On the one hand, it is Pentecost, and [according to some Tweets] the 2000th birthday of the church ... I thoughy that would be 2030 or 2033, but who is counting :).
On the other hand, Pentecost is the beginning of a new era with Eleven apostles restored to Twelve apostle, with the election of Mathias. A remind that we have a new Pope and not yet a new Archbishop of Canterbury.
But we do have - courtesy of a link in Thinking Anglicans - a Statement of Needs for the next ABC. This looks good - comprehensive, careful, considerate, to the needs of the Anglican church there and around our globe.
From the Venerable Dr Will Adam's introduction (with apologies for format as I copy froma PDF):
"The Diocese of Canterbury is looking forward to welcoming its 106th Archbishop. This Statement of Needs, prepared by the Vacancy in See Committee, sets out a little of what the diocese needs and expects in an Archbishop and describes something of the rich life and ministry of the Church of England in the eastern half of Kent as we seek, together, to be disciples of Jesus Christ and to proclaim in word and action the Good News of Jesus."
"Locally we realise that responsibilities in the diocese will form but a small part of the Archbishop’s total ministry. We have a long established, valued and well understood system of delegation of day to day responsibility for episcopal ministry in the diocese to the Bishop of Dover and expect this to continue. That said, there is a real and tangible sense of connection and affection for the Archbishop of Canterbury in the parishes and communities of the diocese. The Archbishop is ‘our’ Archbishop alongside their responsibilities in the Church of England, the nation, the Anglican Communion and on the world stage. We offer in the Diocese of Canterbury and in the Cathedral Precincts a home, where the Archbishop will feel they belong. Canterbury Cathedral is location of the Archbishop’s cathedra, the metropolitical seat and the mother church of the Anglican Communion and the natural location of the Archbishop’s ministry in prayer, liturgy and teaching. The Diocese of Canterbury is not without its challenges. We hope that as we seek to live out a Christ-like life that our next Archbishop would be a supporter and an advocate for us alongside their other weighty tasks. We are praying for the calling out of a faithful pastor to be our Archbishop. If you are a candidate considering whether to express an interest in the post please be assured that we are praying for you in this time of discernment. "
The document then proceeds to a "The Archbishop we are seeking ..." section, which is excellent.
But I note in the last bullet point an interesting implied (or not, let's discuss) note:
"has worked and will continue to work constructively with the Living in Love and Faith process and will fully welcome those from the LGBTQIA+ community. They will recognise with honesty the complexity of the current situation and the strongly held, but different, convictions present in the diocese as in the Church of England more widely. They will affirm that we are all created and loved into being whilst all also having sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. They will embrace those who pray for change to enable same-sex partners to marry in the Church of England. They will also embrace those who hold the current Church of England teaching on marriage. "
On the one hand, the implication of "has worked and will continue to work constructively with the Living in Love and Faith process ..." literally rules out potential contenders from outside of the Church of England, on the grounds that potential candidates in churches as close as Scottish, Welsh and Irish Anglican churches have not so worked with the LLF process.
On the other hand, presumably there is no strict intention to rule out the wind of the Spirit blowing in the direction of, say, a candidate from Ghana or Guyana or Glasgow, and there would be a way of assessing such an extra-England candidate as having a track record of working on LGBTQIA+ matters coherent with the LLF process.
Still, there are 101 reasons, additional to the LLF process, for the CofE looking within itself for its preferred new ABC.
We keep praying ...
Closer to home, and in the spirit of Pentecost, and of Trinity Sunday itself, if you live in or near Christchurch, at 5 pm Sunday 15 June 2025, we are hosting an ecumenical service celebrating the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea at the Transitional Cathedral, Hereford Street. ALL welcome!
"The wind unleashes a mighty force into the world that the old powers of status quo never welcome." ~the late Walter Brueggemann
ReplyDelete"Pentaccost" by Brian Kaylor.
https://publicwitness.wordandway.org/p/pentaccost
This is a terrific, strong piece Liz. Thank you.
DeleteEvery once and a while, *when the Spirit moves me*, when I really want to, I like to pick up a Gospel and read it again. As if I've never read it before. Which, with my memory, isn't far off. Of course it's familiar, but there lots that surprises me.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading Mark, and in the first chapter there is this lovely line which I feel like I've never encountered - ever - before:
Jesus is healing in Capernaum, staying in a house, "And the whole city was gathered around the door". 1:33.
The Church is celebrating the Nicene Creed this year, as Peter says, but I can't get with it. The Jesus that comes through in Mark is so home-spun, so down to earth, not at all interested in explaining himself to anyone. He just keeps healing, keeps proclaiming this very simple gospel (the kingdom of God is close at hand), using "Son of Man" for himself, seeming to say I'm both a typical human being, and the Messiah Daniel spoke of, but almost always leaving it up to the individual to work it out themselves.
I suppose I read to Gospels again and again to keep working this out. At this point in my life, now, not when I was 18 or 8 or 28, who do I say Jesus is?
The Nicene Creed - all creeds - seem the opposite of that. They're a cheat book - the teachers book with all the "correct" answers to the exam questions in it . They do the work for us. They speak in a way that Jesus never spoke in himself. I'd rather we used his koan-like parables - they challenge us to seek and find.
Thanks for saying, Mark! Hey, I'll be along soon to check out more of what's on your blog - I've been distracted - by creating another hang-out at Substack. You're welcome to come visit if you'd like to, I'd be delighted, and for any from ADU who may be curious enough to come along!
ReplyDeleteErstwhile Evangelical
https://erstwhileangel.substack.com/
P.S. After my comment to you Mark, I went back to Substack and immediately chanced across a 'Mark Murphy' there who's a therapist (and doesn't look a bit like you). I was startled!
ReplyDeleteOh, well done Erstwhile Angel ! I'll take a look!
ReplyDeleteA Blessed Trinity Sunday to all in this 1700th Anniversary Year of the Council of Nicea. Nicea didn't resolve the issue of how to speak rightly about God but it laid the foundation for the Council of Constantinople 381, from which the Creed (more or less) arose. The middle years of the fourth century were still very turbulent theologically speaking, but the great advance of those years was the work of the Cappadocians, especially St Gregory Nazianzen, who more than anyone helped to clarify that within the One God the three eternal and uncreated (agenetos) hypostaseis share one being (homoousion) but have non-reversible relations (Father-Son, Father-Spirit); while St Geoffrey of Nyssa helped to affirm the full uncreated deity of the Holy Spirit. Always the bark of Christ must be steered between the Scylla of modalism and the Charybdis of tritheism. The Creed is the rudder of the craft.
ReplyDeleteOf course this strains our comprehension (as the so-called Athanasian Creed repeatedly reminds us), but why should the nature of Almighty God be grasped by our minds? A god we understood would be an idol and a product of nature - and even nature is not understood by us. For more than a century now we have been aware of the wave-particle duality of matter, and those little solar system models of the atom we learned as 11 year olds are simply that, models which work at one level, while the quantum world itself remains deeply mysterious - and yet true because it is the foundation of modern computing. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed teaches us that we can confess the truth, yet not fully know what it means. But that is true of all human speaking. All theology must lead to doxology, as Isaiah knew when he beheld the glory of the pre-incarnate Christ in the seraphic Trisagion (Isaiah 6, John 12).
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
"....helped to clarify that within the One God the three eternal and uncreated (agenetos) hypostaseis share one being (homoousion) but have non-reversible relations (Father-Son, Father-Spirit); while St Geoffrey of Nyssa helped to affirm the full uncreated deity of the Holy Spirit. Always the bark of Christ must be steered between the Scylla of modalism and the Charybdis of tritheism."
ReplyDeleteThis is so far from the language of Christ himself. So far. If people want to speak this way, that's ok, they're absolutely free to it, but it is important to acknowledge it's just light years from the parables and personal encounters of Jesus.
To "anathematize" others who want to speak in another way - say, the so called "Arians" - isn't worth celebrating, is it? It's the creation of a brutal, Christian orthodoxy, and the loss of a greater pluralism, such as the first centuries of Christianity enjoyed.
Try this, Mark: https://www.psephizo.com/preaching-2/the-trinity-explained-in-words-of-one-syllable/
ReplyDeleteThanks Peter. That's a lovely sermon - very creative and helpful!
ReplyDeleteBut if another follower of Christ imagined it a different way, regardless of whether I agree or disagree, who am I to anathematize them?
In the end, we gain the kingdom by actually *following* Christ not through some theological passcode. Was that what Jesus was referring to - as 'the secret" - in Mark 4:11-12?
Wow thanks for that article +Peter! As clear and simple as anything I have ever heard.
ReplyDelete"This is so far from the language of Christ himself. So far. If people want to speak this way, that's ok, they're absolutely free to it, but it is important to acknowledge it's just light years from the parables and personal encounters of Jesus."
ReplyDeleteLight years? Personal encounters of Jesus? What do you make of:
'The Word was with God and the Word was God.'
'You have heard that it was said .... But *I say to you ...'
'Who can forgive sins but God alone?'
'Who is this, whom even the waves and wind obey?'
'Ego eimi.'
'... though he was in the form of God ... God has bestowed on him the name which is above every name' (i.e. Kurios, sc. Yahweh)
'for us there is one God, the Father from whom all things exist ... and one Lord, Jesus Christ through whom are all things' (1 Cor 8.6) - that's Paul c. AD 53, only 20 years after the Crucifixion, expressing identical ideas about the divinity, pre-existence and creative activity of Christ that we find in the Prologue of John's Gospel. I could never accept those daft claims that James Dunn expressed in 'Christology in the Making'. Bauckham was right.
Fascinating to see that the service from St Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney for Trinity Sunday featured;
- Bach's Cantata no. 129
- several great Trinitarian hymns
- recitation of the Athanasian Creed
- a profound sermon on the meaning of the communion of the Holy Spirit as the personal 'vinculum caritatis' between the Eternal and Uncreated (agenetos) Father and the Eternal and Uncreated (agenetos) Son who are all one in being (homoousion) and indwelling of each other (perichoresis). This is the meaning of 'God is love' (1 John 4.8), into which God's children are invited to enter and live - well, that's my summary, the preacher managed to say all this without using any Greek or Latin.
(Maybe one day a brave preacher will do a sermon series on the architecture of Dante's Commedia: 3 sections consisting of 99 cantos (3 x 33), all in terza rima - the greatest architectonic tribute in world literature to the Holy Trinity.)
Tell me again why I shouldn't be a Jehovah's Witness, a Christadelphian, a Unitarian - or a Muslim.
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh
"Light years? Personal encounters of Jesus? What do you make of:
ReplyDelete'The Word was with God and the Word was God.'
'You have heard that it was said .... But *I say to you ...'
'Who can forgive sins but God alone?'
'Who is this, whom even the waves and wind obey?'"
Yeah, much more earthy and close to the source, though the first aren't Jesus's words.
"Tell me again why I shouldn't be a Jehovah's Witness, a Christadelphian, a Unitarian - or a Muslim."
That's entirely for you to decide!
Mark, I didn't know you were a Red-Letter-Christian! Thee are very many quotations I could have given from John's Gospel which even Dunn admits clearly teach the divinity and pre-existence of Christ ('Before Abraham existed, I am', 'the glory I had with You before the world existed'etc etc), but I played the liberal Protestant game here of precluding John's Gospel from consideration - even though I have seen with ever greater clarity that the Christology in Paulletters and in the Epistle to the Hebrews is really no "lower" than John. And it's there in Mark's Gospel as well if you know where to look, e.g. the 'I have come''statements. See Simon Gathercole's book analysing these sayings.
ReplyDeleteUnlike liberal Protestantism, the early Church had no problem with the authenticity of John's Gospel - indeed the Arians were always quoting it. The question was always, What does it t mean or imply? Modalism or tritheism? Or a tertium quid that breaks our customary ways of thinking?
As for my final question which you punted, there is only one good reason to hold a religious conviction: because it is true. ("Objection overruled, Procurator Pilate!')
Pax et bonum
William Greenhalgh