"Call No Man Father"

A reader sends this question:

The Anglican Church has its appeal, but there are a couple of issues that I bump up against.  One of them is the church's habit of addressing clergy as "Father".  Since Jesus clearly said "Call no man Father", I have a hard time with the Anglican and Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Some Anglicans asked me what I call the man that was married to my mother, but I believe that Jesus was clearly talking in a religious context, not a familial one.  How is it that the Anglican Church violates what seems to be a fairly clear statement of our Lord??  Any thoughts?

Dear reader, yes, I do have a couple of thoughts.  The first is that certain Anglicans -- but I am not one of them -- would agree with you.  These Anglicans are typically on the "snake-belly low" side, basically Presbyterians with prayer books, Puritan types who detest anything remotely "Romish", like calling a presbyter a "priest" or addressing him as "father."  So, if you did become an Anglican, you would find at least some kindred spirits in the Puritan party.  (I'm using "Puritan" here, by the way, in a purely descriptive sense, not a pejorative one.)

My other thought is that those Anglicans who've asked you what you call the man that married your mother have effectively dismantled the exegetical argument, for it proves too much.  Your response is that "Jesus was clearly talking in a religious context, not a familial one", but I don't think that really does much for your case, mainly because it's ignoring the context in which the command to "call no man 'father'" is found.  Let's have a look at the passage, which appears in Matthew 23:

23 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, ² “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, ³ so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. ⁴ They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear,^a]"> and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. ⁵ They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, ⁶ and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues ⁷ and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi^b]"> by others. ⁸ But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers.^{c]"> 9} And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. ¹⁰ Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. ¹¹ The greatest among you shall be your servant. ¹² Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

What is the point being made by Jesus here?  Is it about inappropriate honorifics or rather about the importance of humility?  Verse 12 contains your answer.  It's clearly about not pridefully glorying in titles.   Jesus employs a particular extreme rhetorical device here, like he does throughout the Gospels, with a view toward making a point, and here the point is clearly stated in v. 12.  It's somewhat similar to the device he uses when he said, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God.”  Is Jesus really telling us not to attend to the funeral of our parents?  Hardly.  And neither is he instructing us not to refer to our pastor as "father."  I mean, why shouldn't we refrain from calling our pastor "pastor".  For we have only one pastor.   See how it works?

Is there no sense in which church leaders can be called "father", when St. Paul himself wrote, "For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel."?  How can we call no man "teacher" when the gift of teaching is listed as one of the spiritual gifts?  Are we to refrain from calling a seminary professor an "instructor"?  Really?

So yeah, your argument proves too much, and really doesn't account for either the context in which the statement "call no man 'father'" is found or for the fuller testimony of Holy Scripture.

There are my thoughts, for what they're worth.  And here's an article from a Catholic web site that goes into further detail: "Call No Man 'Father'"?

Why I Am Becoming Anglican: A Brief Explanation for My Assemblies of God Family

H/T to fellow chaplain and Facebook friend Randy Demary.  I am posting this in part as a further reply to Kerby Rials.

C.S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism

Worth the time.  On a related note, ex-Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee has gone on record as saying that states do not need to obey the US Supreme Court if that court's ruling is that state laws prohibiting gay marriage are unconstitutional.  Wherever you stand on the right of gays to have some sort of state-recognized union, Huckabee is right, and nullification is coming back to the forefront of national political discussion, whether the Federals and their left-liberal enablers like it or not.  States, county sheriffs and even individual citizens all around the country are currently nullifying, by disobeying, a number of laws they deem unconstitutional and/or irrational.  There is more such disobedience to come, I guarantee it.  As evidenced by such abominable law as the Obamacare contraception mandate, the churches of Christ here in the United States will increasingly be forced to jump on the nullification bandwagon whethery THEY like it or not, for we must obey God rather than men.  The time for "conservative" deference to an increasingly illegitimate liberal state is over.  No sovereign but Jesus.

A Reply to Kerby Rials

UPDATE 1/25. 

On December 21 of last year, Assemblies of God pastor and missionary Kerby Rials posted a critical response to the article How I Got There: An Evangelical Converts to Anglicanism, to which I will respond here.  (The article was written by a certain “Fr. Doug”, who was the vicar at All Saints Anglican Church in San Antonio at the time of the article’s first publication.  I have yet to find his last name.) Before responding to Pastor Rials, however, I want to extend the right hand of fellowship to him by thanking God for his mission to plant Evangelical churches in Belgium, and for the irenic tone of his response to the article.  Pastor Rials and I have become Facebook friends, though we have as yet to interact there.  I think he will find after reading my reply here that he has more in common with certain Anglicans than he thinks.  In fact, a goodly number of charismatic Evangelicals from AOG and Vineyard ranks have become Anglicans.  Many of them are church planters themselves and seek to perpetuate Three Streams Anglicanism in North America and beyond.

So, now that I’ve offered the rose of friendship to Pastor Rials, I would like to turn his attention to the thorns.  His response begins:

Dear Doug,

I read your story with interest, and felt led to leave you a response. In looking over your account of your conversion, I could not find, what seemed to me, to be a strong justification of Anglican theology as opposed to evangelical protestant theology. As I see it, these are the principal concerns:

You noted, first of all, that "the priest is a father and the parishioners are his children. He is responsible for raising and nuturing (sic) them." This contradicts, it seems to me, the New Testament passages speaking of the priesthood of every believer, and the fact that there are no priests in the New Testament at all. The collegiality and the equality of the believers in the New Testament does not concur with the hierarchical system practiced in Anglicanism. It creates a barrier between the believer and Christ, inserting an hierarchical priesthood.

Classical Anglicanism in fact holds to the priesthood of all believers as one of the key Reformational distinctives that fueled the English Reformation.  However, like so many in the baptistic and free church traditions, Pastor Rials illogically concludes from the few New Testament data which speak to the issue of the priesthood of believers that some form of democratic egalitarianism is implied.  He sees no “hierarchical system” in the New Testament when in fact there is hierarchy to be seen just about anywhere you look.  For example, it was the apostles and the elders who convened the Jerusalem Council, not the “priesthood of believers” at large.  We see hierarchy set forth in the listing of spiritual gifts concerning church leadership seen in I Cor. 12:28 and Ephesians 4:11-16.  Of these leaders, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews writes, “Obey . . . and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account.”

Though revisionist Anglo-Catholics would demur, we would agree with Pastor Rials that there is no sacerdotal priesthood in the New Testament.  There is, however, a “presbyterate”.  The English word “priest” is etymologically related to the word “presbyter”, so there it is perfectly acceptable to call an elder of the church a “priest”, so long as we stipulate that the “priests” of the New Testament were not sacrificing priests.  That being said, St. Paul was not averse to seeing a priestly aspect of his ministry, for, as he writes in Romans 15: 15-17, “. . . I have written very boldly to you on some points so as to remind you again, because of the grace that was given me from God,  to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, ministering as a priest the gospel of God, so that my offering of the Gentiles may become acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.”  (NASB)  The word there is hierourgounta, literally, “ministering as a priest”, as the NASB literally translates it, and if it is possible for a church leader to do priestly service in one sense, why not more?   I would recommend to Pastor Rials that he read the Conciliar Anglican blog article On the Eucharist: Why We Need a Presbyter at the Altar and that he also lay his hands on Brian Horne’s article Homo Hierarchicus and Ecclesial Order.   We move on:

Secondly, and in a related fashion, Anglicanism's reliance on apostolic succession is faulty, it seems to me, as Christ himself noted that those who were not apostles and had no apostolic succession had a valid ministry: (Luke 9:49) "John answered and said, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in Your name; and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow along with us.” But Jesus said to him, “Do not hinder him; for he who is not against you is for you.” Paul had no apostolic succession, but it did not hinder him either: (Gal. 1:12ff) For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ...But when God... was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went away to Arabia, and returned once more to Damascus."

Classical Anglicans would agree with Pastor Rials that the ministry of the Holy Spirit can’t be confined to the church hierarchy, but to make that acknowledgment is not in any way to gainsay the proposition that Christ, and the apostles after him, DID establish a church order that was not only hierarchical in nature but would need a means of perpetuating itself.  Read any book worth its salt on apostolic succession, and it is certainly evident that church order underwent a process of evolution during the first century.  However, it became clear by the second and third centuries that a mechanism for episcopal succession was in place.  We see it coming into shape as early as the end of the first century, as evidenced in Clement of Rome:

Through countryside and city [the apostles] preached, and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers. Nor was this a novelty, for bishops and deacons had been written about a long time earlier. . . . Our apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry.

As the decades and the next few centuries unfolded, patristic testimony to apostolic succession became multiplied.  However, it is not in any way necessary to hold the view, as some high church Anglicans and Anglo-Catholics do, that without an apostolic succession there are no valid sacraments or no valid church.  That certainly was not the view of Anglican divinity from Cranmer through Hooker.  It was only later that this view began to assert itself.  Classical Anglicans do not view the bishop as being necessary to the esse of the church, but they tend rather to sort themselves into plene esse and bene esse camps, all of which is to say that the activity of the Holy Spirit can in no way be bound to the canonical boundaries of the church.

And finally,

Anglicanism's reliance upon the liturgy is also not found in the New Testament, nor is its reliance upon tradition as superior to scripture or its belief in transubstantiation (sic) nor its reliance upon infant baptism, which did not come into the church until 400 years after the apostles.  Anglicanism seems to be drifting doctrinally toward Catholicism and LIberalism at the same time. It is a church without a strong sense of purpose, unable to deal with heretical beliefs like homosexuality in the bishopric. I used to consider it a protestant church but I am not sure anymore!

In this paragraph we find a string of wholly false and misinformed assertions.   If Pastor Rials would simply read some scholarly works on this history of the Christian liturgy, he will be shown all the indications to be found in the New Testament that the apostolic (which is to say Jewish) church most likely inherited a liturgical form of worship based on the Hebraic form of worship.  Classical Anglicanism does not believe in transubstantiation, and nor does Anglo-Catholicism (which tends to gravitate to a more Eastern view of the sacrament).  Infant baptism did not appear 400 years after the apostles.  We have copious evidence from the 2^nd century as to its practice, and as the penetrating exegetical and historical work of Joachim Jeremias demonstrates, there is every reason that Christian paedobaptism is related to Jewish proselyte baptism as a child is related to a parent.  Segments of Anglicanism have indeed been drifting toward Catholicism and liberalism ever since the 19^th century, but Pastor Rials illogically concludes that what is true of the part must be true of the whole.  It makes me wonder if he’s ever examined Anglicanism’s Formularies or read J.I. Packer or John Stott, who are noted representatives of a huge Evangelical Protestant stream in the Anglican Communion and Realignment Anglicanism.

The sum of the matter here, if I may be blunt, is that Pastor Rials really doesn’t have much of an understanding of what it is he rejects in his response to Fr. Doug, but if he’s game, we would be pleased to disabuse him of any other false notions he has of the Anglican Way, as we have done here with respect to the notions expressed in said response.  I think if he would simply read the 39 Articles, he’d find a document that is thoroughly Protestant and Evangelical, but  he would also find there a document that reflects a catholicity that the AOG simply doesn’t have, and which is why historically-minded Pentecostals have left churches like the AOG and the Vineyard for “Three Stream” Anglican churches, which are aplenty around the world.  I would direct his attention to one Pentecostal theologian in particular, Simon Chan, who in his book Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community in essence forces the question of why Pentecostals shouldn’t become Anglicans.

From an Anglican Bishop in Nigeria

"I do not know how many more lives must Boko Haram kill in the North East and Central Nigeria before the Western powers show they care. Seventeen lives lost in Paris and world leaders show solidarity. More than two thousand lives lost in two days and just passing comments. Almighty God will help us today or tomorrow. Our help is in the name of the Lord who has made the heavens and the earth..." - Bishop Benjamin Kwashi

H/T Fr. Matt Kennedy.

A Roman Muscular Christian Project

The New Emangelization.  Some good stuff here.   (Other stuff, meh.)  We should follow suit.  Or better, resurrect a similar project.

Text of interview with Cardinal Burke.

C.S. Lewis on the Word "Puritan"

Courtesy of The Calvinist International.

Theologically, Protestantism was either a recovery, or a development, or an exaggeration (it is not for the literary historian to say which) of Pauline theology.  Hence in Buchanan’s Franciscus ad Fratres the Friars’ prophylactic against it is to keep clear of the ‘old man from Tarsus.’ …

All the initiative has been on God’s side; all has been free, unbounded grace. His own puny and ridiculous efforts would be as helpless to retain the joy as they would have been to achieve it in the first place. Fortunately they need not. Bliss is not for sale, cannot be earned. ‘Works’ have no ‘merit’, though of course faith, inevitably, even unconsciously, flows out into works of love at once. He is not saved because he does works of love: he does works of love because he is saved. It is faith alone that has saved him: faith bestowed by sheer gift. From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang.

For it must be clearly understood that they were at first doctrines not of terror but of joy and hope: indeed, more than hope, fruition, for as Tyndale says, the converted man is already tasting eternal life. The doctrine of predestination, says the XVIIth Article, is ‘full of sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort to godly persons.’ But what of ungodly persons? Inside the original experience no such question arises. There are no generalizations. We are not building a system. When we begin to do so, very troublesome problems and very dark solutions will appear. But these horrors, so familiar to the modern reader (and especially to the modern reader of fiction), are only by-products of the new theology. They are astonishingly absent from the thought of the first Protestants. Relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes. In a single sentence of the Tischreden Luther tosses the question aside for ever. Do you doubt whether you are elected to salvation? Then say your prayers, man, and you may conclude that you are. It is as easy as that.

It follows that nearly every association which now clings to the word puritan has to be eliminated when we are thinking of the early Protestants. Whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe; nor did their enemies bring such charges against them. On the contrary, Harpsfield (in his Life of More) describes their doctrines as ‘easie, short, pleasant lessons’ which lulled their unwary victim in ‘so sweete a sleepe as he was euer after loth to wake from it.’ For More, a Protestant was one ‘dronke of the new must of lwed lightnes of minde and vayne gladnesse of harte.’ Luther, he said, had made converts precisely because ‘he spiced al the poison’ with ‘libertee.’ Protestantism was not too grim, but too glad, to be true; ‘I could for my part be verie wel content that sin and pain all were as shortlye gone as Tyndale telleth us.’ Protestants are not ascetics but sensualists.

Pastor, Militiaman and Soldier

“I am a Clergyman it is true, but I am a member of the Society as well as the poorest Layman, and my Liberty is as dear to me as any man, shall I then sit still and enjoy myself at Home when the best Blood of the Continent is spilling?...so far am I from thinking that I act wrong, I am convinced it is my duty to do so and duty I owe to God and my country.” -- Peter Muhlenberg, Pastor, Colonel of Virginia militia, 1775 and later Major General, Continental Army.

The European Faithless Will Rue the Day

They think themselves SO enlightened, but they are wallowing in darkness, and they will rue the day they jettisoned the Faith.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of God continues to leaven the world, and if the West does not return, then, quite literally, to hell with the West (which hell will undoubtedly look much like the Dar al Islam).

William Byrd: Te Deum (And a Happy New Year to All!)

Taking a holiday breather from blogging.  Will be back soon.

Merry Christmas!

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. . . .

In the Christian story God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity . . . down to the very roots and sea-bed of the Nature He has created.

But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, he must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders.

Or one may think of a diver, first reducing himself to nakedness, then glancing in mid-air, then gone with a splash, vanished, rushing down through green and warm water into black and cold water, down through increasing pressure into the death-like region of ooze and slime and old decay; then up again, back to colour and light, his lungs almost bursting, till suddenly he breaks surface again, holding in his hand the dripping, precious thing that he went down to recover. He and it are both coloured now that they have come up into the light: down below, where it lay colourless in the dark, he lost his colour, too.

In this descent and re-ascent everyone will recognise a familiar pattern: a thing written all over the world. It is the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and deathlike, it must fall into the ground: thence the new life re-ascends.

It is the pattern of all animal generation too. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoon and ovum, and in the dark womb a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being reproduced: then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living, conscious baby, and finally to the adult.

So it is also in our moral and emotional life. The first innocent and spontaneous desires have to submit to the deathlike process of control or total denial: but from that there is a re-ascent to fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way. Death and Rebirth–go down to go up–it is a key principle. Through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the highroad nearly always lies.

The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. All the instances of it which I have mentioned turn out to be but transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key. I am not now referring simply to the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. The total pattern, of which they are only the turning point, is the real Death and Re-birth: for certainly no seed ever fell from so fair a tree into so dark and cold a soil as would furnish more than a faint analogy to this huge descent and re-ascension in which God dredged the salt and oozy bottom of Creation. - C.S. Lewis

First Sunday of Advent

 A blessed season to all.

The Effeminization of the Priesthood

Men will never be drawn to the priesthood in large numbers if they must be adjuncts to women in their most visible role. To the modern man, holiness and manliness seem at odds – he may be hellishly torn between these contradictory drives - because of the loss of male authority and hierarchy. The effusive, emotion-drenched atmosphere of contemporary Christianity is like a gauntlet thrown down before him, a challenge to his elemental, irrefutable identity as a man.

Article here.

Essays on the Ordination of Women from the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth

Ordination to the Presbyterate and the Episcopate: A Traditional Understanding (pdf)

The Ordination of Women to the Presbyterate and Episcopate: Where Are We?

The Ordination of Women: The Witness of Holy Scripture

The Ordination of Women: The Witness of Sacred Tradition

Reason and the Ordination of Women to the Presbyterate and Episcopate

Combating Orthodox Caricatures of Western Theology

An intellectually honest post by an Orthodox priest and scholar, Fr. Oliver Herbel:   

A recent post by Fr. Stephen Freeman reminded me of just how common it is for we Orthodox to paint with a broad, reductionistic brush when it comes to the West.  He opened his post on “An Illegal Christmas” by saying:

“The great advantage to thinking about God in legal terms, is that nothing has to change. If what happens between us and God is entirely external, a matter of arranging things such as the avoidance of eternal punishment or the enjoyment of eternal reward, then the world can go on as it is. In the legal model that dominates contemporary Christian thought, the secular world of things becomes nothing more than an arena, the stage on which we act out our moral and psychological dilemmas, waiting only for our final grades to be issued when we die.

In the contemporary world-view, Christ’s death and resurrection change nothing within the day-to-day world. Their effect is entirely and completely removed from this world and reserved for the next. This is a great advantage for Christian thought, for everything of significance becomes theoretical, removed from the realm of practical discussion. Not only does Christ’s work change nothing in this world, it changes nothing within us other than by moral or psychological suasion. And we therefore need argue or labor for nothing other than abstractions. The inert world of secularism is left intact.

This is to say that if “accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior” only brings about a change in my eternal disposition, then it is largely meaningless in this world. Everything Christians do in this world would be but tokens of eternity.

But this is not the teaching of the New Testament or classical Christianity.”

Frankly, I don’t think it’s the teaching of anyone, though the “once saved, always saved” crowd probably does come close to this.  Yet, I don’t think that crowd alone is meant by the “contemporary world-view.”  That’s left undefined, unfortunately, but it seems to apply to “other Christians” or even “the other Christians.”

But Fr. Stephen Freeman is not alone.  Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick makes a slight error in how he presents Luther as well in a recent post on his site also.  He gets Luther partially right.  Luther was reacting against a system that encouraged the likes of Tetzel, who went around selling time out of purgatory.  And yes, Luther does speak and write in places about faith as opposed to works, but if that’s all one gets out of Luther, one read him way too quickly (if at all).  Luther himself actually saw good works as flowing out of faith and as free will even existing in this kingdom (his “two kingdoms” approach also applies here–read up on it if you haven’t encountered this before).  Fr. Andrew wrote, “Luther was wrong that the story was “faith versus works.”  No, it’s “faith and works” on both sides of the question.  The real difference is which faith and works you’re going to follow.”  Thing is, Luther would have agreed with the second and third sentences too. Although a full treatise of Luther’s faith and works is beyond the bounds of my writing here, this extract might help produce a more appreciative view of what Luther was trying to get at.

The two Frs. Stephen are not alone nor is it just an Orthodox blogger problem.  I’ve mentioned Orthodox Constructions of the West before on this site.  It really should be a must-read.  In fact, at some point soon I’ll write a post giving a list of “must reads” for Orthodox Christians.  One of the upshots of that book is that it shows just how prevalent our caricatures often are.  Popular Orthodox writers can tend in this direction regardless of whether they are blogging about it.  It can also happen around the coffee hour table. For example, how easy is it to find simple dismissals of Augustine and Anselm by Orthodox, even well known Orthodox writers?

Now, I am standing on the belief that such reductionist generalizations are not good and appropriate, at least not when perpetuated by people who are educated leaders and influencing the way others interpret fellow non-Orthodox Christians around them.  So, in light of that, what are some things we can do?  Well, one will be to read the books I’ll list in my next post.  Reading those will provide one with a more nuanced and informed view.  Another thing we can do, though, is easy, and if done by the likes of Frs. Stephen and Andrew and other Orthodox bloggers and writers, could be quite effective.  We could articulate our theology and spirituality primarily as standing on it’s own, not needing a heretical “foil.”  So, in Fr. Stephen’s post, his discussion of “transformation” was good and enlightening and a positive expression of what our Orthodox faith is (at least in part) about.  Fr. Andrew’s discussion of good works and faith works quite well without needing an overly simplistic view of Luther thrown in.  Both blogging priests have good things to say to us, as do other Orthodox bloggers and writers.  Heck, now and then, even I might hit the mark (and I hope I am here).  I think if we present Orthodoxy as a positive rather than as a reaction to something, it will help us.

Take fencing.  I mentioned “foil” above, so I hope this will work.  If my whole strategy is only to parry your attack and riposte it, and that’s all I ever do, you’ll pick up on it.  You’ll notice I have a rather simplistic approach to fencing.  You’ll even believe that if that’s the only action I ever do, I don’t even really understand fencing and you’ll want to be instructed by someone else eventually.  On the other hand, if I add attacks and feints and counter attacks and indirect attacks, you’ll see I have a more complete understanding of the sport.  You’ll have to fence me more carefully and, if you’re learning the sport, you might just stay with me as a coach.  Yes, even in fencing, one has an “area of expertise,” and that area might well be certain parries, but to be successful, one needs to be able to create situations that lead to those parries succeeding.  Right now, we Orthodox need a more complete game.  It’s too easy to find caricatures of the West in popular Orthodox writings, whether online or in print.

This hurts us, for it gives us a reputation as ignorant, uneducated, knee-jerk, chip-on-our-shoulders, etc. At least educated and informed non-Orthodox will conclude that and why shouldn’t they? We’d conclude something similar if we encountered simplistic dismissals of Orthodoxy. It also hurts us because it means we are not preparing ourselves or our fellow Orthodox for real meaningful encounters with non-Orthodox. It hurts us because it limits our audience. We end up preaching to the Orthodox choir. To take the two blogs I just mentioned, for example, I highly doubt Ancient Faith wants its podcasts and blogs and such only heard and read by Orthodox (but maybe I’m wrong here). It also hurts us because we set up converts to deconvert later if they come to see their reasons for converting as simplistic and even false. If we truly believe our church has a rich tradition and a spirituality that is open and beneficial to all, why risk that?

Fr. Herbel echoes the assessment of Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart:

The most damaging consequence . . .  of Orthodoxy’s twentieth-century pilgrimage ad fontes—and this is no small irony, given the ecumenical possibilities that opened up all along the way—has been an increase in the intensity of Eastern theology’s anti-Western polemic. Or, rather, an increase in the confidence with which such polemic is uttered. Nor is this only a problem for ecumenism: the anti-Western passion (or, frankly, paranoia) of Lossky and his followers has on occasion led to rather severe distortions of Eastern theology. More to the point here, though, it has made intelligent interpretations of Western Christian theology (which are so very necessary) apparently almost impossible for Orthodox thinkers. Neo-patristic Orthodox scholarship has usually gone hand in hand with some of the most excruciatingly inaccurate treatments of Western theologians that one could imagine—which, quite apart form the harm they do to the collective acuity of Orthodox Christians, can become a source of considerable embarrassment when they fall into the hands of Western scholars who actually know something of the figures that Orthodox scholars choose to caluminiate. When one repairs to modern Orthodox texts, one is almost certain to encounter some wild mischaracterization of one or another Western author; and four figures enjoy a special eminence in Orthodox polemics: Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and John of the Cross.

I think Anglicans can do business, ecumenically, with folks like Dr. Hart and Fr. Herbel.  Orthodox folks who trash our Western theological heritage, or call our English Reformers "heretics", or seek unconditional surrender to the Orthodox Church, not so much.

New Crusade: Armed Christian Opposition to ISIL Seems to be Building, Slowly but Surely

Praying Like an Anglican

Excellent video from St. Peter's Anglican, Evans, GA. 

New to the Blogroll

Ponder Anew: Discussions about Worship for Thinking People

Return of the Embryo Parson

It's complicated. ;>)

Christians for Biblical Equality?

What if "biblical equality" is an oxymoron?

Homo Hierarchicus and Ecclesial Order.  I have a copy of Horne's article from the International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church if anyone desires one.  Contact me if you do.

Abstract

To argue that the concept of hierarchy is a profoundly theological concept is peculiarly difficult at the present time in which there is a general assumption that all hierarchies are hierarchies of power, intrinsically oppressive, and incompatible with human freedom. Consequently there is a deep-seated suspicion of the notion whenever it is invoked – not least in the context of church ‘order’. Such a suspicion would have been inexplicable to those writers from whom we gain our earliest knowledge of the Christian Church. Though we cannot, nor should we try to, recreate the conditions of earlier ages in which the concept was understood with a richness and depth that are lacking in our own age, it is vital to expose the contemporary misuse and degradation of the concept and see that, in the life of the Church, the concept of hierarchy is not intended to be an articulation of power, but an eschatological expression of order. The recognition of the inhuman abuse of the concept down the ages should not blind us to the truth that its purpose is to act sacramentally as a sign of the heavenly kingdom.