Category Archives: Spirituality

Dearmer on the Prayer Book System

In one of his brief little tracts, Percy Dearmer wrote explained for his day (the turn from the 19th to the 20th century) the spiritual system of the prayer book. Of course, he’s referring to the English 1662 BCP, but most everything he says still holds for the American ’79 as well:

A CHRISTIAN’S LIFE ACCORDING TO THE
PRAYER BOOK

Let us see, then, what the Prayer Book system will be when we have come back into the habit of carrying it out.

The Churchman is helped by the grace of God all through his life, from the cradle to the grave. He is baptized as a little child, and thus brought into the [28/29] Holy Catholic Church and made a member of Christ. As soon as he is old enough to understand, he is taught the Catechism diligently, thoroughly, regularly, from week to week, while his elders sit by and listen—for they are expected to be present.

When he has come to years of discretion, and is no longer a little child, he is brought to the Bishop to be fortified by Confirmation. After Confirmation he becomes a regular communicant, going to the Lord’s Service every Lord’s Day, indeed on Holy-days as well as Sundays. [* The Prayer Book provides Collects, Epistles, and Gospels for the red-letter Saints’ Days just the same as for Sundays.]

Thus at Baptism he begins his spiritual life, just as he begins his natural life at birth. [* See the 3rd chapter of S. John’s Gospel, where our Lord explains this as being “born again.”]

At Catechizing he learns about his spiritual life.

At Confirmation he is strengthened in his spiritual life.

At Communion he is given spiritual food to support his spiritual life, just as at ordinary meals he is given common food to support his natural life. [* See the 6th chapter of S. John’s Gospel, where our Lord says that except we are fed with the Body of Christ we have “no life,” that is no spiritual life, in us.]

If he is married, he comes for the blessing of the Church; and at the end of the Marriage Service a rubric tells the newly-married pair that they ought then, or as soon after as possible, to make their Communion. If there are any children, the mother comes to be Churched; and then the little one is brought to Baptism, and the “Occasional Services” are begun over again for another little Christian.

Lastly, when illness comes, the Church is there with her blessing once more for his Visitation, Absolution, and Communion; and at the end of all she receives his body for the last time within her walls, and commends his soul to God in the Burial of the Dead.

[30] Thus the events in a Christian’s life have taken us through a considerable part of the Prayer Book—the part that lies between the Thanksgivings and the Psalter.

“ALL THE DAYS OF MY LIFE”

Now let us look at the rest of the Prayer Book—the parts that concern the everyday life of the Christian, viz.:—

(1) The Kalendar (including the Lectionary).
(2) The large section from Mattins to the end of the Prayers and Thanksgivings.
(3) The Psalter.

How does the Church of England expect you and me to worship God from day to day? More than we most of us do. The bad habits of many generations have left us far behind this Christian ideal, and often we cannot live up to it if we would. Holy-days, for instance, used to be real holidays, when all the people had a rest; and then it was easier to come to church. But Oliver Cromwell made people work on these days, and took away the people’s holidays; and so it has been more difficult to go to church ever since.

Still, most of us could worship God more than we do. We might come to church before work begins, for instance, on Holy-days, and many can often come on ordinary week-days also.

Here, at any rate, is what the Prayer Book expects of us:—

1. Every day of the week. Morning Prayer in the morning and Evening Prayer in the evening, “that the people (by daily hearing of holy Scripture read in the church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God.” [* The Preface “Concerning the Service of the Church.” See also the Order at the end of this Preface; and notice how often the word “daily” comes in the Prayer Book.]

2. Wednesdays and Fridays. [31] The Litany in addition to Mattins and Evensong.

3. Holy-days, i.e., the Saints’ Days, etc., “to be observed.” The Holy Communion (see the Collects, Epistles, and Gospels provided for these days), and Catechizing, in addition to Mattins and Evensong.

4. Sundays. In addition to the above (Mattins, Litany, Holy Communion—with the special Collect, Epistle and Gospel of the Sunday—Evensong, Catechizing) a Sermon is ordered to be preached on Sunday during the Communion Service by Canon 45.

Some special days are further marked out. The Great Festivals (Christmas, Easter, Ascension, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday) have Proper Prefaces at Holy Communion. Ash Wednesday has an extra service of penance called the Commination. Four times a year there are three Ember Days, which have special Collects, so that people may pray for those who are to be ordained on the following Sunday. Other “Prayers and Thanksgivings” are provided for special occasions, notably the beautiful Prayer for ALL Conditions for use on the mornings when there is no Litany, and the Prayer for Parliament for use during the Session; and furthermore, the Athanasian Creed is set down on certain Festivals.

Add to these the Forms of Prayer to be read daily at sea, which come after the Psalter, and the Ordinal (i.e., the Services for the Ordination of Deacons and Priests, and for the Consecration of Bishops), and we have completed our survey of the Prayer Book.

THE IDEAL BEFORE US

Is it not a great ideal of Christian life and worship? Shall we not all be better and stronger men when we take better advantage of our opportunities? Will not the Church of England be indeed a great and noble [31/32] Church when all who belong to her are regular communicants, when the parish church of every place is thronged with devout worshippers day after day, and when the children of England are all thoroughly taught the splendid Doctrine and Duties of the Catechism?

It is a sad and humiliating thought that, while a few centuries ago all Englishmen belonged to the fellowship of the one Church, and all partook of the life of our Lord in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood, now England is full of petty divisions and miserable quarrelling, while the masses of the people are not even communicants. They belong to the Church, but they do not understand her, and so they are not faithful to her, and have little real love for Christ in their hearts. We have, therefore, enormous arrears to make up. We must pray more, worship more, teach others more, and thus lead the way, by our own loyalty, to a great revival of Christianity in our land.

Shall we not succeed? Through the neglect of past years the Church has become like a missionary in a strange land. But as we love God more and love our neighbour more, and in this spirit of love and devotion carry out the half-forgotten rules of the Prayer Book, we shall lead the people back from their Babylon, and build again the walls of Jerusalem.

The whole tract is available on Project Canterbury but this is the heart of it.

On the Ethics of Giving

I have a new piece up on the Washington Post’s site about the ethics of giving.

As usual, the difficulty was paring down what I had to say to fit within the word limit. I incorporated a bit from the Talmud, but wanted to put in a bit more rabbinic material. Since I wasn’t able to fit it in there, I’ll go ahead and include it here! Thus, these items were definitely floating around in my head, they just didn’t make it on the page:

“All men are to be loved equally; but since you cannot be of assistance to everyone, those especially are cared for who are most closely bound to you by place, time, or opportunity as if by chance.” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 1.28.29)

Then these gleanings from  the anthology Jewish Wisdom by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin:

Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsberg (d. 1778) said: “When a poor man asks you for aid, do not use his faults as an excuse for not helping him. For then God will look for your offenses, and He is sure to find many” (p. 15)

If a person closes his eyes to avoid giving [any] charity, it is as if he committed idolatry. [Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 68a] (p. 16)

A person who gives a thousand gold pieces to a worthy cause is not as generous as one who gives a thousand gold pieces on a thousand different occasions, each to a worthy cause. [Anonymous; sixteenth century Orhot Zaddikim (The Ways of the Righteous)] (p. 17)

The question of bread for myself is a material question, but the question of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question. [Nicholai Berdyaev] (p. 25)

Back to Work

I’ve been writing a number of things in a number of places recently. I’ve done some pieces for the Living Church, some of which are out, some of which are still in their pipeline. I was invited to write another piece for the Washington Post which may be on their site today or tomorrow. I’ve also been writing some bits for Forward Movement about which more will be said at the right time. And, I’ve been trying to write stuff here.

The upshot is that I haven’t put out anything at the Episcopal Cafe in quite a while, and that’s not a good thing. The Daily Episcopalian has been running some unusual stuff recently from some new voices—or at least people who haven’t written pieces before—particularly around Communion Without Baptism. We had one from our self-proclaimed liturgically-conservative non-theist, one from the site’s village atheist, then one that I can only kindly characterize as theologically confused.

I think that one of the major difficulties that we’re having around the whole CWOB issue is that there are so many Episcopalians out there who simply have an insufficient understanding of basic Eucharistic theology. Case in point—today’s article. In my comment on it, I pull out what I see as the single biggest mistake our church is making when it thinks and talks about the Eucharist and, by extension, CWOB:

What really bothers me here, though, is this: “Because, you see, I think God has cherished and adored all these persons since before they were born. Has been in relationship with them, all along. And is longing to be closer to them, speaking to them through our worship, even if they only once step through our doors.

I absolutely believe this; she’s spot on.

However—what does this have to do with the Eucharist? The author never makes the connection but seems to assume that there is a clear and easy one to be made.

The Eucharist is the food of the covenant community who confess Jesus as Lord. We enter the covenant community by making our own covenant with Christ in the midst of the community: it’s Baptism. The Eucharist assists us in keeping our Baptismal Covenant and helps us to continue to grow into a life of discipleship through it’s nourishment.

This basic Eucharistic theology is found nowhere here. Instead, there seems to be a simple assumption that the Eucharist means that God loves you and wants to be in a relationship with you and that if anyone can’t have the Eucharist at any time it’s the church’s way of saying that God doesn’t love them. That’s not what is going on at all.

Granted—some people may perceive it like that, but this perception does not constitute the church’s theology. We do need to do a better job about teaching the basics of Eucharistic theology—so that both our visitors and our members can grasp what it is that the church both intends and does.

I think it’s time for a back-to-basics primer on what the prayer book teaches on the Eucharist to provide a real starting point for any discussions going forward.

Towards Teaching the Spirituality of the BCP

After speaking so many fine words about spirituality and the BCP and how it ought to be taught rather than how it is normally taught, I’ve received hearty encouragement to put my money where my mouth is… A friend of mine—and the rector at one of the parishes where M served prior to his arrival—is going to be teaching the deacons in his area about the prayer book and asked my thoughts to supplement his own.

So—in a nutshell, here’s how I’d go about doing it. First a big-picture, then attention to some of the actual parts.

  • Christianity has a variety of valid spiritualities—the BCP enshrines one of them: the liturgical system approach
  • The key logic operative here is the disciplined recollection of God with the intention that following these disciplines will lead to the habitual recollection of God.

The fundamental mechanisms for achieving this goal are threefold:

    • The kalendar which leads us to view time through a salvific lens
    • The Daily Office which is fundamentally catechetical in nature
    • The Eucharist which is fundamentally mystagogical in nature

I shall now proceed to shamelessly plagiarize from one of my own pieces…:

[T]he Book of Common Prayer offers a full integrated spiritual system that is intended as much for the laity as the clergy and which is founded in a lay spirituality that arose in the medieval period. If you look at the book as a whole, it offers a program for Christian growth built around liturgical spirituality. The best shorthand I have for this is the liturgical round. It’s made up of three components: the liturgical calendar where we reflect upon our central mysteries through the various lenses of the seasons of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ and in his continuing witness in the lives of the saints, the Daily Office where we yearly immerse ourselves in the Scriptures and Psalms, and the Holy Eucharist where we gather on Holy Days to most perfectly embody the Body of Christ and receive the graces that the sacraments afford.

So—here’s why this is important and the meat of how it relates to the issue at hand. The purpose of any spiritual system is to bring the practitioner and their community into a deeper relationship with God—to create a family of mature Christians. Through their increasing awareness of who God is, how much God loves them and all of creation, they translate that love they have been shown into concrete acts of love and mercy in the world around them. There are several different strategies that different spiritual systems use to accomplish this. One of the classic ones—referred to in St Paul’s direction to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17)—is the recollection of God. The idea here is that if we can continually keep in mind the goodness of God, the constant presence of God, and an awareness of the mighty works of God on behalf of us and others, that we will more naturally and more completely act in accordance with God’s will and ways. Continual recollection is nearly impossible, but there are methods to help us in this habit.

A primary goal of liturgical spirituality is to create a disciplined recollection of God. Thus, if we specifically pause at central points of time—morning and evening; noon and night; Sundays and other Holy Days—to reorient ourselves towards God and the mighty acts of God, whether recalled to us through the Scriptures or experienced by us through direct encounters with the sacraments, then this discipline will lead us towards a habitual recollection of God.

In the liturgical round, the Book of Common Prayer gives us specific moments to stop and orient our time and ourselves around the recollection of God. As a result, one of the most important parts of the book is the Daily Office section that provides forms for prayer at morning, noon, evening and night. These prayer offices are our fundamental tool for disciplined recollection; they provide the foundation for our spiritual practice. This foundation, then, is punctuated by the Eucharist on Holy Days (at the least). And, conceptually, this is how we should view Sundays—not the day of the week on which we go to church—but as a Holy Day which recurs on a weekly basis.

Turning now to the kalendar, we must begin with the recognition that most human measures for marking time are social constructs. That is, nature gives us a few points upon which we hang our hats. The motion of the sun determines two main things: day and night and the year broken into four quarters based on our motion around the sun. The motion of the moon provides us with another measure but, as it does not cohere with the solar cycle, causes more complexity than it solves. As a result, the majority of the methods by which we keep time say more about “us” and what we think is important than they do about the nature of time itself.

Like the natural world, the Book of Common Prayer has seasons. However, rather than pointing to agricultural potential or lack thereof, the prayer book constructs time around the person of Jesus in the Temporal cycle. While the Sanctoral cycle logically follows subsequent to the Temporal cycle, it is super-imposed upon the year as a succession of static days (as we seem to have mislaid the octaves…). The way that the prayer book orders time, then, is supposed to tell us something about our priorities. Time itself is provided with a Jesus-colored lens.

The statement that I keep coming back to as the simultaneously most important and most overlooked rubric in the prayer book is the first one on the first real page of content:

The Holy Eucharist, the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts, and Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, as set forth in this Book, are the regular services appointed for public worship in the Church. (p. 13)

Now we move to contemplate Mass and Office. The liturgy of the Western Church—especially liturgy that partakes of the monastic spirit—can be described as (among other things) a disciplined and bounded encounter with Scripture. That is, under the early medieval monastic ideal (which itself is described in the preface to the 1549 BCP) the Scriptures were read yearly in the Office; then the Mass could cherry-pick pericopes at its leisure, firm in the knowledge that—thanks to the constant repetition of Scripture—the congregation would immediately recognize the proper text and recall its literary context.

Thus, in the Office the Psalms, the garden from which the fruit of all the other Scriptures may be plucked (as Athanasius put it),  would be repeated regularly (weekly for them, monthly or 8-weekly for us), and the bulk of Scripture read through every year or two depending on how many lessons you use at Evening Prayer.  This is fundamentally catechectical: it grounds us in the stories, the laws, the histories, and the laments of the people of God that illuminate and inform our own experiences.  Too, the canticles serve an important function. They aren’t just praise-bits stuck in with the “real” material, rather they are lenses and orienting devices to help us interpret the readings—especially the set traditional canticles.

The Mass, then, as it rolls through the seasons, offers us not only a weekly or more frequent experience of the grace of God but allows us to hear and experience the Good News in several major modes: expectation, joy, enlightenment, penitence, celebration—the principle Christian affections. If the Office is primarily catechetical, the Mass is primarily mystagogical. That is, it leads us by experiences of grace into the mystery of God and the relationship that God is calling us into with him and with the entire created order through him.

That’s as much as my brain can handle now. There’s lots more to be said, of course, and I’m sure y’all will add a bunch of it into the comments.

Structure, Function, Goals and Objectives

Brian rightly notes in the comments on my previous post that I may indeed have some “structure, function, goals and objectives” in mind for how I’d like to see work on spirituality proceed within our church. Here are some thoughts on these…

As the church moves towards some form of restructuring, there’s been a lot more talk about “networks” that will be relied upon to do some of the heavy lifting. I don’t know a whole lot about the state and extent of these networks but am looking into them. I’m envisioning a “network” that focuses on researching and presenting our core spiritualities to the wider church. A network implies a number of people doing work on the local level contributing to a wider goal that can be used, shared, and felt on a regional or national level. Furthermore, it implies a nexus of some form that serves to collate member activities, identify best practices, and share information about resources—books, curricula, speakers, etc.—that work or don’t work.

As a for-instance, one of the objectives that I envision would be a promotion of the work of Martin Thornton, English priest and ascetical theologian. I had him in mind when I was writing the previous post and fully intended to make reference to his work English Spirituality but neglected to do so. Both this work and his more foundational Christian Proficiency are key resources for the spirituality we’re discussing here. In fact, if you read this blog regularly but don’t have a dog-eared and well-underlined copy of both, I’d heartily recommend that you remedy that situation immediately; thanks to the good offices of one of our comrades both are now available from Wipf & Stock: Christian Proficiency and English Spirituality. (And many thanks to Paul for reminding me of my neglect to mention Fr. Thornton here!) Reviews and summaries of these books and perhaps articles and curricula on using these books with a congregation would be precisely the kind of thing I’m thinking of.

In our digital world, the obvious answer seems to be a web site that would have several sections including but not limited to book reviews, downloadable curricula, and perhaps a forum where people could ask questions and look for answers. There is so much good stuff now out of copyright and in the public domain that ebooks on the topic could be made available for a nominal fee (because clean-up and mark-up do take time and effort).

The major issue here is funding or the incredible lack thereof. Web sites imply administrators, fora imply moderators. Either you use paid staff or you rely on the generosity of volunteers who need to have both a passion for the topic and expertise in it.  (And passion and expertise don’t always travel together…) As far as I can see, paid staff are completely out of the picture which means cultivating a volunteer corps up to the challenge—which is a challenge in and of itself!

I have been involved in discussions about a lay association parallel to the (Anglican) Society of Catholic Priests. My initial sense was that this lay movement would want to focus on these kinds of spiritual practices. There’s no doubt in my mind that there would be a close connection in purpose and intent between a lay SCP and a core spirituality network, I just don’t know if it would be advisable for them to share the same structure. However, a lay SCP organization (as well as the SCP itself) would mostly likely be a good source of volunteers.

So—that’s what I’m thinking about. A set of local people and groups who are actively researching and teaching this stuff to their congregations and communities who would then be linked and reinforced by decent electronic tools.

[Updated: Let me add to that I see a certain possible breadth here; I don’t necessarily see this as a strictly “Episcopal” endeavor. I think there would be space here for a variety of folks who believe strongly in living into the liturgy: Roman Catholics, Lutherans, US and non-US Anglicans, etc. Certainly my stuff would be Anglicanearly EnglishBCP-focused but not everything would have to be. (A system of labels/tags might be useful for any items that might stray into “Dead Horse” territory but we’d cross that bridge if it even came up.)]

Not Quite A Manifesto

This isn’t quite a manifesto—but I get the feeling that it’s headed in that direction…

As I look around at the Episcopal Church, tune in to the chattering at the various levels, I’m feeling like we’re floating a bit. There are some key pieces of who we are that have been soft-pedaled into virtual non-existence.

It’s time for us to do a lot more writing and a lot more talking about core spirituality. For me, “spirituality” means practices that nurture our relationship with God (and with one another through our connection to God) and cultivate a direct experience of God and God’s relationship to the created order. By “core” I mean practices that have a direct and intrinsic relationship to the Anglican expression of Christianity. It doesn’t mean they have to be uniquely Anglican, but it does mean that it should have a deep and abiding connection with what makes us distinctive.

We are a prayer book people. And yet the techniques, strategies, and methods for getting the most spiritual value out of our prayer books have been neglected for quite some time. I honestly don’t recall the last time I heard a good Christian Ed (or other) presentation on the prayer book that dug into the spiritual fruit of the prayer book and how to get at it. In fact, most of the presentations I’ve heard—even from clergy who ought to know better—is about the historical development of the liturgy and how that had shaped what we have now. History is interesting (at least to me) but that’s not what people are hungry for! I believe that what the church needs to hear is how to access the spiritual riches of the Scriptures and the prayer book. In order for that to happen we need to start thinking about it and talking about it—and doing it, of course.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working through the Myroure of Oure Ladye, a part of the Middle English devotional literature connected to Langforde’s meditations and the anchorite traditions that sought to teach Latin-less lay women the use, meaning, and value of the Sarum liturgies: Mass, Office, and Prymer. These, then, are the precursors to understanding the environment that produced the works of Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich and the others. The Myroure not only offers translations, but devotes chapters to what kinds of edification might be found in devotional books and how to get at it, what sort of attitudes are necessary to get the most out of reciting the Offices, practical tips on keeping focused and so on. In short, it lays out for its time, place, and understanding of spirituality, how to get at the meat of the Mass and Office.

Fast-forward to the Victorian era. As ceremonial and a higher view of the liturgy were being re-introduced into Church of England services, a literature arose to explain and champion the spirituality inherent within it. It’s hard to take a dip into the Ritual ‘Reason Why’ without hitting material borrowed from the Myroure. Likewise, I find it interesting that one of the most formative commentaries on the BCP of the period—one still well received today—was written by John Henry Blunt . . . who in 1873 edited the text of the Myroure for the Early English Text Society.

What am I suggesting, then? That the Myroure of Oure Ladye is the fix for the Episcopal Church? Certainly not! Neither are Blunt nor Frere nor Dearmer or others who followed in that line.

No—we need our own books. We need our own thinkers. We need our own spiritualities grounded in our own liturgies that teach us strategies and techniques for what the Myroure did for the Sarum Office of the BVM and Blunt did for the English 1662 BCP. By all means the Myroure and the Ancrene Wisse and Blunt and the rest need to be conversation partners. Just because they don’t fit our tires doesn’t mean we need to reinvent the wheel.

One of the reasons why the Myroure and the Ritual ‘Reason Why’ don’t work any more is that their way of understanding the liturgy was thoroughly repudiated by Vatican II and the Liturgical Renewal Movement.  What the Myroure and RRW understood to be the point was seen by the Liturgical Renewal Movement as precisely the accretions from which the liturgy needed to be cleansed. Taking as normative the practical level of ritual and ceremonial motion, the sometimes overly spiritualized explanations of the Myroure were jetissoned in favor of the practical purpose and the ideal was described as “noble simplicity.”

An academic generation or more beyond the Liturgical Renewal Movement, we must take stock again. If the last fifty years of biblical scholarship have taught us only one thing it’s that the idea of a single objectively “correct” meaning of any given passage is a deeply flawed concept.  Liturgy is no different in this respect. Our attempts to make meaning from and with the liturgy are interpretive acts; we deal in false dichotomies when we force a choice between a spiritual and a practical interpretation. A biblical text can have an historical interpretation, a literary interpretation, a theological interpretation, a moral interpretation, and a wide variety of reader-response interpretations. Typically, one or two of these will take precedence over the others based on the purpose of the interpretive act; the others will remain in the background, offering amplification and/or critique to the dominant interpretation. Liturgical interpretations need to function in the same way. Discussions that suggest that liturgical acts have one meaning (often couched as “the real meaning”) are falling into the modern objectivist interpretive paradigm that sought to impose a single meaning on a single text.

Bottom line—it’s time to go back. It’s time to re-enact Matthew 13:52 and re-examine our old treasure to see how it can be re-purposed for our new environment.

We’re a church, folks. This core spirituality stuff ought to be right in our wheelhouse. The fact that it’s not, the fact that many clergy are at a loss for explaining our liturgies and their implications to our people is a clear sign that we’ve lost focus of what ought to be fundamental.

A network, a forum, a site—something like that is essential to provide a space to think through these issues and to provide a place for people to ask questions and receive answers (or better questions…). I’d rather see something arise organically than try to force it into existence. What are your thoughts?

Concerning Holy Women, Holy Men

I have a new piece out on Holy Women Holy Men. It’s not at the Cafe this time—it’s the lead story in the latest issue of the Living Church.

As those who have been regular readers for a while know, HWHM is a document I’ve struggled with for a while and this piece gives only a partial glimpse into the issues with the book. Some of my other thoughts were expressed in blog posts written while I was hashing out this article—others have yet to be written down. So—for further reading along this topic here are some of the previous posts:

The Liturgical Naming of Spiritual Communities

Another Issue with HWHM (Specifically on the collect issue)

Perspective on the Saints (a more poetic than analytical piece)

Naming Spiritual Communities in the Sarum Rite

On Liturgical Naming: Categories This piece plays with the ways that I think the conceptualization and identification of saints has changed between the ’79 BCP and the current practice including HWHM. I argue that we’re moving from the old “bucket” based paradigm to a “tag” and “cloud” based paradigm. This didn’t fit into the article but is definitely deserving of a follow-up.

On the Sanctity of Saints

Brief Thought on Confirmation

I’ve been thinking about Baptism and about bishops for two entirely different purposes. What’s common between them, however, is that both touch on the subject of Confirmation.

Confirmation has become something of an issue recently in the Episcopal Church. The more recent material on Baptism comes down hard on the prayer-book understanding of Baptism as “full initiation…into Christ’s Body the Church” and I would agree (BCP, 298). But then, these folks tell me that Confirmation no longer has an important place—or perhaps not any place at all—in Christian initiation. The phrase most commonly used is that it is a “rite in search of a theology.” After all, if Baptism is full initiation, what is there left for Confirmation to do?

I don’t buy it.

Principally, I think we’re coming at the question from the wrong direction. The bishop is the focus of unity and the sacramental center of the diocese. The bishop’s blessing is literally present in Baptism through the Chrism that, if used, must be blessed by the bishop (BCP, 298). Confirmation, though, is the rite that reifies the sacramental relationship between the bishop and the laity of the diocese. We are baptized into Christ’s Body the Church—the invisible Church—but we are Confirmed into our diocese and the obligations of local incarnate church life. It’s our connection into the basic administrative and sacramental unit of the Church’s life—the visible Church.

More on CWOB

To the amazement of both the far left and the far right in the Episcopal world, there is a growing vocal movement in the Episcopal Church explaining why Communion Without Baptism is a bad idea.

I’ve contended for some time that the push for it is driven by identity politics not sacramental theology; that is, proponents want to see themselves and their institution as inclusive and their opponents as exclusive. As a result, the rhetoric of the movement whenever possible seeks to link CWOB with both the ordination of women and queer folk and suggests that it’s a package deal.

The other day, Fr. Robert Hendrickson wrote a great piece that thoroughly demolishes the shoddy logic behind this linkage. If you haven’t read it, you should. M and I met Fr. Robert through the Society of Catholic Priests and we always enjoy our conversations with him whether deep, profound, or fun.

I’m aware that there are many who view a shift to CWOB at General Convention as a fore-gone conclusion.

I think they’re wrong.

There is a core of catholic minded, credally grounded laity and clergy who feel strongly about this matter and who are making our voices heard. Expect to hear more in the coming months.

On the Authenticity of the Great Commission

Looking over the whole Lead thread on CWOB, this brief aside from Donald Schell jumped out at me:

I will note that ‘The Great Commission’ a poorly attested addition and arguably late addition to Matthew’s Gospel

Ok—let’s talk about this. I’ve seen this kind of thing in several places and it is begging for some informed discussion.

Basically, the bibles that we read from in church are “eclectic texts”. What does this mean? It means that they are translated from a base Greek text that has been compiled from literally thousands of manuscripts by hundreds of scholars who have been at work on this process for about a hundred and fifty years. The goal of this eclectic text is to recover the earliest possible form of the text; to read the books of the New Testament in the state in which they left the authors’ pens—or, at least, the best that we can do towards that.

Our evidence consists of three major bodies of Greek texts and two additional categories. We have three types of Greek biblical texts determined by style of writing and materials which is roughly correlated to age: papyri, uncials, and miniscules.

Papyri tend to be the oldest. That is, we have papyrus fragments of the New Testament that date anywhere from the 7th century (fairly late) to roughly the year 200 (the celebrated papyrus P46). The problem is that the papyri tend to be fragmentary meaning that we only have bits and pieces. P46, for instance, only has parts of the Pauline Letters. Most contain only a few verses. So—they’re old, but very spotty.

Uncials get their name from their letters—all uppercase. Many papyri (particularly the earlier ones) are written in these letters two but the key difference between the two is material: the uncial manuscripts were written on parchment (prepared skin) rather than papyrus (early fiber paper). As a result, the uncials preserved a heck of a lot better than the papyrus. Uncials containing large sections of the Bible were big projects and expensive to produce in Antiquity—we only get them after the legalization of Christianity. Thus, our best, most trustworthy, and most extensive witnesses to the NT text are the big early uncials. There’s a handful of them that are considered the primo references often referred to as the Great Uncials.

Then we have the miniscules. They’re called this because they’re written in lower case characters and they tend to be later than the uncials.

The two other categories are early translations from the Greek into other languages, and citations from the Church Fathers. The latter will become quite important in a moment so file that away…

A whole bunch of Germans (other people too—but mostly Germans) have dedicated their scholarly lives to going through all of the little bits and manuscripts and have sorted them based on the quality of their readings. The best manuscripts are those with the most careful and accurate scribes and that give us a faithful reproduction of the text. Because of their work, we can rank the various manuscripts and sources on how well they represent the earliest recoverable text by specific books. The best are referred to as the “First-Order Witnesses” and these are the places where we go when we want to see what a text said.

Basic procedure for assembling an eclectic text, therefore, is to start with the major first-order witness uncials, create the text where they agree, then supplement from any papyri that are earlier than the actual base uncials in question. Miniscules provide minor evidence.

Going back to original claim on the authenticity of Matthew 28:19 let’s be very clear: There are no first-order witnesses that omit any part of this verse as we are familiar with it. None. One of the major later unicals (D) adds in a “now” that also appears in early pre-Vulgate Latin versions and two uncials (B and D) have a slightly different form of the participle “baptizing”, but  nothing is missing. There are no surviving papyri of Matthew earlier than the Great Uncials that contain this verse. Remember, the papyri are fragmentary—we don’t have an old one that covers this section.

So—where is this claim coming from if there is no hint of it whatsoever in the actual manuscript evidence? A dude named Conybeare noticed that when the early Church Father Eusebius of Caesarea (died 340) cited this verse—and he did it a couple of times—that he consistently cited it in a different form: “Go ye therefore and make disciples of all the nations in my name”. No mention of baptism or of the Triune formula. The argument goes that since Eusebius was writing before the Great Uncials were written, and since Eusebius was relying on the great text-critical work of Origen, he may be referring to an earlier form of the text than the Great Uncials.

Thus, one Father may have recourse to an earlier form. However, nobody else writes it that way and, by way of counter-example, we have Tertullian (died 220 or so) citing the usual form of the verse in his treatise On Baptism (Ch. 13).

The problem with this argument is that there is no way that it can be disproven. We can establish that Tertullian writing around the year 200 in North Africa knew the standard text but that doesn’t rule out Conybeare’s suggestion.

The big problem, as I see it, is that Conybeare’s suggestion (also forwarded by Kirsopp Lake and other contemporaries) rests entirely on a textual paradigm of citation. That is, the assumption is that Eusebius is looking up every passage and copying it word-for-word from an older and possibly unique text that also happens to be better than all of the surviving ones. Rather than, say, writing it from memory in the form he likes it best…

I’ve noted in my other research that Eusebius’s version of the Beatitudes actually was different from the received version—he flips Matt 5:4 and 5. So does Origen, the Great Uncial D, and some of the Latin, Syriac, and Boharic translations. Note that—here there was a material change and it leaves a number of footprints in the tradition…

Furthermore, the Eusebius theory fits handily into a philosophical construct favored by certain modern folks. That is, some people believe that the Church only gradually came to think of a Trinity and therefore they view any mention of the Trinity with suspicion and call it a late addition to the text whether there’s any textual warrant for it or not.

The claim, again, is this:

I will note that ‘The Great Commission’ a poorly attested addition and arguably late addition to Matthew’s Gospel

The evidence is this:

  • The verse appears as received in all of the first-order witness that contain it.
  • One Church Father, Eusebius writing in the early 300s, writes it differently
  • Other earlier Church Fathers don’t write it differently
  • In other cases where Eusebius was looking at a genuinely different text we see signs of that change in other text traditions

On the strength of the actual evidence, then, we’ve got to conclude that, contra the starting claim, the Great Commission in its familiar form is very well attested textually and there is only one hint read through a particular philosophical construct to the contrary.

QED: Not buyin’ it.