The Spirit

'Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.'

The idea of the Spirit seems to provoke very different reactions from Christians and this has been the case throughout the centuries. One only needs to look back as far as figures such as St Francis of Assisi and his followers or Martin Luther and his friar opponents to see how those who regarded themselves as fired by the spirit could very easily either end up being painted as saint or heretic: the former inspired by the Spirit of God and the latter by the Spirit of the Devil.

Yet despite disagreement about who had the spirit, there was a general agreement amongst Christians that it was indeed important to have it, at least until developments of scholastic thought that led to Reformation and the Enlightenment. Until the High Middle Ages, and the introduction of Aristotelian metaphysics, the Spirit served a very simple function: it was imputed into the heart of the believer through the word and sacraments of the church. It cleansed, hallowed and healed each believer; they carried him around in their heart and allowed them in St Paul’s words to cry ‘Abba, Father.’

In this model from the first millennium of the church the Spirit dwelt in the believer’s heart and freed his will from its bondage to original sin. Here the Spirit was found as a Spirit of freedom: not a freedom to do whatever we want and desire, but a freedom to be the people that God chooses us to be. In this view the sacraments of the church made sense as those things that heal the sinner from his sickness and change him from glory to glory.

This changed with the discovery of Aristotle. Aristotle’s view that ‘like can only know like’ changed the way in which theology was done. This is a very questionable thought to apply to theology anyway: Christianity has at its heart the idea that God the Son became man and by touching the dirty, unclean and wretched he transformed them to wholeness and health of body and soul, which clearly contradicts the ideas of Aristotle, which would imply that God would have to become something less than God and contaminate himself were he to become incarnate.

Nonetheless, despite this contradiction, from Thomas Aquinas on there is more of a tendency to stress that the Holy Spirit sanctifies good habits rather than individuals, so that the Holy Spirit could be free from the contamination that a sinful soul might leak into him. This made the relationship between humanity and the Spirit more to do with the economy of salvation than with a relationship with God. With the rise of Occamism and the gradual falling away of belief in the real existence of universal groups of things, such as habits, the Holy Spirit became evermore to resemble a system in the economic chain. In the theology of Gabriel Biel, a professor at Paris in the 1490s the work of sanctification by the spirit was reduced to turning the leaden token of human good works into the gold that was payable to God: a far cry from the spirit who dwells in our hearts to make us cry Abba, Father.

The Reformation reversed some of this process, but failed to reject the central philosophical developments that had led to this change, in fact in many ways they re-enforced the Aristotelian assumptions that had changed philosophy. For Luther there could be no possibility that the Holy Spirit actually dwelt in the human soul and moved it, for him there had to be a clear divide so that humans were absolutely sinful and absolutely righteous all at once. The Holy Spirit could not move the will of man in relationship toward the divine for this would make God’s purpose mixed up with those of humanity. Thus the Spirit became an imputed thing, something that covered the human being, not something that dwelt in humanity.

Yet at another level the Reformation was successful in reviving an image of the Holy Spirit as relational and not simply to do with the economy of salvation. To Luther, and to Calvin and Bucer, the Spirit was that which consoled the conscience. Even if the Spirit thus became divorced from human action, it became a vital part of human reflection, what we might call spirituality. His consolation gave Christians strength and conviction, a lively faith. The sacraments once again became vital in that they like the preaching of God’s word were things that could quicken the conscience to repentance and true faith, so that alongside an outward act true faith could be imparted.

This achievement was possibly the greatest of all that the Reformers did: economics was replaced with relationship. This achievement was, however, the most vulnerable, and this was demonstrated in their life times by the various radical reformers. If the Spirit was about consolation and this could be found in a number of sources, many of which were simply about private thoughts, then a road was opened to the spirit being pared away from the life of the church, its sacraments, and even scripture which had been so precious to them all. The Spirit could very easily become the spirit of self reliance of Defoe’s Crusoe stuck in the lonely island of his mind.

This was indeed where history took us. Enlightenment thinking tended to radicalise the position of the Reformers. With the new emphasis laid on the philosophy of the immanent ideals formed by the human mind rather than the externals of life, it should be unsurprising that much of the magisterial reformers’ views on lively faith being imputed to the human and imparted to his conscience through word and sacrament gradually diminished in favour of a purely experiential approach. If what could be known is what could be internally verified by the mind then the experience of faith in the conscience, regardless of outward act.

With the various academic attempts to breakdown and reformulate the doctrines of the church, the Trinity often all but disappeared along with an emphasis on incarnation and atonement, and thus the Holy Spirit similarly suffered. In many modern accounts of theology the spirit can seem merely a force of the monad creator God which allows us to know that he cares about us. The Spirit could in this context, one in which there is no real doctrine of sin or justification, could easily be ignored in favour of more pressing concerns such as morality and rights.

Recently there has been an upsurge of interest in the Spirit. Various types of charismatic forms have sprung up attempting to reclaim something of our doctrinal past. Some groups speak of experiences of the spirit in lively worship, for others it is found quietly contemplating with candles or music. Both have some point. However, we should be aware that if our doctrine of the spirit is based purely upon our own experience then it is unlikely to prove enduring. What if we do not feel the Spirit at times? How is this experience of the Spirit to be tested? How do we know that this is indeed the Sprit of Christ and not some fond invention of our own hearts? How do we norm these experiences in the life of the church and in scripture?

In our post-modern context, one in which we can clearly see that the human mind is not as transcendent as our forebears thought it was, how can we as church engage with the Spirit? What should Christians do with Pentecost now?

Possibly it is time to re-root ourselves in the dogmatic tradition of the church and give to the Holy Spirit his proper role. St Paul tells us that it is the Spirit that drives out fear and allows us to cry ‘Abba Father.’ We need to think less of a spirit who is merely about our own private thoughts as a pleasant sensation, and rather more of him who effects our salvation in Christ.

Christians need to grasp that the Holy Spirit, the comforter, is the Spirit that is sent by Christ upon his church and to each one within that church. This should make us aware of two things.

Firstly, the spirit cannot be severed from Christ. If Christ sends his spirit on the church it is because the church is his body. The work of the spirit therefore cannot be divided off from Christ’s work; it is to make effective the preaching of the gospel of the kingdom; the gospel that was manifest in the person of Christ.

The spirit is that which mediates Christ’s presence to us so that we can hear and appropriate the preached word of scripture, and is that which mediates Christ to us in Baptism and the Eucharist. The Spirit is more than just a fuzzy feeling; he gives himself to us with concrete and trustworthy signs, so that we may see the presence of Christ amongst us and thus live a life of holiness.

Secondly, because it is the Spirit of God, the Spirit that was manifest at Christ’s baptism, it is the same spirit that is imparted into the body of Christ and to each believer. The disciples had the spirit given to them as a corporate body and individually, and it is wrong to privilege one of these facets above the other: Christ must present himself to each believer, as each believer attempts to present Christ to the world. Thus the work of the spirit cannot be a just private thought for it is something that illumines the whole body of the church.

We should pray for the Spirit to come amongst us as God’s church, to hallow us in Christ, so that through our Spirit of adoption we may have the will, the freedom and the confidence to be God’s children.

The Beheading of St John the Baptist

Today we remember the witness of St John the Baptist.

Summer and pilgrimage

Summer is a time for journeys. Many of us will have been on holiday, some on long trips, and others of us will have been on day trips to the seaside. Even those of us who simply take a stroll in Bute Park are still going on a journey of sorts. These journeys, more than the daily route to work, are useful in that  they provide relaxation and rest away from our work: they are a vital time for reflection.

Traditionally summer was a time of Pilgrimage. Many medieval folk travelled long distances to go to the shrines of St Edmund in Suffolk, St Thomas Becket at Canterbury, and Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk. Although the reformers destroyed the shrines in the late 1530s, pilgrimage (as a time for reflection and peace) has a great deal to teach us about Christian life.

Pilgrimage is about a journey that takes us away from our everyday life, and re-centres our life in a very different activity. A glance at Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales will tell you a great deal about pilgrims stopping their everyday activities and reflecting on the nature of life. Whilst undoubtedly Chaucer’s pilgrims were somewhat less than serious about their theological reflections, there is an attempt by each actor to say something about the nature of life. Hopefully our reflections this summer are equally fun, but rather more edifying than those of Chaucer’s pilgrims.

Yet, perhaps more importantly for us as church, pilgrimage and journey tell us about our life together: pilgrimage is a journey as community. Church life should reflect the best aspects of the pilgrimage tradition: we as a community stride out along the path of history towards our celestial destination. Whilst we may have rest stops along the way, it is our destination that is our true home, and we cannot simply stop the journey and remain where we are, but we must have the courage to learn from our past experiences and be brave enough to face the future challenges that lie ahead.

To this task, like Chaucer’s pilgrims, we all bring ourselves, our stories, and our talents. All of us bring something to the community as we journey on. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims we are all challenged to contribute to the ongoing story.

Saints

One is often asked what it means to be a saint. Certainly this seems a good question to be asking in a generation where there is only a very basic idea of what such a person might be like. Very often the term might conjure up in the popular imagination pictures of stained glass or images in church, or on the other hand it might point to someone who is regarded as doing ‘good’ (i.e. moral) things.

At one level we can all engage with this idea of doing good, even if we find Victorian images of stern and pasty looking saints rather less appealing. Yet there is always the difficulty that we leave the idea of saints on the Victorian level of the fierce moral exemplar: the ‘do gooder’ of civilised society. The problems with this view are fairly manifest: many of those we remember as saints did not always lead immaculate lives in the eyes of modern secular morality (e.g. the political bishops of Alexandria such as St Cyril and St Athanasius). Canonisation in fact rarely followed the priorities of the modern good as defined by secular society: some saints founded places of prayer, others wrote great theological tomes Often their concern was rather more for dogmatic truth than for purely ethical causes.

What then are we to do with the saints? What are they about? The answer to those questions lies outside the bounds of simply moral acts as defined by secular society. What makes a saint is that, as their name suggests, they are sanctified. To be sanctified is to be one who is made holy by God; someone God has chosen to take to himself to be holy. In those we remember as canonized saints this choice was keenly felt in their lives, and others have since borne witness to the tremendous things that the spirit of God moving within them enabled them to do. Those things included confessing Christ, even though such witness meant painful torture and execution, the ability to have great theological insight, and the ability to move other to the worship of God in prayer.

Saints did do good, but Christians mean something more by this than the secular good. For Christians, the good is about that which is of God: it is the act that is motivated by love of Him and bears witness to His goodness. Doing good is therefore about true charity: it is a manifestation of the pure and holy love of God.

The lives of saints should therefore rightly remind us that we are called with the same spirit to aspire to confess our faith, think about our faith, and pray our faith. The saints should give us hope that we do not struggle on alone, but are united in the one spirit with those that have gone before us in the fight.

One of the great tragedies of modern Christianity is that it is so often wrapped up in the business of individual faith that the very important corporate dimension of faith is lost. All too often we hear of ‘my heaven’ in popular speech, but in reality there is only one heaven, and its nature is decided by God alone. To come to the Kingdom of Heaven will necessarily involve not only having eternal bliss, but also being placed into the communion of the saved.

Saints should remind us that we are not alone in our struggles in this life, nor indeed is ours a solitary eternity to come. We can always join our voices to the whole assembly of heaven, and ask God to be with us and help us.

Happy feast of St Augustine of Hippo

Today we celebrate the feast of the greatest western theologian.

Hymns

Have you ever paused to ask the question ‘What part of the service gives most meaning to the church’s year and to our lives?’ Whilst there are some clerics who may think that it is the sermon, and others that would say it is the liturgy, I would say that the single most memorable feature of worship probably lies elsewhere.

St Augustine of Hippo said that ‘He who sings prays twice’, and there is a great deal of truth in this aphorism. The words we sing are given a certain meaning by the tone of the musical accompaniment, and often the tunes are so memorable that the words remain with us throughout our lives. Singing was very much part of the worship of the Old Testament temple, and the psalter is evidence of the great range of thought and emotions that human beings can direct towards God. This tradition continued into the early and medieval church: the psalter was memorised through tunes originating in Palestine, which developed into plainsong as we know it, and many of the saints of the church composed hymns to mark the seasons and festivals of the year.

It was with the Reformation that a great change came. Apart from worship in the cathedrals, where polyphony and chant continued, in most parishes the old Latin hymns vanished along with chant, and the only music known was that of metrical psalms to Sternhold and Hopkins, and later Tate and Brady. Whilst many congregations welcomed the ability to join in the new vernacular psalms in English in the 1560s, by the 1750s the gloss had gone, and the hymns of the Methodist movement drew a large number of people away from the Church of England.

It is odd to think that Anglicans lived without hymns for 250 years between 1560 and 1810. Just think of how drab the liturgical year would be without carols for Advent and Christmas, or the joyous Alleluias at Easter, yet that was precisely the situation for most churchgoers at the beginning of the nineteenth century: no liturgical colour, and no differentiation of music (only about twenty hymns were sung in Anglican church before the 1820s). Fortunately that situation was remedied by the Victorians, who composed large numbers of hymns even though they had to overcome a great deal of prejudice against hymns because they were thought by many to be vulgar, effeminate and emotional, and a mark of non-conformity.

Yet somehow hymns suddenly took off in the 1820s. Whilst some of the output of Isaac Watts and the Wesleys was adopted by the church, the main source of hymns was Victorian composers: clerical and lay, men and women, all wanted to write hymns. Evangelical clergy sought to promote hymns that spoke of a relationship with God, high churchmen (such as J.M. Neale) provided translations of ancient hymns to speak of how the Church of England was a Catholic church, and many lay people loved them because of the order and relevance they brought to worship. Indeed, hymns have been described by Ian Bradley as the soap operas of the Victorian period: it was through this medium that the great debates of the age were aired in public.

By the 1860s west end gallery band musicians and their metrical psalms were quickly being replaced by pipe organs and surpliced choirs singing the new Hymns Ancient and Modern. Over the next forty years this hymnal would standardise tunes and words like no other, whilst providing a broad range of high and low church hymns. Anglican worship, as we know it now, was born.

Croeso

Welcome to my new blog on which I hope to give a few theological reflections on matters related to Christianity, Anglicanism and ministry.

I very much hope that you will enjoy reading this blog.