Category: Theology

Anglican issues, Sermons, Theology

Fr. David Curry on Cranmer’s Eucharistic Liturgies, 1549/1552

An address delivered at the University of King’s College, Halifax, 19 March 2018.

Like eagles in this life

Thank you for the privilege of being with you and speaking with you this evening. It is nice to be back in familiar surroundings and in a place that has been so much a part of my own life. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Fr. Gary Thorne for his ministry as College Chaplain here at King’s College and for his excellent labours in the challenge of opening young and inquiring minds to the wonders of the Gospel in its engagement with other religions and philosophies.

“We should understand the sacrament, not carnally, but spiritually,” Cranmer argues “being like eagles in this life, we should fly up into heaven in our hearts, where that Lamb is resident at the right hand of his Father which taketh away the sins of the world … by whose passion we are filled at His table … being made the guests of Christ, having Him dwell in us through the grace of his true nature … assured and certified that we are fed spiritually unto eternal life by Christ’s flesh crucified and by his blood shed.” An intriguing and suggestive passage, it conveys, I think, much of what belongs to Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology and which contributes to an Anglican sensibility, to use a much later term (19th century).

There are many others who are far more qualified than I am to speak on the matter of Cranmer’s liturgies.[1] Sam Landry has asked me to speak about “Cranmer’s alterations of the Liturgy (especially those of the very Protestant 1552 BCP),” as he put it and “how we might understand his theological project in relation to our own Prayer Book, which has re-introduced some of the practices which Cranmer removed.” These are important questions that speak to the many confusions that belong to our thinking about Cranmer’s reformed project. Not the least of which has to do with the word ‘Protestant’.

We might respond by asking, ‘which form of Protestantism?’ It is a problematic term, so much so that Diarmaid MacCulloch in his magisterial biography on Cranmer eschews its use almost entirely. The important point is that the First Edwardian Prayer Book of 1549 is just as ‘Protestant,’ if you will, (or ‘Catholic’ for that matter) as the Second Edwardian Prayer Book of 1552. Both reflect Cranmer’s basic Eucharistic theology at the same time as the two books reveal the pressures and tensions that were part of the reformed world in England and on the continent about which Cranmer was fully aware. There was constant debate about what constituted an adequate and proper reform. Cranmer himself was part of that debate which continued long after him.

(more…)

Print this entry

Sermons, Theology

Redire ad principia: The Mystical Theology of The Book of Common Prayer

Fr. David Curry delivered this address to the AGM of the Prayer Book Society of Canada in Halifax on 29 April 2017. The version posted here omits footnotes. To download a pdf version complete with footnotes, click here.

Redire ad principia: The Mystical Theology of The Book of Common Prayer

There may be fifty ways to lose your lover and even fifty shades of grey which may or may not be the same thing, but the ways to lose your humanity? Not so many, it seems.

There is really only one question for our institutions, be they schools or churches, social clubs or societies. It is whether your institution is a factory producing robots or a breeding ground for Jihadis. In other words, are they places which contribute to a deeper understanding of our common humanity or are they simply the ghettoes of nihilism, having despaired of anything intellectual and spiritual; in short, the places where we lose our humanity by becoming machines or by blowing everything up including ourselves?

When Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk agree that the greatest threat facing our humanity is AI, artificial intelligence, then perhaps it is time to pause and think about our technocratic exuberance. For the concerns are very real especially for the millennial generation most wedded to the digital forms of the technocratic world. At issue is what it means to be human. In Albert Camus’ 1942 novel, The Outsider, the robot-woman is the image of a technocratic society in which technology is allowed to reign and rule and which in turn crushes and destroys our humanity and our individuality. We become robots. We make the machine that unmakes us. The novel ends with the Meursault going to his death which has been wrongfully decided on the basis of the absurdities of reason. He goes, tellingly, to the guillotine. The machine which itself is mindless is the machine that takes off your head. And that is the point.

The contradictions are startling. Homo Deus (2015) by Yuval Noah Harari turns out not to be about our humanity in God and with God but about our humanity as digitally enhanced as if that were a kind of divinity, a deus ex machina, I suppose. And while raising various problems about technology – all of which are, of course, solvable, since the naïve idealism of progress is his assumption – he denies that you exist. The idea of a self is an illusion. There is no you. We are nothing more than organic algorithms! He is oblivious to the ethical and philosophical problems pointed out last week in the Chronicle Herald by Professor Teresa Heffernan at St. Mary’s whose research programme, Where Science Meets Fiction: Social Robots and the Ethical Imagination, looks at big data and algorithms. They can only replicate the human biases inherent in their structure. Brains are not minds and machines cannot think.

In a way, this is not new. In 1749, the year Halifax was founded, Julien Offray de la Mettrie wrote L’homme machine, ‘Man the Machine’, a completely materialist and atheist account of our humanity. Romanticism and Existentialism both would react against the reductive assertions of a narrow and empty rationalism which looks at the world and our humanity in mechanistic terms. That is part of the importance of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, where the monster is not the thing that is made but the one who makes it. We are the monsters of our own nightmares and the makers of our own destruction. As Wendell Berry observes: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” This, too, is our world. George Bernanos wisely noted in 1946 that “between those who think that civilization is a victory of man in the struggle against the determinism of things and those who want to make of man a thing among things, there is no possible scheme of reconciliation.”

(more…)

Print this entry

Anglican issues, Prayer Book Society, Statements and other writings, Theology

Address to the Prayer Book Society of Canada

Fr. David Curry yesterday delivered an address to the Annual General Meeting of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, held in Charlottetown. Here are the opening paragraphs (footnotes omitted):

“Through the eyes of John”

Philosophy begins not in wonder, as the ancients supposed, a contemporary English philosopher, Simon Critchley, claims, but in disappointment. The particular forms of disappointment for him belong to religion and politics and result in the culture of nihilism which confronts us everywhere. Nihilism is the breakdown of the order of meaning; it declares and asserts the meaninglessness of all life.

Philosophy begins not in wonder but in disappointment, he says. Critchley has in mind Plato and Aristotle both of whom, to be sure, spoke of philosophy as beginning in wonder. But is this a complete and adequate account?

Click here to download the full text of the address (pdf document).

Print this entry

Prayer Book Society, Statements and other writings, Theology

“William Tyndale and the King James Bible: A good translation made better”

Fr. David Curry delivered this paper yesterday at the Colloquium on the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible, held at King’s College and sponsored by the Nova Scotia/Prince Edward Island branch of the Prayer Book Society of Canada. The opening paragraphs are posted below; the complete paper can be downloaded as a pdf document by clicking here.

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 400th 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.

Print this entry

Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Fr. David Curry on the Anglican Loyalist Experience

Fr David Curry recently delivered an address at Trinity Church, Saint John, New Brunswick, on the occasion of the 225th anniversary of the City of Saint John. His topic was “Beyond Nostalgia: Theological Aspects of the Anglican Loyalist Experience”. The full text is available for download as a pdf document; here are two brief excerpts:

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.

Print this entry

Statements and other writings, Theology

Post-Secularism: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

This article by Fr. David Curry originally appeared in The Anglican Planet, 4 November 2010.

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

Statements and other writings, Theology

A raft of books dealing with the King James Version of the Bible

This morning we will dedicate a new Pulpit Bible – King James Version – which has been kindly donated by Bev & Jacoba Morash!  This article by Fr. David Curry calls attention to the significance and importance of the King James Version of the Bible.

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

The Primacy of Doctrine

The Rev’d David Curry delivered this address to the Open Door Conference (organised by Anglican Essentials Canada), Toronto, in June 2005.

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.

(more…)

Print this entry

Anglican issues, Statements and other writings, Theology

Statement on sexuality

Theological Position of
the Parish of Christ Church, Windsor, Nova Scotia,
in the light of the current controversies about sexuality

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.

Print this entry