jsburbidge | Entries tagged with religion

Well, actually that was the setting up of a set of dioceses in England in the mid nineteeth century. However...

There are a couple of interesting things about this.

First, it seems to me that the measure is as much aimed at the Roman hierarchy as at the Anglican Church. It's been possible for years to have "Anglican Rite" (usually the English or Anglican Missal) churches for disaffected Anglicans; I knew a group in Toronto who were asking for one. However, the local bishops were rarely enthusiastic and tended to do a good imitation of a brick wall. (This was similar to the situation with regard to Tridentine Rite services.) As with the Tridentine Rite rules, this now effectively bypasses the bishops -- in the TR case by setting up automatic rules for allowing the celebrations, in this case by providing a parallel structure with different ordinaries which can bypass the standard hierarchy if necessary.

Secondly, all the previous variants of this (including the Antiochene Eastern acceptance of an "Anglican" rite in the rite of St. Tikhon) have tended to take the standard Western Rite as a norm (i.e. the Missals which were a product of the Anglo-Catholic movement) and in particular the Gregorian Canon. If this means accepting the BCP -- the English BCP, or maybe the 1927 book and its cousins -- as a sufficiently Catholic rite to stand alongside the ancient rites of East and West, then it's a different ball game. This may be an echo of a shift at Rome around the narrower question of the Novus Ordo versus the Tridentine Rite where there is no longer the emphasis on there being one and only one acceptable rite which was the strong line under Paul VI and John Paul II. It may have some interesting implications regarding recognition of the forms of nonstandard rites, in that case.

Thirdly, it's a little hard to see exactly who this is aimed at. Serious Anglo-Catholics don't want the BCP -- they would be an audience for an Elizabethan-language Tridentine Rite with decent music, but most of them have been ignoring the BCP for the last century in favour of the Western Rite in one form or another. As one blogger put it, "The Society of the Holy Cross and forward in Faith in the UK, for example, consist mostly of priests whose views on the Anglican Liturgy vary from “Quite a nice little Tudor Communion Service” to “nasty Protestant invention”." (see http://saintclementsblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/roman-catholic-anglican-rite/).

If it's the case that the rite with Anglican elements is essentially the English Missal -- and the phrasing is consistent with this: "while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony" -- then it makes more sense, but it would then appeal mainly to a smallish core of non-Affirming Anglo-Catholics. However, it would be consistent with the traditional Roman approach to reunion -- that it is to be encouraged by leaving it open for the dissidents to return piecemeal. (It would be a nice umbrella for the TAC churches, who have been pushing for reunion, to manage reunion with Rome under, but they aren't exactly a major bloc.)

Protestants won't go to Rome and already have their own Network. Even in England, most of the seriously disaffected ACs have already left for Rome, or they've become less disaffected and at least decided to try to live with their Affirming Catholic confreres. But except as a stalking horse for better music and liturgy in Rome, it doesn't seem to me to be a winner. I mean, if you have a choice between Brompton Oratory or Westminster Cathedral and an "Anglican Rite" church with OK music somewhere in London, the choice isn't hard to make, now, is it? On the other hand, if the "Anglican Rite" church in a provincial town does Byrd, Tallis and Weelkes and the normal Roman church does guitar masses, the choice is reversed, but it would be just as reversed if the alternative were a Tridentine Rite mass with Victoria and Palestrina. Cardinal Levada has guessed at the scale of crossovers as being in the hundreds, which sounds about right.

"Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc-one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei-the holy common people of God".

-- Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy

"In agreeing to submit oneself to the sacramental gesture of the Church, one no longer avails oneself of one's own theological ideas, as incisive as they might be, or of one's own religious feelings, as sincere as they might be, or of one's own ethical accomplishments, as generaous as they might be. All this certainly causes us to act, but it is not what is at work in the sacramental rite. Here the self is put at the disposal of the Other whom it can let act in the Church's mediation. the self lets the Other act by performing a gesture which is not from itself, by saying words which are not its own, by receiving elements which it has not chosen." -- Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament.

It sounds as if Chauvet's model of the sacraments as mediating the Other has points of contact with the more traditional scholastic discussions of the problem of predication per analogiam as applied to God -- that no truth can be applied to God directly, but only by a closer or more distant analogy. Even the category of being (primary for the Thomists) has to be distinguished between self-subsistent being and created/contingent being, a gap which is wider the more one thinks about it, eventually bringing into focus the massive otherness of God's being.

The mediation between uncreated being and created being which is put in place by the Incarnation and more particularly by the Hypostatic Union is continued via the sacraments.

It is unease about precisiely how valid any other forms of depiction of this ultimate Other are (beyond those explicitly symbolic ones provided by the sacraments and authorised by tradition) which led to the Iconoclast controversy in the East. At another pole, the tension between the sense of usefulness (indeed, necessity) of predication per analogiam and the complete inability of it to capture what it expresses drives the tension between the Positive and Negative Ways of Christian mysticism. (To cite Charles Williams, the see-sawing of "This also is Thou; neither is this Thou".)

This is enough to make me at least interested in Chauvert's sacramental theology from the small bits of it to which I've been exposed. I'll try to get a copy of his basic introduction (The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body) as Lenten reading. (I gather, from what I've been able to glean via the web, that there's some significant tension between his phenomenological approach and the more traditional Thomistic and generally scholastic sacramental theologies, which should be of interest as well -- where I see a touching point may be a more considerable gap).

I said I'd defer making comments about the theology and ecclesiology of SSB's.

Here are a few inconclusive ones.

First, the difference between Protestant and Catholic hermeneutics looms very large here. Most Evangelicals and low churchmen tend to assume (1) that scripture is largely self-interpreting and (2) has a unique place of authority over even the Church. Anglo-Catholics and high churchmen treat scripture as a creation of the Church, and centres authority in scripture only as interpreted by the Church, which provides the definitive interpretative community. In an Anglican context, this is complicated by the fact that not only are there no more General Councils of the Church to rule on matters, there is no pretence of the Anglican Communion to "be" the universal Church. (Rome may not constitute all the Church, but it claims to be it, regardless of the views of, say, the Eastern Orthodox). As long as doctrine is taken to be something essentially static and fixed, a closed set (as tends to be the view of the Orthodox, -- but don't probe too deeply about Palamite theology) this raises no problem, but if one accepts the more Western / Newmannian approach to doctrine as developing over time, it raises problems.

Does a local (i.e. national) synod have the authority to make determinations involving doctrine at all, from any sort of Catholic point of view? During the conciliar period the pattern was (typically) that different positions were taken by different local synods, which escalated to General Councils, which made final determinations. Those determinations might be received or not (if not, the Council would not be considered a valid General Council). It took centuries for Arian Christianity to disappear, and technically Monophysite Churches not only still exist but are recognized as orthodox in the West despite their use of language which differs from the standard language of the Eastern Orthodox -- so if they have not received the conciliar teachings, but are still "orthodox", then should the council's status be reevaluated?

It may be generations before any question is settled, on this model, especially given the other social pressures in differing societies affecting many open questions.

Secondly, I'm inclined to be antsy when we start to go against the teaching and practice of both Rome and the Eastern Churches. (Of course, on that basis, women's orders are an even bigger question). However, it's also true that if an apparently valid and convincing theological argument for something is put forward, it deserves consideration, especially if the novelty of the argument is called forth by genuinely novel conditions to which it is a response; and if other bodies are by their institutional nature going to be less flexible, we can't simply take the lack of reception by those bodies as proof that the arguments are wrong. However, I'm very sympathetic to the argument that we should take that lack of reception as a signal to move very slowly indeed.

Thirdly, views on matters related to this have changed in the past. The entire Church used to consider usury to be just as much against nature as sodomy[1].

With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that delight might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luthes
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision...

At least in the West, this has been abandoned, or so radically changed by redefining usury from the charging of any interest to the charging of excessive interest that the underlying theology has also been dropped -- it is no longer condemned because increase in money on its own is considered unnatural, but because unduly high interest rates are a serious hardship in a social justice context.

Similarly, in the Anglican Church, contraception has been not only allowed -- since the Lambeth Conference in 1930 -- but encouraged in a number of contexts for most of my lifetime. The underlying theology supporting contraception was basically part of that rejecting homosexual sex: the idea that sex had a principal telos of the generation of children, that every sexual act should be open to the possibility of conception, and that deliberately sterile sex violated the end to which it was created. (Even the Roman position as elucidated in Humanae Vitae, allowing one form of non-barrier contraception runs into this problem.) So from an Anglican perspective one needs to accept that differences in theology with reference to contraception are not serious enough to force one to leave the Church in protest. (One needn't agree with the position: it's quite possible to be an Anglican and reject contraception, just as long as you can get along with those who support it, just as I may believe in transubstantiation but as an Anglican have to get along with Low Churchmen who don't.) The shifts in theology necessary to allow for contraception also affect the theology of marriage, willy-nilly.

So we need to take seriously the question of at least considering the challenge of redefining the doctrines surrounding these matters, because it has already been raised as an issue by prior received changes, to take account not only of changing social context but also of other matters. For example, discussion of the telos of particular characteristics of humanity becomes more complex if one accepts the current state of scientific thought regarding the evolution of animal life, and the ways in which environmental pressures rather than immediate divine design play a role in the form that sex takes in the human species.

One of the worrisome things, of course, is that working through a consistent theology from first principles might lead to conclusions we generally don't want. (Here's a thought experiment. Assume that within the next twenty years a combination of anti-aging therapy aimed at telomere reduction and effective anti-cancer and other general therapies extend the normal healthy human life expectancy to 200 years. What would you expect society's response to be with regard to marriage as a lifetime state? What should the Church's response be? When does a changed context mean that general rules have to be re-examined?)

However, this isn't happening at an official level. The studies undertaken or proposed are narrowly fixated on the single issue of same-sex unions, not on the more general underlying theological underpinnings. The questions referred to the Primate's Theological Commission for 2010, in particular, are too narrowly focussed. (Individuals have done more. I haven't read Rowan Williams -- in his academic persona before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury -- but he seems to have done work along these lines.)

And attempts to redefine the overall theological field are not predetermined to produce the results that social pressure wants, either. The project can't be ends-driven, even though it may take as input changed circumstances and more detailed understanding of things. One of the depressing things about the current debate is the degree to which both sides have dug in with fixed conclusions which then leave them to fiddle their premises.[2]

Even once a strong, consistent theological case is made, we still have that problem of how much authority we can take as appropriate at a local rather than a general level. But without the underlying reworking, any new positions are taking a leap in the dark.

[1] Patristic, Mediaeval, and early modern Christian thought doesn't have a concept of "homosexuality", but simply condemned actual sexual activity between members of the same sex. This tends to mean that about 90% of the discussion of things like "same-sex couples" is very difficult to ground in classical Christian theology, since at least that much of a couple's interactions have nothing to do at all directly with sex.

[2] To be fair, the conservative Evangelical view doesn't make a purely ends-driven argument; but since it is also grounded in a hermeneutic which is to my mind both naive and overly simplistic (and doesn't match the way the Church has actually functioned over the ages) I find it almost as depressing as the back-end first approaches of the other sides.

Being a Canadian Anglican (well, Anglo-Catholic, if not Ultra-Catholic) I have been paying some attention to the debates at General Synod this week.

I'll defer making comments about the theology and ecclesiology of the issues; what I want to look at is how badly they now seem to be handling things.

They have:

Voted to recognize the matter of same-sex blessings to be a matter of doctrine, but not of "core doctrine" (whatever that means, precisely), but then
Voted to decide the issue on a straight 50% -plus one basis, defeating a motion for a 60% limit (which itself was watered down from the normal two-synod threshold for doctrinal change -- the Chancellor had disliked even that watering-down), meaning that they've effectively taken a huge non-canonical move to make exceptions for this one issue on the basis of popular pressure, after recognizing its doctrinal nature.
Defeated a motion to refer to a commission -- but on a split vote, where the bishops supported the referral. This must reflect an assumption on the part of the clergy and laity that the substantive motions will pass, whereas the actual outcome suggests that the bishops may block the substantive motion.

In addition, much if not most of the debate has, shall we say, lacked any theological character -- it's been emotions against emotions. And the differences between the Low and High sides of the Anglican Church -- with the different ways in which they regard Scripture and the Church -- are making effective communication even more difficult, because one camp (mainly protestant) regards Scripture as simply and naively authoritative, and the other side (mainly Catholic, if Affirming Catholic, if theologically inclined at all) regards the Church as prior to Scripture (and can point to instances like the change in approach to interest/usury, or to birth control (remember, this is the Anglican Church, not the Church of Rome) as an example of just such a change in the past).

This sets them up for the worst of both worlds. If the motion passes by under 60% there are going to be many people who are upset that such an important -- now officially doctrinal -- issue, which will certainly have the effect of causing significant defections of individuals, at least, was passed with such a low threshold (which the canonical restrictions are explicitly designed to prevent). If the motion fails with blocking by the bishops, then they are back to square one, with some significant disciplinary problems on the liberal side of the Church.

What the ACC needs is a reasonably strong vote one way or another: split or weak votes are, institutionally, very bad for them on divisive issues. And they have set themselves up for one or the other.

Later: They have now passed the substantive motion in principle (i.e. whether the blessings are consistent with core doctrine) with a 21/19 vote in the bishops (the laity were 152/97, which is just over the 60% which the defeated procedural motion would have required). This means that (if the vote on the practical implementation goes the same way) this will have been passed on a very slim margin in the bishops (not good, as discussed above). Since with a one-vote shift it could fail in the bishops, that would also lead to a negative result (although it would be somewhat inconsistent to hold that the practice doesn't offend core doctrine and then not to allow the practice as at least a diocesan option). This is likely to be ugly no matter what happens. Plus, this motion in itself could very well already bring the Global South bishops into conflict with the ACC (meaning that the concern regarding preserving communion with most of the rest of the Anglican Communion could now be irrelevant as a consideration on the following votes).

Note that although the practical motion failed (based on a blocking vote in the bishops only, a problematic sign -- and neither of the votes in the other houses were over the 60% mark) a diocese could in principle proceed now to authorize same-sex blessings because it would no longer be going out on a doctrinal limb (i.e. no longer making a completely ultra vires move) -- the doctrinal vote already supports them. This already implies (e.g.) that New Westminster is free of any threat of discipline.

The state of the matter is now essentially just muddy. There is a doctrinal declaration that SSB's are consistent with core doctrine, but no explicit affirmation of a diocese's ability to authorize them; but the motion on doctrine probably authorises them in principle in any case. And all of this is by very slim margins.

So Charlie Stross has ruffled feathers with his taking apart of some naive assumptions about space colonization.

The reactions are illuminating.

Many of them have an assumption that if we (as a species) want something badly enough we can get it, and that the laws of physics will conveniently accommodate themselves to our wishes. "Previous barriers have gone down; this one will as well, although we don't know how yet".

Several somewhat more balanced commenters, including Charlie in the comments, have referred to this as "religious" in nature. In fact, it's less rational than a normal religious argument. The general outline for a religious argument is: "There is some event (past or future) for which evidence is present but incomplete [from the believer's view]. We will accept this event because it is implied by the rest of our belief system (which similarly has incomplete, but not completely absent, evidence". (For a much expanded version of the above, see Newman's Grammar of Assent.) That is, a believer in Christianity accepts (say) the Resurrection (past) and the Second Coming (future) because he/she accepts the general revelation of Christianity on grounds which do not necessarily command automatic acceptance from everyone's point of view, but which have some basis of acceptance (personal revelation, historical records, Thomas's Five Arguments, etc.) from the believer's point of view. However, what the arguments presented amount to is "We have no actual grounds for believing that ways around the obstacles exist. But it's important to us, so there must be a way around them." This is going beyond the fides quaerens intellectum approach of classical Catholic Christianity (at least) to the mentality of a five-year-old who assumes that anything that it wants to do must be possible because it wants to.

A number of other reactions evince a dedication to the idea of the continuation of the human race in whatever form which is reminiscent of nothing so much as Weston in C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis, of course, opposes an explicitly Christian viewpoint to this sort of affection for an abstraction of our distant descendants to argue that it is incoherent. The Oyarsa of Mars' comments, I think, should suffice to provide a counterpoint to that view.