Reflections from Saint Paul's Church

Anglican Identity - Part III
One of a series of sermons on the roots and character of Anglicanism, this sermon was delivered at St. Paul's Church, Salem, on Sunday, 5 February 2006.

A fourth-century Orthodox monk named Evagrius of Pontus once said, "A theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian." I do not know the quote from its original context, but I have heard various versions of it. Another version says, "A theologian is on who prays truly, and one who prays truly is a theologian."

We are all here to pray, and I certainly assume that we are all here to pray truly, so that makes all of us theologians. When we think of the word "theology", we probably usually think of someone who thinks deep thoughts about God, someone who deals with theories about God, and writes books and perhaps teaches in a university or seminary. But that is a very narrow undserstanding–I would say it is a mistaken understanding of what it means to be a theologian. Real theologians do not just talk about God, they talk to God and, one would hope, God speaks to them–that is, to us.

The purpose of theology is not merely to describe God. The purpose of theology is not merely to know about God. The purpose of theology is to know God himself. We are human, finite, limited. God is divine, infinite, unlimited. That makes for a very unequal conversation. But it does not mean that conversation is impossible. We cannot understand everything there is to know about God. We cannot know God totally. But we do know God. We can have a real relationship with God in which we truly encounter him and know who he is in important, even if humanly limited ways.

I spoke last week about some of the principal ways that Anglican Christians enter into a relationship with God. I said that at the heart of our tradition is a particular discipline of prayer, found in The Book of Common Prayer. There is a wonderful Latin phrase that describes how we believe. The phrase is lex orandi, lex credendi. Translated literally, the phrase means "the law of prayer is the law of belief". In more colloquial English, it means "what we pray is what we believe"–which brings us back to good old Evagrius of Pontus.

I still remember very clearly the first time I ever went to an Episcopal Church. I was in high school. At that time, I was a member of a Presbyterian Church that was very clearly fundamentalist. I am not sure if I would have called myself a fundamentalist at the time. I think I preferred to think of myself as a Calvinist. In any case, what I was very clear about was the importance and the authority of the Bible.

My best friend was a Methodist. We were both very interested in theology and church and, from time to time, he and I would go to visit a different church together. As far as I can recall, he never came to my church and I never went to his. But we liked exploring other traditions than our own, and one Sunday we picked an Episcopal Church and went to it. As it happened, living in Maryland where the Episcopal Church tended to be fairly low church, the service we went to was not the Eucharist. It was Morning Prayer. That was probably a good thing. We had enough trouble figuring out when to stand and sit and kneel and getting lost in the Prayer Book without having to figure out what to do at Communion.

In spite of all of this, the most important impression we had from our visit to an Episcopal Church, was that it was very biblically oriented. The service seemed to us to be absolutely chock full of Scripture: the psalms, the readings, the canticles, even the language of the prayers drew heavily from the words of the Bible. With my fundamentalist background, I approved of that. I thought it was a very good thing–and, in fact, I still do, though I certainly am not a fundamentalist.

When I was ordained, I had to take an oath. In that oath, I said that I "believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation." You can find those words in the ordination services roughly in the middle of your Prayer Book. The oath continues that the ordinand promises "to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church." Now, this is a very interesting oath. It says that everything we believe may be found in the Bible–but notice that it does not say that we believe everything we find in the Bible. There are those, including many people who describe themselves as fundamentalists, who would say that you must believe everything in the Bible. But that is not what we say. In fact, my oath says that what we must believe is limited. Essentially, it is limited by what we say–or pray–in worship.

The oath does talk about doctrine, but an Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid-twentieth century, Geoffrey Fisher, once summed up the doctrine of Anglicanism in these words: "We have no doctrine of our own... We only possess the Catholic doctrine of the Catholic Church enshrined in the Catholic Creeds, and these Creeds we hold without addition or diminution. We stand firm on that Rock." The creeds, of course, are an essential part of our worship–so Scripture, doctrine, and worship are intertwined.

This really does distinguish us from the other churches of the West, most of which practice some form of dogmatism. We are dogmatic, but we are dogmatic about the barest essentials. The Roman Catholic Church sometimes seems to be dogmatic about everything. To some extent, Rome suffers from its heritage as the offspring of the Roman Empire which had a  highly developed legal system. The Roman Catholic Church has rules and laws for everything–from what you believe to how you live. And they go so far as to claim that their rules and laws are absolute–infallible. In fact, fundamentalist Protestants are not all that different. They claim that the Bible, rather than the Church, is infallible, but in the end it amounts to pretty much the same thing. And with them, too, you seem to have rules and laws about everything.

It is important to understand that dogmatism is not all bad. There is a kind of freedom in having the basics spelled out. Let other people solve the difficult issues, just follow the rules, stick to the book, leave the driving to us, and you will get to heaven without a doubt. When life is hard and answers are hard to find, there is comfort in knowing that as long as you stick to the rules, everything will turn out well in the end.

But the truth is, life is not really like that. Free will is one of the gifts God gave to mankind at creation. Free will was and is a dangerous gift. It means that we have the freedom to make wrong choices as well as right choices, both about what we believe and about how we live. But when our freedom is taken from us, for any reason, a piece of our humanity is also taken from us, and this is just as true with regard to our faith as it is to anything else. In this morning’s Collect we prayed:

Set us free, O God, from the bondage of our sins and give us, we beseech thee, the liberty of that abundant life which thou hast manifested to us in thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ.

Here is an excellent example of praying what we believe. We were created to live in liberty, freedom, but we all too often lose our freedom and end up in bondage.

Recently, I happened to read a book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who was executed by the Nazis for his role in the German resistance. He helped Jews to escape from the Nazis and, even more significantly, he participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler. I did not realize at the time that yesterday [4 February 2006] would have been Bonhoeffer’s 100^th birthday. Bonhoeffer has been one of my personal heroes for many years, so this coincidence was particularly significant for me.

Although he was a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer’s approach to theology and authority was very Anglican. One of the things that stands at the heart of his thinking is his understanding of human freedom. For Bonhoeffer and, I believe, for people who approach these things from the perspective of the Anglican way, freedom has a very particular meaning. It is not a general sort of freedom to "go where you want to go, and do what you want to do." Rather, it is a freedom from attachments. We are all attached to things: home, family, friends, possessions–these are some of our more usual attachments. We are also attached to the way we look at the world and to our favorite sins.

Sin is the primary bondage to which the collect refers. But I suspect the most dangerous of our attachments is our attachment to the way we think about things, what you might call the rules that we accept or even create not only for ourselves but for other people. This may take the form of a parent who expects a child to get straight A’s or to be the star quarterback on the football team. It may take the form of a neighbor who expects everyone else to maintain their property in a certain way. It may take the form of a religious person who wants to impose his or her beliefs on a school or a community or a nation.

Freedom from these kinds of attachments does not mean that there are no standards or rules. Even a computer has to have an operating system installed in it in order to function, and the same is true for human beings. We all have, and we all need, some kind of world view to make sense of the world and to inform our actions. So, for the Christian there are standards and rules. But the question is, where do those standards and rules come from?

This is something that Bonhoeffer struggled mightily with. He certainly saw the Bible as the primary and central source. But I suspect that many of you would not agree with some of the conclusions he drew from his reading of the Bible. For example, he was a pacifist. He believed that violence of any sort was contrary to the clear teaching of Jesus in the Gospel. He also took the sixth commandment quite literally: Thou shalt do no murder. To violate that commandment, to kill another human being for any reason whatsoever was, in his view, sin. But he did it. The plot failed and he was not actually there, but for all intents and purposes, he personally attempted to kill Hitler.

Anglicans take the Bible just as seriously as Lutherans do, and just as seriously as fundamentalists do. The key to our understanding of the Bible is in the second half of today’s collect where we ask for "the liberty of that abundant life which [God] has manifested to us in [his] Son our Savior Jesus Christ." The Bible is not a rule book. It is not a book of answers. It is the living Word of God which presents to us the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. That word "manifest" is a key word in this season of Epiphanytide. When something is manifest, it is clear, it is, in effect, right in front of your nose so you cannot miss it and should not misunderstand it. The purpose of the Bible is not to put a lot of words in front of us. The Bible is about the Word, Jesus Christ.  The bible manifests the living Word who was made flesh, who became a man, to meet us personally.

Jesus himself says that the Law will never pass away–and yet, at the same time, he confronts the Law. He refuses to treat the Law as a book of rules. The Law grew out of the living encounter of the people of Israel with God himself. And that is how we must treat it, too. That is how we must read the whole Bible, as something that brings us face to face with God himself and challenges us to live as Jesus did. In Jesus Christ, God became man. That is one of the things that we must believe if we want to claim to be Christians. It is the essential thing, not only for us to believe, but for us to apply to our daily lives. Even the best rules will only get us so far. When the rules are not enough, when the answers in the Book are not crystal clear, and sometimes when they are clear but life challenges them, we need to dig deeply into our prayer lives, and ask God to give us the courage and the faith to find the right way.

We cannot do this alone, and we do not do this alone. First of all, we have God at our side–at our side, not necessarily on our side:  the good news is that he stands by us even when we are sometimes wrong. We also have the Church. When it has truly been the Church–and there have been good days and bad days over the years–but when the Church has truly been the Church it has often faced similar challenges to the ones we face. And in those times the Church has accumulated an immense store of wisdom, which we call tradition. That tradition, that collection of teaching, creeds, prayer, example, and even dogma, helps us to sort out the essentials from the non-essentials, right belief from false belief, right action from wrong action, sometimes giving answers, sometimes creating rules, but often taking the risk of freedom, taking the risk of being wrong, taking the risk even of sinning, but always doing its very best to live faithfully.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged for treason, for attempting to murder the head of state of his own country, a country he loved dearly. On one level what he did was wrong, and he accepted that fact.  In a good Lutheran phrase, he knew that he was simul justus et peccator--at the same time justified and a sinner. As the plot to assassinate Hitler was developing, Bonhoeffer wrote these rather amazing words to his fellow conspirators: "Who stands firm? Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person whose life will be nothing but an answer to God's question and call." Bonhoeffer stood firm in that faith, in the liberty of the abundant life revealed in the encounter with Jesus Christ–not the dead faith of a book of answers, but the challenging faith of the Book of Life, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So, when they came to take him away to the gallows, he was able to say to his fellow prisoners in quiet confidence, "This is the end. For me, the beginning of life."

The Very Reverend Gary W. Kriss

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