Category: Theology

Theology

Who Are the Fathers?

Who are the Fathers?

Even within (or despite) the narrowing confines of the “age of political correctness”, the term “the Fathers” (Patres) retains an unmistakable, almost magical hold on our imaginations. It evokes a larger world, a universe of doctrine, at once authoritative and compelling in spite of its strangeness, mystical in its remoteness and yet, like all things mystical, near. Very near.

The Fathers are very much with us. If we are strangers to them, it is only because we have estranged ourselves from the “consensus patrum” so essential to the understanding of the Christian faith; in short, to the “consensus fidelium” of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Fathers, in no small measure, are the definitive voices of the essential catholicism of the Christian faith.

There are as well the mothers, too, such as the Cappadocian women: the grandmother of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, Macrina the Elder, their mother Emelia, their older sister, Macrina the Younger; Gregory of Nazianzen’s mother Nonna, his sister Gorgonia, and Basil’s two younger sisters. These women are understood to have contributed to the spiritual themes of deification and monastic devotion in the Cappadocian Fathers. And there is Anthusa, the mother of John Chrysostom, and, of course, there is Monica, the mother of Augustine who figures prominently in his Confessions.There are other important figures such as St. Perpetua and Felicitas, and the 4th century Etheria (or Egeria), famous for her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in her account, The Pilgrimage of Etheria. To name but a few.

Scripture and Creeds, Councils and Controversies, Traditions and Polities, Liturgies and Prayers – we cannot think any of these things apart from the Fathers in this broader sense. Without them, we cannot begin to say what the Faith is, let alone think it. They would have us think and to think in their company, the company of the Fathers.

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Theology

Advent Programme I: Ethics & Ecclesiastes

Advent Programme at Christ Church 2025
Ethics & Ecclesiastes (Dec 2nd) and Wisdom (O Sapientia – Dec. 16th)
Fr. David Curry

Why Ecclesiastes and why The Book of Wisdom, you may ask? And why Ethics? Let me attempt an explanation. In the Providence of God this Fall, the weekly readings for the Week of the 22nd Sunday after Trinity brought us to the Sunday Next Before Advent. In the Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer we read through the whole of Ecclesiastes and at Mattins on the Sunday Next Before Advent, we read the last two chapters of Ecclesiastes, which are always read at Mattins on that Sunday regardless of the length of the Trinity Season and whatever office readings followed from the last Sunday after Trinity in any given year. Yet this year we had the whole of Ecclesiastes to read and to lead us into the end and beginning of the Church Year. And why Ethics? Because The Book of Ecclesiastes raises the important question about Ethics, namely, about the highest or greatest good for our humanity and thus belongs to the purpose of Revelation. I am drawing upon lectures on Ethics which I have delivered over many years in The Theory of Knowledge course in the IB programme, though minus the wonderful cartoons of Calvin and Hobbes on matters of ethical thinking.

The American philosopher, Peter Kreeft, in his book Three Philosophies of Life: Ecclesiastes, Life as Vanity, Job, Life as Suffering, and the Song of Songs, Life as Love makes a nice analogy to Dante’s threefold division of his spiritual classic, the Divine Comedy – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso by suggesting that Ecclesiastes in its remarkable treatment of boredom and vanity relates to the Inferno, the Book of Job to the Purgatorio in the positive and redemptive forms of suffering, and the Song of Songs to the Paradiso in the movement of love that perfects and restores all things to their unity in God. Dante himself suggests that the purpose of the Commedia is to lead us “from misery to felicity” or blessedness. All three biblical books belong to Wisdom literature and, especially, it seems to me, to the examination of the ethical.

And Wisdom? You may have noticed that the week following the Sunday Next Before Advent the Office readings at Morning and Evening Prayer are entirely from the Book of Wisdom as if leading us into the radical and deeper meaning of Advent. In the Calendar you will note that the 16th of December commemorates one of the ‘O’ Antiphons, specifically, ‘O Sapientia’, O Wisdom, deliberately recalling the Book of Wisdom and the image of Wisdom that it presents to us. It seemed appropriate to connect these two works for our Advent Programme at Christ Church this year.

Advent Reflections on Ethics & Ecclesiastes (2025)

Austin Farrer in his classic ‘The Glass of Vision’, the Bampton Lectures of 1948, recalls an intriguing observation that in Scripture “there is not a line of theology, and of philosophy not so much as an echo” (Lecture III). Peter Kreeft, on the other hand, states that Ecclesiastes is the only book of philosophy, pure philosophy, mere philosophy, in the Bible” and indeed is “the greatest of all books of philosophy” (‘Three Philosophies of Life’, 1989). I think both are right.

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Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Quiet Day on Classical Anglicanism

Two Reflections on the First of the Christ Church Quiet Days,
Fall 2025: re Classical Anglicanism
Fr. David Curry

I: The Ordinal

At our first Quiet Day on October 25th at Christ Church, the Rev’d Dr. Ross Hebb reminded us of things which we have to “unlearn” in considering the history of the English Church such as thinking in terms of ‘denominations’. I reminded us that classical Anglicanism is robustly non-sectarian. The whole emphasis of understanding is on the idea of being “an integral portion of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church,” as articulated in the Solemn Declaration 1893 and as further elucidated in Fr. Crouse’s paper ‘The Essence of Anglicanism’.

It is worth noting how this emphasis is expressed in the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, and especially with respect to ordination. The phrase “The Anglican Church of Canada” appears nowhere in the public liturgies of the Offices and Communion and other sundry services. It appears in the Preface to the Ordinal (BCP, p. 637), but only once in the oath of obedience of bishops to the Metropolitan (BCP, p. 661). It does not appear in the ordination oaths for Deacons and Priests. Even with respect to Bishops, it is there only in the context of subordination: the profession and promise of the bishop elect “to hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments, and Discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded in his holy Word, and as the Anglican Church of Canada hath received and set forth the same” (BCP, p. 661, my italics). This reflects the same sensibility as the Solemn Declaration where there is also no mention of the Anglican Church of Canada; only “the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada” (BCP, p, viii) and again emphasizing what has been received and the setting forth of the same by way of the Book of Common Prayer.

The point for the postulants is simply this. Those who are ordained are ordained as deacons, priests, and bishops in “Christ’s Church”(BCP, p. 637),“the Church of Christ” (BCP, p. 662), or “the Church of God,” (BCP, p. 643, p. 655, p. 666) of which “the Anglican Church of Canada” or “the Church of England in Canada” understands itself to be an integral or whole portion through the magisterium of the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer. This is a necessary and important subordination without which one moves in a sectarian direction.

The Ordinal in the BAS is, for the most part, conservative, or, at least, can be read in that way, but in the ordination rites themselves there is a tendency to collapse “the Church of God” or “Christ’s Church” to “the Anglican Church of Canada”; in short, to the institution itself. For instance, in the BCP Ordination of Bishops, the profession and promise “to hold and maintain the Doctrine, Sacraments, and Discipline of Christ” is defined unambiguously “as the Lord hath commanded in his holy Word, and as the Anglican Church of Canada hath received and set forth the same” (BCP, p. 661, my italics). By way of contrast, in the BAS, the ordination of bishops, priests, deacons requires the solemn “promise to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Anglican Church of Canada” (BAS, p. 635, p. 645, p. 654). The Preface in the BAS may act as a corrective to this tendency and, of course, in principle, the BAS is subject to the Book of Common Prayer; it is not an equal or substitute authority. Thus BAS ordination rites are strictly speaking to be understood in terms of the doctrine of the Prayer Book and the Ordinal which is included in it (Cdn. BCP.)

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Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Robert Crouse: “The Essence of Anglicanism”

The Essence of Anglicanism

A Transcription of a Lecture delivered October 3. 2002 at Regent College, Vancouver, by Dr. Robert Crouse (For a pdf version of this lecture, click here.)

It is a great honour to be the first lecturer in this proposed lecture series, and I thank the sponsors for the opportunity. And I cannot resist complimenting Regent College on the production of ordinands. It holds promise for a speedy reformation of the Anglican Church of Canada.

The Anglican Communion, the fellowship of Anglican Churches throughout the world, exists by virtue of a voluntary allegiance to a common tradition of Christian faith and worship. Faithfulness to that tradition, and that alone, constitutes the definition of Anglicanism, and that tradition is its principle of cohesion. It has, after all, no racial unity. People of Anglo Saxon origin who once dominated its membership are now a small proportion of it. It is not a linguistic unity. Its liturgies have been translated into many languages and most of the world’s Anglicans nowadays are not English speakers. It is not even really an organizational unity, not really. The Archbishop of Canterbury has a primacy of honour and the Lambeth Conferences bring together Bishops for consultation from all over the world. But no Primate, no Conference, no Council has any legislative authority over the Anglican Communion. So the Communion adheres only by faithfulness to a common tradition, and if that faithfulness falters it moves toward disintegration. No one can legislate for the Anglican Communion. Insofar as its member churches fail in their allegiance to the common tradition the communion disintegrates. And that, I think, is the nature of the current crisis in global Anglicanism.

Signs of disintegration are, as you well know, manifold. The Primates at their meeting in ler Portugal several years ago deplored the fact that repudiations of the resolutions of the Lambeth Conference have come, as they said, to threaten the unity of the Communion in a profound way. And they strongly urged those repudiating Lambeth “to weigh the effects of their actions and to listen to the expressions of pain, anger, and perplexity from other parts of the Communion.” Another sign of the times was, of course, the consecration of bishops to be missionaries to the Episcopal Church in the United States. And, of course, we have all become familiar with the phenomenon of separated or Continuing Anglican Churches in our own country and elsewhere and we have learned to live, somehow, with the condition of what is somewhat euphemistically called “impaired communion,” a condition brought about by unilateral decisions on the part of some Provinces of our Communion.

But these and other disquieting phenomena are merely symptoms of a malaise which threatens the continued existence of the Anglican way. The fundamental issue, I would insist, is faithfulness to a tradition of Christian faith and worship. But just what is that common tradition, and what precisely are its elements? What is the essence of Anglicanism?

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Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Celebrating an Outstanding Scholar: Robert Darwin Crouse (1930-2011)

Celebrating an Outstanding Scholar: Robert Darwin Crouse (1930-2011)

The sermons, lectures, and writings of Robert Darwin Crouse have influenced generations of students and clergy world wide. Clear and concise, scholarly yet pastoral, they address many of the current confusions of a post-secular and post-Christian world by way of connecting the contemporary world to its Christian origins and principles. A remarkable scholar with a poetic soul and gift of expression, his writings speak across the ages and generations with clarity and charity. His sermons are the pastoral distillation of decades of careful reading of ancient, biblical, patristic, medieval, and modern writings with a deep appreciation for the power of the arts to draw us into an engagement with Christian spirituality. They address the waste land of modernity without leaving us in the waste land and without defaulting to a romantic longing for some imagined golden age. Perhaps no collection of sermons captures better the character and concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by bringing the perennial wisdom of Christ before the thoughtful reader. The sermons are a refreshment and a source of spiritual renewal for many a community of souls and for all times. For those of us who had the privilege of being his student and spending time at his place in Crousetown, these sermons are like being once again in his presence and hearing his voice, partaking of his hospitality and generosity of mind.

Dr. Crouse was the most outstanding scholar ever to come out of the School (1944-1947) and College. A theologian and Anglican priest, a musician, poet and preacher, he had a remarkable career as a scholar of Medieval Philosophy and as a beloved teacher at King’s College in the Foundation Year Programme and at the Dalhousie Classics Department in Halifax. He taught at Trinity College, Toronto, and at Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec (where Guy Payne first met him). He also taught at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome where he lectured for many years as a visiting Professor of Patristics. He was a graduate of King’s College and Dalhousie University, of Trinity College, and of Harvard.

A number of the faculty and the board of the School have also had the privilege of being taught by Fr. Crouse. He baptized, for instance, Christian and Zachary Lakes, the twins of Kevin and Penny Lakes, at the School Chapel. He was one of my mentors. As Trevor Hughes, former Chairman of the Board, remarked, Robert had the nicest way of telling you that you were wrong. I think this is captured in his response to students’ comments on whatever subjects were before us: “You might say that,” he would say, meaning “I wouldn’t,” which (by interpretation) suggested that it was foolish or at least mistaken.

Sunday, January 14th, and Monday, January 15th, mark the book launch in Halifax of two books by the Rev’d Dr. Robert D. Crouse, a book of sermons and a meditation on the theme of pilgrimage, the beginning of a publication project that we hope will include many of his scholarly writings. The first two volumes are available through Amazon: Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality and The Soul’s Pilgrimage Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost.

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Sermons, Theology

2020 Lenten Programme

Fr. David Curry has collected his four Lenten Programme addresses (with footnotes) into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Lenten Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer”.

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Sermons, Theology

Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer IV

This is the fourth and final address in this series. The first is posted here, the second here, and the third here.

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us”

Our Lenten study of the Lord’s Prayer brings us to the last three petitions, to the triad of forgiveness, temptation, and evil. They draw us into the deeper meaning of Christ’s Passion. To pray for forgiveness for ourselves and towards one another, to pray not to be led into temptation, and to pray to be delivered from evil is to pray the Passion of Christ.

We pray to our Father in all of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. To pray “Our Father” achieves, Thomas Aquinas tells us, “five things.” First, the words “Our Father” serve to “instruct us in our faith”; second, they “raise our hopes”; third, “they serve to stimulate charity”; fourth, they lead us “to imitate God”; and fifth, they call us “to humility”.  In other words, the phrase “Our Father”, which is present throughout the Lord’s Prayer, gives us confidence in God. As Aquinas says, “Our Lord, in teaching us how to pray, sets out before us those things which engender confidence in us, such as the loving kindness of a father, implied in the words, Our Father.” Once again, we see how the Lord’s Prayer is an essential of the Christian Faith.

Augustine breaks off his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer in the sixth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel to speak about the Creed. He is speaking during Holy Week in the context of preparing catechumens for baptism. Both the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed are to be learned by heart. “When you have learned [the Creed], that you may never forget it, say it every day when you rise; when you are preparing for sleep, rehearse your Creed, to the Lord rehearse it, remind yourselves of it, and be not weary of repeating it. … Call your faith to mind, look into yourself, let your Creed be as it were a mirror to you. Therein see yourself, whether you do believe all which you profess to believe, and so rejoice day by day in your faith. Let it be your wealth, let it be in a sort the daily clothing of your soul. Do you not always dress yourself when you rise? So by the daily repetition of your Creed dress your soul.” It is a powerful passage complemented by his teaching about the creedal nature of the Lord’s Prayer as being an essential form of our participation in the life of God in Christ.

From these remarks about the Creed, he turns to the “Our Father,” and highlights its essential and radical nature. In saying “Our Father,” he says, “you have begun to belong to a great family. Under this Father the lord and the slave are brethren; under this Father the general and the common soldier are brethren; under this Father the rich man and the poor are brethren. All Christian believers have various fathers in earth, some noble, some obscure; but they all call upon one Father which is in heaven.” Like the Creed, it is to be prayed every day.

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Sermons, Theology

Lenten Programme on The Lord’s Prayer III

This is the third address in this series. The first is posted here and the second here.

“Give us this day our daily bread”

Who are we asking? Our Father. Not our Lord. It is perhaps important to remember that all of the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are addressed to God as “Our Father.” As with the first three petitions, so too with the last four petitions. What we ask for we ask “Our Father.”

Origen already remarked on this unique and special feature of the Lord’s Prayer. Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures do we find any prayer addressed to God as Father. Augustine several centuries later also calls attention to this as does Aquinas in the thirteenth century.

The opening words of the “Our Father” carry over into all of the petitions and serve to ground our prayers in a kind of praise and wonder about God himself that acts as a counter to the ways in which we invariably seek to make God subject to ourselves. That, of course, is how we lose ourselves because we lose sight of God. “For many things are said in praise of God,” Augustine notes, “which, being scattered variously and widely over all the Holy Scriptures, everyone will be able to consider when he reads them; yet nowhere is there found a precept for the people of Israel, that they should say ‘Our Father,’ or that they should pray to God as a Father; but as Lord He was made known to them.” It suggests something intimate and important about the “Our Father” as belonging to the essential understanding of the Christian faith.

The seventeenth century Anglican Divine, Lancelot Andrewes, in his Holy Devotions, notes that the Lord’s Prayer begins with “a Father, not a Lord/ One being a name of love./ The other of dignity … One being, a name of Goodness, Comfortable … the other of Power, Terrible … Who then durst be so bold as to call the Father, but that Christ did command it?” The Lord’s Prayer is grounded in the Son’s love of the Father; his Father is “Our Father” at his bidding and command. We are bold to say, “Our Father.”

Jesus provides instruction about prayer and about persevering in prayer in many places such as in Matthew 7.9. “What man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?” Christ’s first temptation, too, was about the manipulation of the world, about turning stones into bread. The image of “Our Father” reminds us of the essential goodness of God and about what he seeks for us, namely, not stones but bread. Why? Out of the love of the Father for the Son and in the power of the Son’s love for the Father; out of the bond of their mutual and indwelling love, we learn the deep love of God for us. Thus this fourth petition, which marks the beginning of the second set of petitions, concerns what we seek from God in terms of our lives here and now but only as grounded in the deep love of God himself and that love as turned towards us; in short, God’s love for us.

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Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

“Nothing has changed”: Fr. Curry on the Marriage Issue

‘Nothing has changed’
A statement about same-sex marriages in the light of the decision of the General Synod and Archbishop Ron Cutler’s response

It is incumbent upon me, for what it is worth, to say something about the recent decisions of the Anglican Church of Canada with respect to the question about same-sex marriages. Simply put, nothing has really changed. The Anglican Church of Canada remains caught in the confusions and the contradictions of contemporary culture about the politics of identity. Yet the General Synod, meeting in Vancouver, ultimately voted against equating same-sex marriage with the Christian doctrine of marriage articulated most clearly in the Book of Common Prayer. The result of a long and drawn out process of discussion, this was the result, whether or not one agrees with it, or, for that matter, whether or not one agrees with the assumption that national and diocesan churches have anyauthority to determine on such matters of doctrine, in this case, moral doctrine.

Councils “may err and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God,” as our Articles remind us (Art. XXI), and so Councils will err though sometimes, too, they may be right. There is also the question about which councils and upon what issues. Archbishop Ron Cutler of the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island notes that this issue can be revisited within the institutional structures of the Anglican Church of Canada. Everything, it seems, is endlessly ‘provisional’ especially when one is in pursuit of a predetermined end which only then becomes, mirabile dictu,definitive. Thus, despite the decision of the General Synod, he has declared that Diocesan local option takes precedence against it. Same-sex marriages will be allowed where desired in the Diocese of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. At the same time, we are told, no parish or priest will be forced to marry same-sex couples. Nor can they be. And so the division continues and endlessly so.

We live with the confusions and complexities of our age about identity, about what it means to be a self. What matters are the assumptions underlying such decisions. Marriage, according to the Archbishop, and in this he simply reflects the assumptions of the culture, is fundamentally about ‘committed relationships’. If that is so, then there can be no discussion, no debate. And while commitment is an important concept, the question is, commitment to what? After all, one can be in a ‘committed relationship’ with any number of things, including oneself, and to any number of social constructs of whatever sort. While we would all want to agree about the importance of commitment, the classical understanding of Christian marriage is not simply or even primarily about commitment beyond a commitment to the character and nature of marriage; in short, to what it is. We cannot be of one mind if we cannot say what something is; in this case what marriage is. At issue are the principles which govern our understanding about the meaning of our humanity as found within the doctrines of creation and redemption in which marriage is located as oneof the ways of living out the Christian faith.

Nothing has changed inasmuch as the institutional church remains caught in the controversies of identity in our contemporary culture. And nothing has changed with respect to my own contributions to the debate theologically. “The sad tragedy of the Anglican Churches” continues to be “the inability … to distinguish between two different things: marriage and the blessings of friends.” I continue to be committed to upholding the principles of Christian Faith doctrinally and morally as they have been received by the Anglican Churches insofar as they lay claim to be and are an integral part of the Catholic and Universal church regardless of the statements of Synods and Bishops. We live in a divided church but prayerfully and, I hope, charitably with respect to these divisions.

Rev’d David Curry
July 18th, 2019

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Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

The Solemn Declaration: The Net of Memory

Given the reference to the Solemn Declaration of 1893 in this morning’s homily, it seems appropriate to post Fr. David Curry’s paper “The Solemn Declaration: The Net of Memory”, which was published years ago in the Machray Review by the Prayer Book Society of Canada.

Click here to download “The Solemn Declaration: The Net of Memory” (in pdf format) or click here to read it online.

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