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.

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.

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.

While this may sound like a purely good news story after years of supposed relentless secularization, it’s not so simple. The convergence of three phenomena contribute to what appears to be a world-wide resurgence of religion: (a) “the missionary expansion” with respect to all of the big five religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; (b) “fundamentalist radicalization” both in Islam and in Christianity; and (c) “the political instrumentalisation of the potential for violence innate in many of the world religions;” in short, what I would call, “the good, the bad and the ugly.”

With respect to missionary expansion, Habermas notes that the key factor is institutional flexibility and that in this regard the Protestant churches which are nationally organized are the least capable of adapting to the globalizing trend and are therefore the biggest losers. This is the reality which the Churches of the Anglican Communion face in North America, though not in the Global South.

The Anglican via media was once a term used to capture the balance of its reformed Catholicism. Now, it seems, the Anglican Communion is caught in a middle that is really a muddle between the transnational and multicultural aspects of its Communion, on the one hand, and the autonomy of the national churches, particularly in North America, on the other. The latter have steadily undermined the decentralized aspects of their history, polity and mission through the creation and dominance of centralized bureaucracies. Paradoxically the transnational and multicultural aspects of Roman Catholicism and the decentralized networks of evangelicals are the ones best capable of engaging the global world of religious resurgence.

There remain, of course, the strong advocates of secularism. The popular works of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens delight the secular atheists, for instance, as do the recent pronouncements of Stephen Hawking that God is not needed “to light the blue torch paper and set the Universe going”. The image suggests a remarkable philosophical naiveté for such a noted physicist. After all, where did the blue torch paper, let alone the match, come from, to use his arresting metaphor? Rowan Williams, Jonathan Sacks and Ibrahim Mogra – Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders respectively – note the philosophical weakness of Hawking’s claim of the universe’s random origins (The Times, Sept. 3rd). It doesn’t and can’t answer the religious and philosophic question about why there is anything rather than nothing.

Dawkins, Hitchens and now Hawking “protest, methinks, too much.” They perpetuate what is, in my view, a false dichotomy between science and religion. They do so, I suspect, out of a not unreasonable distaste (and outright hostility) to the institutional forms of organized religion. Dawkins, after all, wants to have Pope Benedict arrested when he visits England and prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Their voices seem extreme and reactionary. But what are they reacting against?

I would say the re-emergence of religion, “the good, the bad and the ugly.”

In other words, the secularization theory no longer holds as an inevitable historical necessity. Hitchens, a disenchanted Marxist, hasn’t really given up on historical and material determinism, while the biologist Dawkins and the physicist Hawking equally want to hold to the random and the accidental as the basis for science. God should not be invoked in the physics lab to account for the way things work (a pause for God, as it were). But the reality that things are and are knowable is the philosophical and theological assumption upon which science itself depends.

Radical Orthodoxy, the contemporary theological movement which is rabidly anti-secular, is surely right about at least one thing: the inability of modern science to account for its own disciplines apart from the theological world, especially in the West, that gave them birth and without which they lack compelling explanatory force. To explain how something works doesn’t explain why it exists or how it is knowable. That is a philosophical and theological question and one which goes to the quest for meaning. To say, as Dawkins claims Darwin does for biology and as Hawking does for physics, that existence is random is as dogmatic and hypothetical a statement as anything that religion postulates. And is it not passing strange that the intelligible universe should have its origins in what is, in principle, unintelligible?

The complexities of our contemporary global world mean that a more respectful engagement between “the secularists” and “the religionists” is required. This is what Habermas means by a post-secular society. It is one where secularists have to move beyond the narrowness of assumptions about religion and come to terms with the post-modern critiques of reason just as the religionists have to come to terms with the various forms of secularism. Secular society does not mean either the eradication of religion or the privatization of religion. Habermas notes that churches and religious organizations increasingly have a role in public life as “communities of interpretation.” At issue, then, are the principles which inform the Church’s understanding of the Word in its encounter with contemporary culture. How to account for the contemporary secular means coming to terms with the sacred.

Both Habermas and Taylor argue for the emergence of the modern constitutional state as “the response to the confessional wars of early modernity.” To my mind, this is too negative a view of the origins of the constitutional state and the consequent emergence of secular society. It downplays or overlooks the principles of unity and diversity inherent in the theological teachings, principally, though not exclusively, of western Christianity in and through its long, historical engagement with Jews and Muslims.

How we deal politically with differences of race, religion and sex in the face of the economic is wonderfully explored, for instance, by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice who points towards the possibilities of constitutional polities also hinted at in his play The Tempest. It is not too much to say that the re-evaluation of contemporary society as post-secular requires a more positive account of the secular as well as the sacred. Perhaps, then “the good” will far outweigh “the bad and the ugly” in the re-emergence of religion.

The Rev’d David Curry is Rector of Christ Church, Windsor, NS, and Chaplain and Teacher (English & Philosophy) at King’s-Edgehill School in Windsor.

A raft of books dealing with the King James Version of the Bible – 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. Among publishers’ phantasmagoria of biblical translations available in bookstores, it is still possible to find the King James Version of the Holy Scriptures. But is it being read? Is it being heard?

The Pocket Canons is another project that calls attention to the significance of the King James Bible. A publishing initiative by Grove Press, New York, books of the King James Version of the Bible are published individually in small volumes, each 4 1/8” by 5 5/8” in size. They can also be purchased in box sets; thus far two sets are available covering a range of Old and New Testament books. But what is really outstanding and of interest is the way this initiative undertakes to engage contemporary culture in all its diversity. Each volume is provided with an introduction by a contemporary writer.

The range of writers is remarkable. They include such figures as P.D. James writing on The Acts of the Apostles – an interesting twist on the genre of the whodunit; Charles Frazier of the novel Cold Mountain, now a movie, writing about another struggle of epic proportions, the struggles of Job; the novelist, non-fiction and short-story writer Doris Lessing on Ecclesiastes; the author, poet, journalist and literary critic par excellence of The Spectator and the Sunday Times, Peter Ackroyd on the Book of Isaiah; the Dalai Lama on the Epistles of James, Peter, John and Jude; novelist Joanna Trollope on the books of Ruth and Esther; the mystery writer Ruth Rendell on The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans; Karen Armstrong, famed for, among other things, The History of God, writing on The Letter to the Hebrews; Thomas Cahill, author of such books as The Gift of the Jews, The Desire of the Everlasting Hills, How the Irish Saved Civilisation, and Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter writing on The Gospel according to John; and without exhausting the list of writers but bringing it to some sort of finale, last but not least, singer and writer, humanitarian and activist and sometime court jester at the coronation of Paul Martin, Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono of the rock-band U2 writing, appropriately enough, on the Psalms!

Intrigued? You should be for what is on offer through these writers is more than Oprah fluff and puff. Here are some pretty high-powered writers engaging in a lively, serious and reflective manner with the most formative translation of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament in the English speaking world. What is amazing is the depth of the engagement. They are not biblical scholars, mercifully, but they more than do the job of providing informative and satisfactory introductions to the often very complex texts that are before them. Along the way they reveal, if not a yearning, then at least, an openness to the sacred and a profound respect for the language of revelation and its formative power that reaches, thankfully, beyond institutional religion to literature and the arts. Paradoxically, that reach of the transforming Word is often through exposure to the Word proclaimed in the life of the Church.

Doris Lessing, admitting that she hadn’t really read Ecclesiastes before her assignment, nonetheless recalls the formative experience of hearing “the thunderous magnificence of this prose” for the generations for whom church attendance was obligatory and frequent. Her father said that Sunday – Church three times plus Sunday School – “was like a great black hole every week, but… listening to the prose of the Bible and the prayer book …taught him to love language and good literature”.

Bono, growing up in Ireland during “the troubles”, the son of a Protestant mother and a Catholic father, recognized that “the Prods”, as he puts it, “had the better tunes and the Catholics had the better stage-gear” and recalled that “at age 12, I was a fan of David, he felt familiar…like a pop star could feel familiar”. “The words of the psalms”, as he says, “were as poetic as they were religious”. David “was a star”. Bono explains that “words and music” did for him “what solid, even rigorous, religious argument could never do, they introduced me to God”, though not necessarily to “belief in God” but “more [to] an experiential sense of God”. Once again, though, there is the paradox of being exposed to the words and music through the Church – whether Protestant or Catholic – and even to the doctrine conveyed on the wings of the word.

“No organization with which human beings are concerned, even one divinely ordained or inspired, is ever free from controversy”, Dame P. D. James observes about the Church as it emerges from that book of controversy, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, words which surely speak to our own day. The same can be said about the Scriptures themselves, of course, and yet, as Peter Ackroyd points out about The Book of Isaiah, which “incorporates the voices of many authors in a tradition of oral poetry”, it has a kind of unity “representative of the Bible itself”. As to the question about the Bible as literature versus the Bible as sacred text, he notes by way of Coleridge that “there is no necessary distinction between the two since the highest poetry is always a manifestation of the sacred, while the most sacred insights will necessarily take on the vesture of poetry”. God is the poet, the great maker of all, whose Word is poetry and doctrine.

Such sensibilities suggest that there is more in the secular culture than simply an antipathy towards the sacred. They also challenge the Church about the form and the content of the Word which she is charged to proclaim and present.

It might be said that these introductions are mere pot-boilers, but if so, ‘tis no mean pot that serves up so a rich feast. We may wonder whether the contemporary church has not exchanged the richness of its legacy for a mess of potage in forsaking the aural feast of God’s word in the King James’ Version of the Bible that has so caught the imaginations of these writers.

It is there, of course, to be remembered. Like ‘40’, the last track on U2’s album War, a song based on Psalm 40 with a refrain from Psalm 6, “’How long’ (to sing this song)”, we may find in the witness of the Scriptures the deepest yearnings of our souls. As Bono puts it, “I had thought of it as a nagging question – pulling at the hem of an invisible deity whose presence we glimpse only when we act in love. How long… hunger? How long…hatred? How long until creation grows up and the chaos of its precocious, hell-bent adolescence has been discarded?” How long, indeed, how long?

The Primacy of Doctrine

“How came we ashore”, asks Miranda in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, having heard the litany of betrayal and deceit that exiled her and her father from Milan. “By Providence divine”, replies Prospero, himself the victim of the machinations of others but also aware of his own neglect of what belonged to his ducal office. Well, we have just heard powerfully and prophetically from David Short about the litany of betrayal and deceit, confusion and disarray, that brings us to this conference and this moment.

But I want to suggest that there is a wonderful providence, too, that brings us ashore, that brings us to this moment, a wonderful providence that is at work in the Anglican Communion. And it is not about who shouts the loudest, not about who holds the power cards, not about who has title and who has not. No. It is about the recovery of the doctrinal mind of the Anglican Communion. And if we are not part of that, make no mistake, we are nothing and nothing worth.

Doctrine, not praxis, though doctrine should shape and measure our actions. Doctrine, not process thinking, though doctrine should guide and direct our thinking. Doctrine, yeah! Just what you came to hear about, right? “These are a few of your favourite things” (I’ve always wanted to sing in Roy Thompson Hall!) But whether this is something which is your favourite thing or not, doctrine is the unum necessarium, the one thing necessary, without which we are nothing and nothing worth. The wonderful providence at work in the Anglican Communion is about the possibility of thinking again what belongs to our true and collective identity in the body of Christ. But we have to think it.

If we do not keep before us, front and centre, the teaching of the Church, the teaching which we have received through the witness of the Scriptures faithfully transmitted down through the centuries by the power of the Spirit in the ordered life of the Church, then we are nothing. If we do not hold ourselves accountable to the doctrines that define us, then we become the betrayers of Christ and his Church.

Betrayals, of course, are everywhere. They are built into the witness and the wonder of the Christian Faith. Yet, more than anything else, perhaps, we resist the spectacle of our own betrayals. “Behold, a door was opened in heaven”, as was proclaimed for centuries as the lesson on Trinity Sunday. In so many ways, we have tried to close that door, the door that opens us out to the wonder and the mystery of the triune God and to the vision of our humanity restored, redeemed and sanctified. Like Nicodemus, we have to be born again, born literally from above; in short, to be thinking upwards. “If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not; how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?”, Jesus says, pointing suggestively to a twofold problem.

For in our refusal to attend to the “heavenly things”, revealed in the witness of the Scriptures, our perspective and understanding of “earthly things” is distorted, too. We are closed to the pageant of redemption, to the gathering of all things back to God in prayer and praise.

We have to live the vision. It means thinking upwards. The work of gathering all things back to God in prayer and praise is a work of intellection, an activity of the understanding. It means thinking the doctrines of the Faith and the way in which we have received them authoritatively in our own Anglican tradition. These are the things that bind us to the Church Universal, the things of orthodoxy, meaning right belief or right worship, without which there can be no mission, no life, no church.

In many ways, we have got it all backwards and we have for quite some time. If we have been thinking at all, and there seems to be some suspicion about thinking at all, then we have been thinking downwards. The right impulse to engage the world and the culture in which we find ourselves has often resulted in collapsing the Gospel into the world, making it conform to the categories of expression and experience belonging to the social and political agendas of the day. The drive to engage has meant accommodations to the culture that have emptied the doctrines of the Faith of their distinctive meaning and robbed them of their vital force.

Just recently, an American theologian, Philip Turner, has observed that the doctrine of redemption has been supplanted by what is really a false doctrine, the doctrine of acceptance. Accepting one another (quote-unquote) “for who you are” indiscriminately is not only cynical and patronizing but often overlooks what belongs to the truth and dignity of our common humanity. More importantly, it ignores what belongs to the redemption of our humanity, to that great something more which Christ reveals to us through the witness of the Scriptures, namely that we have an end with God.

The purpose of our being is our being with Christ and that means the upward call of our humanity to be what we behold in him. God reaches down to us, to be sure, but only so as to lift us up to him. It signals the necessity of transformation and change, the call to holiness of life. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds.”

“God is love and he that abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.” We have our abiding in the abiding love of the God who is Trinity. This passage is the recurring refrain of the Trinity season. You have probably heard it a thousand times. It is about our Trinitarian identity, our life in the communion of God. The phrase “God is love” does not mean “Gentle-Jesus-Come-and-Squeeze-Us-Where-and-When-It-Pleases”!

The consequences are profound. When our hearts and minds are not in sync – not connected – to the essential doctrines of the Faith as we have received them, then there is a shipwreck of the body.

I have mentioned the doctrine of the Trinity. It is the great and distinctive doctrine of the Christian Faith which gives coherence and meaning to all other doctrines. It is not about some arid abstract speculation by a bunch of ecclesiastical eggheads with long-beards (or not) from some by-gone era. It is about nothing less than the reality of the living God. It is about nothing less than the living, vital and even practical reality of our life together in the body of Christ. It is the Mystery which we cannot exhaust, the Mystery which we cannot take captive to our finite minds and imprison by our ingenuity. To the contrary, it is the Mystery which takes our minds captive to itself. We cannot not think it.

“He therefore that would be saved let him thus think of the Trinity” – think of it in this way. What way is that? It is the way of negative theology (apophatic), on the one hand, how God is utterly unlike everything in the world, and the way of positive or affirmative theology (cataphatic), on the other hand, how God is related to everything in the world as its cause and principle but without being collapsed into the world. This, my friends, is to think upwards. It is to think the doctrine that gives cogency and coherence to the various images of God in the witness of the Scriptures. “No one has ever seen God. The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known”, literally exegeted him. It is the only time that exegesis is used in reference to God.

Now, I don’t really want to know and I am afraid to ask how many of you have ever read The Creed of St. Athanasius (so-called), let alone recited it liturgically even once in your lives. And I know, pastorally speaking, it is pretty challenging and yet there it is as one of the three great Catholic Creeds of the Western Church of which we are a part and to which we are committed by the formularies which constitute the doctrinal magisterium for Anglicans: The Book of Common Prayer, The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, The Ordinal, and for us in Canada and by way of deference to those things, The Solemn Declaration of 1893. We neglect these things at our peril.

And for years, these things that constitute the doctrinal magisterium for Anglican Christians have been dismissed, derided and denied. But without them, we cannot be a full and integral part of the One, Holy, and Apostolic Church. Without them we cannot speak of the Scriptures as Holy Writ. Without them, we cannot make sense of what is revealed in the witness of the Scriptures.

Without them, we have no mission. Without them, we are a shipwreck. Whether it is as the Network or the Federation or as priests and people struggling to be faithful wherever God in his Providence has been pleased to place us, our task is to reclaim the doctrinal magisterium of our Anglican tradition, for it is through such things and not otherwise, that the Orthodox Christian Faith has been mediated to us.

Orthodoxy is not about pat answers glibly trucked out in a patter of pious talk. It is about a firm and genuine way of thinking the questions of our day by gathering them into the Revelation of God. And in our Anglican heritage, too, it is about a gracious way of living out the Christian Faith in lives of service and sacrifice, in lives of prayer and praise, in lives of study and devotion that bear witness to the transforming, redeeming and sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit. But it cannot be assumed. It cannot be taken for granted. We have to be constantly thinking upon the doctrines of the Faith. If we don’t, then we are thinking away from them.

There is importantly a hierarchy of doctrine: three areas that are inter-related and distinct. There are matters of essential doctrine; there are matters of order and polity; there are matters of moral order.

With respect to the first, there are the governing principles that define the orthodox Faith. There is the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the Incarnation, the doctrine of Creation, Redemption and Sanctification, all wonderfully, concisely and coherently expressed in the Creeds and embodied authoritatively in a vital and living way in the liturgy that is The Book of Common Prayer to which all “alternative” liturgies are properly subject, and further attested to in The Thirty-nine Articles of Religion.

The Creeds, of course, are the distillation (like good Scotch) of what the Scriptures teach, and provide, in turn, a way of thinking the Scriptures. In other words, they come out of the Scriptures and return us to them in a pattern of thinking and living.

With respect to the second, matters of order and polity, there are governing principles that guide and direct the order and life of the Church, for the fellowship of the faithful. The Church, in fact, is a Trinitarian fellowship and here we see, yet again, the formative nature of doctrine. The Church is “the family of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Spirit” (Supplementary Instruction, The Catechism, BCP, p. 552). As Anglicans, moreover, we are committed to a three-fold order of ministry, the ministry of deacons, priests and bishops, and to a ministry that exists to hand on faithfully the Apostolic Faith and that commits itself to the Universal Church. The doctrine of orders and the polity of the Church is expressed most authoritatively in The Ordinal and The Thirty-nine Articles and these principles are further underscored by The Solemn Declaration of 1893 which commits the Canadian Church to being an integral portion of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church by being “in full communion with the Church of England throughout the world”. This expresses clearly and unambiguously the constitutional limits to episcopal and synodical authority.

The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, which the Canadian House of Bishops seems to want to hide behind, is something else. Its purpose was to establish the doctrinal principles by which the Anglican Churches of the Communion would undertake to relate ecumenically with other non-Anglican Churches. It is a curious irony that it should be invoked to justify the autonomy of certain Anglican Churches within the Communion! Autonomy, by the way, as The Windsor Report acknowledges, properly refers to the independence of the Church from the State in certain civil and political situations. The autonomy of the various churches of the Communion does not and cannot extend to matters of doctrine as was implicitly recognized by the question raised at General Synod about the doctrinal status of the blessing of same-sex couples.

With respect to the third area of doctrine, the matter of moral order, there are the teachings that define and order our lives in Faith, among which is the doctrine of marriage. Once again, we may note the formative qualities of the principle or essential doctrines of the Faith expressed in the Creed which govern how and in what way we think about our lives morally. There is the doctrine of the Trinity for we are called to life with God. There are the doctrines of Creation, Redemption and Sanctification which provide the primary categories for the understanding of our humanity and above all else, there is the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins which is the main avenue of approach to all matters of morality for Christians.

When we compromise any of these teachings in any of these areas, there is a shipwreck of the body. With respect to the presenting issue before the Anglican Communion of the blessing of same-sex couples, it suffices to say that there is a clear and distinct doctrine of marriage which we have received. The three reasons for marriage as something divinely instituted “in the time of man’s innocency” as the Canadian Book of Common Prayer puts it, are essential to its character and in no way optional.

But perhaps the greatest tragedy and even the greatest betrayal in our current situation is the betrayal of friendship – our friendship with Christ and with one another, the blessings of friendship and fellowship in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Our tragedy is the inability to think the distinction between the doctrine of marriage, on the one hand, and the blessing of friendships, on the other hand, without collapsing them into one another. Friendships are betrayed when they are made equivalent to something which they are not and marriage, too, is betrayed when it is reduced to friendship. We can only begin to think through these questions by way of the doctrines which we have received.

What is God doing? He is calling us to account, to repentance and to renewal. It means that we have to confront our betrayals, our betrayals of Christ and one another.

I end, even as I began, with The Tempest. In the play, the betrayers of Prospero are convicted of their betrayals by means of a play – like the liturgy, we might say. “Ye are three men of sin”, Ariel announces. In the play, there is another play, like the liturgy again, we might say, that instructs Ferdinand and Miranda about the nature and the fruitfulness of marriage. And in the play, again like the liturgy, there is the most wonderful restoration of friendship and fellowship through the power and grace of forgiveness. And finally, there is a growing up into thought. “I’ll be wise hereafter”, says Caliban, “and seek for grace”. May it be so with us, for only through such a growing up into grace and thought can there be “a sea-change into something rich and strange”, into the wonder and the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

“How came we ashore?…By Providence divine”, for “grace”, indeed, “is everywhere” (Bernanos).

Fr. David Curry
The Open Door Conference
Toronto, ON
June 16th, 2005

In the light of the present controversy within the Anglican Communion, particularly about the blessing of same-sex couples, The Parish of Christ Church states the following theological position:

that, The Parish of Christ Church upholds the classical understanding of Christian marriage as articulated in The Book of Common Prayer (Cdn., 1962); in particular, that marriage is the sanctified union of a man and a woman;

that, The Parish of Christ Church recognises that friendships are a blessing but finds no warrant in Scripture or Tradition for any equivalence between the blessing of friends and Christian marriage;

that, The Parish of Christ Church welcomes all people to the Church as the refuge of sinners regardless of any particular form of self-definition but without requiring the acceptance of any other category of definition about our humanity than what clearly belongs to the doctrines of creation, redemption or sanctification, namely, as male and female, as sinners seeking redeeming grace, and the sanctified states of life as single or married, lay or ordained.

Passed unanimously by the Parish Council of the Corporation of the Parish of Christ Church on Tuesday, October 14, 2003.