Wycliffe’s teachings were not confined to England. The connection between Britain and Bohemia seems distant, but in an era when scholars all wrote in Latin, language was not the barrier that it has been in intervening centuries. There another priest, Jan Hus, espoused and began to preach Wycliffite principles, eventually to be tried as a heretic and burned at the stake in 1415. Although the words “Hussite” and “Bohemian” were spattered as insults, Hus remained a popular national hero in the minds of many.
As with Wycliffe’s teachings in England, the doctrines which Hus proclaimed continued to spread. Almost exactly a century later, on 31 October 1517 Martin Luther posted his famous Ninety-Five Theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral and unleashed a movement which the hierarchy in Rome was unable to suppress. When Luther was accused of being a Hussite, he boldly replied, “Among the condemned beliefs of Jan Hus and his disciples, there are many which are truly Christian and evangelical and which the Catholic Church cannot condemn.”
Of course by the sixteenth century Hus was only one of a number of influences abroad in Europe. The abuses of the church were the cause of widespread discontent among clergy, scholars and laypeople alike. Even Erasmus of Rotterdam, a moderate humanist scholastic who remained within the Catholic Church, writing at about the time of the Reformation, could speak of the church as engulfed in a “sea of superstition”. Of the absurd practices associated with the veneration of saints he remarked,
One gives relief from toothache, another helps in childbirth, another restores things that are stolen, another brings help to the shipwrecked, still another guards the flocks, and so it goes down the line. There are some saints who can do many things, like the Blessed Virgin, whom the common folk honour more than they do her Son.
Erasmus’ withering sarcasm was not confined to popular folk religion. He had as much (if not more) to criticize in the clergy and prelates of the church:
Under the present system what work need be done is handed over to Peter or Paul to do at their leisure, while pomp and pleasure are personally taken care of by the Popes. They believe themselves to be readily acceptable by Christ with a mystical and almost theatrical finery. Thus, they proceed with pomp and with such titles as Beatitude, Reverence, and Holiness—between blessings and curses—to execute the role of a bishop. Miracles are considered to be antiquated and old-fashioned; to educate the people is irritating; to pray is a waste of time; to interpret Sacred Scripture is a mere formality; to weep is distressing and womanish; to live in poverty is ignominious; to be beaten in war is dishonourable and not worthy of one who insists that kings, no matter how great, bend and kiss his sacred foot; and to die is unpleasant, death on a cross—dishonor.
In addition to this there was an increasing sense of nationalism, which resulted in mounting tension between church and state. And thirdly the newly-introduced movable-type printing press was making the written word available to an increasingly wider and better-educated populace. Notions of reformation were able to spread far more quickly and effectively than they had a century before.
The Reformation was not merely a protest against the wrongs of a church rife with corruption. Much more it was a movement to bring back into centrality the core teachings of the gospel: the doctrines of justification by grace through faith, of the unique authority of the Bible in all matters of faith and life, of the priesthood of all believers (that is, that Christians need no other mediator than Christ), and supremely of the all-sufficiency of Christ and of his death on the cross as the one and only sacrifice for the sins of the world.
While popular ideas of the beginnings of Protestantism center on Martin Luther, the Reformation was in fact a complex and widespread movement with a number of leaders. Reformation teachings were being espoused not only in Germany, but in Switzerland and France—even in Italy and Spain. And in England the remaining Lollards discovered that they now had allies across the channel on the continent.
07 November 2007
06 November 2007
Our Anglican Heritage: (1) John Wycliffe & the English Bible
This is is the first in a series of brief articles on the history of Anglicanism.
One of the challenges of presenting a series on “Our Anglican Heritage” is where to begin. For a start, we need to recognize that the word “Anglican” really means “English”. Thus to speak of “our Anglican heritage” is to a great degree to speak about a tradition which has come to us from England. We could begin, then, by tracing that heritage back to the origins of Christianity on the British Isles, past Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, to men like Ninian and Patrick, Aidan and Brendan, intrepid missionaries who brought the good news of Christ to the Celtic people. There are even legends that seek to trace those origins all the way to the Apostle Paul or Joseph of Arimathea.
However, we shall skip over a thousand years or more of history to the fourteenth century, to a priest and scholar named John Wycliffe (d. 1384). Little is known about the man himself. Stephen Neill writes of him as “a bitter, angry and disappointed man, with a harsh and narrow mind”. A.G. Dickens reflects,
The man himself remains in some respects a mystery; we know so much of his thought, so little of his thoughts, so little of the inner sources of his radicalism. An obstinate North-Country mind endowed with the subtleties of the Oxford schools; a combination of disappointed careerist, temperamental rebel, sincere reformer of immense moral courage; all these and yet further complexities seem to dwell side by side.
Wycliffe has been called the “Morning Star of the Reformation”, and for good reason. He is best known for his translation of the Scriptures, although exactly how much Wycliffe himself rendered into the earthy English of his day is not certain. What was for certain was Wycliffe’s recognition of the Bible as the one sure basis for the church’s teaching and of the need to bring it into the hands of the common people. He also rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation (the mediæval teaching that Christ is physically present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion) but spoke of Christ being present “sacramentally, spiritually and virtually”. He also questioned the supremacy of the pope, spoke against the celibacy of clergy and advocated the disendowment of the church, which had become rich and decadent. “Perhaps the only major doctrine of the sixteenth-century Reformers which Wycliffe cannot be said to have anticipated was that of Justification by Faith Alone.”
John Wycliffe died in relative obscurity, but his teachings were perpetuated by a group that came to be known as “Lollards”. The word is a derisive Middle Dutch term meaning “mutterer” or “mumbler”. In spite of hot persecution, the Lollard movement grew rapidly through the first quarter of the fifteenth century and seems to have remained a force to be reckoned with, though largely underground, right to the time of the Reformation.
One of the challenges of presenting a series on “Our Anglican Heritage” is where to begin. For a start, we need to recognize that the word “Anglican” really means “English”. Thus to speak of “our Anglican heritage” is to a great degree to speak about a tradition which has come to us from England. We could begin, then, by tracing that heritage back to the origins of Christianity on the British Isles, past Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, to men like Ninian and Patrick, Aidan and Brendan, intrepid missionaries who brought the good news of Christ to the Celtic people. There are even legends that seek to trace those origins all the way to the Apostle Paul or Joseph of Arimathea.
However, we shall skip over a thousand years or more of history to the fourteenth century, to a priest and scholar named John Wycliffe (d. 1384). Little is known about the man himself. Stephen Neill writes of him as “a bitter, angry and disappointed man, with a harsh and narrow mind”. A.G. Dickens reflects,
The man himself remains in some respects a mystery; we know so much of his thought, so little of his thoughts, so little of the inner sources of his radicalism. An obstinate North-Country mind endowed with the subtleties of the Oxford schools; a combination of disappointed careerist, temperamental rebel, sincere reformer of immense moral courage; all these and yet further complexities seem to dwell side by side.
Wycliffe has been called the “Morning Star of the Reformation”, and for good reason. He is best known for his translation of the Scriptures, although exactly how much Wycliffe himself rendered into the earthy English of his day is not certain. What was for certain was Wycliffe’s recognition of the Bible as the one sure basis for the church’s teaching and of the need to bring it into the hands of the common people. He also rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation (the mediæval teaching that Christ is physically present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion) but spoke of Christ being present “sacramentally, spiritually and virtually”. He also questioned the supremacy of the pope, spoke against the celibacy of clergy and advocated the disendowment of the church, which had become rich and decadent. “Perhaps the only major doctrine of the sixteenth-century Reformers which Wycliffe cannot be said to have anticipated was that of Justification by Faith Alone.”
John Wycliffe died in relative obscurity, but his teachings were perpetuated by a group that came to be known as “Lollards”. The word is a derisive Middle Dutch term meaning “mutterer” or “mumbler”. In spite of hot persecution, the Lollard movement grew rapidly through the first quarter of the fifteenth century and seems to have remained a force to be reckoned with, though largely underground, right to the time of the Reformation.
29 October 2007
Some thoughts on heaven from Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)
Award-winning Christian author Madeleine L’Engle died earlier this year. I came across this quotation as I was preparing for All Saints’ Day.
The Churches have tended to be too literal about heaven and hell, defining what no mortal can possibly know, because only God knows. A young woman came to me, deeply disturbed, because her minister had told her that immortality is not a Christian concept. It is left over from Greek thinking, he said, and Christians are not supposed to believe in it.
This was not what she needed to hear. She had lost a beloved sister, and she needed affirmation, not a lecture. “If there is no immortality, then what about my sister?” she asked the minister.
“We believe in the resurrection of the body,” he said. “What body?” Her sister had died, very slowly, of cancer, looking like a victim from Belsen. Her sister would not want to be resurrected in that emaciated, dying body. Her minister did not have an answer, at least not one that she could remember and tell me.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that the word immortality involves time, involves our going on and on in time, human time. But resurrection is in eternity, and that’s a tough concept for us to understand.”
“Do you understand it?”
“No, but I believe it. I don’t understand it because I am in time right now. I get glimpses of eternity, of kairos, God’s time, which is far more wonderful than ordinary chronos, clock time.”
“What about my sister? She was so alive, so vibrant, until those last months.”
All I could do was repeat my affirmation that God does not create us and then drop us into nothingness. I don’t think her sister is in either the old-fashioned heaven or hell; but I think she is, somehow, somewhere, more truly alive than she was on earth. I don’t know what the resurrection body will be like.
Tommy, my evangelist friend, quoted something to the effect that many Christians are more interested in resuscitation than resurrection.
Ouch.
My grandfather would not have wished to be resuscitated at 101.
But when a child is suddenly killed, don’t we intuitively wish for resuscitation? We want that child back, exactly as before—the same deep gray eyes, the fair hair, the dimples that came and went.
But Jesus was never recognized by sight after the resurrection. So what on earth do we mean by resurrection?
When the people asked St Paul what the resurrection body was going to be like, he snapped out, “Don’t be silly,” one of my favorites of all the sayings of Paul. Don’t be silly. We can’t have back what we have lost. I can’t have my tall, lean husband with his amazing blue eyes, larger and bluer than any other eyes I have seen.
I want him back, and there’s no evading that I want him.
So what do I mean, what do we all mean when we say that “we believe in the resurrection of the dead”?
A friend said to me, “When I die and see Jack again I will recognize him.”
If we didn’t recognize Jesus, can we count on that? Not unless we, too, have been resurrected, not resuscitated.
Once again we are in mystery, outside the realm of provable fact. We are, I believe, given glimpses, and I have had a few. Walking down a dirt road on a shining summer day I moved into a realm of beauty and depth that became indescribable once I had left it, but it gives me a hint that after I die I may say, “Oh, glory! What a thin way of living I have just left!”
Madeleine L’Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1996) 184-186
The Churches have tended to be too literal about heaven and hell, defining what no mortal can possibly know, because only God knows. A young woman came to me, deeply disturbed, because her minister had told her that immortality is not a Christian concept. It is left over from Greek thinking, he said, and Christians are not supposed to believe in it.
This was not what she needed to hear. She had lost a beloved sister, and she needed affirmation, not a lecture. “If there is no immortality, then what about my sister?” she asked the minister.
“We believe in the resurrection of the body,” he said. “What body?” Her sister had died, very slowly, of cancer, looking like a victim from Belsen. Her sister would not want to be resurrected in that emaciated, dying body. Her minister did not have an answer, at least not one that she could remember and tell me.
“I think,” I said slowly, “that the word immortality involves time, involves our going on and on in time, human time. But resurrection is in eternity, and that’s a tough concept for us to understand.”
“Do you understand it?”
“No, but I believe it. I don’t understand it because I am in time right now. I get glimpses of eternity, of kairos, God’s time, which is far more wonderful than ordinary chronos, clock time.”
“What about my sister? She was so alive, so vibrant, until those last months.”
All I could do was repeat my affirmation that God does not create us and then drop us into nothingness. I don’t think her sister is in either the old-fashioned heaven or hell; but I think she is, somehow, somewhere, more truly alive than she was on earth. I don’t know what the resurrection body will be like.
Tommy, my evangelist friend, quoted something to the effect that many Christians are more interested in resuscitation than resurrection.
Ouch.
My grandfather would not have wished to be resuscitated at 101.
But when a child is suddenly killed, don’t we intuitively wish for resuscitation? We want that child back, exactly as before—the same deep gray eyes, the fair hair, the dimples that came and went.
But Jesus was never recognized by sight after the resurrection. So what on earth do we mean by resurrection?
When the people asked St Paul what the resurrection body was going to be like, he snapped out, “Don’t be silly,” one of my favorites of all the sayings of Paul. Don’t be silly. We can’t have back what we have lost. I can’t have my tall, lean husband with his amazing blue eyes, larger and bluer than any other eyes I have seen.
I want him back, and there’s no evading that I want him.
So what do I mean, what do we all mean when we say that “we believe in the resurrection of the dead”?
A friend said to me, “When I die and see Jack again I will recognize him.”
If we didn’t recognize Jesus, can we count on that? Not unless we, too, have been resurrected, not resuscitated.
Once again we are in mystery, outside the realm of provable fact. We are, I believe, given glimpses, and I have had a few. Walking down a dirt road on a shining summer day I moved into a realm of beauty and depth that became indescribable once I had left it, but it gives me a hint that after I die I may say, “Oh, glory! What a thin way of living I have just left!”
Madeleine L’Engle, Penguins and Golden Calves (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1996) 184-186
25 October 2007
Thoughts on Marriage
“Dearly beloved: We have come together in the presence of God to witness and to bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony…” The brief exhortation in the Book of Common Prayer (page 423) given by the priest at the beginning of the service offers a succinct outline of the theology that underlies our Christian understanding of marriage. It speaks of what we are witnessing as “holy matrimony”. Underlying that is the conviction that what is taking place is not merely a contractual arrangement between two people, but a covenant, where God is the key player.
The service goes on to inform us that marriage is not a human invention. It was God who established it at the dawn of creation, when he brought together the first man and the first woman in Eden. “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” the man cried aloud as he first set eyes on his newly created partner. And the author of Genesis comments, “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
So it is that the wedding service begins with the principle that marriage was God’s idea. That point is driven home further by the reminder that our Lord’s first recorded miracle took place in the context of a marriage ceremony. I believe that teaches us the high value that Jesus himself set on marriage.
Thirdly, the exhortation speaks of marriage as signifying “the mystical union between Christ and his Church”. The reference here is to the apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 5:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church.
In other words, at its best, marriage is a window that helps reveal the self-sacrificial love of Jesus Christ for us, his church.
This theology of marriage was a revolutionary thought in the sixteenth century, when the wedding service was first written. In those days it had been assumed that God’s highest calling to men and women was to be celibate, as a priest or a nun. The reformers turned that around, to affirm that marriage is every bit as much a response to God’s calling, and therefore “is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God”.
This approach to marriage may be equally revolutionary in our society today, when so many see it as a legal agreement, a creation of the state, or a purely human device. May we not be swept along by this tide, but continue to see marriage—and live it out—as a holy gift, a sacred trust, from our gracious and loving God.
The service goes on to inform us that marriage is not a human invention. It was God who established it at the dawn of creation, when he brought together the first man and the first woman in Eden. “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!” the man cried aloud as he first set eyes on his newly created partner. And the author of Genesis comments, “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
So it is that the wedding service begins with the principle that marriage was God’s idea. That point is driven home further by the reminder that our Lord’s first recorded miracle took place in the context of a marriage ceremony. I believe that teaches us the high value that Jesus himself set on marriage.
Thirdly, the exhortation speaks of marriage as signifying “the mystical union between Christ and his Church”. The reference here is to the apostle Paul’s words in Ephesians 5:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church.
In other words, at its best, marriage is a window that helps reveal the self-sacrificial love of Jesus Christ for us, his church.
This theology of marriage was a revolutionary thought in the sixteenth century, when the wedding service was first written. In those days it had been assumed that God’s highest calling to men and women was to be celibate, as a priest or a nun. The reformers turned that around, to affirm that marriage is every bit as much a response to God’s calling, and therefore “is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God”.
This approach to marriage may be equally revolutionary in our society today, when so many see it as a legal agreement, a creation of the state, or a purely human device. May we not be swept along by this tide, but continue to see marriage—and live it out—as a holy gift, a sacred trust, from our gracious and loving God.
09 August 2007
Margaret Avison
The Globe and Mail carried an obituary today for Margaret Avison, who died in Toronto on July 31, in her ninetieth year. It includes these words:
Margaret wrote poetry almost all her life. She twice received the Governor Generals Award (Winter Sun, 1960, and No Time, 1989). She held three honorary doctorates and in 1985 was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. Her Concrete and Wild Carrot, 2002, was awarded a Griffin Prize for Poetry. Her first six volumes of poetry were collected as Always Now, 2003, and a seventh, Momentary Dark, appeared in 2006.
It does not mention what is my favorite of her works, a poem entitled “The Dumbfounding”:
When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: “His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country?”
Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried, “A ghost”
and only on our planks counted you fast.
Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.
The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.
You died.
We said,
“The worst is true, our bliss
has come to this.”
When you were sen by men
in holy flesh again
we hoped so despairingly for such report
we closed their windpipes for it.
Now you have sought
and seek, in all our ways, all thoughts,
streets, musics—and we make of these a din
trying to lock you out, or in,
to be intent. And dying.
Yet you are
constant and sure,
the all-lovely, all-men’s-way
to that far country.
Winning one, you again
all ways would begin
life: to make anew
flesh, to empower
the weak in nature
to restore
or stay the sufferer;
lead through the garden to
trash, rubble, hill,
where, the outcast’s outcast, you
sound dark’s uttermost, strangely light-brimming, until
time be full.
Margaret wrote poetry almost all her life. She twice received the Governor Generals Award (Winter Sun, 1960, and No Time, 1989). She held three honorary doctorates and in 1985 was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. Her Concrete and Wild Carrot, 2002, was awarded a Griffin Prize for Poetry. Her first six volumes of poetry were collected as Always Now, 2003, and a seventh, Momentary Dark, appeared in 2006.
It does not mention what is my favorite of her works, a poem entitled “The Dumbfounding”:
When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: “His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country?”
Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried, “A ghost”
and only on our planks counted you fast.
Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.
The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.
You died.
We said,
“The worst is true, our bliss
has come to this.”
When you were sen by men
in holy flesh again
we hoped so despairingly for such report
we closed their windpipes for it.
Now you have sought
and seek, in all our ways, all thoughts,
streets, musics—and we make of these a din
trying to lock you out, or in,
to be intent. And dying.
Yet you are
constant and sure,
the all-lovely, all-men’s-way
to that far country.
Winning one, you again
all ways would begin
life: to make anew
flesh, to empower
the weak in nature
to restore
or stay the sufferer;
lead through the garden to
trash, rubble, hill,
where, the outcast’s outcast, you
sound dark’s uttermost, strangely light-brimming, until
time be full.
07 August 2007
The Inadequacy of ‘Instant Christianity’
Some pithy words from A.W. Tozer (1897-1963):
It is hardly a matter of wonder that the country that gave the world instant tea and instant coffee should be the one to give it instant Christianity. If these two beverages were not actually invented in the United States it was certainly here that they received the advertising impetus that has made them known to most of the civilized world. And it cannot be denied that it was America … that brought instant Christianity to the gospel churches…
The American genius for getting things done quickly and easily with little concern for quality or permanence has bred a virus that has infected the whole evangelical church in the United States…
By “instant Christianity” I mean the kind … which is born of the notion that we may discharge our total obligation to our own souls by one act of faith, or at most by two, and be relieved thereafter of all anxiety about our spiritual condition. We are saints by calling, our teachers keep telling us, and we are permitted to infer from this that there is no reason to seek to be saints by character. An automatic, once-for-all quality is present that is completely out of mode with the faith of the New Testament.
Excerpted from That Incredible Christian (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1964). The article may also be found on the web here.
It is hardly a matter of wonder that the country that gave the world instant tea and instant coffee should be the one to give it instant Christianity. If these two beverages were not actually invented in the United States it was certainly here that they received the advertising impetus that has made them known to most of the civilized world. And it cannot be denied that it was America … that brought instant Christianity to the gospel churches…
The American genius for getting things done quickly and easily with little concern for quality or permanence has bred a virus that has infected the whole evangelical church in the United States…
By “instant Christianity” I mean the kind … which is born of the notion that we may discharge our total obligation to our own souls by one act of faith, or at most by two, and be relieved thereafter of all anxiety about our spiritual condition. We are saints by calling, our teachers keep telling us, and we are permitted to infer from this that there is no reason to seek to be saints by character. An automatic, once-for-all quality is present that is completely out of mode with the faith of the New Testament.
Excerpted from That Incredible Christian (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1964). The article may also be found on the web here.
06 August 2007
August 6
Lest we forget what day this is in the Church’s calendar…The Transfiguration seems to stand at a watershed in the ministry of Jesus, and to be a height from which the reader looks down on one side upon the Galilean ministry and on the other side on the Via Crucis. The story resembles the baptism of Jesus, inasmuch as it culminates in the heavenly voice proclaiming the Sonship; and it resembles the agony in Gethsemane, inasmuch as it shows the three disciples witnessing a decisive moment in the relation of Jesus to the Father.
Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1961-1974
On a more sombre note, it is also the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945.
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