千里之行始于足下 (‘a thousand-mile journey begins beneath one’s feet’), in the words of Laozi. Or as the Proverbs say, Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. The way we live is trained by patterns earlier established. Thinking about integrating Morning and Evening Prayer into a parish’s life, I wondered how any normal parishioners living in the modern world would make it to Morning Prayer especially. All Anglican clerics are obliged to say the Daily Office anyway, so questions concern mainly the how, not so much the whether.

How, indeed, could you establish a pattern for people to go to church early in the morning every day? Many people, after all, don’t consider themselves morning people, though like my dad they may shlep themselves whithersoever they need to go. Parents, moreover, have family duties of every kind, so often a disposition toward public prayer will come to nothing in a secularized society where no one’s expected to attend any services at all.

Becoming part of family life

If family be a hindrance, then maybe family is the key as well. Working parents with schoolchildren know the experience of droping off the kids at school before work and picking them up at the end of the day. If drop-offs happened in the same place as Morning Prayer before work, things could be a lot easier. If parents could go to worship with their children in the morning and not have to take them some place else before work, they could have more time to grow together with their families and have a time to be still before God and peacefully to entrust themselves and their children to his mercy.

These are advantages of parochial schools. It surprises no one for a Christian school to have morning chapel, and if that was how the public day began for parents as well as students, I should hardly think anyone would be worse off. There’s something eminently worthwhile in giving parents and children the daily opportunity to confess their sins together, to hear God’s pardon together, to render thanks to him together, to set forth his praise together, to hear his holy Word together, and to petition him together. The schoolchildren, of course, would also learn the ways of the Bible and the prayerbook. There’s a liminal quality to such a daily ritual, similar to the way in which pubs and cafés bridge public work life and home life: sent forth to the work of the day, the parents, teachers and students all apply themselves to their godly vocations.

Building up the people

A simple, sober service edifies the people. The weekday services need not be weighed down with morning sermons, but the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intents of the heart. This low-pressure service has evangelistic potential, too, especially for unbelieving parents of some of the schoolchildren, who though not actively joining in have space to sit and think; the schoolchildren themselves, of course, can be quite welcoming even to their peers whose parents have already dropped them off.

Eventually, the community notices this morning service, and a few who are curious may even sit in the back and hear the holy Scriptures for the first time. Some may flip through the prayerbook and even return for Evensong. As these services become known, things change, because God’s word suffuses community life. I recognize that this isn’t within the current means of many parishes, but I do think it can happen. Is this a good idea? How could it be improved?

Others, thinking this assessment an overreaction, have raised the point that the State of the Union address in an election year is a political speech designed for reëlection. I shall pass over the fact that the State of the Union address, made by the President as head of state, should aim primarily to edify all, not to score points for one faction. The address may in fact be aimed toward reëlection, but even granting that this is acceptable, I cannot but view the President’s speech with a measure of distaste, especially if he claims liberal ideals.

We should always hope for progress that benefits all, even if we believe strongly that the way we propose is the wisest way. A political speech for reëlection should have nothing to do with envy and everything to do with incitement to virtuous labour. We are America, gifted with industriousness and freedom of invention, and have sometimes been the stupor mundi. Perhaps this is long gone. Perhaps this no longer appeals to Americans. Perhaps we’re no longer inspired to outdo the rest in ennobling the world. But if we will be so mean-spirited as to desire victory at all costs – if this be the moral squalour to which we have sunk – we deserve to sink like a rock.

‘Don’t let other countries win the race for the future,’ our President says. There is both truth and avarice here. Blue-collar folks see foreign manufacturing as threatening; indeed, some of my own family members think outsourcing rather unpatriotic. I, too, have my grievances against corporations that (by nature, it seems) pursue their own gain without attachment to human bonds, the same thing I hold against the great Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. I even believe our country’s failure to invest more heavily in magnetic confinement fusion energy will cost us if the bulk of resulting jobs goes to Korea and Japan.

None of this, however, constitutes a good excuse for xenophobia. If the world moves inhumanly fast, the point is to take care of grandma, not to profit from a neighbour’s misfortune, nor to curse him with hope of gain, nor to wager against him. In the end we all lose by encouraging vice instead of virtue.

The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another, but rather it is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ’s death: insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith, receive the same, the Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ; and likewise the Cup of Blessing is a partaking of the Blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.

The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is Faith.

The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.

The heavenly and spiritual is actually related, I’m sure, to Two Kingdoms theology. The bread and wine, as not only consecrated but also received, are in effect the Body and Blood of Christ when faithfully received by the believer. That this happens is, as everyone affirms, the work of the Holy Ghost. In the Reformed tradition, the Holy Ghost communicates the Body and Blood to the believer, but he indwells the external elements administered by the minister no more than he indwells holy Scripture.

Reception of the sacred Body, then, isn’t according to any human acts but according to the spiritual reception, by faith, of the divine act. To claim this is mediated by the clergy rather than brought about directly by the holy Ghost in the heart of the Christian is a clericalism that the Reformed, even when they retain the ancient institution of bishops for good temporal governance, will not accept in a matter of salvation. We affirm that by the authority of God’s word a minister ordained to priestly representation may administer the gracious promise and covenant of God, yet he cannot ex opere operato efficaciously bring in the saving presence of Christ – that is, his Body and Blood, a reality in heaven – even to someone who takes the sacrament’s earthly sign without belief.

If we leave off for now the much-controverted communicatio idiomatum (‘communication of properties’ between the two natures of Christ), the difference in the presence of Christ in Scripture and in the Lord’s Supper is his word of promise. The key to the sacrament, then, is the covenantal word and not the ubiquity of Christ.* Since it’s by the Lord’s word that we can enjoy his human presence, it’s this word that a minister has authority to pronounce visibly on earth, while invisibly in heaven the believing Christian feeds on the Lord’s flesh and blood.

This is, as I see it, the connexion between the Reformed (and therefore the Anglican) doctrine of the Eucharist and the Two Kingdoms theology of the Reformation.

Notes

* Indeed, if Christ were everywhere according to his humanity, then the only point of his Ascension to heaven would have been to dramatize his being in heaven as our High Priest. Unless this is so, the Reformed view holds: that according to his human nature Jesus Christ remains bodily in heaven as our High Priest, even while in his divine nature he’s everywhere.

It is passing strange, that it is by pain that I am at once attracted and repulsed by the world: by others’ pain attracted, by my own repulsed. I betray my feelings, and they betray me. Trahison, trahison. Dost thou mock me with remembrance of my misery? I wish to remember no more, as God remembers no more the sins that he has forgiven. Why must I have feelings, or why can I not leave with them? They do no good. I grant that they were created for good, as are all things essential to the nature of things; but though made for pleasure, for happiness, in an evil age they are an evil, bringing endless suffering: if life is nasty, brutish and short, let us not have such troubles to molest us. Sweet is sweet, but bitter is bitter indeed. All erdly joy returnis in pane.

When I have served my purpose, I do not mind departing; but when I have served my purpose, I do not mind departing. I find it perennially hard to see my value apart from what I do. I am what I do, for who can see what else there is, but through my deeds? God, yes, but how? Once I am finished – yes, am finished – it is not parsimonious for me to live longer: to put it blasphemously, it is finished. I should hardly have the motivation ever to take my life: what you will see me doing instead is to disregard it entirely.

That is, after all, the height of apathy. Or of some kind of irony. Dimittam adversum me eloquium meum. Well, you may discern some of the reasons I like to listen to Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum. All erdly joy returnis in pane.

Historical examples would likely be a great help toward addressing problems churches face today, from the social fragmentation of Chinese-American parishes to the lack of clarity about the continued existence of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), a missionary district sponsored by the Church of Nigeria, when it appears to have every reason to join the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).

The difficulty with empire arises in part because empires often make totalizing claims. They claim to exert complete sovereignty. They claim unrivaled power. They claim to know best. They have the means to accomplish their will regardless of what anyone else thinks. They demand allegiance. They sanction their actions with religious talk (‘God bless America’). They cannot tolerate dissent.

Counterintuitively, I find this to be an argument against disestablishment, not for it. My thought concerns not only empires (or what we usually call empires) but also civil jurisdictions of any kind.

The modern ‘secular’ state claims to judge between YHWH and Baʿal, or between the Bible and the Qurʾān. This is necessary, unavoidable for any state that judges both Christians and Muhammadans. The god proclaimed by the Bible claims all, and the god proclaimed by the Qurʾān claims all. Every person has pretheoretical commitments: Christians have the Bible, and Muhammadans the Qurʾān, and atheists another set of ideas and texts. But every state encodes some ideology or another, in order to decide what may or may not happen in public. May it be permitted, for example, for a Muhammadan to convert to Christianity, or vice versa? Some may think the answer 0bvious, that no one ought to be punished for these choices, but Christians have excommunication, and Muhammadans have their own sanctions for apostasy. The state must decide what to accept and what to outlaw.

I shall put it more starkly. To some Muhammadans, and indeed to almost all orthodox Muhammadans before the late nineteenth century (when the Islamic community met the influence of liberalism), the proper punishment for someone who confesses the Islamic creed and then turns to the worship of Jesus Christ, thus blaspheming Allāh, is death. To much of the civilized world, this is common sense. To reject it, and to outlaw it, is a religious choice whose logic requires the state to say either

1. that Allāh does not legislate execution for leaving Islam, or
2. that Allāh does not have the right to legislate the death penalty for leaving Islam.

There is an apparent alternative: multiculturalism. According to multicultural orthodoxy, Muhammadans may follow the Qurʾān, and Christians their Bible, and each his own beliefs. This gets us nowhere in the case of the man who rejects the covenant of Muhammad’s god and is baptized into that of the Trinity: does he fall under the Christian jurisdiction or the Islamic? The decision, unavoidably religious, will reveal the prevailing religion of the state.

There can be no complete disestablishment without another establishment. For this reason I have no moral objection in principle to sharīʿah law, except that it is, in my view, the wrong system. I shall not personally revile those who try to make it the dominant political force: I too deem the civil authority accountable to the laws of my god, and under the belief that these circumscribe the common good I will push for a legal system compatible with these laws.

If there must be no establishment, let’s all be Anabaptists and dissolve the state altogether. If this solution be unacceptable, we’re stuck with what we have, and what we must do is reform what we already have.

So what does a godly magistrate do? He holds the sword to punish wickedness: he stops the rich from devouring the poor by theft, and he stops the poor from devouring themselves with revolutions. He does not, in the name of the realm, make totalizing claims; he does not, in the name of the realm, claim complete sovereignty; he does not, in the name of the realm, claim unrivaled power; he does not, in the name of the realm, claim to judge God. If confronted with his sin as David was confronted by Nathan, he will kneel in penitence before the God and ruler of all.

Disestablish and dislodge the truth of God, and idols will exercise dominion in the persons of the rulers, and the rulers of the Gentiles will lord it over them. We have already seen the face of an idol in Madame Guillotine. Expel one god, and you will get another. As St Augustine would tell us, man always loves something, and man always give his highest allegiance to something. Under the Protestant doctrine, no one gets jailed for believing the wrong things, and there’s no threat of interdict for a ruler who pays no heed to a foreign bishop; at the same time, a bishop can speak out against corruption, and the laws can follow the justice of God. Because it’s right, then, and because it’s the way of liberty, I hope the civil authority gives its allegiance to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

God bless America, and God save her people from their sins; and in the UK, God save the Queen.

Protestants answer yes to the first question and no to the second; Anabaptists do the opposite. Anabaptists, unlike Protestants, didn’t seek to reform the existing visible Church (since the invisible Church cannot be reformed by man at all, being the realm of the human soul, which none rule but God); instead they sought to make, from the number of ‘new’ believers leaving the old corrupt Church, a new, different, separate ‘pure’ Church, living apart from ‘the world’. Because the Anabaptists saw the Church of Rome not only as the seat of the papal Antichrist (as the Protestants viewed it as well) but also as a completely false Church, and irredeemable, the only way was to separate from and shun this worldly institution to gather into a new, godly community. Since the baptism of the world was invalid, the symbol of this new community of ‘true believers’ was rebaptism into voluntary membership in this new community, a baptism predicated on walking in newness of life.

The two kingdoms, and nature and grace

This difference in theory is the Protestant doctrine of the two kingdoms. This doctrine, developed out of older Catholic theories of the Church, is the way in which Protestants can teach justification by faith alone. It teaches that God is the ruler of the whole world and that he rules in two ways. The earthly kingdom, or the left-hand, he rules through temporal government, by means of law (i.e., the sword or compulsion); the heavenly kingdom, or the right-hand, he rules by the Holy Ghost, through the gospel of grace. To the latter kingdom, the spiritual, belong Christians as a new creation that voluntarily obeys; to the former belong all who live on earth, including Christians.

Anabaptists have no doctrine of the two kingdoms. Therefore, since true believers in the Anabaptist order didn’t live within the same polis as the non-believers, Christians could not serve in civil governments or swear oaths in their courts. Nor was the magistrate’s sword to be coöperated with, since it belonged to the world and lay outside the people of God. God’s elect were instead to use excommunication, or the ban, to exclude sinners from the company of both God and his people; to be in the world and apart from God’s people was to be in the company of the damned. In short, Christians could have no rule on earth but ‘Scripture itself’.

The idea was a radical doctrine of sola Scriptura with no use for natural law or anything but the illumination of the Holy Ghost, which being spiritual had nothing to do with the natural. This idea contrasted with the Protestant sola Scriptura: that the Holy Scriptures reveal all things necessary for eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, and the dogmas added to them by the Pope cannot damn anyone. The classical Protestant doctrine is what Richard Hooker taught in Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie against the both papalists and the disciplinarian biblicists (such as Thomas Cartwright):

The schooles of Rome teach scripture to be so unsufficient, as if, except traditions were added, it did not conteine all revealed and supernaturall truth, which absolutely is necessarie for the children of men in this life to know that they may be in the next saved. Others justly condemning this opinion growe likewise unto a daungerous extremitie, as if scripture did not onely containe all thinges in that kinde necessary, but al thinges simply, and in such sorte that to doe any thing according to any other lawe were not onely unnecessary, but even opposite unto salvation, unlawfull and sunful.

The Anabaptists’ version of sola Scriptura, against that of Hooker and the Reformers, has resulted in aberrant behaviours, which I outline below.

Results of Anabaptist theology

Some Anabaptists rejected the sword altogether; others, such as the Münsterites, took up arms against ‘the world’. Radical Puritans like Cartwright, by similar reasoning about Holy Scripture, admitted to public worship only the things that the Scriptures expressly called for, concluding, ‘Scripture is the onely rule of all things which in this life may be done by men.’ Like the Romanists, ironically, these groups at the logical extremes subordinated the ‘natural end’ of man to his ‘supernatural end’ (cf. Boniface VIII’s papal bull Unam Sanctam, which subjects all Christian kings to the Bishop of Rome). The fruit of the Anabaptists’ stolid biblicism is dissension and sedition, and all kinds of evils in the Church (as for the Romanists, ‘remember, remember the fifth of November’).

Another result in our own time, transfigured by theologically liberal tendencies, is an extreme resistance to any call to do things lawfully in the Church. The Anabaptist perception of the legal system as inherently pagan, or at least as (rightly or wrongly) impervious to the word of God, makes people reluctant to mix church and law at all, either in excommunication or in ‘legalistic’ reporting to the magistrates; thinking that a ‘system of grace’ means no law, no rigorous thought and no clear distinctions between being morally wrong and doing unpopular, uncomfortable things (unless with pastoral approval), Christians are often uneasy even with the term government when I refer to the government of such and such a church. Insistence on informal ‘leadership’ and resistance to formal procedures has perhaps hurt Sovereign Grace Ministries at a time when formal canon law might really have helped.

As common in our time, if not more common, is a sacred-secular divide, under which things not obviously spiritual (which pertain to ‘the culture’ and not to evangelism) are either condemned as unspiritual or permissively lumped together with truly unholy things as ‘what does not belong to God’. But what truly doesn’t belong to God? Falsity and wickedness and corruption, which don’t condemn a good thing but are themselves condemned, for God cannot sin, nor can he lie, nor can he tempt a man to sin. Christ is the truth, and evil is the lie; those who cling to Christ will have all good, but those who cling to evil are black as sin in God’s sight, and they will with sin be burned in everlasting fire. At the end of the age, the chaff will be burnt up, and the wheat will grow thick and rich in the new heavens and the new earth, and man will forever live in blessed joy.

Related books, recommended by Kenny Robertson:
Creation Regained, by Albert M. Wolters (Eerdmans);
Maximum Life, by Julian Hardyman (IVP).