May 16, 2008
Church History Q&A
Q&A:
From what I have been taught, the Catholic/Anglican/Orthodox seem to be the way the Christian church ran itself for a very long time. However the Evangelical mode of an Altar Call, or sinners prayer at the seat at the least. And then believers Baptism. When did this method get started?
I know of the Baptist History "Trail of Blood" but I have heard that it was both true, and not true. (From Baptists themselves).
What can you share with me about the subject?
The Church split East and West in 1054. The East-West Schism, or Great Schism, (1054) divided medieval Christendom into Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek) branches, which later became the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, respectively.
The Church of England (Anglican) split from Rome in 1534 by decree of King Henry VIII.
In Europe, beginning about 1517 or so, Martin Luther and John Calvin (and a few lesser names) protested the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church and called for reform--their movement became known as the Protestant Reformation. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, etc., (all Protestants) have their origin in the Protestant Reformation.
In the USA, revivalism or "awakenings" (the first Great Awakening occurred in the 1730's), gave rise to Altar Calls, etc. Believer's Baptism was a "Baptist" doctrine. Baptists (so called because of their conviction that only adult believers were to be baptized and the proper mode of baptism was immersion) were English Seperatists. When the Protestant reformation came to England, some thought the reform effort was unsuccessful and wanted to "seperate" from the Church of England.
The "Trail of Blood" was a pamphlet written by James Carroll and was part of the "Landmark" movement in Baptist history. Carrol claimed (seemingly) every heretic in Church history as a proto-Baptist--Waldensians, Cathari, Donatists, et. al. No modern historian would make such a claim. But many Baptists believed Carrol (who was from Lexington, Kentucky if memory serves).
Charles+
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May 08, 2008
Gene Robinson on the Today Show
Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire was on the Today show this morning:09:10 PM in Religion | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Sara Miles, an Episcopalian, reads her essay on her conversion from atheism on the NPR program "This I Believe."
The podcasting feed can be found on the sidebar or at: http://podcast.askthepriest.org and is listed in the iTunes, Odeo and podcast.net directories.
More information & podcasting software can be found at http://www.ipodder.org
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Feast Day of Julian of Norwich
Today is the feast day of Julian of Norwich on the Episcopal Calendar. This is especially important to me as I am an associate of the Order of Julian of Norwich and we had a big festival mass this morning at the monastery.
A page of special materials from the order for the feast day may be found here.
Julian's writings are lesser known than many other Christian Writers, but her influence is vast. Thomas Merton once wrote:
"Julian is, without doubt, one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older, and whereas in the old days I used to be crazy about St. John of the Cross, I would not exchange him now for Julian if you gave me the world and the Indies and all the Spanish mystics rolled up in one bundle. I think Julian of Norwich is, with Newman, the greatest English theologian."
David+
This is an excerpt from Fr. John-Julian's (OJN) upcoming book on the Episcopal Saints, Stars in a Dark World.
Saint Julian of Norwich
1342 - ca. 1420
May 8
We don’t know her true name; we don’t know her birthplace; we don’t know the exact date of her birth; and we don’t know the date of her death. All we know for certain about Saint Julian of Norwich is that she spent a significant portion of her life as an anchorite, a recluse, at Saint Julian’s Church in England’s Norwich, that she was granted by God a series of sixteen visions or “showings” (as she called them) of the Crucified Christ, and that she was the first woman to write a book in English – her Revelations of Divine Love – which recounts her visions and her own twenty-year process of coming to understand their meaning.
Since almost all we know of Julian comes to us from her own book, we can surmise from that evidence that she was born sometime in late 1342. There are those who believe that the grammatical pattern of her work suggests that she grew up in the north of England, but most agree that she was probably a Norwich native.
Since she became an anchorite – that is a recluse who was literally sealed in one closed room – adjacent to Saint Julian’s church in Norwich, it is likely that she came from a well-to-do or noble family (since virtually all female monastics at the time were of noble birth, and anchoresses had to prove that they had the means and income to support themselves before they could be enclosed). There is also some strong evidence that she may have been the daughter of Norwich’s eminent Sir Thomas Erpingham, a close friend and associate of King Henry V, and who (according to Shakespeare) commanded the British longbows at the famous British victory at Agincourt. [1]
There is also some ambiguous evidence that Julian may have been a widow at the time of her seclusion – surviving local records from the time mention a gentlewoman “Julian” whose husband was killed in a duel only two weeks after their wedding. She may also have been a “Beguine” – that is, a woman who lived a pious, religious, and celibate life but did not take formal religious vows and lived in her own family home.
Finally, her name – Julian – may have been her original baptismal name, but it is just as likely that she followed the contemporary custom of taking as her name-in-religion the name of the saint attached to whose church her anchorhold was built – that being Saint Julian of LeMans.
Although the anchoritic life of seclusion seems almost incomprehensible to us today, it was highly revered in Julian’s day, and parishes vied with each other to have “a saint” living in a cell attached to their church. We have record of some 1500 recluses in England, and over 50 in Julian’s Norwich alone. The life of an anchorite was considered the most holy, most ascetic, and most pious life possible in late medieval England, and historians often note that in those years in which the great organized religious orders were in decline and increasing corruption, often the truly devout soul needed to find a different and personal avenue of asceticism, the highest of which was the solitary anchoritic life.
Julian lived in Norwich, which in her day was England’s “second city” and central to the wool and cloth trade with Flanders. The Black Death hit Norwich in 1348 when Julian was about 6 years old, carrying away over half of the population (a higher proportion than elsewhere in England because of the close trade exchanges Norwich had with the Continent). And the plague struck again twice during her lifetime. In 1381, when Julian was about forty, Norwich was a primary center for the first popular rebellion in English history – the Peasant’s Revolt – which had been provoked by attempts to set a maximum limit on laborers’ wages and the imposition of a poll tax. The revolt was finally overthrown in London and in East Anglia when the local rebels were crushed by the militant (and military) Bishop of Norwich, Henry le Despenser, and their leader, John Litester, was executed.
In early May in her thirty-first year (confusion in surviving manuscripts makes it uncertain whether it was May 8 or May 13), Julian was struck with an apparently terminal illness. When she was expected to die, her parish priest was sent for and he placed a crucifix before her, telling her to cast her eyes upon her Savior. When Julian did so, the crucifix came alive for her and she began to receive the fifteen showings in which she experienced being present at the Crucifixion of Christ, and then listening to and speaking with Christ afterwards. She apparently wrote an account of her revelations shortly afterwards, and then twenty years later she expanded that short account to include the conclusions of her two-decade-long study and meditation on the meaning of her visions.
It is probable that Julian was not an enclosed anchoress at the time of her visions, but became so thereafter, spending between 20 and 50 years in her anchorhold and living to be over 70 years old. The peripatetic mystic, Margery Kempe, records a visit to Julian in about 1413 to ask her advice, and she adds “she was excellent in such counseling”.
Julian’s book was apparently not broadly circulated during her lifetime or for some years afterwards. We do know that it was published in its first printededition in 1677 by Serenus Cressy who wrote in his introduction: “I was desirous to have told thee somewhat of the happy Virgin, the Compiler of these Revelations: But after all the search I could make, I could not discover anything touching her, more than what she occasionally sprinkles in the Book itself.” We also know that Julian’s book was carried to the Continent by some of the 16th-century Roman Catholics who fled England. After that, very little is heard about Julian’s writing for almost 300 years until 1911 when Grace Warrack published the first modern edition. Then in 1979, Father Robert Llewelyn, a retired Anglican priest became chaplain of the Julian Shrine Chapel at St. Julian’s, and interest in Julian began to build. Since then there have been at lest six new translations of Julian’s Middle English manuscripts and a virtually uncountable number of commentaries, as well as the establishment of the Anglican Order of Julian of Norwich, a contemplative, mixed monastic community of monks and nuns in the U.S.
The uniqueness of Julian’s writings includes her incredible optimism in the face of the cultural chaos and confusion of her day, and her ability to transcend that confusion. Her phrase, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” is not a Pollyanna-esque blindness to reality, but the results of a deep faith that God is indeed in control of all, even in the midst of apparent evil. Julian repeatedly states that there is no wrath or anger in God, a proposition that is upsetting to Puritans and biblical literalists. And preceding modern psychology by centuries, she points out that the wrath we think we see in God is really in ourselves.
Julian may be most famous for her unapologetic treatment of Christ as Mother, no doubt the finest and most sophisticated treatment of the subject in all of Christian literature. What is absolutely unique in Julian is her protestation that it is not that Christ is like a mother, but that all mothers are like Christ: Christ is the proto-mother and all earthly motherhood is an imitation and reflection of Him.
Sin, which so absorbs so many ecclesiastical writers, is given short shrift by Julian when she declares with the Scholastics that sin has “no manner of essence nor any portion of being”, that it is “no deed”, but is rather an absence of goodness. She declares that all human beings have a “godly will” within them which “never consented to sin nor ever shall” and “is so good that it can never will evil, but always good.” She frequently uses “blindness” as the analogy for human weakness.
As great a spiritual master as Thomas Merton has written: “Julian is without doubt one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older…” Our last evidence of Julian’s life is in 1416, and her death is usually assumed at about 1420.
Bennet, Judith M.; Women in the Medieval English Countryside…; Oxford U.P; Oxford; 1987.
Cowan, Tom; The Way of the Saints; G.B. Putnam’s Sons; NY; 1998.
Cross, F.L. & Livingstone, E.A., eds.; The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church; Oxford U.P.; Oxford; 1988.
Dupré, Louis & Wiseman, James A., eds.; Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism; Paulist; Mahwah, NJ; 1988.
John-Julian, tr.; A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich; iUniverse; NY; 2000.
King, Ursula; Christian Mystics: The Spiritual Heart of the Christian Tradition; Simon & Schuster; NY; 1998.
Ollard, S.L. & Crosse, Gordon (eds.); A Dictionary of English Church History;Mowbray; Oxford; 1912.
Rolt-Wheeler, Ethel; Women of the Cell and Cloister; Methuen; London; 1913.
Ward, Maisie, ed.; The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman; Sheed & Ward; London; 1933.
[1] There is some evidence that Mother Julian mayhave been Julian Erpingham, the sister of the famed knight Sir Thomas Erpingham. If this is true, she would have been married twice and had three children before becoming an anchorite. Her revelations (and the “Short Version” of her book) would have happened at the time of the death of her first husband in a duel (1373), and the “Long Version” and her entering the cell would have happened shortly after the death of her second husband (c. ±1393). He death would have come in 1414, meaning that she would have spent about 21 years as an anchorite.
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April 24, 2008
Father Matthew Presents: The Archives
Episcopal priest, Matthew Moretz, Curate at Christ's Church (Episcopal) in Rye, NY, roots through his church's archives. He finds a surprising cache of photos from the days when services were nationally broadcast on NBC. This video is part of the "Father Matthew Presents" series, which continues on a semi-regular basis.
Further Information:
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April 23, 2008
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Interview with the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson on Fresh Air.
The podcasting feed can be found on the sidebar or at: http://podcast.askthepriest.org and is listed in the iTunes, Odeo and podcast.net directories.
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March 31, 2008
Mary, Mary!
A Reader Writes in,
"What exactly does the "falling asleep of the Blessed Virgin" mean? It is celebrated on the same day as the Assumption is. Do we celebrate Mary's Assumption in the Anglican Church? If we are not celebrating Mary's Assumption what do we celebrate. And if we do not believe in Mary's Assumption (which I think we do, but I'm not sure) then what do we believe about Mary's death?"
I think I will quote Fr. John-Julian, OJN, founder of the Order of Julian of Norwich. This article is from a soon-to-be published book Stars in a Dark World, which has excellent biographies of the saints in the Episcopal Calendar. It is much more in depth and in many ways more even-handed than Lesser Feasts and Fasts.
In the early 18th century, Pope Benedict XIV declared that the belief that the blessed Virgin Mary's body was assumed into heaven at her death was a doctrine to be honored as a "probable opinion" — that is, a technical definition which would be impious and blasphemous (although not heretical) for a Roman Catholic to disbelieve. There continued to be hesitation on the part of the hierarchy to a more formal declaration in the face of the silence of scripture and early witnesses to the Christian tradition. However, in 1950 Pope Pius XII responded to petitions including over eight million names and formally declared the doctrine of Mary's Assumption to be an actual dogma of faith which required belief by all Roman Catholics. He announced:
By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, by that of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define to be divinely revealed the dogma that the im¬maculate Mother of God, the Ever-virgin Mary, was on the completion of her earthly life assumed body and soul into the glory of Heaven.
He provided a new set of Mass propers for the feast and listed it among the Holy Days of Obligation for Roman Catholics.
Scholars generally agree that the idea of Mary's actual assumption into heaven was not a doctrine known in the earliest years of the Church. No Christian writer before the end of the 4th century had even mentioned it. In fact, the idea is first encountered in certain Gnostic apocryphal writings of the late 4th century.
In the Eastern Church, the death of the Blessed Virgin was celebrated as early as 397 in Antioch, and in Palestine during the next century, but there was disagreement on the date, some churches celebrating it on the 18th of January (as part of the Epiphany celebration) and others on the 15th of August; in the late 6th century the August date became universal by imperial decree. It also appears that early on, the Church in Gaul (which, being at the end of the Eastern trade routes contained many Christians from the East) celebrated the January 18th feast as well. In Spain, the tenth council of Toledo in 656 established the feast of the Blessed Virgin on December 18, eight days before Christmas.
However, since in the Church's early years commemorations of the saints were generally set on the days of their deaths – i.e., their "heavenly birthdays" – the same pattern was evidently followed regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The Eastern Orthodox Churches have always called the feast the Koimésis or Dormition (the "falling asleep") of Mary and from very early times, those Eastern Churches believed and taught the bodily assumption of the Blessed Virgin, but tended to avoid defining in precise terms as the Western Church eventually did.
In Europe, it appears that originally one general feast of Our Lady was celebrated annually on January 1. In the late 7th century, however, the Byzantine feasts of the Blessed Virgin were introduced into Roman use (including, in order of their antiquity, the feasts of the Purification, the Annunciation, the Nativity, and the Dormition). By the end of the 8th century, the feast of the Assumption was universally observed in the Western Church on August 15. In 847 Pope Leo IV added an eight-day octave to the celebration, and about twenty years later, Pope Nicholas I decreed that the feast was to be recognized as equal in stature and solemnity to Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost – thus providing a major holy day in each of the four seasons of the year.
The doctrine of Mary's Assumption is not merely some far-out invention of rambling theologians. It is simply the doctrine of the universal Resurrection of the Dead applied "early" to the Blessed Virgin – and, of course, it also assumes something like either Duns Scotus' doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in which Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin or Thomas Aquinas' teaching that her conception was normally human, but that God suppressed and ultimately extinguished original sin in her (apparently before she was born). It also presumes her lifelong sinlessness — which in the popular minds of the time tended to include the tradition of her perpetual virginity. In simple terms, the Assumption is believed to have occurred since Mary had no sin, and therefore was able to be taken to heaven bodily without having to await the General Judgment as the rest of us do.
Most of the legends about Mary's death place it in Jerusalem (where there is even a tomb that was ostensibly prepared for her), although there are other stories which place her death in Éphesus or in Antioch. Some of the legendary accounts indicate that she was assumed into heaven instead of dying, others that at the moment of death she was taken up to heaven, and still others that she was raised three days after her death. All of these are apocryphal, however, and none has any historical validity.
In the early 8th century, St. John of Damascus wrote:
In 1549, when the first Anglican Book of Common Prayer was published in England, the August 15 feast of the Blessed Virgin was omitted in the calendar of holy days as having no basis in scripture (although the feasts of the Purification and the Annunciation were retained because of their biblical base).St. Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, at the Council of Chalcedon (451), made known to the Emperor Marcian and Pulcheria, who wished to possess the body of the Mother of God, that Mary died in the presence of all the Apostles, but that her tomb, when opened, upon the request of St. Thomas, was found empty; wherefrom the Apostles concluded that the body was taken up to heaven. (Fount of Wisdom. I, 96)
In the early prayer books of the Episcopal Church, the August 15 feast was also omitted, but it was restored in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer as a general feast of Saint Mary. The Collect provided in the Prayer Book for that feast is modeled on that of the South African Prayer Book where the feast is called "The Falling Asleep of Mary". The Collect is phrased in such a way that it suggests the Assumption ("O God, you have taken to yourself the blessed Virgin Mary…Grant that we may share with her the glory of your eternal kingdom") and therefore is accommodating to those devout Anglicans who embrace the Assumption not as a dogma, but as a permitted "pious opinion".
Sources:
Carroll, Michael P.; The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins; Princeton U.P.; Princeton, NJ; 1986.
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March 23, 2008
Alleluia!
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March 19, 2008
Father Matthew Presents the Sacraments - Unction
A teaching piece on the anglican / episcopal Rite of Unction or Ministry to the Sick, one of the sacraments in the Episcopal Church. The seventh of eight videos that Episcopal priestblogger, the Rev. Matthew Moretz, is producing on the sacraments, the outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual graces of God. This video will be part of a forthcoming DVD, and is also featured on the website Beliefnet.com. Father Matthew is the Curate (assistant priest) at Christ's Church (Episcopal), Rye, NY.
Further Information:
The Book of Common Prayer - Ministration to the Sick
An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church - Annointing
WIkipedia - Annointing
David+
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February 26, 2008
The Old Testament and Early Christians
A reader asks... 
"When and how did the Old Testament come into use for early Christians? It doesn't seem logical that Greek and Roman pagans being taught the story of Jesus would have felt the need to look at or think about an old and very long Jewish text. It also doesn't seem that guys like Peter and Paul would have felt the need to carry it around and try to get new converts to buy into it, since it doesn't appear to be central to their message. So... who decided that Christians should also read and believe in the Old Testament, and when?"
The best evidence and in fact all evidence points to the fact that the early Christians did not so much take up the use of the Hebrew Bible as scripture as that they never ceased to use the Hebrew Bible as scripture. The earliest Christians saw themselves as in such continuity with Judaism that those who were in around Jerusalem continued to go to the Temple and others continued to go to synagogues. In fact, Paul's method of evangelism as found in Acts was to go first to synagogues to teach.
When New Testament authors refer to scripture they seem to mostly be referring to what we now call the Old Testament. So when the letter to Timothy says, "Until I come, give attention to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching" (I Timothy 4:13), the reference is to the public reading of the Hebrew scriptures following the pattern found in synagogues. And when the Book of James says, "If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well" (James 2:8) it is Leviticus 19:18 being quoted as scripture, though the readers would have known this to be a central tenant of Jesus' teaching as well.
However, in time, the newer writings, including the Gospels and the letters of Paul and others came to be viewed as scripture alongside the Hebrew Bible. We see this internally to the New Testament in the second letter of Peter which says,
In these verses, Paul's letters are treated as scripture along with the Hebrew Bible as they were coming to be treated as scripture by churches who read the letters in worship."Therefore, beloved, since you look for these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, spotless and blameless, and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction" (II Peter 3:14-16).
Beyond the evidence within the Bible itself for Christians using the Hebrew Bible as scripture, we find Christians defending the use of those scriptures as early as the year 150 in defense of Marcion of Pontus, who taught against the God of the Old Testament which he saw as different from the God of the New Testament. This was defended by Irenaeus, who was then Bishop of Lyon saying that in rejecting the earlier Jewish scriptures, Marcion was "blaspheming the God whom the Law and Prophets proclaimed."
So the Old Testament never ceased to be read and studied by Christians. This was only natural as Jesus continually ministered in synagogues, took part in worship in the Temple in Jerusalem and taught there and also quoted widely from the Hebrew scriptures.
Frank+
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