they have received their true rest and inheritance, and not merely a promise of them.  The households that gather in their parish church demonstrate the most basic Anglican understanding of the Church, derived from Holy Scripture, that the Church is the family of the New Israel, and a communion of families under God and in Jesus Christ.  The rubrical vestments of their priest demonstrate that the life outlined in the Book of Common Prayer is not an arbitrary imposition by the Church, but the visual expression of that Covenant that binds all the faithful in a common discipline.

      The heritage of this covenanted discipline frees us today from the tyranny of our own hearts and the temptation to do whatever is right in our own eyes.  It is the truth behind this three-hundred-year-old picture that our shared life of common prayer enables us to lift a single heart of prayer to God, enkindled by His love.

      When Mattathias, the father of the Maccabees,lay on his deathbed, he said to his sons: “Now therefore, my sons, be ye zealous for the law, and give your lives for the covenant of your fathers.  Call to remembrance what acts our fathers did in their time; so shall ye receive great honor and an everlasting name” (1 Maccabees 2:50–51).

      The “law” of which he spoke is, of course, Torah, and much more than the 613 individual laws that the Pharisees later identified, missing the point of the Torah completely.  Torah is the outward and visible manifestation of the spiritual Covenant with Himself that God offers to man.  The Law is the order of life that God demands of those who come by grace to faith in Him.  It is also a diagnostic tool for the pastor or spiritual advisor, since an outwardly disordered life speaks of spiritual disorder in the innermost recesses of the heart as well.

      The new and final Covenant established by Jesus Christ in His own Blood is not a replacement for that Covenant which dying Mattathias told his sons was worth the sacrifice of their lives.  It is the completion of that Old Covenant in the one sacrifice, once offered, of the life of the Son of God.  Christ’s death does not do away with the Law, but only with those few ordinances that governed Israelite ritual and civil law as shadows of what was to come in Christ (see Article VII).  Rather, the sacrifice of Christ extends and confirms the Law as the moral law of Christians, as both the law of behavior and the law of fellowship, whether with God or man.

      In fact, the Christian Covenant includes Mattathias and his sons, and all those ancestors in the faith that God had called into a life-giving relation with himself.  None of these heroes of faith, not Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, nor any of the saints raised up under the New Testament after Christ’s Ascension, had a private relation with God.  They shared, instead, a common Covenant, perfected now in Christ.  They await the same general resurrection, when the divinely commanded order of the physical and the spiritual will be as complete in themselves as it is in the resurrected Christ.

      The perfect ordering of the physical and spiritual may await the Second Coming of Christ, but in the meantime we have the Covenant of our fathers to order our lives according to God’s plan.  The imperfections in this order are, obviously enough, our own, and they are known precisely by our variance from the terms and observances of the Covenant.  But it is our faithfulness within the Covenant, by God’s grace, which gives us an honorable and lasting name before God and among the rest of the faithful, as it gave such a name to the saints of old.

Confronting Some Slurs against the Anglican Family Name

      There will be among the members of a family, even in a family of grace, as large a variety of tendencies as there is a variety of personalities and characters.  These tendencies need not be divisive or destructive, as long as they are restrained by the basic identity and unity of the family.  When they are addressed against the historic identity of the family, however, the family will more often than not break into pieces rather than become something different from what it has been.

      The family identity of the Anglican Churches has been the Covenant with God, summarized and made visible by the Book of Common Prayer.  As liturgical change and moral experimentation in some of the Anglican national churches have obscured that identity, unity has suffered.  A new term has been coined to describe this disorder, “impaired communion,” which seems to mean that institutional membership in the Anglican Communion can be separated from spiritual and sacramental membership in the historic Covenant of the Anglican family.

      This concept of a divisible “double membership” has led to charges that there never was any substance to the Anglican Way.  Some of these charges are leveled by the same partisan forces, organized and operating in the manner of modern political parties, which are tearing the Anglican Churches apart.  They benefit from these charges, by claiming to bring order out of a chaos that they have created.  Other such charges, however, are brought by honest people outside the Anglican family who cannot make sense of our life in its present chaotic state.

      But imagine the “Smith Family.”  Take away the lives, histories, practices, and beliefs of all the generations of the Smiths themselves, and what would be left?  The name “Smith” would become meaningless, not because it never had any meaning, but because exactly those realities that had given meaning to their family name had been erased.  The Anglican “name” may be suffering the same sort of violence at the hands of revisionists, but the historic Book of Common Prayer remains the surest single proof of the reality and substance of Anglican life under a Covenant with God.

      Another attack on the substance of Anglican faith and practice stems from either a misunderstanding or a manipulation of the term “Via Media,” which means “the Middle Way” and was given importance by John Henry Newman.  Any classically educated person will recognize immediately that this is not a term of compromise, but an assertion that there is a right path to travel through the obstacles and hindrances of life.  Writing in 1897, historian William Clark explained:

We have more than once referred to the position of the Church of England as equally removed from Roman Catholicism and popular Protestantism, a position which has been somewhat unfairly termed the Via Media, since it was certainly not adopted as a compromise, but as a distinct principle.  That principle was the retention of everything scriptural and primitive, and the rejection of everything medieval which was inconsistent with primitive Christianity or superstitious (The Anglican Reformation, 282).

      In the seventeenth century, George Herbert put the matter even less apologetically in describing the Anglican pastor’s care and adornment of his church:

All this he doth, not as out of necessity, or as putting a holiness in things, but as desiring to keep the middle way between superstition and slovenlinesse, and as following the Apostle’s two great and admirable rules in things of this nature: the first whereof is, ‘Let all things be done decently and in order;’ the second, ‘Let all things be done to edification’ (I. Cor xiv).  For these two rules comprize and include the double object of our duty – God and our neighbor; the first being for the honor of God, the second for the benefit of our neighbor: so that they excellently score out the way, and fully and exactly contain, even in externall and indifferent things, what course is to be taken; and put them to great shame who deny the Scripture to be perfect (Countrey Parson, XIII).

      The power of the Anglican Way is its well-scored path of faithfulness to the Covenant revealed in Scripture, demonstrated by the life of the ancient Church, and maintained by the Book of Common Prayer.  Those who would honestly discuss or debate the Anglican Way of life in Jesus Christ must do so on these terms and on none other, or they are not addressing the Anglican Way at all.  Their error must be corrected in charity, but it is an error nevertheless, since they are contemplating or attacking a straw man, and not the Anglican life in history.

Life in Christ

      There is “life,” and there is “Life.”  There is biological life – the life of insects, plants, trees, birds, bees, and animals.  But that is not the end of the story, because there is also Life – eternal life as the gift of God, the life that is in Jesus Christ, the life of the kingdom of God and of the age to come.

      Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God made man and the Word become flesh, is Life; and as a human being He has life.  In fact, all life came into being and is sustained by Him, for the Father created all things through Him (John 1:1ff.).  Yet in His manhood, which He assumed in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, He had biological life in common with us all – the life connected to His vital bodily organs.  Thus, as the One Person with two natures, Jesus Christ is Divine Life as the Son of God, and He possesses life, human life, as the Son of Mary.

      One way of stating the purpose of the Incarnation of the only-begotten Son of the Father, and of His death at Calvary, is in the very words of Jesus himself: “I am come that they [my sheep] might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).  This purpose does not refer to the extension and deepening of natural, biological life, but to eternal life: the life of the kingdom of God, given by the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Spirit to all those who believe in the Son of God.

      In and through the ministry of the Church of God, this gift of Life is offered and provided on God’s terms to all who truly repent of their sins and believe the Gospel of the Father concerning His Son.  Before we look more closely at how the Anglican Way offers Life from God to those who are “dead in their trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1), we need to recall the major themes connected with Life in the Bible, especially in the New Testament.

      We see in the Old Testament the growing recognition that true Life, that which is more than the fulfillment of life on earth, is only to be found in fellowship and communion with the LORD God.  Certainly there is an ordered and fulfilling life within Israel in the keeping of God’s Covenant, but this is life, in the first instance, which pertains to this world and to existence within it.  This daily personal, family, tribal, and national life is exceedingly more important than earthly contentment and fulfillment, however, for it is where God is actually and really to be met, trusted, loved, and obeyed.  It is where the experience of true Life – friendship, communion, and fellowship with the LORD God – is to begin and to be known.

      In Deuteronomy 30, the implications of the Covenant that the LORD God has made with Israel are set out with clarity and power.  Israel has the choice of either obeying the Lord her God, and thus choosing “life and good,” or of disobeying God and thereby choosing “death and evil.”  The call and promise of the LORD God were clear: “See I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil.  In that I command thee this day to love the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it ... I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life...”

      The prophets also placed before the covenant people of God the way of life and death (Jeremiah 21:8; Ezekiel 3:18ff; 14:20); and in this gravest of warnings they were followed by the teachers of wisdom (Proverbs 2:18f; 3:2,18).  The LORD God is the One who gives life and the One who delivers from death.

      Life from God, and life offered to God, is primarily life as the covenant people of God.  Such life exists in relation to the LORD God by loving and serving Him in all aspects of existence, by obeying His Law, and by walking in His ways and keeping His statutes.  At the center of this covenantal life, as was to be seen ever more clearly by the faithful as the centuries went by, was fellowship and communion with the living God, so that life on earth in obedience to the LORD is enlarged and transformed into life that is in direct spiritual contact with Him.

      And such is the strength of this Life, which is more than life, that death cannot destroy it, and Sheol and Hades cannot hold it for ever.  This growing dimension is apparent in the Psalms, especially in Psalm 63 and Psalm 73, and it is the central point and content of the emerging doctrine of the future resurrection of the dead.  Thus a faithful Israelite, whose mortal life is short and full of trouble, so that he does not enjoy the fullness of life on earth, can see that in communion with the LORD his God he truly has Life, and Life that is even richer and fuller than the wholeness of “a life of long years” and a large healthy family within the Mosaic covenant he has lived on earth.

      Without any devaluation of our daily covenantal life in this world, lived in faith, hope, and love, to the glory of God our Father, the New Testament presents and offers us that which is true life: Life from and with God the Holy Trinity.  This is “eternal life” or “everlasting life” or “the life of the age to come” or just “life” in its absolute sense.  This “life” begins in this world for human beings, but it is not confined to historical space and time, for it is really and truly the life of God, and the very life to be fully known in the age to come of the kingdom of God.  This “life” that is truly Life proceeds by the Holy Spirit from Jesus the Messiah.  He is “the bread of life” (John 6:35,48) and “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25), for He Himself is the true life (1 John 5:20).  The pre-existent Son of the Father is sent into the world to give Life to human beings by His word and in and through His own Person (John 6:33; 10:10; I John 4:9).  When disciples receive this Life, they find that death and judgment are no longer major factors to be reckoned with (John 5:24; 11:25).  They look forward to seeing the divine glory and to enjoying the fullness of life in the city of God (Revelation 22).

      The clear message of the Acts of the Apostles and of the Epistles of St. Paul is that through His wonderful resurrection from the dead, after having made His Atonement for the sin of the world, Jesus Christ as the Second and Last Adam has become the Author of Life for mankind (Romans 5:12ff; I Corinthians 15:20ff.).  The real and true life of Christians is not their own biological and psychological life, but the eternal life of Christ himself in them.  Christ lives in them, and they live the life of Christ (Galatians 2:20; Philippians 1:21; 2 Corinthians 4:10).  Another way of putting all this is to state that believers in union with the Lord Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit, are given the Spirit of Christ who indwells them.  Thus they live in the Spirit, and walk in the Spirit, and are led by the same Spirit (Romans 8; Galatians 5).

      Practically speaking, there is of necessity a certain tension in the daily experience of the true believer, for he belongs simultaneously to two spheres of existence – he is “in Christ” and he lives in this world.  What he will be in the fullness of the life of the age to come he can only know now in part, and he is called to live in this world with all its trials as one whose true citizenship is in heaven.  This paradox and tension are fully recognized in the Book of Common Prayer, where both our baptism and our burial are provided for, where we beg God’s forgiveness for our sins before our most exalted moments of adoration and communion, and where the long penitential season of Lent leads us to the glories of Easter.

The ministry of the Church

      Through the proclamation of the Gospel of the Father concerning His Son, and through the teaching given within the fellowship of the local church, people come to hear of God’s provision of abundant life through Jesus Christ, and how this Life may be received and nurtured in their own human lives.  Then, through the constant reading of, and meditation upon, God’s Word written, God’s people are nourished in this Life even as they are led into a deeper appreciation of its nature, its content, and its demands upon them as disciples of the Lord Jesus.

      In fact, all of the means of grace within the Church exist in order to give this Life to the people of God, so that they may be His true Household, reflecting His life in theirs.

      The two Gospel Sacraments of Baptism and the Holy Communion are particularly related to the gift of eternal life.  Baptism is the Sacrament of “new birth” and of “being born again/from above” (John 3).  Jesus told Nicodemus that it was necessary (“ye must”) for all men, including Jews like himself, to be born again, that is “born from above” by the supernatural action of the Word and Spirit of God.  So the Church has also spoken of the regeneration of sinful men by their being born again and born from above, which is an action that only God can perform!  And in the Rite of Baptism, as the Church does all that she is commanded to do, and as those to be baptized “repent of their sins” and believe the Gospel, the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of the exalted Lord Jesus, secretly and invisibly sows the seed of eternal life in each baptized believer.

      A careful reading of the text of “The Order of Baptism” in the Book of Common Prayer reveals that this Sacrament is the means of the gift of Life.  At the very beginning the minister states:

Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin ... and they that are in the flesh cannot please God, but live in sin, committing many actual transgressions; and that our Saviour Christ saith, None can enter the kingdom of God except he be regenerate and born anew of Water and of the Holy Ghost: I beseech you to call upon God the Father, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that of his bounteous goodness he will grant to these persons that which by nature they cannot have; that they may be baptized with Water and the Holy Ghost, and received into Christ’s holy Church, and be made LIVELY members of the same.

      Here the full reality of sin, leading to death, is made the background for the gift of Life, so that the baptized will be made “lively” or “living” members of Christ.

      In “The Order of Confirmation,” this theme of Life, the life of Christ from the Holy Spirit, is continued.  The Bishops prays: “Strengthen them, we beseech thee, O Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Comforter, and daily increase in them the manifold gifts of grace.”  Then, laying his hands upon each candidate, the Bishop says, “Defend, O Lord, this thy Child [Servant] with thy heavenly grace, that he may continue thine for ever: and daily increase in thy Holy Spirit more and more, until he come unto thy everlasting kingdom.  Amen.”  What is confirmed is not merely the commitment of the recipient of Confirmation to Christ, but Christ’s commitment to him.  It is Life, given by God’s mercy in Baptism, that is defended, deepened, and strengthened by grace and the Holy Ghost.

      Turning to “The Order for the Administration of the Holy Communion,” we find that one of the many sacred results of the reception of the sacramental Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ is His living in us and our living in Him.

      The same theme of Life presents itself in the Thanksgiving after Communion.  We thank God for feeding us through these holy mysteries with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of His Son our Savior Jesus Christ.  In doing so, He has assured us that we are true members of the Body of His Son, heirs of Life, and heirs of His everlasting kingdom, by the merits of Christ’s precious death and passion.  We are, thus, the members of a fellowship of Life, in Christ the Lord.

      In fact in the full service of Holy Communion, the believer is encountered by Jesus Christ the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  He is also the unique Bread of Life, both in the ministry of the Word of God, and in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood.  In the Prayer of Humble Access we pray: “Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.”

The Christian hope of Life with Christ

      The Life that is given in Baptism and strengthened by the Body and Blood of the Savior is also nourished by all the other means of grace in the common experience of the Church and of the Christian family.

      The Christian life is lived in faith and love, as well as in hope, for the eternal life experienced now within the confines of this body and age, is hoped for in its fullness.  That fullness will take us from glory unto glory in the experience of the life of the age to come, after the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead.

      In the collects and prayers of the Book of Common Prayer, the abiding Christian hope of the fullness of eternal life with Christ Jesus in heaven is affirmed with clarity and in humility.

      In the prayer for the Church within the Order for Holy Communion, the priest prays, for example:

We bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom...

      This is a prayer addressed to the God of the living, and not to the God of the dead (see Mark 12:27).  Similarly, in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, the hope of eternal life through the “Cross and precious Blood” of Christ the Redeemer is clearly presented.  Where there is no hope of recovery in this life, the prayer is “to receive him into those heavenly habitations where the souls of them that sleep in the Lord Jesus enjoy perpetual rest and felicity.”  Another petition made to the Father of mercies on behalf of the dying, and one day for ourselves, is “so to fit and prepare him against the hour of death, that after his departure hence in peace and in thy favour, his soul may be received into thine everlasting kingdom, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ....”

      The Collect for All Saints’ Day is an especially moving statement of the fellowship of love and Life that we share in Christ by God’s mercy:

O Almighty God, who hast knit thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord; Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou has prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

And so are the words from a prayer at the grave, recited in the Burial Office:

...that we, with all those that are departed in the true faith of thy holy Name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul, in thy eternal and everlasting glory, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

      The Collect for Easter Eve declares to us beyond any mistaking that the resurrection life we look forward to with hope and joy is the fulfillment and completion of the life that God has given to us in Baptism.  It is the Life of Christ, when we have submitted all things in this mortal life to the Father through the Son:

Grant, O Lord, that as we are baptized into the death of thy blessed Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, so by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him; and that through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection; for his merits, who died, and was buried, and rose again for us, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

      Life on earth for the Christian is life that embraces the significant belief: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”  The promise of our everlasting life is made visible by our life according to God’s Covenant, even as grace and the indwelling of the Holy Ghost fulfill that promise invisibly.

8.  Vocation for Life

      To speak of the Christian “vocation” or “calling” is to speak, first of all, of God’s purposes from before the creation of the world.  These purposes are neither discoverable nor amendable from within the confines of this world, as Adam and Eve, and the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, have learned to their sorrow.  Nevertheless, these purposes are knowable because God has revealed them in the Holy Scriptures and in the life of His Incarnate Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

      The Son of God became Incarnate in this world for a purpose, which we recount in the Anglican Way every time we say the Comfortable Words in the Order of the Holy Communion from the Book of Common Prayer:

Come unto me all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.  (Matthew 11:28)

So God loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

      The Son of God came into this world to die as an atoning sacrifice for our sins, offering himself once for all to the Father in heaven, at whose right hand He remains as our only Mediator and Advocate, until He comes again in glory on the Last Day.  In this way, He makes visible the eternal Father’s purposes that His human creatures, made in the image and likeness of God, should have everlasting life, and that life, whether in heaven or on earth, can only be redeemed, sustained, or fulfilled according to His own righteousness.  All else is sin and death.

True humanity

      To come to Jesus Christ by grace and faith is to begin to live in Him human life as the Father created it.  As the Son of God made man, Jesus Christ rescues human life from futility by living human life everlastingly.  He is risen from the dead in the perfection of human nature, and by ascending to His Father He has taken human flesh into the Holy of Holies not made with hands.  To be man as Jesus Christ is the Son of man is the proper vocation of the human race, achievable by the graces of redemption from sin, incorporation into the Body of Christ, and adoption as the children of God.

      These graces are not only at work in some future age when their work will be perfectly completed in the general resurrection of the dead, but also right now, in this world and age.  This is the day of salvation, and the human vocation to life in Jesus Christ is being worked out according to God’s purposes and grace, inseparably, in the particular life of each Christian and in the common life of all Christians (2 Corinthians 6:2).  Life in this world matters and can be conformed to God’s righteousness, or else Jesus Christ would not have lived in this world or died for the redemption of it.  He would not be in the midst where two or three are gathered together in His Name, if our lives could not be lived in this world from within His life and according to the pattern of it (Matthew 18:20).

      The vocation of the people of God until the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, in this world that properly belongs to God, is clear – “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), and “Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16).  Despite our sins and weaknesses, which God knows better than we do, “This is the will of God, even your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3).  God has saved us when we could not save ourselves, but our being made holy by God is not a passive experience.  We must work, in Christ and by His grace, to exterminate every vice and fault in ourselves that holds us back from pleasing the God who has shown us such mercy.

      Those who are Christ’s are set apart from the world and consecrated to the service of the Holy Trinity and God’s righteousness.  They are to be in the world, but not of the world, and belonging to the world to come, they are to serve the Lord faithfully and joyfully (John 17:15–16).  They are to love the Lord their God with all their being, and they are to love their neighbors as they love themselves (Matthew 22:37–40).

      All of God’s people, without exception, are called to this consecration; and it is His service, which can only be accomplished by His calling and by His grace, that makes us holy, and thus His saints.  The “saints” are not some superior class of Christian, but all faithful Christians as God makes them holy in the particular lives and personal vocations that He has given them (see St. Paul’s salutations in the Epistles: Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:2; etc.).  Bishop Hugh Latimer preached this doctrine in a sermon on the Lord’s Prayer in 1552:

It is a common speech amongst the people and much used, that they say, “All religious houses [meaning the monasteries suppressed by Henry VIII] are pulled down”: which is a very peevish saying, and not true, for they are not pulled down.  That man and that woman that live together godly and quietly, doing the works of their vocation, and fear God, hear his Word and keep it; that same is a religious house, that is, that house that pleaseth God.  For religion, pure religion (I say), standeth not in wearing a monk’s cowl, but in righteousness, justice, and well-doing, and as St. James saith, in visiting the orphans, and widows, ...to help them when they be poor, to speak for them when they be oppressed: herein standeth true religion, God’s religion, I say.

      The universal calling to sanctity in Jesus Christ and the ordinary holiness of faithful Christians in their work and in their homes must never be taken for granted, or considered less than that of faithful monks and nuns in their own vocations.  These are the manifestations of the kingdom of God in this world.  They are also the stuff of poetry, as George Herbert proved in The Elixer, as he prayed to God in the seventeenth century:

All may of thee partake:

Nothing can be so mean,

Which with this tincture (for thy sake)

Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause

Makes drudgerie divine:

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,

Makes that and th’ action fine.

This is the famous stone

That turneth all to gold:

For that which God doth touch and own

Cannot for lesse be told.

      And, in the nineteenth century, John Keble proclaimed in the Morning Hymn of his Christian Year.

If on our daily course our mind

Be set to hallow all we find,

New treasures still, of countless price,

God will provide for sacrifice.

The trivial round, the common task,

Will furnish all we ought to ask;

Room to deny ourselves – a road

To bring us daily nearer God.

      As we come to the end of the twentieth century, these older Anglicans continue to show us the true Anglican Way to follow Jesus Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as His saints.

Vocation and Baptism

      Vocation in the world flows from Baptism.  Therefore, all of God’s people, whatever their sex or rank or race or name, share the same basic vocation to be holy.  Since, however, each person is unique, each person has an individual calling related to the particularities of his own life, as one member of the Body of Christ.  The cumulative effect of the combined vocations of all the members of the Body of Christ is that the disciples of Christ are “the salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” (Matthew 5:13–14).

      At the end of “The Ministration of Baptism to such as are of riper years,” the minister says:

And as for you, who have now by Baptism put on Christ, it is your part and duty also, being made the children of God and of the light, by faith in Jesus Christ, to walk answerably to your Christian calling, and as becometh the children of light; remembering always that Baptism representeth unto us our profession; which is, to follow the example of our Saviour Christ, and to be made like unto him; that as he died, and rose again for us; so should we, who are baptized, die from sin, and rise again unto righteousness; continually mortifying all our evil and corrupt affections, and daily proceeding in all virtue and godliness of living.

      Here is the Christian calling to be a child of the light, to follow the example of Jesus Christ, and to be so identified with Him that there is a setting aside of all evil and sin and a walking in virtue and godliness.

      In terms of daily living, and in the happier context of a social life that no longer generally exists in the West, but is still operative in many places in Asia and Africa, this vocation in the world is explicated in these words from the Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer.  They are an analysis of the “second table” of the Ten Commandments, intended primarily for young people, but quite useful for Christians of any age:

My duty towards my Neighbour, is to love him as myself, and to do to all men, as I would they should do unto me: To love, honour, and succour my father and mother: To honour and obey the King [supreme magistrate], and all that are put in authority under him: To submit myself to all my governours, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters: To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters: To hurt no body by word nor deed: To be true and just in all my dealing: To bear no malice nor hatred in my heart: To keep my hands from picking and stealing, and my tongue from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering: To keep my body in temperance, soberness, and chastity: Not to covet nor desire other men’s goods; but to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to call me.

      “That state of life” points to variety and could be a single or a married life, and the calling of being a father or a mother.  That state of life might also include wealth or poverty, social station or a lack of it, not as mere “givens” of birth or the impositions of our fellow men, and not merely as we would choose for ourselves, but as God’s Providence chooses best for us.  Further, vocation in the world as a Christian includes the profession or job by which we work to earn our livings and to serve our fellow men.  And what matters to the Lord is not the prestige of the profession or job, or the opinion that the world has of us, but rather the quality of the service we offer to Him in the service of our fellow human beings.

      The Anglican Way teaches that each and every Christian has a vocation in God’s world, and that this vocation has at its center our duty towards God and our duty towards man.  We have already examined the general duty towards man in the light of the Catechism.  In its summary of the “first table” of the Decalogue, the Catechism also expresses our duty towards God.  That duty is clear and all-embracing:

My duty towards God, is to believe in him, to fear him, and to love him with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul, and with all my strength; to worship him, to give him thanks, to put my whole trust in him, to call upon him, to honour his holy Name and his Word, and to serve him truly all the days of my life.

      Such a high calling towards God can only be followed says the Catechism, by “his special grace” and “by diligent prayer.”  Nor can the duty toward God and the duty toward man be separated in a Christian vocation.  We may not choose one or the other, honoring God and hating man, or serving man and ignoring the glory of God.  We must love and serve both, God first and then mankind in Him, or in the end we will love and serve neither of them.

Vocation, Justification and Sanctification

      All this talk of duty, if it were the sole message of Christianity, could seem to make the Christian life into a kind of heavy and permanent bondage.  Such was often the misunderstanding fostered by the various “moralisms” of the past, which disconnected Christian duty from the gifts of God’s grace.

      As we know, however, from the Articles “Of the Justification of Man,” “Of Good Works,” and “Of Works before Justification” (XI, XII, XIII), and as we celebrate in the Order for Holy Communion, Christians are described in St. Paul’s exposition of the Good News of Jesus Christ as “justified by faith”: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.  For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8–10).

      Those who are called to do their duty by the Catechism and by the Commandments, which Anglicans dutifully recite at the beginning of the Service of Holy Communion, are those who are “in Christ” and free from the weight of the guilt of their sins.  They are freed by Christ from obligations to the world, the flesh, and the devil, and therefore they are free to rejoice in the Lord and to love Him, trust Him, and serve Him.

      The Reformation of the sixteenth century recovered for the Church with a new emphasis the biblical doctrine of justification by faith, by which we are restored to a right relation to God by the grace of faith in Jesus Christ alone.  As in the days of its first preaching by the Apostles and the ancient Church, it has proved to be a most important and comforting teaching.  Since salvation is truly the gift of God, it cannot be earned by our efforts or depend upon them.  Salvation must be received by faith as a whole new life in Jesus Christ, established in His righteousness: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

      Along with a renewed understanding of the principle of Justification by Faith in what Christ has done for us, the Anglican Way also gives strong emphasis to the related principle of Sanctification by the grace of Christ in us.  The interplay of justification (Christ for us) and Sanctification (Christ in us) together with the hope of glory (our perfection in Christ) belong to the distinctive contribution of the Anglican Way to the Church Universal.  As Richard Hooker expressed it: “There is a glorifying righteousness of man in the world to come: and there is a justifying and a sanctifying righteousness here.  The righteousness, wherewith we shall be clothed in the world to come, is both perfect and inherent.  That whereby here we are justified is perfect, but not inherent.  That whereby we are sanctified, inherent, but not perfect” (Works, III, p.485, “A Learned Discourse on Justification”).

      Once received, this salvation, with its new life given from God, frees and empowers the repentant believer to serve the Lord and to obey His commandments joyfully.  Duties to God are not onerous.  They are the thankful offering of His grateful servants.  Thus, vocation for the Christian in the Anglican Way is the calling of “the just who live by faith” (Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11); of those who “stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free” (Galatians 5:1); and of those who in the freedom of the Gospel seek to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in their lives (Galatians 5: 22–25).

      At the close of the Service of Holy Communion, we find this petition: “We most humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end.  Amen.”

      Similarly, in the Collects for Peace and Grace at the end of Morning Prayer, the service of God is described as “perfect freedom,” and the petition is made, “grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger; but that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do always that is righteous in thy sight.”

      Here, as elsewhere in the older formularies and official texts of the Anglican Way, we discover a great emphasis upon our freedom in Jesus Christ, and upon our duty towards God and our fellow man.  We are also presented with the many privileges and blessings we receive from God under the new covenant, but what we do not encounter is any teaching on our “rights” as claims against God or claims against our neighbors.

      In the Common Prayer Tradition, the emphasis is not on “having rights,” but on “being right”: to be in a right relation with the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Ghost.  It follows necessarily from a belief in justification by faith to believe as well that a human being, as a creature, has no “rights” as such against God.  All that he has or will have, and all that he is or will be, is in the gift and the will of His Creator.  He may be loved with an everlasting love by God the Father, receiving the riches of grace in Christ, but he remains a creature who has privileges and blessings, which he cannot convert into “rights.”

      It follows, too, from the very same doctrine of justification by faith, that we have duties towards our fellow human creatures that derive from the righteousness of our Creator, now imputed to us for the sake of Jesus Christ our Savior.  No claim of a “right” among human beings can be true, if it is contrary to God’s righteousness; and “human rights” become nonsense when they are founded on something other than our duty to conform to God’s righteousness in relation to our neighbors.

      The “what ifs” of speculative rights and their demands on others must always fall before Jesus Christ’s Parable of the Good Samaritan.  There He answered the lawyer’s abstract and defensive question “who is my neighbor?” with an example of mercy and the commandment to go and do likewise in order to be a righteous neighbor himself (Luke 10:25–37).

      In contrast, it may be claimed that the only form of moral discourse that is common to the West today is the language of “human rights,” put forward as claims against others, rather than as duties to be performed for the love of God.  In terms of the development of political discourse in the West, since the seventeenth century human beings have been assigned an ever-growing list of “rights,” solely on the basis of their humanity, viewed as a philosophical end in itself.

      Understood in this way, “rights” are not a submission to God’s rule over our lives, but an attempt to rule the lives of others and to remove them as barriers to our own will or self-fulfillment.  Such “rights” figure prominently in the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, as well as in the Constitution and Law of western nations.

      In such a man-centered environment, then, it is not surprising that the Churches have adopted the language of human rights and made it a part of their religious and theological discourse.  This adoption has led, however, to a confusion of thought, because the biblical themes of righteousness and God’s justice proceed from the doctrine of God the Creator and Moral Governor, while the modern teaching on human rights proceeds from the value of the human being in and of himself as a living material being.  And in the modern Church, it is usually the biblical themes which suffer, being adapted to the basic philosophy of man-based human rights.

      Two prominent examples of the invasion of biblical categories by claims of human rights, with a corresponding disruption of biblical living, are marriage and ordination, to which we turn.

Marriage

      Today, particularly in the West, there is considerable confusion about marriage and married life.  This manifests itself in the phenomenon of cohabitation, common law relations, divorce and remarriage as well as in so-called same-sex “marriages”.  These represent in their totality a considerable state of disorder and disarray.  It is perhaps not at all surprising that so much of this disorder and disarray has found its way into the churches.  For in large measure, the churches have failed to teach with clarity and compassion the Christian doctrine of marriage and to set forth compellingly the moral ideals of lives consecrated to Christ, whether within or without the married state.  The churches, we might say, have been taken captive by a culture now altogether divorced from its spiritual and moral origins.  And this culture brings with it the emphasis upon each person’s “rights” to self-development, self-expression and self-gratification.

      In the face of such disorders, both within and without the Church, it is not sufficient simply to assert the law of Christian marriage or to recall the customs of an imaginary golden age now past and gone.  These are especially the temptations of traditionalists.  They fail because they are essentially reactionary and engage neither the Gospel nor the culture.  The churches of the Anglican Way have to be something more than the enclaves of a kind of moral self-righteousness or the ghettoes of a particular form of social correctness.

      It is, after all, only by the grace of God that we stand at all.  It is also only by the grace of God that we can be forgiven and arise and walk and go in peace.  “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee ... arise and walk”; “Woman .... hath no man condemned thee?...Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more”.  Sin is clearly and unambiguously acknowledged, but it is not permitted to define us over and against the grace of God.  Christ would define us by His grace of forgiveness.

      What is, perhaps, most needed is a renewed confidence in the doctrine of Christian marriage and in basic Christian morality, but only through a primary emphasis upon the greater doctrine of the forgiveness of sins.  There are those who would deny that there is any revealed morality or that creedal orthodoxy implies any moral order.  To the contrary, the doctrines of creation, redemption and sanctification proclaimed in the catholic creeds open out to view an entire moral universe, but the particular avenue of approach is the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins.  That is the great and critical starting point for setting love in order, the point to which we must ever return.  For without that we shall ever fall and never hope to rise again.

      No doubt, there are many contributing factors to the present state of moral confusion and disarray, but above all else there is the failure of the church to teach and to set the moral order of our lives in the greater context of divine forgiveness.  We have forgotten the grace which underlies the law and the moral order of our lives without which our lives are empty and vain and nothing worth.  We have forgotten the transforming power of God’s grace that would set all loves in order, even out of the disorder of our contemporary confusions.

      The failure of the church to teach has resulted in the inability of people to intend what the church should intend in Christian marriage.  This has to be admitted in dealing with the phenomena of divorce and remarriage in the pastoral work of setting love in order.  It will not do simply to draw a line in the sand delineating those who are in and those who are out, as if the church were some sort of sect of the elect.  The church must be the place of forgiveness.

      The clergy should be brought to know, too, that a higher standard is indeed expected of them, namely, “in framing the manners both of yourselves, and of them that specially pertain unto you, according to the same rule of Scriptures” and “to sanctify the lives of you and yours, and to fashion them after the rule and doctrine of Christ, that ye may be wholesome and godly examples and patterns for the people to follow”.  To recover such an understanding does not mean the harsh fist of legalism but once again the convicting power of the forgiveness of sins.  It means a deeper understanding of repentance and forgiveness, like David’s rather public penitence and prayer: “Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness;/ according to the multitude of thy mercies do away mine offences” (Psalm 51.1).  “Man”, we are told, “looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).  In the story of David, we are given to see something of the heart that God sees.  It is his heart of penitence that makes him truly beloved of God.  “David”, John Donne tells us, “both shows us all the slippery wayes into sin and all the wayes out of sin”.  “The wayes out of sin” are always the ways of penitential prayer and forgiveness.

      The failure of the Church in the West to uphold the necessity of the institution of Christian marriage has resulted in a generation or more that have been told by their parents and grandparents to take the experiential approach and “to live together”.  The wonder is that increasingly many of that generation come now to the church seeking for something more, seeking for the understanding of their lives in grace, seeking for what was not passed on to them, namely, the idea of the grace-ordered form of their lives together in holy matrimony.  At issue, is whether the church will be there for them with the forgiveness of Christ or against them in cold judgment.

      The failure of the church to hold firmly and without equivocation to the three classical reasons for Christian marriage (as stated in the Preface to the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer of 1662) results in the redefining of marriage to mean any kind of committed relationship, including same-sex partnerships.  By omitting reference to procreation or by rendering it merely “optional”, the church effectively reduces every marriage to a “gay marriage” and dishonors the institution of Christian marriage.  Against the illusions of sexual fulfillment and the eroticizing of friendship, a renewed understanding of Christian marriage is the call to maturity in love, to sacrifice and commitment, and to an acceptance of the God-given forms of our creatureliness, for “male and female he created them”.  Equally, it means a recovery of the proper forms of friendship.

      But with the recovery of clarity there must be also a deepening of charity.  Both belong inextricably to the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins.  Jesus Christ is the forgiveness of sins.  He would have us know that He is the forgiveness of sins.  “Christ pierced upon the cross is liber caritatis, ‘the very book of love’, laid open before us” (Lancelot Andrewes).  To behold that love is to let that love set our loves in order.  We are recalled to the forgiveness of sins without which we cannot hope to rise and walk.

      In the face of Western disorder and confusion, it may be that the Christians of Asia and Africa who maintain with their clergy the biblical doctrines of marriage are being called to set an example for the whole world of the holy vocation of the Christian family to mirror the love of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church His Bride and of the calling of clerical marriages to be “wholesome and godly examples and patterns for the people to follow”.

Ordination

      The Ordinal, bound with the Book of Common Prayer, sets forth the traditional doctrine and forms of ordaining Deacons, Priests, and Bishops.  The Anglican Way has taught that while all Christians have a vocation to serve the Lord through their Baptism, there is a specific vocation to serve as pastors in God’s Church to which some are called.  This vocation to the ordained and sacred Ministry does not cancel the primary vocation given to every Christian in Baptism, which always remains, but it places those called to ordination in a distinct order within God’s Church possessing specific duties.

      As the Preface to the Ordinal explains, this doctrine of Holy Orders “... is evident to all men diligently reading holy Scripture and ancient Authors”, and has been in place “from the Apostles’ time”.  This rather modest claim conceals a hidden strength.  It avoids the pitfalls of the exaggerated claims of either an extreme biblicism or an excessive ecclesiastical positivism as the basis for the order of the Church’s ministry.  It simply states that the ministerial orders of the Church have been received from the witness of the Scriptures and Tradition.  The sense of underlying reasonableness of the order which the Church has received is a distinctive of the Anglican Way.  It situates the Anglican Church(es) ecumenically with the churches of the magisterial reformation, the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church as well as the churches of Orthodoxy.  It avoids the authoritarian tendency to collapse episcopacy, for instance, into an Article of Faith.  The focus is on the purpose of the Church’s order and not on the order itself.  Apostolic order exists for the sake of apostolic doctrine; the order for the Faith.  As Bishop John Pearson puts it in his classical work An Exposition of the Creed (1st.ed. 1659), “True faith is the true foundation”.

      In later editions, he added an important qualifying phrase to the consideration of the Church’s unity of regiment and discipline: “as therefore there is no Church where there is no order, no ministry; so where the same order and ministry is, there is the same church.”  Yet he is remarkably restrained about the precise nature of the orders of ministry.

      The restraint is the restraint of essential doctrine in accord with the nature of the subject at hand.  That there is an order and ministry of the Church is to be believed as belonging to the Article of Faith in “the Holy Catholic Church” and in its Nicene explication, “the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church”.  What form the order and ministry of the Church may take is not so to be believed as a matter of essential faith.  Its necessity is not of the same kind.  It is worth observing that this equally counters the scriptural positivism of presbyterian and congregational polities and, ultimately, provides a stronger argument for the threefold ministry as something reasonably and rightly ordered upon the Scriptures, consonant with the Faith though not of the Faith.  Such a way of thinking also offers a salutary corrective to our present day idolatry of the institutional church in synodical and episcopal assertions and especially, our idolatry of bishops.  It counters all forms of ecclesiastical positivism by recalling us to much more fundamental things, the eternal verities of the Faith to which any particular order and ministry and upon which they must be ordered.

      Often in the West, the claim is made by liberal theologians that the vocation received in Baptism contains or includes all other vocations of ministry in the Church.  Thus, each person baptized is potentially a deacon, priest, and bishop: “Baptism is the fundamental sacrament of Christianity ... Confirmation appropriates it, the Eucharist presupposes it; ordination authorizes the expression of the priesthood into which all the baptized are incorporated” (Paul Avis, Anglicanism, Edinburgh, 1989, page 304).

      It seems fair to summarize what is being claimed as follows.  A person is baptized, and is authorized or ordained thereby to Christian service of all possible kinds.  Thus, every baptized person is potentially an ordained presbyter-priest.  Further, since each baptized person is by virtue of baptism placed in the royal priesthood to offer the sacrifice of praise and worship to God, and is, therefore, a priest already, he or she can move naturally into the role and vocation of a presbyter-priest when and if required.

      The fallacy of this kind of thinking is this: the ministerial priest hood of the presbyter and bishop is not the same thing as the royal priesthood of the whole, baptized membership of the Church of God, and is distinct in origin from it.  All Christians, laity and clergy, are placed corporately, as One Body, in the royal priesthood by their Baptism into Christ, who is the High Priest; but only a few men are placed by Christ, who is the Shepherd, in the ministerial priesthood, to feed His lambs and sheep.

      The words of Bishop Edward Harold Browne, who wrote in defense of the Church’s having any ordained ministry at all, apply as well to this newer case of confusion:

It is said, however, that all Christians are priests, and that a distinct ministry is therefore needless and inconsistent (see 1 Peter 2:9; Revelation 1:6; 5:10).  But it is to be observed, that wherever Christians are said to be priests, they are also said to be kings.  We know that the kingly character, which Christ bestows upon His people, has not abolished monarchy; why should their priestly character have abolished ministry?  Besides which, the very passages in the new Testament in which Christians are called a “royal priesthood,” “kings and priests,” are absolute quotations from the Old Testament, where the very same titles are given to all the people of the Jews. ...The one did not forbid a special priesthood in Israel; the other cannot disprove a ministry in the Church.  It was indeed argued on one occasion, that the sanctity of the whole congregation made it useless to have priests at all.  But how far that argument was safe the sequel showed, when the earth swallowed up Korah and his company, and fourteen thousand of the people died of the plague, because they had listened to his reasoning (Numbers 16:32, 33, 45–49).  It is difficult to see, where the difference lies between this statement of Korah and the modern denial of a Christian ministry, on the ground that all the Christian Church is a holy and spiritual priesthood; and it is difficult to understand what can be, if this be not, the “gainsaying of Core,” so strongly rebuked by St. Jude (verse 11).  [Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, 1890 ed., 569.]

      The relation between the royal priesthood and the ministerial priest hood is not that the latter is a specific function within the former.  It is that Jesus Christ, by two distinct acts of His One Person, creates both the royal and the ministerial priesthoods.  He does not create the royal priesthood, from which the ministerial priesthood simply emerges.  Rather, He creates each independently, even though all who are called into the ministerial priesthood belong to and can never leave the royal priesthood.  In the New Testament, those who were called to be apostles never ceased to be disciples as well.

9.  Sharing Life with Others

      One element of the expansion of the Anglican Way from Britain to other parts of the world was the simple fact of the expansion of the British Empire into America, the West Indies, Africa, Asia, and Australasia.  The Church of England, the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer went wherever the British explored, settled, or colonized.

      We need not approve of every action or every motive associated with the extension of British influence in order to view it, nevertheless, as a providential means of spreading the Gospel of Christ.  The Roman Empire, which had opened Britain herself to the Gospel during a four hundred year occupation, had also been intent on pursuing its own interests when Providence used it and its Legions as the instruments of a higher purpose.  Churches were built where there was no Church, and the Scriptures were taught where they had never been heard before.  The Roman roads were equally the conduits of the Christian Way.

      At the same time, we ought not to confuse the intentional and sacrificial work of faithful churchmen with whatever spreading of the Gospel was accomplished, if only incidentally by their civil governments, whether ancient or modern.  Since the beginning of the Church, there have been men and women who were willing to give their lives, with or without their governments’ consent, to fulfill the Great Commission given to the Church by Christ: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.  Amen.” (Matthew 28:19–20)

      It is neither fair nor accurate, then, to attribute the worldwide presence of Christians living according to the Anglican Way either to “an accident of history” or to an aggressive dissemination of “British culture.”  If nothing else, the translation of the Book of Common Prayer into over 150 languages demonstrates that the Prayer Book and the Anglican Way it encapsulates are not the exclusive preserves of English speaking peoples or nations.  Human hearts, moved by the grace of God to deliver the Gospel of Jesus Christ crucified, and prepared by the grace of God to receive it, have spread the Anglican Way.

Propagating the Gospel

      “Evangelism,” after all, is not the recruitment of human beings to prosper an ecclesiastical institution or to magnify some earthly culture, even if many Anglicans do have institutional or cultural ties to one another.  Only disembodied spirits can do entirely without such things.  Rather, “evangelism” is the faithful delivery of the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ, not merely to “change lives,” but to rescue them from eternal death by the grace of God.  Faithfulness requires, moreover, that the “evangelist” or the “evangelical” Church truly working in God’s Good News live and teach an absolute submission to “all things whatsoever” the Living Word of God has commanded in the Holy Scriptures.  Every nation is a missionary territory for the faithful Church, until every knee is bowed to Jesus Christ or the Lord himself returns.

      Up to recent times, much of the major expansion of the Anglican Way took place through the efforts of evangelistic organizations such as the Church Missionary Society or the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.  Their labors resulted in the birth of local churches, so that, since the Second World War, the indigenous Provinces of the Anglican Communion in Africa and Asia have been deeply engaged in evangelism and missions themselves, and there has been tremendous growth in church membership through conversions and baptisms.

      In other Provinces today, perhaps because the Anglican Way began as simply the national church of England, the call to evangelism appears to be more difficult to hear or to implement.  In the context of a nominally Christian state and nation, evangelism may seem an odd thing to do, “what is done in pagan places.”  In reality, though, teachers in parish and Sunday schools often do the work of evangelists.  The dedicated priest who looks after his parish (which is, of course, all of the people within the parish boundaries) is doing evangelism as he prepares parents and sponsors for baptisms, as he instructs young people before Confirmation, as he counsels a man and a woman before marriage, as he visits the sick and those who mourn, and as he buries the dead.

      Despite such continuing acts of faith, however, it is necessary to reassert in the secularized West, at a time when few people have any real sense of God their Creator, Judge, and Redeemer, that all of the churches of the Anglican Way have a duty to evangelize, without exception.  Whether a Western Church conceives of itself as an established national church or as a major old-line institution, it has just as certain a mandate to evangelize as have the Churches of Asia and Africa that face the challenges of animism and Islam.

      The 1990’s has been declared “The Decade of Evangelism,” but few Anglican dioceses and parishes, either in the Church of England or in North America, seem to have taken this seriously.  Perhaps the real reason why there is little or no vital evangelism promoted by Anglican Churches in the West is that there is little passion in them to bring sinners into a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Perhaps it is as simple as this: they have nothing to share with others through witnessing and testifying because their religion is either nominal or secularist, privatized or neo-pagan.

      Unless people who call themselves Christians believe in their minds and know in their hearts the dynamic and sober truths of the Atonement and the sinfulness of man before God, they are not likely to go out into the modern world to preach “Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”  Unless they believe in heaven and hell, and that Jesus Christ is the only Mediator between the Living God and fallen man, they are not likely to exert themselves to declare that “Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life” or that “no one comes to the Father except by Him.”

      A church, in fact, which despite its tradition of Trinitarian belief is practically committed to pantheism or monism, living the lie that “all is god, and all is one,” is more likely to equate evangelism with the message that “all religions lead to God” and that all who are sincere in their intentions will be given eternal life.  By this kind of approach, the Christian religion is reduced to a form of self-fulfillment and a celebration of merely human community, in which all may share their feelings, whether or not they share the Faith once delivered to the saints.  It is also singularly unable to engage with other religions and to honor the truth of Christ that is in them.

      To have an external life of evangelism, a church must first have an interior life in which she knows her God and is in communion with the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Ghost.  She must read and take to heart the Scriptures as the Word of God written.  She must learn how God looks upon His world in its sin and disbelief.  Otherwise, she will be only a hollow shell, with nothing to offer the world but general religious platitudes or a rehash of its own self-help schemes.  Only a Church that truly seeks to be the Body of Christ and humbly to be the Household of God can truly begin to contemplate obeying the heavenly mandate to “go and teach all nations,” including the nation that surrounds her.

      Regrettably, even in those places where there is a conviction that a church ought to evangelize, the application of that conviction is often conformed to the models of secular commercial marketing.  The Gospel message is trimmed and its demands are softened to make it more palatable to its hearers and to ensure an immediate response and instant “church growth.”

      What human beings need to hear is replaced by what ecclesiastical salesmen have determined they want to hear.  Thus, the God-centered evangelical message, “Because God the Father has created you and loved you, and because God the Son has died on the cross to give you eternal life, you ought, therefore out of your own grateful love, to repent of your sins, to believe the Gospel concerning Jesus Christ, and to surrender your whole life to God,” is exchanged for the self-centered inducement, “If you want to find true personal fulfillment and meaning in your life, then let Jesus come into your heart.”

      There is more of utilitarianism, the worship of what works, than the worship of God in all this; and the life that is being offered by such appeals is not a new life in Christ, but the old life somehow enhanced by Christ’s being invited to participate in it.  Furthermore, the invitation to love God for what we expect to get from Him, as opposed to loving Him for who He is and for what He has done in His mercy, is a solicitation to love for gain.  Love for gain, whoever practices it, is a prostitution of love.

      Additionally, the latter form of invitation usually accompanies the belief that “evangelism” is about offering from God to believers “a personal relationship with Jesus”: a kind of One-on-one association with “the Lord.”  In fact, many Anglicans appear to believe today that the center and essence of Christianity is “a personal relationship with Jesus.”  They see conversion as entering into such an arrangement, and they describe the Christian life as the “experience” of it.  Such a way of speaking sounds so sincere and so meaningful that few question its content or its authenticity.  Thus, “a personal relationship with Jesus” has become a standard form of expression, and Christians of varying backgrounds and theological traditions have granted it a kind of orthodoxy.

A “personal relationship” as the goal of evangelism?

      Unfortunately, few of those who encourage the use of this expression to describe Christian life seem to realize that it is not to be found either in the Bible or in classic theology.  It is of relatively recent origin, owing its acceptance to particular developments in western culture – most particularly to the rise of individualism, the cult of the autonomous self whose interests and reality may be disconnected from those of every other person or thing as he wills.

      The “personal relationship” is, then, the central feature of a popular theology that despite its claims to be straight from the Bible emphasizes what could be judged to be the dubious premises that “God loves you as an individual” and that “Jesus Christ died for you as an individual.”  From these premises, the even more dubious conclusions are drawn that “you, as an individual, can have a personal relationship with Jesus,” and thus, “a personal relationship with God.”

      When anyone asks for a model from the New Testament for this “personal relationship with Jesus,” its proponents can only point to the disciples who followed Christ in Galilee, or to the disciples who met with the risen Lord Jesus in the forty days before His Ascension.  In so doing, however, they miss the obvious point that although the Scriptures treat these disciples as “persons,” they are only “disciples” because they share a single life in Jesus Christ and are the nucleus of His Church.  They are not “autonomous” or “self-ruled,” but ruled by Christ, and accountable to one another.  Their being disciples did not begin with a “personal choice,” but began outside of them completely, as Christ told those of their number who were also Apostles at the Last Supper, addressing them corporately, in the plural, and not as individuals with twelve severable “personal relationships” to Himself: “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you” (John 15:16).

      Throughout the New Testament, baptized Christians and their calling are described in the same plural and corporate way.  They are to be the family of God as adopted children, within the Body of Jesus Christ as members under Christ the Head.  They are to be branches of the vine whose trunk is Jesus Christ, as sheep following the Shepherd, as travelers in and on the Way to the Father.  They are to be members of the royal priesthood and soldiers in the army of the Lord.  They are called to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world together, adorning and commending the Gospel by what they are, what they do, and what they say.

      Certainly, the call to become a Christian is addressed by the Father, through the Lord Jesus Christ, and by the Spirit in the preaching of the Gospel to each person, for God loves the whole world, and each person therein is precious in His sight.  Further, the response to this call in repentance and faith is personal, made personally by each believer.

      The gift of the indwelling Spirit, who comes to live in the soul of each member of the Body of Christ, is the gift of a Real Person to a real person, which he personally experiences: for “the Spirit bears witness with my spirit that I am a child of God.”  Christianity certainly involves and includes a personal encounter with the Holy and Undivided Trinity by each individual Christian.  It is indeed personal and experiential, because it is fundamentally and essentially Trinitarian.  By baptism we are made “members of Christ, and the children of God and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven”.

      However, the act of personal commitment to the Father, made through the Son, is only possible because of the invisible and secret activity of the Holy Spirit within the mind, heart, and will.  It is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son who unites the repentant believer to the Father, through the Son, for forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life.  And it is the same Holy Spirit who places the new Christian in the Body of Christ, the family of God, and the royal priesthood, as He brings that person into union with Jesus Christ, both Lord and Savior.

      There is, therefore, never an individualistic union of a believer with God.  The fellowship, union, and communion with God that he possesses in Jesus Christ are truly personal and very real (as the saints all testify), but they are always also enjoyed together with all others who are in Christ Jesus, by faith and love, with the Holy Spirit.

      It is not within the capability of any human being to place himself in friendship with God or in communion with the Holy Trinity.  The Old Testament chronicles God’s sovereign establishment of His Covenant With His Chosen People.  The Lord Jesus Christ established the New Covenant by the shedding of His blood – His propitiatory and expiatory sacrifice of himself on the Cross.  Only when God has established His covenant of grace, and declared its terms, is it possible for people to enter into it.  The giving of God’s Covenant, then, is not to be understood as merely a case of God’s taking the initiative and of man’s responding, as if it were a contract negotiated between a major and a minor partner.  It is the Holy Trinity actually establishing the Way and the means for sinful human beings to be reconciled with their Creator and judge, for them to be brought into the fullness of life everlasting, and for them to know Jesus Christ as the Life.

      Through and in Jesus Christ, and by the Holy Spirit, God the Father created and maintains a gracious relation with the human race.  This is His covenant of grace.  It is all of mercy, for even the response of sinners to the invitation of the Gospel is accomplished by the assistance and power of the Holy Spirit.  The acts of repenting, believing, confessing, obeying, trusting, and loving are certainly the acts of free human persons, but the freedom to act is only possible through the presence and assistance of the Holy Spirit, who indwells the soul and quickens the faculties.

      A careful reading of the Anglican formularies (The Book of Common Prayer, the Ordinal, the Thirty-Nine Articles) will confirm that from a historic, biblical Anglican perspective, sinful human beings can only have fellowship with the Holy Trinity because the same Holy Trinity has established a covenant and created a relation with mankind through the new and second Adam.  This covenant, and the relation it effects, has its center and its meaning in the Lord Jesus Christ, the new Adam, who is the Word made flesh, our only Mediator and Advocate, and our Great High Priest.

      On the basis of the biblical theology of the Anglican Way any talk which suggests that anyone can negotiate the terms of a One-on-one covenant with the Father, through the Son, and by the Holy Spirit is to be rejected.  Furthermore, any talk which suggests that there is such a thing as a one-on-one union of the individual Christian with the Holy Trinity is also to rejected.  None of us can do what Jesus Christ has done in establishing the one life-giving relation of mankind to His Father in himself.  To say otherwise, is to claim to be miniature “Christs,” each with a miniature “covenant” of his own, denying the uniqueness of our Savior.  This is not, however, “a new approach to Christianity,” but the spirit of antichrist condemned long ago by St. John (1 John 2:22).

      We need to be very clear that any union which we sinful creatures have with God the Father is, always and only, through and in Jesus Christ.  He, as the Son of God incarnate, has an eternal union with the Father within the Godhead, and we are united with the Father by being enclosed within the Son – that is, within His vicarious and sacred humanity.  This is why the apostle Paul speaks so often of Christians being “in Christ.”  There is a perfect personal relation of the Father and the Son, and on the basis of this relation, and within this relation, there is a relation of all who are “in Christ” with the Father, and of the Father with all who are “in Christ.”  All of these relations exist in and by the presence and the activity of the Holy Spirit.

      But these are “relations,” and not “relationships.”  Adding the suffix “-ship” to the end of a noun changes its meaning to denote the state or condition of being what is expressed by the noun (OED).  For example, “friendship” is the state or condition of being a friend.  This is, of course, an abstract word, since it expresses the idea of being a friend.  A person could write an essay on “friendship,” without having any actual friends at all.

      So, “relationship,” strictly speaking, is the abstract word for “the state or condition of being related,” while “relation” is the concrete term for the thing itself: the connection between persons.  Thus, there is first the “relation” between persons; then there is their “relatedness” in the relation that joins them; and finally there is the “relationship”: the experience of the relation, or their idea and understanding of it.  To stress “relationship” when discussing our relation in Christ to the Father, is to stress our own understanding of what God has done and is doing, over the reality itself.  To depend on our own ideas of “relationship” is to ask God to submit to us, rather than to submit to God in the relation that He gives us on His terms alone.

      Further, while the word “relation” has more or less kept its traditional meanings (which include, of course, the blood-ties of a family – thus “relatives”), the word “relationship” has taken on a much broader sense than it had earlier in this century.  A “relationship” may now refer to any kind of association or union, temporary or permanent, licit or illicit, moral or immoral, involving two or more persons or two of more groups of persons.  Thus I have a “relationship” with my therapist, butcher, doctor, broker, dentist, friend, acquaintance, brother, lawyer, senator, pastor, daughter, teacher, plumber, baker, and wife – to name but a few!  I may claim a “relationship” with someone I have never met, as long as I have thought about him long enough.  If I am homosexual, I may have a “relationship” with one or more persons of the same sex.  If I am heterosexual and committing adultery or fornication, I have a “relationship” with my “lover.”  And so on.

      The use of “relationship” in this all-inclusive modern sense began in the 1960s, primarily as a way of making neutral what was known in earlier times as “having an affair.”  It is, perhaps, one of those words, such as “interesting,” which is intended to have no moral connotation.  It simply refers to some kind of association between persons, and it has the effect of creating the impression that all such associations are of similar value, and are equally temporary or transient.  It clearly belongs to the culture of modern, autonomous individualism, in which there are no obligations to others, except for those accepted by the individual person from moment to moment.

      To summarize, “a personal relation to God” is a correct way of speaking, if it is understood that this relation is of grace and that it is always and only through and in Jesus Christ, in His Body, and with the Holy Spirit.  “A personal relation to Jesus Christ” is also an acceptable way of speaking, if it is understood that this relation is that of the disciple to the Master, of the sinner to the Savior, and of the servant to the Lord, alongside and with other such disciples in the kingdom of God.

      It is best, however, to avoid speaking of “a personal relationship with Jesus,” even though it can be given a sound meaning by those who have a right theology.  In today’s culture and moral environment, as we have seen, “relationship” is a word that points to temporary and even immoral associations of persons.  And whatever it is that unites the forgiven sinner to the gracious God, it is certainly not ephemeral, temporary, or immoral!  We must not give the impression that becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ is something that lasts only as long as you or I feel good about it.

      In order to make clear that being a Christian truly consists of communion with the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity within the Household of God, an Anglican ought to use biblical and patristic terms to describe that reality.  We should say that a Christian is a child of God, a disciple of Jesus Christ, a member of the Body of Christ, a patient in Christ’s hospital, a lamb in the flock of Christ, a friend of God, a brother of Jesus Christ, a temple of the Holy Spirit, a servant in God’s household, and so on.  We can say with the apostle Paul, “I know in whom I have believed”; and we can say with the apostle John, “Our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son.”  What we cannot claim is an individualistic relationship with either the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit, or with the Three in One.

      If we allow our minds to be formed by classical theology (made vastly easier in our case as Anglicans, simply by using the Rites, Offices and Collects of the classic Book of Common Prayer), then we shall not fall into questionable ways of speech, either ancient or modern.  Rather, by grace, we shall speak joyously and faithfully of our relation to the Holy Trinity grounded in His relation to us.

“Relevant” Liturgy

      We have claimed that evangelism in the Anglican Way has to be true to Holy Scripture in both content and vocabulary.  So also must worship, but here we reflect on the further duty that worship in the Anglican Way needs to be true to the principles of Common Prayer if we are to lead inquirers and converts into the fullness of liturgical worship, the discipline of praying the Daily Office, and an ordered life of ascetic prayer and meditation.

      Common Prayer not only forms a common bond among worshipers in the Anglican tradition, it is the common bond of worship and discipline that unites Anglicans past, present, and future with their fellow Christians of the undivided Church.  It is the visible “Anglican 1-2-3-4-5” of one Canon, two Testaments, three Creeds, four Councils, and five centuries of patristic practice applied to our spiritual nurture.  There must, therefore, be a vital connection between services designed for use in missionary and evangelistic settings and the regular worship of the informed and educated Anglican congregation using the Book of Common Prayer.  Otherwise, converts will be introduced only to a generic kind of “introductory” religion, from which entry into the Anglican Way, or into any other full-blown Christian tradition, will be difficult, requiring much instruction and much relearning in order to take part in liturgical worship.

      At a time when many nations, peoples, and families are intent on rediscovering their identities in their heritage from the past, it seems odd to have to defend the Anglican heritage and the identity that it preserves.  Nevertheless, demands for “contemporary language” and “contemporary services” have pushed the Book of Common Prayer aside in many places, and in some places removed it completely from the hands of the Church’s people.  The refusal of a large number of seminaries to teach the Common Prayer tradition has left it a mystery, not only to converts, but also to many younger priests.  A Church that does not hand on the traditions of its life to future generations soon has neither traditions nor life.

      It is necessary, of course, for any Christian household to balance its obligations to preserve the past and to address the present.  But these obligations are not mutually exclusive, and the clamor for “newness” is itself very old.  As Cranmer explained in his essay “Of Ceremonies,” appended to the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549: “And whereas in our time, the minds of men be so diverse, that some think it a great matter of conscience to depart from a piece of the least of their Ceremonies (they be so addicted to their old customs), and again on the other side, some be so new fangled that they would innovate all things, and do so despise the old that nothing can like them, but that is new: It was thought expedient not so much to have respect how to please and satisfy either of these parties, as how to please God, and profit them both.”

      Cranmer’s twin precepts of pleasing God and profiting the Church remain valid today.  And just as traditionalists must search their hearts for idols of mere habit, those who would innovate must guard them selves against the deadly sin of accidie, weariness with the holy things of God and a restlessness under the spiritual discipline of the Church.

      Nothing ages, moreover, so quickly or so badly as “contemporary liturgy.”  It may well be that one of few beliefs that unite radicals, evangelicals, and Anglo-Catholics in the Anglican Churches of the West today, is the opinion that the “Books of Alternative Services” introduced in the 1970s and 1980s have gone well past their “use by” date.  Another, unfortunately, is the conviction that the classic Book of Common Prayer is not, and cannot be “contemporary.”

      Much of the confusion about “contemporary liturgies,” we suggest, comes from the use of two very different and competing definitions of the word “contemporary.”

      Under the first, “contemporary” means “conformed to these times, including their fads and fashions.”  When those who hold to this first definition speak of “liturgy,” they mean to provide the same sort of stimulation and entertainment that their congregations receive from television, movies, and rock-concerts.  Since most local churches lack the budgets to compete with the unabashedly secular forms of such diversions, much of “contemporary liturgy,” in this sense, will often look cheap and out of date, since it will be only “second-hand” modernity.

      In contrast, the second definition of “contemporary” means simply “in these times,” with an accompanying sense that certain things are of permanent or perennial value.  Think, for example, of the stylistic differences between older and newer recordings of the canon of classical music.  In the best “contemporary” recordings, there is a freshness that avoids unnecessary mystification or affectation, alongside a lively interest in original instrumentation.  The old is made new, and a living part of the present, through imagination and skill, and according to an intrinsic value that will not simply pass away with the times.

      In this second sense, the historic Book of Common Prayer and the tradition it represents provide a pastor with any number of “contemporary” options.  He can, for example, take God, his people, the liturgy, and his office in all seriousness, without taking himself too seriously.  He can stress the objective over the subjective, which is anathema to the first sort of contemporaneity, but essential to the second.

      He need not pretend to be a creature of another age, whether a pseudo-baroque cardinal or the Hollywood version of a Roundhead parson.  He can avoid the “stained-glass” voice and the plummy accent, to speak the words of the Prayer Book as a living conversation with the Great King in His court.

      The Prayer Book offers him ample opportunity through thoughtful biddings to relate worship to contemporary events.  He can use the Decalogue to connect moral instruction, week by week, to the appropriate commandments.  When making announcements, he can speak as a pastor and spiritual father, rather than as a bureaucrat or overlord.  The appointed lessons will provide him with all the contemporary sermon material he could ask for, as they have for over fifteen hundred years.

      Vestments pose no problem, if he wears them as his uniform of office, without indulging in “dress-up” or self-expression.  When a bride and groom dress formally for a wedding, no one laughs, unless their taste is awful, or they lack the dignity to match their clothes.  A foretaste of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb can easily have such a happy dignity, if a pastor works to make it so.

      Priests and congregations that desire to hold “prayer meetings” can use the Litany to join personal prayers with the prayer of Christ to His Father and the constant intercessions of the faithful Church.  Those who want a hymn-sing can just schedule one, without using it as a replacement for the common worship of the Church.  Better yet, Evening Prayer can be done simply in twenty minutes, followed by as much singing as anyone wishes, with the confession, psalms, lessons, creed, and prayers to anchor the hymns in God’s Kingdom and not in man’s.  The Anointing of the Sick provides healing services.  The Catechism, used publicly and systematically, yields any number of topics for contemporary instruction in the Faith.

      We saw earlier in discussing “relationships” that the meanings of words do matter, and that recognizing our Lord’s plural address in John 15:16 was crucial to understanding His meaning and message.  For these and similar reasons, the developed theological language of the classic Books of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible, along with their care in maintaining the singulars and plurals of verbs and pronouns in the original texts of the Holy Scriptures, continue to honor God and to profit the Church.

      In saying this we do not want to prohibit the use of such faithful English translations as the Revised Standard Version.  Our purpose here is to defend and commend the use of the KJV alongside the classic Books of Common Prayer.  Cranmer retained in the Prayer Book the older English “thou” forms, because they provided him not only with the means to make certain that one could differentiate between the singular and plural address of human persons, but also with a means of asserting on every page the singularity of Almighty God.  In 1611 the King James committee also followed this course in English translation and liturgy.

      When the “modern” translations remove the “thou” forms of pronouns and verbs, the result is a greater obscurity than the few archaisms that might be found in the KJV, or that the Prayer Book could ever be blamed for.  Compare the Sermon on the Mount in the KJV with any modern version of the Bible, and the inability of modern translations to make clear the difference between our Lord’s commandments for corporate and private life will appear immediately.

      Christian language needs to be understandable, but that does not necessarily mean “understandable without thought or effort.”  The KJV and the classic Prayer Books are not examples of the street-language of their times, but of a language that was understandable to anyone who cared to understand, while still being able to express the subtleties and distinctions of the Christian Faith.  None of this means “no change, ever,” but it does suggest a need to be more careful about the language we use in worship for we speak of Christ our Life, who is the same yesterday, today and for ever.

Epilogue

      If the only expression of the Anglican Way were in America or Britain then it would be easy to conclude that, at the close of the twentieth century and of the second millennium, this ancient Way is worn out, lacking in vision and energy, seriously infected with alien ideas and viruses, and unlikely to enter the next millennium as anything other than a pale shadow of its former self.  By God’s mercy there have, however, always been and there remain the “seven thousand” faithful western Anglicans who have not bowed their knees to Baal as their voice is drowned by the cacophony of post-modern religion.

      However, the Anglican Way is alive and well in others parts of the world, notably Africa and Asia, and it is possible that a stream of new life will flow from the younger Churches there into the tired and sick Churches of the old West before the end of the second millennium.  God’s providence may include the sending of Anglican missionaries from Africa and Asia to evangelize the West and the planting of new, biblically-based Anglican parishes and the creating of a vibrant Anglican Way to witness for Christ in the third millennium.

      Few in the Anglican Churches of the West seem to want to receive new life and joy from the younger Churches.  The old idea that the West is the giver and the rest of the world the receiver does not go away quickly.  Further, when it comes to the nature of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the morality which is pleasing to God, not many in the West are sufficiently humble to believe that they can learn from their brethren in Africa and Asia.  In fact, revisionist theologians and “keep-up-with-the-times liturgists,” as well as the activist homosexual lobby, in the western Churches are actively spreading their message around the world.  And, while many Westerners are ready to try primitive and ancient forms of pagan spirituality especially from the East, the idea of recovering authentic Christianity from Africa and Asia does not yet appeal to them.

      It may, however, be God’s plan that the revival of the biblically-based Anglican Way in the West is going to begin with the transference of authentic Christian faith and practice from Africa and Asia.  Further, it could well be the case that it will be missionaries from non-western cultures and races who will be the means whereby the Church in the West actually recovers the use of its discipline of Common Prayer as the basis of its family life before God again.  Many Christians in the younger Anglican Churches are more familiar with the Book of Common Prayer (in their own languages of course) than are members of the Anglican and Episcopal Churches in the West.

      One way or another, since all things are possible to Almighty God our heavenly Father, the vision of Anglican Christians for the future-until the Second Coming of our Lord-must include the continuing strengthening and expansion of the Anglican Way in Africa, Asia and other areas where it is now alive and well.  And it must also include the necessary reformation and urgent renewal of the Churches in the West where they have “lost their first love.”  All in all we must look to God to maintain and build His Church for which our blessed Savior shed His precious blood.

“O gracious Father, we humbly beseech thee for thy holy, catholic Church; that thou wouldest be pleased to fill it with all truth, in all peace.  Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it.  Where it is right, establish it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Him who died and rose again, and ever liveth to make intercession for us, Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord.  Amen.”

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