Charles Grafton: Evangelical at heart, while in belief a liberal Catholic

Introduction

By the time he was elected 2^nd bishop of Fond du Lac in 1888, Charles Grafton was already well known as an advocate a Catholic Anglicanism. He had for 16 years been rector of the Church of the Advent, Boston, a leading Anglo-Catholic parish in the Episcopal Church. As such he was suspect in the minds of many and there was some doubt about his election being confirmed by other bishops. Another well know Anglo-Catholic, James DeKoven, had twice been elected bishop and twice failed to receive sufficient consents. But it turned out Grafton had influential supporters. As he reflected in his autobiography,

Perhaps the confirmation of my election was owing largely to the action of Dr. [Alonzo] Potter, the Bishop of New York. . . [Bishop Potter] seemed best to understand my position of being an Evangelical at heart, while in belief a liberal Catholic.^[i]

“Evangelical at heart, while in belief a liberal Catholic.” I am intrigued by that description. It is an embrace of the three traditional parties of Anglican comprehensiveness.

Bishop Grafton celebrated that comprehensiveness and embodied it in himself. He belonged to the High Church Catholic heritage of Anglicanism and could be quite partisan in advocating for that heritage. But, some of the ways he came at theology would have gotten labeled as a Liberal. And he did have something of an Evangelical bent.

Each of those terms calls for some explanation. But the combination, understood as they apply to Bishop Grafton, could also be used more or less to refer to other Anglican worthies of the 20^th century: Francis Hall, Charles Gore, Evelyn Underhill, William Temple, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, Autin Farrer, e. L. Mascall, Michael Ramsey, and Kenneth Leech. And we might add contemporary folk like John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, Sarah Coakley, and Rowan Williams.  Though there are differences among them, each of these of these is fundamentally Catholic in orientation while also being informed by some Liberal and Evangelical approaches to faith. Along with Bishop Grafton, they are representative of what former Archbishop of the Anglican Province of Southern Africa, Njongonkulu Ndungane, called “The Heartland of Anglicanism.”

I want to look at each of these terms, Catholic, Liberal, and Evangelical as they applied – and didn’t – to Bishop Grafton. I’ll end with some suggestions about how they might guide us living a little over a hundred after his death.

Catholic

In the phrase “Evangelical at heart, while in belief a liberal Catholic,” “Catholic” is the predicate noun and indicates Grafton’s primary identity. He was influenced by the Anglo-Catholic movement, particularly Edward Pusey, about whom he wrote a short book, Pusey and the Church Revival. Whatever else he was and however he might qualify it, Bishop Grafton was first and foremost an Anglican Catholic. He was convinced that the Anglican tradition was a legitimate representation of the Catholic faith. He wrote a book, The Lineage of the American Catholic Church, making the case for that conviction.

But, it is important to note what he did not mean by “Catholic.” He makes it very clear in just about everything else that he wrote that by “Catholic”, he did not mean Roman Catholic. While, he could on occasion write appreciatively of the Roman Catholic Church, it is much more common to find him writing quite polemically against it.

The historical context is important here. There were three significant events in the Roman Catholic Church in Grafton’s lifetime about which he offers critical comment.

The first came in 1854 when Grafton was a young man. Pope Pius IX declared the Immaculate Conception of Mary to be a dogma of the church. Later, as bishop, Grafton was critical of this doctrinal novelty and of Roman Catholic Marian devotion generally.

A few years later, under the same pope, Vatican I was held from 1869-1870. That Council declared the dogma of Papal Infallibility. Bishop Grafton wrote frequently and at length refuting the notion of Papal infallibility and indeed against the very office of the pope. In a letter to the Oneida, he wrote,

“God may save a Roman Catholic, but we believe He hates the papacy as a worldly thing.”^[ii]

He considered both the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility to be theological innovations and they offended his sense of Catholic heritage and his commitment to tradition. In his mind insisting on such novel teachings made the Roman church schismatic.

Then, in 1896, Pope Leo XIII issued Apostolicae Curae, a papal bull declaring all Anglican ordinations to be "absolutely null and utterly void." This was particularly offensive to Grafton who argued that it was just more proof that popes were not infallible given that Anglicans knew first hand that their ordinations, and thus their sacraments, were valid.

Bishop Grafton was so confident in the validity of Anglican orders and sacraments and so suspicious of Rome, he could warn,

“. . .  it is a very great sin for any Churchman to leave their own Church, where they have the true Faith and Sacraments, and join the Roman Church” and those who do so “run great risks of their final salvation.^[iii]

So, if not Roman Catholic, what did Bishop Grafton mean when he described himself as Catholic?

Part of what the bishop meant by Catholic was the conviction that the Church was founded by Jesus and, as the body of Christ in history, is animated by his Spirit. Grafton wrote,

Christ left not His revelation to be evidenced by manuscripts alone. Christianity came into the world as an institution. This institution is a living organism, in which the Holy Spirit dwells and through which He acts and speaks. This organism has from the first declared that on the third day Christ rose from the dead. It does this to-day, not only by her creeds, but by her sacraments.^[iv]

And elsewhere,

The Church is not a mere aggregation of believers, but is an organism welded into oneness by the indwelling Spirit.^[v]

Therefore, being a Christian is not just about having a personal relationship with Jesus, it is necessary to be incorporated into his Church.

God speaks to us through His Church. We all need two conversions. We need to be converted from sin and take Christ for our Saviour, and to be converted to the Church and have her for our Mother. If a person has only experienced one of these operations he is only a half converted man.^[vi]

Within the Church there is an ethos that demonstrates the presence Christ and the Spirit in the Church and the shapes the life of the faithful. For Grafton, this ethos included particularly Catholic doctrines but also habits and practices that marked and formed the faithful. Key elements of the Catholic Church for Grafton were Apostolic Succession, the thee sacred orders of the ministry, baptismal regeneration, the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine of Communion, Eucharistic adoration, the importance and value of sacredotal confession, fasting, daily prayer, and liturgy incorporating whatever vestments, candles, incense, and other aspects of ritual as enable the Church’s ability to worship God in the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty.

Significantly, as a young man, Grafton was a founding member of the religious order, The Society of Saint John the Evangelist. Later, he co-founded the Sisterhood of the Holy Nativity. After becoming bishop, he moved the sisters to Fond du Lac.

As a Catholic, Grafton emphasized the role of tradition in discerning Christian truth more than say, scripture, or reason. In this regard he appeals frequently to the “Vincentian Rule”:

In determining what is Catholic doctrine and practice, two principles in the application of the famous rule, "Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus," "what always, what everywhere, what by everyone,” must ever be kept in mind.^[vii]

This emphasis on the Vincentian Rule led Bishop Grafton to be fundamentally opposed to the idea of theological innovation. He appeals again and again to the consensus of the early church Fathers and Councils. This is an appeal that is not just Catholic, but very Anglican.

But, Grafton makes a distinction between the Vincentian rule applied to doctrine and applied to practice.

The Church is a living Body. She has a corporate life. As the Bride of Christ, she repeats in her life the different phases of her Lord's Life. She has her hidden life, her missionary and public life, her disunited, rent, and crucified life when all her bones are out of joint. She has her glorified life. She is drawn consequently in special degrees in her devotions, sometimes to one Mystery of her dear Lord and sometimes to another.

The Church has also met the different phases of the world's attack by adaptations in her discipline, in changes in her worship, and by forging new spiritual weapons of her own.

It has been asked whether St. Vincent's rule applies to Practice as well as Doctrine. It is applicable only to doctrine and to such practices as involve doctrine. St. Vincent says, "which ancient consent of the holy Fathers is with great care to be investigated and followed by us, not in all the lesser questions of the Divine Law, but only or at any rate principally in the Rule of Faith."^[viii]

More surprisingly, Bishop Grafton adds experience to the Vincentian Rule as a test of the Church’s teaching:

We have ventured to add to Vincent's rule one further test: the practical one of Christian Experience. What, we may ask ourselves, does the Christian Experience or Christian Consciousness bear witness to in any matter?^[ix]

The bishop is clear that he does not mean each individual should presume to be guided by his or her private experience. He meant corporate experience. Still, it is an unexpected addition to the Vincention Rule. He adds this,

Now there are those whose natural conservative tendency of mind leads them with St. Vincent to make their appeal to Holy Scripture and the Authority of the Church. There are others who naturally turn more to the practical results of Christianity as seen in conduct and character, and rest their belief on the approval of Reason and Conscience and the certification of truth by the Voice within. Then there are our Evangelical brethren who, while loyal to the Prayer Book, make the Word the lantern to their feet, and the indwelling Holy Spirit its interpreter. But I trust we may see that these three modes are not exclusive of one another, but may walk as friends peacefully together, lending to each other a mutual support. May they make a three-fold cord, the less easily broken because the strands somewhat differ.^[x]

As a Catholic, Bishop Grafton affirmed the centrality of the Church, her faith declared in the formularies of the early Church councils, her sacramental system as a means of grace, and then importance ceremonial in her worship. But, he was no mere traditionalist. He was also, particularly for his time, quite open and even liberal.

Liberal

Charles Grafton was fundamentally Catholic. But, he allows that he was something of a Liberal Catholic. What did he mean by that?

What he didn’t mean was an acceptance of the Liberal Protestantism which developed during his lifetime in the works of German theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ernst Troeltch, and Adolf von Harnack, or those English and American theologians who echoed them. These theologians embraced modern scientific method and literary criticism to engage the Bible and faith. But, they also tended to embrace a naturalistic rejection of the miraculous and a rejection of dogma in favor a supposed simple ethic of Jesus unvarnished with the overlay of doctrine.

Bishop Grafton believed that this sort of liberal or modernist approach was a serious error. In a letter to the editor of an Evangelical Episcopal periodical, The Southern Churchman, he wrote,

We Churchmen are in the presence of a great struggle with radical unbelief in our own body.

Living in Boston as I did for many years, I came in much contact with the Broads and their school of thought. They do not believe in the "historical" Christ, but in the "essential" Christ, which is a being of their own construction. The miracles of our Lord are explained [away] .  .  .These Broach Churchmen are not sound on the deity of Christ, and reject as unessential or unproven his His Virgin Birth and the resurrection of his crucified body. To them the sacrifice on Calvary has lost its vicarious, atoning character.^[xi]

Bishop Grafton rejected this Broad Church or Liberal approach to Christian faith as little more than “a respectable expression of growing disbelief. It was religion made palatable to educated ungodliness.”^[xii]

His convictions about Catholic Christianity made him instinctively conservative theologically,

We have thus an answer to the popular saying that we are living in an age of enlightenment and new discoveries and must not be tied to old truths. The answer is this: A distinction must be observed between revealed truth and all other truth. The latter depends for its progress on observation and experiment. The longer the world lasts the more time it will have to make observations and experiments, and so the wiser it will grow. But it is different with the truth revealed in Christ. It was given in Him, in its completeness, and once for all. While therefore it is no objection in any other class of truth, that a proposed theory is new or destructive of what has gone before, in respect of Christian truth, it is an obvious axiom that what is new is necessarily false.^[xiii]

This conservatism also showed up in his engagement with some of the ethical debates of his day. Leading up to the discussion regarding the possible relaxing of the church’s teaching on the remarriage of divorced at General Convention of 1904, the bishop took a rather unyieldingly conservative position,

The question of marriage is perhaps the most important. The only argument of worth in favor of allowing the innocent party to re-marry in a case of divorce, is to be found in a saying of our Lord. But scholars have pronounced this text to be so uncertain that we cannot safely base an argument upon it; and if it were correct, our Lord is said not to be revealing the law governing Christians but that in relation to the Jew. Under the Gospel, Christian marriage was to bear witness to the indissolubility of Christ's union with His Church, and however hard it may be in certain cases for a Christian to bear the witness, Christ has promised that "My grace shall be sufficient for thee."^[xiv]

So, in what way then was Bishop Grafton’s Catholic Anglicanism, “liberal”? In spite of his rejection of the excesses of Liberals or “the Broads,” he did not absolutely reject everything and everyone related to the liberal approach. He wrote positively of the Church’s indebtedness to the “theological genius” of Frederick Denison Maurice, who many other condemned for his liberalism. And he was able to write of Broad Church Liberalism,

Negatively, it was rationalistic in its methods, destructive in its criticism. Positively, it sought to readjust the old religious formulae to the new discoveries of the age. This movement is far from having spent its force.

The movement did good, and is still doing it. It created a profitable discontent with inherited apologetics, formerly serviceable, but now useless. It helped to demonstrate that no dogma of the Catholic faith is contradicted by any recognised scientific fact. It disillusionised men from a belief in the mechanical theory of verbal Scriptural inspiration. . . . It started the Church on new courses of philanthropy.^[xv]

Further, while he could be quite conservative in some areas, he also embraced aspects of the liberal movement that came to be known as the Social Gospel. He asserted that “The Church has ever been on the side of human rights and projects for the uplift of humanity.” He pointed out that many Episcopalians, including George Washington, were leaders in the fight for American independence. As a law student in 1853, he wrote an extensive and forceful treatise against slavery at a time when many Christians, including those of his High Church persuasion, defended it. Later, as bishop, he was one of the Vice-Presidents of a society for the protection of labor's rights in the early struggle between capital and labor while still acknowledging both rights and duties of business.

The bishop was also liberal in endorsing some of the critical approaches to the Bible that were coming into their own in his lifetime:

In respect of the Holy Scriptures: the Anglican Church stands for truth. It places no ban on research into the origin of the various biblical books. It encourages priests and laymen to study God's Holy Word. Nothing that science can discover concerning the origin of the books or the method of their compilation can affect their corroborative value as to the teaching of the Church. It is by living in the Church, and primarily listening to her teaching, that the written word is best understood. What the Holy Spirit has enlightened the Church to read out of Holy Scripture, the Holy Spirit put into it, to be so read. Differences of interpretation may exist about different texts, but the mind of the Spirit is to be found in the Church's common and enduring consent.^[xvi]

And he was liberal in his acceptance the best science of his day. Darwin published On the Origin of Species when Grafton was 29 years old and he was convinced that it did not contradict Christian faith:

The Church has no opposition to the investigation of science in any department of knowledge. Nothing has so far been demonstrated that contradicts the dogmas she has declared essential. We may allow, for instance, the allegorical character of the early chapters of Genesis without denying the sinful tendency found in man's nature by reason of heredity. Man has fallen away from God.

After noting and criticizing the pope for insisting in 1909 on the literal historical interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis, he goes on.

To deny what is called the Darwinian theory, or the evolutionary process, is as unwise as to deny the truth of the world's diurnal revolution or orbit about the sun.^[xvii]

Bishop Grafton did not just accept the theory of evolution, he asserted that it actually confirmed aspects of Christian theology,

Now the discovery of the law of progress in the natural world, rightly understood, is in favor of the doctrine of the progressive development of man (in and through the Incarnate Lord) into a final union with God, which secures sinlessness and eternal life. . . .Christ is the embodiment of progress, and we attain to our new union with the divine life through Him.^[xviii]

And elsewhere,

Scientific research has tended more and more to the idea of the unity of the material universe and, by its discovery of the correlation of its forces, to the oneness of the energy of which it is the expression. It is not ordinarily known that the first theological definition of God, as given by the schoolmen, is that of "pure activity." In this science and theology seemingly come into close agreement.^[xix]

As we have seen, Bishop Grafton rejected “the effort made to liberalize the Church and make it more like the Unitarian.”^[xx] But, he was himself, something of a creedal minimalist. The Catholic faith, he wrote,

is found in the universally accepted Creeds, that is, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, and set forth in the Sacraments which witness to the Faith, and bring its grace to us. What is thus certified to us by the whole Church is Catholic Doctrine. We can so rest upon it, assured that it is infallible truth. At the same time, what is not so witnessed and declared to be of the essential faith, we may regard as matters of pious private opinion, about which Christians may lawfully differ.

It is upon this broad, strong position the Anglican Church stands and authoritatively teaches. She is at once Catholic and also liberal.^[xxi]

And, in an instruction to the Sisters of the Holy Nativity, he claimed,

Outside the Creed we need have no settled opinion. When we have said Amen to that, we have said Amen to all that we really know and upon any point we can yield to others.^[xxii]

Finally, one could say that Bishop Grafton was liberal in the most basic sense of the word. He celebrated the generous latitude the Episcopal Church which allowed its members freedom to discern for themselves particular moral applications of Christian faith,

The Church, in the administration of her discipline, seeks to train souls in sanctity by the exercise of their own consciences. She does not treat them as children in a school, giving them laws, which they must under ecclesiastical compulsion obey. She instructs her children in great moral principles, leaving it to them to apply them in their own individual lives. In other words, she trusts them. She does not say, "You must not go to the theater, or play cards, or dance, or go to social entertainments." She leaves these matters to their individual consciences. "Whatever," she teaches, "is found to come in between the soul and God, and hinder union between the two is to be avoided," but each person is to be judge for himself, and refrain from judging others. Thus the conscience and the will are individually trained, as being, not under the law, but under grace.^[xxiii]

Bishop Grafton’s willingness to be open to the learning of his day while remaining grounded in a commitment to the basic Catholic faith was line with the liberal Catholicism of folk like Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford. Though I have found no reference to it in his writing, it is interesting that Lux Mundi was published in 1889, the year of Grafton’s consecration as Bishop of Fond du Lac.

So, while he was a convinced and unwavering Catholic, the bishop did not shy away from the adjective “Liberal”. His particular brand of Liberal Catholicism was also informed by an Evangelical heart.”

Evangelical Heart

Without question, Bishop Grafton had an evangelical heart. He was a church planter. He writing and preaching are full of the call for conversion and he is consistently focused on Christ and his gospel. The collect for his feast day has it right, he had “a burning zeal for souls.” His motto was, “Press on the Kingdom.”:

A duty incumbent upon every member of the Catholic Church militant is to work for its extension. A missionary zeal should burn like fire in every Christian's heart. The time is short and the second coming of Christ draweth nigh. In all ways in our power, by our alms and prayers and personal service, we must labor to "press on the kingdom."^[xxiv]

He appreciated strengths of the Evangelical or “low Church” approach writing that he “loved their Evangelical principles and internal piety, and their trust in the merits of Christ.”^[xxv]

But, again, we have to ask what this meant for him and what it did not mean. We have already gotten some indication that what that meant for him was not what we often take it to mean today. For example, given what we have seen above, it is safe to say that while he was no simple Liberal, he would not have fit easily in the Religious Right or political Conservatism of today.

There are other ways in which Bishop Grafton was not Evangelical in the contemporary sense. The modern theory of biblical inerrancy was developed during Grafton’s lifetime and his episcopate overlapped the early Fundamentalist-Modernist debate. The “Five Fundamentals” were published in 1910, two years before his death. Though Grafton was no thoroughgoing Modernist, neither was he a Fundamentalist (he would have accepted four of the five Fundamentals, but not the first which asserted a particular (and recent) understanding of Biblical Inerrancy in all matters.

As we saw above, Bishop Grafton was convinced that accepting a critical approach to the Bible did not threaten the faith of the Church. But, he did not just reject the theory of inerrancy; Grafton also challenged the Protestant notion of sola scriptura:

Preachers may wax eloquent over "the Bible and the Bible only" theory, but however attractive, was it the method instituted by Christ? If it was, we dutifully accept it; if not, we must not take it for our guide.

We can easily settle the question. There is no recorded command of Christ to His Apostles bidding them write a book and disseminate it. As a matter of fact, the Christian Church was in existence and in active operation before any of the Gospels were written. The books also of the New Testament were not collected and certified till the close of the second century. Copying by hand was expensive, and so comparatively few persons could possess a copy of the whole Scripture. Now God could have had the art of printing invented in the first century as well as in the fifteenth. He could have had the Bible put into circulation when the Apostles went forth on their missionary journeys. But here is the plain fact: He did not do it. Nor does this theory meet the condition of enabling sincere persons with reasonable certainty to know the faith. For in every denomination there are persons abler and more learned than ourselves, and just as prayerful and sincere, yet the result of the Protestant theory is a babel of conflicting and contradictory doctrines on matters admitted, by their divisions into sects, to be essential. The rule of faith upon which Protestantism is based is not Christ's rule. We ought not, therefore, as His followers, to adopt it.^[xxvi]

That does not mean he did not have a high regard for the Bible as the inspired Word of God. He certainly did. But, he understood its value primarily for edification of the faithful and as useful more as a corroboration of the churches teaching than it only source of that teaching.

Still, Bishop Grafton’s Evangelical heart is revealed in his preaching. He was taken to task for preaching such classically Evangelical themes as “the need of conversion . . .  the necessity of being convicted of sin, and the work of the Spirit, and of salvation by Christ's cross and passion, and of a conscious acceptance of Him,” things the liberal of his day might scoff at and even his High Church colleagues rejected as “Methodism”.^[xxvii] As a result of such preaching, while he was rector of Church of the Advent in Boston, “the parish thrived beyond all expectations, with more baptisms and confirmations than any other parish in the diocese.”^[xxviii]

And you can’t get more Evangelical than this:

So sometimes as you recall, and recall it well you may on your knees, earth's greatest tragedy, and look up at the Divine Sufferer, crucified for love, you may come to know the truth, that if you were the only human being in existence, the only living sinner, just as truly as that sun must rise if you are to live, so must Christ the Lord come and suffer and die, that you may be saved. Out of Christ's temptations consummated on the cross we need to gain this truth and make it a home truth. "He loved me, and gave Himself for me." Then as true love always must make its response, and as far as it can a like return, our response will be self-surrender to His love. It must be love for love and life for life.

As Thou gavest Thyself,

Blessed Lord, to me, so, poor and weak and imperfect as I am, I give myself to Thee,

"Just as I am, though tossed about

With many a conflict, many a doubt,

Fightings and fears within, without,

O Lamb of God, I come."^[xxix]

Conclusion: Learning from Bishop Grafton

In a back and forth in the editorial page of the local paper with the Roman Catholic priest of Fond du Lac, Bishop Grafton described himself thus:

I recognize my littleness, my incapacity and my feebleness of attainment in sanctity. It is of little account what I am, but I believe I am a Christian and a Catholic. An evangelical Christian, believing and trusting in Christ's merits only for salvation, and a liberal Catholic, holding as faith that only which is certified by the universal consent and experience of Christendom, and relegating in charity all other matters to the realm of allowed opinion.[xxx]

So what might it look like for us to be Catholic Anglicans in the spirit of Charles Grafton one hundred years and counting later? Can we be “Evangelical at heart and in belief, liberal Catholics”?

Joy in the Gospel: First of all, we can seek to emulate, or pray to receive his joy in the Christian gospel. Though it is only slightly reflected in this lecture, Bishop Grafton engaged the world as one who knew deep in his bones the mercy and delight of God. And he radiated that mercy and delight. His was a humble, generous, and hospitable spirit full of the hope of the gospel. Some future lecture in this series should focus on Grafton’s piety and his spiritual guidance. But we would do well to fall in love again (and again) with the One who first loved us and demonstrated that love in the Incarnation and on the cross.

Multi-lingual: We can also seek to imitate Bishop Grafton’s broad spirit. As we have seen, he was emphatically a Catholic Anglican. But, he was also conversant in the other “dialects” of Anglicanism. I wonder if at least some our recent troubles in the Episcopal Church might have been mitigated had more of our leadership been as “theologically multi-lingual” as was Charles Grafton. I suggest we would benefit from cultivating such theological multi-lingualism, whatever our preferred dialect. This would mean more than passing lip-service to diversity and a more fulsome embrace of classic Anglican comprehensiveness.

Catholic

Worship: With Bishop Grafton we will recognize the Church as central to the mission of God in the world, bearing witness to, and seeking to live in anticipation of, the Kingdom of God. It is the body of Christ and contrary to the rampant individualism of our age we will affirm that the fullness of our personal relationship with Jesus depends on our being members of that body. And that wherever people are on their spiritual journey that journey finds its clearest direction in baptism and as members of the Church. The church is the community established by Jesus to bear witness to the reconciliation and healing of human brokenness. As such it is not insular but rather the place where we learn to see our solidarity with all people and the rest of creation.

Being Catholic Anglicans also means recognizing and celebrating that the church is not bound by time or place. For us that means that we are not just members of congregations, dioceses, or national churches, but members of the Anglican Communion.

Sacramental: Bishop Grafton was convinced of the centrality of the sacraments in the life of the Church and of their transforming power. This is particularly true of the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Eucharist by which Christians are formed. We will embrace the sacramental life of the Church. With Grafton we will believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But we will see that as not only something about what happens to the consecrated Bread and Wine, important as that is. The Sacraments reveal that material reality can be charged with the grandeur of God. We can will learn through our involvement with the Sacraments to see the whole of creation and one another sacramentally as potential means of God’s grace. 

Apostolic Tradition: With Bishop Grafton we will “continue in the apostles’ teaching” and embrace a robust and unapologetic affirmation of the classic creedal faith of the Church. We will engage the tradition of the church not as a problem to be overcome, but a community across time to which we belong and with which it is possible to dialogue. We might not be bound to a simple repetition of the past in all things, but we will seek continuity with the Apostles and the communion of saints who encourage us as we run the race in our time. Tradition is not the dead weight of the past, but rather the momentum of past faithfulness giving us direction and propelling us forward.

Practices: In the spirit of Grafton, we might also seek to cultivate a catholic ethos that will open our hearts and lives to the movement of the Holy Spirit and enable us to resist the spiritually corrosive effects of secularism and consumerism. What would it look like for us in the 21st century to reclaim classic practices disciplines that open our lives to God’s mercy and delight? Practices such as: Daily Prayer and devotion, Spiritual Direction, Confession, Regular Fasts, Observance of Holy Days, Sabbath, Commemoration of the Saints, Benediction, etc.

Liberal

Social Justice: With Bishop Grafton, we can commit,

to lift mankind upward and Godward; to ameliorate the condition of servitude and labor; to undo the chains of the slave; to bless every investigation and effort for the advancement of humanity; to mitigate the evils of war; to quicken all philanthropic enterprises; to enlarge men's hearts towards their fellow-men.^[xxxi]

Not beholden to a particular political or economic ideology, program, or party, but committed to being on the side of human rights and the uplift of all humanity – particularly the poor and vulnerable. We might well disagree on the means to such ends and our liberality will include honoring such disagreement.

Generous: Following Bishop Grafton’s example, we can be liberal in its purest sense – a spirit of generosity which makes space for the broadest diversity of views possible within the context of creedal Christian faith.

Receptive to Scientific Discovery: Attending to creation as a source of revelation along with scripture and tradition and confident of the revealed truth of the essential creedal faith we can avail ourselves of whatever creation reveals about itself and thus about its Maker. We can share Grafton’s confidence that new learning is no threat to Christian faith,

so in the domain of truth, while she is immovable in declaring the faith once and for all revealed, allowing of no alteration by addition or diminution . . . yet she possesses the power to meet by her definitions the newer aspects of human knowledge in science and philosophy, and show how conformable they are to revealed truth. She stands thus in no conflict with the discoveries and ascertained results of modern sciences. . . She does not fear any established results of the higher criticism. She, in calm security, possesses her deposit of truth, knowing that every difficulty in the future, as in the past, will only confirm the Catholic faith."^[xxxii]

Here we might wonder though, if the bishop was overly sanguine about the impact new knowledge of the origins and nature of the universe and of humanity is bound to have on theology. Recognition of evolution for example does not contradict the creedal affirmation that God is the “maker of heaven and earth.” But, it might well reshape what we understand that to mean. And it is bound impact our understanding of related theological concepts. Similarly, acceptance of some of the conclusions of an historical-literary-critical approach to the Bible does not contradict the affirmation that the Holy Spirit “has spoken through the prophets.” But, it does force us to think afresh about what that means.

Humility: As we have seen, Bishop Grafton’s liberality was not based on an attempt to accommodate secularism or appease Christianity’s cultured despisers.  Rather, it was rooted in deep humility. And humility is a fundamental Christian virtue that I hope we can reclaim as heirs of Bishop Grafton. Such humility is characterized by what Rowan Williams calls a "passionate patience" that is reticent to declare too handily exactly how God is to defined or to presume too easily to know what God desires in all instances. Continuing with Williams,

There is in the Anglican identity a strong element of awareness of the tragic, of the dark night and the frustration of theory and order by the strangeness of God's work." [ . . . ] "The result is a mixture of poetry, reticence, humility before mystery, local loyalties and painful self-scrutinies."^[xxxiii]

Evangelical

Prima scriptura: With Bishop Grafton we can recognize that the Bible is not the only means by which God reveals himself to us (the sola scriptura of the Protestant Reformation). But, informed by the tradition and reasoned engagement with creation, it is the first place we go find out about the revelation of God in Jesus Christ and what that means. Thus, we will commit to engaging with scripture together.

Sharing the Good News: We will reclaim Bishop Grafton’s confidence that we have Good News to share. And that people outside (as well as inside) the Church need to hear that Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit, continues to transform lives and will transform the world. Archbishop William Temple defined evangelism this way, “Evangelism is the presentation of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit in such ways that persons may be led to believe in Him as Savior and follow Him as Lord within the fellowship of His Church.” Bishop Grafton would want us to find fresh ways in our day to be about that.

Notes

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[i] Charles Grafton, A Journey Godward of a Servant of Jesus Christ, Chapter VIII, (http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v4/160.html

[ii] Grafton, Letter to the Oneida, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v7/322.html

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Grafton, Christian and Catholic Chapter IV, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v1/46.html

[v] Ibid, Chapter X, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v1/169.html

[vi] Grafton, Catholicity and the Vincentian Rule, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v6/180.html

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Grafton, Letter To the Editor of The Southern Churchman, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v7/234.html

[xii] Grafton, The Rise of Ritualism in the Church, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v6/355.html

[xiii]Grafton, Christian and Catholic, Chapter VIII, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v1/127.html

[xiv] Grafton, Church Principles and Church Parties, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v8/408.html

[xv] Ibid.

[xvi] Grafton, A Journey Godward, Chapter IX, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v4/182.html

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Grafton, Christian and Catholic, Chapter I, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v1/3.html

[xx] Grafton, The Lineage of the American Catholic Church, (Milwaukee, The Young Churchman Company, 1911) p. 282

[xxi] Grafton, Some Characteristics of the Episcopal Church, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v8/397.html

[xxii] Grafton, Meditations and Instructions, (Fond du Lac, WI, Sisterhood of the Holy Nativity, 1923) p. 83

[xxiii] Grafton, Some Characteristics of the Episcopal Church, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v8/397.html

[xxiv]Grafton, Christian and Catholic, Chapter XIII, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v1/242.html

[xxv] Grafton, Church Principles and Church Parties, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v8/408.html

[xxvi] Grafton, Christian and Catholic, Chapter VIII, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v1/127.html

[xxvii] Grafton, Letter To the Editor of The Southern Churchman, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v7/234.html

[xxviii] Fr. John-Julian, OJN, Blessed Charles Chapman Grafton ~ 1830-1912,Grafton Lecture, 2009, http://www.episcopalfonddulac.org/grafton/documents/paper2009.pdf

[xxix] Grafton, Christian and Catholic, Chapter V, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v1/71.html

[xxx] http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/correspondence1909.html

[xxxi] Grafton, Church Principles and Church Parties, http://anglicanhistory.org/grafton/v8/408.html

[xxxii] Ibid.

[xxxiii] Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities, (Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) p. 6

On the Christian Creed: F. D. Maurice

“All superstition, all priestcraft, in its worst and most evil sense – we cannot repeat this proposition too often, or put it in too many shapes – has its root in vague, indefinite religious apprehensions; not resting upon the knowledge and confession of a Being who is not our image, but who has declared Himself to us that we might receive His image”

Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872) was one of the great (some have argued he was the greatest) Anglican theologians of the 19th century. Maurice (pronounced like Morris) critiqued the usual church factions of his day and was seen as suspect by each of them as a result. He was hardly a conservative. He was accused of being a universalist. He was an early proponent of "Christian Socialism" which also made him suspect to both "unsocial Christians" and "unChristian socialists."

But he was also critical of liberal theology:

“Every hope I had for human culture, for the reconciliation of opposing schools, for blessings to mankind, was based on theology. What sympathy then could I have with the Liberal Party, which was emphatically anti-theological, which was ready to tolerate all opinion in theology only because people could know nothing about it?"

In our own era of church factionalism, I appreciate Maurice's ability to cut across party lines to engage appreciatively and critically with just about everyone. One might say he was something of a radical centrist.

The following is from a sermon of Maurice's on the significance of the Creed:

Let us understand this well, brethren, for it is very important in reference to notions that are current in the present day. If there is to be a religion of trust, and not of slavish cowardly fear, that religion must have a Revelation, the revelation of a Name for its basis. A religion which creates its own object cannot be one of trust. I cannot rest upon that which I feel and know that I have made for myself. I cannot trust in that which I look upon as a form of my own mind or a projection from it. . . Neither can I trust in any shadowy, impalpable essence, or in any Soul of the world. If this be the God I worship, my worship will be one of doubt and distrust, whenever it is at all sincere. If I do not seek all strange, monstrous means of propitiating the unknown Being, it is only because I am altogether uncertain whether he is real enough for such services. . . All superstition, all priestcraft, in its worst and most evil sense – we cannot repeat this proposition too often, or put it in too many shapes – has its root in vague, indefinite religious apprehensions; not resting upon the knowledge and confession of a Being who is not our image, but who has declared Himself to us that we might receive His image . . .

But the question – How is He a Father, how do I know He is? cannot be evaded. The Church had no wish to evade it. She acknowledged that something more was implied in the Revelation of a Father than His Name; that there must be some one to reveal Him. She proclaimed the Name of His only-begotten Son, our Lord. She says that He revealed Himself as he Son of God by being conceived of the Holy Ghost our Lord, by being born of the Virgin Mary, by suffering our death, our burial, by going down into the Hell we tremble to think of; by facing all our enemies visible and invisible, all that we actually know we must meet, all that our imagination dreams of; that He rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven, and sat down on the right of the Father, and will come again to judge the quick and the dead.

If God be absolute, eternal love, as St. Augustine makes the Catechist affirm, how has he shewn it? Has it come forth, or is it all hidden in his own nature? Has it come forth to some other creature, or to man? Has it met him where he needs to be met or somewhere else? Has it encountered the actual woes of mankind, or only those which affect a particular set of men? Has it been found mightier than these, or has it sunk under them? Has this love been cheerfully entertained, or did it encounter ingratitude? Was the ingratitude too strong for the love, or the love for the ingratitude? Is the victory for all times, or only for that time? Is He who you say is our Lord really our Lord? Does He reign over us? Will he leave all things just as they are, or set them right at last? These questions have a claim to be answered; that is no Gospel to humanity which does not answer them; the Christian Church said, 'This is the answer' . . . And again, supposing the words be true, all we have to do is to proclaim them and live upon them. He who has sent us into the world for that end can prove them. Those that know His Name will trust in Him, and so they find that He has not deceived them. 
– F. D. Maurice, Sermons on the Prayer-Book, Sermon X, The Creed, 1848

See also: On the Christian Creed: Some Questions & Responses

On the Christian Creed: Some Questions & Responses

The man in Sapphire Blue, Hildegard of Bingen's vision of the Trinity

The Apostles' Creed [is] the Baptismal Symbol and the Nicene Creed [is] the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.

– Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (1979 Book of Common Prayer, p. 877)

The Christian creed enunciates a powerful and provocative understanding of the world, one that ought to scandalize a world that runs on the accepted truths of Modernity. There is something in the creed to offend virtually every contemporary sensibility. At the same time it communicates a compelling vision of the world’s destiny and humanity’s role that challenges the accustomed idolatries and the weary platitudes of current worldly wisdom.

– Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters, p. 7

The creed provides the boundaries of Christian belief and therefore of the Christian community.

– ibid, p. 49-50

I seek to be centered in the faith delineated in the Christian creed (by which I mean both the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed). I am wary of attempts to make that Creed more palatable to this or that contemporary intellectual fashion.

1.      But, isn't one's faith about one's relationship with the living God and with God's children. Can’t we just say Love God and love your neighbor and leave it at that?

We can, I suppose, if we already think we know something about these things before we get to the Creed. "God" is a meaningless word until it is given meaning. To say "Just love God with your whole heart mind and soul" only begs the question, "Who, or what, is this 'god' I am to love and what does it mean to love this 'god'?” As for loving neighbors (let alone enemies), why should I? And in what way? Why is it so hard to do? And, for that matter, what does it mean to be human? And what kind of a world do we live in? Any answer to those questions takes us into the realm of belief and doctrine. The Creed is the basic Christian answer to those questions. You might prefer other answers or make up your own, but you cannot talk about “god”, “love”, “creation”, or “human beings” without some sort of belief system, i.e., a creed.

It is inadequate to appeal to a simplistic pietism, whether in its more conservative or more liberal versions, that says "Don't bother me with doctrine, just give me Jesus". We have no access to Jesus other than the Gospels which are soaked in interpretation (doctrine) of who Jesus is and why he matters. And the creeds are the Christian guide to understanding God in light of Jesus.

2.      Can’t we just worship God without getting hung up with the Creed?

Again, that presumes some knowledge (creed) about God and what it means to worship.

In any event, within my Episcopal/Anglican tradition, getting rid of or ignoring the Creed would not resolve things for those who don’t like it. The rest of the liturgy is rife with the same story and the same imagery.

Further, the Creed and worship are integrally related:

Nicene Christianity has also understood orthodoxy in a richer and deeper sense: as right praise. To be orthodox is to strive to stand rightly with others before the mystery of the true God. To be orthodox is to join with a community of faith in adoration of God’s doxa (glory), which already casts light on the day when God will finally make everything right. Belief is never correct when it becomes nothing more than a political mechanism to ensure the unity of an institution. Belief is right only when it points us in the right direction: to glorification of the true God, who promises not to give us a secret wisdom, but to be graciously present to us, even and especially where our vision and knowledge are weak.

– John Burgess, Going Creedless

3.      But isn’t the language of the Creed poetic, rich in metaphors?

Quite so. And we should always remember that lest we begin to think we have comprehended God who is always beyond our comprehending. In fact, you'd have a hard time finding a theologian of the early Church who did not say the same. They were not so naïve as moderns often suppose. Over and over again, the early theologians remind us that all our language for God is stammering. All images must be held lightly. Gregory Nazianzus, one of the more important defenders of the Creed, affirmed, "It is difficult to conceive of God, but to define him in words is an impossibility" (Theological Orations 4). And yet those same theologians also affirm that we must speak of God because God has spoken a Word to us – in history, especially in Jesus Christ. Thus, while we must speak cautiously and humbly in the face of the mystery that is God, we can yet dare to say something about God because God has said something to us in Jesus, the Word made flesh. "The impossibility has become a possibility by the boundless excellence of the grace of God," is how Origen put it in his treatise On Prayer. 

Because it is about God, much of the Creed is indeed metaphorical. Certainly, referring to God as "Father", while it reflects the language of Jesus and signifies something of the character of God, does not mean God is male. Gregory of Nyssa, another of those who defended the Nicene language, is clear on this in his commentary on the Song of Songs. Similarly, affirming that Jesus Christ is "seated at the right hand of God the Father metaphorically signifies something about the relationship between Jesus and God the Father, but it is not a spatial relationship. There is no literal physical chair on which Jesus sits. 

But, because the Creed is about the God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus much of it is not metaphorical, but historical (i.e., everything from “became incarnate” through “he rose again”). That has always been the scandal of Christianity to the philosophers and Gnostics (ancient and contemporary) who want to keep God safely on the side of the metaphorical (protecting God? or themselves?). But, Christians confess an historical virgin birth to an historical Mary of an historical infleshment of God who died an historical death under an historical Pontius Pilate, but lives again through an historical resurrection leaving behind an historical empty tomb – all "for us and for our salvation".

The Creed is part poetry, part prose. Indeed, one might say that in the incarnation, God (ultimately hidden in Metaphor) has become prose – prosaic – in order to turn all to poetry. Trying to keep them strictly separate or make it all one or the other always gets us into trouble.

To say that our language about God’s essence is metaphorical is a theological truism. To conclude that therefore all metaphors for God are only human creations or that all metaphors are more or less equal are assumptions and theological falsehoods. To say that all language about God acting in history, e.g., the virginal conception, the incarnation, and the bodily resurrection as historical, physical events, is metaphorical and only true in some spiritual sense is to try to be more spiritual than the God we know though Jesus has deigned to be. The God we know through Jesus and the creeds is a God who is prepared to get down and dirty in the material world to address the very literal, tragic, and historical mess we have made of ourselves, others, and the world.

4.      But, I read or heard somewhere that the root meaning of credo is to “give the heart” so intellectual assent is not the point.

To say that the root meaning of credo is to “give the heart” and reduce its meaning to only that is like saying that every time the atheist, Richard Dawkins, says, “Good bye,” he really means, “God be with ye.” However helpful it might be in adding color to our understanding, the meaning of words and phrases are not reducible to their roots. The meanings of words evolve. What did credo mean to those who used it in the 4th century? One need only look at the historical development of the creeds to know that they were meant to delineate right belief from wrong belief as well as to shape the direction of the heart.

Both are necessary. You cannot give your heart to something without some knowledge or belief about that to which you are giving your heart. And you cannot truly come to know something without giving your heart to it. Love and knowledge go together. Can I claim to love my wife but then believe whatever I want to believe about the kind of person she is? Getting to know her as she is what it means to love her.

You are not supposed to be able to say the Creed with integrity if you find it incredible (a related word). The very reason for trying to shift the meaning of credo from intellectual assent is self-contradictory in as much as it is based on the conclusion that some aspects of the creed are no longer intellectually credible.

Continuing to say the words of the creeds without intellectual assent and meaning them in the common sense warps language. Either we mean it or we don’t. Or we stretch the meaning of words beyond all logic. What if we used the same approach to language with the marriage vows? Can I have an affair and then tell my wife she needs to get over her unsophisticated, literalistic interpretation of “forsaking all others”?

Reducing the creeds to “matters of the heart” to minimize their intellectual claims tailors them to the heritage of a naïve romanticism prioritizing feeling over reason. It is an odd thing to do for those who (as many Episcopalians love to do) pride themselves on being in the “thinking person’s church”.

5.      That doesn’t leave much room for doubt.

The issue is not about doubt or judging those who struggle with this or that aspect of the Creed. I have no problem with honest struggle with the Creed – historical or otherwise. I have my share, though as I've said elsewhere, there are implications of the Creed that I struggle with more than things like the virginal conception or bodily resurrection (see Virginal Conception and Other Preposterous Things). Thankfully, it is not up to us to believe this or that bit of the Creed on our own. As we sometimes pray, "regard not our sins, but the faith of your Church" (1979 Book of Common Prayer, p. 395). Sometimes others believe for us. In spite of any personal struggle, the Creed is the standard of Church teaching. At the very least, it is what Christians aspire to believe and conform their lives to – however inadequately.

One thing I do object to is when official teachers and leaders of the Church go beyond doubting and publicly reject the Creed of the Church. Why should anyone consider us credible – again, a related word – if our preaching and teaching contradict the rest of what we say in worship? Or if all we have to offer is doubt and more questions? The latter is almost always a power move that hides the real answers those who claim to be about questions are actually peddling.

Doubts, whether about orthodoxy or orthopraxy, arise when one way of understanding how the world works and how God engages the world comes into conflict with another. But that cuts both ways. Questioning the virginal conception and the bodily resurrection, for example, is unsettling to one way of understanding things. Believing them is unsettling to others.

Praying Shapes Believing. Or Does It?

In Episcopalian circles one often hears appeals to the idea that “praying shapes believing.” It is the title of a widely used commentary on the Book of Common Prayer written by Leonel Mitchell. I have come across the phrase, spoken or written, several times in reference to the current proposal before the Episcopal Church’s General Convention to revise the prayer book. But, the way it is often used misunderstands its meaning.

“Praying shapes believing” is a translation of an ancient axiom long used by Anglicans to express our approach to Christian theology and practice. The Latin phrase is lex orandi, lex credendi, literally, “the law of praying is the law of believing”. Episcopalians and other Anglicans often simply refer to this Latin phrase. It is a short-hand paraphrase of this passage from ‘The Call of All Nations’ by early Christian theologian, Prosper of Aquitaine (390-455):

Let us consider the sacraments of priestly prayers, which having been handed down by the apostles are celebrated uniformly throughout the whole world and in every Catholic Church so that the law of praying might establish the law of believing.

“Praying shapes believing" is an imprecise and ambiguous translation of that ancient axiom and thus misleading. It has led to what appears to be a widespread misunderstanding of its intent.

If “praying shapes believing” simply means that whatever we pray will shape our understanding, it is no more than a truism. Of course, if one prays regularly for God to increase one’s material prosperity, one will come to believe that God is primarily about doing so and that God has no problem with the accumulation of money and stuff. If a church fills its worship with images of God’s wrath and judgment, regular worshipers will come to believe that God is primarily angry and judgmental. But, some Episcopalians seem to appeal to the idea that praying shapes believing along these lines. We want to shape the way people believe. Therefore we need to revise our prayer and worship so they will come to believe better. But that is not what lex orandi, lex credendi means.

Some seem to use the phrase “praying shapes believing” in another way. Our prayers and, more specifically, our worship, should reflect what we believe. And if our belief has changed, it is time to change our prayer and worship to better reflect what we have come to believe. But that is also not what lex orandi, lex credendi means.

Lex orandi, lex credendi, the law of prayer is the law of belief, means that what we believe is determined by what we pray. More specifically, it means that our worship as expressed in the liturgies of our prayer book determine the parameters of our belief. It was common among earlier Anglicans to refer to the liturgies – especially those of Baptism, the Eucharist, and the Ordinals – as the definition of what we believe. What are members of our Church expected to believe about God, life, and humanity? The answers (and the limits) are found there. We are not free to believe contrary to our common worship.

Those liturgies are not simply our invention. They are something we have received. With the exception perhaps of Prayer C, the liturgies of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer are clearly rooted in ancient liturgies of the Church. We are not free to simply change them to reflect beliefs contrary to them. They predate and determine what we believe. Not the other way around.

And that is a major reason for my skepticism regarding current calls for revising our prayer book. One of the resolves of the current resolution (A068 Plan for the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer) indicates that the process of revision will include “providing space for, encouraging the submission of, and facilitating the perfection of rites that will arise from the continual movement of the Holy Spirit among us and growing insights of our Church.” There are lots of reasons to be wary of that phrase. Most of all I have seen little evidence that we can discern the difference between “the continual movement of the Holy Spirit among us” and the latest prejudice of American Progressives. We should not seek to remake God in our image. We should be wary of doing the same with our worship.

I am not in principle opposed to revising the Book of Common Prayer. I actually would welcome liturgies with more expansive inclusive language for humans and even more expansive language of God. But, I distrust and am opposed to the spirit under which it seems it is being proposed. I do not trust my own or others ability to discern “the continual movement of the Holy Spirit among us.”

Joseph Butler (1662-1752) was one of the great theologians of the Anglican tradition (in spite of his removal from the proposed revision of our calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts). He was once essential reading in the curricula of Episcopal seminaries. In a conversation with John Wesley, as reported by Wesley, Bishop Butler said, "The pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Spirit is a horrid thing–a very horrid thing." Wesley insisted to the bishop that if that is what the bishop thought he was up to, he was mistaken. But, it seems that pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Spirit is precisely what the resolution to revise the prayer book is suggesting. That might be how some understand “praying shapes believing”, but it is not lex orandi, lex credendi. And if that is the way we go, it would indeed be a horrid thing–a very horrid thing.

I could get behind a revision of the Book of Common Prayer if I trusted that we were committed to translating into contemporary idiom the prayer and worship (with its basic theology) we have received and that has indeed shaped us for generations. But, appeals to the continual movement of the Holy Spirit among us do not give me much confidence.

Communion, Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament & Benediction

“Taste and see that the Lord is good” – Psalm 34:8

Communion

Along with Baptism, Eucharist is the foundational Sacrament of the Church. It is where we return again and again to meet Jesus. Anglicans have typically been wary of trying to explain how Jesus is present in the Sacrament, but we have affirmed that, however mysteriously, he is present, really and tangibly. And visibly. We receive Jesus in the Bread and Wine of Communion and taste his goodness. Through it we are woven more deeply in our communion with the life and love of the Trinity and woven more deeply in communion with one another. And we are transformed.

Adoration

The conviction that Jesus is really present in the Bread and Wine of Eucharist leads us to treat the

consecrated elements with care and reverence. Almost from the beginning some of the Sacrament was set aside–reserved–in churches for those who were unable to be present at Eucharist. In the Middle Ages, Christians began to extend the reverence for the Sacrament beyond the Eucharist by praying before the reserved Sacrament. This led to the practice of adoration in which believers sit or kneel in prayer in the presence of the Sacrament–in the presence of Jesus. There, they can gaze in adoration at the one who loves us so much–Jesus, mysteriously present in the outward and visible sign of the Sacrament. It is another way to commune with the one whose love evokes ours.

Vision Restored

In a secular society such as ours, Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament can seem quite strange. But, its strangeness might actually be a reason it is a valuable and instructive practice in our context. Whether we like it or not, and in spite of ourselves, our imaginations have been shaped to see the world secularly. We experience God, more or less, but we tend to engage creation and other people as though they are drained of sacredness.

But, that is not the Christian vision. The Christian vision is that all creation and every human being is sacramental. The universe, including all humanity, is a vast interlocking web of glory, charged with the grandeur of God. All things participate in and manifest God. Not just grand vistas and glorious sunsets, but every tree, plant, and animal. And especially each human being along with the whole human community. Creation vibrates with God who is in, with, and under it all, sustaining and cherishing everything. The stuff of creation, like some bread and wine, can bear the Presence of God. Jesus came to heal the damage done to all of this by sin and to restore our ability to see all of creation, including every human being, with God’s delight.

In a secular age it can be hard to hold onto that vision. We have mostly lost it. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is one means of regaining that vision. When we gaze at the Host in the monstrance, we see Jesus. But, it might also be a lens through which we begin to see the rest of the world and each person sacramentally, as something holy, to be engaged with care and reverence.

Benediction

Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament can be done simply, alone or in small groups wherever the Sacrament is reserved. But, it can also be a more formal liturgy that includes the celebrant blessing the assembly using a monstrance containing the Blessed Sacrament. The word “benediction” comes from the Latin word meaning “blessing.” Jesus came to bless us. So, it is fitting to end our adoration with a benediction from the one whom we adore. But, of course, it never ends there. We who have been blessed are to go forth bearing that blessing to the world.