Bishops in Temporal Power

Samuel Coleridge, On the constitution of the church and state, according to the idea of each; with aids toward a right judgment on the late Catholic Bill, 104:

It would be strange indeed if ignorance and superstition, the dense and rank fogs that most strangle and suffocate the light of the spirit in man, should constitute a spirituality in the power which takes advantage of them!

This is a gross abuse of the term, spiritual. The following, sanctioned as it is by custom and statute, yet (speaking exclusively as a philologist and without questioning its legality) I venture to point out as a misuse of the term. Our great Church dignitaries sit in the Upper House of the Convocation, as Prelates of the National Church: and as Prelates, may exercise ecclesiastical power. In the House of Lords they sit as barons, and by virtue of the baronies which, much against the will of these haughty prelates, our kings forced upon them: and as such, they exercise a Parliamentary power. As bishops of the Church of Christ only can they possess, or exercise (and God forbid! I should doubt, that as such, many of them do faithfully exercise) a spiritual power, which neither king can give, nor King and Parliament take away. As Christian bishops, they are spiritual pastors, by power of the spirit ruling the flocks committed to their charge; but they are temporal peers and prelates.

The spiritual power here is the power of God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, acting by his word to build up the Church of Christ. Coleridge says rightly that, not only in Parliament but also in Convocation, the bishops exercise not a spiritual power but a temporal. They can, to be sure, be guided even then by the wisdom of the Holy Ghost, as we hope all Christians are in all their doings, but their legislative acts in Convocation are not, strictly speaking, spiritual.

Reclaiming the Chapel

© Roy and Dolores Kelley Photographs

The Wren Chapel at the College of William and Mary is a beautiful English-style chapel, with a pipe organ from Norfolk, England. Anyone who has seen even one such chapel will recognize the Wren Chapel’s purpose in its architecture. Yet the most obvious symbol, the Cross, has been removed from the holy Table, to be brought in only when the chapel is being used for a specifically Christian service. ‘In order to make the Wren Chapel less of a faith-specific space, and to make it more welcoming to students, faculty, staff and visitors of all faiths,’ explains the administration, ‘the cross has been removed from the altar area.’

© Jerry Gammon.

At such a heathen place as William and Mary is today, this is unsurprising. But what is there to be done? As the Rev. John Parker suggests,

By God’s grace, the only way fruit will be born at the college is by repentance. The Cross will be seen as the sign of Christ’s redemptive, self-sacrificial, and atoning embrace, the ‘weapon of peace’ as it is called in the Orthodox tradition, only when self-professing Christians fully devote themselves to chastity, humility, patience, and love; when our chief foci are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

There is, in fact, a very easy way for the cross to be returned to the chapel: Schedule the traditional hours of the Church in Wren Chapel daily. The method will also return the Cross to the lives of those related to the College, offering a two-fold metanoia.

Let groups of local students, faculty, staff, and alumni organize themselves into congregations of prayer. Offer the ancient daily services along with the biblical hours of prayer: the evening service (vespers), the service after supper (compline), midnight, the morning service (matins), and 6:00 a.m., 9:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., and 3:00 p.m. (the first, third, sixth, and ninth hours). This holy action would bring the cross out of the sacristy for a few hours every day and would change both the hearts and the minds of all who take part in such ministrations.

I hope Protestants will take the lead in reading Morning and Evening Prayer daily during term time; Terce (3rd), Sext (6th) and None (9th), as well as Compline, might be added from Cosin once the others were well-established.

Speaking of festivals, I think also of some that come later in the year, not just Easter and Pentecost.

The Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節) really should have its own Collect, Epistle and Gospel in Chinese churches. It corresponds, for the Chinese, to the Feast of Tabernacles ordered in the Law of Moses, and is therefore a most fitting time to give godly thanks for ‘the kindly fruits of the earth’.

Reform of the Memorial Acclamation

Cardinal Ratzinger on liturgy in the last few decades: ‘In the place of liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over the centuries and replaced it – as in a manufacturing process – with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.’

In many churches, including the church I attend on Sunday evenings, the Prayer of Consecration includes this acclamation: ‘Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again.’ These are important truths, of course. I fail to see, however, the point of inserting them into the Prayer of Consecration in this particular form. If the point is to confess these truths directly, the congregation has already done so in the Creed, and a repetition of the same truths with the same purpose is redundant at best.

Whatever its historical pedigree, if any, the current use of this acclamation, it seems to me, is but another unconsidered measure of the Liturgical Movement, with no respect for the integrity of the historic formularies. In both Roman and historically Protestant churches, the acclamation has widely been used for decades, yet without much to commend it. Rather than adding to the celebration of Holy Communion, the acclamation has but detracted from its focus, despite affirming three incontrovertibly orthodox propositions. This is because it seems only marginally related to the purposes of the Prayer of Consecration, or else threatens to wriggle out of its subordination thereto.

The Lord, however, is the God of order, not of disorder. The acclamation, if at all to be retained, must more closely suit its place in the liturgy: ‘Thy death, our Lord, we commemorate, thy resurrection we confess, and thy second coming we await. Thy mercy be upon us all.’ Though much less extraverted, indeed much less sloganeering, this wording is much better suited to the devotional purposes that an acclamation might serve.

Easter Festivities

Joel wrote two years ago about reforming the Easter celebration. Below I add my suggested quasi-schedule.

Easter Vigil, Mattins, Holy Communion with candles, bells and the whole shebang.

Families break their fast at home by breaking and eating eggs whose shells have been dyed red.

Everyone sleeps in after a long night.

Roast lamb and wine, and more red eggs. Riddles are made about the work of God, and solved to make this work manifest.

Solemn Evensong in the late afternoon, with a solemn Te Deum at the end. Processions after church, with the singing of psalms and the shot of cannons – and, for the Chinese, lion dances. Bonfires of Judas Iscariot in effigy, and of sinful things (fetishes, pornography, immodest clothing, &c.), as psalms are heartily sung.

Lanterns and fireworks in the evening.

Sola Scriptura

‘At the Reformation the Church of England became protestant in order to become more truly and perfectly Catholic.’ These words of William van Mildert, Bishop of Durham 1826–36, are a true judgement of the English Reformation, and indeed of the entire Protestant Reformation. How well each of the classical Protestant churches succeeded is another question, but this was the end for them all: to become ‘more truly and perfectly Catholic’. This end, of being reformed to greater catholicity, contrasts with both the Anabaptist churches and the Roman. The Anabaptists would have no part with the historic Catholic church at all, since they wished to create the Church anew; the Romanists, for their part, thought their church perfectly catholic already, needing more zeal and better regulations but not a reformation of doctrine and political structure.

The Protestants held up, as the supreme standard of judgement, holy Scripture, the word of God, the most catholic thing of all. That this supreme standard might not in practice be subordinated or at least bound to the mind and will of a sinner, even the Bishop of Rome, they rejected the authority of any to give an infallible interpretation. Any interpretations of holy Scripture would need to be defensible according to the natural laws of hermeneutics, and therefore nothing could be imposed by human fiat as needing to be believed. All necessary dogmata, then, could be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture; all other doctrine was, depending how well it comported with what was certain in the Scriptures, either defensible private opinion or vain superstition. Sola Scriptura, then, was the formal principle of the Protestant Reformation, expressed by the judicious Richard Hooker with nuance in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (5.8.2):

Be it in matter of the one kind [doctrine] or of the other [comeliness, order and decency], what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgments whatsoever.

For the holy Scriptures cannot err, yet neither is truth in conflict with truth, nor grace in conflict with nature. Instead, once Scripture is acknowledged to be God’s special revelation, erring no more about the will of God than the decrees themselves that wrote the universe into being, and no more about nature than the laws of nature themselves, then what is most to be believed is what Scripture plainly delivers. In answer to Satan’s first deception, we believe and obey first the plain teaching of Scripture, saying, ‘Yea, God hath said.’ In the second place is whatever any man’s ability concludes as a logical necessity of the things that Scripture has plainly declared. Third is the voice of the Church by her ecclesiastical authority, saying what she, under Scripture and natural law, thinks true and good. As the Rev. Dr Christopher Brown says, ‘Since we are not the first to strive to understand the Word of God, but stand within a theological tradition, we inevitably draw upon the reflections of those who have gone before us.’

It is upon this understanding of sola Scriptura that councils and synods of the Church, though fallible, have authority; that, subordinate to these, a preacher’s sermons have authority; that, under these, a pastor’s grave advice has authority. For this is the truly catholic doctrine of authority, where the Roman doctrine is not catholic, and where the Anabaptist doctrines are not catholic; here, on the matter of authority, the Protestant Reformation has reaffirmed the supremacy of of the catholic Scriptures without neglecting the subordinate authorities that mediate the truth of these Scriptures.

In Heaven but Truly Present

Aquinas, on the question whether an angel may truly be be said to be in any place:

I answer that, It is befitting an angel to be in a place; yet an angel and a body are said to be in a place in quite a different sense. A body is said to be in a place in such a way that it is applied to such place according to the contact of dimensive quantity; but there is no such quantity in the angels, for theirs is a virtual one. Consequently an angel is said to be in a corporeal place by application of the angelic power in any manner whatever to any place.

Accordingly there is no need for saying that an angel can be deemed commensurate with a place, or that he occupies a space in the continuous; for this is proper to a located body which is endowed with dimensive quantity. In similar fashion it is not necessary on this account for the angel to be contained by a place; because an incorporeal substance virtually contains the thing with which it comes into contact, and is not contained by it: for the soul is in the body as containing it, not as contained by it. In the same way an angel is said to be in a place which is corporeal, not as the thing contained, but as somehow containing it.

Therefore, though Christ’s human body is in heaven and so cannot be locally present on earth, his whole person, both human and divine, can by virtue of his divine omnipresence be truly present in a place, wherever through the Holy Spirit he is at work. And he is sacramentally at work here both to sanctify the physical elements for his spiritual uses and to give faith to those who hear the word. This is his presence with respect to his holy Supper, that he being both God and man worketh in our hearts to give us himself.