Christianity: a traditional Chinese religion

I originally posted this to the Confessing Reader weblog on May 13, 2005, after reading a biographical narrative of the remarkable journey of Rabban Sauma, a priest of the Church of the East and diplomat from the court of a Mongol khan, from China to western Europe in the 13th century. With the recent publication of Dr Philip Jenkins’ book, The Lost History of Christianity, an account of the “thousand-year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia and how it died”, it seems fitting to revisit some of this history here. I have added one small note based on information taken from Jenkins’ book, as well as an explanation of an Aramaic word occurring in a Nestorian hymn.

Some time back Laura, a close and very good friend told me that her son (my wife and I are two of his godparents) had come home from school expressing an interest in traditional Chinese religion after a volunteer had explained during class the celebration of the Chinese New Year. (He may simply have been fascinated by those animal year astrological charts that show up on paper placemats in many Chinese restaurants!) Laura expressed some concern at this, given that he seemed to be considering traditional Chinese religion (in some vague, nonspecific form) more interesting that the Christian faith into which he had been baptized and in which he was being formed.

My response to Laura was simply, “Tell him that Christianity is a traditional Chinese religion.”

Admittedly, in our sometimes myopic Western view of things, that seems quite a surprising thing to say. As it turns out, there is evidence of Nestorian Christian missionaries in China as early as the 7th century.

A little early Christian dogmatic history seems in order at this point.

Nestorianism, a heresy that holds that there are two separate persons (God and human) in the incarnate Jesus – note persons, not natures, as orthodox Chalcedonian Christianity holds, derives its name from Nestorius, an early 5th century patriarch of Constantinople who objected to the use of the title Theotokos (God-bearer) as applied to Mary, preferring Christotokos (Christ-bearer). Fearing monophysite tendencies (themselves denounced as heretical by the later Council of Chalcedon), Nestorius tended to use the word “conjunction” to describe the relationship between the God and human natures of Jesus, rather than “union”, but it is not clear – and opinion is widely divided over this – whether Nestorius actually held a heretical view of two “persons” in the incarnate Jesus. So-called Nestorianism was anathematized by the Council of Ephesus in 431, and Nestorius, quite a powerful and popular preacher in the imperial city, was sent packing to a monastery at Antioch after the emperor Theodosius acquiesced to the Council’s decision.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church states that

In the polemic surrounding the theological controversies of the later 5th and 6th cents., the term ‘Nestorian’ was applied by their opponents to all upholders of a strict Antiochene Christology; as a result the Church of the East has come to be popularly called ‘the Nestorian Church’ even though its teaching has never been Nestorianism as defined above.

The Church of the East, also known as the Assyrian Church of the East, or the “Nestorian Church” (I use Nestorian in parts of this essay, given its frequent and continued use to denote the Church of the East, not least by some Assyrian Christians themselves), developed from the Church in Mesopotamia, which lay outside the Roman Empire. Their bishops are not known to have taken part in the early ecumenical Councils, though the Council of Seleucia (410) formally accepted the Creed and Canons of the first Council of Nicaea, which affirmed the full deity of Jesus. The Council of Ephesus and the title Theotokos for Mary are rejected, while the Chalcedonian Definition (of two natures joined together in hypostatic union in the one person Jesus) is viewed ambivalently, apparently because of a different understanding of the meaning of hypostasis. Their christology is “strictly Antiochene”; that is, stressing Jesus’ humanity, but not denying his deity, though with a looser understanding of the union of his humanity with his deity than Alexandrian christology would hold.

Their theology is summarized in a hymn of praise, the Teshbokhta, composed by the most influential Assyrian Christian theologian, Mar Babai the Great (d. 628):

One is Christ the Son of God,
Worshiped by all in two natures;
In His Godhead begotten of the Father,
Without beginning before all time;
In His humanity born of Mary,
In the fullness of time, in a body united;
Neither His Godhead is of the nature of the mother,
Nor His humanity of the nature of the Father;
The natures are preserved in their Qnumas*,
In one person of one Sonship.
And as the Godhead is three substances in one nature,
Likewise the Sonship of the Son is in two natures, one person.
So the Holy Church has taught.

*An “unofficial website of the Nestorian Church” explains: “Qnuma, is an Aramaic word. The nearest equivalent is the Greek ‘hypostasis’, in Latin ’substantia’ and in English ’substance’.”

The missionary impulse of these Nestorian Christians of the East resulted in a fairly rapid expansion of the Church across Asia. By the late 5th century the Church had extended eastward from Mesopotamia, with bishoprics at Marv and Nishapur in Persia and at Harat in what is now Afghanistan. By the end of Sassanian rule in Persia (651), the Christians of the East constituted an important religious minority in the country. The Church had at least nineteen metropolitan (archiepiscopal) sees, stretching from Tripoli and Jerusalem in the west to Beijing in the East (including a metropolitan sees in the Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Tibet and China), with the Catholicos-Patriarch presiding from his patriarchal see at Seleucia-Ctesiphon (later removed to Baghdad) over the entire Church, and the Church flourished during the late Sassanian period (after intermittent persecution in the 4th and 5th centuries, including the martyrdoms of a number of high-born converts from Zoroastrianism) and after the Arab conquest (completed in 651) continued to flourish, with the establishment of monasteries, the writing of theological treatises, and the translation of much Greek philosophical and scientific literature into Arabic, which then made its way westward to Iberia and then in the 12th century into Western Europe to create a sort of Aristotelian renaissance in the West. The learning of the classical Hellenistic world, often said to have been preserved by the Arabs, was actually preserved before them and bequeathed to them by these Syriac Christians. (See De Lacy O’Leary’s How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs on this point in particular.)

And still they evangelized, by means of missionary monks and clergy as well as such laity as traders, who shared their Nestorian Christian faith along the eastern trade routes (not unlike the eastward expansion of Islam across southern Asia, an expansion driven by proselytizing Arab traders). From the 6th to the 9th centuries Nestorian missionaries evangelized and converted many of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia to the Christian faith, and early in the T’ang dynasty they reached China.

Assyrian Christians exist down to this day, having survived a mid-16th century division that resulted in the creation of a Uniate patriarchal line in communion with Rome, known as the Chaldean Church. The Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East has continued a separate ecclesial life in continuity with its earliest traditions, and a number of Western churches (predominately Anglicans and Presbyterians) sent missions to the Church of the East in the 19th century, typically to set up Syriac printing presses and the like. These Assyrian Christians have suffered greatly (along with the Chaldean Christians) as a result of the political developments of the 20th and early 21st century. The members of the Church of the East are scattered in many parts of the world, including the United States and the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran). In these latter days, the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Church have worked for closer relations as divided brethren, and in 1994 the Roman Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East issued a Common Christological Declaration, which recognizes an essential agreement on christology and further states that “the particular Catholic churches and the particular Assyrian churches can recognize each other as sister Churches”, while, because unanimity does not exist among them over “the content of the faith, the sacraments and the constitution of the Church”, there cannot be eucharistic fellowship yet.

The Assyrian Church of the East still uses an ancient Syriac eucharistic liturgy known as the Holy Qurbana of Addai and Mari (the traditional founders of the Church at Edessa, held to be among the Seventy of Luke 10), and Mar Nestorius (”Lord” Nestorius) is a saint of the Church of the East, revered as an “unbloody martyr, persecuted for the truth of the orthodox confession”.

(Another interesting note is that the Assyrian and Chaldean Christians preserve and use the Syriac language, directly descended – and little changed? – from the Aramaic spoken throughout the East in the first century. I remember reading a Christian jounalist’s expression of surprise when he heard a man on a Baghdad bus sharply say to a little girl [presumably his daughter] who was inattentively lazing on the seat when she should have been getting off the bus, “Talitha cumi“!)

The first-discovered evidence of an early Christianity in Central Asia and China came with the discovery in 1625 at Sian-Fu (now Xian), the ancient Chinese capital located in what is now northwest China, of a 7½ feet high stele, which came to be known as the Nestorian Stone, or the Xian (or Sian-Fu or Sigan-Fu) Stone. This stele, depicted in the photograph at the beginning of this article, was set up in 781 and bears an inscription written by a priest of the Assyrian Church, mainly in Chinese but also with some Syriac, containing an “allusive statement of Christian doctrine”, a description of the arrival in 635 from Ta-ch’in of a missionary named Olopun (or in Chinese characters, A-lo-pen, believed by some to be a version of the name “Abraham”), and the imperial privileges which he was granted, followed by an account of the Church down to the late 8th century reign of Tih-tsung, a hymnic ode, and information on several Nestorian leaders of the time (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church). The translated text of the stele’s inscription is posted online.

Regarding the arrival of Olopun (Alopen), the inscription reads,

In the time of the accomplished Emperor Tai-tsung, the illustrious and magnificent founder of the dynasty, among the enlightened and holy men who arrived was the most-virtuous Olopun, from the country of Syria. Observing the azure clouds, he bore the true sacred books; beholding the direction of the winds, he braved difficulties and dangers. In the year of our Lord 635 he arrived at Chang-an; the Emperor sent his Prime Minister, Duke Fang Hiuen-ling; who, carrying the official staff to the west border, conducted his guest into the interior; the sacred books were translated in the imperial library, the sovereign investigated the subject in his private apartments; when becoming deeply impressed with the rectitude and truth of the religion, he gave special orders for its dissemination.

Bishop Alopen (as Assyrian Christians denote him) is believed to have been an early Nestorian missionary to the peoples of Central Asia, entering this area after the reestablishment of the Silk Road trade route that ran between China and the Middle East. The Xian stele relates that he became a “Guardian of the Empire” and “Lord of the Great Law”. Alopen later became the metropolitan of the Church in the region.

Alopen arrived in Xian, the ancient imperial capital of China, in 635. For a little perspective, recall that Augustine of Canterbury arrived in Kent in 597, and Columba of Iona, missionary among the Picts and Gael in what is now western and central Scotland, died in 597. Willibrord began his mission to Frisia (the northern Netherlands) in 690. Anskar, the apostle of the Danes and the Swedes, began his mission in Denmark c. 826.

In 2001, the Rev’d Mr Ken Joseph, Jr, an Assyrian Christian pastor living in Japan, and founder and director of the Keikyo Institute, wrote on the discovery of a 7th century Nestorian Christian site near Xian. The church which stood at the site is gone, but a tower that archaeologists have dated to the 7th century still stands at the site. In his article, Joseph writes

The Nestorian Monument, a stone tablet in the city of Sian which was discovered in the 1600s was the only testimony to Christianity in China. What was always a puzzle was that it clearly stated that `monasteries abound in a hundred cities`. This monument which is often called the `Rosetta Stone` of Christianity in Asia was the only proof of this past.

The discovery of the Christian site has dramatically changed all this. The Church is in the center of the Imperial area of the Tang Dynasty and its location is what is particularly bringing amazement to experts on the Silk Road. With the Church in the center of the imperial area it confirms for the first time the stories that have long been passed down and appear frequently in Chinese narratives which tell of a major Church in China in the Tang Dynasty from 618-877.

With the passing of the T’ang dynasty the Nestorian Church underwent a period of persecution and weakening, but under the Yüan (Mongol) dynasty the Church experienced revitalization, spread through many parts of China, and thrived. At least six bishoprics of the Church are known to have existed in China, with five of these (Xian, Kashgar & Nuakith, Khan Balik & Falik [Beijing], Khatai, and Tangut) having metropolitical (archiepiscopal) status. (The fact that five of these six known bishoprics were metropolitanates suggests that there were far more than six dioceses of the Church in China.) By the late 11th or early 12th centuries, the Syriac Christians were evangelizing the Mongols, eventually converting some of the Mongol nobility, particularly women of prominence. It is known that the Mongol capital at Khara Khorum had at least one Nestorian church. After the Mongol conquest of China, with the removal of the imperial capital to Tai-tu (Beijing) by Khubilai Khan, a Nestorian metropolitanate was established there, and the Great Khan established the chief consistory of the Syriac Church in China, the Ch’ung-fu-tze.

In the late 13th century, during the reign of Khubilai Khan, a Nestorian monk named ben Sauma (Rabban Sauma) embarked with his pupil Markos from the imperial city of Tai-tu on a pilgrimage to visit the holy sites in Jerusalem. In this endeavor they had the support of both the Nestorian community and Khubilai Khan. Travelling the Silk Road route through central Asia, receiving the hospitality of vital Nestorian Christian communities along the way, the two reached Persia, spending several years there at the court of Arghun Khan, son of Hülegü Khan, the founder of the Ilkhanate of Persia and brother to the Great Khan Khubilai. Hülegü Khan, who was neither Christian nor Muslim, had waged war against the Islamic Caliphate in Baghdad for some years and his son Arghun continued his father’s policy of aggression against the Egyptian Mamluks, then the power occupying the Holy Land. Anxious to secure European help in his plans to drive the Mamluks from the Levant, Arghun Khan sent Rabban Sauma as his emissary to the Pope of Rome. In his book, Voyager from Xanadu: Rabban Sauma and the First Journey from China to the West, Morris Rossabi writes,

On June 23, 1287, the citizens of Naples were startled by the arrival of a ship carrying an Asian cleric who had traveled all the way from Tai-tu, the fabulous capital of the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan, now the city of Peking. He was not the first voyager from the Mongol world to enter Europe, but all his predecessors had come from the Middle East; he was the first ever to arrive from as far away as China. Indeed, he is known as “the first identified Chinese to reach Europe.”

Rabban Sauma left an account of his life and travels that has survived in truncated form, “offering an explanation of his journeys’ objectives and descriptions of his encounters and observations along the way” (Rossabi). The Persian original of the account has been lost, but the Syriac redaction, by a fellow Nestorian Christian cleric, has left enough details of Rabban Sauma’s life and journey to offer a fascinating glimpse of the 13th century in China and central Asia, the Middle East and Europe, as well as the man himself. The text of Rabban Sauma’s account of his travels is posted online.

While his journey did not result in a common offensive against the Mamluks nor an alliance between the Pope and the Persian Ilkhan (he arrived two and a half months after the death of Honorius IV, before a new Bishop of Rome had been elected), Rabban Sauma’s arrival from Constantinople (where he met with and conversed with the emperor Andronicus II) and his sojourn in Europe, during which he visited Rome, Paris, and Bordeaux, meeting with cardinals, princes and kings, offers a remarkable glimpse of medieval European Christians in contact with a Christian from the East (remember, European Christians still nursed legends of an Eastern Christian kingdom established by Prester John). The ambassador of both the Ilkhan and the Assyrian Patriarch-Catholicos did in fact receive pledges of support for his mission from the kings of France and of England.

One meeting, which I find quite remarkable in its singularity, is worth noting here: Rabban Sauma arrived in Bordeaux in mid October, 1287, having come from Paris. While in Bordeaux he met with the English king Edward I, once again pressing upon him, as he had pressed upon the cardinals in Rome and Philip IV in Paris, the need for a joint crusade against the Mamluks. Edward invited Rabban Sauma to celebrate Mass at court, and Sauma celebrated the Holy Eucharist according to the Assyrian rite (almost certainly the Holy Qurbana of Addai and Mari), and the English king, along with several other court officials, received communion from the hands of this Chinese Christian priest and ambassador of the Mongol Ilkhan of Persia.

Rabban Sauma returned to Persia, where his pupil Markos, also a Chinese Nestorian, had been made Patriarch-Catholicos as Mar Yaballaha. Rabban Sauma tired in his senescence of the constant migrations of the Ilkhan’s court (nomadic Mongol habits being hard to break, I suppose) and the Ilkhan Geikhatu, brother of Arghun Khan, granted Rabban Sauma’s request to have a church built in Maragha, near the Catholicos’ residence, to house the numerous holy relics that Sauma had acquired during his travels. Rabban Sauma died in mid October, 1294, and was interred adjacent to the tombs of several of the great Assyrian Patriarch-Catholicoi. But then there arose a pharaoh who knew not Joseph. After the death of Arghun Khan, who favored Christians and Jews at his court and who had his eight-year-old son baptized in 1289 by Mar Yaballaha, Muslim opposition to the prominence of Christians and Jews arose. Ghazan Khan, another son of Arghun and successor to Geikhatu Khan, converted to Islam and made the Ilkhanate of Persia a Muslim country.

After the death of Khubilai Khan, and with the rise to prominence of Buddhism at the imperial Chinese court, the prominence and influence of the Syriac Church in China waned, though they still prospered through the Mongol period of imperial rule. The friar Oderic reported on his visit c. 1324 that he found three Nestorian churches in the city of Yang-chou, but the churches soon afterwards fell into decay. By the early 17th century and the arrival of the Jesuit mission under Fr Matteo Ricci, Nestorians were all but extinct in China.

Perhaps the best postscript to this brief history of early Chinese Christianity is to note the remarkable growth of Christian faith in present-day China, noting especially the dogged survival of the Catholic Church in China with a growing rejection by many of the faithful and the clergy of state control of the Church, and the exuberant growth of the house church movement in China. It is asserted by some demographers that a majority of Chinese will be Christians by the second half of this century.

Bishop Alopen and Rabban Sauma would be pleased.

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord;
even so saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors,
and their works follow them.

I highly recommend Jenkin’s book, The Lost History of Christianity, for a much more complete history of this remarkable Church that went from a Church that claimed perhaps a quarter to a third of the world’s Christians a little over a millenium ago to a mere shadow of itself in succeeding centuries, its remaining people and clergy oppressed or dispersed. Keep the remnant of the Church of the East, many of them beleaguered in Iraq and elsewhere, in your prayers.

The persistent oversimplification of boundary crossing and the ancient Church

[N.B.: The rejection of diocesan boundary crossing by bishops from other provincial Churches of the Anglican Communion, as has gone on for several years now in the United States, Canada and Brazil, continues to be an important (essential?) commitment on the part of some conservatives who remain within The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, as in the latest offering from the principal theologians of the Anglican Communion Institute. I don't comment on this piece, "Patient Endurance - On Living Faithfully in a Time of Troubles", for reason of not yet having read it closely enough to offer either cogent criticism or praise. However, I am persistently bothered by the appeal to this rejection, one of the injunctions of the 2004 Windsor Report, because it represents an oversimplication of life in the early Church during the time of the Arian controversy (which, remember, was not settled by the Council of Nicaea but continued to rage at least until the Council of Constantinople, near the end of the fourth century). My objection to the Windsor injunction, and its continued endorsement by some conservatives, is grounded mostly in a protest against this oversimplication of history and against an appeal to the canons of the Council of Nicaea that is theologically incoherent in the current context for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that the bishops gathered at Nicaea understood themselves, and those bishops in communion with them, to be The Church, while Anglicans do not so understand themselves. Episcopalians and Anglicans who appeal to the canons of Nicaea against diocesan boundary crossings skate on very thin ice indeed, when many Anglican dioceses have been set up where there previously had been bishops in historic succession, whether Catholic or Orthodox or Old Catholic (not to mention Oriental Orthodox or Assyrian Christian), in some cases for many centuries before Anglican incursions into these established apostolic sees. Examples of these incursions in North America alone include all Episcopal and Anglican dioceses in Quebec, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas and the rest of the Southwest, California, Alaska, and Mexico. And yet Nicaea is not invoked against them. The only right basis for an appeal against diocesan boundary crossings by bishops in other provincial Churches of the Anglican Communion is an appeal to "the bonds of affection" - and the strain put on them by the actions of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada renders such an appeal difficult in the extreme.

The following is the original form of William Tighe’s essay “Abusing the Fathers: the Windsor Report’s Misleading Appeal to Nicea”, published in edited form in Touchstone, and republished here in its entirety, after publication in March 2005 on the original Confessing Reader weblog with Dr Tighe’s kind permission. While I am myself among those conservative “evangelical (and catholic, in my case)” Christians who appreciate Dr Wright’s scholarship, I believe that Dr Tighe does us a service in providing this critical analysis of the appeal to the canons of the Council of Nicea with reference to the current crisis in Anglicanism. Dr Tighe's critique is no less apposite now than it was nearly four years ago.]

N. T. (”Tom”) Wright, Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, has for some years deservedly enjoyed a reputation of a first-rate Scripture scholar who has been able to counteract and debunk “revisionist” — read, if you will “heretical” or “anti-Christian” — views of the life, death and resurrection of the Lord and the authority of the Bible, such as those emanating from the “Jesus Seminar” or from the retired Episcopalian Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, John Shelby Spong. He appeals particularly to those “conservative evangelical” Christians who wish to uphold a generally “high” view of the authority and inspiration of the Scriptures, as regards doctrine and morals, but who wish to leave room for some “developments” that more conservative and tradition-minded Christians find suspect, such as the ordination of women, of which Bishop Wright is a strong supporter.

A year ago, the uproar after the election and subsequent consecration of the notorious Vicki Gene Robinson — the Episcopal priest who divorced his wife and subsequently openly entered a homosexual relationship which continues to this day — as Bishop of New Hampshire, the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed a committee of Anglicans (five archbishops, five bishops, two female clergymen and five lay church officials) to look into the matter — it was a development which clearly contradicted the 1998 Lambeth Conference’s resolution declaring such relationships to be incompatible with the Christian faith — and to make recommendations as to how the Anglican Communion could deal with it in such a way as to maintain the highest possible degree of communion. The Chairman of this “Lambeth Commission” was Robert Eames, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of the Church of Ireland, a man who, as chairman of a similar committee in the late 1980s about the issue of women bishops, helped to devise a way in which the Anglican Communion could avoid — as it has so far — a split over that divisive issue. Possibly the hope was that he would be able to work the same magic on this new, and even more divisive issue. When the Lambeth Commission produced its “Windsor Report” on October 18, 2004, the results fell well below the expectations of those who expected, or hoped, that it might recommend the expulsion, or at least the suspension, of the Episcopal Church (and the Anglican Church of Canada, whose diocese of New Westminster began officially to bless homosexual “partnerships” in May of that year) from the Anglican Communion, or at least some measure of firm discipline.

The report came to three conclusions: it called for a “moratorium” on the elevation to the episcopacy of all non-celibate homosexuals, a similar moratorium on the authorization of rites for the public blessing of same-sex “partnerships” and an end to the intervention of traditionalist Anglican bishops (usually from Africa or Asia) who have intervened in the dioceses of other Anglican bishops to support traditional Anglicans who have been under attack for their orthodox stance on this issue, or on that of the ordination of women: these bishops, as well as those responsible for fostering and promoting the blessing of such homosexual unions or involved in the consecration of Bishop Robinson, were called upon to express regret for their actions, which were deemed to be incompatible with the tangible and intangible bonds which held the Anglican Communion together. But no “enforcement clauses” appeared in the report, although there was the suggestion that those bishops who refused to express regret for their actions might abstain from participation in any function or forum in which the Anglican Communion as a whole was represented, and just the hint that if the first two condemned practices were to continue and the requisite “regrets” were not forthcoming, something further might have to be done about it.

Bishop Wright was a member of the Lambeth Commission, and in various places since the issuance of the report has defended its actions (and lack of firmer actions). He has, in particular, defended the Windsor Report’s implicit censure of the intervention of orthodox Anglican bishops in the dioceses of “revisionist” ones. In a report which he had published in the 23 October 2004 issue of the liberalish English Roman Catholic weekly journal The Tablet he justified this censure — which the African Anglican primates, who met in the last days of October, criticized strongly for “the moral equivalence drawn between those who have initiated the crisis and those of us in the Global South who have responded to cries for help from beleaguered friends” — on the basis that such interventions were “in contravention not only of Anglican custom but on the Nicene decrees on the subject.” As Bishop Wright’s grasp of the Church Fathers’ theory and practice seems a bit weak in these areas, it may be useful to pursue the subject a bit further. First, however, I have to note a regrettable feature of the Windsor Report — its lack of documented notes and references to back up its claims and assertions. This compares badly with such documents as those produced by the various ecumenical dialogues in which the Catholic Church has been involved, such as the “Joint Declaration on Justification” of 1999, in which the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation claimed to have reached a consensus on that issue, one of the most critical matters separating Catholics and Protestants (especially Lutherans) in the Sixteenth Century. That is a document for which one or more Biblical or (in some cases) Patristic references are provided for every assertion of a doctrinal nature which it contains. The Windsor Report, for example, simply cites “the ancient norm of the Church” for the unity of all Christians in one place, without any references, for its rationale against the intervention of outside bishops, and although there is an allusion to a canon of the Council of Nicaea tucked away in another section of the Report, it is far from obvious, as I shall show later, that it has any bearing on the current crisis in the Anglican Communion.

The Council of Nicaea, which met from May to August of 325 AD and is most famous for its formulation of the original version of the Nicene Creed — the version in universal use today is a modification approved by, if not created at, the Council of Constantinople in 381 — also produced twenty canons, or “rules,” to settle problems, or fix abuses, in the Church. Several of them concern the relations of bishops with one another, or of clergy with their bishops. None of them seem to have any real applicability to the situation of the Anglican Communion, or the Episcopal church, today — and it is clear that these canons as such have no legal force in any contemporary Anglican church — but when I read them over I thought that if any one of them underlies Bishop Wright’s oblique reference it must be Canon 16, which runs as follows:

Priests and deacons or, in general, any member of the clergy, who have the audacity, not considering the fear of God and not knowing the Church’s rule, to abandon their churches, must not under any circumstances be received in another church but by all means must be forced to return to their proper communities, and if they refuse, they are to be properly excommunicated. In addition, if anyone dares to take someone who is under the authority of another bishop and to ordain him in his own church without the consent of the bishop in whose clergy he was enrolled, let the ordination be regarded as null.

This canon obviously deals with “clergy flight” and “clergy poaching:” it assumes a community of orthodox belief between the churches and bishops concerned, and says nothing at all about interventions in churches whose bishops have, in the view of other bishops hitherto in communion with one another, abandoned orthodoxy of belief and practice and have begun to oppress those of their flock who continue to uphold it, even if that “oppression” consists only in contradicting that orthodoxy and furthering those who teach and act against it. But while I was puzzling this over I received information form the Canon Theologian of the ECUSA Diocese of South Carolina, the Rev’d Dr. Kendall Harmon, that it was Canon 8 of Nicaea that had been cited in the Windsor Report. So I went back to the Windsor Report. There was nothing to help me in the Endnotes or in Section D of the report, the section which contains its conclusions. Finally, and after much searching, I found an allusion, rather than a reference, in Section A of the report, in a subsection entitled “Illness: The Surface Symptoms.” Paragraph 29 of that section describes — and while describing deplores “as now part of the problem we face” — the breaking of communion with ECUSA by other Anglican provinces and dioceses, attempts by dissenting parishes and groups to “distance themselves” from the dioceses, bishops and provinces within which they are “geographically located” and the interventions of Anglican archbishops from elsewhere in dioceses of ECUSA and the Anglican church of Canada. About this last “problem” it comments: “This goes not only against traditional and oft-repeated Anglican practice” — and here there is an allusion to the 1988 and 1998 Lambeth Conferences — “but also against some of the longest-standing regulations of the early undivided church (Canon 8 of Nicaea).”

So what does Canon 8 of Nicaea say? It is, unfortunately, one of the longer of that council’s canons, and runs as follows:

Concerning those who have called themselves ‘the pure ones,’ if ever they want to come into the catholic and apostolic church corporately, it seems right and proper to the holy and great council that they (i.e., their clergy), after having received the imposition of hands, should then remain in the clergy. But first it is important that they promise in writing to accept and to follow the rulings of the Catholic Church, that is, that they will have communion with those who have been married a second time and with those who renounced the faith during persecution for whom a period (i.e., of penance) has been established and a date (i.e., of reconciliation) set. It is, therefore, necessary that they follow in full the rulings of the Catholic and Apostolic Church. Consequently, when in the cities and villages there are only clergy ordained by these ‘pure ones,’ let them keep their status as clergy; on the other hand, where there is a bishop or a priest of the Catholic Church, if certain of these ‘pure ones’ want to be admitted to the clergy, it is evident that the bishop of the Church should keep the dignity of bishop. As for the person who carries the name of bishop among the so-called ‘pure ones,” he is to have the rank of priest unless the bishop consents to let him have the honor of his title. But if he is not so disposed, let the bishop give him a place as a chorepiscopus (i.e., a bishop or perhaps a priest who exercised some supervision over Christian communities in the rural areas, while being himself subordinate to the bishop of a nearby city) or as a priest so that he can appear as being integrated into the clergy. Without this provision, there would be two bishops in the city.

“The pure ones” was the name given — perhaps self-given — to a schismatic group known as the Novatianists. They originated in the aftermath of the great persecution — the first empire-wide persecution — launched against the Church by the Roman Emperor Decius in 249-251. Before that persecution, a Christian who apostatized, or renounced Christianity, under pressure and then wished to return to the Church could only be readmitted to the Eucharist when on his deathbed. In the aftermath of the persecution, which saw apostasies on a large-scale, the Bishop of Rome, Cornelius, decided to relax this practice by allowing apostates to be readmitted after some years of public penitence (which involved, among other things, standing in a particular place during the Church’s liturgy and leaving before communion). Most bishops elsewhere adopted this practice as well, but in Rome Pope Cornelius was opposed by the priest Novatian, whose followers elected him as bishop in opposition to Cornelius, and in the ensuing years the schism spread throughout the Roman Empire. The Novatianists were moral rigorists, best known for their absolute prohibition of second marriages to their adherents and their refusal to readmit the “lapsed” — those who had renounced the faith — to communion. In every other respect, though, their beliefs were thoroughly orthodox. A Novantianist bishop turned up at the Council of Nicaea, where he was as vehement in his opposition to the views of the heretic Arius (whose views the council had been called to consider, and which it condemned) as any of the other bishops there, and it was only when he went on to insist on the exclusion of the lapsed from communion that his Novanianist allegiance came to light, and he was ejected from the council. Of all the various heretical or schismatic Christian sects — “heretical” or “schismatic” in the judgement of the “Catholic and Apostolic Church” whose bishops assembled at Nicaea — the Novatianists were the ones who were viewed with the most indulgence, as this canon indicates. It was common at the time to regard as “heretical” all Christian sects who pertinaciously and as a matter of principle separated themselves form the “Catholic and Apostolic Church,” while the term “schismatic” was applied to those separations, local in nature, and without any doctrinal basis, which resulted from such causes as disputed episcopal elections, and so while on a strict view the Novatianists would have been viewed as heretics separated from the “Catholic and Apostolic Church,” in practice the Council of Nicaea (as Canon 8 shows) was willing to treat groups of them who wished to rejoin the Church as though they were simply schismatics. But, in fact, few Novatianists took advantage of this offer: their church, or “denomination,” continued to exist (as a rigorous and “pure” alternative to the established Catholic and Orthodox Church) in parts of the Eastern Roman Empire for some three or four centuries afterwards.

It is hard to see that this canon has anything to do with the troubles of contemporary Anglicanism that evoked the Windsor Report. It does uphold the “principle” of the unity of the local church, but the situation that it addresses is that of the reunion of a schismatic group with the Church, not the question of the appropriate reaction of bishops to the defection of one of their brethren from their common orthodoxy. However, such situations did arise in the Fourth Century, in the long aftermath of the Council of Nicaea and later still.

The main purpose of the Council of Nicaea was to judge the views of the Alexandrian priest and theologian Arius, who held that Jesus Christ, the Savior, the “first-born of all creation” was a creature — a divine being created by God before the angels, the cosmos and mankind, but a creature nevertheless. Nicaea condemned Arius’ views, and its creed the full co-divinity and co-eternity of “the everlasting Son of the Father” (the question of the nature and status of the Holy Ghost arose subsequently, and was not settled until the Council of Constantinople in 381). However, since the controversy continued unabated after Nicaea, and since the Emperor Constantine’s purpose in calling it together was at least as much to promote ecclesiastical harmony as to define dogmatic truth, the fact it failed signally to produce ecclesiastical harmony induced the emperor within a few short years to attempt to promote various attempts at theological compromise that would have the effect of reconciling Arius and his followers with those who upheld the decisions of the council. (The fact that many of the most influential bishops around the emperor were sympathetic to some degree with Arius’ theological outlook gave added impetus to these efforts at compromise.) Among the most vigorous and uncompromising upholders of Nicaea and its creed was the young archbishop of Alexandria, Athanasius (ca. 296-373), who as a priest has accompanied his predecessor as archbishop, Alexander, to Nicaea, and had succeeded him as bishop three years later. Athanasius’ vigorous opposition to any compromise on the matter earned him the hostility of the bishops who had most influence with the emperor, who himself in the last decade of his life (he died in 337) increasingly regarded Athanasius as a disturber of the peace, and finally exiled him to what is today the German Rhineland; and after Constantine’s death, as his Arianizing son Constantius became master, first of the East and then (in 350) of the whole Roman Empire, Athanasius experienced repeated recalls and renewed exiles, as imperial policy shifted from conciliation to coercion of the adherents of Nicaea. As time went on, the whole church, especially in the Greek-speaking eastern regions of the empire, became divided over the question, with bishop opposing bishop. Athanasius, in particular, was willing, as the conflict intensified, to intervene unilaterally in dioceses whose bishops were Arians or compromisers, but he was not alone.

The Fourth-Century ecclesiastical historian Socrates (ca. 380-440) records that Athanasius, after his vindication by the Council of Sardica in 343, and the ending of his exile (he would experience more exiles over the next quarter century), undertook to ordain men in dioceses whose bishops were tainted with Arianism to serve the orthodox upholders of Nicaea, and that without seeking or obtaining the permission of those bishops. We do not know for sure whether Athanasius, then or later, ordained bishops for these orthodox communities faced with hostile heterodox bishops, or only priests and deacons. We do know that another contemporary “Nicene” bishop, Eusebius of Samosata, travelled around much of the eastern portions of the Roman Empire disguised as a soldier, and where he found Arian or Arianizing bishops he ordained deacons, priests and even bishops to care for the orthodox and oppose the “official” bishops and their supporters. Details of the activities of Athanasius, Eusebius and any other like-minded contemporary bishops, such as Lucifer of Cagliari, who wandered throughout the Mediterranean world in support of those who upheld Nicaea, or Epiphanius of Salamis (in Cyprus), a native of Palestine who conducted ordinations in Palestine in defiance of compromising bishops, are few, but in the Fifth Century, after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, both proponents and opponents of the council among the bishops in the eastern parts of the empire were willing to intervene, or intrude, regularly in dioceses whose bishops were on the “other side,” especially when the imperial authorities supported first once side, then another, or attempted to broker compromise settlements, during a period of 85 years after that council. All of this allows us to say that any attempt to construct a theory of the inviolability of diocesan boundaries — a theory which would serve to underpin the statements of more than one or two ECUSA bishops in recent years (such as Peter Lee of Virginia or Neil Alexander of Atlanta) that “heresy is preferable to schism” and that the faithful should feel obliged to put up with an unending stream of doctrinal absurdities and moral enormities — cannot find any support in the theory and practice of the Early Church.

In the light of this history, Bishop Wright’s invocation of “Nicene decrees” and the Windsor Report’s allusion to “the ancient norm” and “some of the longest-standing regulations” begins to look distinctly thin, and when on a closer look it seems all to boil down to Canon 8 of Nicaea, it vanishes altogether, and all that is left is “Anglican custom” (Wright) or “traditional and oft-repeated Anglican practice.” But then one has to ask whether, if this is all that remains, it amounts to anything at all. Those who have followed the actual practices of Anglican churches, in the United States, Canada and Australia especially, over the past three decades, will see how readily proponents of one innovation after another have been willing to norms, decrees, regulations, canons, customs — you name it — in order to gain their ends: the illegal and uncanonical “ordinations” of priestesses in ECUSA in 1974 and 1975 and in Australia in 1991, and the subsequent cave-in of both Anglican churches on that issue; the casting of a blind eye towards clergy and ordinands in irregular marital or sexual situations; and, just recently in ECUSA, the production (as “resources”) of syncretistic rites introducing elements of “goddess worship” or outright paganism as acceptable, if unofficial, options. Speaking personally, for me the clearest and most instructive (as well as the saddest) lesson of this episode is how sincere and pious Christians, like Bishop Wright, who endorse one patently unbiblical innovation (or “development”), such as the ordination of women, but wish to oppose another (partnered homosexual bishops and clergy, and the blessing of such “partnerships” by their church), both deprive themselves of any compellingly persuasive basis for rallying a forceful “Athanasian” opposition to retake their churches from the heterodox innovators who dominate it and (in consequence) render their own situations hopeless, as able neither to fight nor to flee.

Dr William Tighe is Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College, specializing in the history of the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Plus ça change….

To such a degree of temerity has this our senseless age advanced, that there is scarcely anything in Christianity itself which is not either called into doubt in private, or made matter of controversy in public. So much so, that even those doctrines and rites, which many ages back, and from the very beginning of the Church, have everywhere been received, at last in these our days come into hazard and are assailed, just as if we were the first Christians, and all our ancestors had assumed and borne the mere name of Christ, and nothing more…Forsooth in these full late times, it seems new lights are boasted of, new and greater gifts of the Holy Spirit are pretended; and therefore new forms in the use of all ecclesiastical administrations are daily framed and commonly adopted…Hence these tears, hence so many horrible schisms in the Church.

Bishop William Beveridge (1637-1708), Preface to his Codex Canonum Ecclesiae vindicatus ac illustratus (1678), quoted in Judith Pinnington, Anglicans and Orthodox: Unity and Subversion 1559-1725.

The History of Missiology webpages

Anneke Stasson, a PhD student at Boston University studying the history of Christian missions, has directed me to a website project in whose development she is assisting her adviser.

They are posting brief biographies, with bibliographies and links to online texts, of seminal figures in the history of Christian missions and missiology. Take a look at their History of Missiology page.

William West Skiles, Deacon, Monastic and Missionary, 1862

A snippet of history from the 19th century Diocese of North Carolina. I was unable to post this earlier in December, owing to having no access to my old Classical Anglican Net weblog.

Born October 12, 1807 in Perquimons County, North Carolina, William West Skiles distinguished himself in his early adult life for his honesty, industry and strong sense of duty. At the age of thirty-seven he joined the small community of theological students and their rector at the missionary station established the previous year at the behest of the Rt Revd Levi Silliman Ives, Bishop of North Carolina, in the remote valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina known as Valle Crucis, so named by Bishop Ives because of the St Andrew’s cross-like junction of three streams in the valley, whose joined waters flowed downstream into the Watauga River. Skiles’ sound practical judgment, good character, and skill and experience as an overseer of lumber mills soon placed him in a supervisory role of the day to day workings of the mission station at Valle Crucis. Over the years he served as head farmer, storekeeper, postmaster and general treasurer, and years later he directed the construction of a new chapel for the community. Because of his age and experience, he was consulted on practical points by the younger men and theological students of the mission station, one of whom in later years described Skiles to a biographer as “our Nestor”.

Shortly after his arrival at Valle Crucis he expressed a desire to serve the Lord more fully by being ordained to the sacred ministry, and for the next two years he divided his time between his work on the mission station and his studies. On August 1, 1847, Skiles was ordained by Bishop Ives to the diaconate under a canon of 1844, which allowed for the ordination of men to the diaconate without having received a classical (rather than a “plain English”) education. Retaining stewardship of the temporal affairs of the mission station at Valle Crucis, Skiles also entered upon his duties as a deacon, occasionally reading the daily office in the chapel and carrying out mission work at the outlying stations in the Watauga Valley, reading prayers, catechizing and occasionally preaching. He undertook some medical training through reading books and receiving instruction from one of the students at the station who himself had previous medical training. With the departure of this fellow missionary after his ordination, Skiles was frequently called upon to provide medical care to the people of the surrounding valley and mountains.

In 1847 the work of the missionary station became more focused. The store and the boys’ school were closed, leaving the theological school and the missions work  at Valle Crucis and at the outlying missions stations. At his visitation to Valle Crucis that year, Bishop Ives established the Order of the Holy Cross, the first Anglican monastic order since the Reformation. The Revd Mr Glennie French, head of the missionary work at Valle Crucis, was appointed Superior, and many of the divinity students there, along with Skiles, assumed the obligations of the Order. Despite trials and privations, the missionary work at Valle Crucis proceeded with encouraging results, a number of baptisms and confirmations being recorded every year. The Revd Mr William Prout, for a long time the only priest in the area, reported,

“”Much improvement has been effected in the religious condition of the people in this section within the year. The Church is felt to be permanently fixed here, and is consequently exerting a steady influence on the population. The hopes of the members, and friends of this Mission, are beginning to be realized, and we are cheered, while we wish only to work in quietness, and faith. We derive new confidence of final success in our work by widening continually the entire adaptation of the arrangements of the Church, to the wants, and capacities of a plain, uneducated people.”

Over the next few years concern arose in the Diocese of North Carolina regarding Bishop Ives, whether he had embraced “Romish” doctrines regarding the invocation of saints, transubstantiation, auricular confession and absolution. In 1851, after investigation by a committee of inquiry requested by the bishop and appointed by diocesan convention, Bishop Ives reassured his diocese in a signed statement that he had renounced belief in any doctrine not consistent with the teachings of the Protestant Episcopal Church, doctrines (like the invocation of saints and auricular confession) into whose adoption he stated to have been “insensibly led”. With regard to the Order of the Holy Cross, he declared that “No such order is now in existence.”

(In September, 1852, Bishop Ives requested a six-months’ leave of absence and an advance on his salary to enable him to travel with his wife “for the benefit of [his] impaired health”. Bishop Ives sailed for Europe with his wife in October, and on December 22 he addressed a letter to the diocesan convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in North Carolina, resigning his office of bishop and declaring his intention to make his submission to the Bishop of Rome.)

In Watauga County, the attendance at the mission stations continued to be encouraging, though Skiles was left alone at Valle Crucis. He continued to devote himself to the welfare of his scattered flock, despite many difficulties, including the sale of the heavily-encumbered property of the mission to the grandson of a clergyman, who worked the former mission ground as a farm, and who was kind to the Skiles, allowing the deacon the use of the former office and library as his home, feeding the deacon from his own table, and providing for a horse and several cows. Henry, Skiles’ horse, was his faithful companion on errands of duty and charity, day and night, over many rugged paths. The cows Skiles reserved for the benefit of poor families, loaning them out to those who need the milk and, so as not to tax the supplies of the families, sending along meal with the cows as feed. Skiles continued faithfully in his missionary and pastoral duties, reading divine service, preaching, catechizing, and preparing candidates for baptism and confirmation. He kept both day schools and Sunday schools for the benefit of the children of the region and served many households in Watauga County not only as pastor, but also as physician and occasionally as nurse. He also served a largely illiterate populace as scrivener and legal adviser, and few days passed when he was not brought a family letter, a business letter or a legal paper to read. His opinion in farming and stock matters was sought often. He frequently acted as an arbitrator in disputes between neighbors, his opinion being generally accepted as wise and just, and it was always a pleasure to him when he could act as a peacemaker.

The Rt Revd Dr Thomas Atkinson, Bishop of North Carolina after the resignation of Bishop Ives, took special interest in Skiles and his work. The bishop generally invited the deacon to accompany him on a circuit of visitations, sometimes going as far afield as Asheville. Over the course of a year, Skiles held services in as many as sixteen places, many of them widely distant from one another, such that he would have had to travel more than 1000 miles during the year. On any call for pastoral care, Skiles would saddle Henry and ride over the mountains, sometimes as far as twenty miles, often in stormy weather, to pray with a sick person or to nurse them in illness.

By 1858, the Sunday attendance at the Lower Watauga station had become too great for any single room in the settlement, and plans were made for the construction of a house for the church on a high bank above the Watauga River, some six miles from Valle Crucis and about one mile from Skiles’ home at the house of a parishioner, one Mr Evans. Skiles drew up plans for a simple, church-like building with the help of prepared architectural plans and the advice of more experienced friends. The people of the Lower Watauga gave what they were able (most families in the region were poor), and many of the men donated lumber and labor for the church’s construction, but the gathering of funds and materials was no easy task. Skiles himself gave more than one-third of the $700 cost of the church. As soon as the church was fairly enclosed in the summer of 1860, services were held there. On August 22, 1862, Dr Atkinson consecrated the Church of St John the Baptist. Skiles never saw the church again after the consecratory liturgy.

Accompanied by Dr Atkinson, Skiles left the Lower Watauga to take up residence at the home of Colonel Palmer, who was leaving home to take up command of a regiment in the Confederate Army and wished that his wife and nieces should have “a respectable man” in the house to look to in case of a danger of violence from roving marauders. After a prolonged and painful illness, during which he was nursed by Mrs Palmer, Skiles died on December 8, 1862. Wintry weather made it impossible to send to a nearby town for a coffin, and he was buried in a rough box of boards constructed on the spot by a neighbor. Mrs Palmer herself dressed Skiles in his surplice, unwilling that any hireling should do him this last service. He was buried in the garden near the house.

On December 16, a friend, the Revd Mr Wetmore, had Skiles’ body disinterred, and the remains were removed to the Church of St John the Baptist, where a service was held on December 18, some forty people in attendance, and his body was reinterred in the churchyard there.

In 1882, the Church of St John the Baptist was removed in pieces and reconstructed on a spot higher up the Watauga, for the convenience of the parish. Skiles’ remains were translated to the new churchyard and were decently and reverently committed to their final resting place.

In his episcopal address to the diocesan convention of 1863, Dr Atkinson said,

“[The Revd Mr Skiles] was one whom all loved and honoured for his humility, his self-denial, his diligence, his affectionate temper towards his fellow-men, his unwearied zeal in the service of his Master. He was permitted to live until he saw the Church [of St John the Baptist] consecrated, and some of the living fruits of his self-denying labours gathered in. From that day he never saw it again…He was a true Missionary, humble, patient, laborious, and affectionate, not despising the day of small things, and still less despising any human soul, however rude, sin-stained, and ignorant that soul might be. Long will the dwellers in the valleys and forests of that wild mountain region miss their faithful Pastor, who was at the same time their Physician, their counseller, and their familiar friend.”

Prepared from William West Skiles: A Sketch of Missionary Life at Valle Crucis in Western North Carolina, 1842-1862, edited by Susan Fenimore Cooper (1890), published online by Project Canterbury

Collect

O God, whose blessed Son became poor that we through his poverty might be rich: Deliver us from an inordinate love of this world, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant William West Skiles, may serve you with singleness of heart, and attain to the riches of the age to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The Rt Revd Joseph Blount Cheshire came to Valle Crucis in 1895 to reestablish the Episcopal ministry, directing the construction of several buildings still in use. Shortly thereafter, the Rt Revd Junius Horner, the new Bishop of the Missionary District of Asheville, begun a renaissance of Valle Crucis, and the present Church of the Holy Cross was built in 1925. The Church of St John the Baptist, a splendid example of the 19th century “Carpenter Gothic” style, stands three miles distant from Holy Cross and is still used by the parish for special services.

Why the Revd Deacon Skiles has never been added to the calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, I cannot say. It is an omission that needs redress. I propose commemorating Skiles on August 1, the date of his ordination to the diaconate, or on December 18, the date of his translation to the churchyard of the Church of St John the Baptist, since December 8 is kept by some Anglicans as the feast day of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah, Bishop in South India and Evangelist, 1945

The first Indian bishop of the Anglican Church in India, Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah was born in 1874 in a small village in one of the most economically deprived areas of South India (now in the state of Andrha Pradesh), the son of Thomas Vedanayagam, an Anglican priest, and Ellen, a woman with a deep love and understanding of the holy Scriptures. Samuel became a YMCA evangelist at nineteen and secretary of the organization throughout South India only a few years later. He saw that, for the Church in India to grow and to bring ordinary Indians to Jesus Christ, it had to have indigenous leadership. He helped create the Tinnevelly-based Indian Missionary Society in 1903, and was a co-founder of the National Missionary Society of India, an all-India, Indian-led agency founded in December 1905. At the age of thirty-five he was ordained to the presbyterate, and three years later (December, 1912) he was consecrated as the first bishop of the new Diocese of Dornakal, with eleven bishops of the Anglican Church in India participating in the liturgy at St Paul’s Cathedral in Calcutta. Bishop Azariah was the first Indian to be consecrated a bishop in the Churches of the Anglican Communion.

As bishop, his work moved from primary evangelism to forwarding his desire for more Indian clergy and the need to raise their educational standards. By 1924, the ordained leadership of the Diocese of Dornakal included eight English-born priests and fifty-three Indian clergy. Bishop Azariah was also an avid ecumenist and one of the first to see the importance, indeed the necessity, of a united Church to mission and evangelism (a passion that would be taken up by others in India, like the missionary Lesslie Newbigin). Azariah died on January 1, 1945, two years before the inauguration of the united Church of South India.

In The History of Nandyal Diocese in Andhra Pradesh, Constance Millington writes,

Azariah had two great priorities in his work: evangelism and the desire for Christian unity.

He understood evangelism to be the acid test of Christianity. When asked what he would preach about in a village that had never heard of Christ, Azariah answered without hesitation: ‘The resurrection.’ From a convert he demanded full acceptance of Christianity which would include baptism and which could therefore include separation from family and caste. He claimed that Christianity took its origin in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the outburst of supernatural power that this society manifested in the world.

Azariah recognised that because four-fifths of Indian people live in villages, for the Church to be an indigenous one it must be a rural Church. He was constantly in the villages, inspiring and guiding the teachers, clergy and congregations. He blamed the missionaries for not training people in evangelism, and thought their teaching had been mission centred instead of Church centred, and he pleaded with missionaries to build up the Indian Church. Much of the Christian outreach in his area was among the outcast people. Gradually as Christianity spread amongst the villages, the social situation began to change, the Christian outcasts gaining a new self-respect as they realised their worth in the eyes of God.

Azariah considered that one of the factors that hampered evangelism, and possibly the deepening of the spiritual life of the convert, was the western appearance of the Church in both its buildings and its services. As early as 1912 he has visions of a cathedral for the diocese to be built in the eastern style, where all Christians could feel spiritually at hom regardless of their religious background and race. Building was delayed because of the Great War in Europe, but finally his dream was realised when the cathedral of The Most Glorious Epiphany was consecrated on January 6, 1936. The building is a beautiful structure embodying ideas from Christian, Hindu and Moslem architecture. Its dignity and spaciousness create a very different effect from that of the nineteenth and twentieth century Gothic churches and furnishings scattered elsewhere in India. (N.B. For a description of the Cathedral Church of the Epiphany in Dornakal, see here. Also scroll up to the preceding page at this site for a description of Bishop Azariah’s indigenization of the liturgy.)

If evangelisation of India was Azariah’s first priority, the second was that of Church unity. He was the two as inter-related. He believed that a united Church was in accordance with the will of God, ‘that we may all be one’, and he also believed that a United Church would be more effective for evangelism. Addressing the Lambeth Conference in 1930 he pleaded:

“In India we wonder if you have sufficiently contemplated the grievous sin of perpetuating your divisions and denominational bitterness in these your daughter churches. We want you to take us seriously when we say that the problem of union is one of life and death. Do not, we plead with you, do no give us your aid to keep us separate, but lead us to union so that you and we may go forward together and fulfil the prayer, ‘That we may all be one.’”

Prepared from material in Celebrating the Saints (compiled by Robert Atwell), A History of the Church of England in India (The Right Revd Eyre Chatterton), and others.

The Collect

O God, our heavenly Father, who raised up your faithful servant Samuel Azariah to be a bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Bishop Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah is commemorated in the sanctoral calendar of the Church of England on January 2.

Calculating Christmas

With Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the latest ecclesiastic publicly to espouse the “Christmas is in December because of the pagan winter solstice celebrations”, it is perhaps salutary to revisit the likelier (that is to say, with some evidence other than mere conjecture based on coincidence) reason for the dating of the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in Dr William Tighe’s essay, “Calculating Christmas“.

Dr Tighe responds to misconceptions about Donatism

Yesterday the professorial weblogger of the Rather Not Blog weblog posted an entry entitled, “The Last Refuge“, concerning the Bishop of Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas’ misunderstanding of what Donatism was and is (this is a perennial misunderstanding among many reappraisers and “centrists” in western Anglican circles, particularly in The Episcopal Church).  Dr Kendall Harmon took note of IRNS’ unpacking of the Bishop’s category confusion by linking to the post at Titusonenine, leading to the usual spate of comments.

Dr William Tighe, professor of history at Muhlenberg College with particular expertise in early Church history (and the history of the English Reformation), wrote a reply to certain comments that continue to demonstrate a misunderstanding of precisely what Donatism was (and that tar some modern conservative Anglicans with that particular schismatic or heretical brush on the basis of misunderstanding).  Unfortunately, Dr Tighe has recently been banned from commenting at the Stand Firm weblog, a ban that seems to have extended at least temporarily (because of shared software?) to Titusonenine.  I have taken the liberty of posting Dr Tighe’s comment here, which he writes is particularly in response to comments #2, 10, and 23 to the Titusonenine entry.

This is a distorted account of the Donatist origins.  There was a major dispute over electing a Bishop of Carthage (the Primate of North Africa) after the death of Bishop Mensurius in 310, one of the candidates, Majorinus, espousing the position that became known as the “Donatist” one (which was so termed after the name of this man’s successor as bishop, Donatus, bishop 315-355), but which was a view that had a great deal of support, almost certainly majority support, among North African Christians (although Bishop Mensurius held to the opposed view, that espoused by the Roman Church and dominant elsewhere), while the other faction elected Mensurius’ archdeacon, Cecilian (bishop 311-345).  Rome, it appears, recognized Cecilian from the beginning, on the basis that his views were orthodox (by Roman standards) and Majorinus’ were not.  In 314 the Emperor Constantine assembled a synod of bishops in Arles to rule on the  election: he wanted them to decide which candidate had been duly elected, but they supported Cecilian on the grounds that he was the “Catholic” bishop, whereas Majorinus was not, ignoring the question of canonical correctness in favor of the more important one of doctrinal orthodoxy.  Constantine intervened several more times, using a combination of threats (against the Donatists) and blandishments (offers to rehear the case), which served only to harden the division and encourage the Donatists in their resistance, until, after his move to the East in 320, he appears to have lost interest in the matter.

The Donatists were clearly the numerical majority in North Africa  down to the 390s, when the combined effects of their own divisions, government repression and a number of theological debates which the Catholics (among whom St. Augustine figured prominently) appear to have won diminished their numbers considerably.  Some historians suggest that some of the Donatists were won over to the Arianism of the Vandals who ruled North Africa from 440 to 535, but while North African Arianism disappeared with the Byzantine conquest of the Vandal Kingdom in the 530s, Donatism appears to have continued, more of a nuisance to the Catholics than a threat, into the late Sixth/early Seventh century.  It appears, however, that the Byzantines never attempted to recover those interior regions of North Africa that had been under Roman rule prior to the Vandal conquest, and which the Vandals had abandoned to the native Berber tribes; and so (except in the area roughly corresponding to contemporary Tunisia) what the Byzantines ruled down to the final Moslem Arab conquest in 697 (when they took and destroyed Carthage; the isolated Byzantine garrison at Septem, contemporary Ceuta, across the Straits of Gibraltar from Spain, held out for a few more years before surrendering) were isolated coastal enclaves which the Arabs were able to pick off one by one.

Seen in this light, the “history lesson” has different implications for contemprary Anglican quarrels than those which Dale Rye appears to favor.  It is ECUSA that is in the “strategic position” of the Donatists, and the “reasserters” that are in the position of the Catholics.  But it stretches credulity beyond the breaking point to cast Anglican Canterbury of the 21st Century in the position of Rome of the 4th.  In the first place, Canterbury can hardly claim to have been as faithful to its own tradition of faith and practice, its paradosis, as Rome was to its (I need not give examples, lest they get me banned here, as they did recently elsewhere).  [N.B.  Dr Tighe's commenting privileges at Confessing Reader are not in jeopardy!]  Secondly, the authority of Canterbury in the Anglican Communion is purely a conventional one, arising only since the 1860s, whereas the basis on which Rome claimed to be the ultimate “touchstone” of ecclesiastical communion (whether rightly or wrongly is beyond the scope of this response), as much in the 4th Century as in the 21st, and was accepted as such, at least in the West, rested on a different basis — and one that, perhaps, gave it a confidence in its exercise that it would be hard to ascribe to Canterbury.  But, finally, there is no evidence that Canterbury is either able or willing to exercise any authority (whether real or simply asserted on the basis of the intrinsic authority of a Catholic Bishop and Primate  — as opposed to a Lutheran or Methodist “CEO bishop”) in these critical times and matters.  If Canterbury is unwilling to “name it and claim it” as regards a kind of semi- or pseudo- “primatial authority,” then obviously the result will be the second verb of the phrase “use it or lose it.”