Anglicanism is . . . 11. Committed to the Coinherence of all Humanity and All Creation

Like most Anglican commitments, this one goes deep into the early church. It only sound novel to us after some centuries of having our imaginations shaped by a way of reasoning that is reductive, materialistic, and disenchanting that looks at the rest of creation as a collection of things to be "objectively" studied and used rather than fellow creatures to be known and engaged with respect and reverence. Too often Christians have adopted that more recent way of understanding. We have sometimes forgotten if not denied that the world is charged with the grandeur of God and that everything and everyone is is woven together in relationship with God and each other. Denying that coinherence leads eventually to incoherence. Before we encounter anyone or anything, before we decide if they or it is "useful" to us, God is already is there, knowing and delighting. We are invited to share in that knowing and in that delighting. 

“Fountain of life and source of all goodness, you made all things and fill them with your blessing; you created them to rejoice in the splendor of your radiance.”

– Book of Common Prayer (1979), Eucharist, Rite II, Prayer D

“God hath created nothing simply for itself, but each thing in all things, and every thing each part in other have such interest, that in the whole world nothing is found whereunto any thing that is created can say, ‘I need thee not.’”
– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), The Nature of Pride

“God is not so in any creature, nor any creature so in God, as Christ—whether we consider him as the personal Word of God, or as the natural Son of man. All other things that are of God nonetheless do have God in them, and he has them in himself. Yet because their substance and his wholly differ, their coherence and communion either with him or among themselves is in no way like that union between the Persons [of the Holy Trinity] discussed above.”

– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

 
“God is present by his essence; which, because it is infinite, cannot be contained within the limits of any place; and as the sun, reflecting upon the mud of strands and shores, is unpolluted in its beams, so is God not dishonored when we suppose him in every one of his creatures, and in every part of every one of them.”
– Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), Holy Living

“No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.”

– John Donne (1572-1631), No Man is an Island

 
“The [intensity] whereby sometimes a man doteth upon one creature is but a little spark of that love, even towards all, that lurketh in his nature. We are made to love, both to satisfy the necessity of our active nature, and to answer the beauties in every creature. By Love our Souls are married and solder'd to the creatures and it is our Duty like God to be united to them all. We must love them infinitely, but in God, and for God and God in them: namely all His excellencies manifested in them. When we dote upon the perfections and beauties of some one creature, we do not love that too much, but other things too little. Never was anything in this world loved too much, but many things have been loved in a false way: and all in too short a measure..”
– Thomas Traherne (1636-1674), Centuries of Meditations
 
“That [humankind] is a community, that we all stand in a relation to each other, that there is a public end and interest of society which each particular is obliged to promote is the sum of morals.”
– Joseph Butler (1692-1752), Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, Sermon IX. Upon Forgiveness of Injuries

“All mankind is one volume.”

 – John Donne (1572-1631), Meditation XVII

 

“God has made us not to be separate creatures, but to have fellowship with one another. I believe He is working in these spirits of ours that we may have it. There is something which hinders us from having it. When we are bitter against each other that hinders it; when we are suspicious of each other that hinders it; when we think ourselves wiser or better than one another that hinders it. I believe the Spirit of God would take away these hindrances from us. Those from whom He takes them away are made saints or holy. I believe, then, in the Communion of Saints; in their Communion with the loving God and with His children.”

– F. D. Maurice (1805-1872), The Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Commandments

“We are always in the condition that we are because of others. . .
 
The Christian idea was expressed in the phrase ‘bear ye one another’s burdens.’ It encouraged, indeed it demanded, a continual attention to the needs of one’s neighbor, to his [or her] distresses and his [or her] delights. And it defined ‘neighbor’ as meaning anyone with whom one was, by holy Luck, brought into contact. It required then, an active ‘sympathy,’ and it spoke of something still higher, of an active and nonselfish love. It went even farther. It declared a union of existences. It proclaimed that our own lives depended on the lives of our neighbors. Saint Anthony of Egypt laid down the doctrine in so many words: ‘Your life and your death are with your neighbor.’”

– Charles Williams (1886-1945), The Way of Exchange

“We are all limbs and parts of one Whole. Hence of each other.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Till We Have Faces

“The word 'human' refers to something more than the bodily form or even the rational mind. It refers also to that community of blood and experience which unites all men and women on the Earth.”

– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Perelandra

 
“God promised to make you free. He never promised to make you independent.”
– Madeleine L’ Engle, (1918–2007), The Irrational Season

“I cannot but think that those who have detected this law of the imagination—this law of sympathy and communion between themselves and that which is distinct from them, have been assailed by a conviction which they cannot resist or part with, that some such Jaw of communion is the law of their whole life; that life is an unintelligible blank without it; that here must be the key to its deepest mysteries.”

– F. D. Maurice (1805-1872), The Kingdom of Christ

 

“God created us for fellowship. God created us so that we should form the human family, existing together because we were made for one another. We are not made for an exclusive self-sufficiency but for interdependence, and we break the law of our being at our peril.”

– Desmond Tutu (1931-2021), Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, December 11, 1984

“The first law of our being is that we are set in a delicate network of interdependence with our fellow human beings and with the rest of God’s creation. . . It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness; it speaks about compassion.”
– Desmond Tutu (1931-2021), God Has a Dream

“The paradox, noted by a good many other commentators, is that our supposed ‘materialism’ is actually a deeply anti-material thing. The plain thereness of the physical world we inhabit tells us from our first emergence into consciousness that our will is not the foundation of everything—and so its proper working is essentially about creative adjustment to an agenda set not by our fantasy but by the qualities and complexities of what we encounter. The material world tells us that to be human is to be in dialogue with what is other: what is physically other, what is humanly other in the solid three-dimensionality of other persons, ultimately what is divinely other. And in a world created by the God Christians believe in, this otherness is always communicating: meaning arises in this encounter, it is not devised by our ingenuity.” 

– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Embracing Our Limits, Commonweal, September 23, 2015

“If you believe in a loving God who created all things and who wants to know and love all creatures in a relationship rooted in their freedom and willingness to participate, then we should expect that all human existence will be full of signposts, clues, and magnets toward the truth of God’s existence and love. Episcopalians believe that creation is embedded with clues and keys to seek and embrace God’s love. We are free to follow these natural and spiritual trails to their Creator, but we are not free to live in a world without them.”

– Patricia Lyons, What Is Evangelism?

“Worship, in all its grades and kinds, is the response of the creature to the Eternal: nor need we limit this definition to the human sphere. There is a sense in which we may think of the whole life of the Universe, seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, as an act of worship, glorifying its Origin, Sustainer, and End.”

– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), Worship

“First of all I don’t think the world is actually unenchanted. We are the ones who are failing to see what it is. So what I am interested in is not so much re-enchantment of the world as the undisenchantment of ourselves. Inside the word ‘enchantment’ is the word ‘chant’. In a sense, we have to hear the chant again. We have to tune our ears to it. But we have to chant in our turn. We have to make and shape the beautiful response to the beauty that we see. And that is part of reality.”

– Malcolm Guite (1957 - ), Malcolm Guite: We need to awaken the mind's attention, Re-Enchanting Podcast, Seen & Unseen Magazine

“[I]n God’s eternal knowing and loving of Godself, that is in the eternal begetting of the Word and breathing forth of the Spirit, God also knows and loves all the ways in which creatures might participate in the God’s life through God’s gift of each creature’s existence.

. . . Christians have understood the whole universe as the expression in time and space of God’s infinite activity of knowing and loving, that is, of God being the Trinity. This means there is a rich depth of intelligibility that rational creatures (humans and angels in particular) are all to apprehend and appreciate.; and it means there is an ultimate truth of all creatures, recoverable beyond all the world’s incoherence and violence―a living truth that is imperishably known and loved in God’s beloved Child from eternity, incarnate in Christ yet rejected by the world, and finally vindicated and brought to newness of life in Christ’s resurrection.”
– Mark McIntosh (1960-2021), The Divine Ideas Tradition

“Christ the Word incarnate, who bears within himself God’s eternal knowing and loving of every creature, draws the whole world to himself; in his dying sin’s mendacious and abusive grip on every creature is undone and, in his rising, the deep truth and goodness of every creature is vindicated and brought fully to life.”

– Mark McIntosh (1960-2021), The Divine Ideas Tradition

“The Christian community, desiring to share ever more fully in Christ’s dying and rising again, develops a new understanding of humanity’s contemplative calling―so that a continual conversion of contemplative consciousness collaborates in Christ’s re-harmonizing of creation with God’s knowing and loving of each creature.”

– Mark McIntosh (1960-2021), The Divine Ideas Tradition

 
Sin might be understood as the denial of coinherence and communion with God, all humanity, and the rest of creation:
 
“We see beneath all evil, beneath the universe itself, that eternal and original union of the Father and the Son . . . that union which was never fully manifested till the Only-begotten by the eternal spirit offered himself to God. The revelation of that primal unity is the revelation of the ground on which all things stand. It is the revelation of an order which sustains all the intercourse and society of men. It is the revelation of which sin has ever been seeking to destroy, and which at last has overcome sin. It is the revelation of that perfect harmony to which we look forward when all things are gathered up in Christ . . . when the law of sacrifice shall be the acknowledged law of all creation.”
– Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), The Doctrine of Sacrifice Deduced from the Scriptures

 
“[Humans] desired to know schism in the universe.”
– Charles Williams (1886-1945), The Forgiveness of Sins
 
“They [Adam & Eve, Humanity] had refused the co-inherence of the original creation and had become (literally) incoherent in their suffering. He [God] proposed to make those sufferings themselves coinherent in him, and therefore to reintroduce them into the principle which was he.”
– Charles Williams (1886-1945), Natural Goodness

“We are being made aware that the organisation of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. . . I would not have it thought that I condemn a society because of its material ruin, for that would be to make its material success a sufficient test of its excellence; I mean only that a wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom.”

– T. S. Elliot (1888-1965), The Idea of a Christian Society

 
“Like all the members of the community, we are all a mess of incoherent elements until the Holy Spirit calls us into roles and invites us into opportunities that resemble all our experiences and gifts in a beautiful way: and we trusting that our reassembling – a glimpse of the final reassembling of heaven – will be a blessing not just to ourselves but to all around us.”
– Sam Wells (1965 - ), Forward to Letters from Nazareth by Richard Carter

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10. Committed to Belonging and to Being the Church as the Body of Christ

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12. Committed to the Pursuit of Holiness

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1. Biblically Focused, but not Literalistic