Month: March 2023

1. “Hear, Read, Mark, Learn and Inwardly Digest”

One of the stained glass windows in the Chapel at King’s-Edgehill School depicts Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. It is based on Gerlach Flicke’s 1545 portrait of Cranmer which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, England. The painting captures the theological intent of the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer.

Cranmer is pictured reading a volume of the Epistles of St. Paul while before him on a table are two books, one title of which can be clearly seen. It is Augustine’s treatise De Fides et Operibus, on Faith and Works. As Diarmaid McCulloch suggests, this expresses the nature of the theological programme that underlies the enterprise of the Book(s) of Common Prayer. It would be about the primacy of the Scriptures understood through the best of Patristic scholarship, particularly Augustine; in short, a Protestant Augustinianism, as Ashley Null terms it, a distinct feature of the Reformed Theology of the Book of Common Prayer. Stephen Hampton argues that “the Reformed theological tradition is an essential ingredient in any conception of Anglicanism.” The Anglican Reformed tradition, he says, “continued to insist upon the evangelical teaching of justification by faith alone, upon the established scholastic way of expressing Trinitarian doctrine, and upon the broadly Thomist understanding of the divine nature which was shared by both Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians.”

That same intellectual and spiritual intent appears in a rather remarkable phenomena, the two Books of Homilies. Homilies refers to discourses delivered publicly; in short, sermons. The terms are more or less synonymous. These homilies or sermons were provided for the use of the clergy who were encouraged to read them at Divine Service. They are part of the reformed project in its sense of the centrality of the Scriptures and Doctrine. They also witness to a problem about literacy and education among the clergy and the desire to provide teaching in sound doctrine.

Article XXV of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion is unusual among reformed documents about doctrine and order in naming Homilies as belonging to doctrine and thus to the teaching life of the Church. It names the two books of homilies and provides the titles of the homilies contained in The Second Book of Homilies, though not the first. The First Book of Homilies was published in July 1547 just after the death of Henry VIII and thus in the early months of the reign of Edward VI; the second in 1563 during the reign of Elizabeth I. The Article speaks of them as containing “a godly and wholesome Doctrine, and necessary for these times” and judges them to be read in the Churches by the Ministers, diligently and distinctly, that they may be understanded of the people.” The phrase echoes Article XXIV about how “it is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God” for Public Prayer and the Sacraments to be administered “in a tongue not understanded of the people.” We are however not talking about street talk or slang but about what can be grasped and understood through instruction. Article XI, “Of the Justification of Man”, also refers to the Homily on Justification which is the third sermon in the First Book of Homilies, though entitled “a Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind, by only Christ our Saviour, From Sin and Death Everlasting.”

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“It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs”

There is all the difference in the world between wrestling with God and wrestling against God. And, perhaps, nowhere is that better illustrated than in this outstanding and yet disturbing Gospel story. Wrestling against God, we might say, belongs to the Temptations of Christ presented to us last Sunday. Wrestling against God is really about putting God to the test either by presuming to manipulate the natural world at the expense of its truth and integrity, turning stones into bread, as it were, the technological idolatry of our times that contributes to a kind of denaturing and a dehumanizing of ourselves, or seeking to be ourselves the ultimate authority and power of all reality, itself a repeat of the Fall, and a denial of our creatureliness and of God as creator, and, finally, as in Matthew’s account, the worship of ourselves which is really the worship of Satan, the worship of what is simply the negation and denial of God himself, the worship of what opposes God in its self-delusion. Wrestling against God is profoundly anti-human, anti-nature, and anti-God.

The Temptations of Christ are all a reworking of the great exodus themes of the trials of Israel in the wilderness. Exodus is the Greek term for going forth and is the Greek name for the Second Book of Moses, known in the Hebrew as Shemot, or Names. Numbers is the fourth Book of Moses but its Hebrew name means simply “In the wilderness”. The whole point of the exodus as recounted in the Torah and re-presented in Christ’s being “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness. to be tempted by the devil” is about learning through suffering; in particular, our learning through the sufferings of Christ for us and with us. He suffers our temptations to teach us the overcoming of temptation in him and not simply in us. It is an illumination at the same time as it reveals what needs to be purged in us, namely our false attachment to the things of ourselves and the world that negates their truth and being. It is only through our going with Christ into the wilderness that we learn the radical truth of ourselves as found in him.

Exodus complements The Odyssey of Homer which is about the homecoming of the Greek heroes from Troy. That homecoming is about discovering the order of the cosmos, the intellectual and spiritual structure of reality, in which we find our place. For the Greeks, our place in the cosmos is found in the polis, the community or city-state, so to speak. For the Hebrews, it is not so much about a place but about creation as grounded by definition in the will of God. The exodus journey is about an education that brings us to the Law, concretely and concisely expressed in the Ten Commandments. The Temptations of Christ recall us to the Law in countering the various forms of idolatry which are always about confusing the created with the Creator. In the Temptations we see the radical meaning of that confusion. It is Satan, the devil, the accuser and the tempter, who is defined by opposition and denial of the very principle of his own being and nature. He exists in contradiction to what is prior to himself.

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