The European explorations of the Australian interior in the nineteenth century give us the most wonderful insight into understanding Jesus’s instructions to his disciples.

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Smile!

…the great value of wearing a SMILE badge is that it leaves your face free to scowl.

Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Havernization’ , The New York Times, 29 September, 1977

Dear fellow Herbicidalists!

It has been sometime since the last installment of KGH was posted on 3 Minute Theologian. This has been caused by, amongst other things, Easter, parish life, the demands of a new PhD project, preparing for the Lambeth Conference, Anglican Roots, an exciting project that is still underwraps (but was hinted at by my new best friend, Sam Norton), and vain attempts to get a life.

Having said all that, the next section of Killing George Herbert will be posted beginning on Monday, in smaller, screen-sized chunks (rather than the previous, full-on, chapter-length, 15,000 behemoths). If you want to see in which way a parish priest’s ministry should approximate to a Bob Dylan/Jimi Hendrix song, join me from Monday.

Dorothy Sayers’ Ethic

Do this, do that, love your friends and like your neighbours, be just, be extravagantly generous, be honest, be tolerant, have courage, have compassion, use your wits and your imagination, understand the world you live in and be on terms with it, don’t dramatise and dream of escape. Anyhow, that seems to me to be the pattern, so far as we can make it out here.
So come in again with your eyes open, when you feel you can.

Dorothy Sayers, quoted in Anglicansonline.org 1 September 2002

Practical Eating

“If it’s slower than me, stupider than me, and tastes better than me, then I’m eating it.”

Anthony Bourdain, guest chef on Steve Wright in the Afternoon, Radio 2, 24 January 2002

Those of us who write blogs find ourselves at the mercy of search machines: Google might not necessarily be the friend of the keen and enthusiastic person within the UK who today entered “ordination training” as the search term, and was directed to

KGH : Lin-Chi, the Curate and the Anglican Divine

Sorry, whoever you are. Perhaps that wasn’t the sort of information that you want now… but, one day, you will!

Vincent Donovan travelled to Tanzania in the 1960s to teach the Masai people about Christianity. In return he learnt a profound lesson on what it means to be a church community, in a time and culture which has all but forgotten what “community” means.

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The Missionary Societies

We heard earlier on how the Bishops of the Church of England, and principally the Bishop of London, managed church life in the colonies through the work of commissaries. The most famous, able, and influential of these commissaries was a Shropshire Boy, Thomas Bray, who was born in 1658. A bright boy from a boy family, Bray went to Oxford, became a school master and then was ordained, being presented to a series of livings by lay patrons who heard him preach and were impressed by his learning and good sense. By 1690 he was Rector of Sheldon in Warwickshire.

Bray took his legal responsibilities seriously, especially that laid down in the 59th Canon of the CofE’s Canon Law: the young of the parish were to be catechetized on Sunday afternoons. Bray realised that teaching the faith required resourcing, and so published his own system of teaching under the catchy title Catechetical Lectures. It was a best seller, selling 3000 copies and making a profit of £700 (equivalent to more than £100,000 today!). Even more importantly it got him the attention of the bishop of London, Henry Compton.

When in 1695 the Governor of Maryland requested the Bishop of London to provide an able clergyman as commissary for the colony, Compton knew exactly who to send.

As he was preparing to leave for the Americas Bray surveyed the clergy who would be prepared to travel as missionaries with him. Unsurprisingly he found that it was the poor, unbeneficed clergy who were prepared to go (they had no fat living to lose in England), and yet they were the clergy without libraries of their own, and the learning Bray felt was necessary for such an important task. He petitioned the Bishop Compton for assistance in setting up a charity to support buying books for clergy. He received a donation of £44 (£5000) from Princess (later Queen) Anne, and thus was born, in 1699, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In the December of the same year he finally travelled to Maryland, taking three months to get there, and founding thirty-nine libraries, some having more than a thousand volumes.

On his return Bray realised that a more thorough effort at the evangelising of the colonies was needed. He saw the danger posed to the Anglican Church by the vigour of such groups as the Quakers, and so in 1701 he received the charter for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Its first meeting was held in Lambeth Palace, and the Archbishop of Canterbury became its first president. It was the means by which the Church of England was able to support its clergy in the English colonies ‘for the instruction of the King’s loving subjects in the Christian religion’ and to evangelize the native peoples there. Having set up these two important societies, Bray retired to his parish, first Sheldon, and then St Botolph’s Aldgate in the city of London.

It was Bray’s foresight that enable the Anglican church to survive the shocks of the War of Independence. It was the model of the two societies which enabled the Church of England to respond to the growth of empire in the nineteenth century, with the swift foundation of other missionary societies:

• CMS– 1799, for the missions to Africa and Asia;
• UMCA (Universities’ Mission to Central Africa)– 1857 (working in Malawi and Zanzibar);
• the BFBS (British & Foreign Bible Society)– 1804;
• the LMS (London Missionary Society)– 1795 (David Livingstone’s sponsoring body);
• SAMS (South American Missionary Society originally the Patagonian Mission)– 1844.

An assessment of the missionary societies?

On the one hand:

SPG funded its missionary endeavours, in part, through the ownership of the Codrington plantation in Barbados where slaves had the word “Society” branded on their chests. Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1758 to 1768 realised that this was a dreadful responsibility: “I have long wondered and lamented that the Negroes in our plantation decrease and new supplies become necessary continually. Surely this proceeds from some defect, both of humanity and even of good policy. But we must take things as they are at present.” When slavery was abolished in 1833, the bishop of Exeter was paid nearly £13,000 (over £1 million) to compensate him for the loss of 665.

On the other hand:

Before his enthronement as Archbishop of York, John Sentamu said this:

My late parents always said to me whenever you meet a group of people who may be interested in hearing what you have to say, always tell them how grateful we are for the missionaries who risked their lives to bring the good news of God’s salvation to Uganda. It is because of that missionary endeavour that I am standing in front of you. A fruit of their risk-taking and love.¹

In the end it was right and is right that a church which was founded and fostered and fed by missionary endeavour from a world-wide church contributed in turn to that missionary endeavour.

1. Quoted in Stephen Bates, ‘A cleric’s journey: from Idi Amin’s Uganda to York’, The Guardian, Saturday 18 June 2005. [↩]

The ethos of Anglicanism

It has become the easiest of journalistic cliches to accuse leaders of the Anglican Communion of sitting on the fence, fudging issues and woolly thinking. It is worth distinguishing pusillanimous behaviour, which simply lacks the courage to face a difficulty or the honesty to admit that one exists, with a fully justified refusal to fall into a neatly-set journalistic trap. ‘We know you are a plain, honest-to-goodness, no nonsense kind of teacher,’ they said to Jesus once. ‘What about this tax, then; should we pay it or not?’ And the meaning of Jesus’s famous reply, ‘Pay to Caesar what is due to Caesar, and to God what is due to God’ — an archetypical sound-bite— has been disputed ever since he uttered it. The refusal to give neat, categorical instructions on each and every issue is by no means a necessary sign of religious decay.
Stephen Sykes¹

The word ‘Anglican’ begs a question at once. I have simply taken it as referring to the sort of Reformed Christian thinking that was done by those (in Britain at first, then far more widely) who were content to settle with a church order grounded in the historic ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, and with the classical early Christian formulations of doctrine about God and Jesus Christ – the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon. It is certainly Reformed thinking, and we should not let the deep and pervasive echoes of the Middle Ages mislead us: it assumes the governing authority of the Bible, made available in the vernacular, and repudiates the necessity of a central executive authority in the Church’s hierarchy. It is committed to a radical criticism of any theology that sanctions the hope that human activity can contribute to the winning of God’s favour, and so is suspicious of organized asceticism (as opposed to seeing the free activity of God sustaining and transforming certain human actions done in Christ’s name).
Rowan Williams²

The Anglican “Via Media”?

the… via media was not in [George] Herbert’s day a mere compromise, a golden mean. Rather, it was a balance and an integration, an affirmation of the best of both traditions. In the sense that it was Catholic – in its sacramentalism, its liturgical worship, and in its continuity with the past – it was very Catholic. In the sense that it was Reformed – in its focus on the grace of God, in its Biblicism, in its evangelical liberty – it was very Reformed.
Gene Edward Veith³

The Collect for Quinquagesima : The Anglican Collect

O Lord, who hast taught us
that all our doings without charity are nothing worth:
send thy Holy Ghost,
and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity,
the very bond of peace and of all virtues,
without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before thee:
Grant this for thine only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

1. Stephen Sykes, ‘The Genius of Anglicanism’ in Unashamed Anglicanism, p. 222. [↩]
2. Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004), pp. 2-3. [↩]
3. G.E. Veith Jr., ‘The Religious Wars in George Herbert Criticism: Reinterpreting Seventeenth Century Anglicanism’, George Herbert Journal, 11 (1988), p. 18. [↩]

Every time a church body meets it comes up with a statement, justifying the meeting and the accompanying expense. Sometimes the statement is grandly called a “communique” as if saying it in French makes it more official. I am sure that all of you eagerly seize upon these statements, with their neatly bulleted and outlined sentences, knowing that the publication of each is bringing the kingdom nearer. No?

Then praise the Archbishop of Canterbury for turning the 2008 Lambeth Conference away from being a deliberative legislative body and into a retreat for bishops to learn how to be better bishops (although, in the words of a senior retired clergyman of my acquaintance, the Lambeth Conference has always had a simpler purpose: “The Lambeth Conference is a teach in for Bishops who have stopped reading books. They come to Lambeth, go to Wipples and get kitted out with the latest Episcopal gear and then go home and retire.”)

The first Lambeth Conference was called to deal with a doctrinal crisis in the now world-wide Anglican Communion. In 1853 a methodical mathematician called John Colenso was consecrated bishop of the new diocese of Natal. Someone didn’t do their research, because it soon emerged that Colenso had radical (for then!) ideas about polygamy, heathenism and the proper interpretation of the Old Testament. The Bishop of Cape Town attempted to depose Colenso, then excommunicate him. The Privy Council in London got involved and complicated matters further. There ended up two bishops in Natal, the Bishop of Natal (Colenso, who remained in communion with the Church of England even if excomunicate from the church in South Africa) and the Bishop of Maritzburg (who was in communion with the Bishop of Cape Town). It was a mess: if I am in communion with you, but not with him, will I be in communion with her, who is in communion with him, but not with you? Positions were assumed and attitudes were struck. Samuel John Stone, the curate of Haggerstone in London, even wrote a polemical hymn attacking Colenso and supporting the actions of the Bishop of Cape Town:

Though with a scornful wonder
men see her sore oppressed,
by schisms rent asunder,
by heresies distressed;
yet saints their watch are keeping,
their cry goes up, “How long?”
and soon the night of weeping
shall be the morn of song.

The Bishop of Cape Town, despairing of this mess, called in 1860 for a synod of the colonial bishops. The Canadian Church agreed in 1865. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Longley, was a cautious man, and it wasn’t until 1867 he invited the colonial bishops to a meeting at his London home, Lambeth Palace: the first Lambeth Conference. It was not a great success: 76 bishops attended for the four day meeting (four days! After a voyage to London of weeks for some of the bishops!); the Archbishop of York refused to attend, concerned that this impinged upon the authority of Parliament. As one historian said:

It ended after only four days of meeting without any great accomplishments, but its great achievement was simply to have met. [(!)]¹

Which isn’t entirely fair. Longley was wise enough to recognise the true nature of the Anglican Church and the more profitable way for such meetings to behave: “Longley insisted that the meeting was a conference not a synod: no declaration of faith was to be made nor were canons to be enacted.”² — a lesson not heeded by subsequent Archbishops.

A second Lambeth Conference, held in 1878, meant, according to Anglican custom, that we have always done things this way, and so a third was inevitable. It was at the third conference, held in 1878 that the strange beast that is the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral was discussed.

To understand the C-LQ we have to take a step back and introduce William Reed Huntington (1838-1909), the Rector of Grace Church, New York. Reed Huntington was a great man in the history of the Anglican Communion, an inheritor of the great theologian saints such as Anselm and Hooker. He realised the doctrine when correctly understood and articulated, was the great engine of evangelism and mission. In 1870 he wrote a book The Church Idea which deserves to be much better known outside the Episcopal Church:

If our whole ambition as Anglicans in America be to continue a small, but eminently respectable body of Christians, and to offer a refuge to people of refinement and sensibility, who are shocked by the irreverences they are apt to encounter elsewhere; in a word, if we care to be only a countercheck and not a force in society; then let us say as much in plain terms, and frankly renounce any and all claim to Catholicity. We have only, in such a case, to wrap the robe of our dignity about us, and walk quietly along in seclusion no one will take much trouble to disturb. Thus may we be a Church in name, and a sect in deed.
But if we aim at something nobler than this, if we would have our Communion become national in very truth, – in other words, if we would bring the Church of Christ into the closest possible sympathy with the throbbing, sorrowing, sinning, repenting, aspiring heart of this great people, – then let us press our reasonable claims to be the reconciler of a divided household, not in a spirit of arrogance, but with affectionate earnestness and an intelligent zeal.

And the curious path Huntington took to achieve this role as the reconciler of a divided house was to set out exactly what united all those who called themselves Anglican, so that we can press onward to find out exactly what unites all those who call themselves Christian. Huntington’s path to unity had four points, hence “Quadrilateral”. By 1886 the Quadrilateral had got itself on to the agenda of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church at its meeting in Chicago. It was heartily endorsed. It was then passed over the Atlantic to the meeting of the Third Lambeth Conference. Again it was endorsed as the irreducible basis of all that we hold in common as Anglicans. Thus it became the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral.

Four points, in four sentences, and 108 words.

The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral

(Resolution 11 of the Lambeth Conference, 1888)

1. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as “containing all things necessary to salvation,” and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith.
2. The Apostles’ Creed, as the baptismal symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.
3. The two sacraments ordained by Christ himself — Baptism and the Supper of the Lord — ministered with unfailing use of Christ’s words of institution, and of the elements ordained by him.
4. The historic episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the unity of his Church.

There was a elegant simplicity to this formula, which proved to be very effective for some years, especially in cementing the unity of the disparate churches throughout and beyond the British Empire which had some historic connection with the See of Canterbury:

There was no mention of England, Anglicanism, the Reformation, the Thirty-Nine Articles, or the Book of Common Prayer.³

But there are also (were also) very serious problems caused by the formula. To work out what those might be, think ecumenically.

1. Frederick Shriver in John E. Booty, Stephen Sykes and Douglas A. Knight, eds., The Study of Anglicanism, (SPCK, 2nd rev ed. 1998), p. 195. [↩]
2. J. R. Garrard, ‘Longley, Charles Thomas (1794–1868)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [↩]
3. Mark Chapman, Anglicanism: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford VSIs, 2006), p. 121 [↩]