In my last year of college I had a sudden and profound experience of Christ that did not fit into the secularized version of the Christian faith that I had started to experiment with. I went to seminary in Boston right out of college not to prepare for the priesthood but just to try to fit my experience into my skeptical and anti-supernatural world view. I took a course with Harvey Cox, one of the theologians of the Death of God movement. I knew about Harvey Cox from the religion teacher at my college, William Hamilton who had written with T.J. Altizer the book The Death of God which made the cover of Time. Cox was famous for a book called The Secular City which predicted the demise of the churches and religion and to a degree celebrated the “religionless Christianity” that would survive.

Harvey Cox was a sociologist and he was famous for the participant-observer model. Down with the detached and antiseptic observer and up with the observer who threw him or herself wholeheartedly into the experience and then came apart to reflect and analyze. As part of the class Harvey brought in a musician who was an expert in the Gospel music of Appalachia. The young man was an ethnomusicologist and this genre was his specialty. Harvey wanted us to sing the songs and have some of the experience. The musician was himself skeptical. He introduced the songs by saying, ” There is the religion of the earth and the religion of the sky and we are more earth people now but we are going to sing some songs of the sky god tonight.”

We sang a number of Oldtime favorites; I Saw The Light, I’ll Fly Away, What A Friend We Have In Jesus and so on. Then we sang a song that really got me. I have heard Doc Watson do it since. I am not sure of the title but the refrain is, “I like the old time preaching, praying, shouting singing, I like the old time worship of the Lord.” And there was this line, “In these latter days they say there is no need to pray, all we need to think religion is a better way but I am here to tell you brother Jesus saves from sin and in that old fashioned way he saves and now he dwells within.” I wasn’t sure I believed the line but I was sure that in the midst of all the palaver about the earth god and the sky god I had come across something that was serious, that had heft, weight, what I now understand the Bible calls glory. I left the auditorium thinking that if it was a choice between the earth god and the sky god that the sky god had way better songs. It took a while for the effect to go all the way home but that song had pulled on the end of the twelve year old atheist’s knitting and the whole scarf was coming undone. I love these old songs. They gladden my heart. At first hearing they can sound quaint and naïve. They are full of dynamite. Listen at your own risk.

Leander S. Harding, 2009

Check it out here

With the help of the Anglican Communion Institute the Communion Partners Bishops have produced an extremely important document. It is the most lucid and succinct account yet given of how the polity of the Episcopal Church applies to the current debates about the relationship of the Episcopal Church to the Anglican Communion. I heartily recommend a detailed reading of this important document. The text may be found here http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/?p=391.

The publication of the document was preceded by the release of a series of confidential emails between Dr. Christopher Seitz and other correspondents from among the Communion Partners. The flap about these unguarded communications is an unfortunate diversion and in my view does not detract in any way from the serious and well prepared statement the Communion Partner Bishops have produced. The theme that ties all the emails together is that of a group working hard to show Episcopal Church parishes an option other than knuckling under to non-canonical authority or leaving the Episcopal Church. It is certainly no secret that this is the longstanding public policy of the Anglican Communion Institute.

The document itself is a closely reasoned and fully documented précis of the historical development of the polity of the Episcopal Church. In a painstaking way the statement shows that the General Convention of the Episcopal Church is a creation of the dioceses and that “ordinary” power resides in the dioceses. The office of Presiding Bishop is not that of a metropolitan but of a presiding officer with roles delegated by the constituting dioceses gathered in convention. Neither the General Convention nor the Presiding Bishop has by canon or by custom any governing role within the life of a diocese. The claim that the Episcopal Church is hierarchical in the sense in which this term is normally understood in legal documents is shown to be without foundation in the constitution and canons of the Episcopal Church. The careful historical and theological commentary given in the Bishops Statement shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the lack of hierarchical language in our church’s founding documents is not by oversight or ignorance but is deliberate and intentional and in the face of counter-examples in the contemporary founding documents of other churches in the United States. It is important to note that there is nothing new here. The history and polity described in Bishops Statement is the traditional and standard account in the major histories of the Episcopal Church but it is put forth here in very lucid and comprehensive form. (The Statement quotes Canon Dawley’s work. See also Robert Prichard, A History of The Episcopal Church)

A particular point of interest is the discussion of the vows which Bishops make in their ordination service to “conform to the doctrine, discipline and worship” of the Episcopal Church. The Statement notes that this oath appears in the founding documents of the Episcopal Church as a substitute for the oath of submission to the Monarch and the authority of an archbishop. The Communion Partner Bishops affirm that, “our episcopal vows contain no pledge of obedience to a higher office or body, as do churches with metropolitan hierarchies, but we do hold our apostolic office in trust. We understand our vow to require conformity to the doctrine and worship we hold in trust and to the discipline of The Episcopal Church as set forth in this (Communion Partners) statement.” It is very important and a major contribution that it be remembered that the context of the ordination vows is doctrinal and that the doctrine referred to is the doctrine of the catholic church as received from the Church of England and sustained by communion with the See of Canterbury. The Communion Partners are right to stress that the oath is not an oath of personal loyalty such as a feudal prince might extract but an oath of loyalty to a body of doctrine which is expressed both liturgically and canonically. To conscientiously object to actions by either the Presiding Bishop or the General Convention that subvert this tradition of doctrine, liturgy and canon law could in certain circumstances be exactly what is required by such an oath and this seems to be the position of the Communion Partner Bishops.

The Bishops assert that they are “committed to remaining faithful members of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion.” But they reserve their right the right of their dioceses to participate in and eventually sign the Anglican Covenant. The Statement notes that the constitution of The Episcopal Church “identifies constituent membership in the Anglican Communion as one of the fundamental conditions on which our governing agreement is based.” In other words the General Convention of The Episcopal Church was created and is sustained by the dioceses on the basis of a common commitment to continue as constituent members of the Anglican Communion. Actions which bring into jeopardy the continuing membership of The Episcopal Church in the Anglican Communion create a constitutional crisis for The Episcopal Church. As the statement forthrightly puts it, “It is an elementary principle of law that agreements can be terminated in the event of material breach or repudiation by another party or by fundamental changes of circumstances.” The Statement continues, “Failure to sign the proposed covenant would be decisive in this respect. And were The Episcopal Church to attempt to change its constitutional governance to restrict diocesan autonomy, particularly in the case of an Anglican covenant, it would constitute a material breach or repudiation of its “basic” governing agreement.” Finally, “We must speak plainly here. Any attempt to prevent willing dioceses from signing the covenant would be unconstitutional and thereby void.”

This is a very forthright document by  Bishops who are trying to keep The Episcopal Church together but are not willing to do so at the price of cutting themselves off from the Anglican Communion or acquiescing to novel interpretations of the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church. They are in effect insisting that The Episcopal Church be The Episcopal Church and act in accord with its own law and traditions. This is precisely what Bishops ought to do when they intend to be faithful to their vows.

There are a lot of questions raised here for future discussion. I am completely convinced that the Statement is an accurate description of the polity of The Episcopal Church as it has ever been and as it now stands. Our polity is indeed unique but not for the reasons usually put forward about the participation of the different orders in decision making but rather because it envisions a provincial structure with a level of diocesan autonomy unparalleled in most other Anglican jurisdictions. Unlike most provinces we have no archiepiscopal order. It remains to be seen how this order can be integrated into a true communion of churches. The proposed Anglican Covenant is a step in that direction and would represent for Communion Partner Bishops and their dioceses a willing surrender of some aspects of their present autonomy for the sake of the ongoing unity and communion of the church.

There is also the very pertinent question of how the instruments of unity in a church whether they be the instruments of unity of the Anglican Communion or of a local diocesan synod or convention are actually and practically in the service of unity in faith, witness and mission. In the American scene there have been countless actions including the election of Gene Robinson which have been arguably legal and canonical but which have undermined unity and have not been the result of patiently building up the mind of the church over time at all levels including at the congregational level. There has grown up in the American church a penchant for extra-canonical legislation in the form of policies for ordination and the clergy calling process among other things which are simply promulgated by Bishops and various committees and commissions without any sort of canonical process and which ride roughshod over the prerogatives of local congregations. There has grown up a style across the theological spectrum of outfoxing the folks and slipping things through the convention when no one is looking. As we work our way out of this particular crisis of authority in the church it will be important that we abide by the full measure of our constitution and canons and that we do so with a genuinely Christian spirit of charity and mutual submission truly seeking the mind of Christ in His church and not narrow political victories. Polities can be more or less susceptible to subversion by the unscrupulous but there is no Christian polity which can succeed in its purposes without the ongoing conversion of its constituents.

By

The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

“I think it’s really very dangerous when someone stands up and says: ‘I have the way and I have the truth and I know how to interpret holy scripture and you are following what is the right way,’” he said “It’s really very, very dangerous and I think it’s demonic.” Bishop of Washington, John Chane as quoted in the English newspaper The Guardian.

This is from an interview in which the bishop of Washington was commenting on the crisis in the Anglican Communion and the charge by Anglican traditionalists that many bishops in The Episcopal Church have simply departed from the Apostolic faith.

John Chane charges the traditionalists with the crime of certainty. This is a commonplace. It is a corollary of the reigning intellectual culture among the intellectual elites of the West. It is a consequence of the dogmas of post-modernism. It is based on the conviction that there is very little that can be known with certainty, perhaps just a very few “facts” of science, perhaps not even them. The dogma at work here is the ironic post-modern dogma of the certainty of uncertainty. Consequently according to this post-modern dogma, to claim certainty in the area of beliefs and values is immoral and especially so given the huge variety of religious and philosophical options. The high dudgeon of the well educated university grad schooled in the dogmas of post-modernism is reserved for anyone who has the audacity to claim certainty in the area of religion, morals and beliefs. This is seen by people such as John Chane as an example of immorality and trying to force your beliefs on others. People who are morally and religiously certain create alarm. They are in Bishop Chane’s words, dangerous.

This protest against certainty claims the moral high ground and sounds on the surface as though it is based on a generous tolerance. This supposed moral protest in the name of tolerance needs to be unmasked as exactly the opposite, the dismissive and marginalizing rhetoric of the powerful who seek to protect their own agenda from critique on the grounds of any transcendent authority. It is precisely an attempt to force your beliefs on others before any argument is engaged by virtue of the way in which the rules of discussion are established. It is saying, in effect, ” before we talk you must agree that your beliefs and values are the sort of thing that I say they are and I say they can never be more than one opinion among others. If we are to talk, you must give up all your truth claims before you come to the table. With regard to the rules of the table, I will be the final referee.”

Lesslie Newbigin has brought forward a devastating critique of this pretended stance of tolerance. Newbigin identifies one of the foundational myths of contemporary pluralism in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. A group of blind men so the story goes are exploring an elephant by touch. One feels the tail and says the elephant is like a rope and one feels the leg and says the elephant is like a tree and one feels the ear and says the elephant is like a large leaf. Each has a piece of the truth. No one of them has it all. To apply the parable to our current controversy, many in The Episcopal Church see the protest of traditionalist Anglicans as an attempt by one of the blind men to make his perspective the one authoritative perspective and thus a power play and an immoral case of over-reaching. Lesslie Newbigin points out that there is a problem with this parable. The parable is told from the point of view of the King and his courtiers who take in the whole scene. The parable is told from the point of view of a supposedly neutral observer who is able to see the partial and limited nature of all other perspectives from the vantage point of the one perspective which is not subject to any critique. The parable is told from the imperial point of view. The teller of the parable adopts the pose of tolerance but this is surface camouflage behind which the King asserts the right to relativize and marginalize all other claims to truth but his own. Of this Newbigin says, “In a pluralist society such as ours. . .any claim to announce the truth about God and his purpose for the world, is liable to be dismissed as ignorant, arrogant, dogmatic. We have no reason to be frightened of this accusation. It itself rests on assumptions which are open to radical criticisms, but which are not criticized because they are part of the reigning plausibility structure.” (Gospel in a Pluralist Society, page 10.)

Bishop Chane’s protest sounds high minded and tolerant but it is in reality the rhetoric of the despot who is beyond rebuke. I do not ascribe a calculating mentality to the bishop in this but the words quoted in the Guardian are nonetheless words which express an imperial pluralism. Having once dismissed his opponents, Bishop Chane will immediately turn and announce his agenda for revision of the inherited moral teaching of the church as a “Gospel imperative.”

Now the question is this: to whom shall we turn when issues are disputed; to the whole Christian dogmatic and moral tradition of the last 2000 years or to the dogmas of skepticism and nihilism of the current Western intellectual elites?

Opening Remarks

Election of a Bishop Suffragan

Diocese of Dallas

My name is Leander Harding. I am in my 27^th year of ordained ministry. For most of that time I have been a parish priest. For the last three years I have been teaching Sacramental Theology, Pastoral Leadership and Pastoral Care at a seminary. I am also Head of Chapel and on Sunday I help out at one of the local parishes.

I am here because three of your clergy were at a conference where I was the chaplain. They heard me give a homily on the Christian virtue of patience and stopped me on the way out of the service to ask me if they could put my name forward for this election. I don’t think they walked into the church that evening thinking to ask me that question and it certainly hit me as a great surprise. We had dinner and talked and I promised to read the profile, talk with my wife and pray. Ultimately the whole thing, the profile, the words of your bishop and the way this request came to me in an atmosphere of prayer, touched my heart and made me wonder if it might be the Lord and I thought I had better do my part to find out. So thank you for the great privilege of being part of this moment of discernment.

I want to tell you something of my understanding of the ministry of a bishop. I believe the bishop is first and foremost a teacher of the faith. I have a personal mission statement which is to speak of the basic things of the Christian faith in a simple way. I see persistent, consistent teaching of the basics of the apostolic faith as the essence of the episcopacy. The bishops certainly do this in their preaching and teaching ministry in the course of the normal visitations. I hope it might be possible from time to time to gather together the clergy and people in a part of the diocese and have a time for building each other up in the faith. The bishops could teach, the clergy could teach, lay people with a gift of teaching could teach and we could share stories of what God has done in our lives. Some of these might be quite spectacular and some more humble and simple but no less a witness to the work of God in His people. This would be the kind of thing that could encourage us all and to which we could bring people who were curious about the faith with confidence that they would find grace, a gentle spirit and a winsome introduction to life in Christ.

I think a bishop is a pastor to the clergy and to the families of the clergy. I hope the suffragan could put a lot of focus here and really be a backstop for the diocesan. With a diocesan and suffragan I hope that this could be a truly personal and pastoral ministry. I hope it might be possible to meet with the clergy in groups small enough to have real conversation and often enough to build real community. I hope we might read the Bible together, share our faith and hope, pray and in this context deal together with the shared challenges of parish ministry and the life of the diocese and wider church.

I know that a particular challenge for the new suffragan is the care of the rural parishes. I spent the first ten years of my ordained ministry in small and struggling parishes. I have a soft spot for this kind of ministry. There are a lot of things that look different from the inside looking out than they do from the outside looking in and rural ministry and small church ministry is one of them. It would be a joy for me to get to know the people and clergy of these parishes one by one and work with them one by one to find the way forward for their ministries.

Let me close by saying one of the things that I am not good at. I am not good at finding someone to blame. Often when the ministry is not going smoothly our natural instinct is to find someone to blame. It’s the rector or the vicar or the vestry or the bishop or the national church. Surely we all make mistakes and there are certainly from time to time very serious incidents which require enforcing the discipline of the church. But more often when there is a problem and things are not working well my prejudice is that 85% has to do with the way we have set things up, with our system and method and our process. I am very interested in understanding the set up and working with others to make it less a burden, more workable, more likely to support success and effectiveness. That will usually take care of 85% of problem. For the other 15%, what a wonderful opportunity to practice Christian forbearance and charity.

You know that hymn text, “Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I constrained to be.” This is what I want to be a daily witness to the undeserved grace and love of God which has been made known to us in Jesus Christ.” Thank you for letting me make my witness here tonight.

Godly Bishops

By

The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

In what follows I am going to take it as established that the historic episcopacy is a continuation of the apostolic ministry which has evolved in the church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and that therefore an episcopacy which has integrity and authenticity will be self-consciously seeking an ever greater conformity with the ministry of the first Apostles. One way of speaking about godliness in the episcopacy would be to enumerate all the virtues that would go into a truly consecrated character. So we would speak of prayerfulness, learning, humility, the spirit of service, zeal for souls and so on. But how might a bishop find a way into these virtues? How can the motivation to grow in real godliness be sustained? I think by dwelling on the originating encounter with the crucified and risen Lord which propels the Apostles into their ministry. Essential to the ministry of the first Apostles is that they are witnesses to the resurrection and it is in the resurrection encounters that we should expect to find the distinctive shape and power of the apostolic ministry

Three locations dominate my thinking, meditation and prayer about the apostolic office. First there is John 20:19-23. The apostles are really cowering behind closed doors and the crucified and risen one appears to them. He shows them his hands and his side. They are glad when they see the Lord and he then says to them, “Peace be with you, As the Father has sent me even so I send you.” Then the Lord breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” To be an Apostle is to be one who is sent. Jesus is the Apostle of the Father and in his turn the crucified and risen one sends out his own apostles whose mission is to create by their witness a community of witness to the crucified and risen Lord and to the presence of his Spirit. At the heart of this witness is the extension of the reconciliation which has been offered to them. That the Apostles are given the authority to proclaim the reality of reconciliation and to distinguish false from true reconciliation is not some arbitrary power but a personal authority and knowledge that comes from their own actual personal redemption and what they have learned from welcoming and embracing the one who comes to breathe into them God’s peace.

The apostolic ministry originates in a personal encounter with the saviour. There is no way for these original witnesses to claim their vocation without looking upon the one whom they have betrayed and abandoned. They cannot be reconciled to him who holds out his wounded and glorified hands without embracing their own faithlessness and sinfulness. This dynamic is portrayed even more starkly in the encounter between Jesus and Peter on the beach in the twenty first chapter of St. John’s Gospel. Peter rushes to the beach where the Lord meets him over a charcoal fire and asks those excruciating questions, “Peter, do you love me?” There by that charcoal fire Peter must think of another interrogation and of his betrayal of the Lord. Peter can only answer the call to go and gather and feed the sheep by embracing the fire of his own sin. The connection between a personal confession of sin and the reception of the call to gather in and feed the flock of Christ that is being driven home to Peter on the beach in Galilee is there as well behind those closed doors in Jerusalem. The reception of the crucified and risen one’s commission to go and tell the nations begins necessarily with a personal sense of sinfulness and failure which is provoked by the sudden breaking in of the undeserved forgiveness of God. I am not speaking so much of a particular type of conversion experience but of the reality of knowing oneself as a betrayer and crucifier of the Lord and knowing oneself as the recipient of an undeserved and costly forgiveness. There is a place where shame and joy grow together, where a growing consciousness of the enormity of human sin and rebellion and a consciousness of the astonishing goodness of the seeking, searching, sacrificial love of God grow together. In this place which is at once a place of deep humiliation and deep peace, the words of the Lord “even so I send you,” can be rightly heard and when heard are an irresistible invitation to return love for love. Here the human race is being remade by a new genesis, a new inspiration of God’s Spirit. From this place the forgiveness of sins can be declared and the lost sheep of the Father gathered in. Here is the wellspring of godliness in the ministry of bishop and shepherd. The way into this place is the way of humility, of lowliness and of deepening repentance.

The third scriptural location I propose is suggested to me by Lesslie Newbigin. It is Paul’s encounter with the crucified and risen Lord on the road to Damascus, recorded in Acts 9. Paul is a persecutor of the church of God and is thrown from his horse by his encounter with the Lord. Lying in the dust he hears the Lord say to him, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Here we have the same revelation of sinfulness and of utterly undeserved love and forgiveness which strips Paul of any righteousness of his own. The disciples in Jerusalem, Peter on the beach and Paul on the road all share in the same humiliation which is at once an exaltation, in the same death which is at once life. In Paul’s circumstance an aspect of this originating apostolic encounter is made especially clear. In order to embrace his call to be an apostle, Paul must not only confess himself as God’s enemy but in order to grasp the wounded and glorified hand stretched out to him, Paul must also grasp the hands of those he has persecuted. Paul must recognize the nascent church as the body of Christ. Paul cannot be reconciled to God without being reconciled to God’s people. Paul recognizes that God is building a new people which shall be marked off not by the works of the law but by faith in the crucified and risen Messiah. Paul recognizes that God’s promise to recreate humanity, to reconcile the nations in a renewed Israel is coming true in and through Jesus. In Paul’s call we learn that to be a witness to the resurrection is to be at one and the same time a witness to the reality of the new Israel which is the body of the Christ.

Just these few encounters we have considered point us to elements that are at the heart of the ministry of episcopacy and which if they are held fast set a person on the same road toward holiness and godliness trod by the first Apostles. We learn that the apostolic ministry begins with a deep and personal apprehension of the forgiveness of sins by the crucified and risen Lord. That included in this forgiveness and reconciliation with God is the fact of the church and the body of Christ and that the new human life that comes in this encounter by the gift of the Spirit propels one into the life of mission, evangelization and witness.

The witness and authority of the original Apostles is intensely personal. They stand before the world as men personally convicted and personally redeemed by their encounters with the crucified and risen Lord. It is possible for us to distinguish between the evangelical concern for personal faith and the catholic concern for the body of Christ and for the apostolic ministry as a vital organ in the body of Christ, but these elements are encountered in the Bible always simultaneously as inextricably intertwined. The first Apostles are living proof and a sacramental sign of the forgiveness of sins, the reconciliation with God and the reality of the one body dependent on its one head, by their very presence. The message authenticates the person and the person authenticates the message.( It is of course possible for those who succeed in this office for this relationship between person and message to be impaired and this is perhaps the source of ungodliness in episcopal ministry.)

We come to our encounter with the crucified and risen one through the testimony of these original witnesses as that testimony is transmitted to us through the Word of God and through the succession of apostolic teaching and witness. The challenge for the contemporary bishop who wishes to stand in the shoes of the original Apostles is to dwell in and upon the Word of God in such a way that this originating apostolic encounter becomes real and personal and having once found this originating moment of encounter to return to it again and again and let it be the engine of the bishop’s teaching, preaching and witness. This call to return again and again to epicenter of the apostolic earthquake is a call to prayer and contemplation. It is a call to a life of study of the Bible and of the faithful teachers who by God’s grace make a faithful succession to the Apostles possible. It is call to mission, to evangelization, to invite others into this encounter (which is bound to come in different ways for different people) with the crucified and risen Lord.

This call is also a call to guarding the unity of the church. The new life with God which the saviour comes to bring us at so great a price is a new life with each other no less than with God. It is the restoration of God’s plan that he should be our Father and we should be his children and loving brothers and sisters of each other. At the center of the apostolic experience of forgiveness is the reality of the one people of God and the body of Christ. The Apostles witness to the reality of the forgiveness of sins not just as an idea, as a teaching of the master, but as something which he has accomplished by his costly work and which has now through the power of the resurrection and the gift of the Spirit appeared. The unity of the college of the apostles in witness and in love is part of the Gospel which they proclaim. The Bible already tells the sad story that this testimony can be marred by a lack of unity and by attempts to find the center of the church in anything other than the forgiveness of sins brought by the death and resurrection of the Lord. If the secret of godliness in the episcopacy is dwelling upon the personal invitation to confession and the personal offer of redemption given by the outstretched, wounded and glorified hand of the risen one, then the bishop seeking godliness will want to lead the whole church back to this one cornerstone that it might be built up in unity and by the Spirit of love which is breathed by Christ into his church at just this point. There must be an impatience with anything which would seek to define the church on any other basis and there must be a resolute resistance to any attempt to draw the church away from utter dependence on the actual death and resurrection of her Lord. A godly bishop is one who stands in the center of the church as an authentic and personal sign of the reality of forgiveness and new life with God and among people which comes through the utter dependence of the whole church upon its one head and upon the actual events of the death and resurrection of the Lord.

Doctrine

In many of our churches there are more people in the basement attending 12 Step meetings during the week than there are attending the worship of the church on Sunday. If you attend these meetings you discern a feeling, a sense of things that is absent from many of our churches. People come to the 12 Step meetings because they are in a life or death struggle with what they call “a crippling disease.” Sometimes this disease is given a personality. It is referred to as a “canny disease.” “You can’t outsmart it.” Hope lies in attending the meetings and sharing in the faith, hope and encouragement that is there. Hope lies in attending to a teaching, a doctrine, the 12 Steps which are a matter of life and death and the only practical means of salvation from certain, sure and complete destruction. (The seriousness with which this teaching is taken is shown in the prohibition against the discussion of literature which is not “conference approved.”) But if destruction apart from the “program” is sure, inevitable and complete, with the “program” there is a confident promise of recovery, healing and new life. Meetings regularly include testimonies by people who have been saved by following the Steps and returned to sobriety and sanity. The contrast between the old life and the new life is dramatic and affecting. Often people express their gratitude for the disease which propelled them on a search which has led to a far better life than they would have otherwise had.

This sense of a life and death struggle with a real and canny evil, of being in the grip of a dark power, of being unable to extricate oneself and of needing( what else can it be called) salvation, this sense that is so palpably present in these groups of having indeed found the one thing needful, I call this feeling, this consciousness of both the need for salvation and the reality of an answer to that need, as a living reality, a sense of soteriological urgency.

Soteriology has to do with the soter, the saviour. In theology soteriology is the doctrine of salvation. Anyplace where people human beings ask life and death questions and where there is an urgent search for an answer to these questions, any place where an answer is made to such questions with the sense that upon your choice, decision or action there hang the most weighty consequences, such a place, such a moment is marked by soteriological urgency. One can think of many places, and the many ways in which those questions are famed and which answers are offered. This sense of the drama of salvation, of an answer to the problem of evil and suffering can take many forms, personal, corporate, economic, social, political and religious. One can see how it is impossible to find an answer to the cry of the human heart for an answer to these questions which concern us a matters of life and death which do not embrace in some ways all the dimensions of our existence. When the physician talks to the patient about the “options” for treatment, when someone gives a testimony about liberation from the disease of addiction thanks to the intervention of a “higher power,” when young people fill the streets to protest policies they believe will lead to global ecological disaster, it is clear that we are in the presence of soteriological urgency, that an answer to the problem of salvation is being sought and that a witness to the real possibility of salvation is being made with the utmost seriousness and with a demand for decision, commitment and action as a matter of life or death.

Clearly the language of the Bible is a language of soteriological urgency. when Elijah defeats the prophets of Baal by calling down fire from heaven, the people are astounded, but immediately comes the demand, “choose this day whom ye shall serve, whether God or Baal.” The message of the prophets is that the one hope of Israel is that she should repent and return to the Lord. The Lord is her strength and her salvation, apart from God there is only ruin. “Better one day as a door keeper in the House of the Lord, than to dwell forever in the tents of wickedness.” Then finally, the last of the prophets comes and he says, “I baptize with water, after me comes one who baptizes with Holy Spirit and with fire.” And that one when He comes speaks of selling everything for the pearl of great price, tells his disciples that they will only find their lives if they will lose them for His sake and for the Gospel. He bids them go now, this instant, for the harvest is heavy and the laborers are few. He warns them to keep watch for they do not know when the master of the house will return; “stay awake, therefore, and watch.”

The liturgies and formularies of the church, especially the Book of Common Prayer, because they are so replete with the language of scripture are full of these words of Jesus which are urgent words, words of life and death, of that which may be found or lost, words of salvation and destruction. “You made us in your image but when we fell into evil and death you did not abandon us but sent your only and eternal Son. . .” Christ had died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again.” “Do you renounce the evil powers which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” “Will you turn to Jesus Christ and accept Him as your saviour?” Will you follow and obey Him as your Lord?” “The blood of Christ which was shed for you preserve your body and soul unto everlasting life. . .” “Ye that truly and earnestly repent you of your sins and intend to lead the new life walking from hence forth in God’s holy ways, draw near with faith and make hour humble confession to almighty God devoutly kneeling.”

All this–it leaps off every page of the Bible and it is the urgent voice of Jesus himself speaking to us out of every liturgy. Yet somehow, in much of our church life, much of the time, though the urgent words, words of life and death, of sin and salvation are there, the tune is not, a true feeling for the words, a true consciousness of soteriological urgency, a recognition of the eschatological crisis which the presence of the Lord must create; this feeling, this consciousness, this music of both desperation and joy is absent.

How is it that the church has in so many instances lost this vital sense of the significance of its own life and teaching? Such a long story could be made of this, of telling how in the West the gift of God’s reason has been turned into a weapon against the supernatural, of how the world has been split into a secular world of objective facts and a subjective world of beliefs, opinions and values, of how this sphere of the sacred has become more and more private, more personal, more idiosyncratic, unreal and bizarre, how the churches have acquiesced in this tearing asunder of God’s cosmos and have colluded in secularizing themselves and traded the mission of bringing to the world the objective saving presence of the living Lord for the mission of promoting “humane values” and being “centers of spirituality and inclusive community”, of how the inhumanity, injustice and immorality that are the natural consequence of the god forsaken world which secularism creates are used to further condemn and accuse the Christian message and God himself, of how, as C.S. Lewis says, God is now in the dock.

When it is said by confessing Christians, including the ordained servants of the church that Jesus Christ is a way of salvation for me but not necessarily anyone else, it is a witness to the advance of a process by which the salvation of God as an objective fact which happened in Palestine, “under Pontius Pilate,” and upon which the whole history of the human race hinges, has been turned into a private opinion and the inspiration for a merely personal spiritual journey. When such things are said by the ordained and consecrated teachers of the church, it is a witness that there is a deep crisis of confidence in the church about the truth of its teaching, about its doctrine as a saving doctrine.

At this point more is offered and with greater conviction in the basement of the church during the week than is offered in the sanctuary on Sunday morning. In such a case the words of salvation will continue to be used but they will indeed, become a ritual in the worse sense of the word, a nostalgic reminder of what people used to believe and of a hope that once answered questions no longer being asked. Lassitude and ennui become the constant facts of life in such a church. To fill this emptiness which comes from a lack of faith in our own teaching, our own doctrine, our own proclamation, the church will flee to other rhetoric about salvation and will constantly try to fan up a sense of urgency about the things of this world, as thought they were the one thing needful and the salvation of humankind, and the life of the world to come. It is very tempting in such circumstances to resort to psychological tricks and emotional manipulation to keep at a fever pitch an artificially manufactured sense of religion.

There is a great need for a renewal of the role of doctrine within the life of the church. There is a need to reclaim the doctrine, the teaching of the church as a mater of life and death, as the means of making plain the urgent Word of salvation, the urgent reality of salvation that is in Jesus Christ which meets the urgent search of the human heart for “a power greater than ourselves,” that can save us from sure and certain destruction by a dark, canny and destructive evil. There is a great need for the Christian priest whether bishop or presbyter, whether charged with the responsibility of teaching in a diocese or a parish to regain a sense of the priesthood as an instrument of salvation and of the role of teaching sound doctrine as a role that has to do with matters of life and death, of salvation and destruction in this life and in the life of the world to come.

The heart of the Christian Faith is not teaching, not theology but the crucified and risen Lord and the new life with the Father and with each other, this life which is a foretaste of the life of the world to come. But that presence, this opportunity to turn away from this world which passing away and from the rulers of this world and toward the life of the world to come as that life comes to meet us in the Risen Lord, all this is brought to light, illuminated, made accessible, made into an understandable and necessary word of salvation, brought to light as a reality to which we would gladly surrender, brought to light as the living Word of life and light to those of us who are dying by sound doctrine and by consecrated teaching.

A lot is made today of the fact that Anglicanism in general and the Episcopal Church in particular is not a ‘confessional” church that doctrine is not what holds us together. All of this comes at the end of a long period when there has been a tendency in the seminaries, entranced by secularism, materialism and the historical-critical method to treat the doctrinal inheritance of the church as a collection of cultural artifacts and curiosities, as the telling title of one of the sections of our prayer book puts it, “historical documents.” We are held together, it is said, by our worship and common prayer. Unity of belief is not required of us, it is said with some pride. We find our unity in worship and “deeds, not creeds.” Almost immediately this is said monumental and revolutionary changes are proposed in liturgy, worship and sacraments which challenge the most fundamental historical consensus about basic Christian doctrines.

It is quite true that the English Reformers did not set up a confessional church in the same way that the Lutherans and the Calvinists did. It is also true that both the majority of the clergy and laity of the Church of England came to be revolted by the violent and uncharitable controversy leading up to the Elizabethan settlement and gladly accepted the Book of Common Prayer and the modest, by Reformation standards, explication of the Thirty Nine Articles as sufficient formularies of unity. It is true that because of this history there developed an ethos of granting the greatest possible latitude to conscience, (assuming of course, that the conscience in question was formed and informed by the scripture, the liturgies and the great teaching tradition of the church,) and of accepting actions, a willingness to sign the articles, a willingness to use and pray the offices of the Prayer Book as sufficient and purposively allow for some finessing of definition in order to comprehend the greatest unity possible. It may be that of all Christian churches, Anglicans have practiced the art of a diplomatic language of theology. At times this has made possible a respect for conscience and a maintenance of community other churches have missed. At times it makes us liable to cynical obfuscation.

It is not right to say that we are not a doctrinal church. I doubt there can really be such a thing. There is no way of salvation of which I am aware that does not have a teaching–a doctrine. In our church basements week in and week out a saving doctrine is proclaimed with great confidence and conviction as a sure guide to a ‘spiritual experience” which can save one from destruction by the disease of addiction. Many of the paths of salvation that are offered today are notorious for the complexity and tediousness of their doctrine. So the comedian can make a good living telling jokes about what it means to be politically correct. There is no salvation without doctrine. Indeed some paths of salvation appear to consist only of doctrine and teaching. There is no authentic form of Christianity that is without doctrine, though the purpose of the doctrine is to point away from itself and toward Christ.

It is just plain false and dishonest to say that we are not a doctrinal church. All versions of the Christian faith are doctrinal. They have doctrine, authoritative teaching of the Lord, of Christ Himself, and they have doctrine, authoritative teaching about Christ and about the salvation which He brings. All the extant Books of Common Prayer ring with such doctrine on every page, the teaching of the Bible itself, in its own words, the teachings of the Lord Himself in His own words, “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” and very explicit, straight forward teachings about Him and the meaning of the salvation to be found in Him, “ We believe in one God and in His only begotten Son,” “Very God from very God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father,” “who for us and for our salvation was crucified under Pontus Pilate.” “We believe in the resurrection of the dead, the forgiveness of sins and the life of the world to come.”

Baptism, Eucharist, Ordination, Prayers for the Sick, Holy matrimony, Burial, all these contain a great deal of explicit doctrinal teaching of the most traditional sort, often self consciously reaching back and bringing forward the insights of the Patristic period. There is even more doctrine that is implicit, as in the place given to the Eucharist in the American prayer book of 1979. Anglicanism in general and the Episcopal Church in particular is highly doctrinal. To say that it is not is to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the words that echo in our common prayer and to deny their plain meaning and the documented intention of those who were authorized to craft them on our behalf.

It is a very dishonest thing to claim that we are not a doctrinal church and those who make it do so not because they want to propose a doctrineless Christianity, such a thing is not possible, but because they wish to be released from some of the particular doctrines of the church, so that they may embrace some other doctrines, often doctrines that are alien and hostile to the teaching of the Apostles, for instance that there is not resurrection of the body, or that Christ is a way rather than the way, the truth and the life. To profess the traditional doctrine is not to trade a “worship centered” Christianity for a doctrine centered or confessional church life. To cease to profess the doctrinal tradition is simply to trade a church life loyal to the teaching of the Apostles for a church life based on some other teaching which must necessarily be the doctrine of a salvation other than the salvation found in Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is the Apostle and the high priest of God. He brings the living reality of salvation. He is completely consecrated to true teaching about the identity of God, “Truly, Truly, I say to you. . .” He teaches us about the goodness of God, about God’s care for each person, explicitly, “Not a sparrow falls but your Father knows it, are you not worth more than these.” He teaches the same doctrine in parable, “ A man had 100 sheep and left the 99 to go in search of the one.” And He teaches a doctrine about God by His actions and especially by His treatment of sinners and His fellowship with them. He has a terrible and awesome doctrine about the seriousness of sin, about the lost vocation of the people of Israel, about how sin is to forgiven and Israel renewed and restored to her place in God’s plan of salvation as “the light of the nations.” The Messiah must suffer and die, that is the Lord’s teaching and doctrine and the Apostles reject it. When Peter tempts the Lord to abandon His doctrine, the saving truth which He has come not only to teach but to be and to accomplish, Jesus calls him Satan. On His way to the cross the Lord has harsh words of condemnation for the false and distorted teaching of the Pharisees and religious leaders who by false and insincere teaching lead the people astray. After His Resurrection on the road to Emmaus, He walks with them teaching them, opening to them the scriptures, helping them to see the meaning of the salvation wrought in His death and resurrection. He promises the Holy Spirit who shall lead them into all truth. He commissions them to go into all the worlds to make disciples, in other words to teach a doctrine and what they are to teach is not their own but their witness to His teaching which He gave them by word and by His death and rising again. The priesthood of Jesus Christ includes an absolute consecration to a saving doctrine about who God is, who God’s Messiah is and what God is doing in Him for the sake of a lost world. This consecration is in the blood of the cross.

When the Risen Lord breathes upon His disciples after the Resurrection He gives them His Apostalate. “As the Father sends me, even so I send you.” They are witnesses to the living and risen Lord, to who He is and what God has done in and through Him for the salvation of the world. Their consecration to Him as Apostles and priests includes a consecration to be stewards of a definitive teaching, a definitive doctrine about God, about Jesus, about the need of humanity for costly salvation that is to be had by an encounter with the Risen Lord as He makes Himself known in the Life of His body, the church. Thus the Apostle Paul says, “If an angel or if I myself return and preach to you another Gospel, do not believe it.” In the Bible, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, in the ministry of the Apostles, the matter of true doctrine is a matter of life and death, of salvation and to be in the Apostolic succession, to be a priest, is to be a person of doctrine, a person who can give a confident teaching that clearly points the way to a real and effective salvation, a person not who teaches with detachment and irony about historical curiosities but as one who answers the urgent questions of the human heart with an equally urgent, true and trustworthy word, with trustworthy words about the Lord and trustworthy words of the Lord.

The Reformation was a moment when the seriousness of true doctrine was rediscovered, when the power of false doctrine and false teaching to lead people astray and to hide and obscure the salvation of Christ, rather than to bring it to light, was disclosed. The Reformers perceived that the odious doctrine of indulgences and sinecures obscured the goodness of God and grace of salvation and caused people to fall either into a false complacency and impious reliance on works, or to fall into despair because they knew they could not atone for their own sins nor ever balance the books of their lives no matter how many good deeds they did or indulgences they bought.

The ordinal of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer is a beautiful and profound rite and is an example of the positive impact of the liturgical movement in the life of the church. It represents a repristination of the liturgy, reaching back to liturgical forms that come from the witness of the Patristic Age. The ordination rite in the 1979 Book brings out very strongly the reality of the Body of Christ and the interdependence and mutual relationships in the one Body between the different orders of ministry. The actual formula for ordination was rightly recognized to be a prayer together with the laying on of hands. For the formula “take thou authority” the prayer for ordination was substituted, for the long exhortation on the ordained ministry was substituted a succinct teaching on the Apostolic succession, the Body of Christ, the three orders of ordained ministers and of the role of the ordained in service to the church. Anything that could possibly lead to an inappropriate clericalism was edited out. There has been great gain in all of this but in the process the note of seriousness and weightiness of preaching and teaching Apostolic doctrine, which is a very distinctive element of the all the Books of Common Prayer from 1549 through the American book of 1928, has become muted. Let us recall some of these words from the old book which remain little changed from Cranmer’s original. In my view, we are more threatened by a forgetfulness of the office of the sound teaching of Apostolic doctrine than we are by an exaggerated clericalism.

You can not read the service in the 1662 book without being struck by the way in which it drives home the significance of the work of the ordained ministry in the salvation souls and the significance of teaching and preaching in that work. Over and over the ordinand is urged to look to his (sic) doctrine. The opening collect prays that God who by the Holy Spirit hast appointed “divers orders of ministers” would replenish the ordinands with “the truth of Thy doctrine” and with “innocency of life.” But perhaps the most remarkable part of the 1662 service is the exhortation which proceeds the examination. It persisted in the American church with little change through the 1928 book. In the exhortation there is a sense of the solemnity of the office being conferred, a very intense sense of soteriological urgency, “Now again we exhort, in the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye have in remembrance, into how high an dignity, and to how weighty an office and charge ye are called: that is to say, to be messengers, watchmen and stewards of the Lord; to teach and to premonish, to feed and provide for the Lord’s family; to seek for Christ’s sheep that are dispersed abroad, and for his children who are in the midst of this naughty world, that they may be saved by Christ forever. Have always therefore printed in your remembrance, how great a treasure is committed to your charge. For they are the sheep of Christ, which He bought with His death and for which He shed His Blood. . .” And so it goes in the most solemn way beseeching earnest labor, warning of the horrible punishment that will ensue from any negligence of office and urging that the priest persevere in bringing all the people of the parish, “unto that agreement in the faith and knowledge of God, and to that ripeness and perfectness of age in Christ, that there be no place left among you, either for error in religion or for viciousness of life.” Here there is a vision for a personal, pastoral, sacrificial parish priesthood which has a care and concern for the teaching of sound doctrine and the religious understanding of the people at the very heart of it. The connection between “error in religion” and “viscousness of life” is taken for granted. It is assumed that good and sound teaching helps people to grow into the full stature of Christ and that erroneous conceptions of God, of the saviour, of the path of salvation can not help but result in personal immorality and parish discord.

The exhortation goes on to make the obvious point that such a ministry is impossible without the grace of God and bids the ordinand pray for the Holy Spirit, “and seeing that ye cannot by any other means compass the doing of so weighty a work, pertaining to the salvation of man, but with doctrine and exhortation taken out of the Holy Scriptures, and with a life agreeable to the same, consider how studious ye ought to be in reading and learning the scriptures and in framing the manners both of yourselves, and them that specially pertain unto you, according to the rule of the same scriptures; and for this self same cause, how ye ought to forsake and set aside, as much as ye may, all worldly cares and studies.” The exhortation continues with a call that “ as much as lieth in you, ye will apply yourselves wholly to this one thing, and draw all your cares and studies this way;” And further, “that by daily reading and weighing of the scriptures, ye may wax riper and stronger in your ministry.”

Teaching, scripture, doctrine, a personal and pastoral interest in the people with a view to their eternal souls, a life long commitment to develop and grow in understanding and as a teacher of truth and by God’s grace to lead the people into maturity of faith and out of any “error in religion or viscousness of life;” these are the components of the vision of the priesthood the old ordinal gives. The priest who is a pastor with a real care of souls must be a profound student of the scriptures and a teacher of sound doctrine.

Then comes the examination in which the significance of teaching out scripture is reiterated. Promises are exacted to minister the “doctrine and sacraments and discipline that you my teach the people committed to your charge with all diligence to keep and observe the same.”

Then this, “Will you be ready, with all faithful diligence to banish and drive away from the church all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God’s Word; and to use both public and private monitions and exhortation, as well to the sick as to the whole, within your cures, as need shall require, and occasion be given.” The commentaries on the Book of Common Prayer note that the inclusion of this promise in the form for ordination to the priesthood adds to that order a responsibility that was found in the Medieval ordinals only in the service for the consecration of bishops. Evidently the framers of the Prayer Book wanted to magnify both the authority and the responsibility of the parish priest for the stewardship of Apostolic doctrine and for the unity of the people in faith.

This is our heritage and the historical and theological roots of the Prayer Book vision of Holy Orders. Each age emphasizes themes that seem particularly needful in the life of the church at that time. The 1979 Book emphasizes in a very beautiful way the themes of the Body of Christ and the role of the ordained ministry within the interdependent life of the one Body. This is in the foreground along with the significance of the pastoral and liturgical function but the note of sound teaching is still there and I think we are well within our rights and well advised when in the 1979 Book the bishop gives the ordinand the Bible as a sign of authority to preach the Word of God and to administer the his Holy Sacraments and says, “Do not forget the trust committed to you as a priest of the Church of God,” to hear those words of Cramner from the 1662 exhortation laying out for us the weighty and solemn nature of that trust and our need to be teachers of sound, wholesome and Biblical doctrine.

But what is this doctrine and where is it to be found. If you say the Bible, how can you get around the wide variety of legitimate interpretation and settle on any kind of authoritative teaching? We have no confession, no majesterium, so how can a vision of sound teaching of authoritative doctrine be made plausible? We have also in front of us the very dispiriting example of an official court of the Episcopal church defining Apostolic doctrine down to the vanishing point.

Yet, the ordinals of all the Books of Common Prayer, including those presently in use exact a promise from the ordinand which imply that there is such a thing as sound teaching and saving doctrine and that to be a teacher, professor and defender of that doctrine is at the heart of the office to which we are ordained. The ordinals do not belabor the content of the doctrine but take it for granted that it is discernable to a person who has met the canonical requirements and that in the time leading up to ordination the bishop who is the premier steward of doctrine will have been satisfied with the ordinands capacity to teach the orthodox faith. That commissions on ministry are often more interested in more topical issues does not change the weight and responsibility that is upon us to set forth the doctrine of salvation.

At the very least we are committed to teach and explicate the doctrine that is explicitly and implicitly taught in the liturgies of Baptism and Holy Eucharist, as for example, in the recitation of the Nicene Creed in the Eucharist or the Apostles’ Creed in Baptism, as well as what is implied and what is enacted in the liturgical performance of these two fundamental sacraments.

Especially in he Holy Eucharist, the sacrament toward which, as St. Thomas says, the priesthood is ordered there is in all of the Eucharistic prayers a recitation of the mighty deeds of God culminating in the sending of the eternal Son to be our salvation. There is without doubt, take any view of eucharistic sacrifice that you please, a presentation of His death on Calvary as an atoning, sacrificial death and there is an explicit proclamation of His resurrection and a prayer for the gift of His Spirit, “that we might receive all the benefits of His passion”. . .”That He might dwell in us and we in Him.” There is even a specific and explicit liturgical reference to the Apocalypse and the expectation that the Lord will come at the end of time to bring in the Kingdom in power and glory.

Implicitly, explicitly and in the enacted presentation of the liturgical action there is summarized and represented the whole doctrine, the whole Apostolic teaching about God, humanity, about creation, the Fall and sin, about the providence of God in choosing Israel, about the revelation of the Word of God in the law and the prophets, about in the fullness of time the Incarnation of the Son of God from the flesh of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, of the teaching and healing of Jesus, of His atoning and saving death, of His Resurrection, Ascension, gift of the Spirit, and His coming in glory, of the judgment of “the quick and the dead,” of “the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.” It can not be that we are commissioned to say these great words which ring with the preaching of the Apostles and echoing voices of the whole history of Christian thought and feeling at the altar without also be obligated to a deep contemplation of this doctrine and being consecrated as teachers of this doctrine in and to the church.

There is a moment in the traditional Anglo-Catholic ceremonial of the Eucharist taken over from the Latin rite, when after the offertory and before proceeding to the canon of the mass, the priest washes his hands. A so called “secret prayer” is said which is a quote from Psalm 26 “I wash my hands in the water of innocence that I may go about the altar of my God reciting His mighty deeds of salvation.” The recitation, the representation of the whole doctrine of salvation from creation to the parousia is at the heart of the priestly life.

This means that as the liturgy does not leave out any of the well known chapters of the story of the creation, the fall and redemption, neither may we. A priest may not present the goodness of creation in such a way as to leave out the teaching of the reality of the evil one, the fall and the struggle with sin. The Word of love made known to us in the Incarnation may not be presented without the cross, the cross may not be presented without the resurrection, nor the resurrection without the Ascension and gift of the Spirit. The mystery of Christ may not be presented apart from the mystery of the church, the meaning of the holy order of the church and the sacraments. The call to mission and ministry in this life may not be presented apart from the judgment upon this world that is passing away and the hope of the world to come. We are consecrated to bring forth the whole story of the mighty deeds of God from Genesis to Revelation and the whole meaning of this story by setting forth the doctrines of creation, fall, redemption and what has been called the last things, when God shall bring to completion His work of love and glory. This lays upon the priest the greatest obligation to comprehend the wholeness of the story and the meaning of the story reflected in the great doctrines of the church, to see the interrelatedness of the story and the interdependence of the chapters, to perceive the distortion that creeps into the life of a church, whether a local parish or one of the historic denominations when some part of the story is emphasized at the expense of some other part, to perceive also the distortion that creeps into the life of the priest and of individual parishioners when a vision of the wholeness of the faith or the catholicity of doctrine is lost.

In each particular context, in each locality, in each age there are elements of the story, there are particular doctrinal themes that resonate with the people. There are particular elements of the story and particular doctrinal themes that resonate in the heart of the individual priest. Often a priest has a particular gift for bringing out some feature of the great story, some aspect of its doctrinal significance, especially well and with great power. This is to be celebrated but it also points the priest to a challenge to find the depth of the priestly office in the struggle to bring forward the wholeness of the trustworthy Words of God and the wholeness of the trustworthy words about God which are cherished in the Great Tradition of the church and so to light the path to a more complete and profound experience of the saving grace of God.

In the great Christological debates that lead up to the creeds of Nicea and Chalcedon there were moments when the divinity of Christ was stressed to such a degree that His humanity began to disappear and so also began to disappear His sympathy with the human race and His capacity to save what He had assumed. At other times the humanity was stressed to such a degree that Jesus was in danger of becoming a purely this worldly figure, another wise man and teacher who gives yet one more impossible standard to follow and the mighty act of God in the incarnation and atonement, that new life, new virtue, begins to be lost. There are times when the reality of the fall and sin and the Holy God’s judgment upon sin are stressed to such a degree that the vision of the goodness of the creation and the mercy of God are brought into question. In our own day we suffer from an attempt to bypass the fall, the reality of sin and the need for redemption. The inherent goodness of the creation and human nature is stressed to such a degree that it sometimes appears that the church exists to proclaim to humanity that men and women are already blessed and redeemed and need only to have it pointed out ot them. On account of this a new, stern and unmerciful works righteousness is being introduced an people are once again told that they need only try harder to do better in their struggle with evil which is conceived of as mistaken ideas. How much more realistic, even biblical, the language about “our lives have become unmanageable,” and the necessity to “believe in a higher power who can restore us to sanity.”

If the priests of the church do not teach the whole and wholesome doctrine of Christ and truly open the way, illuminate the path to a saving encounter with Christ, people will go in search of a doctrine that recognizes the urgency of the human situation and which speaks an urgent word of life and death in reply.

So He asks them, “Will you now also turn away and leave me.” And the answer comes, “Lord to whom shall we go? For you have the words of eternal life.” He has given us these words so that we might give them to others that they and we should have life in His name. At the heart of the priestly vocation is the mission to hand on faithfully and loyally the doctrine of the Apostles.

©Leander Harding+2003

The Glory Of The Lord
Glory, kabod in Hebrew, doxa in Greek, here is one of the most important words in all of scripture. The lexicons tell us that the word has to do with weight, heft and also with shimmering light. The word has the sense of power and majesty and even danger and threat. When the lookout put his hand over his forehead and searched the horizon and there saw the shimmering reflection of the desert sun on the spear points and chariot wheels of an approaching army, he would say that he had seen the glory of an army. If it were an enemy army it meant threat and danger, if it were an ally, it meant rescue and salvation. When the people of Israel were encamped before the Red Sea, the lookouts sounded the alarm, “Behold, here comes Pharaoh and all his glory.” Moses stretched out his hand and said, “Behold, the glory of the Lord.”

There is the closest association between the glory of the Lord and the salvation of the Lord in the scriptures. Moses, the Prince of Egypt, is raised in the midst of the glory of Pharaoh. The secret of his birth as a Hebrew slave emerges in his life and he becomes a murderer and an exile. He falls from the glorious life of an Egyptian noble to the humble life of a shepherd. To one who has lost his glory there appears the glory of the Lord in the vision of the burning bush. So Moses turns aside to see this site, this bush that burns and is not consumed and there he encounters the glory of the Lord. He is overcome with wonder and awe at the presence of the God of glory. He hides his face because he was afraid to look upon the glory of the Lord. Here out of His glory God speaks to Moses and calls him to be an agent of God’s answer to the cries of God’s people and to take a role in God’s plan of salvation. It is inconceivable that Moses could persist in his vocation, his calling to bring a message of redemption to Israel, to bring a message of judgment to Egypt, without this vision of the glory of the Lord which he sees and yet dares not look upon. Moses has to persist in the face of the unbelief of both the house of Jacob and the house of Pharaoh. Moses has to persist in bringing the promise of redemption which has hidden within it a word of judgment and a call to repentance. Moses has to persist in bringing a promise of judgment which has hidden within it a word of forgiveness and grace. God has allowed Moses to draw near and to perceive God’s glory so that God can use Moses to forward the plan of salvation.

In this calling of Moses there appears a fundamental aspect of the priestly life. It is a life that is a witness to the glory of the Lord. The priest is someone who has seen something which is beautiful, fearsome and precisely awe-full. The priest is someone who has seen something which one longs to see, which one turns aside to see, which one lays aside the ordinary business of life so that one may see and yet this something, this vision of the glory of God is something from which, at the first real glimpse of it, we draw back and hide our eyes, because we are afraid to look. But the priest has seen enough to know what it is to be afraid to look upon the glory of God, to be caught between the irresistible attraction of that terrible beauty and the fear that one will be incinerated, consumed. The priest has seen something that cannot be seen and this sight changes everything. There is really no possibility of a return to ordinary business, ordinary life. To see this thing which cannot be seen, to become in this way aware of the glory of God, means to be confronted with the demand of God in an irresistible way. The thicket of ordinary life in which we hide from God is burned away in that moment of vision and there is left only this bush which burns but is not consumed. In the light of that fire there is no longer a place to hide from God’s call to be an instrument of God’s plan of salvation. I do not think there is in the scriptures a record of the vision of the glory of God which is not also part of a command and demand by God to become a herald, an instrument, in God’s plan of salvation. So God says to Moses, “Go tell old Pharaoh, Let my people go.” Moses goes with this indefatigable conviction about the glory of the Lord. He is able to persist in his testimony to God’s will to redeem His people. He is able to persist in speaking a word of hope to those who disbelieve because of despair and he is able to persist in speaking a word of warning to those who disbelieve because of an exaggerated self-confidence. Moses demands the impossible from both the slave and the King and he persists in these improbable demands at great cost, at the risk of being thought mad or a fool or a charlatan. Moses persists in giving a testimony to God’s glorious plan of salvation to people who have not seen the glory of the Lord and who in the present moment because of despair or hardness of heart cannot see but Moses has seen, and seen enough so that he cannot pretend that he has not seen. He must continue and persist in his life of worshipping witness and sacrificial service to the vision of glory that the Lord has granted him, to the vocation of message bearer to which this vision commits him. All the while he desires with all his soul to see more and fears the destruction that he knows must come with a fuller vision.

This gift to Moses of a vision of the glory of God is the means by which God calls Moses to his vocation to be a messenger of salvation and it is the means by which God strengthens Moses for the contemptuous and disbelieving reception Moses is bound to encounter from both Hebrew and Egyptian. The purpose of this vision granted to an individual is not to set up some spiritual elite with a monopoly on the vision of the Lord, (Indeed we know that Moses is no clericalist in this sense but that he hopes “that all the Lord’s people might be prophets.”) the purpose is to lead Hebrew and Egyptian alike to perceive the greatness of God and the glory of the Lord. It is the way God works that He calls the many by calling an individual to be a minister, a servant, a priest. The vision of glory granted to Moses consecrates him, sets him apart for a life of witness, worship and sacrifice, makes him a herald of salvation and a priest. The gift of the vision of God’s glory which Moses treasures in his heart makes it possible for him to persist in his vocation of preparing people to see and respond to the glory of the Lord. The Hebrew people are able to answer the call to leave their slavery and go quickly because they have been made ready by the witness of Moses. They are lead out not by Moses but by the glory itself which appears to them in form of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

There is a relationship between Moses’ own desire to come closer to the glory of the Lord and the growing relationship between God and the people. They come to that mountain and there is fire and smoke on the mountain. The glory of the Lord is there and the people are afraid. We may not doubt that Moses is afraid. Moses has seen enough that he wants to see more. He has seen enough that he knows that his calling is to draw closer and not only for himself to satisfy his own spiritual curiosity but for the sake of these people. It is inherent in the priestly life that the pursuit of the vision of the glory of God is something that has always more than personal consequences. In the response to the call of God, in the response to the vision of God’s glory, in the quest for a fuller vision of that glory there is always at work this desire of God to reach others, to touch other lives and draw them closer. The spirituality of the priest is inherently public. It is not for nothing in the Anglican tradition that the priest is called the parson, the public person. This drama of Moses and the mountain, shall he go higher, shall he go up to meet the face of the Lord, shall he come back with some word of the Lord, is reported with great interest. If here Moses loses courage, if he refuses to make the climb then God’s desire to bring a word to God’s people is thwarted and God must find another way. People instinctively resent the priest who has drawn back and refuses to go farther and who has thus betrayed the priestly vocation. People inherently resent a church that draws back and refuses to go farther and thus has betrayed the call to be a priestly people. Sometimes though there is an inner resentment of this loss of courage and lack of nerve there can be an outward acceptance and even colluding encouragement in superficiality because people rightly fear the glory of the Lord and both hope and fear that the priest will seek the face of God. It is a great blessing when a priest of the church serves among people who encourage the priest to go higher, to draw closer.

The vision of that bush burning within his heart propels Moses up the mountain in spite of his intuition that unlike the bush he might burn and be consumed. Upon the mountain Moses is entrusted with the Torah, with the Word of God’s law. This is part of the gift of glory that God wants to give to the people. The glory of God that dawned the first day of creation and that called to Moses out of the burning bush is in those ten words, in that revelation of God’s law. The Ten Commandments are resplendent with the holiness, righteousness and the majesty of God. In the Torah we see the goodness of God and the glory of God are one. God is awesome, powerful and just and righteous. God reveals His glory by calling the people to goodness and righteousness and shows God’s own goodness by showing the people how to live toward God and how to live toward one another. God had sent them a messenger to call them from the slavery of Egypt to freedom and now through that same messenger God calls them from the slavery of sin and evil to the free life of worship, sacrifice and service. God sends them a priest who calls them to a priestly life. God redeems a man from exile and saves him so that through him God might make plain the path of salvation to God’s people. In all of this God is revealing God’s glory. God is revealing, power, might, majesty, light. The structure of this revelation is first to the one and through the one to the many. It is a pattern that will be repeated again and again and will find a consummation in the ministry of Jesus and which Jesus will reconstitute in His own way as he calls this one and that one so that many may come from East and West, North and South, to eat at table in the Kingdom. The call to live in the light of the glory of God comes through the person who has been drawn into the priestly life through witnessing the glory of God. This initial witness came to Moses through the burning bush. It was confirmed by the miracles of Egypt and the mystery of the Passover, in the revelation of the Ten Words upon the mountain. It continued to be witnessed to and ministered to the people as a living presence in the ministry of Tabernacle and Temple. The weight of this glory was felt as an aching absence when the priests and people turned away from God and toward the idols. This is the glory that descended upon Jesus like a dove at His Baptism, that is revealed in His life of teaching and healing, redeeming and absolving as He restores the lost sheep of Israel. His life was a life attended by signs and wonders in power and glory. This glory is above all seen in that persistence of love in the face of sin and evil which is the cross of Jesus Christ and this glory is the same glory of the risen and ascended Lord and the same glory which is gifted to the church through the Spirit. This glory reveals itself as more than raw power, as not only majesty but goodness in the these words of love that call the people to salvation, that call them to a way of life that is life lived in light of the glory of God, to a way of life that reflects the glory of God.

The path to ordination in the church often begins with a glimpse of the burning bush. For me there were two places where as a child I encountered the vision of the glory of God. One was in nature, in the created order. There was a place where I used to go in the woods when I was a small child of five or so that was full of light and that also spoke to me of an awesome, even fearsome power, that was fearsome not because it was bad but good, that was threatening not because it was bad but good. I both feared and loved to go to that place. Later when I came to the sacraments of the church I saw that this same glory was in the church and at the heart of its worship. As a child the altar where the Eucharist was celebrated held that same light, that same glory that I had witnessed in that clearing in the woods. Later I began to hear that glory, that majesty, that immense and fearsome goodness in the words of the Bible. The priest is one who is a witness to the glory of the Lord in creation, in the mighty deeds of God as He delivers the captives and in the words of God’s Word. Moses is the preeminent priest of the Old Testament. He is the one called to bear the Word of God to God’s disbelieving people and to a hostile world. He is completely consecrated to this task and this calling, this ordination, this anointing by God marks him, changes him. His hair turns white, his face glows with the reflected glory of the encounter with God and the people find the sight of the reflected glory so frightening that he has to veil his face when he talks with them. (The traditional theology of priesthood as an indelible character is not elitist speculation. It is an attempt to put into the language of a theological system the most commonplace of observations that a life set apart for service of God’s Word leaves a mark.)

What did the people see when they saw Moses with the veil upon his face? They saw someone who by his very person, by his being was a witness to the glory of the Lord and to the awesome authority of the Word of God. Through Moses God draws the people to Himself and evokes in them awe, reverence and an attentive listening to God’s Word. When they see the veil and the radiance upon Moses face they know they look upon the prophet of the Lord who bears the Word of God and upon the priest of God, the consecrated mediator between God and His people. The personality of Moses recedes. It does not disappear. He is still a man and in the moments when the radiance is not upon him and veil is not upon his face they have no trouble recognizing him as such. One moment they are in awe of him and the next moment they treat him with contempt and disrespect. But when he first comes down from the mountain having been allowed only to glimpse the glory of the Lord going by and subsequently when he emerges from the Tabernacle when the shekinah glory is upon the tent in a cloud, his veiled face shining from the encounter, his personality does not disappear but recedes into the background and it is his ministry that is in the foreground. When the radiance is upon him they do not see Moses, the man, so much as Moses, the bearer of God’s Word, the witness of God’s glory, God’s representative to them, their intercessor with God. When Moses appears before the people of God, his face veiled and radiant with the reflected glory of God, he is completely identifiable as the priest of the most high God, as the one through whom God makes his terrible yet tender appeal to His people. In the fullness of time God himself will take the veil and the glory, veiled in humanity and by the mystery of the cross, will draw His people unimaginably close to His awesome glory and bring them to the place where they can go boldly behind the veil and come themselves to stand even closer to God then Moses did upon the mountain. “and behold the veil of the Temple was torn in two.”

The Christian priest, the priest of the new Israel is the witness of and servant of the glory, the glory of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “No one has ever seen the Father (not even Moses from whom God held back a complete revelation of His glory lest he die) but we have seen His glory, glory as of the only begotten Son of the Father, in the face of Jesus Christ.” When the priest appears at the Eucharist in radiant vesture there is a veil upon the face of the priest and the personality of the priest recedes. It does not disappear. It cannot. It should not but it recedes and we remember the words of John the Baptist, “I must decrease, the He may increase.” And the words of St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ liveth in me,” and “I carry about in myself the marks of the death of Christ that the life of Christ might be made known as well.” As the priest appears in the holy vestments, veiled for the services of God and the service God’s people, the people see the one who has been set apart by God to be His witness to His glory, to be the messenger of His Word and to be the intercessor and the go-between. The priest vested at the Eucharist is veiled that the people might see the glory of the Lord in the life and death and resurrection of the Messiah and that they might be taken up in that glory as they, “lift up their hearts” and join the song of the angels and archangels who behold the glory of heaven. So the Christian priest, so to speak, dons the veil of Moses and the people see not the glory reflected in the face of Moses but the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ as He takes the bread and says, “this is my body broken for you,” and takes the cup and says, “this is my blood of the New Covenant.” “Take eat for my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed.” And once again the veil of the Temple is torn from top to bottom and the tombs are opened and the dead are seen alive.

I have passed quickly from the veil upon the face of Moses, to the veiled divinity of the Incarnate Son by whose death and resurrection God is able to unveil His glory amongst us and bring us by, with and in Christ to the glory of eternal life. I have not lingered on the wilderness Tabernacle or the Temple of Jerusalem with its holy holies behind the veil and have gone quickly to the removal of that veil and the long awaited revealing of the glory of God in Jesus Christ. In the Tabernacle and the Temple the veil upon the radiant face of Moses gives rise to two garments, the veil that separates the holy of holies and hides the overwhelming glory of the Lord upon the mercy seat and the vestments of Aaron and his sons. These beautiful garments represent to the people the radiance upon the face of Moses. They are witnesses to the glory of the Lord and they allow the people to se God at work in and through His ministers making His people holy. The vested priests and the service of the Tabernacle make possible a continuing liturgical presence of the revelation of the Word of God in power and glory. The sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist perform the same function for the new Israel.

There is a recent tendency in the churches which have cherished a priesthood for the clergy to abandon their distinctive dress in their day to day work and even to abandon all but the most simple and plain Eucharistic vestments. The reason given is a commendable desire to eschew “elitism” and “clericalism” and to avoid ostentation and show solidarity with the poor. In fact what happens is that the veil of Moses which is the distinctive mark of the biblical priesthood of Moses and Aaron and more perfectly of Jesus Christ, is laid aside. Instead of the role of priest having the preeminence and the personality of the priest its rightful but secondary place in the background, the personality and agenda of the person takes the front ground and the center stage. We should not be surprised if it becomes difficult for the people to know when we are appearing not in our own right with our own word but with the radiance of the Lord upon as we speak not our word but His. We should not be surprised if a reluctance to don the veil, which expresses itself in so many ways including such apparently indifferent things as the manner of dress, should not cause us who are priests to become confused ourselves between our understandable human agendas and our role as witnesses to a glory not our own, mediators of a life not our own, intercessors for a mercy not our own, as priests through whom the Father makes present His glory in the service of Word and sacrament.

This service of Word and sacrament is a witness to the glory of God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and of the gift of the ascended Lord’s glorified life to His people in the power of the Spirit. The priest is a witness to the transfiguring power of the glorified Lord both to individual souls and to the gathered community. This witness is on the model of the witness of Aaron and his sons. It is not a witness to a past event but to a present, living reality whose glory is perceived and understood as the continuing presence of the God of glory who has acted decisively for the salvation of His people. The Tabernacle is a witness to the present active glory of the God who has definitively revealed Himself on Sinai. Moses dies. The original witnesses of Moses die but in the worship and ministry of the Old Testament, God has provided that His glory will never lack a witness consecrated to make present as a living reality the mighty deeds of God on behalf of His people to to recount to the people the words God spake to Moses as a living Word which calls out faith, worship, thanksgiving and sacrificial obedience. Likewise the witness of the Apostles is not a witness to an event which is past but to the decisive intervention of God into the life of the world in the life, death and resurrection of the Lord and to the continuing presence of the Risen Lord in the midst of the church as he redeems, saves and transfigures His people. The priest is a witness to the glory of God who speaks and acts to save His people. The liturgy, the energetic and energizing work, of the priest (in the case of both the Old Testament and the New Testament itself given as a gift directly from the hands of God) is to make it possible for the people to reconstitute themselves as a saved company, as the people of God in such a way that they come once again to Sinai and a reverent hearing of God’s Word, come once again to the night in which He was betrayed and hear the words of the Word made flesh as He offers them His Life of worship and obedience, of sacrifice and service which is to be poured out for them on the cross, which is to be raised victorious and which will pour forth by the power of the Spirit at Pentecost.

The priest offers this liturgy of witness to the glory of God, a witness that is an active representation of a living reality, of a hidden but ever present glory most completely in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. For here the whole history of the saving deeds of God come to completion and fulfillment as the sacramental priests of the church witness and represent the living presence of the Great High Priest as He forgives and absolves His people and blesses them with the gift of His eternal life. Away from the Eucharist, the great act of thankful witness, the priest continues the work of absolution and blessing by bringing forward and making active outside the liturgy, the glory of God in forgiveness and blessing and the glory of His people repentant, forgiven and blessed with everlasting fellowship with God.

To persist in the priestly life the ordained priest needs to be convicted and reconvicted with the reality of the glory of God in God’s word. For the people to persist as a priestly people they need to be convicted and reconvicted with the reality of the glory of God in God’s word. To be the messenger and witness of this glory is the vocation of God’s priest and God sends Moses down the mountain consecrated in a new way to the service of God’s word. The word of God is no longer only a word in the ear of Moses. The word is a text, a collection of words that must be cherished, communicated, learned, studied and transmitted from one generation to the next. It is the ministry of Moses now to bring these words to the people in such a way that they perceive the glory of God, that they feel the weight of them and see the light in them. Lord your word is a lamp unto my path and a light unto my way. But this ministry of the Word is precisely a priestly ministry. It is a sacrificial ministry which is effective only when it draws forth sacrifice from the people. It is a prophetic ministry of proclamation that fails in its mission if it does not elicit adoration and worship and this ministry of being the herald of God’s Word cannot be done apart from liturgy. The proclamation of God’s Word requires a consecration of the messenger and a consecration of the people. So Moses takes the blood of a bull and throws it both upon the people and upon the tablets and the reading of the Word becomes the most aweful, solemn and sacred event and in the most visceral way the life and death struggle by which they have been redeemed by God, the preciousness of the new life, the debt and honor owed to God and the peril of denying their God are evoked. All of this Moses literally throws in their face by the crudest and yet profound ritual.

Children of the Reformation and a somewhat anti-Semitic tradition of Biblical scholarship we are prone to overdraw the distinction between the ministry of the priest and the prophet and to create an imaginary religion which unlike the actual religion of the Bible imagines a Word which is delivered without a liturgy and without a priesthood. The attack of the prophets on the priesthood is not an attack on a superfluous office but upon one which does not fulfill its function, on a priesthood which has failed to lead people to perceive the glory of the Lord and the awesomeness of His word, on a priesthood which has domesticated God and robbed God of His glory. The priesthood is criticized by the prophets because it has abandoned its function of creating a holy, a consecrated, a priestly people, a nation of witnesses to the glory of the Lord.

In the Bible God’s Word, God’s glory, the messenger who is the witness and herald of this glory, who is consecrated by this glory and thus the priest of the glory of the Lord and the people who respond in praise and adoration, in sacrifice and service and are thus the priestly people of the Lord, witnesses to the glory of God by worship and obedience, these things are indissoluble parts of the one act of God by which He saves and redeems His people. The Word never appears apart from a liturgy of praise and sacrifice even if it is only the pouring forth of the messenger’s own blood in witness. This perfect priesthood is indeed the form of the perfect prophecy of Jesus Christ and in the sacred liturgy of the cross the Word of God is perfectly proclaimed and the people see the glory of the Lord and are made holy by it.
The path to ordination will be different for different people. It is doubtful anyone would persist in that path without some vision of the glory of God. It might be in creation, or in the worship of the church or in some more private, inner vision, or in the love given by a parent or some other witness to the glory of God. To persist in the priestly life the ordained minister cannot do without a profound experience of the presence of the glory of God in God’s Word, in the Bible and the desire to witness to that glory will allow one to persist as a preacher and teacher. Just to the extent that glory is recognized in the words of Bible, the priest will bring to the liturgy of the church and especially to that liturgy that is shot through with the glory of the proclamation of His own death and resurrection on “the night in which He was betrayed” a witness of reverence and awe which give glory to God and which serve God’s one act of redemption through which God glorifies His people.

To “rightly and duly administer the sacraments must mean among other things that the priest by virtue of a posture of awe, wonder reverence and care communicates to the people that its the same glory of the Lord that is there at Red Sea and upon the mountain, that shines forth in all the law and the prophets, that descends upon the Tabernacle in the desert and the Temple in Jerusalem, that Isaiah saw in the year king Uziah died and heard the witness song of the angels, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” that Ezekiel saw leave the Temple and which he saw on the banks of the river of exile like wheels of fire, “way up in the middle of the air,” that is the same glory that the prophets foresaw in the coming of the messiah, the one anointed to restore the glory of the kingdom and the Temple, all the same glory that appears at last in completion and fulfillment in the face of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, whose one glory is in the cross and the resurrection and by the Spirit given by the ascended Lord in His people who become His body and His glory in the world and a token of the glory to come, that it is the one glory that is in the words of the Bible, in the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving which is the Eucharist and in the people repentant and restored to fellowship with God and each other. This is the ministry and the witness of the priest.

©Leander Harding+ 2003

To Persevere In Love
Meditations On the Priesthood

Our talk about ministry and priesthood is oddly imageless, abstract and generic. We speak of ministry, the ministering community, of facilitating gifts, of empowerment, of spirituality for ministry, of the baptismal covenant, of circles rather than pyramids, of mutuality and mutual ministry, of the Roland Allen model, of mission and the missionary church, of reconciliation, inclusion, justice and peace. Less often we talk about the Body of Christ and very seldom or so it seems to me do we hear of Jesus hanging on the cross, appearing after the Resurrection, breathing upon the disciples, Ascending into heaven and there interceding for us as the Great High Priest. What could it mean for the church and all its ministers, lay and ordained, if this image of the Jesus, The Great High Priest were more clearly before us and more carefully developed in our imaginations. So I invite you in what follows to an exercise in imagination.

REVELATION
Toward the end of her life my mother was hospitalized. I was very fortunate that she was in a hospital that was between the rectory and the church and I was able to visit her easily. During the last few days she was unable to speak but our visits were still full of communication. After one such visit as I left with a very full heart I noticed the newly opened hospital chapel. I went in with expectation, hope and longing and I was stunned, dazed by what I found. The room was beautiful and tasteful. There was fine woodwork, a soothing carpet, hushed lighting and an abstract pattern that resembled clouds on the walls. It was an interfaith chapel and in the effort to be inclusive all specific content had been excluded. There were no explicit religious symbols of any kind, not Jewish, not Christian, not Buddhist. Even in the moment I understood the necessity and appropriateness of the choice but it did not keep me from feeling bereft. As I sat there with my heart full of thanksgiving and regret and a deep desire both to forgive and be forgiven, it is hard to imagine anything less satisfying than the abstract clouds floating in cones of artfully directed light. At that moment I would have given anything to see a crucifix with its assurance that God knows and redeems suffering, or a Christus Rex, with its proclamation of the Risen Christ reigning from the cross, a simple empty wooden cross, proclaiming both realities at once would have been a great consolation.

I tried to think of what could be in a place like this. While I know that our public institutions now need to be sensitive to religions outside the Jewish-Christian traditions, somehow I felt that night if I could come up with something from Judaism that could be shared there might be some hope of the emptiness being filled. Of course, Judaism frowns on images. Then I thought of the Ten Commandments which you sometimes see written on the walls of churches. The Torah, The Way, The Ten Words. And then I thought of something which I had seen but not until that moment really understood. The image came to me of Torah processions. In synagogues it is the practice for the rabbi to take the scrolls of the Torah which are vested and ornamented in procession. The people reach out and touch the scrolls with great reverence and devotion, as if reaching out for life itself. Often this is a very solemn and decorous procession. But I had once seen a film of a Torah procession in a Hassidic community. A wild eyed rabbi with long, curly, sideburns and a black suit in disarray, with fringe peeking out of it, danced about fervently until the whole congregation was literally jumping for joy. And I understood, God speaks. In the emptiness, in the loneliness, to the fullness which cannot contain itself, God speaks. God does not leave us bereft but speaks and gives us a word, a word of love, a word of direction, a word of promise. God is not silent. God speaks. What joy, what inexpressible joy. What can one do save jump up and sing and fall down and pray? And what if this Word becomes flesh, as real and and knowable as another person? What response could possibly be adequate to such a reality? First we should want to receive to the fullest extent possible this word, we would wish to reach out and touch it as if touching life itself and in so doing express our relief, gratitude and joy. We would want to offer praise and adoration which included conforming our lives to this word. Then would we not want to tell those who have not heard, have not seen, “what we have handled and touched with our own hands,” as the Apostle Peter says. Would we not want to do this even at great cost, even if the price were high? Here is a first clue to the life of the priest, whether that priesthood of which every member of the church shares or the special calling of the ordained, that priesthood has to do with revelation, with the God who speaks and with responding to the word which is spoken with relief, gratitude, joy, obedience and with costly, sacrificial witness. The priest is one who is a living testimony that God speaks and addresses humankind with a welcome word of love, direction and promise.

There has always been a choice between those religions which believe in revelation, in a God who speaks, and those which do not. Judaism, Christianity and Islam on the one side and something like Zen, which is completely agnostic about God or the gods, on the other. There has always been a choice between versions of revealed religion. There has always been the choice to believe or reject the Word spoken to us in Jesus Christ. Is this word a dependable word or no? It is of the nature of revelation that it is to be accepted or rejected. There is the inescapable choice, God speaks or not, this is God’s word or not. What is unique in our own time is the attack on revelation in the heart of the church. This fundamental choice between a trust in God’s word and a distrust is part of the theological discussion at the center of the church today. I do not mean to call into question the undoubted usefulness of exegetical tools and biblical scholarship which are of help in sharpening and refining our interpretation. But there is a feeling, which has arisen perhaps because of an overconfidence in and overuse of historical-critical methods, that the Bible is primarily a cultural artifact with very limited relevance and that Jesus Christ is perhaps one of the words which God may have spoken alongside many other words to which we also must listen. One of the giants of twentieth century theology Emil Brunner was asked about this problem of the dependability of revelation and he answered that though there is wisdom and beauty in the world’s great religions, there you will never hear the voice of the Good Shepherd calling his sheep by name. The priest is one who has heard a voice, the voice of the Good Shepherd calling the sheep by name and who with rapture and with rapt attention says “listen, listen, do you hear that.” It is the singularity, the uniqueness of revelation that produces a priest, this obsessive witness to the word from beyond with which God addresses our longing and hope. The priest is a person who bets his or her life on the conviction that God speaks and that the voice of God can be heard and God help us because it is such an audacious claim, that it is possible to be a servant of this voice and help others to hear this word of love, of direction of promise as though it was directed directly to them because in fact it is directed directly to each and everyone, everyone, everywhere. This is the sort of person you send for when you are facing death, your own or of those you love. When you are facing death you want to know someone who is confident that there is a God and that God cares and that God can be known. You want someone utterly consecrated to that reality. You want a priest.

Much is made today of the reality of the mystery of God. God is inherently mysterious it is said. All we say about God is metaphorical and analogical. All we say about God is therefore thought to be limited, tentative, provisional. Very often wise things are said about St. Gregory, Nanzianan and the apophatic Greek tradition. It is claimed that it is really very ancient Patristic Theology that God is primarily and fundamentally ineffable mystery. Therefore we must be very humble in what we say and not claim too much. We must listen attentively to other claims and perhaps by collecting enough metaphors from enough traditions we will have our little theological worlds expanded and arrive at a greater approximation of the truth which we realize is an ideal term which perpetually recedes as we approach. Apparently by combining one undependable tradition with another undependable tradition and assessing the combination on the basis of some undisclosed and unaccountably dependable principle we come to truth by adding up falsehoods.

Of course there are limits to what we say about God and these limits are well known in the history of theology. But when the Fathers of the church pointed to the mystery of God they wanted to point to the superabundance of meaning in God, not to empty the word God of all meaning. St. Gregory had no doubt that Jesus Christ was the one word of God addressed to humanity and that this word was a word of personal, sacrificial love. The great thing that Christianity brought to the ancient world was certainty, revelation, dependable knowledge about God. The ancient world was weary of comparative religion and and philosophical speculation. Confusion and uncertainty had cut the moral nerve of the society and left the individual aimless, prone to ennui and jaded by the diminishing effectiveness of distractions like the games. It was the appearance of those first priests with their certainty that both attracted and repelled the ancient world. It was the appearance of certainty in the midst of uncertainty, of conviction in the midst of confusion. In a world in which people were not sure who the gods might be, there appeared a group of people who were so certain that they had heard God, had met God, that they were willing to die for God and who dying proclaimed the possibility for their persecutors to hear and know God also, even to be forgiven for the crime of persecuting God’s messenger. It was this priestly sacrificial life on the part of the Apostles and the ordinary Christians who heeded them that created the early church. Of course we must have humility and restraint and say no more than has been given to us. What has been given to us is the life of Jesus Christ, a life lived with utter conviction in the reality of his Father and the Father’s will that we should repent and return and heed the word of love and forgiveness directed to us in His Son. Jesus Christ perseveres in love, perseveres in bringing us God’s Word., perseveres in being God’s Word, perseveres to the end, perseveres in the face of great hostility, perseveres to the Cross and thereby opens the way to eternal life, a new life that begins now and which the grave cannot hold. It is this perseverance in love, based on confidence in the Father and certainty about His love and purpose, which produces the sacrificial, priestly life of Jesus Christ and which has the power to bring us to redemption, to the place where we can hear and obey. The listening, hearing, obeying of the Son produces the priesthood of Christ and of His Body the Church. Within the church there are those whose ministry it is to continually reconstitute the church by virtue of their utter consecration to the reality of God’s Word. It is the sacramental priesthood of the church’s ordained ministers that makes possible a fresh hearing of the Word of God and animates the the life of believers with the conviction that leads to praise, adoration and sacrifice, to the priesthood of all believers. The figure of the ordained, sacramental priest disappears when confidence in the Jesus Christ as the one Word of God disappears, for Christ’s own priesthood is disappearing and with the loss of this confidence on the part of the ordained ministers the whole priestly life of the church in all its members begins to dissipate. In the place of relief, gratitude, joy, adoration, praise and self-offering(sacrifice is grateful self-offering) there begins to creep in a spirit of striving and pride. With striving and pride come their twins, exhaustion and despair. If there is no dependable revelation then we are condemned to an exhausting search. If there is no definitive gift of salvation in the sacrificial life of Christ then we must try and must fail to reach God ourselves and in some way fabricate our own salvation out of good works or spirituality. We should expect that when confidence in the one Word of persevering love that comes to us in Jesus Christ begins to be lost there should come into the life of the church and its ministers a restless, frenetic quality, a seeking without finding, a striving which leads to disappointment and despair.

The church lives from the grateful, joyous, free self-offering of the Son to the Father in the power of the Spirit. The inner life of the Trinity is a life of praise, adoration and joyous, self-offering, the inner life of the Trinity is a priestly life, a going out in preserving love, a return in loving praise and sacrifice. It is the mission of the Son to bring this priestly life, this sacrificial persevering love to light and so He comes in the power of the life He has with the Father, in the power of the Spirit, to be the light and life of the world, to be the one Word of divine persevering love. Yet, He cannot really bring us this love without persevering to the end with a listening, an obedience that extends even to the cross. Only when rebellion, resistance and hatred have been drowned in the blood, (the sacrificial love) of the cross–only when the tide of hate and rebellion flowing from the evil one has been overwhelmed by the tide of love flowing from the Father and pouring out through the wounded side of Christ–only then–through that total self-offering, does the new life of the Resurrection appear and it becomes possible for sacrificial, persevering love to do its recreating work. Had the Risen Christ no wounds in His hands, His feet, His side–He could not quicken us. It is the love that perseveres unto the death of the cross that is His peace which He breathes into the Apostles that first Easter. It is a peace which the world can not give. It comes from above and it is bought at great price.

This peace, this joy, this sacrifice, can not come to us abstractly, can not come as a theory, an idea. it must come as He came–in a particular time, in a particular place, in a particular person. It must come by one who has heard this word, “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” And I dare to add, for it is said in so many words, “Persevere in love as I have persevered. Die with me so that you may live and so that by the witness of your dying and rising others may be brought to life and that which I said to you in the beginning, by the side of the lake will surely come true, “Follow me and you shall catch people alive.”

It will instantly be said that this is the duty of all Christians and so it is. The life that Jesus Christ lived was the duty of every human being but the Father had to send the Son to persevere in love, to make this life a possibility for us. So the Son provides for an effective sign of His persevering love in the midst of His people–So a particular person in a particular time, in a particular place, is ordained, consecrated, set apart to make present the death of Christ which is our life–to by a priestly life of praise, adoration and grateful sacrifice, call others to the death by which they may live and find the life for which they were made as members of the Body of Christ, as a Royal Nation, as a Kingdom of Priests.

But how is it possible to have this confidence? Is this something that a modern–an enlightened person can really do? Do we not know too much to so completely trust one claim and only one among so many claims to be the definitive word of God? Does not anyone who claims such confidence risk being a hypocrite who suppresses honest doubt? These are legitimate questions and they must be addressed. But we must see what is at stake. At stake is the life of faith itself, especially in its priestly dimension as a life of commitment, consecration, and sacrifice–a complete trust. A commitment with a reserve held back for the truth which might yet come can not qualify as a priestly service of praise and self-offering.

There are two parts to this question. In part this a philosophical and theological question. It is a matter of foundational choices about first principles. To assume that there can in principle be no one trustworthy Word of God is a foundational choice, a faith in itself, an ultimate commitment which can be justified on the basis of no other more ultimate principle. It is a choice and commitment of the same nature and structure as the choice to believe in a God who speaks, who reveals himself in a gracious word of persevering sacrificial love. It is not inherently more rational, more plausible to disbelieve in a definitive revelation. The conviction that such faith is overreaching or lacking in intellectual integrity comes from an uncritical, excessive trust in the illusion of a disinterested, critical principle. So in part the charge of a faith that overreaches needs to be met by the unmasking of an overreaching, critical-rationalism. Martin Luther once called reason a whore by which he meant that it is all too easy to rationalize our denial of God. The introduction into the heart of the church of a distrust in revelation as a first principle more basic and dependable than a fundamental trust in the goodness of God and effective desire of God to be known is precisely the sort of thing of which Luther was speaking and which must be condemned as a false intellectualism and a kind of anti-theology.

Once it is established that the conviction that revelation is undependable is not inherently more intellectually respectable than the conviction that there is one dependable Word of God, there remains another part of the problem–the problem of the human heart which both yearns to give itself totally and completely and which yet, draws back at the moment of commitment. We can have hesitations that are not only intellectual, but which have to do with the fear of vulnerability which comes from such total commitment which in my own case I freely admit is over determined and irrational. Even if I can come to a moment of clarity, conviction and commitment, it is hard to sustain and soon I am assailed by doubts which no strength of argument can suppress. Once we acknowledge that the one Word of God addressed to us in Jesus Christ cannot be said in principle to be untrustworthy how do we bring ourselves in actual fact to trust and commitment? How do we silence the voices within and without, which tell us to go slow, be cautious, hedge our bets and to protect ourselves by refraining from the kind of total commitment that can lead to a terrible exposure, to an insupportable vulnerability?

The call to Christian Faith, to bet your life on Jesus Christ is not a call to silence all those interior or exterior voices. It is not a call to be completely sure and confident before commitment. It is a call to die–to bet everything–holding nothing back. We want all questions to be settled first and then we will commit ourselves. We will always have doubts, fears, voices within and without which will give us pause, which will hold us back. There will never be an end to this kind of hesitation. The order is not first the elimination of doubt and then commitment, faith, the life of obedience and sacrifice, the priestly life. The order is trust, commitment, sacrifice, the priestly life, and from this comes the growing conviction of the faithfulness of God which draws forth praise and adoration. In this growing life of faith, doubts and hesitations can have a dynamic role and lead to greater assurance and conviction. As the priestly life of sacrifice and praise is pursued in the face of doubts and fears and God is again and again found faithful to save, as the profound dependability of the Word of persevering love which has come to light in Jesus Christ becomes more evident, the adoration, praise and sacrifice, the consecration of the priest grows and so does the effectiveness of this sacramental presence of Christ in His church.

It is appropriate, it is necessary, it is indispensable to the life of faith and especially to that life as a priestly life of praise and sacrifice that solemn and in principle irrevocable commitments should be made in spite of doubts and fears and with the realistic expectation that doubts and fears will never completely disappear, that they even have a providential role in God’s plan of salvation. But it is not doubts and fears that are meant by God to determine the shape of human life but unswerving commitment to the One Word of God’s persevering love addressed to us in Jesus Christ. So the promise to trust Christ and follow Him as Lord and Saviour which is made in Baptism is regarded as an irrevocable commitment. It cannot be allowed that the mistrust of this commitment can lead to the life for which we were made. There are no fears or doubts that can release us from our moment of commitment. The nature of the commitment is that it is to be maintained in the face of doubts and fears. The promise is that in this struggle faith and character will grow.

Over and over again in the life of the church Christian people are asked to deepen their commitments to Christ and each other in the face of and in spite of fears and doubts. Those who have been baptized at an early age are asked to renew their covenant in Confirmation. A man and a woman are asked to bring alive in a unique way, Christ’s irrevocable commitment to us by making an irrevocable commitment to each other. We are asked Sunday by Sunday to renew, reaffirm our faith and these requests come with an understanding and acknowledgment of the doubts and fears that assail us. The teaching office of the church subverts itself when it speaks without seeming to have knowledge of or sympathy for these very real doubts and fears. Nevertheless, it is the reaffirmation of faith that gives the gift of a life of praise, thanksgiving and sacrifice. It is the renewal of faith in the face of doubt that arises in a suffering and sinful world that is meant by God to structure our lives, and give life and hope.
In the midst of the necessity, the demand, and the difficulty of renewing faith and making irrevocable commitment, the commitment of the sacrificial, sacramental priest has a special role. The invitation of Jesus Christ to follow Him in complete trust, complete dependence, total self-giving to the Father, comes to the life of the faithful, gathered together in a congregation, not as an abstract principle, not as a theory but through a unique person who embodies a unique irreplaceable and irrevocable commitment to Jesus Christ and to his Church. It is vital, indispensable and uniquely constitutive of the sacramental priesthood that the priest makes an irrevocable and life long commitment to the service of Christ’s Church in Word and Sacrament. Such a commitment is made not by silencing voices within and without that protest the extravagance of such a vow, but in spite of them and with the determination that faith and not doubt shall determine the shape of this life. “As for me and my house we shall serve the Lord.” The priest makes ordination vows knowing many doubts and fears and knowing that many more will come. Moments of deepening faith will bring a deepening crisis of doubt and trust. It is the reckless and wild abandonment of such a commitment that Christ uses to keep alive at the heart of the church His own recklessness in love and wild abandonment to the will of His Father. The grace of ordination works in and through the commitment of the priest, the abandonment of the priest to the priestly life, to elicit commitment and sacrifice in the people despite their doubts and fears.

One of the things that gives many people pause when they contemplate the vocation of Holy Orders is the obvious dependence of the parish priest on the life of the congregation. It is perceived and rightly so, that the priest is at the mercy of the congregation, that failure and rejection in this role can be devastating in way that threatens to overwhelm and from which recovery is hard to imagine. Sometimes this reality keeps people from the priesthood, sometimes people try to minimize the effect by choosing specialized ministries like teaching, chaplaincy or pastoral counseling. Such efforts are ineffective. This dependence and vulnerability are inherent in the priesthood because they are inherent in the priesthood of Jesus Christ. He makes Himself uniquely and irrevocably dependent on us. He makes Himself vulnerable to being rejected by his own. His passion–the suffering of the cross–is the suffering of one rejected by His own. It is not possible to embrace the life of the priest without embracing the cross, this death by which He gives life, and the cross will be there all the same in the classroom, the hospital and the counseling session. The priest will be there with this vulnerability that comes from complete abandonment to the one Word of God’s persevering love and with the necessity to persevere in the face of rejection and hostility. Vulnerability is part of the sacramental witness of the priesthood to the priestly life of Christ in our midst as He calls us all to risk all with Him for the sake of His Father and His Father’s children. The endurance of hostility and rejection are part of the life of every priest and part of the life of the priestly people of God. For most parish priests most of the time this is balanced by the real love of the people for the faithful priest. Many priests have experienced at some time a very complete rejection by the people to which they have committed themselves. Such a rejection is perhaps not inevitable but it is a likely experience at some point in the priestly life given both the frailty of priest and people. But even in such a moment there is not a failure of the sacramental sign which Christ gives to the church in the sacramental priesthood. Even in failure and rejection, even when removed from office because of relational incompetence or popular demand, the vulnerability of the priest to the loyalty of the people brings to light the way in which Christ puts himself at the disposal of His people and the way in which the redeeming presence is at work in our midst, suffering our indifference and rejection.

Less and less do I feel that effectiveness in the exercise of the sacramental priesthood has to do with skill and competence and more and more I feel that effectiveness has to do with surrender, abandonment, dependence and vulnerability. This should not be confused with an imprudent disregard for developing skills and competencies appropriate to one’s office. We are duty bound to be diligent and disciplined. We must try to infuse our relationships with our fellows with warmth and Christian affection. But these things only grant the occasion, the opportunity for the grace of ordination to work and that grace is dependent on the living response to a Word that is revealed. The grace of ordination depends on surrender to the costly, sacrificial, persevering Word of God’s love by abandonment to that Word in the care of God’s people. It is the willingness to die with Christ that we might rise with Him that is at the root of the priesthood of both the sacramental priest and the priestly people. It is trust in His Word that if we would find our lives we must lose them.

©Leander Harding 2003

The Passion Of Jesus Christ
And The Passion Of Parenthood

The sacrifice of Christ is pondered in endless books and hymns and works of art. It is a “big story” generating much wonder and wondering. There is at least one part of it that I think I understand. I believe that at the heart of the sacrifice of Jesus is the suffering of rejected love, which the saviour meets with an unswerving passion.

Many years ago I watched a documentary on television about the famous school for emotionally disturbed children run by the now discredited psychiatrist, Bruno Bettleheim. What is not in dispute is that some very sick children went to his school and got better with the help of the young and dedicated therapeutic teachers employed there. The documentary found some of these children now successful as adults and interviewed them and the teachers about their past. I was struck by one story. The man, now a successful broker on Wall Street, recalled how he had been sent to the school because he had as a seven year old tried to kill his mother and sister with a knife. The film cut to a middle-aged woman remembering being a young teacher who read to the children each night before they were to go to bed. One night as she was reading she felt the air stir by hear face and looked up in time to see a knife whiz by her at eye level and stick into the wall next to her. She looked across the room and saw a seven year old boy, the boy she knew had been admitted for trying to kill his mother and sister with a knife standing poised by an open window, ready to jump out. “What did you do?” The interviewer asked. “I didn’t know what to do, so I picked him up and held him. I held him while I finished reading to the group. I held him so tightly it made my arms hurt. I held him while I put the rest of the children to bed and I continued to hold him until we both fell asleep. I continued to hold him for most of the next several days except when it was absolutely impossible for either of us.”

The scene shifts to the stockbroker. “What where you going to do?” I was going to jump out of the window and kill myself.” “What was the effect of being held?” “I can’t remember what I thought but I know it was then that things began to change for me. There is a direct line from that night to my life now, even if I can’t explain it.”

There is a kind of holding that changes things. It is the holding power of love even when love is rejected, even when love is met with hostility. The cross of Jesus Christ is a mystery of unfathomable richness. It is at least this. It is the price of the persevering love of God, of God’s holding of the human race that changes everything. God holds us even though we are God’s enemies and even though we resist God’s love and push the saviour out of our lives and onto the cross. Even so God does not let go and in Christ God hangs onto us even though it costs the saviour the cross. Let us allow ourselves to be grasped by this Passion that we may hold out this love to the children given into our care. Amen.

Leander Harding+