Audio recordings of the Papers given by three more of our principal speakers at the 2017 Conference can be accessed below: The Papers given were: The Public Authority of the Church in the Cranmerian Tradition, by Dr. Joan O’Donovan, University of Edinburgh Incarnational Reading: A Tractarian View of the Authority of Scripture by The Revd. Dr. George Westhaver, Principal of Pusey House, Oxford “The Holy Scriptures, or … [Read more...]
The Fear of the Lord
Now therefore stand and see this great thing, which the Lord will do before your eyes. Is it not wheat harvest to day? I will call unto the Lord, and he shall send thunder and rain; that ye may perceive and see that your wickedness is great, which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking you a king. So Samuel called unto the Lord; and the Lord sent thunder and rain that day: and all the people greatly feared the Lord and Samuel. And all the people said unto Samuel, Pray … [Read more...]
Ascension I 2015
Christ's Ascension is therefore also our own, upon the glory of the Head rests the hope of the body. On this holy day, we have received not only the assurance of entering into possession of eternal glory, but we have already entered into the heights of heaven with Christ Jesus. (Leo, Sermon 1 De Ascensione Domini c. iv) This is the first Sunday after the Ascension. We find ourselves situated between our Lord's Ascension back to the Father and the coming of … [Read more...]
The Fall…
The author of Genesis does not always provide the literal details of the creation he describes. This is because he assumes that his readers are rational creatures who analyze and study the material he provides. From their contemplation of the text they are meant to elicit the rational truth that lurks necessarily beneath its surface. One such example of this process can be found in the description of man’s creation. There we seem to find scarce few details of man’s nature in relation to nature … [Read more...]
Easter I
As my Father has sent me, so send I you. (St. John xx. 21) You and I have just emerged from a rigorous Holy Week and Easter, when we tried to walk with Jesus Christ through his Passion and into His Resurrection. Here are my prayers. I pray that we have striven to move from death into new life. First we meditated upon the external and visible events that comprised the last days of our Lord Jesus Christ. They were contemplated with a view to see exactly what happened. And second, … [Read more...]
Quinquagesima’s Love
St. Paul uses a word for love rarely employed among his contemporaries. It seems as if he carefully avoided any of those terms, and they were many, which make it easy to associate the supreme virtue with desires which spend themselves in their own satisfactions, and through instinctive in human nature, are often degraded by man's perversity. English people have never found a word entirely equivalent to St. Paul's term. Our word love stands for a wide range of feeling. It may represent merely … [Read more...]
Holy Communion
Countless debates have raged in the last 500 years over the nature and meaning of the Holy Communion, Lord’s Supper, or The Mass –call it what you will. Richard Hooker reminds us that the point or purpose of the Sacrament is to come into Communion with Jesus Christ and to feed on Him spiritually. (Laws....II.) To feed on him spiritually comes after we have said Yes to His desire to unite with us. What is clear is that Jesus Christ -the Way, the Truth and the Life, desires to live with us and in … [Read more...]
Discovering the Anglican Way: The Homilies
Anglicans have traditionally found their identity in the Anglican formularies - the Elizabethan Book of Homilies, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the 1662 Ordinal, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. These formularies contain the coherent theology of Anglicanism. Unfortunately, the study of these formularies largely has disappeared, as congregations have attempted to place their “Anglican” identity in various theological movements or in their own experiences. While many people are still somewhat … [Read more...]
Praising the Book of Common Prayer for its Literary Style
THE SUMMER 2014 ISSUE of the Anglican Way magazine has hit the press, and this issue's theme is poetry, liturgy, and the relationship of aesthetics to doctrine. Included in this issue is Joan O'Donovan's review of Alan Jacobs' book The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. The Rev. Gavin Dunbar has discussed the meaning of sola scriptura, correcting contemporary misinterpretations and setting the term within its historical context. Bill Murchison has contributed the second part to his tale of … [Read more...]
The Form and Structure of the Collect
By Peter Bayer The Collect is one of the oldest and most universal forms of prayer in the church. The Roman liturgy uses three prayers of the form, the Collect, Secret (in preparation for communion), and the Postcommunion. These prayers generally change for each Sunday and major holy day. They are generally very ancient. One finds the same Collects in both Roman and Anglican liturgies; although in the Book of Common Prayer there are special collects which Cranmer composed for Advent and Ash … [Read more...]
The Book of Common Prayer is Still a Big Deal
In Christianity Today, Alan Jacobs describes the enduring influence of the BCP and its importance to evangelical Christians: The Book of Common Prayer is nearly 500 years old. Does it still make a difference for how we worship today? I suppose that would depend on who you mean by "we"—there are millions of Christians worshipping in ways unaffected by the BCP, except insofar as they share common roots in Jewish and early Christian worship. But the reach of the BCP is more extensive than one … [Read more...]
Why Worship?
The Rev. Gavin G. Dunbar The following piece is taken from the Lenten Parish Papers of St. John's Church, Savannah, GA. After the healing of ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19) from the disease that made them outcasts to Israel, one of them came back to Jesus, "and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks". He is a Samaritan - not only an outsider but also a heretic. Jesus responds with a question: "Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine? … [Read more...]
Ritual and Worship
Allison Steinberg We moderns have a positive fear of ritual. I find myself naturally in that category, but I still haven’t quite figured out the reasoning behind it. Perhaps there isn’t any reasoning at all. But it does have to do with the Enlightenment. Because we suspect ritual, we as modern Christians have relegated it to the realm of “dangerous,” “heterodox,” or “prideful,” especially when we find ritual in worship. Much safer, we say, to be spontaneous, heartfelt: REAL. So we end up with … [Read more...]
Repentance in the Daily Office
Jordan Lavender, from The Hackney Hub, makes the case for Absolution in the 1662 BCP. Morning and Evening Prayer begin with repentance for sin. Lavender writes: “The daily services of Morning and Evening Prayer, as shaped by Archbishop Cranmer, reflect the biblical teaching of repentance, right from the start. As the reader will already know, Morning and Evening Prayer begin with a Scriptural sentence, in the original Prayer Book, these were penitential sentences, to be read before the … [Read more...]
Bishop, Book, and Church: GAFCON and the Quest for Anglican Catholicity
Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliffe Prelacy, Episcopacy, and Conciliarity are manifestly foundational to the project that is GAFCON. The latest manifestation of this powerful movement in the contemporary Anglican Communion, held in Nairobi in October, made this quite clear in its actions if perhaps less immediately in its words – but then everyone knows which of these speak louder. The Nairobi gathering was commonly referred to as GAFCON II, and although there was a meeting last year in London, … [Read more...]