Christ Church

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”.

Click here to download the Rector’s Annual Report for 2010 (pdf document).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2009 can be accessed via this page.

Fr David Curry recently delivered an address at Trinity Church, Saint John, New Brunswick, on the occasion of the 225th anniversary of the City of Saint John. His topic was “Beyond Nostalgia: Theological Aspects of the Anglican Loyalist Experience”. The full text is available for download as a pdf document; here are two brief excerpts:

The Anglican Loyalist story is a way of recovering the grand and great narrative of the Christian story, what [David Bentley] Hart calls “the Christian revolution.” Getting the Christian story right, means overcoming all the false forms of that story, the distortions and misunderstandings about the history of Christianity, particularly, in relation to the account of modernity and contemporary culture. It means getting beyond our nostalgia for some particular aspects of our history, the shards and fragments to which we cling so desperately, in order to embrace a deeper nostalgia, a longing for the absolute, for God, which underlies, shapes and informs the Anglican Loyalist story.
[…]
It is in the context of the larger Christian story that we can begin to understand the Anglican Loyalist experience here in the Maritimes. Our endeavour will be to identify certain predominant features of the Loyalists. They are: the sense of Divine Providence as undergirding the commitment to peace, order and good government; the intrinsic connection between public worship and public service; the commitment to a learned ministry and to education; and idea of the Churches as sacramental presences contributing to the sanctity and the civility of common life. Underlying these themes is the necessity and importance of the stable liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, the spiritual manifesto of the Anglican Loyalist experience.

Click here to download the address as a pdf document.

This article by Fr. David Curry originally appeared in The Anglican Planet, 4 November 2010.

Post-Secularism: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
By David Curry

IS POST-SECULARISM just another buzz word — or is it, rather, a term that captures the global realities in which we find ourselves?

For several decades we have lived, at least in the western democracies, in what social scientists, political philosophers and theologians have called a ‘secular society.’  In 2007, Canada’s most outstanding philosopher, Charles Taylor, wrote a great tome entitled A Secular Age.  In this new reality, religion is understood to have lost its relevance and the divine seems to no longer hold any power of enchantment.

Then there is Jürgen Habermas, a leading European philosopher who describes himself as a ‘metaphysical atheist’. He has undertaken to explain the assumptions upon which ‘secularization theory’ rests and to provide the counter to them, both empirically and intellectually. As he puts it, secularization theory rests upon three, initially plausible, explanations, which he describes as follows:

First, progress in science and technology promotes an anthropocentric understanding of the ‘disenchanted’ world because the totality of empirical states and events can be causally explained; and a scientifically enlightened mind cannot be easily reconciled with theocentric and metaphysical worldviews.

This kind of technocratic arrogance assumes that things are always progressing and that science has become our religion, capable of explaining all reality and utterly dismissive of the older philosophical traditions, ancient and modern (think Aristotle and Descartes), that understood the physical to be grounded in something beyond the natural.

Second, with the functional differentiation of social subsystems, the churches and other religious organizations lose their control over law, politics, public welfare, education and science; they restrict themselves to their proper function of administering the means of salvation, turn exercising religion into a private matter and in general lose public influence and relevance.

In one way, this marks the success of religious institutions. In preaching social justice, they have been listened to by the state which has created the social welfare society. Religion is widely assumed to be a personal matter and no longer has a public voice. It has become marginalized.

Finally, the development from agrarian through industrial to post-industrial societies leads to average-to-higher levels of welfare and greater social security; and with a reduction of risks in life, and the ensuing increase in existential security, there is a drop in the personal need for a practice that promises to cope with uncontrolled contingencies through faith in a ‘higher’ or cosmic power (from Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, April 2008).

The demographic shifts from the rural to the urban, from the agrarian to the industrial, and now from the industrial to the post-industrial, capture the experience of several generations along with the general sense, at least until the economic debacle of 2008, that things are getting better for all concerned and that there is really nothing to worry about. We don’t need to think about God.

Overall, the secularist viewpoint assumes the imminent disappearance of religion in all secular societies. The one exception to the rule seems to be America. But now, as Habermas goes on to point out, the United States exemplifies what is, in fact, a global norm. Contrary to secularist dogma, religion is in fact a necessary and inescapable feature of the global landscape, even in the most ‘advanced’ secular societies which now struggle to come to terms with a variety of religious expressions that affect social and political life, most controversially, for instance, in France, in Holland and in England. Yet it is actually a concern for all of the western democracies.

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