On The End of All Things

The Sunday Next before Advent

STIR Up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Two and a half years ago, I began the Canterbury Calgarian as an attempt to figure out where my home was. In 2013 and early 2014, I had spent time exploring some of the basic theologies of various Christian traditions. Even today, I continue to on occasion attend Great Vespers at a local Eastern Orthodox parish out of reverence and appreciation for that tradition, and hold significant respect for the theological depth of the Roman Catholic tradition. It was in that context, as a lay person, that the investigation into Anglicanism was undertaken in this blog.

Yet today, I find that context is no longer applicable. When I began, I was an Anglican lay person who had recently come to make his home there. Today, I am an Anglican seminarian who has discerned a call to Holy Orders and is preparing for ordination. I am serving in a parish within the Diocese of Calgary, and the concerns reflected in this exploration have largely been concluded.

I am no longer as concerned with uncovering the historic nature of Anglicanism as I once was. The goal of this blog was to establish a clear vision of a traditional Anglican ecclesiology, one rooted in Holy Scripture and the teachings of the undivided Catholic Church. Over the past two and a half years and one hundred and fifty articles, a wide range of issues have been addressed from history, to the Sacraments, to the Anglican formularies and dozens of issues in between. The Anglican ecclesiological foundation has been laid.

As the year ends, it seemed appropriate then to consider a shift. In Christianity, death is not the end. There is a Tolkienesque sentiment there that finds its roots in Christ’s gospel. While this project is at an end, it does not mean that I do not have planned future projects to explore other questions of the faith.

In particular is this: having established this ecclesiological foundation, what are the implications?

Since the advent of digital technology and their proliferation, something that really only occurred within my own lifetime (one of the final generations of children to grow up without the ubiquity of personal computers, let alone personal digital devices), the pace of social change has accelerated dramatically. New secular sociological concerns and practices within society have profound impacts on how Christians live out their faith.

The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion are a product of 16th century British law and culture, and while they are still quite applicable today, what does that look like? What unperceived challenges do Christians face today that have not explicitly been addressed by these guidelines on how the Christian faith was to be lived out in English society of the day?

From falling rates of marriage to the loss of respect for the authority of Holy Scripture, to simple issues of international connectedness and the wider ranging impact of states upon one another, there are many issues that challenge us in how we are to live out our faith.

This is essentially a shift from academic understanding of theory towards praxis.

While this shift could be lived out in this blog, rather than do so I intend to start fresh with this new perspective and new goal on a new blog. That leaves nothing more than to close out this one.

I think as I reflect, perhaps the biggest conclusion that can be drawn is the great value to spiritual formation to considering the questions that have been considered here. Understanding the nature of these foundational elements of the Catholic faith and Anglican tradition. When someone asks me something about the Anglican tradition, I generally am able to answer. When questions come up today about where Anglicanism is heading or ought to be heading, I can argue from a foundation of Anglicanism actually meaning something—this is harsh reality that for many Christians who do not come from confessional traditions where subscription to a particular confession is a requirement for membership in a particular church, they may not know what their tradition actually professes and their own beliefs may ultimately be incompatible.

This experiment has reinforced in my mind the importance of catechesis and Bible study going forward. I, as an interested Christian, learned quite a bit, and while perhaps not all the details are necessary to know (I can’t really come up with any theological implications for failing to know about the participation of British bishops at the Council of Arles, for instance), overall it seems in many cases, Anglicans have failed to be taught the richness of our own tradition, nor do we even seem to realize how little we actually know about our history.

I’ll close this out with a favourite collect from the Book of Common Prayer:

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that the words, which we have heard this day with our outward ears, may through thy grace be so grafted inwardly in our hearts, that they may bring forth in us the fruit of good living, to the honour and praise of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

On Desire

The Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity

O LORD, we beseech thee to keep thy Church and household continually in thy true religion; that they who do lean only upon the hope of thy heavenly grace may evermore be defended by thy mighty power; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

As the Articles of Religion affirm and as Scripture teaches us, God has gifted humanity with free will. A consequence of this free will is that we have desires. These are the forces within us that motivate us to act. Our desires can be either good or bad, either drawing us nearer to God or taking us away from him.

St Augustine of Hippo famously defined desire that draws us towards God, virtue, in terms of rightly ordered love. In On Christian Doctrine he famously expands on this meaning stating that:

love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.

To use the language of desire, we must use our free will to order our desires in order that we desire to be in the amount suitable to the object of that desire. Disordered desire is the root of sin. For instance, when we desire material wealth for ourselves over our desire for the well-being of our neighbours, it is easy to see how we might be willing to cheat them or otherwise allow our actions to negatively affect them in the pursuit of our own gain.

A clearer example comes from the consideration of the desire for social belonging. It is a fundamental motivator of all human behaviour to have belonging. In a modern Western context, that desire manifests in certain culturally conditioned patterns of behaviour which are normative for anyone who wants to fit in and be a part of society. It is perfectly natural and anyone would be hard pressed to suggest that in and of itself a desire to be a part of a group is sinful. Yet Christianity often challenges these cultural norms that form the basis of belonging. How often on a Sunday does a homily exegete a passage of Holy Scripture by expounding on how Christ is calling us to counter-cultural action? Suddenly our desire for God—to follow him, to honour him and to have intimate relationship with him, is placed in conflict with the desire to conform to the norms of society in order to fit in. If we place our desire to conform to the norms of society above our desire to follow God’s counter-cultural call, we have a disordered desire.

There are many hymns and modern praise songs that speak of turning ourselves wholeheartedly over to Christ. How many Christians, however, can upon reflection sing these lyrics in all sincerity? 

In the famous lyrics, “O Love that wilt not let me go, / I rest my weary soul in thee; / I give thee back the life I owe, / That in thine ocean depths its flow / May richer, fuller be,” we are promising to give back our lives to God who gave us life, yet that does not in practice seem to be what we do. We withhold our lives from God like Ananias and Sapphira withheld some of the profit from the sale of their property.  Our lips proclaim a desire to turn ourselves over to God, but our actions often show those words to ring hollow in our lives.

There is a disconnect between what we say we desire, what we say we love, and what we actually love. We have failed in most of our modern Christian lives, to cultivate a theology of desire, this place of rightly ordered desires that will maintain our orientation towards God.

It is helpful to think of this in terms of desire rather than love because often we view loves as something which we have no control over, and also because we associate love with the emotion of love far more than we ought to when considering the full spectrum of what love entails. With desire, it seems easier to draw that mental connection with our ability to control our desires.

This is where spiritual disciplines come in. It is through the use of spiritual disciplines that we can begin to cultivate Godly desires and suppress those or reshape those desires that are disordered. Spiritual disciplines are opportunities to practice intentional orientation of our desires in a way that we often wouldn’t consider to be the case in terms of love. When love is viewed as an emotion it means it cannot be controlled or shaped, simply experienced and actualized or denied. With desire, we can shape it because it is something more persistent.

Ultimately, when our desires are oriented towards God, they will move us towards him. When they remain disordered, however, they will move us away from him. Desires apart from God are never fully satisfied, however, as they are ultimately self-satisfied. CS Lewis makes this point when he argues that pride is the great sin from which all other sin derives because it explicitly involves placing ourselves in the place of God. As we are created with a desire and that desire can only be fulfilled by God, it becomes a clear implication that when we follow these disordered desires we will always be left wanting more.

Spiritual disciplines that are useful for the reorientation of our desires include the cultivation of gratitude and thankfulness. This might be as simple as beginning your morning in a prayer of thanksgiving for how you are thankful for a day of opportunity that God has brought you to (the collect for grace from Morning Prayer is a suitable starting point for this) to creating gratitude lists: identifying throughout your day all the things you are grateful to God for. 

The confession from Morning Prayer reminds us that, “we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,” and is a lesson that St Paul reminds us of. In Romans 1. 21 Paul describes how the lack of gratitude towards God for who he is and what he has done is the root of humanity’s descent into guilt and the disordering of humanity’s desires. To return to Godly desires, we need to consider why we got there in the first place and then continue to practice this culture of gratitude in order to strengthen the correctly ordered desires.

It is through this development of a clear theology of desire that we find ourselves drawing closer and closer to God.

On the Articles: Article XXXIX

The Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity

O LORD, we beseech thee, absolve thy people from their offences; that through thy bountiful goodness we may all be delivered from the bands of those sins, which by our frailty we have committed. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our blessed Lord and Saviour. Amen.

The Octave of All Saints Day

O ALMIGHTY God, who hast knit together 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 hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

XXXIX. Of a Christian Man’s Oath
As we confess that vain and rash Swearing is forbidden Christian men by our Lord Jesus Christ, and James his Apostle, so we judge, that Christian Religion doth not prohibit, but that a man may swear when the Magistrate requireth, in a cause of faith and charity, so it be done according to the Prophet’s teaching, in justice, judgement, and truth.

Article XXXIX, the last, addresses two different issues.

The first sentence of the Article notes that, “vain and rash Swearing is forbidden Christian men,” by which it means profanity is barred. From the commandment not to use the Lord’s name in vain to Christ’s warning that what comes out of the mouth is more damaging than what goes in, there is a clear line in Scripture that tells us that Christians ought not to be vulgar. It should be recognized that there is a cultural context to profanity—what is considered to be profanity changes from language to language and time to time. In some cultures, for instance in Quebecois French, many vulgarities are sacrilegious, while in English, vulgarities are often sexual or relate to bodily waste. No matter their case, it is what they reflect from within us that is prohibited, and it is the causes of the utterances of profanity that is truly being warned against, not simply the utterances of profanity itself.

The second sense of the Article is a reference not to profanity, but to the swearing of oaths. While it is primarily the second part of this Article that addresses this, there is one historic way in which that first sentence condemning “vain and rash Swearing” also applies to the swearing of oaths. Historically prior to the reformation, it was common for young children to be sent to monasteries and convents. In order to be taken in, these young children would be required to swear oaths of celibacy, poverty and other forms. This Article condemns that medieval practice pointing out that it is a rash thing to have someone swear an oath so rashly, namely when they cannot understand the full consequences of what they are about to do. Biblically, the story of Jephthah (Judges 11. 29-40) seems to speak against this as well, as Jephthah swore rashly and paid a severe price for that mistake, being forced to sacrifice his daughter.
The second half of the Article makes a similar reference to the swearing of oaths in a way that would be understandable to modern eyes, namely the civil and legal sphere where oaths must be sworn, for instance before entering into a civil office or giving legal testimony in a courtroom. To some of the more radical reformers, Christ’s admonition to, “Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil,” (St Mt 5. 37) is interpreted as prohibiting the swearing of such oaths.

Yet there are many other places in Scripture where oaths are commended, from the Law of Moses (Deut 6. 13) to St Paul’s many references (Rm 9. 1, 2; II Cor 1. 23; Gal 1. 20). Nowhere in the Gospel does Christ overturn the law of Moses, and St Paul and the other Apostles, St James the Bishop of Jerusalem is mentioned explicitly in the Article.

It should be noted that there is room and even historic example, of how Christians ought to apply the lack of oaths, which comes from honesty: the lives as relate to Christians. In monastic communities, monks were prohibited from swearing oaths once they had joined their community because they were to be honest in all things and to swear additional oaths was to suggest they failed in their duty to be honest in all things. It may have been the extension of this practice to clergy in general in the medieval period that placed the seed of the prohibition of oaths among some of the radical reformers of the day.

In recognizing however that not everyone is held to such a standard, because not everyone is Christian, it becomes clear that this Article is a practical way of ensuring that Christians can relate to them in a pluralistic society. While the Christian should follow Christ’s commandment for honesty, that does not prohibit them from swearing an oath, to God or simply directly to another person, in order that the other party might believe them. Similarly, even among Christians, the use of contracts as a legal vow between parties are not prohibited as they can ensure clear understanding on both parties and ought not to be implied to suggest a lack of trust by one party towards the other.

The final sentence of this Article instructs that Christians ought to follow lawful civil authority, “according to the Prophet’s teaching, in justice, judgement and truth.” This is a rather suitable prescription to conclude the Articles, saying simply that as far as our relationship to civil society goes, we ought to do our best to live in such a society in recognition that not all within it are Christian, but bearing witness to Christ in what we do, displaying justice, good judgement and God’s truth.