Notre Dame

My wife found a lovely and deeply personal essay (really, more of a letter) on the First Things weblog, written by a young woman who became pregnant during her senior year at Notre Dame, and how – despite the complete lack of compassion on the part of her boyfriend (the father of the child) – she was supported and encouraged by the Blessed Virgin Mary, her parents and a few caring friends.

God bless Lacy Dodd, her child, her parents and her supportive friends. May none of our own prolife talk be mere “dining room talk”.

As I think about the role of Mary in this, I am reminded of of what Dr George Weigel wrote in a biographical sketch for Pope John Paul the Second in the book Great Spirits 1000-2000: The Fifty-Two Christians Who Most Influenced Their Millennium (I don’t endorse the whole book, by the way):

Mary’s last recorded words, at the wedding feast of Cana, were, “Do whatever he tells you.” True devotion to Mary always points beyond Our Lady to her Son, the incarnate Word of God, a Trinity of self-giving love and receptivity. Thus Mary is the paradigm of all discipleship.

Do whatever Jesus tells you to do. The essence of discipleship and of Marian devotion.

For the President of the United States and all in Civil Authority

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peacable life in all godliness and dignity. 1 Timothy 2:1,2

And so the Apostle Paul exhorts us to pray for those in authority.

His politics are not mine, but like every other man who has occupied the office, President Barack Obama needs our prayers. (My own politics tend toward a sort of conservative communitarianism, and I am strongly opposed to big government progressivism and particularly to social liberalism – and, for that matter, to big government conservatism like we’ve seen for the past eight years.) And so I offer up this prayer to the throne of grace on this the inaugural day of President Obama’s administration.

O Lord our Governor, whose glory is in all the world: We commend this nation to thy merciful care, that, being guided by thy Providence, we may dwell secure in thy peace. Grant to the President of the United States, the Governors of these States and Commonwealths, and to all in authority, wisdom and strength to know and to do thy will. Fill them with the love of truth and righteousness, and make them ever mindful of their calling to serve this people in thy fear; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

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.

O Eve! Reconciled!

An image and a poem that make the heart ache and sing all at once.

Many thanks to the Anchoress for posting this wondrously fresh – and thoroughly orthodox – insight into the significance of the Incarnation. God bless the sisters of Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey.

Be sure to listen to composer Frank La Rocca’s setting of the poem for women’s voices (SSAA, a capella).

The Incarnation – a hope remembered in the ancient days of Middle Earth

The beauty of Tolkien’s writings, especially his Elvish poetry and the songs of the First and Second Ages (from the Silmarillion and other texts), and the richness of his tales and the worlds of his tales, sometimes makes one truly wish that these were from the ancient history of humankind.

There have been essays written, one senses only partly as fantasy, that posit that the Fourth Age, which began with the destruction of the One Ring and of the Dark Lord who forged it, ended with a catastrophe, viz., the Flood; that the Fifth Age ended with the birth of Our Lord; that the Sixth Age will end with the Parousia; and that the Seventh Age will have no end.

I am reminded by those conjectural and wishful accounts of the eons of humanity of a passage from the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, “The Debate of Finrod and Andreth”, a conversation between one of the wisest of the Noldorin Elves (Finrod, king of Nargothrond, known as Friend-of-Men) and a Wise-woman of Men (Andreth), in which they speak and argue about many things, including the place of humanity in the World. The bitterness demonstrated by Andreth throughout their argument must be understood in the context of the condition of humankind in the First Age of the world, when they were a race buffeted and endangered by the wicked designs of the rebellious Ainu Morgoth (the first Dark Lord, and master of Sauron, also known as “the Nameless”). The two, Noldor Lord and human Wise-woman, speak of human death, of what we might call “original sin”, and of the place of humanity in the world.

At one point, Finrod suggests the real purpose and calling of humanity (”Arda” refers to the created world):

‘This then, I propound, was the errand of Men, not the followers, but the heirs and fulfillers of all: to heal the Marring of Arda, already foreshadowed before their devising; and to do more, as agents of the magnificence of Eru: to enlarge the Music and surpass the Vision of the World!’

‘For that Arda Healed shall not be Arda Unmarred, but a third thing and a greater, and yet the same. I have conversed with the Valar who were present at the making of the Music ere the being of the World began. And now I wonder: Did they hear the end of the Music? Was there not something in or beyond the final chords of Eru which, being overwhelmed thereby, they did not perceive?’

Professor Tolkien did not publish this text; it was published twenty years after Tolkien’s death by Frank Williamson and Christopher Tolkien in the volume, Morgoth’s Ring (Houghton Mifflin, 1993). The following remarkable passage occurs in the middle of Finrod and Andreth’s conversation, and is an eminently suitable meditation during Christmastide.

‘Have ye then no hope?’ said Finrod.

‘What is hope?’ she said. ‘An expectation of good, which though uncertain has some foundation in what is known? Then we have none.’

‘That is one thing that Men call “hope”,’ said Finrod. ‘Amdir we call it, “looking up”. But there is another which is founded deeper. Estel we call it, that is “trust”. It is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience, but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruhin, the Children of the One, then He will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own, not by any Enemy, not even by ourselves. This is the last foundation of Estel, which we keep even when we contemplate the End: of all His designs the issue must be for His Children’s joy. Amdir you have not, you say. Does no Estel at all abide?’

‘Maybe, she said. ‘But no! Do you not perceive that it is part of our wound that Estel should falter and its foundations be shaken? Are we the Children of the One? Are we not cast off finally? Or were we ever so? Is not the Nameless the Lord of the World?’

‘Say it not even in question!’ said Finrod.

‘It cannot be unsaid,’ answered Andreth, ‘if you would understand the despair in which we walk. Or in which most Men walk. Among the Atani, as you call us, or the Seekers as we say: those who left the lands of despair and the Men of darkness and journeyed west in vain hope: it is believed that healing may yet be found, or that there is some way of escape. But is this indeed Estel? Is it not Amdir rather; but without reason: mere flight in a dream from what waking they know: that there is no escape from darkness and death?’

‘Mere flight in a dream you say,’ answered Finrod. ‘In dream many desires are revealed; and desire may be the last flicker of Estel. But you do not mean dream, Andreth. You confound dream and waking with hope and belief, to make the one more doubtful and the other more sure. Are they asleep when they speak of escape and healing?’

‘Asleep or awake, they say nothing clearly,’ answered Andreth. ‘How or when shall healing come? To what manner of being shall those who see that time be re-made? And what of us who before it go out into darkness unhealed? To such questions only those of the “Old Hope” (as they call themselves) have any guess of an answer.’

‘Those of the Old Hope?’ said Finrod. ‘Who are they?’

‘A few,’ she said; ‘but their number has grown since we came to this land, and they see that the Nameless can (as they think) be defied. Yet that is no good reason. To defy him does not undo his work of old. And if the valour of the Eldar fails here, then their despair will be deeper. For it was not on the might of Men, or of any of the peoples of Arda, that the old hope was grounded.’

‘What then was this hope, if you know?’ Finrod asked.

‘They say,’ answered Andreth: ‘they say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end….’

The nature of the Resurrection event

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. (1 Corinthians 15.17)

[T]he resurrection of Jesus is to be thought of as the recreating and restoring of man into the same sphere of real being as that to which we human creatures belong, and is, as such, an historical happening in continuity with the whole historical happening of Jesus, the incarnate Son. If the resurrection is not an event in history, a happening with the same order of physical existence to which we belong, then atonement and redemption are empty vanities, for they achieve nothing for historical men and women in the world. Unless the atonement through the resurrection breaks into, and is real in, our historical and physical existence and continues to be valid as saving power in our earthly and temporal being, it is ultimately a mockery. That is why all docetic conceptions of the risen Christ are quite irrelevant to men and women of flesh and blood, and have no message to offer them in their actual existence. It is for this reason that eschatology, with the heart taken out of it in the denial of a genuine resurrection, is meaningless, and without relevance to the on-going life of the world. Everything depends on the resurrection of the body, otherwise all we have is a Ghost for a Saviour.

Space, Time and Resurrection, Thomas F. Torrance, p. 87

More than a via media

‘More than a via media’ suggests that Anglicanism is more than a mere pragmatic compromise. Rather, it views Anglicanism as a Communion in which the Catholic tradition and the insights of the Reformation inform and enrich one another – in which the Catholic tradition heeds the Reformation protest, and the Reformation attends to the Catholic tradition.

That is how the weblog, “More than a via media: reflections & musings of a postliberal Anglican” describes Anglicanism.

The last few weeks the weblogger there, Brian Crowe, has posted several insightful entries on the Anglican Catechism in Outline as a means of catechesis and re-catechesis in the Church. Check him out.

Recalling Lesslie Newbigin in the face of the present controversy

I am reading (albeit through an influenza haze) Dr Geoffrey Wainwright’s biography of the late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, entitled Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life. My longtime readers, acquaintances and friends will know that Newbigin’s writings have exercised a great influence on my own amateur theological and philosophical thinking (and teaching as a lay catechist), bringing together a lot of seemingly disparate threads from my reading and thinking of the past thirty years.

Given his career as a pastor, missionary, bishop, ecumenist and religious interlocutor who gladly entered into honest conversation with adherents and teachers of other religions (particularly, in his work in South India, with Hindus) about those teachings and the Gospel (never compromising his belief in the uniqueness and universal Lordship of Jesus, succinctly stated, in his own words, as the subtitle of this weblog), it is not surprising that Newbigin became interested in the rise of Islam in Western countries. This is particularly so when one considers that, after his retirement from active episcopal ministry in the Church of South India, his ministry in a local parish church of the United Reformed Church in inner-city Birmingham involved him closely in the lives of his Muslim, as well as Sikh and Hindu, south Asian immigrant neighbors.

I think that Newbigin’s thoughts on this might be edifying and challenging in the midst of our present difficulties, symbolized in part by the eruption of feeling and commentary on recent remarks by Dr Rowan Williams on aspects of sharia law in Britain. His thoughts also bring to mind other controversies in recent years, viz., the Danish cartoons of Mohammed that caused an eruption of Muslim outcry and, in some places, led to violent responses against what was perceived to be a blasphemy.

Bear with me – the quotations are extended ones. I hope that Professor Wainwright and his publisher will forgive me their extensiveness.

Over his final years Newbigin manifested a new preoccupation with Islam, occasioned both by the growing presence of Muslims in Britain (“More Muslims than Methodists,” it is said, and perhaps more than practicing Anglicans) and by the increasing impact of Islamic nations in the political world…On the one hand, Newbigin respected Muslims greatly on account of their confessional stance, the frank recognition of their faith-commitment as the basis for action in public affairs and for their entire dealing with reality. On the other hand, he also believed Islam to be profoundly wrong in its divergence from the Christian story: “At many points,” he said in his Henry Martyn Lectures of 1986, “Christianity contradicts the strongest affirmations of Hinduism, or answers questions which Hinduism does not ask. And this is even more obviously the case if we consider Islam.” It is this twofold fact – the shared principle of fiduciary knowledge and the discrepant content of actual belief – which makes Christianity and Islam, in Newbigin’s eyes, such serious rivals.

The rivalry may be played out in various ways. In the ailing nonscientific part of Western culture (for “the scientific part of our culture continues to flourish because it does not accept pluralism, it does not assume ‘the parity of all scientific views’”), the relativism that seeks to evade the question of truth and error is a sign of impending death. Such relativistic pluralism, wrote Newbigin in 1990, “will simply crumble in the presence of a confident and vigorous claim to know the truth – such a claim as Islam is at present making with increasing vigor in the contemporary world.”

…

Meanwhile, to end this chapter on Newbigin as religious interlocutor, his late concentration on Islam may be illustrated by an incident, a speech, and a book.

The incident was the publication in 1989 of the novel The Satanic Verses by the Indo-British writer Salman Rushdie, the explosion of wrath in the Muslim community at its blasphemy, and the incomprehension of the Western intelligentsia, which could hear the outcry only as an attack on freedom to publish. Although Newbigin deplored the “order to kill” (fatwa) issues by Iranian ayatollahs, he could look on the absolutists for liberty of publication only with a mixture of astonishment and pity at their failure to understand “the explosives they are playing games with.” The freedom classically championed by Milton and his like demanded as its corollaries commitment to truth and the exercise of responsibility. “If Rushdie’s work is stating a truth which is more precious to him than life,” wrote Newbigin, “then he is right to stand by it and pay the price. But freedom without responsibility to the truth becomes mere nihilism.” To view the offense of blasphemy as no more than injury to the feelings of a few people who choose to adhere to the Christian or some other religion is part of the modern illusion that a society can exist without any publicly shared belief about the truth. “The explosion of Muslim wrath,” said Newbigin, “ought to be seen by Christians as a sharp word from the Lord about our failure to challenge the public life of our society with the Gospel” – and that, of course, “not because a nation with no shared belief about the truth will simply crumple [sic] under the assault of real conviction, but for His sake who died on the cross that all might have life.” And there Newbigin adverts to “the fundamental difference” between Christianity and Islam: “Muslims have shocked us because they regard blasphemy as a terrible crime. I believe they are right in their judgment but wrong in their response. For Muslims it is impossible that God himself should have accepted death on a charge of blasphemy; for Christians it is the centre of God’s saving work. That dictates a totally different kind of response, but it does not allow us to regard blasphemy as a matter of indifference.”

The speech that shows Newbigin at grips with the challenge of Islam was his address on “The Gospel in Today’s Global City” given at the relaunching of the old mission department of the Selly Oak Colleges as the School of Mission and World Christianity. [N.B. The address was delivered in May 1996.] In it he interpreted the rise of “religious fundamentalisms,” whether Islamic, Hindu, or Christian, as “a cry for life” among people finding that the secular worldview – an ambiguous and ambivalent product of Western Christendom that has degenerated into hegemonic secularism – is not finally sustainable. That, he said, was the context for “the beginnings of Muslim fundamentalism in this country”:

The majority of British Muslims are living in the most deprived areas of our large cities and experience at first hand the worst results of the secular ideology. For there does not seem to be any logical stopping place on the slope which leads a purely secular society into a pagan society. As Nietzsche so clearly saw, if there is no God anything goes. All attempts to base effective moral norms on an atheistic philosophy are bound to collapse. The result is the society with which we are becoming familiar, in which there are no landmarks, no fixed points of reference, no public belief about the purpose of human beings, only the need to gratify every immediate want. When some young Muslims uncompromisingly reject allegiance to this kind of society and insist that the rule of God over all human life be acknowledged, I am amazed at the complacency with which many Christians seem to accept a secular society as onein whcih they can be content to live. Where there is no God, life becomes finally meaningless and senseless. We may work ourselves up into a froth of indignation over the sticky mess of violence, drugs and gang warfare. But should we not realize how far down the slope we have gone when a British Prime Minister takes prime time on television to announce the latest jewel in the crown of our statecraft – a lottery? … We may disagree with our Muslim fellow citizens about the manner in which we understand God’s exercise of his rule over human life. However, we cannot, I believe, ignore the very sharp questions which Islam puts to our cosy co-habitation with the secular society: Do you believe that God is Lord over the public life of society, its economics, its politics, its culture? Or do you believe that his rule is limited to the Church and the home?

…

Although Newbigin always said that “dialogue is not enough,” it would be a pity if either Christians or Muslims forswore between them the kind of interreligious dialogue that Newbigin had earlier advocated on matters of common public concern.

That kind of relationship between Christians and Muslims is, in fact, envisaged by Newbigin in the book that much finally be mentioned. [N.B. Wainwright here refers to the book published after Newbigin's death as Faith and Power: Christianity and Islam in "Secular" Britain, co-authored with Lamin Sanneh and Jenny Taylor.] … Here only three points need be noted that Newbigin makes in connection with Christianity and Islam.

The first is this: “To the question ‘What kind of society?’ our Muslim fellow citizens have their answer. Through the network of mosques (now more than 2,000 in the UK) and through the teaching that is there provided for their young people, they seek to maintain the integrity of their society in a world which they (with much justice) perceive as pagan. The firmness of their stance contrasts with the relative timidity with which Christian leaders occasionally challenge the norms of British society…

Second (and one needs to know that “naturalistic” became Newbigin’s preferred word for “secularistic” or “scientistic”): “In our present situation in Britain, where Christians and Muslims share a common position as minority faiths in a society dominated by the naturalistic ideology, we share a common duty to challenge this ideology, to affirm that it can only lead our society into disintegration and disaster, and to bear witness to the reality of God from whom alone come those ‘norms’ that can govern human life, that ‘dharma’ which can give order to the chaos of human passions. Here Christians should be both encouraged and challenged by the much more vigorous testimony of Islam.

Third, Newbigin asserts, and will argue, that the Christian faith in Christ’s Cross both excludes coercioin and provides the basis for true freedom: “During their long histories, both Christendom and Islam have sought to establish the absolute hegemony of their faiths over whole societies. Christians have, for the most part, been so chastened and humiliated that they have learned the bitter lesson and should never again be tempted to go down this road. It is not clear that Islam has been through the same experience. What is becoming clear is that in the last analysis it is only the Gospel that can provide the basis for a society which is free, but in which freedom does not lead iinto disintegration and destruction. The reason for this lies in the unique character of the Gospel itself. It is in the fact that God’s decisive revelation of his wisdom and power was made in the crucifixion of the beloved Son, that in his resurrection from the dead we have the assurance that, in spite of all appearances, God does reign, that in the commission to the Church we have responsibility to bear witness throughout history to its end that God does reign, and that until the end God has provided a space and a time in which the reconciliation of our sinful race is possible, not by coercion by by freely given faith, love and obedience.”

From Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life, Geoffrey Wainwright (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 213-236.

The Decalogue as confession of sin

The Ten O’Clock Scholar recently published two posts on confession, including one in which the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes are phrased as examinations of conscience in preparation for confessing one’s sins.

For his 1534 Liturgy for the Church of Strassburg, Martin Bucer wrote a paraphrase of the Decalogue in the form of an extended prayer of confession to serve as the third form of the reformed Confiteor, the corporate confession of sin. The text is from Bard Thompson’s Liturgies of the Western Church, 1961. Some readers may find it helpful in their own examinations of conscience and confession of sin.

I poor sinner confess to thee, O Almighty, eternal, merciful God and Father, that I have sinned in manifold ways against thee and thy commandments.

I confess that I have not believed in thee, my one God and Father, but have put my faith and trust more in creatures than in thee, my God and Creator, because I have feared them more than thee. And for their benefit and pleasure, I have done and left undone many things in disobedience to thee and thy commandments.

I confess that I have taken thy holy Name in vain, that I have often sworn falsely and lightly by the same, that I have not always professed it nor kept it holy as I ought; but even more, I have slandered it often and grossly with all my life, words and deeds.

I confess that I have not kept thy Sabbath holy, that I have not heard thy holy Word with earnestness nor lived according to the same; moreover that I have not yielded myself fully to thy divine hand, nor rejoiced in thy work done in me and in others, but have often grumbled against it stoutly and have been impatient.

I confess that I have not honored my father and mother, that I have been disobedient to all whom I justly own obedience, such as father and mother, my superiors, and all who have tried to guide and teach me faithfully.

I confess that I have taken life: that I have offended my neighbor often and grossly by word and deed, caused him harm, grown angry over him, borne envy and hatred toward him, deprived him of his honor and the like.

I confess that I have been unchaste. I acknowledge all my sins of the flesh and all the excess and extravagance of my whole life in eating, drinking, clothing and other things; my intemperance in seeing, hearing, speaking, etc., and in all my life; yea, even fornication, adultery and such.

I confess that I have stolen. I acknowledge my greed. I admit that in the use of my worldly goods I have set myself against thee and thy holy laws. Greedily and against charity have I grasped them. And scarcely, if at all, have I given of them when the need of my neighbor required it.

I confess that I have born false witness, that I have been untrue and unfaithful toward my neighbor. I have lied to him, I have told lies about him, and I have failed to defend his honor and reputation as my own.

And finally I confess that I have coveted the possessions and spouses of others. I acknowledge in summary that my whole life is nothing else than sin and transgression of thy holy commandments and an inclination toward all evil.

Wherefore I beseech thee, O heavenly Father, that, thou wouldst graciously forgive me these and all my sins. Keep and preserve me henceforth that I may walk only in thy way and live according to thy will; and all of this through Jesus Christ, thy dear Son, our Saviour. Amen.