Seeing western Christianity from a distance

Wondering about the need for a post-imperial ecclesiology - and liturgy...



Reflecting this week on a book I picked off the shelf by 'chance' as I left for vacation, I have been thinking particularly about the vernacular, the establishment of Christianity, and the need now for a post-establishment - post-colonial - post-imperial ecclesiology - and liturgy.


"Seeing western Christianity from a distance, Bede was feeling more and more that it ‘needs a larger vision of life, which includes more consciously the whole evolution of nature and history to its fulfillment in Christ to be adequate to the needs of the modern world’ [16]. In his personal letters he revealed his criticisms of western Christianity in a way that, at the time, loyalty and tact restrained him from admitting publicly. He wanted radical change in the Church, admitting that he was ‘feeling very much the total inadequacy of Christianity to-day’, finding modern Roman Catholicism an extremely decadent religion, a kind of fossilization of what had once been a great tradition’ [17] and the control of the Roman Curia ‘rigid and disgusting – the spirit of the Inquisition was always – and still is – there.’ [18] Unusually in those days he even suggested that the Roman Church might have to moderate some of its views on the papacy, writing to a fellow monk that they must be prepared for great changes in the Church:

"‘The vernacular will eventually transform everything. It is the end of the whole Roman system set up at the Council of Trent. As you know, no doubt, a revolution is already taking place in theology & the Roman theology is on the way out. The next session of the Council will probably see a further phase in the revolution. If the Collegiality of the Bishops is established, the whole conception of the place of the Pope in the church will have to be revised. The teaching and governing authority of the church is not the Pope, but the bishops with the Pope at their head. This puts it in a different light altogether & brings us much nearer to the Eastern Church (& all ancient tradition.)’

"He was, however, to draw some hope from the conclusions reached by the Second Vatican Council towards the end of the 1960s, feeling that it might lead to a thorough reconsideration of the place of the Pope in the Church, which he felt should be much more modest, and that it had opened the way to a renewal of the Church which could bring the main Christian churches into united. In particular he delighted in the Council’s admission that God might be found in non-Christian religions and in its decision, for the most part, to replace the Latin Mass with liturgies in the vernacular. Optimistic as ever, he believed the Council had opened the way to a complete renewal of the Church and released it from ‘a bondage which had to go’. For him the decisive point in the evolution of the Church was in the age of Constantine; it was then that the Church became a worldly power, adopting all the trappings of the Roman Empire, evolving a Greek theology and a Roman law. He longed for a new Church, appropriate to the second half of the twentieth century, for now, he argued: ‘We are entering a new age, social, political, economic, a new phase of history, and the old forms are no longer adequate. We have to go back to the roots of our religion – as the Vatican Council has tried to do – to the Gospel, the early Church, even the Old Testament, and in Hinduism and Primitive religion.’" [19]


Du Boulay, Shirley. Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths. New York: Doubleday, 1998. 138-139.


[16] Letter to Martyn Skinner, 18 February 1965. [17] Letter to Martyn Skinner, 23 June 1966. [18] Letter to Martyn Skinner, 25 December 1967. [19] Letter to Martyn Skinner, 12 July 1964.

"The vernacular..." hmm... The vernacular alone may not transform the Church though one hopes good liturgy will foster conversion and congregational transformation. The vernacular was introduced to the Church of England in the first prayer book (1549) and it did have, along with putting the Bible into a language of the people, an empowering effect. But the invitation to collegiality must include more than words; there must be a living tradition behind them.

Right now there is an insistence among some Anglican neotraditionalists on the use of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as the standard for worship throughout the Anglican Communion... which was originally conceived by the American and Canadian churches as a network for conversation about mission ... odd choice since the Scottish Episcopal Church had its own rite by 1637 and its independence from the Church of England by 1689 ... leading to its ability to consecrate Samuel Seabury bishop for the new united States of America and its nascent Episcopal church in 1784...



http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Scotland/BCP_1637.htm



http://www.scotland.anglican.org/index.php/liturgy/




Anyway this insistence by some in the Anglican tradition on the 1662 BCP of England as its shibboleth (in not one word but many pages) shows how anachronistic and retrograde the new conception of Anglican Communion as pseudo-Roman imperium (with Curia to follow?) is.



The 1662 book was promulgated after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. So its use became then a kind of loyalty test. (Of course it also became a great gift of resources for prayer and is so used to this day.)



What we need to do - okay, what I need to do - now is question whether our liturgy has its shape from this moment (1662) of the reassertion of imperial, royal, and episcopal authority at the moment of the Restoration... or whether that book's roots in a larger purpose - going back to the early centuries of the Church and farther into Hebrew (and other ancient and archaic) religion....... gives it so much of its character as not to bother to look further.



In his blog Fiat Lux my friend Jim Richardson says what really tore it among Anglicans was that moment in Christ Church, Philadelphia, when the rector took up his BCP (1662) and went through it striking out the king's name and writing in its place 'the United States of America'.... on 4 July 1776...



http://spmcrector.blogspot.com/2010/06/it-began-by-crossing-out-king-from.html



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