Archbishop Haverland replies to some of the questions and points made in comments on his post.

The Anglican Catholic Church does not ordain subdeacons, though the liturgical function exists in parishes that celebrate Solemn High Mass. The function may be performed by layreaders or deacons or priests. Ordination of subdeacons, like the mandatory vow of celibacy taken before that ordination (as in the Roman Church between Trent and the post-Vatican II reform), is a matter firmly covered by the principle of desuetude, to which I made reference in the posted articles. I am unaware of any ACC bishop purporting to 'ordain' subdeacons. If one did so, it would be little more than licensing a layreader or an acolyte.

Trent occurred after the reign of Henry VIII.

Trent rejected medieval Pelagianism also, of the sort exemplified by Gabriel Biel, and asserted the unelicited character of prevenient grace. As I believe Ronald Knox once observed of his Anglo-Catholic days, the one element of the Roman system which no Anglican that one has ever heard of, no matter how spiky, ever felt the least attraction to is indulgences. The notion that any lingering elements of the indulgence system in the Henrician Church require explanation by any modern Anglican Catholic is not serious. This matter too is covered by desuetude. Indulgences have not existed in any Anglican Church for centuries, and the formularies of the ACC do not revive them. This issue strikes me as a red herring.

As for the idea that a reconstruction of late medieval vestment color schemes is important, much less central, to the identity of any Church: well, that too does not seem to me to be very serious. As Percy Dearmer and many others demonstrate, late medieval English usage in the matter was various and flexible. Many parishes did not have full sets of vestments, and the rule was that one used the best that he had for important occasions, whatever the color. Dearmer also notes that as best one can now reconstruct a color sequence in strict accordance with the Ornaments Rubric, the result 'would differ but very slighty from the Roman sequence which is so well known at the present day.' Which suggests that the ACC's critic in this case need not be so worried.

Anglicanrose is mistaken in thinking that my seeking a consensus of East and West even today assumes that 'one of the two (likely the East) have [sic] no innovation.' On the contrary, the obvious purpose in seeking consensus (a good, Hookerian exercise) is precisely that matters of agreement are much more likely than either the East or the West alone to avoid erroneous or dubious innovations. This implies no Anglican self-negation but rather an Anglican refusal to confuse a part for the whole.

Anglicanrose's liturgical questions simply ignore what I actually wrote about the relevance of Henrician Catholicism for the ACC. I explicitly said that in many matters, including liturgical, desuetude and positive legislation have altered matters since Henry's reign.

+MDH

More From Archbishop Haverland on ACC Formularies

Archbishop Haverland kindly sends an occasional note, which I gratefully use (with his permission, of course) as blog material while I am mired in the busyness which keeps me from blogging regularly.

I mentioned in a previous post on Retro-Church some examples of things clearly present in the Henrician Church but not found in the Anglican Catholic Church now due to authoritative ACC formularies to the contrary or due to desuetude. In that category I mentioned 'mandatory clerical celibacy, legally-enforceable tithing, mandatory Latin liturgy, and many other things which the ACC does not retain'.

Likewise I mention positively a number of things from the Henrician Church that the ACC does keep. These include 'rejection of the papal office in its late medieval form; episcopal and synodal Church government; three-fold Holy Orders; the doctrinal and credal orthodoxy found in the large number of patristic authorities named in the C&C; the sacramental system which the Henrician Church retained; and large chunks of the Corpus Juris Canonici and the custom and common law of the Church'.

Some have wondered about the significance of the ACC's canonical starting point in the Henrician, rather than Elizabethan, settlement of religion. To explain that significance it might help to expand the list of positive elements in the ACC flowing from Henrician Catholicism. An expanded list might include the permissibility of the invocation of the saints; the objective (though not magical) efficacy of the seven sacraments; baptismal regeneration; and a high doctrine of the Real Presence. These beliefs are all features of the faith of the Universal Church which were preserved in the Henrician Church and are believed in the ACC. Such beliefs are not authoritatively contradicted by anything that binds us in the ACC, whatever contrary views one might cite from some in the Elizabethan Church of England. If the Articles seem to teach something to the contrary, either the Article in question has been misunderstood or is not authoritative, since it contradicts the more central and authoritative tradition of Christendom to which it is the purpose of the Articles to bear witness. Tract 90 and Bicknell and Father Robert Hart generally would say that the Article would in such a case have been misunderstood.

I try to be an ecclesial thinker. I joined the ACC as soon as it formed and have never looked back. I begin with the actual faith and actual formularies of the actual Church in which I actually find myself. I think the faith that I hold is Anglican in a variety of ways which are very important to me. However it is much more important to me to maintain the faith of my Church and to be squarely within the consensus of the central tradition of Christendom on controversial matters. If that approach is insufficiently 'Anglican' in the minds of some, I am not too worried. I am more interested in being a faithful Anglican Catholic and in standing within the central tradition of Christendom than in meeting some criterion of Anglicanism that is not itself firmly rooted in the ACC's actual formularies.

For the most part the central tradition of Christendom can be identified simply by looking for the consensus of East and West even today. I see nothing in the actual faith of the ACC which contradicts anything actually held by both the East and West. The only exception might be the marriage of bishops, but on that matter everybody admits that our position is in fact consistent with Scripture and the earliest Church, while the contrary position is a disciplinary matter rooted in no doctrinal necessity. The supposed agreement of East and West against Anglican Orders is clearly contradicted by actual Orthodox positions in the 20th century. Is there anything else held by Rome and the Orthodox but rejected by the ACC? Perhaps that there is One True Church. But as the Two One True Churches disagree about which is True and which Not, I am content with our charitable position that both are True, as are we.

Another advantage to a doctrinal starting point in Henrician Catholicism is that it historically antedates the most revolutionary claims of Roman Catholics and Protestants. Everyone now agrees, I think, that the late medieval Western Church had many serious problems, practical and doctrinal. For instance, the late medieval Church had a powerful Pelagian strand which Trent, a reforming synod in many ways, rejected as did Luther, Calvin, and the Articles. Everyone also agrees that all early modern monarchs sought to control their national Churches and to limit papal authority therein. But both the continental Reformers and Trent responded to the problems of the late medieval Church and the challenge of the monarchs by a radical abandonment of the Conciliar movement. Both radically abandoned Erasmian and Conciliarist reason, one for fideism and the other for the authoritarianism of an absolute ecclesiastical monarchy. The Henrician reformation at its best may be seen as an attempt to reform rather than revolutionize. Henry's bishops only abandoned the effort when forced to choose between the Romanism of Mary and the new-model revolution of Edward's later reign. But already with the Elizabethan anti-Puritans and Hooker the moderate, reasonable spirit began to revive. We in the ACC combine unambiguous doctrinal Catholicism (looking back to the Henricians and reasserted in the Affirmation of Saint Louis) with the riches of the later Anglican patrimony (literary, musical, architectural, spiritual), and the liturgical glories of the Prayer Book tradition. We have the best of all theological worlds.

The Individual, The Church, and the Holy Ghost

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth… John 16:13.

There is a real haziness about the Holy Ghost which infects great numbers of Christians, and the main cause is that teaching on the Doctrine of the Trinity is sorely neglected. As Catholics, we have a wonderful patrimony of such teaching in the Ecumenical Councils which officially formulated the Doctrine of the Trinity, and in the Fathers, both before and after the Councils, who wrestled with, proclaimed, and defended the doctrine.

Protestants, relying as they claim on Scripture alone, are somewhat hamstrung when it comes to clear teaching on the Trinity. Once one is aware of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity as fully proclaimed by the Church, one may go back into Scripture and see that the doctrine has a firm Scriptural foundation. But leave aside the Holy Tradition of the Church, and Scripture alone is rather vague about the Trinity. No matter how exhaustive a Bible concordance you have, you will search in vain for the word “Trinity”, which nowhere occurs in Scripture. There are several fundamentalist denominations which deny the Doctrine of the Trinity precisely because it is not explicitly stated in Scripture. In the end, there are two things for which almost all Protestant denominations are inescapably indebted to the Catholic Church: the canon of Scripture and the Doctrine of the Trinity. However, neglect of the Catholic context in which the canon of Scripture was proclaimed also leads to a neglect of the Doctrine of the Trinity.

However, if Protestants are hazy about the Holy Trinity, they tend to have very definite ideas about the Persons who make up the Trinity, and especially about the Holy Ghost. In the context of Protestantism, and especially in its evangelical and charismatic branches, the Holy Ghost has a central place in the practical task of daily Christian living. If there is a problem among Catholics, it tends to be a downplaying of this centrality of the Holy Ghost, or on the other hand, a sloppy adoption of charismaticism and its doctrinal haziness. There are those who flee from the emotional craziness of charismatic worship by embracing the comparative stillness of liturgical worship, and there are those who want to rescue liturgical worship from its comparative stillness by importing the emotional craziness of charismatic worship.

Among those who concentrate heavily upon the Holy Ghost, there is often a very facile connection made between one’s own definite feelings and convictions and the promptings of the Holy Ghost. I grew up in an evangelical setting where strong feelings regarding any aspect of the spiritual life were taken definitively to be the work of the Holy Ghost. Most often, this didn’t do any real harm, but my favorite Sunday School teacher from high school left his wife, divorced her, married a much younger woman, and believed that this was what God wanted him to do. I once had a lady in my office who said, “God has finally shown me the man he wants me to be with for the rest of my life, and I can’t help it that he’s married to my daughter”. All of this comes from a misunderstanding of the Person and work of the Holy Spirit.

Now it’s interesting to note that “Holy Ghost” or “Holy Spirit” is really not a Proper Name at all in the way that “Father” or “Son” is. “Father” and “Son” tell us something about the relationship of the First and Second Persons of the Trinity; “Holy Ghost” does not tell us anything about the relationship of the Third Person to the First or Second. In fact, since God is holy, and God is spirit, “Holy Spirit” could apply with equal accuracy to the Father or the Son. The Name of the Holy Ghost tells us nothing about His essential subsistence within the Trinity.

This anonymity, if you will, is by design. Our Lord tells us that the work of the Holy Ghost is to glorify the Son, and that the Holy Ghost does not “speak of himself” (Jn. 16:13). At Pentecost, when the Apostles were filled with the Holy Ghost, they did not spill into the streets to speak of the experience of being filled with the Holy Ghost; they did not, like so many in the Pentecostal movement, concentrate on the feelings and sensations which were the result of the action of the Holy Ghost. Under the influence of the Holy Ghost, and with His inspiration, they spoke of Christ, and were able to communicate the Gospel to all those who heard their voices. The Holy Spirit is God, and should of course be worshipped and adored as God, but He does not, as it were, draw attention to Himself, but ever calls to mind Jesus and enables us to love Christ more and more. “I will not leave you comfortless,” Jesus tells the disciples early in the Farewell Discourse; “I will come to you” (Jn. 14:18), and this coming of Jesus is none other than the coming of the Holy Ghost, so closely is the work of the Holy Ghost associated with glorifying Jesus and calling to mind the things of Christ.

The works of the Divine Nature as they are manifested in creation are referred to by theologians as works of economy. Most of what we know about the Holy Ghost, then, is economic: that is, we know about Him through His acts within and upon the created order. And one of the chief of these acts is, Christ said to the Apostles, “to guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16:13). Notice that this promise is given to the Apostles assembled together. It is not a guarantee of individual infallibility applied to any one of them alone. St. Peter, we are told in Scripture, went astray in siding with the Judaizers and requiring new converts to be circumcised and to keep many of the dietary restrictions of the Mosaic law. He maintained this error and was confronted by St. Paul. The two of them then submitted themselves to the authority of the Council of Jerusalem, detailed in Acts Chapter 15, in which St. James, speaking for the Council, declared the truth of the matter. The declaration of the Council, sent to the churches, identified the teaching of the Council with that of the Holy Ghost: “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things” (Acts 15:28). This is an early example of how the Holy Ghost guides “into all truth”. There is a direct identification with the teaching of the Apostles and their successors, the Bishops of the Church, with the work of the Holy Ghost. For the great truths of the Faith, for doctrine and for dogma, the voice of the Holy Ghost is the voice of the Church speaking through time in the office of its Bishops. And this is for our comfort, so that we don’t have to fret about what is true and what is not, and so that we can proceed with the serious business of our journey to salvation with confidence that the road-map set before us is accurate and reliable.

This is not to say, of course, that the Holy Ghost does not illuminate individuals with certain truths applicable to themselves. This He certainly does, especially as one prays or meditates upon Scripture. In fact, without the aid of the Holy Spirit, neither our prayers nor our time spent in Holy Scripture is of any use to us. We are expressly told in Scripture that our prayers have efficacy because the Holy Spirit assists them with “groanings deeper than words”. And yet, it is important to state emphatically that the Holy Ghost never inspires or directs individuals to do or think anything contrary to what He has revealed in the teaching of the Church. If more people were aware of this, there would be a lot less individual anguish, and a lot less nonsense of the sort I heard from my old Sunday School teacher or from the lady in my office. St. Paul warned the Galatians that even if an angel from heaven delivered a message contrary to the teaching of the Gospel, he would be accursed; and he told the Corinthians that Satan can appear as an angel of light. If Satan and his angels can do these things, it is no surprise that they can lend a spiritual power to the misguided thoughts of our own hearts so that we mistakenly believe we are hearing the Holy Ghost.

In fact, in our individual lives, the work of the Holy Ghost is almost always hidden and quiet. The Holy Ghost tends not to call attention to Himself, and because our souls are infused with His presence at Baptism, we would be in some danger if it were otherwise. Our souls are weak from sin, and so God usually treats us gingerly, allowing awareness of His presence in us and of his leading to grow gradually, almost imperceptibly. Were it otherwise, our weakened natures would be tempted to fasten on God’s manifestations in us, rather than on God Himself. And when 
for some reason we didn’t feel anything at one time or another, we’d tend to believe that God had gone from us. And so the Holy Ghost normally operates in hidden and quiet ways within us.

But if we give ourselves to God, and allow Him to have His way with us, the Holy Ghost will invariably be operating within us. Even if imperceptibly, He will be guiding us, leading us, ad comforting us. Our Lord repeatedly calls the Holy Ghost “the Comforter”. More specifically, He calls the Spirit “another Comforter”. The word “Comforter” is the Greek word “Paraclete”, which has the sense of one who comforts by interceding for or acting as advocate for another. Jesus is our Paraclete, and the Holy Ghost acts in his stead, not replacing or supplanting, but fulfilling and completing the mission of Christ. When Jesus walked this earth, he could reach only those people who had access to Him: he was willingly constrained by the limits of His human nature. But after the Ascension, when he is seated at the right hand of the Father, the Holy Ghost can make him manifest to all people, everywhere.

He does this most sufficiently and most excellently in the Eucharist. Every liturgy of the Church acknowledges the role of the Holy Ghost as the agent of the Eucharist, as the One who makes present the Sacrifice of Calvary and makes that Sacrifice efficacious for us. It is perhaps in the Liturgy that the role of the Holy Ghost as Comforter is most plainly set forth for us, just as it is in the Sacraments generally that we see the most objective signs of the Holy Ghost’s operations in our lives. I am convinced that there is no better way to discern the operation of the Holy Ghost within you than by devout reception of Holy Communion and by the practice of sacramental Confession.

In all of His works, the Holy Ghost shows us, not Himself, but Jesus Christ, and testifies of Him. The best way, then, for us to be open to the working and operation of the Holy Ghost is to be open to Christ, to be always thinking of Christ, to be dwelling in heart and mind in the company of Christ. We need the Holy Ghost even to be able to make a start, but if we offer our feeble, storm-tossed wills to God, the Comforter will lift us up and make possible for us what we could never accomplish on our own. And the more we abide in this mindful, loving attention to Christ, the more the Holy Ghost will do the work of our sanctification, by showing us the truth in Christ’s Church, by leading us into that truth through personal illumination, by enabling us to come into Christ’s real Presence in the Eucharist, and by enabling us to make a good Confession. We cannot see the Father, and we cannot see the Holy Ghost; we can see the human face of Christ, the Son of God, and when we fix our gaze on that face, the Holy Ghost will sanctify us and fill us so that the Son may present us, perfect and finished, before the Father.

Easter

When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. Colossians 3:4

“Christ is risen!” With this cry the Apostles greeted one another with the spectacular news which Peter and John brought back from the empty sepulcher, and with this cry the early Church made known its central and most profound doctrine: that Jesus Christ, who was fully God and fully man, and who died on the cross “for us men and for our salvation”, rose from the dead on the third day.

With this cry the succeeding generations of Christians continued to greet one another, and with this cry they challenged the world and called men to conversion. “Christ is risen”: this is the message of the Church, whole and entire.

So central is the Resurrection to the life and teaching of the Church that Easter Day is the preeminent Feast of the Church Year and the font from which all other feasts flow. Every Sunday, the Church tells us, is a Feast of the Resurrection, a little Easter, a picture of this Day of days, the Sunday of Sundays, the Feast of Feasts, the Glory of the Church. The world has taken Christmas, the Feast of the Nativity, and utterly secularized it, more or less with our consent, and has set it up as the great Holiday. But as Christians we must always bear in mind that, great though the Nativity is, it is the Feast of the Resurrection which is the greatest of all Feasts. The world has secularized Easter, too, though with somewhat less success, and has usually been content to classify this day as one of the lesser Hallmark Holidays. One can be lukewarm or even fairly antagonistic toward Christianity and still believe that the birth of Jesus marks a time when all men should think vaguely of the angelic message of “peace on earth, goodwill toward men”. One can believe that Jesus was a good man, or even a prophet, and celebrate Christmas in light of those beliefs. But such a person can do nothing with the Feast of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, for this marks him as something more than a messenger of goodwill, more than a moral teacher, more than a prophet: it proves his assertion that he is God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and utterly deserving of all our loyalty, service, and love.

The earliest witnesses to the Resurrection insisted on the literal, physical nature of the Jesus with whom they had contact on Easter Day and for forty days thereafter, and it was precisely this which St. John intended to emphasize when, a few verses on from today’s Gospel, he shows Thomas placing his finger in the wounds on Jesus’ hands and his hand in the wound on Jesus’ side. The presence of the death-wounds was proof to the disciples that this risen Body was the same which died on the cross. When St. Peter preached the Gospel to the household of Cornelius in Acts chapter 10, he emphasized that the Apostles ate and drank with Christ after he rose from the dead (Acts 10:41). The early Church carried on the testimony of this proof in the response to the Easter greeting: “Christ is risen”; “He is risen indeed”. He is risen indeed: not in a metaphorical or allegorical sense, not in a spiritual sense, but in an actual, physical reality which could be touched.

The physical reality of the Resurrection has a host of important ramifications for us. First, Jesus’ Resurrection is not merely an instance of an individual coming back from the dead. As marvelous as that would be, there are a few others who have travelled that road: we know from Scripture of the widow’s son raised by Elijah, of the young girl and of Lazarus, both of whom were resurrected by our Lord. St. Paul once preached so long that a young man named Eutychus dozed off and fell from the loft where he was sitting and was killed by the fall. St. Paul raised Eutychus from the dead (which might be some amends for having contributed to his death in the first place). These were all raised from the dead and restored to their natural life, a life transformed surely by their sojourn into a country unknown to all the living, but a life still subject to the death which is the first and surest result of the sin of Adam and of our continuing participation therein. These all were raised from the dead to die again some day.

But Christ did not simply come back to life: he utterly overcame death. Death is the fruit of sin and by dint of our sinfulness death holds sway over all of us, but because of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, death does not hold eternal sway over us. We live in a world which is utterly beset by illusion. We’re told that death is the end of life, and that there’s nothing out there beyond it. We’re told that there is no God, or if there is, He is not involved in our affairs. We’re told that the Resurrection of the Lord was a fable. And this isn’t just a problem for non-Christians. I knew a woman who spent 30 years in a Christian denomination and was never taught the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The new life which the Christian receives at Baptism operates in a hidden fashion, at least at first, much as a seed planted in spring does all of its initial growth out of the sight of the gardener. Unfortunately, a great many Christians never put themselves to the difficulty of becoming more and more immersed in the Christian life of prayer and worship and so never really see much growth above the surface. A great part of that growth is the transmission to us, through grace, of greater faith and of more refined spiritual vision and understanding.

One of the things one comes to understand is that God did not make man for death. “For God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity,” we’re told in Wisdom chapter 2. We’re told in the same place that those who do not understand this are “deceived”. Death is a very unnatural separation of the soul from the body. We are not souls using bodies in the way that people use cars or computers: each of us has a body which was made for our soul, and a soul which was made for our body. They are completely intertwined and interpenetrate each other. The body relies upon the soul for life and growth, and the soul relies upon the body for the information from the senses which forms the normal basis of all the soul’s knowledge and understanding. Death, in this sense, is utterly unnatural, and involves the separation of things which were never meant to be separated. This is one of the great consequences of the Fall. However, because Christ in his Resurrection overcame death, it has been limited in its scope: death, to put it simply, has become no more than the temporary separation of the body from the soul. Death has been put within limits and constraints; our souls will not be its prisoners, and our bodies will be remade. This is what St. Paul means when he writes in I Corinthians that, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (I Cor. 15:22). Because Christ has overcome physical death, everyone who ever died will be reunited with his body at the general resurrection associated with the Second Coming of our Lord.

If our resurrection is to be a resurrection to glory with Christ, we must now unite ourselves to him; he must be, in the words of the Epistle, “our life”. Because of sin, we suffer not only physical death, but spiritual death as well. We are blind to spiritual realities, and forgetful of God. But Christ’s Resurrection has reversed death utterly, and we can live not only in hope of future resurrection, but in current spiritual victory. We do this by making Christ our life. First, we are joined to him in Baptism, which is itself made powerful to save us by Christ’s own death and resurrection. Next, we ask for grace to commit ourselves wholly into his hands day by day, moment by moment. The Lord who took human flesh, who lived, who died, who rose again for our salvation will not leave you as you make your way through life. His Resurrection from the dead gives not only future hope, but meaning and purpose here and now.

There are two direct methods by which Christ becomes our life once we have been joined to him in Baptism. The first is prayer. If you are not praying, the life of Christ is not growing within you. If you are not seeking him as the pearl of great price, in comparison to which nothing else matters, if you are not moving all the furniture of your life to find him, sweeping the remotest corners in confession, then this wonderful new life will lie unrealized within you.

The next way of making Christ our life is by reception of him at the Eucharist. If Christ is risen indeed, if he has taken his physical, human nature with him into the very heart of the Most Holy Trinity, then the radical possibility of the Real Presence presents itself to us. If Christ is physically present at the right hand of the Father, then his transformed physical nature, still and forever united to the Second Person of the Trinity, becomes available to us here and now in the Eucharist. That’s why Christ tied his feeding of the disciples at the Last Supper to his coming Sacrifice: “This is my Body; this is my Blood”; and that is why his death-wounds remained visible in the glorified flesh he bore after the Resurrection. St. John, for whom the episode with doubting Thomas is so important, is later shown the continuation of this reality in Heaven. In the 5th chapter of the Revelation, St. John is shown a vision of the ascended Christ, whom he describes as “a Lamb, as it had been slain” (Rev. 5:6), that is, still bearing the marks of his Passion even in the glory of Heaven. It is this “Lamb that was slain” (Rev. 5:12) who the Angel says in Rev. 7:17 will feed the faithful. He does this by giving us Himself, his glorified flesh and blood, but still his real flesh and blood, in the Sacrament of the Altar. And that is why every Sunday is a Feast of the Resurrection, a little Easter, because the Risen Christ becomes present for us in his very flesh and very blood, in all his humanity and all his divinity, under the veils of bread and wine.

And we, partaking of him, become partakers in his Resurrected Life, in his reversal of death. As the Prayer Book puts it: “…that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us” (p.82). The full message of Easter is that Christ has risen to become our life, the Life that is the light of men. The world is compassed about with death, both physical and spiritual, but Christ lives to give us life in Baptism, in prayer, in the Eucharist. Heaven is union with the risen Christ; when he becomes our life, and especially as we approach his Altar, we have a pledge of heaven now, and the death in us is overcome by his life.

1662 And All That

I received the following in an email recently, and it seems a nice riposte to the "More-Anglican-Than-Thou" attitude one encounters so often.

Some would like the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer and strict conformity to the rubrics of that common Prayer Book. What would the result be from this 1662 strictness?

There would be no ashes on Ash Wednesday, no palms on Palm Sunday, no candles on Candlemas.

There would be virtually nothing seasonal or variable in the Eucharistic celebration - no sequence hymns, no varying minor propers or postcommunion collects, very few Proper Prefaces, no omission of the Gloria in excelsis in Lent or Advent. Only the collect, epistle, and gospel would change on the average Sunday, though the Ornaments rubric at least might allow some change in vestments to relieve this Holy Monotony. There would be very few feast days observed liturgically, no propers for Lenten ferias until Holy Week, no Christmas Eve gospel from Saint Luke's gospel. No Christmas Eve, in fact.

There would be one or two very long Exhortations read on all Sundays or holy days prior to the celebration of the Eucharist - which would be every Sunday if celebration is every Sunday. AND there would also be read another long Exhortation in the course of the celebration itself. Both of these two long, mandatory Exhortations would be read in addition to the Prayer for the Whole State and any other notices, in addition to the sermon, and in addition to the Decalogue. The Prayer of Consecration would end abruptly with the dominical Words of Institution.

Of course the 1662 book is seldom used in this strictly correct manner. Most people who think they want 1662 in fact want and are familiar with something else - with a rite that uses 1662 as its base, but rearranges the elements of the rite, omits much or all of the Exhortations, and supplements the propers with material from other, later books.

Does anyone think that 1662 strictly used would attract people to our parishes? In fact people are not longing for rubically correct Prayer Book fundamentalism, particularly when the Prayer Book in question is the inflexible 1662 book. People are looking for what Archbishop Cahoon used to call 'plausible liturgy'. Either a missal or any of the ACC's authorized Prayer Books can provide the basis for such plausible liturgy. For Continuing Anglicans such liturgy should have at its core the language of Cranmer and Coverdale, and the bulk of the rite should derive from their translations and compositions. Beyond that, no particular edition of the Prayer Book or set of ceremonial and rubrical accompaniments is likely to have much significance for most laymen, except for the rapidly diminishing set of laymen from an Anglican background who have a strong preexisting attachment to a particular book.

Also, and as important, people are looking for carefully prepared, brief, plausible, preferably expository sermons. They are looking for clergy who are kind and pastorally concerned, not rude, compulsively eccentric, or uninterested. They are looking for solid Bible study, good music, some outreach and charitable work in the wider community, warm and welcoming congregations.

Here's To The Stale Old Vision

I think message boards in front of churches are lame. Unless your church uses its message board simply to announce service times, or unless the person responsible for your pithy messages is Samuel Johnson, your church is probably broadcasting inanity. There was a church where I used to live which for a long time had the following message on its board: “Drive friendly”. 2,000 years of Christian enlightenment and struggle, and this is all they’ve got?

Recently, a church I drive past frequently has posted the following: “God is giving us a fresh new vision. Come check it out.” Christianity has a name for fresh new visions, and that name is “heresy”. Not really the sort of thing you’d want to advertise.

Of course, these people probably aren’t formally heretical (but who knows anymore?); they’re probably jumping on the neo-church bandwagon of the Emerging Church movement. The primary tenet of EC seems to be that the way things have been done is bad because, well, it’s the way things have been done. The past is practically anathema for these EC folks, and while there’s a good deal of stupidity mixed in with “the way things have been done”, this view neglects the Catholic consensus that Holy Tradition is the voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s not usually the Catholic consensus that the EC folks are trashing; it’s usually the Protestant consensus (if there is such a thing).

Evangelical Protestantism seems to have been stuck for about a century in the end of the 19th Century. When Evangelicals talk about “that old-time religion”, that’s what they mean. They’re not talking about incense and icons, but about brush-arbor revivals and teetotalism. They’re basing themselves within a certain web of assumptions and practices the most consistent application of which is found among the Amish.

These assumptions and practices have left Evangelical Protestantism open to a lot of attacks from what we might call the left and the right From the left, it has been riddled by and reacted against biblical criticism, and by social pressure to accept divorce, homosexual practices, female ministers, and contemporary worship schemes. From the right, it has been attacked by Calvinists for its lack of theological rigor, and by pressure to embrace contemporary worship schemes.

Contemporary worship is urged upon Evangelical Protestants by everyone, and the practice has been more or less fully accepted. This is probably the greatest inroad into the orthodoxy of the Evangelicals. The feminization of the Evangelical clergy got its start in the feminization of Evangelical worship, and a whole host of assumptions and practices fell in its wake.

From the Catholic point of view, the undoing of the 19th-century mindset of the Evangelicals can be a good thing if it drives them to re-examine the “old-time religion” in ways that makes them more open and sympathetic to the Catholic consensus. It can be destructive if this undoing takes with it the underlying orthodoxy once held by the Evangelicals, and so removes our points of commonality.

Lent is a good time to think about these things. Lent is anything but a “fresh new vision”; it’s a hoary old vision, as old as fallen human nature. Lent is very un-contemporary, in that it involves an acknowledgment of our wretched sinfulness, our lack of penitence, and our absent-mindedness regarding God. These are acknowledgments that contemporary culture not only refuses to make, but from which it strives to keep us distracted.

The search for novelty is one of the hallmarks of our culture’s mortal illness, and it has infected many, many formerly orthodox Christians. The stale practices of Catholic Orthodoxy are powerful antidotes against this symptom. I say “stale”, because that is how the cure appears to our jaded, wounded vision: our spiritual cure looks tedious and troublesome, and it’s so much easier simply to ignore it, pretend we need no cure, and spend our time searching for fresh new visions.

No one who is truly immersed in Catholic Orthodoxy can mistake the old, the tried and true, the ancient cure of souls, for something stale and hidebound. The twitchy innovators may make this mistake, and as they appear entrenched in their restless quest for novelty, perhaps it’s best to raise against them the standard of the stale, the dusty, the hoary, the old. They won’t get it, of course, but it’ll make a good talking-point. So here’s to the stale old vision. It’s probably best contemplated in the company of an old, old whisky.

Archbishop Haverland on the Formularies of the ACC

The following is an article by the Most Reverend Mark Haverland, Ph.D., Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Anglican Catholic Church.

What are the Formularies of the Anglican Catholic Church?

What are the Formularies of the Anglican Catholic Church? What documents and authorities have the greatest weight for the ACC in determining debated issues of doctrine and morals? The question should be of interest, of course, to members of the ACC in particular. The question also may be of some interest to some others.

In such matters one often has to distinguish intrinsic and formal authority from practical and material authority. For instance, most Christians would agree that Scripture is intrinsically more important than a Conciliar formula, say the Tome of Saint Leo. However, often as a practical matter a less intrinsically important authority may provide the practical lens which brings the more fundamental, greater text into focus. Roman Catholics, for instance, certainly would acknowledge that Saint John’s gospel is more fundamental and important than a papal encyclical. However, as a practical matter Roman Catholics view, for instance, S. Matthew 16 or Saint John 21 in the light of developed assumptions and teachings about papal authority which have a kind of practical, interpretive priority. The lesser authority as a practical matter determines the meaning of texts which can be and are interpreted in widely different senses by different sincere, intelligent, and learned readers.

So while no sane or sensible person would assert that the Constitution and Canons (C&C) of the Anglican Catholic Church have any profound intrinsic authority, they have a kind of priority in any attempt to identify the authoritative formularies of the ACC.

One approach to the question before us is to apply to the ACC a line of argument following from the term ‘Continuing Church’. On this theory the ACC is a Continuing Church; what the ACC continues is classical Anglicanism; and the formularies of classical Anglicanism are, in the reckoning of the late Father Peter Toon, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (with its Ordinal), the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, and the Homilies.

As an approach concerning the formularies of the ACC the obvious problem for this theory is the fact that none of the documents mentioned in the previous paragraph is established in the ACC’s Constitution and Canons. The Articles are not given any authority at all, for the C&C do not mention them. The Homilies are not given any particular authority. And the Prayer Books explicitly authorized for use in the ACC do not include 1662 but rather are the ones in use in the U.S. (1928) and Canada (1962) at the time of the ACC’s formation, along with the first book (England 1549) and the traditional books in use in places to which the ACC has later spread, namely the South African book of 1954 and the Indian book of 1963 with its official Supplement. The C&C also explicitly authorizes the use of the American, Anglican, and English Missals.

Whatever one makes of the difference between the Toon list of authorities and the C&C’s list, any correct answer to the question posed in this article has to begin with the actual formularies mentioned in the C&C rather than with various other possible lists of documents which have been given some authority by various commentators in various places and various times in the many centuries of Anglican history.

The actual authorities recognized in the C&C, in addition to the Prayer Books and missals already listed, include:

1. The Affirmation of Saint Louis. In the light of the collapse of Christian orthodoxy and Catholic Order in the Churches of the official Anglican or Canterbury Communion (in 1975 in Canada, 1976 in the Episcopal Church, and in the early 1990s in England), the ACC correctly asserts the need to fix and establish definitely our teaching concerning many matters that long were debated in the Anglican world. Some of these matters were the precipitating issues at question in the late-20th century collapse: the male character of Holy Orders, the sanctity of unborn life, and the inadequacy (or worse) of the modernist liturgies. But other issues which the Affirmation settles were long debated in Anglican circles. The Affirmation does not debate, but affirms and asserts, for example: that there are seven sacraments, not two; that there are seven Ecumenical Councils, not four; and that valid sacramental marriages are simply indissoluble. The Affirmation also asserts that all Anglican formularies and authorities are to be interpreted in accordance with the clarified, definite teaching of the Affirmation and its basic principles. In short, within the ACC many long-standing Anglican debates are definitely and clearly settled by the Affirmation.

2. The ‘Henrician Settlement’. On a number of basic matters of doctrine, polity, and Church law the C&C fix as authoritative the state of English Catholicism in the reign of Henry VIII after the break with Rome but without the Royal Supremacy. The teachings of the Fathers and of the Councils are accepted ‘as received in the Church of England through the year 1543' (Canon 2.1). So too canonical matters not determined by the ACC otherwise are to be governed by the state of affairs in the Church of England ‘in its estates in convocation assembled as specified by the Acts of Parliament of 1534 and 1543’. (Canon 2.2) This is not quaint antiquarianism. Rather the ACC establishes as its default assumptions the Henrician rather than the Elizabethan Settlement. However, the liturgical fruits of the Elizabethan Settlement, as improved by later Prayer Book revision and as viewed through the lens of the Affirmation, are also established. The ‘Henrician Settlement’ would include: the rejection of the papal office in its late medieval form; episcopal and synodal Church government; three-fold Holy Orders; the doctrinal and credal orthodoxy found in the large number of patristic authorities named in the C&C; the sacramental system which the Henrician Church retained; and large chunks of the Corpus Juris Canonici and the custom and common law of the Church. This starting point looks much more like the Church consensus of the first millennium than it does Protestantism in the common meaning of the word.

3. Subsequent, positive Anglican legislation insofar as it is consistent with the Affirmation and the ACC’s C&C. The Henrician Church included mandatory clerical celibacy, legally-enforceable tithing, mandatory Latin liturgy, and many other things which the ACC does not retain. The Henrician Church also did not include many things which the ACC establishes, such as a house of laity in all Synods. Desuetude and explicit or positive canonical legislation explain the differences in question. I am not asserting that the ACC is governed in detail by Henrician norms. I am asserting that Henrician Catholicism is a more authoritative starting point in many, particularly non-liturgical, matters than is the state of the Elizabethan Church. But desuetude and subsequent legislation affect almost all matters since the 16th century. For the ACC the most significant locus of such normative legislation is the C&C.A quick review of the official footnotes of the C&C is instructive. Scripture, the Prayer Book, the Ecumenical Councils, and the Fathers are the authorities most often cited. John Cosin is the only individual Anglican theologian or Churchman cited by name. The C&C are not some odd invention of canon-mad Continuers, but a fairly workable set of rules which limit lawless bishops and help regulate most of our affairs. These rules are explicitly drawn from Scripture, the Prayer Book, the Councils, and our own past.

So, given this information about the ACC’s formularies and authorities, what are we to make of some of the other authorities sometimes cited?

A. The Articles. The Articles of Religion, as I have said, are not an ACC formulary, though they are undoubtedly an historical Anglican formulary. From this I conclude that when the Articles are useful they may usefully be quoted. When they are understood so as to harmonize with the actual formularies of the ACC they may be very useful. There is great apologetical and historical value in careful reading of the Articles in the manner familiar to readers of The Continuum in the writings of E.J. Bicknell or Father Robert Hart. But the Articles themselves have no independent authority within the ACC: like it or not, there it is.

B. The Tudor and Stuart theologians. C&C quotation of individuals after the Patristic era is very rare. John Cosin is quoted. Saint Thomas Aquinas is quoted. That’s about it. As a general matter I would suggest that particular theologians of the 16th and 17th century have to be read and judged as individuals. I would agree with A.M. Allchin who once wrote:

...The position of the seventeenth-century Anglican theologians is,...and must remain, of real importance for all Anglican theological thinking. But this emphatically does not mean that we have to follow them in every particular, nor that we are limited by their positions and conclusions. What it does mean is that we may find in them certain attitudes, certain approaches to theological problems, which are still valid for Anglican thinking to-day and, we would dare to say, still of value for Christian thinking as a whole. By their constant appeal to “the Scriptures interpreted by the perpetual practice of God’s Church”, to use the words of Herbert Thorndike, they provide us with a method and a starting point for our own researches. But they do not give us a complete and finished system. (Our Lady in Seventeenth-century Anglican Devotion and Theology, 1963)

I wrote a master’s thesis on Richard Hooker and a doctrinal dissertation on Henry Hammond. Obviously I see a very great value in understanding the great writers of our own Church and tradition. Modern Roman Catholic scholars have argued that in moral theology the Caroline divines better preserved the great medieval synthesis than did any of their Roman contemporaries. Nicholas Lossky has argued something similar in the case of Lancelot Andrewes, whom Lossky sees as a better synthesizer of the Fathers than his 17th century Eastern contemporaries. But in any case what we gain now from these classical Anglican writers builds on firm foundations established by our own formularies.

C. The Anglo-Catholic movement. If the main impetus for early lay membership in the ACC was Prayer Book loyalty, the main impetus for early clerical membership in the ACC was partisan Anglo-Catholicism. These two obvious facts of our history are such that any wise ACC leader will incline towards American rather than English Anglo-Catholicism. At the risk of oversimplifying, I think it is true that American Anglo-Catholics were more loyal to the Prayer Book than English Anglo-Catholics. We also were less inclined to be Anglo-Papalists. In both cases our greater confidence in our own Anglicanism may have come from the fact that our disestablishment limited the power of our bishops to persecute and to suppress the positive developments of the Tractarian and Ritualist revivals. It also comes from the fact that the 1928 American book is much more adequate than the 1662 English book. Americans did not feel as great a need to fiddle with what was in place. In any case, in matters liturgical I know of no ACC bishop who would attempt to foist a missal or any addition therefrom on a parish that is happy with an unadorned Prayer Book rite. It also is clear that no ACC bishop could get away with an attempt to stop a united priest and parish from doing anything liturgically which can be clearly supported by any authorized missal. There is a spectrum of accepted liturgical usage, and I think we have achieved a broad agreement on that spectrum.

In brief, then the Affirmation of Saint Louis is the lens through which we view all Anglican authorities. This place for the Affirmation is established by material provisions of our Constitution and Canons. The particular Anglican authorities actually received in the ACC are not what they were in the Churches from which we came. Nor are specifically Anglican authorities a razor for trimming the basic affirmations of the ACC as found in our actual formularies. We are not a Church in which Catholic opinions (e.g., that there are seven sacraments and Councils) are tolerated. We are a Catholic Church in which all opinions are subject to correction on the clear basis of our formularies.