by CCW | 29 October 2026 08:00
Notes on Fr. Tom Plant’s King Oswald’s Heirs:
Meditations on the Catechism of the English Church,
Session # 2, Ch.12-21, pp. 124-228.
Fr. Plant’s project of our re-enchantment of the Good happens by the Good; in short, by the movement of God’s grace seeking the perfection of our wounded and broken humanity. Our session tonight, providentially on the Feast of SS. Simon & Jude which marks the completion of the cycle of the Apostolic Saints in the liturgical year, takes us through the rest of the Apostles’ Creed. We begin with the theology of atonement in the Passion of Christ, his Resurrection and Ascension, the Descent of the Holy Spirit bringing life and order to the Church, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting. He takes us through these articles of the Faith in a wonderfully imaginative and creative way through the logos of mythos, the meaning or reason and truth of the images in a number of stories that belong to the culture and history of the English Church. These relate in various ways to the overcoming of the dragons and demons in our own souls and world by showing us the triumph of the Good itself in and through suffering and tribulation, the sufferings and tribulations of Christ and ours as joined to his in what he suffers for us.
The opening chapter (12) for our session captures this overarching theme: “Love as strong as death,” meditating on Christ who “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.” It is a very fine reflection on suffering and sin and its overcoming through the sacrifice of Christ. It offers a well-expressed theological argument that counters the common complaint about the goodness and almighty power of God that is often thought to be contradicted by the fact of suffering and death, of sin and evil. But our human ways of thinking stand in complete contrast to God’s ways “whose ways are higher than ours and whose thoughts are higher than ours.” This speaks to some of the confusions at the Saturday WORCs Quiet Day, I think, in the felt tension between the transcendence and the immanence of God. This is a kind of false dichotomy that leaves things in an unresolved tension and opposition which is very different from the interplay and dance of kataphatic and apophatic theology. God is God in se and per se, on the one hand, and as such utterly beyond and unreducible to human reasoning, but God is also all in all, on the other hand.
Those two moments are united in God. God is not collapsed into the world nor the world into God. Fr. Plant shows how Christ’s suffering, his passion, is not passive but the active movement of the absolute goodness of God in reconciling his sinful creation – us – to himself. It is all about reconciliation or recapitulation, the gathering of all things back to God. This is the theology of atonement, our being made at one with God through Christ’s bearing our sins and overcoming all evil past, present and future in himself, something which we cannot do. We can at best be only aware of how we have separated ourselves from the very good that we seek and thus know that we are powerless of ourselves to help ourselves. Hence the love of God made visible in the sacrifice of Christ that changes the very nature of suffering. God makes something good out of our evil and out of our suffering. As the philosopher Michel Henry notes, “Blessed are those that suffer!” That is the kind of radical insight that Fr. Plant also presents.
Fr. Crouse pointed out the modern problematic about the atonement in his assessment of the Lundensian school (Swedish Theologians such as Gustave Aulén and Anders Nygren both of whom influenced the Anglican Fr. A. G. Hebert) that claimed that there are three distinct and opposed theories of the atonement. There is the classical theory of Christus Victor, which sees redemption as the work of Christ as God, the Anselmian theory of forensic or legalistic teaching which sees it as the work of Christ as Man, and the more subjective or moralistic & exemplarist view associated with Enlightenment liberalism, though anticipated by Abelard.
As Fr. Crouse puts it, all three are present in Scripture and the Fathers and, perhaps, most clearly in Augustine.
But there is a true Mediator, whom in your secret mercy you have shown to men. You sent him so that by his example they too might learn humility. He is the “Mediator between God and men, Jesus Christ, who is a man” (1 Tim. 2:5), and he appeared on earth between men, who are sinful and mortal, and God, who is immortal and just. Like men he was mortal: like God, he was just. And because the reward of the just is life and peace, he came so that by his own justice, which is his in union with god, he might make null the death of the wicked whom he justified, by choosing to share their death. He was known to holy men in ancient time, so that they might be saved through faith in his passion to come, just as we are saved through faith in the passion he suffered long ago. For as man, he is our Mediator; but as the Word of God, he is not an intermediary between God and man because he is equal with God, and God with God and together with him one God. (Conf. X, 43, and De Trinitate IV, 13,17).
As he notes, all three theories are clearly there in the language of “divine justitia, propitiatory and substitutionary sacrifice, and satisfaction.”
The patristic doctrine of redemption is not “classic” or propitiatory, or exemplary; it is all of those at once, as is the doctrine of the Scriptures. To exclude one dimension or another is to diminish its truth and its power. It is not “objective” or “subjective”; it is both at once. It is not the work of Christ as Son of God or of Christ as Son of Man; it is the work of Christ who is both God and man in distinction of natures and unity of person. Indeed, the full development of the patristic understanding of the atonement depends upon the working out of the Chalcedonian understanding of the integrity of the divine and human natures in Christ.
Fr. Plant refers us to Article II of the 39 Articles of Religion that captures this sensibility as well. As he says, “Christ, indivisibly man and God, truly suffered on the Cross. The purpose of this suffering was ‘to reconcile his father to us;’ the reason it was necessary was for our sins, both actual and inherited. His sacrifice was part of the suffering of sin and its consequence, death”(p. 126). Thus, quoting John of Damascus, “suffering is common to and affects our whole race.” And building on this theme of redemption and atonement through the God/man Christ, he reminds us that “the history of humanity shows that we are incapable of defeating the Devil by our own designs. To fight back, a man was needed ‘in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin’” (Heb. 4.15), p. 127.
Along with Fr. Plant’s emphasis on the image of battling dragons and demons, Fr. Crouse notes that for Augustine, “the work of Christ is a triumph over demons and all the powers of darkness; certainly, Christ is our salvific example, especially in his great humility.” Both the classic and subjective views of the atonement “are not alternative or opposed theories for Augustine, nor for the Fathers generally; they are aspects, and indeed necessary aspects, of one doctrine of redemption through the sacrifice of Christ.”
As Fr. Plant says, “The witness of suffering is the seed of compassion; endurance of suffering is a school of love. And love is the beginning and end of Christian faith … By joining Christ’s suffering, we attain to the fulness of His friendship, the friendship of God,” which is also friendship with the Good. This chapter provides much of the theological ground for what follows in the other chapters wherein he blends together poetry and philosophical theology.
Chapter 13 is entitled A Maiden in the Dragon’s Maw which examines “He descended into Hell” through the story of Margaret of Antioch, who became a popular saint in England. Her story is told as an illustration of Christ’s descent into Hell. He notes the associations with the legends of Margaret and the Book of Jonah, and passages from Job, Isaiah, and the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf. In a way, like St. Margaret’s tale and Jonah’s, they are all “retellings, even relivings, of Christ’s descent into hell” and serve to strengthen us in the power of the Cross even in the face of what he calls “the winding diabolical bowels of modern systems (p. 139);” in short, the dragons of “technocratic totalitarianism”.
Chapter 14, The Young Warrior Awoke, offers a dynamic vision of Christ’s Resurrection drawing on literary references to Eleanor Parker’s The Descent into Hell, from which he takes his title for the Chapter and Cynewulf’s Christ II,which is a reworking of a homily on the Ascension by Gregory the Great. He notes the significance of the days of the week, particularly in the Jewish reckoning, and makes some lovely connections between such events as the Wedding of Cana and the work of the sixth day, the creation of our humanity, male and female, and connects both to the eucharist. Such associations and connections are at once delightful, informative, and insightful and reveal the play of poetry and philosophy.
Chapter 15, The Black Cap, (an image of judges?) reflects on the necessity of judgement by way of the ascension, session and judgement of Christ. He does so partly by way of an explanation of some of the hard sayings of the Creed of Athanasius by showing their ground in the words of Christ.
Chapter 16 entitled New Babel treats “I believe in the Holy Ghost” and offers a nice excursus on Spirit as the Wind and Breath of God that helps us, hard as that may be, to reclaim the mindset of those who saw themselves as “part of the action of a cosmos which is as spiritual as it is physical.” This is another example of challenging incomplete or partial divisions and tensions and transcending them without negating them. As the title suggests, the focus is on the story of the tower of Babel seen in relation to Pentecost as “the reversal of Babel.” But along with Genesis, interestingly, he references a lovely passage from the Book of Jubilees! (p. 159).
Chapter 17, No Innovation, provides a full apologia of the Church in the creedal article, “the Holy Catholic Church” which offers a good overview and defense of the English Church not as a new church, hence no innovations, but to its reformation in continuity with the consensus fidelium of the Church Universal, nicely encapsulated in the English Ordinal in words which for us in Canada echo The Solemn Declaration of 1893. It commits the Church of England in Canada to being “an integral portion of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.” He unpacks quite usefully howthe Church is One and how the Church of England claims to be part of the One Church, and what it means to say the Church is Holy and Catholic, but only “as long as we stay true to the Catholic and Apostolic faith” (p. 172). He is very clear and direct about our current difficulties and divisions within and between the churches of the Anglican communion.
Chapter 18 on Prayer of the Church provides a nice summary of a number of critical moments about the history, emergence and significance of The Book of Common Prayer which undertakes to locate it within the wider catholic and apostolic tradition, capable of yielding “great spiritual fruits” and “rightly reckoned chief among the treasures of the Anglican way” (p. 199).
This leads into Chapter 19, The Holt House on “the communion of saints” by way of a meditation on the Shrine of Walsingham as one of “the places where the chief of saints, the Blessed Virgin Mary, has been known to visit,” at least in terms of the legends and stories that belong to the traditions of Marian devotion, including the forms of Anglican Marian devotion. Here he draws upon various aspects and figures in Church History such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Augustine, and reformers such as Hugh Latimer, and poets such as Henry Vaughn who refers to Mary as “the true Loves-knot” by whom “God is made our Allie.” The image of love-knot is one which Lancelot Andrewes used to talk about the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Father and the Son and to the union of the divinity and humanity of Christ and to Christ and the Church.
Chapter 20 is entitled Burning Guy and uses the imagery of Guy Fawkes and the traditions that arose later after the Gunpowder Plot (1605), a most momentous event in English history. Here he uses that image in the unpacking of “the forgiveness of sins” and the importance and meaning of repentance as metanoia which he defines as “a reorientation of the heart toward God.” In a more literal way, it is about our thinking after or following God’s thinking but as a returning to him from whom we have turned away. In that sense, it is the redemption of our minds, our coming to ourselves (like the Prodigal Son). But this requires the disciplines of our participation in Christ’s saving work.
This leads to Chapter 21, He Deifieth Me, a meditation on “the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.” Drawing on the 17th century poet, Thomas Traherne, and the poetic preacher, Lancelot Andrewes, and the 19th century Oxford Movement figure of E.B. Pusey, Fr. Plant points us to what we seek as the ultimate good of our humanity individually and collectively as presented in the last two articles of the Apostles’ Creed. It is nothing less than “our dwelling in God by his dwelling in us,” as Pusey puts it; nothing less than our being made “partakers of the Divine Nature,” as 2 Peter 1.4 puts it, nothing less than what Andrewes says about our “taking part with Christ in that which he took part in with us” how “he by ours became consors humanae naturae, so we by His might become consortes Divinae naturae.” Wonderful and, as Fr. Plant rightly notes, the mystery of theosis is connected with the eucharist. He ends this chapter and thus the treatment of the Creed in the Catechism with the following words.
Our goal as Christians is to become saints, to be transformed into the likeness of Christ, and by Resurrection of our bodies to share in the very life of the Holy Spirit, p. 228.
This part of our study ends on the note of theosis or deification, the counter to the threatening forms of demons and dragons that Christ has overcome for our good and his glory.
Fr. David Curry
2nd Session
Oct. 28th, 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/10/29/notes-on-the-catechism-part-2/
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