The Body of Christ

From a general audience on 15 March 2006, Pope Benedict XVI remarked:

…
In this light, one understands how the Risen One confers upon them, with the effusion of the Spirit, the power to forgive sins (cf. Jn 20: 23). Thus, the Twelve Apostles are the most evident sign of Jesus’ will regarding the existence and mission of his Church, the guarantee that between Christ and the Church there is no opposition: despite the sins of the people who make up the Church, they are inseparable.

Therefore, a slogan that was popular some years back: “Jesus yes, Church no”, is totally inconceivable with the intention of Christ. This individualistically chosen Jesus is an imaginary Jesus.

We cannot have Jesus without the reality he created and in which he communicates himself. Between the Son of God-made-flesh and his Church there is a profound, unbreakable and mysterious continuity by which Christ is present today in his people. He is always contemporary with us, he is always contemporary with the Church, built on the foundation of the Apostles and alive in the succession of the Apostles. And his very presence in the community, in which he himself is always with us, is the reason for our joy. Yes, Christ is with us, the Kingdom of God is coming.

The Petri Dish of Ecclesiology

The Anglican “communion” – such as it is – provides a sort of petri dish in the laboratory of ecclesiology. A recent document by the Anglican Communion Institute in the United States, which is also authored by Britain’s foremost Anglican scholar, N. T. Wright, is entitled The Anglican Communion: Shared Discernment Recognized by All.

There’s discussion over at Fulcrum, a British evangelical site.

Also, while on this topic, there are similar issues among Lutherans – similar in the sense of having to deal with foundational cracks. [Update: article in the Rapid City Journal]

Speaking of Lutherans, as someone posted on Free Republic:

The formation of the ELCA is what nudged Fr. Richard John Neuhaus into the Catholic Church. At the time, he said that the merger was not based on theological principle or belief, but was merely a material merger for material reasons—like a merger of Wal-Mart and K-Mart.

Neuhaus said he had always viewed the Lutheran “Church” as the Lutheran “Movement” within the universal Church. After the formation of the ELCA, he could not maintain that view—of Lutheranism as a principle-based movement within the Church.

While the characterization of “communion” or, better, “movement” can be useful, I find it more productive to use the phrase “separated religious order” for such ecclesial structures.

The ACA’s (Anglican Church in America, one of “continuing anglican” ecclesial groups) Rt. Rev. George Langberg recently said:

The ongoing collapse of the Anglican Communion and the concurrent inability of conservative Anglicans outside that body to get their act together suggest that these groups may share a fatal flaw. Anglicanism may arguably be seen as a 450-year experiment to determine whether a separated part of the church can remain fully catholic, keeping its apostolic ministry and grounding its teaching and practice in Holy Scripture and the Sacraments, but replacing the authority structures of the main body of the Church with a sort of democracy in which no single leader has complete authority, and in which clergy and laity gathered together in Synods and Conventions take the place of Church Councils. A strong case can be made for the premise that the experiment is concluded, and it has failed.

[Update: 23 Sept 2009] In the context of current Lutheran difficulties, there’s an article on The Agony of Mainline Protestantism by R.R. Reno in First Things. Reno has personal experience in this matter:

. . .
I once wrote a book defending the spiritual vocation of loyalty to a declining mainline denomination-and I eventually left when I recognized that my own spiritual mediocrity left me unable to live up to St. Paul’s vision of a Christ-like sacrifice. So readers should not be surprised that I have sympathy for David Yeago’s Pauline admonitions-and that I am consoled by his generous concessions the opaque and uncertain and sin-weakened condition of each person.

But I am more than consoled. Since my entrance into the Catholic Church, I have become more and more aware of the importance of personal discernment, which Yeago rightly emphasizes. It is a perversion of our age-one shared I might add by both Protestants and Catholics-that we think ourselves capable of coolly judging or assessing or somehow weighing the orthodoxy of our churches by what we imagine to be objective criteria.

This approach is wrongheaded. Yes, we have the scriptures, and we have a patrimony of theological wisdom. But it is important to recognize that the church is not created by confessions. She is not a theological artifact, nor is she a catechism or set of doctrines. The church is body of Christ, a primal fact that guides the reading of scripture, supports confessions, and gives birth to doctrines. Events may force us to make a fundamental decision about our ecclesial community. But to act independently, to step outside the fellowship of faith and navigate forward on our own-this circumstance brings more blindness than clarity of vision, and it requires far more prayer than theological analysis. So, yes, the decisions made by the ELCA last summer are wayward. The future is not rosy for Lutherans or other mainline Protestants who care about orthodoxy. But no wavering Protestant should step back and tote up the apostasies of the UCC or Episcopal Church or ELCA. The truth of Christ comes clearest when one is closest, and this requires drawing near rather than stepping back. As a former mainline Protestant who hovered at a distance for longer than I care to admit, I can report that, without an abiding loyalty to a church (however debilitated, however removed for its true source), there is no reliable list of essential doctrines, no confident navigation by biblical principles. . . .

Fellow Toastmasters

Fellow Toastmasters,

I want my words to be gracious, wise and well-seasoned. However, that is a fair and faraway goal; right now, my concern is to get rid of meaningless noise: uh, ah, like you know? I came across an old, 16th century pamphlet on this by a Professor Theophilus K Bandersnatch of Oxford. Unfortunately, it was written in Latin and I can not understand much of it so I will just summarize in my own words the Bandersnatchian Theory of Stray Guttural Avoidance.

There are four aspects of stray guttural avoidance: friendship, self-knowledge, work, and art.

I start, of course, with friendship. When Marisa pointed out a rate of 4 per minute, I was appalled – not only about the rate but also that I was not even aware of speaking that way. And then Barbara noticed nearly all of my sentences included some sort of meaningless guttural. Depressing! However, that is what friends are for: to point out hidden faults while at the same time giving the pill a coating of good will. Friendship is much more than that, of course, including being at ease with one another which can also, hopefully, help to reduce the number of stray gutturals. Moreover, only among friends would I attempt to talk on something my very speech might disprove!

Friendship calls for friendship in return which means, in this case I think, taking the critique seriously – which leads me to self-knowledge: to listen to hear what I am, in fact, saying. Are the stray gutturals just bad habit, are they an unnoticed nervous twitch, do thy come from an inflated opinion of the sound of my own words? I want to focus on this last aspect a bit: to punctuate silence with a stray guttural is to claim that my meaningless noise is better than silence. That’s absurd, and also childish. Hopefully, recognizing that will enable me to both eliminate stray gutturals and to make better use of pauses and points, to develop better timing and rhythm which is part of what I meant by saying I want my words to be well-measured.

To friendship and self-knowledge, I must add effort, to work at what I’m going to say, to plan and [horrors!] to write the speech out beforehand. Being lazy, I’d like to avoid that stage; however, I can only practice and work on the delivery of the speech if I’ve written out at least some sort of draft beforehand. Both the writing and the delivery have to be worked on and developed if I’m not to be at a loss for words and fall back on a guttural to mark time. I admit that I have to force the effort to write out the speech whereas once I’m standing in front of you, now, it is easy to talk, receiving energy from you.

Finally, to friendship, self-knowledge and work, one tries to add art: to use just the right word and to make each word count within well-measured phrases. This is where poetry can help, perhaps. Not the highflown rhetoric of, say, Milton but rather the everyday talk of Frost, with its art mostly hidden from all but the careful listener. That is my ideal for a speech: to be as a silken tent, with just a touch of tautness, with the words and sentences interconnected and mutually supporting an organic structure.

These four aspects reinforce one another. For example, mentoring depends on both friendship and self-knowledge and nothing gets made without both work and art. In summary: stray gutturals can be minimized by adding self-knowledge to friendship, for a start, and then tying together with both work and art.

Christina Rossetti

In an article on Christina Rossetti, Fred Sanders concludes:

There are lots of reasons to read Christina Rossetti, but here’s one of them: She knew how to read Homer. She brought to the Iliad everything she had and everything she was –her broad education, her Victorian womanhood, her vast potentials and her searing limitations. But above all, she brought to the reading of Homer her deep faith in Christ. She did not cheaply deploy the Jesus trump card, but she certainly knew where her help came from and when the true Golden Age was:

Yet sometimes, when I feel my strength
Most weak, and life most burdensome,
I lift mine eyes up to the hills
From whence my help shall come:

Yea, sometimes still I lift my heart
To the Archangelic trumpet-burst,
When all deep secrets shall be shown,
And many last be first.

Where There’s More

Christian organizations, of whatever sort, help in the spiritual formation of their members – both by gathering together and by providing resources for personal devotion. There’s more in the Catholic Church than anywhere else. To cite just one example, the Liturgy of the Hours in comparison to any other book of common prayer.

Thomas Howard

Thomas Howard is an English professor (recently retired, after nearly forty years of teaching), who taught at Gordon College and then at St. John’s Seminary. Howard is from a family of prominent evangelicals: his father, Philip, was editor of the Sunday School Times; his brother David Howard was head of the World Evangelical Fellowship; and his sister Elizabeth married the famous missionary Jim Elliot, who was martyred by the Auca Indians in Ecuador.

Some of his books include:

• 1988 – Evangelical Is Not Enough
• 1994 – Lead, Kindly Light: My Journey to Rome
• 1997 – On Being Catholic
• 2006 – Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

The foreword, by Fr. George William Rutler, to that last book is online at Ignatius Press and begins:

T.S. Eliot was the quintessential modern poet by being the last modern poet. The ability to speak of the modern in the past tense exposes a nervous tension in the concept of the modern as “the only now”. Modernity’s isolation from time past and future evaporated anthropological radicalism by its superficiality and made banality an enterprise. I am aware of no other age that was so self-conscious: the Greeks did not think of themselves as classical, nor did the Scholastics think of themselves as highly medieval. But modern people justified everything they did by calling it modern. The end of the modern age was not like the end of any other age, for the essence of modernity was that it was not supposed to end: and so while other ages contribute their echoes to the development of culture, the modern age erased itself by succumbing to the future. Like John the Baptist, who was the greatest of the prophets by being the last of them, so was Eliot the most blatant voice of modernism by ending it when he wrote the Four Quartets. What comes next is yet to be grasped, but the vague and properly vacuous term “postmodern” means that the only substance of modernity, its unsurpassibility, was a phantom.

Church Instruments

“In the Latin Church the pipe organ is to be held in high esteem, for it is the traditional musical instrument which adds a wonderful splendor to the Church’s ceremonies and powerfully lifts up man’s mind to God and to higher things.” Vatican Council II, Sacrosanctum Concilium ¶120, Dec 4, 1963

Sung Mass at the Vatican

From an article by Jeffrey Tucker on music for Mass at the Vatican:

For Easter, he chooses Mass I (Lux et Origo), along with Mass IV (Cunctipotens Genior Deus) for the Feast of the Apostles. He also uses Credo I, III, and IV, and, periodically, the whole of Mass IX (Cum Jubilo). He is trying minimize the use of Mass of the Angels, though it is still programmed for large international Masses since this is the one that most people know.

These are all huge advances, and he is thrilled to hear that people are singing with gusto! Actually, people are singing as never before. He is careful to print large booklets for every Mass with translations. He is dedicated to making sure that he does not use modern notation in the booklets. He believes in neumes, the notation of the Church, because he regards them as easier to sing than modern notes and because they convey the sense that the music of the Church is different from other forms of music

The biggest advances have been made in the area of propers, which had long been displaced by hymns that are extraneous to the Mass. The Introit of the day is sung at every Mass as the celebrant approaches the altar, following a hymn or organ solo. The communion chant is always sung with Psalms from Richard Rice’s editions posted at MusicaSacra.com.

This is a major step and a restoration of a very early practice for Papal Masses. The offertory antiphon is also sung periodically and increasingly so as more and more singers can handle the material. For the Psalm, St. Peters is alternating the use the of the Gradual Psalm from the Graduale Romanum and the simpler Psalms from the Graduale Simplex.

Just now, the choirs are moving into the polyphonic repertoire of the Italian masters such as Palestrina and Victoria, and will be increasingly exploring polyphonic propers along with new compositions.

Comments in Blogs

Often the comments in blogs are just as interesting as the blog article itself, as any blog reader knows. Just to cite one example (Irenaeus on Amy Welborn’s blog)..and another example (from StandFirmInFaith, an evangelical anglican blog).

Return of Patriarchy

Regarding Philip Longman’s 2006 article The Return of Patriarchy and its relevance, Albert Mohler remarked:

The publication of this article within the pages of Foreign Policy should send a very clear cultural signal. Something serious is afoot when one of the nation’s most influential journals directed at questions of foreign policy takes up the return of patriarchy, especially among conservative Christians, as an issue of major consideration. Throughout his article, Longman is careful to argue for what he observes, rather than what he may or may not advocate. His verdict is clear–societies that follow a patriarchal pattern tend to reproduce at a higher rate and advance, while those who devalue the role and responsibilities of men as fathers find themselves in decline.

While recent US politics distract from the issue, its primary and long-range cultural importance remains.

Must Theology Sit in the Back of Secular Bus?

This article by Francis Beckwith:

“Must Theology Sit in the Back of Secular Bus?:  The Federal Courts’ View of Religion and Its Status as Knowledge.” Journal of Law & Religion 24.2 (2008-2009): 547-568 (Francis Beckwith PDF)

makes an important argument, which I hope Dr. Beckwith will expand. For more on this topic, see Christopher Eberle’s Religious Conviction in Liberal Politics.

Time for Rescue?

An excerpt from an article by Damain Thompson:

The main thing is not to miss a heaven-sent opportunity. It’s widely believed, among conservative Catholics and Anglicans, that the Church in England and Wales did not do enough to welcome refugees from the Church of England after the vote for women priests in 1992. On reflection, though, perhaps the time was not right. The Bishops of England and Wales were not well disposed to “misogynist” traditionalists, as they were unfairly characterised; the standard of English Catholic liturgy was at an all-time low; and Anglo-Catholicism, though divided and unhappy, still had the stomach for a fight.

Now Anglo-Catholicism has fallen apart. Liberal High Churchmen have quietly abandoned their opposition to women priests, ditching their principles but keeping their chasubles; they include most of the practising gay clergy who were such a stumbling block in the 1990s. Conservative Anglo-Catholics, meanwhile, no longer identify with a C of E that treats them like batty aunts to be locked in the attic when the first woman bishop arrives, as she will soon. The question is how best to escape.

As for our Catholic bishops, there is now more sympathy for the Anglo-Catholic dilemma. The appointment of Archbishop Vincent Nichols to Westminster is significant; for, although he has never been a “traditionalist”, nor has he ever been at the heart of the dialogue between liberal Catholics and liberal Anglicans that has wasted so much time since the ordination of women priests made reunion impossible. As a young Westminster bishop, he unobtrusively cleared the path to Rome of at least one Anglican priest; there is no reason to think that he will not do the same again.

But the crucial change is that the present Pope, unlike his predecessor, is an admirer of the conservative Anglo-Catholic tradition – and open to the idea that doctrinally orthodox Anglicans should convert together, bringing with them spiritual gifts. He is aware that the practical obstacles to such a move (or series of moves) are immense. But he will not be dissuaded by a Catholic ecumenical lobby that, even now, pays court to liberal Anglicans.