Nielsen’s Nook

Tomorrow I’m off to the disernment retreat for the Diocese of Dallas. It’s one of the first major steps for ordination in the Episcopal Church. I’d appreciate your prayers. I’ll keep you posted.

17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

“That is,” writes Farley, “they are to manifest the Lord’s life on earth, as His Body.” ¹ I remember one of the extremely helpful and paradigmatic books I read in seminary by Benjamin B. Warfield. In this little booklet that he wrote to incoming students to Princeton Seminary, he encouraged us that there is never a time that we would turn from worshiping the Lord to our books or from the study of our books to the worship of the Lord (to paraphrase). ²

Warfield, Farley and St. Paul all resonate symphonically together here. The strange thing about truth is that it transcends all kinds of boundaries, traditions, cultures, and time. Colossians 3:17 underscores union with Christ the paradigmatic element of Christian theology and life. This union is in fact a participation in the divine energies (workings, ενεργη) and is most profoundly proclaimed at the Lord’s Table, where Christians by faith receive the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus—where God gives us himself and we give Him ourselves. And so we say during the consecration of the Bread and Wine:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him. ³

This is of course a continuation of the theme we find in John 15, where Christ makes plain his desire that we abide in Him and He in us, as He—the Second Person of the Trinity—abides in His Father. In this way Christians graciously participate in the divine life given to us in Christ Jesus. “[Our] life is His life. [Our] existence is to be one continuous outpouring of thanksgiving to God in His Name. The Christian calling is to be a eucharistic man.” ⁴

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¹ Farley, Lawrence. The Prison Epistles, The Orthodox Bible Study Companion Series. (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Conciliar Press, 2003) , p. 186.

² Warfield, Benjamin B. The Religious Life of Theological Students.

³ Book of Common Prayer, 336.

⁴ Farley, 187.

In Chapters in Church History, discussing the Puritan Revolt in England, Powel Mills Dawley writes:

…Puritan intolerance would have imposed a religious system as unpalatable to the mass of the people as Anglicanism was to the few.¹

This of course made me smile, given my Presbyterian background. It also made me think of my favorite definition of Puritans from H. L. Mencken that a Puritan was someone that feared that someone somewhere might possibly be having fun. Caricatures aside, the impact of the Puritans on the Church of England has been lasting as Dawley continues:

… it called forth the famous defense of the Church of England against Geneva, The Laws of Ecclesiastical polity by Richard Hooker, the most notable Anglican scholar of the sixteenth century. ²

However, the most profound impact might be what Dawley records regarding the placement of the Gospel in the self-consciousness of the Anglican Church as a historical continuation of the apostolic faith and practice:

The evangelical concern [imparted from the Puritans] with “Gospel before Church” would enable Anglicanism to call itself into judgment. The Catholic element, on the other hand, would bind the Church, even while under judgment, to the traditional stream of Christian life and experience in all ages. By means of this creative tension Anglicanism has remained aware that in religion of Incarnation, history is both the means of God’s self-revelation and the scene of God’s redemption. ³

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¹ Dawley, Powel Mills. Chapters In Church History. (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1950), 186.

² Dawley, Powel Mills. Chapters In Church History. (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1950), 186.

³ Dawley, Powel Mills. Chapters In Church History. (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1950), 187.

Our rites have tended to domesticate God within the images of Western culture projected into the heavenly places. Liturgy is most authentic when it is experienced as awestruck praise, the creature standing at the threshold of the Holy. … Annie Dillard has summed up the point, saying, ‘I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.’

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Weil, Louis. “The Gospel in Anglicanism.” The Study of Anglicanism. Stephen Sykes et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 62-3.

ChurchYear.net has put together what looks to be a very helpful reading plan for Lent, composed of readings from the Church Fathers. It is available for download.

The Church Liturgy is divided into two parts: 1) the Word Spoken and 2) the Word Broken. In the first part one will experience the reading and preaching of the Word of God. There is in our church an Old Testament reading, the singing of a Psalm, the Epistle reading and then the reading from the Gospel. There is a processional from the altar to the middle of the sanctuary, in the midst of the people, where a formation occurs and the reading of the Holy Gospel occurs. The formation looks something like this:

The crucifer (i.e., the person carrying the crucifix) stands at the head of the formation. The torch bearers stand to either side and forward, shining light upon the Gospel Book held by the Lay Reader in between them. And at the foot of this cruciform formation stands the priest who reads the Gospel. Something is profoundly and purposefully communicated to both clergy and laity, that is to everyone, at this point. Whatever the Gospel is, we come to it at the foot of the Cross. It is a visible lesson on hermeneutics, that we must always seek to understand Jesus at the foot of the Cross. We cannot read His book on any other terms than the terms that were given at the foot of the Cross. Thus, it is that St. Paul has told us that he decided to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:2).

Want to learn more about Christian Liturgy? Check out Thomas Howard’s Liturgy Explained.

Translation

3 For this reason and concerning all things, I praise you, I bless you, I glorify you [1] through the eternal and heavenly high priest, Jesus Christ, your beloved son, [2] through whom be glory to you, with him and the Holy Spirit, both now and for the ages to come. Amen.”

[1] σε αἰνῶ, σὲ εὐλογῶ, σὲ δοξάζω is a sequence used today in the liturgy, “We praise thee, we bless the, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory, O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty….” (Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, 324).

[2] See note on §14.1 regarding the use of παιδός.

For those who are following the battle for orthodoxy in the Episcopal Church, J. I. Packer, a priest in the Canadian Episcopal Church has an article worth reading. In particular, the distinction he makes between schism and realignment is helpful.

HT: my wife

For that is what worship is: an act. It is not primarily an “experience,” although we often hear people talking about having had “a beautiful worship experience.” This is a fine sentiment, but partly misses the point. God commands us to worship him, and you cannot command an experience. Like love (which is also commanded), worship may be attended by exalted feelings; but the thing itself is the act of bringing laud and honor to the Most High…. Worship is the act in which we approach the highest mystery of all, namely, God.

Thomas Howard. The Liturgy Explained. (Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 2006), 9-10.

While traveling back to Thulcandra, Ransom reflects:

He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite — that life was waiting outside the little iron egg-shell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality.¹

It is said that the theologians of the Anglican church are often their poets and literary personae. Lewis certainly hands us weighty allusion to Christology here.

¹ Lewis, C. S. Out of the Silent Planet. (New York: Scribner, 1938), 145.