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The Logic Underpinning the Eucharist (Such As It Is,) Continued [Commentary on Browne: Article XXIX]–North American Anglican
If I had to rate the Articles, this one would be at the bottom. Why did this church insist on going against the wisdom of “Good Queen Bess” and insist that the wicked don’t receive the Eucharist? This is one of many reasons why I find Anglican Eucharistic theology overcomplicated and, in this case, unBiblical. The point of the Scriptures is that those who receive it unworthily do receive it, but the consequences of doing so, from Judas to the sinful Corinthians, are dire. Little wonder Bossuet, who wasn’t much on women running the church, gave Elizabeth I a pass the way he did in his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches.
Once we get past this, there are errors on both sides.
The Roman Catholics, swept up in the enthusiasm of their Eucharistic theology, overlook the fact that one really needs to be in a state of grace to properly receive the Sacrament. “But Christ is really present in the Sacrament…” He was on the Cross and they mocked him! As one priest from my Aggie days said, if you encounter Jesus you are either changed or scandalised. And that, I would add, goes for the Eucharist as well.
On the other hand those who would push us to one version or another of Bill Clinton’s Eucharistic Theology: It Depends on What ‘Is’ Is diluted the reality of the Lord’s Supper, a path too many have followed in the centuries since.
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Pope Francis Goes to Meet God
It has been my custom to reproduce sentiments of people who have died which I wrote while they’re living, and I’ll do the same for Pope Francis.
First: I would quote from my 2019 piece Pope Francis to Bossuet: Hold My Beer, but it’s the best summation of my attitude towards the recently deceased pontiff and so I commend it in its entirety to my readers.
From The Catholic Church Will Lose Again With the “Reverend Jesuit Fathers”:
The bad part of the rondeau is that the Jesuits did indeed seek a New World, which explains much of the quality of Latin American Catholicism. Now we have a product of both region and religious order as Pope, and the consequences aren’t pretty. He and others been so inculcated with the Marxist idea that the top of society sets the rules to oppress those below that they are ready to move towards a more “liberal” idea not only for “social justice” purposes but also to keep their system full of people. They do not understand that the austerity of Jansenism and like systems, with emphasis on clear rules and discipline, is in fact the real “way up” for the bourgeois in a Christian context, and that entangling morality in Jesuitical complexity only benefits those who pull the strings from the upper reaches of society.
As we all know, the triumph of the Jesuits (the Jansenists made something of a comeback, but it wasn’t enough) didn’t stop the advent of the Enlightenment, even with their “concessions” to the world around them. The bourgeois turned elsewhere for inspiration and ultimately toppled the monarchy which had supposedly backed what was “best” for them, wrecking the Church in France in the process.
I said a long time ago that the Roman Catholic Church is only one bull away from disaster. We now have the possibility that this bull may be in the wings (some people think it’s already been issued.) Or perhaps we’re looking at a series of them. But Francis and his ilk need to wake up to the fact that playing to the crowd–or to the powers that be–won’t save the Church but destroy it, just as it has its liberal Protestant counterparts.
From The Pope, Technology and Slavery:
The Holy Father has once again ambushed American Catholics with Laudato Si, his encyclical on the environment and global warming. As was the case with his earlier document on social teaching, we should not be too surprised; there is a great deal of precedent for this kind of thinking. As R.R. Reno points out:
In this encyclical, Francis expresses strikingly anti-scientific, anti-technological, and anti-progressive sentiments. In fact, this is perhaps the most anti-modern encyclical since the Syllabus of Errors, Pius IX’s haughty 1864 dismissal of the conceits of the modern era.
Buried in the Catholic psyche is a longing for a Ptolemaic, village-centred world where the church, at the heart of things both physically and spiritually, rings out the daily cycle of Mass and prayer and orders the life of the people. This was before Copernicus and Galileo had the bad taste to point out that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe, which didn’t sit well with the Aristotelian intelligentsia that dominated Catholicism. The fact that post-modern progressives find a congenial ally with such a mentality speaks volumes of their own scientific level.
From The Big Differences Between Pope Francis and the Prosperity Charismatics:
What Francis is probably banking on is that, sooner or later, prosperity teaching is going to hit the wall. This is for two reasons,
The first is that prosperity teaching doesn’t really account for situations–and everyone has them–when God doesn’t do either according to our expectations or those that are drilled into us from the pulpits or television. When I was growing up, liberals would bawl over how they didn’t believe in God any more because he didn’t do what they expected him to do (remember Gilbert O’Sullivan)? The New Atheists have taken this up with a vengeance: how can there be a God when so many bad things happen? (I deal with this in more depth here). Prosperity teaching plays right into this and, in many ways, atheists and prosperity charismatics are working from the same assumptions, only coming to different conclusions.
The second is that the ability for prosperity charismatics to accumulate wealth has always depended upon an economic system that permits it to the extent that ours has. That’s in jeopardy for two reasons. The first is the growing inequality and class stratification of our society. Prosperity Charismatic Christianity is the preferential option of the poor par excellence; when they find that they have a bulletproof glass ceiling above them, they may change their attitude towards the aspirational spirituality they have adopted. Moreover in the West the heavy hand of the state is tilting against any form of Christianity. That is at the heart over the current fracas over bakers and florists refusing same-sex civil marriages; making economic activity of any kind a matter of conscience, and forcing people to make decisions that will cost them economically, goes straight against prosperity teaching in a way that few other things do.
On the other hand, prosperity charismatics, triumphalistic by nature, may figure that God is on their side and the Pope and the Church under him will come their way. But given current realities and the durability of Roman Catholicism, I wouldn’t put money on the prosperity teachers. They’d probably take it anyway.
From Pope Francis and Two-Way Ignorance:
Prior to his election Francis had never set foot in the United States, making him the only pope in the last eighty years other than St. John XXIII who had never been to America before taking office…People close to Francis also say his U.S. trip last year helped him to better distinguish between ordinary Americans and “the system.”
But when another world leader discovered something, the evaluation was different:
Latin Americans also tend to have long memories, and many still recall moments such as Ronald Reagan’s famous reaction upon returning from a 1982 trip to the region: “You’d be surprised … they’re all individual countries.” The fact that national differences could strike a U.S. president as a revelation still rings in Latin American ears as proof of our capacity for condescension.
What I think we’re looking at is two-way ignorance. There’s a lot that people in the U.S. need to learn about Latin America, but the converse is also true, as we see with His Holiness.
I’ve spent a considerable time on the subject of the deceased pontiff, but do not be deceived: the real white-knuckle (and white smoke) part is just beginning.
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Book Review: “What Still Divides Us”–North American Anglican, and Some Comments
As someone who has been “there and back again” on this divide (and there are few of us who have made that journey) I think I could add something to the discussion, so here goes:
In the first chapter, “How are we Saved?” Maloney points out significant differences in how Protestants and Roman Catholics see human will, God’s grace, faith, justification, and the role of good works. Is unregenerate man free to cooperate with God’s grace, or is his will bound to the point that he is “dead in his sins”?
The one thing I have come to find distasteful in Roman Catholicism is their concept of merit, which is linked in turn to how much time they anticipate spending in purgatory. Jesus Christ’s merit–irrespective of how that’s dispensed, which is a separate question–is sufficient, the hard part is getting people to come to a place where it is applied to them. After all, if grace isn’t free, it isn’t grace, is it?
On the other hand, Protestants–and yes, I’m looking at you, Reformed types–have obscured the issue by insisting that we start out totally depraved, which is why we cannot reach heaven. You don’t need to be totally depraved to miss heaven. To put it in a mathematical example, if you start at zero and the goal is 100 you’ll never make it if you stay at zero, but you won’t make it either if you only get to 99, or 99.9, or 99.99…if God’s uncreated goodness is not in you, then you won’t make no matter how close you get or how close you think you get.
Similarly, the second chapter, “How Does God Speak to Us?” points to differences in how Protestants and Roman Catholics view the relationship between the authority of the Bible and the authority of the Church. This is the point I typically focus on when asked the difference between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. The way I typically explain it, all other differences are downstream from the most fundamental issue of authority. Are the Holy Scriptures sufficient for Christians on matters of faith and morals, or is the Church’s teaching authority on the same level as Scripture? Is the Bible knowable by Christians, or must the Church authorities provide a definitive and infallible interpretation of the Bible? Does the Bible have authority over the Church, or are they parallel sources of authority?
The issue of authority is an obsession in Christianity these days, and this blog has been dealing with it for a long time with posts like Authority and Evangelical Churches and We May Not Be a Church After All. The reviewer muddies the water on whether Scripture and tradition are different sources of authority or one in the same. Traditionally Roman Catholicism has regarded Scripture and tradition as a unity which cannot contradict each other; the serious issue is whether the Roman Catholic Church has botched the job by allowing the latter to deviate from the former (whose canon is set in place.) As I noted in Some Thoughts on Bossuet’s History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches:
The Variations were Bossuet’s efforts to show the serious problems inherent in the Reformed churches. So how successful was he? Part of how successful he seems depends upon how you accept his view of Roman Catholicism. A Roman Catholicism which is more like Bossuet envisions it–conscious of Scripture, independent of the state, Augustinian in theology–would be a better entity to adhere to than the one that he had then and we have now. A big part of the problem is that the reverends pères jesuites, or at least one in particular (Pope Francis,) are once again propagating their morale accommodante, as they did in Bossuet’s France (much to its long-term detriment.) Unfortunately then and now the situation is more complicated, but Bossuet tends to ignore this.
We now turn to the third part:
The third chapter, “Who Runs the Church?” is mostly about the office of the Papacy. Again, there is little in this chapter with which a well-catechized Anglican would disagree. We would agree with Maloney that our church leaders have a limited authority that is subject to the Scriptures. His definition of priest, however, is limited to an Old Testament sacrificial priesthood which stand as a mediator between God and the people (54). As such he rejects any idea of priesthood for Protestant clergy, despite acknowledging that only “most” Protestants agree with this rejection (53). Again, Anglicans who accept the Formularies as our “confessional” authority would disagree with his definition.
The problems with Roman Catholicism’s wholesale importation of the Old Testament’s concept of priesthood are numerous, not the least of which is that it detracts from the unique nature of Christ’s own priesthood. This is an issue I discuss in Why I Don’t Agree With the Concept of the “Sacrifice of the Mass”.
The final chapter, “How Should Christians Worship God?” is more problematic from an Anglican perspective. Not only does Maloney (rightly) contrast Roman Catholic and Protestant definitions and understandings of the Sacraments, but he also paints a contrast between Roman Catholic and Protestant worship. He claims that Roman Catholic worship is centered on the Eucharist, while Protestant worship is centered on the proclamation and preaching of the Scriptures.
Roman Catholicism has been successful in bringing the war on the topic to the Anglican home front rather than the other way around, as is evidenced by the “communion every Sunday” reality of the 1979 BCP TEC and the endurance of Anglo-Catholicism, and it’s spreading elsewhere too. Until an effective counter to this is sent to the battlefield this situation will continue.
The reviewer asks the question, “So, in the end, is What still Divides Us a useful book in an Anglican context?” Much of this post is a review of what I’ve written on this topic before, and I would round this out with another reflection from Book Review: Trevor Gervase Jalland’s The Church and the Papacy:
Jalland was unsure of where all of this was going, both for the Roman Catholics and for everyone else. Three quarters of a century after Jalland gave these lectures, we really don’t have a clearer picture. Vatican II had a great deal of promise but its own mandate for change was at once too broad and too narrow, and worse it became the tool of those with a sub-Christian agenda. The current Occupant of the See of Peter, back to the usual agenda of protecting the Vatican’s turf, currying favor with the “gods of this world” and using the authority of an infallible successor to Peter to make this happen, has left many inside and outside the Church in the lurch. As for the Protestant world, the Main Line churches, descendants (in the US) for the most part of the state churches (in Europe) that emerged from the Reformation, have lost center stage to the Evangelicals and Pentecostals, whose propensity to splinter makes putting the pieces back together difficult just by the sheer number of the pieces themselves.
What Christianity needs is leadership which is committed to transmitting the paradosis of the Apostles without expanding it.
Some of you may ask the question, “If all of this is true, why did you swim the Tiber?” The answer is simple: Roman Catholicism has many constants, but is also subject to upheavals and changes, and few match the situation in the two decades after Vatican II, when I was Roman Catholic. Although the Trads concentrate on attacking the “sub-Christian agenda” of some in the wake of that council, there were others–including my first parish priest–who were having serious doubts about the way Roman Catholicism was leading its flock and seldom seeing the transformational power that the New Testament speaks of in the faithful. The desire to see that was a motivation behind, among other things, the Charismatic Renewal, and the fact that it got bogged down in authority issues was and is a tragedy. With Paul VI’s death and John Paul II’s accession in 1978, the push to revert to the “old ways” in a post-Vatican II context ended much of that experimentation.
I consider myself blessed that I experienced what I did, and, as I noted here, its failure still hurts.
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Francis Collins Calls it Quits
Late last week, Christian geneticist Francis Collins resigned abruptly as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). On Wednesday this week, the U.S. Senate held a confirmation hearing for a new NIH director, Stanford University medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, a fellow Christian who Collins privately disparaged as one of “three fringe epidemiologists” during the COVID crisis.
I don’t see the “Stockholm Syndrome” business; I think that Francis Collins, for all of his achievements, is a product of a culture that is obsessed with moving up. His fault is that he made it what winning was the Vince Lombardi: the only thing. Along with Anthony Fauci, his trashing of Jay Bhattacharya and the other proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration was, IMHO, the most disgraceful thing he did during the entire COVID-19 fiasco. But that’s part of moving up: it’s not only elevating yourself, but putting down those who would challenge you for prominence.
Photo above: a climber in Palm Beach.
Jay Bhattacharya’s nomination is a demonstration of an old saw of mine: be nice to the people you meet on the way up, you’ll meet them again on the way down. So Collins has.
I’ll close by reproducing my thoughts on this subject in my 2021 post The Unsaid Lesson of Francis Collins:
If there’s one thing shocking about American Evangelicalism, it’s its blindness to the moral hazard of getting into the upper reaches of a society. Having been brought up in the upper reaches of this one, that moral hazard was definitely apparent.
And yet, with the “have it all” and “move up” mentality that permeates American Evangelicalism, there is a general blindness to that moral hazard. I’d be the first to admit that Francis Collins’ rise is amazing—and objected to by secular types–but the things which Fisher lays out should be expected in an era when moral corners are to be cut, especially in the biomedical field.
I think Evangelicals should be more careful about the way they lionise people who move up the way Collins has, and more importantly quit encouraging people to constantly push themselves into positions where they have to make decisions and compromises such as Collins has had to do. Do we really need to push our children into elite schools? Did we think about the compromises we would have to make in a major political movement? Questions like these and many others go unasked and unanswered in the Evangelical world, which is a major reason we ended up with Donald Trump. Many of the same elite-adjacent evangelicals (such as those listed above) who have blubbered about the support for Trump have pushed people into aspiring for high positions and secular success, which in turn encourages successful political action, which in turn…
You can’t have it both ways; make up your minds.
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Beating the Bounds of Anglican Eucharistic Doctrine–The North American Anglican (Or More Accurately, Beating Around the Bush)
This is a long exposition of Anglican Eucharistic doctrine that mostly succeeds in making it look complicated.
I thought about doing a “blow by blow” on this, but I will restrict myself to referring my readers to my 2020 article on the subject, Overcomplicating Anglican Eucharistic Theology.
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Reformed Methodist–The North American Anglican
The “ties that bind” American Christianity are a complex web, and this is a good example of that. It’s no secret that the Wesleyan tradition–like John and Charles Wesley themselves–came out of Anglicanism, and had things worked out a little differently the Episcopal Church itself could have stayed together with North American Wesleyanism.
But now we see that one of the first offshoots of the Protestant Episcopal Church–the Reformed Episcopal Church–came out of the interaction of Methodists and Episcopalians. It’s sometimes hard to see today, but the REC started as a reaction to creeping Anglo-Catholicism in the Episcopal Church, and it was natural that Methodism, which was a reaction to the dry, nominal Church of England of the eighteenth century, would be an inspiration and a help to the fledgling REC. It is an interesting meeting of two traditions–liturgical and revivalistic–which have generally been at odds with each other.
Perhaps the most revivalistic heir of Wesleyanism–modern Pentecost–will take some lessons from this story, we certainly could use some in our present situation.
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A Few Reminders on Fast and Abstinence During Lent
As Lent fast approaches, I’ve seen some pushback on X from Anglicans on “why do we do the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday as Anglicans?” It’s a fair question, and the culprits in the Anglican-Episcopal world are the “more Catholic than the Pope” people, the Anglo-Catholics. In the middle of their preparation for the impositions and their exhortations to “figure out what you’re going to give up during Lent” it’s worth stopping to consider a few things. As someone who has done both the Old High Church and Roman Catholicism, I think I can bring a different perspective to this whole discussion.
I don’t remember going to an imposition of ashes during my years at Bethesda, although I may have gone to one during my prep school years at St. Andrew’s. I didn’t do many as a Roman Catholic, and there’s a good reason for that: Ash Wednesday isn’t a Holy Day of Obligation for Roman Catholics in the U.S.! (Neither is Good Friday.) I was faithful to the days of obligation (and that was back in the day when you went to them during the week, and not this “move to Sunday” rubbish) but Ash Wednesday wasn’t one of them.
Turning to the issue of fast and abstinence, the regulations for those haven’t changed either, as this from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops attests:
Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are obligatory days of fasting and abstinence for Catholics. In addition, Fridays during Lent are obligatory days of abstinence.
For members of the Latin Catholic Church, the norms on fasting are obligatory from age 18 until age 59. When fasting, a person is permitted to eat one full meal, as well as two smaller meals that together are not equal to a full meal. The norms concerning abstinence from meat are binding upon members of the Latin Catholic Church from age 14 onwards.
The fast was put more simply back in the day: skip one meal. As a student at Texas A&M, unencumbered by my Baptistic mother, I fasted the entire day when I could.
With the abstinence, being an engineering student at Texas A&M had one bonus for Texas Catholics: there was a McDonald’s across the street from the Zachry Engineering Centre, which allowed the convenient weekly Lenten consumption of the Filet-o-Fish sandwich. We now know that this was the whole point of that menu item.
For those exhorting us to “up our game” on Lent–Anglo-Catholic, Trad or exvangelical liturgical enthusiast–the simple requirements of post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism may come as a shock. But the truth is that Roman Catholicism instituted the imposition of ashes and all of the Lenten practices that followed, and it has–for better or worse–adapted those to life today. That should give pause to the “more Catholic than the Pope” people of all kinds, and perhaps should turn the rest of us away from trying to keep up with the Joneses and do something that will draw us closer to God between now and the time we celebrate His Resurrection.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 