Where is Carl?
Happy Jack is getting concerned by Carl's absence from weblogs. The last he heard from him was over 4 months ago. Since then he hasn't posted anything. Here's what he said:
"I just haven't felt well recently so I haven't felt much like writing. Nothing serious. Just aggravating."
If anyone has any news please let HJ know.
Didn't Carl submit an article about American football to you back near the start of the blog? Could you try contacting him through whatever method he used to send it?
ReplyDeleteGood idea, Batwoman!
DeleteAs recently as 20 April, just over a fortnight ago, Carl posted a comment at the Psephizo blog. It's about halfway down. Thanks to our sharp-eyed friend Anton for the information.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.psephizo.com/sexuality-2/can-we-square-the-living-in-love-and-faith-circle/
Many thanks Ray, and do please convey my thanks to Anton.
DeleteWell spotted. I'm glad that Carl's doing ok.
DeleteThat's quite the article. In some ways, I'm impressed that someone can still wring that number of words out of this subject. I think Carl's comment is right (and infinitely more succinct) - the trajectory of the CofE has been obvious for years; if you're an evangelical who has the luxury of not believing in a sacerdotal hierarchy, just leave. You don't need the institution. The CofE will go round and round this mulberry bush for eternity (is an endless discussion of the same topic a foretaste of hell?) and religious dialogue in the west has largely become a one issue conversation. Imagine if all that time and effort spent spilling ink and pixels and arguing online were actually spent on outreach! I'd hazard a guess that the number of souls liberated from Satan's claws by a witty riposte in a blog comments section is close to zero.
Last time I checked, Jesus told his followers to shake the dust from their feet and walk away from those who wouldn't listen to them; he didn't tell them to spend the rest of their lives arguing about it at the expense of searching out those who will listen.
That's fine if you're a protestant, but it doesn't work so well when you believe that the Church Christ founded is HQed in Rome. Where are we going to go?
DeleteIt depends what it means to have the Church HQed in Rome. If someone's faith is reliant on the Roman See being incorruptible, then they're rather stuck (not for the first time in history). If their faith is rooted in the incorruptibility of the Catholic Church as being something based on but not exhaustively encapsulated in Rome and the Pope, then it's a matter of (again, not for the first time in history) holding fast to the faith in turbulent times, even when all around are losing their heads.
DeleteEither way, I doubt that misguided prelates will suddenly change course because they read a scathing comment on the internet. Pretty much everything that can be said about this subject has already been said, what is the gain in rehearsing it again? As an individual believer, the best we can do is to plough our own furrow, not let our hearts be troubled by things we can't control, and give the rest to God - because it's his Church. If there are problems in a parish or diocese, it's legitimate to challenge those, withhold one's giving, or if needs be, move.
Christ promised that the Church would prevail against Hades; this is either true, or it isn't - even when Hades is leaving sulphurous hand prints all over the Church's front door.
雲水,
DeleteYou do write horribly well sometimes - here's hoping that you will continue to use your powers for good!
I guess I'm an evangelical who does not believe in a sacerdotal hierarchy, though why this would be a 'luxury' I am not sure - shouldn't I be feeling benighted or confused, or is my ignorance indeed bliss?
"The religious dialogue in the west has largely become a one issue conversation." The West is clearly ripe for being evangelized again; the African Anglican churches appear to have far more sense than Cantebury, and in my own humble corner of the Baptist movement that single issue doesn't come up that often.
@Gadjo - thank you, you do give the best compliments 😂
DeleteMy comment about it being a luxury is in reference specifically to evangelicals within the CofE. When the Church of England split with Rome, unlike some other Protestant churches (e.g., the Church of Scotland) it retained the Catholic 'threefold ordering' of clergy: deacon, priest and bishop. Under this understanding of holy orders, the bishop is seen as a successor to the Apostles, and only the bishop has the fullness of holy orders - he is a sacerdotal priest in his own right. In the early church, the bishop administered the sacraments.
When the church grew large enough that this became impractical, priests were ordained. Priests minister in a parish with the permission of their bishop and administer the sacraments on his behalf. If he moves to another parish or diocese, he must either be licensed or received permission to officiate from the relevant bishop there. He can't simply take off of his own accord and be a priest elsewhere; his sacraments would be invalid. Similarly, a deacon is licensed by the bishop and requires a priest's blessing to operate liturgically as a deacon. Crudely put, a deacon is 1/3rd of holy orders, a priest is 2/3rds and a bishop is the whole. This is also true of the CofE's implementation of holy orders, as per the Prayer Book and the Ordinal, but it's often misunderstood.
For Anglo-Catholics who hold to this ordering (some conveniently forget it), to be separated from one's bishop is to cease to be able to function as a priest. This is why the 'flying bishops' were/are so important to traditional Anglo Catholic parishes. They can't simply leave and set up their own church. For CofE evangelicals, on the other hand, this problem doesn't exist. Other than line management, there's no intrinsic reason why they should need a bishop (the CofE evangelical's need for a bishop for ordinations and confirmations throws up some very muddled theology here), and most non-Anglican evangelical churches don't have them: they're Presbyterians or Congregationalists etc. In that respect, it's much easier for a group of evangelicals to leave the CofE and strike out on their own - technically, they only need find a meeting space and elect an elder or elders.
When the church grew large enough that this became impractical, priests were ordained.
Delete@Lain, do we have a date for that change? I have read, though I don't remember where, that the three levels of bishop, priest, and deacon are known to have been in place in Antioch in the early second century.
According to the prefaces and footnotes in the Revised New Jerusalem Bible, some of the early Christian communities adopted the same organization pattern found in synagogues in the diaspora at that time: each community was governed by a council of elders, who picked one of their number to act as president. In Greek, an elder was a presbyteros, which in English became “priest”, while the president was the episkopos or “bishop”. Does this match with your information?
@雲水,
DeleteThanks for the explanation! The argument seems to hinge a lot on what words like "επισκοπης" are taken to mean.
I see that fr. Seraphim Aldea is looking well and making videos. Also, he says that they will have a new monastary on Iona, which the men will move to, while the one on Mull will be for nuns. Interesting times for their community.
@ Ray - there's definitely evidence for bishops being assisted by priests as early as the second century, but the bishop was still the primary holder of the priestly office and had a more 'hands on' role in the daily sacramental life of his church. From memory, I think it was around the 7th century that something more like the system we have in place today - where parishioners primarily deal with a priest instead of a bishop - was established.
DeleteEven then, medieval priesthood was very different to today's. Eamonn Duffy's Faith of Our Fathers gives a good overview of the history of the priesthood in England. Literacy was poor (there were medieval debates about how much one could mangle the Latin and still have a valid Mass), priests were often married (and the Church lost land in inheritance to hereditary priests) and most pastoral and preaching work was carried out by monasteries: the priest was really just expected to celebrate Masses and other sacraments. It wasn't until the 13th/14th century that celibacy was properly enforced and young men sent to seminaries to be educated for the priesthood and the 'all rounder' parish priest that we know today was born.
I think the RNJB's footnotes are broadly right, but I also think that the early Church's distinction between the presbyteros and episkopos is not quite as clear cut as we sometimes read back into it. Iranaeus, Clement of Rome, the Didache etc., tend to use the two terms almost interchangeably. However, we do know from the NT that early communities had bishops, like Paul, who oversaw them and confirmed the community's choice of elders through the laying on of hands, as Acts and 1 Tim. attest. We also see in 1 Tim 5:17,19 that the bishop (Timothy) has authority to hear or dismiss charges against the presbyters, which is already evidence of some hierarchy. There may have been councils of governing elders, but they weren't Presbyterians; they governed on behalf of their bishop.
Some historians think that the episcopate was born out of the elevation of certain presbyters, but this seems the wrong way around to me - the priesthood surely came out of the episcopate. Certainly, by the time of Ignatius (2nd century), we find him writing about a very strong distinction between the three orders, without which he says there is no Church, and in which the bishop is undoubtedly sovereign. Aerius of Pontus was also declared a heretic in the mid fourth century for saying that bishops and priests had equal authority.
@ Gadjo - I think in understanding biblical terms, it's important to look at how people understood them in the practice of the early church - some of which I've briefly outlined in my reply to Ray. There is very strong evidence that the threefold hierarch that we have today came into existence very early in the Church's life, is evident in the NT, and was largely unchallenged until relatively modern times. I think there's a danger in trying to draw definitive unchanging practices from the churches of Acts and the epistles because we only have one side of the conversation in the letters, and Acts describes a tumultuous period of the church finding its feet. It seems to me that arguments for alternative church structures rely heavily on the idea that Christians didn't really understand the simple words of scripture for 1500 years, until some enlightened modern folk pointed it out for them (basically, the same argument for reinventing marriage). I don't find this convincing: I've spent a lot of time studying biblical languages, but I'd be very cautious of any argument that suggested I understood NT Greek better than the people who wrote it and lived it and whose testimonies were left to us.
DeleteYes, Fr. Seraphim is back, there has been an ordination in the community and it's growing. Glory to God. I must admit that I'm very tempted to point my bike towards the Hebrides!