Christ Church

The Eastertide 2012 issue of the parish newsletter, Christ Church Chronicles, can be downloaded via this link as a pdf document. Previous issues can be downloaded via this page.

Fr. David Curry delivered this paper yesterday at the Colloquium on the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible, held at King’s College and sponsored by the Nova Scotia/Prince Edward Island branch of the Prayer Book Society of Canada. The opening paragraphs are posted below; the complete paper can be downloaded as a pdf document by clicking here.

This paper, poor as it is, is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Jane Curran, whose wit and philosophical understanding and whose love of learning and language has meant so much to the lives of all who have been privileged to know her. She knew about the Word that underlies all words.

“Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come to the water….”so Miles Smith in his Translators to the Readers states at the outset of one of the most outstanding and most influential works of translation in human history, the King James Bible, words whose earthy pithiness capture the genius of William Tyndale. It is his translation of the Christian Scriptures that provides the ground of the celebrated King James Bible. The Preface, as it is commonly known, is actually a kind of apology for translation – that alone is remarkable in itself.

Translation matters, indeed, it is not too much to say that translation is an integral feature of the Judeo-Christian heritage and one which has its roots in antiquity. The Preface to the King James Bible actually provides as an argument of justification for its enterprise the fact that in the early seventeenth century there are “of one and the same book of Aristotle’s Ethicks … extant not so few as six or seven several translations.” It is an intriguing and interesting argument especially at a time when the arguments against Aristotelianism, particularly in what early moderns called ‘natural philosophy’, would outweigh apologetic arguments for Aristotelian physics and, by extension, metaphysics. This is but one of the many paradoxes of the King James Bible. Sometimes called the Authorised Version, it defends itself in part on the basis of multiple translations of the Bible already in existence about which, too, it shows a remarkable generosity of spirit; to wit, “[W]e do not deny, nay, we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession … containeth the word of God, nay, is the Word of God…”

The paradox is even greater when you consider that the Ethicks of Aristotle along with so many more of the works of the Aristotelian corpus came into the West by way of the Muslim Arabic scholars of the Iberian peninsula, themselves part of the religious tradition of Islam where there can be, in principle, no translation of the Qu’ran. Translation matters, but in very different ways, it seems.

A veritable library of books dealing with the King James Version of the Bible has appeared over the last decade and a half. Alistair McGrath’s In the Beginning, Benson Bobrick’s Wide as the Waters, and Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries, for instance – all witness to a revival of interest and scholarly appreciation for the remarkable achievement of the King James Bible, even before the 400^th anniversary celebrations got underway, which have brought out even more shelves of books; to take but one as an example, David Crystal’s Begat. There is the enterprising and ingenious publishing endeavor of The Pocket Canons, undertaken in 1998, in which individual books of the Bible in the King James Version have been published in small volumes (each 4 1/8” by 5 5/8” in size) provided with, get this, introductions by a wide range of literary, philosophical, and religious figures. It is a truly amazing enterprise.

Click here to read the complete paper.

Click here to download the Rector’s Annual Report for 2011 (pdf document).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2010 can be accessed via this page.

The Advent 2011 issue of the parish newsletter, Christ Church Chronicles, can be downloaded as a pdf document via this link. Previous issues can be downloaded via this page.

The September 2011 issue of the parish newsletter, Christ Church Chronicles, can be downloaded as a pdf document via this link. Previous issues can be downloaded via this page.

This paper by Fr. David Curry was delivered at the 2010 Atlantic Theological Conference and recently published in the Conference Report.  The opening paragraphs (footnotes omitted) are posted below; the complete paper can be downloaded as a pdf document by clicking here.

Introduction

The retrospective viewpoint is a common feature of Canadian literature. It is complemented by another viewpoint, the introspective viewpoint, that is to say, looking inward. The interplay of retrospection and introspection provides the narrative framework for certain novels, for instance the Manawaka novels of Margaret Laurence. Whether you are like Hagar in The Stone Angel, a ninety year old lady, looking back on her life and discovering the ways in which she has been doubly blind, both blind to herself and to others, realizing in a wonderful phrase that “pride was my wilderness,” or like Morag Gunn in The Diviners, divining an understanding of oneself through the activity of writing, the engagement with the past is altogether crucial for an understanding of identity. Indeed, the failure to come to terms with one’s past is destructive of identity. That recovery of the past, however, is actually a creative activity, for in remembering we re-appropriate the things that belong to our identity. The challenge is to have a free and honest relation to the past.

Some of you may know the story about Fr. Crouse in the early 60s, responding to a Bishop who was complaining about ‘the new theology’ that was beginning to infect seminaries and theological colleges. “No, Bishop,” he is said to have replied, “not new theology, no theology.” And now, we might ask, what would he say? Well, after a meeting of the Primate’s Theological Commission several years ago, his response was “not much theology.” But that’s progress. There is, it seems, at least some theology!

In a way, we are witnessing the rebirth of a more principled theological understanding. In and through what some might see as the unravelling of the Anglican Communion, there is, perhaps, the beginning of its being knit together. There is, to my mind, at least, a kind of providential miracle in the recovery of the Anglican mind. There has never been so much discussion and attention paid to the foundational documents of the Anglican way in the contemporary world as there has been in the last several decades and from most, if not, all sides of the theological spectrum. The very things which some, if not many, in the various echelons of ecclesiastical power have been quick to dismiss, have come back into prominence or at least into some kind of notice; such things as the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Ordinal and the Book of Common Prayer, and not merely among some group of eccentric antiquaries, like the “Cranmer Club” in P.D. James’ extraordinarily perceptive, if not prophetic, novel, The Children of Men.

The theological underpinnings of such things is to be found in what Dr. Ingalls has outlined in his paper and which I am tasked to continue in terms of seventeenth century English Theology. An impossible task, I merely hope to point out what I think are some salient features of the theology of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that bear upon the questions of essential doctrine and matters indifferent or, to use the Melancthon’s term, adiaphora, which weaves in and out of the period almost like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Far from being a retreat into some nostalgic and romantic Anglican past, all that I wish to suggest is what Stephen Hampton has pointed out in his Anti-Arminians, The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I, namely, that “the Reformed theological tradition is an essential ingredient in any conception of Anglicanism.” Our interest will be to identify what is meant by reformed here. Our concern will be to negotiate the currents of the theological debates of the period which, in some sense, are perennial.

In our context, the theological concern is with the Reformed response in the English Church to two intertwined movements, the one dealing with the doctrine of salvation; the other, we might say, with the doctrine of God as it bears upon the defining principle of Christian Faith, the doctrine of the Trinity. The two movements, intra and inter-ecclesial in their scope, are Arminianism and Socinianism.

The burden of my paper is to suggest that the English Reformed Tradition, through its focus on the Creeds and the Liturgy as the devotional expression of Scriptural and Creedal doctrine, counters and, dare I say, contains, these divergent, and often overtly heterodox outlooks, and plays an important role in upholding the essential Catholicism of what has commonly been called Anglicanism. Such observations might be allowed to have some bearing upon our present confusions and uncertainties.

My argument, in brief, is that the Reformed theological tradition argues strongly for the essential Catholicism of the English Church as a full and integral part of the Church Universal, precisely through its insistence on thinking with the metaphysical traditions of the Patristic and Medieval periods at the same time as engaging with the new epistemological developments of early modernity, some of which were altogether dismissive of the forms of thinking from the past.

The Reformed tradition in the English Church from the mid-seventeenth century through to the early decades of the eighteenth century insisted on maintaining the formularies of the Faith – the Creeds, the Articles, the Ordinal and the Book of Common Prayer – against the explicit attempts to change or remove them. They did so through a double engagement of the mind, engaging intellectually the theological inheritance which they had received as well as the new forms of intellectual inquiry belonging to early modernity

How the questions about grace and free will, on the one hand, and about the Trinity, on the other hand, were dealt with sheds light upon the understanding of matters essential and matters indifferent for the reformed Catholicism of the English Church.

Click here to read the complete paper.

“How readest thou?”

Christ crucified, Lancelot Andrewes tells us in a marvellous sermon is “liber charitatis, the book of love, opened to us” to read. How do we read?

It is a pressing contemporary question. How do we read? There has been a virtual explosion of books about the marvel and the miracle of reading and about what reading means in the digital age. There is, in fact, a considerable climate of anxiety about books and reading. Does it mean the end of books? Does it mean the end of reading, itself? In the technological changes of the digital world, do the changes to reading mean changes to our thinking?

There is, for example, Alberto Manguel’s classic, History of Reading (1996), not to mention his A Reader on Reading (2010) and a collection of other writings. There is Maryanne Wolf’s remarkable and prescient book, Proust and the Squid (2008), Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), Christopher Hedges The Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2007), Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardises Our Future (2008) – no prizes for guessing where he is coming from! There is the digital cheerleader, Clay Shirky, with Cognitive Surplus (2010) and, soon to come, Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation (2011).

There are the scholarly reflections of such figures as Anthony Grafton with his Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (2009), and Ann Blair’s Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (2010). And just as recently, there is Alan Jacobs useful overview and balanced reflection in his The Pleasures of Reading in An Age of Distraction (2011), who opens us out to a larger world past and present about the how, the what, and the why of reading. As he notes about Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why (2000), it should really have been called ‘What to Read and What to Think about It’. There is always, it seems, a moral, even dogmatic, imperative that slips into the consideration of reading. And, finally, to end this eclectic romp about books about books and reading, Amazon alerted me just the other day about a book just released by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, entitled This is Not the End of the Book (2011)! I suspect that this is not “the end of the matter”, though I think the wisdom of Ecclesiastes will indeed be born out, namely that “of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

It might seem that along with the question, “how do we read?”, there is the equally important question, “what do we read?” To be sure. Yet, this may be one of those rare moments where the how sheds light on the what, the means upon the purpose. At the very least, it opens to view the necessary interrelation between how we read and what we read.

And what about worship and prayer? What about the reading of The Book of Common Prayer? How readest thou?

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I have been asked about the decisions of the recent Synod of the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island as reported in the media. I can only offer the following observations in what is an attempt to explain what seems to be rather confusing.

The Politics of Confusion?
Some Reflections on the Recent Decisions
of the Diocesan Synod of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island

Truth, it is often said, is the first casualty of war. More often than not, there is simply confusion. In the ‘sex-wars’ within the Anglican Communion, confusion reigns supreme. The recent Synod of the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island provides a case in point.

The Synod discussed and debated a number of motions regarding the issue of same-sex blessings. The four motions were, one might say, aggressive in their zeal for providing some sort of arrangement, blessing, marriage, or otherwise for same-sex couples. Most remarkable is the degree of confusion about the word, ‘marriage’.

The motions included keeping a roster of parishes and clergy “amenable to the blessing of same-sex civilly married couples”; providing a liturgy for “blessing covenanted or committed unions outside marriage”; requiring clergy to “cease acting as agents of the civil government in performing marriages until such time as the clergy of the Diocese may officiate at the marriage of all legally eligible persons”; and a motion that, on the one hand, called for the Bishop’s Pastoral Letter on Human Sexuality (2010) to become an Episcopal guideline, while, on the other hand, seeming to advocate the principle of local option.

Overall the motions are, well, intriguing, ranging from the blessings for those already civilly married, as if the Church were to bless whatever the state has allowed, to forcing parishes and priests to declare themselves on this matter as if such things lay within the purview of either. Not to mention the idea of the clergy going on strike and refusing to marry anybody until everybody in the Church is compliant with what the state has determined are legal marriages. Once again, in this view the church is seen as subservient to the state and not independent.

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The Eastertide 2011 issue of the parish newsletter, Christ Church Chronicles, can be downloaded via this link as a pdf document. Previous issues can be downloaded via this page.

Fr. David Curry has collected his 2011 meditations for Lent and Holy Week into two documents, which are now available for downloading.

Click here to download “Original Sin: A Lenten Series (based on the Propers for the first four Sundays in Lent)”.

Click here to download “’What mean ye by this service?’ Meditations for Holy Week”.