The following is my Anglicanism paper (final).  My professor for the class was Dr. Charles Erlandson, a PhD graduate from Lancaster University in England and assistant rector at Good Shepherd REC.  Fr. Erlandson also hosts “Give Us This Day”, a daily devotional blog and book.  The topic of the paper is a fascinating one for me, as part of my ancestry is Celtic.  It is a topic that will occupy my interest and time in the years to come.

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Anglicanism

Dr. Charles Erlandson * Fall 2011 * Nancy Jones

 A Thread Runs Through It:
The Celtic Nature of Anglicanism

 Introduction

There is a thread that runs through Anglicanism, one that has done so from the earliest days of Christendom in the British Isles.  It is what some would term blood memory[1]—a corporate (or tribal) understanding of the way in which the Anglican life is to be lived out.  For many, the thread is a mere wisp of smoke—a sensory echo that one is not fully aware of yet will automatically respond to when coming into contact with it.  Others are a bit more aware and, though not actively seeking the thread, acknowledge it while at the same time being unable to put a name to it.  Still others, a small minority, are keenly aware of this thread, not only recognizing it for what it is and naming it rightly, they are deliberate in their efforts to seek it out and maintain it.  This group knows that thread to be the Celtic nature of Anglicanism—an elusive connection to the earliest of our Anglican heritage.

It is this elusive connection to which we now turn, attempting to discern its flavor and flow that entices us like a sweet-smelling aroma; endeavoring to seek out the warp and woof of that single thread, the strands of which, three cord strong,[2] ever bind us one to another—by family, by community, by church, by faith.

Background

In order to understand the Celtic nature of Anglicanism one must understand from whence it came.  That presents a bit of difficulty in that the earliest beginnings of Christianity on the British Isles (and hence Anglicanism) are lost to the mists of time.  There is long-standing anecdotal evidence that Joseph of Arimathea and others settled in what is now known as Glastonbury[3] in southern England.  There are also stories that both St. Peter and St. Paul visited the “Western Isles” during their missionary journeys, although no archeological evidence currently exists to support this theory.

Here is what is known: The first missionary bishop to Britain was probably Aristobulos, brother of the Apostle Barnabas (and some say father-in-law to St. Peter) and numbered among the seventy sent out by Jesus.[4]  Certain rites and customs of the early British Church were asserted to have come from Jerusalem or Ephesus.[5]  There is the statement attributed to Gildas, a 6^th century Briton monk: “We certainly know that Christ the True Sun, afforded his light, the knowledge of His precepts, to our island in the last year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar [AD 37].”[6]  We may also presume that there were Christians among the Romans (the soldiers and the people who accompanied them) who conquered Britain beginning in AD 43.  All of these provide a convincing argument to the arrival of Christianity on the British Isles well within the early first century.

What is also known is that several hundred years before the Benedictine monk, Augustine landed at Kent, there were Briton bishops present at the Council of Arles in AD 314, and several other councils as well.  Further, in the Middle Ages at least two councils (Pisa in 1471 and Constance in 1419) affirmed that the British Church (the church before Augustine, i.e., the Celtic Church) was, as noted by Sabellius, “the first nation that proclaimed [Christianity] as their religion, and called itself Christian after Christ.”[7]

The years leading up to Augustine’s arrival on the shores of Britain, however, were dark and egregious for the Celtic Britons and their church, for no sooner had the Roman armies withdrawn from the island (circa AD 409) then Britain was invaded and over-run by the Saxons, Angles and Jutes.  For the next hundred years and more these invaders from the north dedicated themselves to the complete destruction of all that the Britons had known—homes, towns, people, and language.[8]  The destruction was as thorough as it was merciless, and nowhere was it more evident than with the Celtic Church and her people.  Such was the vehemence with which the northern invaders attacked the churches and monasteries in Briton that, when all was said and done, there was nothing left but a remnant of Christian Britons seeking refuge in the wilds of Wales and Scotland.[9]

Thus, when Augustine arrived in 597 on the shores of Kent, the Kentish people to whom he preached were not the indigenous Celtic Britons but the descendants of their invaders and destroyers.  Augustine only first met with the bishops of the Celtic Church in 602; it was not a fruitful meeting.  The two threads—Celtic and Roman—would from that point forward co-exist in an uneasy truce[10] until the Synod of Whitby in 664 when the Roman Church gained supremacy.  The Celtic Church and all that she was, however, did not go quietly into that good night, for it is the Celtic thread that runs strongest and true—bright shining—through Anglicanism as we shall see.

The Celts

The people who came to be known as the Celts arrived in the British Isles by way of Gaul, a territory that covered a large portion of Spain, France, and central Europe, including the European side of the Black Sea region.  The Celts were in turn described by their contemporaries as “energetic, talkative, sociable, creative, and intelligent; also proud, warlike, unstable, and vain.”[11]  They were known to live life to its fullest and to not do anything by half measures.  As Chant points out, “Restraint and moderation were not virtues which they prized greatly.”  Their vanity was expressed most visibly in their appearance; other nations were quick to note the personal fastidiousness of the Celts, even to the poorest among them.[12]   Chant continues:

Most of their garments were wool or linen, but they wore finer materials when they could, … Colours were as bright as possible, … and they were fond of combining them in checks or plaids.

The most enduring evidence, however, of the Celtic love of finery is to be found in the jewelry and personal items that have survived them.  Mirrors, caskets, cups, torcs, brooches, and rings, all made from bronze, gold or silver and all adorned with precious and semi-precious gems.  Celtic design work—mostly abstract though sometimes stylized animals or faces—was added wherever there was space.  Yet it was the enamel work, which the Celts excelled in, that “most often supplied the touches of brilliant colour so dear to them.”[13]

The Celts were a tribal society, their interdependence uniting them closely within their clans and providing value to each individual—women were equal to men, for example, and children had legal rights.[14]  Theirs was not a society based in a written language, however, but a verbal one.  They attached great importance to the spoken word, so much so that “to be spoken ill of was social death…In the Celtic context, the value of a man’s word, his honour, and his life, were all equal.”[15]

At least two groups—the Bard and the Druid—made up the learned class of Celts.  Both kept the law and history of their people for each successive generation.  Of the druids, “Caesar says that they officiated at the sacrifices, and that they were seers and judges in disputes.”[16]  Indeed, the druid was a “man of art,” well-known for his medical skill, ranking as high as the Celtic nobility; the intellectual of his time.  He was a teacher, philosopher, artist, and doctor.

Druids known as “augures” oversaw sacrifices and prophesied.  The pre-Christian Celtic religion was an active, important part of the Celtic life, with their gods mainly symbolized as hunters or animals.  The Celts were deeply spiritual, believing in an afterlife which was “like Earth but better.  There was no sickness or calamity and all were beautiful.  The sun always shined, birds always sang, and food and drink appeared in plenty as if by magic.”[17]  The druids proper were well-versed in law and philosophy, and would hold court once a year to judge disputes between tribes and individuals, which decisions were always final.[18]  They were also the teachers of the tribe, and large numbers of young men, including sons of the Celtic nobility, came to be taught by them.[19]

The Celtic bard, while having some of the same functions as the druid, was “the keeper of the soul of the people, a ‘poet-priest’.”  The bard was the guardian of the Celtic people’s rituals, history, and genealogy, all of which defined their identity and were important in a communal society.  Story-telling and poetry were at the very heart of Celtic life, an important ritual filled with the power to bless and protect, and forbidden to be written down.  Thus, the Celtic bard, like the druid, was highly trained, possessing an uncannily accurate memory (there being no written language), which served him well with his sophisticated audience who were “members of the most verbally alive culture there has ever been, [with] skills of ear and mind lost to literate people.”[20]

The Celtic Church

Although pushed to the corners of the island by the northern invaders, the Celtic Church, by the time of Augustine’s arrival, was not some mere backwater ragtag group of unorganized Christians; no indeed.  While leaving Britain to the invaders,[21] the Celtic Church, its influence and teachings, instead spread far and wide through Ireland, Scotland, and across the Channel into Gaul and beyond.  Their monasteries were renowned centers of learning, and hopeful students traveled great distances to live and learn from their monks, Patrick, Columba, Aidan, and Columban by name, in their monasteries of Iona, Lindisfarne, and Luxeuil.  The Celtic Church was orthodox in faith, its services were chanted; it had its own liturgy and customs, and a regularly ordained Episcopate that traced its authority to the Apostles.[22]

The Celtic Thread in Wales.  With the complete annihilation of the Celtic Church in Britain, the remnant that remained found refuge and renewed purpose in the Welsh lands of the west.  There the Celtic Church, for good or ill, was cut off from—and perhaps for a time completely forgotten by—the rest of Christendom.  Rome during this time had her own hands full trying to protect herself from the invading Atilla and his Huns.[23]

Building on their way of life prior to the invasion from the north the Celtic Church in Wales set about establishing religious and educational communities among the Welsh tribes.[24]  Societies were established under religious vows, and the holy houses came to be inhabited by hundreds upon thousands of monks, students, and other laity.  One holy house “inhabited, we are told, by 965 monks, 300 of whom, being illiterate, cultivated the fields; 300 fulfilled literary work in the interior of the house; and the 365 others celebrated divine service without intermission.”  The great monastery of Llancarvan, founded by St. Cardoc, became a famous religious and literary school and, for a long period of time, “the favorite school for the sons of British chiefs.”[25]  From these great houses, Celtic Christianity spread to neighboring Ireland before skipping over into Scotland and beyond and then returning, finally, to Britain.

The Celtic Thread in Ireland.  In religious history, Ireland stands out as the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.  Until the time of Elizabeth I, there were no Irish martyrs in Ireland.[26]  This perhaps can be attributed to the Celts themselves and their own pre-Christian religious beliefs, which “knew no such thing as intolerance and persecution.”[27]  Indeed the foundational tenet of their pagan belief was truth against the world, which echoed what the Apostle Paul wrote in his second letter to the Corinthians, “For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.”[28]  It was similarities such as this as well as their reverence for the number three[29] that allowed such a rapid and fluid acceptance of the Christian faith as the true faith within the Celtic tribes.

The “universal” religion of the pre-Christian Celts, if one can say there actually was one, was clearly a religion of nature—a belief in the holiness of the physical world coupled with a belief in the immorality of the soul.[30]  Indeed, there are some Celtic celebrations which exhibit startling characteristics to certain Old Testament Christian feasts.  For example, elements found in the institution of the Passover[31] may also be found in the Celtic celebration of Samhain.[32]

Like restraint and moderation mentioned briefly above, asceticism was not a thing normally associated with the Celtic people; they were a live-life-to-the-fullest, energetic, and zealous people.  Yet when the Celts were introduced to Christianity and it became important to the life of the Church, it is not surprising to learn that those who became Christian adopted the life and teachings of the monks who converted them and did so “with typical energy, and became extremely ascetic.”  Chant continues: “Few saints were so unworldly as the Celtic saints; they indulged in self-denial, as in all else, to glorious excess.”[33]

Ireland, for all intents and purposes, was the last outpost of a purely Celtic people.  It was a country “free from Roman influences, Roman garrisons, Roman development.  Latin was an unknown tongue there before the fifth century, and the gods of Greece and Rome had never been heard of in the Celtic island.”[34]  The Celtic tribal life, for example, continued there with little change or modifications from the earliest days on the plains near the Black Sea.  As is known, St. Patrick, a North Briton, was the first to bring Christianity to Ireland.  Yet it was a Christianity devoid of Romanism, “a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the Irish scene.”[35]

It was the passion and energy of the Celts that gave to Christianity in Ireland a force never before known.  “It threw around it something of the grace, the witchery, the romance of the Irish temper.  It coloured even its tenderness with the peculiar pathos of the Celt.”[36]  It was the tribal nature of the Celts which allowed Patrick to convert whole clans of the Irish; for how the chief went so went the clan.  It further allowed Patrick and his followers to “plant in every tribe, churches, schools, and religious communities” which grew into the vast monasteries and schools that soon became “the wonder and admiration of western Christendom.”[37]  As Spence notes:

But the principal work outside the solemn, constantly-recurring duty of prayer and praise, was literary work of various kinds.  Indeed, the special raison d’etre of an Irish monastery of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries was writing books, copying books, illuminating books; the study of Holy Scripture and theology; and above all, teaching and instructing the young of many lands.[38]

It is also from the great houses of monasticism in Ireland that “the religion of the Crucified was re-introduced into the pagan Britain of the Anglo-Saxons.”[39]

The Celtic Thread in Scotland.  The Celtic Church, through the work of the Irish monks and their monasteries, soon found its way to the barren lands of the Picts in Scotland.  It was here that an Irishman by the name of Columba founded what would become one of the greatest houses of learning and monasticism at that time—Iona.  Columba has been described as “tall, broad, vigorous, tempestuous, with a voice of thunder, he could strike terror into the heart of any who opposed him.”[40]  He was:

A typical Irishman, vehement, irresistible: hear him curse a niggardly rich man or bless the heifers of a poor peasant; see him follow a robber who had plundered a friend, cursing the wretch to his destruction, following him to the water’s edge, wading up to the knees in the clear, green sea-water, with both hands raised to heaven.[41]

A study in contrasts with the gift for gab; typically Irish, quintessentially Celt; such was Columba.

The monastery Columba founded at Iona “was hugely successful, and played a crucial role in the conversion to Christianity of the Picts of present-day Scotland in the late 6th century and of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria in 635. A large number of satellite institutions were founded, and Iona became the centre of one of the most important monastic systems in Great Britain and Ireland.”[42]  The Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript, is thought to have been begun on Iona toward the end of the eighth century, as were the first of the large stone crosses, with their interlocking designs so typically Celtic in nature, which were erected around that time as well.

The Celtic Thread Returns to Britain.  Like Iona, the monks of Lindisfarne were known for their manuscript work; the Lindisfarne Gospels is a well-known work of illuminated manuscript from that time.  And it was a monk from Lindisfarne, a student of Columba at Iona, who won over the long-hated invaders of the north, and whose students in turn, brought Christianity to the conquered areas of Mercia and East and Middle England.  Celtic Christianity had returned home.

Lindisfarne was one of Iona’s satellite institutions, which was founded by St. Aidan, a student of Columba, who was sent from Iona to Northumbria at the behest of its king, Oswald, a Christian convert, to help educate and train his people in the true faith.  Where Paulinus, missionary bishop to Northumbria from the Roman Church, had failed ten years before, the patient work of the Celtic Aidan and his monks eventually won over the descendants of those long-ago invaders, the Angles.  Like his teacher, Columba before him, Aidan related well to the people on their level, unlike the missionaries of the Roman Church, who were more likely to demand obedience than nurture devotion.  In the same vein as the great St. Patrick, who was likened to the Apostle Paul, Aidan became all things to all men.  In attempting to explain the secret of the success of these Celtic evangelists, Spence writes:

[They] possessed in a strange degree, never possessed since, the magic key of hearts.  In all lands their terrible austerities, their life-long asceticism, their deep, intense sympathy with men, and with those very passions and vices which they cursed with awful curses, but at the same time wept over with the bitterest of tears; all this won impulsive men in that wild and lawless time, … Teachers like Aidan and Columba could see beauty in the fiercest and most cruel barbarian, and had the rare power of evoking that spirit of tenderness and love which ever lurks even in the darkest and most abandoned hearts.[43]

It was this Celtic charm of manner, zeal, and devotion to piety, which won the Northumbrians and the rest of the descendants of those long-ago invaders to Christ.

The Celtic Thread on the Continent.  One of St. Patrick’s contemporaries, St. Bridget, founded the first double monastery (monks and nuns) in Kildare, which became the prototype for double monasteries that flourished later in Anglo-Saxon England and on the Continent and were of such great influence during their time.  But it was another Irishman, with a name very similar to Columba’s, who brought the Christianity of the Celtic Church and the monasteries of the Irish to the Continent.  That Irishman was Columban.  During his time on the Continent, Columban was not unknown to the Roman Church.  Some of his letters to various Roman bishops and pontiffs survive and showcase his quick wit and turn of phrase, so implicitly Celtic in nature.[44]

It is said that some mysterious impulse urged Columban to leave the confines of the monastery at Bangor in Ulster (Ireland), his home for 25 years, and seek out a new home and larger work in a distant land.  Eventually, Columban and twelve other monks found their way to the base of the Vosges Mountains in the region known today as Alsace-Lorraine (located near the German border).  Their first settlement soon led to a second one, which was located among the ruins of a Roman town and became known as the Irish monastery of Luxeuil.  A third monastery followed; this one at a place called Fontaines.  As Spence relates, “Continued reinforcements from the great Irish monasteries…enabled Columban to make fresh, and ever fresh, settlements.”[45]  From these sprang up—in short order—a network of monasteries, extending from the Vosges Mountains south to the lakes of Geneva and Zurich, north to the great North Sea, and northwestward to the channel that separated Columban from his homeland.  Spence continues:

Many of the most famous monasteries of central and northern Europe, which played so great a part in medieval history for several eventful centuries, were founded by Columban and his companions.  They were dotted over western Germany, Switzerland, France, and the Low Countries; not a few of those great religious houses where the lamp of religion and learning was kept brightly burning during several hundred stormy years of wars and confusion and trouble, were the after-fruits of the prayers and labours of Columban and his noble band of workers.[46]

Thus it was that the Roman Church owed the continued existence of Christianity in the West to the Celtic Church, that backwater ragtag group of unorganized Christians, which Gregory and Augustine once worked so hard to put down.  It was the Celtic Church, through the monks and monasteries of Iona, Lindisfarne, and the monasteries of Columban which held safely within her walls the Christian books, teachings, and writings during those years known as the Dark Ages.  Notes Cahill, “Latin literature would almost surely have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down.  Beyond that, there would have perished in the west not only literacy but all the habits of mind that encourage thought.”[47]

Celtic Threads in Anglicanism Today

One perhaps must ask at this point, if the Celtic Church had such great influence and success in those early centuries, why is there only the influence of the Roman Church that is perceived as remaining within Christianity generally today and Anglicanism specifically?  There is no one answer to that question.  One might respond as King Oswiu did at Whitby when Wilfrid, a former student of Aidan and then Bishop of Lindisfarne, acknowledged that it was St. Peter who held the keys to heaven:

I think, like you, he is the gate porter of heaven. I will not dare to oppose him. I will obey him in all things, lest when I reach the doors of heaven, those doors open not to me if I am the enemy of the one who carries the keys.[48]

One might also say that the Celtic Church and the Celtic people generally never overcame their decimation at the hands of the Angles and Saxons, with later plagues and another invasion by the Vikings in the 9^th century merely completing the work.  There also would be no error in concluding that the Roman Church was too well-disciplined and too well-financed to stand against and succeed.  All of these would be true; and yet.

There are monasteries still today that were established long ago by the Celtic Church.  The habit of private confession—begun by the Celtic Church[49]—was adopted by the Roman Church as its own and is still in use today by it.  The missionary zeal of the Celtic Church can still be found in today’s evangelical churches, many of which can trace their roots back to the Church of England and through her to those long ago Celtic monks.  Indeed, the Anglican Communion would not exist today were it not for the missionaries who were sent out by the Church of England beginning in the 17^th century with the colonists in America and the West Indies and later expanding to West Africa, China, India, and Japan as the British Empire grew.

Within Anglicanism itself the passions and nuances of the old Celtic Church can still be found.  For instance, while we may not be able to state with certainty what they might be, we can infer from instructions given to Augustine by Gregory that certain customs of the Celtic Church were carried over and into the newly evangelized “church of the English” and may thus still be in practice today.[50]  We see the work of the monks of Iona and Lindisfarne in the symbols and designs found on Anglican vestments, Communion ware, altar crosses, and processional crosses, which harken back to the design work and finery of the early Celtic people.[51]  We hear the power and poetry of the words of Patrick, Columba, and Aidan in hymns such as the Lorica, Be Thou My Vision, and Jesus, Lover of My Soul, which harken back to the Celtic bards and their stories and poetry; and we are most especially moved by these hymns when they are played as intended, on the instruments of the Celts from long ago: the tin whistle, harp, tambor, and reed pipe.

Yet what of those things Celtic in nature which have been lost or so buried that they are unrecognizable in Anglicanism today?  Are we able, with what little information we have been able to glean from history, to discern those things, bring them forward into the light of day, and perhaps recapture and put them to use for a people who are once more quickly lapsing into paganism?

We know that the Celtic people were tribal in nature, and that this developed interdependence among the people within each clan.  We also know that each person had value—man, woman, and child—each one had certain rights accorded to them.  We learned that when St. Patrick introduced Christianity to the Celtic people of Ireland they brought it into their culture, into their clans.  Within the tribes churches, schools, and monasteries sprang up and grew.  The Celtic love of words was bridged from the verbal to the written and, combined with their eye for beauty and artistry, flourished as has not been seen since.

We also know that the pagans of their time were put off by those sent from Rome yet embraced and came to be evangelized by the Celtic monks of Iona and Lindisfarne.  Why?  Spence offers up some clues:[52]

[speaking of one of the Roman schools] …owed its inspiration entirely to Rome and Italy; …Its teachers were men trained wholly under the influence of Rome; …It rather discouraged the development of English and national thoughts.  Such policy was part of the long struggle between Romish and Celtic Christianity. [248]

[on the difference in songs] …the Engle dweller in these countries had come to love with a passionate love the songs of Caedmon in their own native tongue—songs intensely English.  There was no room in their hearts for the comparatively cold and foreign poetry of Rome and Italy. [248]

[on the difference in bishops] …he cared nothing for pomp or state.  His ideal of a great pastor was a Columba or an Aidan…not a stately bishop of Rome or of Lyons, living with all the magnificence and state of a great earthly prince…[who] from their hearts [ ] believed their Master’s cause would be better advanced by His chief servants assuming among men the ensigns of lofty rank and supreme power.  But Chad and the Celtic saints chose to do their work in a different way…by different instruments. [194]

[on the difference in evangelism] On these untutored hearts the cold and calculating, highly cultured Italians, austere and pure, but often self-seeking and proud, made but little impression.  The stateliness of their worship, their splendid organisation, their love for order and obedience, failed to touch the Northman’s heart. …The ineffable and tireless tenderness, the deep and wide human sympathy of the Irish and Scottish preachers, at once found the hearts of Engle and Saxon.  That mighty, tender love kindled by the love of the Crucified, which burned in the hearts of men like Aidan, a love which flowed over the souls of men to all that the Crucified made—beasts of the field and birds of the air—a love which claimed kinship and brotherhood with all things created, a love which understood and chose to share the lot of the poor, the weak, the wretched; this it was which comforted so many stricken souls with its boundless sympathy. [143-44]

The Celtic monks came and lived among the people to whom they ministered.  They became all things to their charges in pursuit of their souls for Christ.  They established their churches and schools and monasteries in the tribes and communities in which they lived.  They “spoke the language” of the people, not that of the noble or the elite.  They did not stand on pride or pomp or circumstance but instead toiled tenderly, diligently, and unceasingly in the field, whether that field was a plot of land or the heart of a pagan.  As Spence so rightly stated:

[They] would have naught to do with land or gold or honours.  They wanted nothing, asked for nothing, but the hearts of the men of war, to whom they told the story which they accepted themselves with a passionate belief—the story of the cross and the passion of the Christ, and His blessed work of redemption among men.[53]

To win the pagan heart today, to light such a fire as shall never be put out, Anglicanism can do no less.

A question still remains, though: how can Anglicanism accomplish this?  For guidance we turn to Martin Thornton and a small work he wrote entitled, “Rural Synthesis.”[54]  Written in 1948, Thornton makes several observations and points which are as applicable today as they were when written.  Martin first points out that there are two primary forces common to all ages: “We have the Spirit of God, dwelling within the Christian Church, and ministering to the human urge towards eternal salvation; and the force of Fertility by which all worldly life is created and sustained.”  This theme—an integral synthesis, if you will, of the transcendental and the material—Thornton argues has been divorced one from the other in our modern society.  As he notes, “…the Christian religion is not primarily a code of moral behavior or social ethics, but a body of doctrine springing from the supreme revelation of ultimate truth by that same Creator.”  Perhaps it was this difference the early pagans observed between the Roman Church and the Celtic, for as we noted above the Celtic spiritual life was inextricably intertwined with the Celtic daily life (a reality not clearly understood by those from Rome), unlike today’s modern spiritual and daily lives, which are quite independent and divorced from each other.[55]  Thornton drives the point home by pointing out the modern world’s greatest fear—the reunion of religion and life:

The rekindling of man’s fundamental desire for spiritual development, the rebirth of some conception of eternal values—of that adventurous quest for the very fullest development of personality as restored by God—which could bring about the adaptation or reunion of religion and ‘life’, presents the modern world with what is perhaps its greatest problem. …Man demands an environment which under typical modern conditions he is unable to create, for such ‘culture’ can only spring from that wholeness, or ‘holiness’, of personality, …Yet both Church and State, faced with this modern paradox, are inclining more and more towards practical, social morality—divorced from, and displacing, true spiritual progress.[56]

There is no disassociating the material from the transcendental, creation from its Creator.  The Celtic people understood this implicitly; even the pagans whom they Christianized held their religious life and daily life together in one hand, intertwined and interdependent.  Yet the separation of one’s religious (or spiritual) life from one’s daily life is not a modern contrivance; it is fundamentally a Gnostic teaching.  As Thornton notes, “[Christianity] has always rejected the Gnostic teaching on the inherent evil of matter and the isolated existence of ‘pure’ human spirit.  The problem is always sacramental, the acceptance of both sides and the quest for their proper ratio, rather than support or denunciation of any particular side.”[57]

What Thornton asserts in this and his other work, English Spirituality, is nothing less than a life lived sacramentally, the direct corollaries of which are objectiveness and humility.  As Thornton writes:  “Objective humility is the direct result of constant contact with things greater, more powerful, and more impressive than self, with not only ‘finite persons and things but the infinite and invisible God’”[58] and that the very core of the sacramental principle:

…is the indivisible interconnection between material and spirit.  To isolate the one part from the other is to insist either upon the basest materialism or upon human conception of ‘pure spirit’; to regard a rose as negative and ‘useless’ or to boast of aesthetic attainment without any use of human physical senses.[59]

This sacramental principle at work, of course, is found in the Book of Common Prayer, the guiding principles of which, if lived and practiced daily, will reunite the religious life and the daily life within the individual and ultimately within the Church.  Thornton agrees, “Thus the pastoral significance of the sacramental teaching of the Christian doctrine is of the first importance, and a Christian conception, permeated throughout a unified society, becomes an invigorating force to the benefit of all aspects within that unity; not only to individual lives but to the living heritage…”[60]

Thornton also points out that there is a dangerous tendency to accept a “one size fits all” approach when attempting to establish “social unity and Church fellowship amongst vast, scattered, and heterogeneous masses of people” endeavoring to reawaken that instinctive human spirituality “which has been largely swamped by an adverse environment.”[61]  As observed in the differences between the Roman priests and the Celtic monks, today’s priest, like the monks of old, should spend his time and energy being a priest instead of merely trying to look like one.  Driving the point home once more, we read Thornton:

…suffice it to say that the village priest helping his neighbor on an understaffed threshing tackle is very much nearer to his true vocation than when organizing some petty social function which is unnecessary, unwanted, and has no real place in the synthesized scheme of a sacramental culture.  Such a priest is not only helping his neighbor and ‘visiting’ a dozen men, but gaining some contact with ‘the village’—as opposed to the people who happen to live in it.  The ‘villagers’ of one particular generation are no more ‘the village’ than last Sunday’s congregation is ‘The Church’.[62]

This is where the rubber meets the road for Anglicanism; this is how those aspects of the Celtic nature that were so powerful in evangelizing a lost and pagan world can be recaptured and put to use once again.  Current research and surveys show that the “modern” way of “doing church”—with its mega churches, group ministries, coffee bars, and eclectic congregations—is an abject failure.  Further, it is in direct opposition to the sacramental system of life lived out through the Prayer Book.[63]  This is the “one size fits all” model about which Thornton warned; this is the “social morality” that is attempting to displace true spiritual development.  As Thornton, and this paper, concludes:

The ancient traditions of Christian Catholicity are worthy of our most humble respect, but we must ever focus our attention upon the spiritual development of a [21^st] century village.  In effect, these will largely coincide, but we must be wary of putting the cart of the shallower tradition before the essentially Catholic horse.  The one matter of supreme importance is that the real needs of the community, rather than superficial wishes, should be our first consideration; that sincere worship be placed over and above the particular whims of the individual parson.  The rural environment wants no ‘new’ religions, no sentimental humanism nor liturgical innovation.  It needs orthodox Christianity adopted to, and expressed by, its own inherent talents.[64]

 Bibliography

Holy Scripture, New King James Version.

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org.

Robert C. Harvey, To the Isles Afar Off, Four Directions Press, Rhinebeck, New York (2009).

Very Rev. H. D. M. Spence, D.D., The Church of England – A History for the People, Cassell and Company, Limited (London), Special Edition (circa 1898), Vol. 1.

Andrew Gray, D.D., The Origin & Early History of Christianity in Britain, Hoffman Printing Co., Muskogee, Oklahoma, 2001 Ed., 5^th printing.

Joy Chant, The High Kings, Bantam Books (1983).

Lawrence Jones, The Ancient Celts, English IV (1981), quoting Barry Cunliffe, The Celtic World, McGraw-Hill, St. Louis, Missouri (1979), and Duncan Norton-Taylor, The Celts, Time-Life, New York, New York (1974).

Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, New York, New York (1995).

John R. H. Moorman, A History of the Church in England, Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg—New York (1980).

Martin Thornton, English Spirituality, Cowley Publications, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1986).

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, translated by Leo Sherley-Price, Penguin Books, London, England (1990).

Martin Thornton, Rural Synthesis: The Religious Basis of Rural Culture, Skeffington and Son Ltd, London, England (1948).

 

Introduction

Hold the pickles
Hold the lettuce
Special orders won’t upset us
All we ask is that you let us
Serve it your way.
Have it your way; have it your way!

 

Many of us will remember this popular fast-food jingle from the 1970s and 1980s.  If you came of age during this time, you probably also found yourself right in the middle of what is known as the modern feminist movement.  Ideas regarding sexuality, equality, and morality came of age as you did, birthed during the 1960s’ “flower power” era of your older siblings and their friends.  The last line of our fast-food jingle offers a tantalizing insight into a basic belief of those who blazed a then-unknown trail away from the traditional values of their parents and grandparents, “have it your way.”

It is precisely that mindset—having it their way—which has led the generation known as the Baby Boomers and those who came after them away from the fundamental truths of the Bible and Christianity.  This poses quite the dilemma for today’s Christian women who grew up during that time.  I know; I am one of them.  I have two older sisters, part of the Baby Boomer generation, who can only be categorized as liberal feminists.  I cut my eye-teeth on all of the feminist movement tenets.  As a young new Christian, I clung to those tenets tenaciously, especially those regarding equality and pro-choice.  But then, a funny thing happened on the way to adulthood.  I started questioning those long-held beliefs.  Not at first, mind you, and certainly not out loud (what would my sisters say!), but the mustard seed of truth planted long ago had begun to take root and grow.

As a Christian I know that the image of God, the Imago Dei, resides in me, resides in every person.  The Bible teaches us exactly this:

²⁶ Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; … ²⁷ So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.[1]

What came as a surprise to me, though, was that all the while I was clinging to my liberal feminist ideals, God’s image was there, in the back corner of my mind, whispering to me, over and over and over again, “you know this is wrong.”  Which brings me to the point of this paper.  Read the rest of this entry »

The following is my seminary paper (final) from the Acts and Paul class.  My professor for the class was the Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw, who is also Dean of the seminary, Cranmer Theological House.  The subject is one that is very near and dear to my heart–marriage; more specifically, Biblical marriage.  I hope you find it “an interesting read.”

* * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * ** * * * *

Introduction

In his Epistles, the Apostle Paul addresses the subject of marriage several different times and in several venues.  This paper will deal with the specific aspects of marriage from 1 Corinthians 7 and Ephesians 5, while touching on certain other Pauline thoughts that are connected to marriage.  Before proceeding to the task at hand, however, some historical background—both of Paul and the Jewish people of the 1^st century—are in order.    Read the rest of this entry »