Year: 2023

“For ye were sometimes darkness”

At first glance, it must seem that there can be no greater contrast than that between the Epistle reading from Ephesians and the Gospel reading from St. Luke. “For ye were sometimes darkness,” Paul tells us, while bidding us to “walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us,” bidding us to “walk as children of the light,” and not the darkness, the light which is given us by Christ, the light which reproves the things of darkness, the light which overcomes the darkness of sin and death. It signals hope and life, light and love. But the Gospel sounds a more sombre and disquieting note where the goodness of Christ is called evil and where, ultimately, “the last state of that man is worse than the first.” Where is the light in that?

It is, I think, in naming the darkness. The Gospel speaks prophetically and powerfully to the confusions and contradictions of our contemporary world. It is really a telling portrayal of nihilism, the sense of the empty meaninglessness of life. Why? Because of a despair of knowing, a despair of God that results in an intellectual and spiritual emptiness. There is, as is commonly noted, the problem of information overload in the digital culture of our time that only contributes to something more serious, a knowledge deficit, and even more, a loss of wisdom. T.S. Eliot’s verse pageant-play “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” (1934) offers a sustained critique of the intellectual and spiritual poverty of our world.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Information is not knowledge, and wisdom is more than knowledge, and while this is ancient truth, it is truth which we have forgotten. It is not simply that the Church is forgotten and no longer wanted but that the churches, too, have forgotten or ignored or denied what belongs to their essential being.

The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying
within and attacked from without;
For this is the law of life; and you must remember that while
there is time of prosperity
The people will neglect the Temple, and in time of adversity
they will decry it.

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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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