Catching up with Father Matthew

Catching up with Father Matthew after my Irish Pilgrimage....

Episcopal priest, Matthew Moretz, directs films a piece on behalf of the workshop participants at Shrinemont 2008, a conference for adults with the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia. Father Matthew was the keynote speaker at their "Incarnation in a Virtual World" conference. He led a workshop where we scripted and filmed our own webisode as a team.

Episcopal priest, Matthew Moretz, presents a selection from the book "The Big Book of Martyrs" by John Wagner. This piece is on the Apostles that few know about and the mixture of history and legend that surrounds them. This survey somehow misses Bartholomew, who everyone knows was flayed alive.

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Stephen Colbert explains all about the Lambeth Conference

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Super-Hyper-Ziondispensationalwhat?

A Reader writes in:

Recently, I have entered into a discussion with a person who follows a theology called Christian Zionism. It seems to be a variation of John Darby’s Dispensationalism, which places great emphasis on the Great Tribulation and Rapture of the Church, but wants to influence Middle Eastern politics. Lately, this person has been referring to members of the Episcopal and Catholic Churches as followers of something called “replacement theology,” which he claims to be anti-Semitic.

I have rarely encountered end times theology in the Episcopal Church, but I have read Barbara Rossing’s excellent book. Rapture Exposed. But I am still unsure of how to best respond.

What is the Church teaching on the end times?

How can I best respond to this charge of “replacement theology?”

What would be the best way to respond to a person who believes in Christian Zionism?

The Rev. Charles Hawkins answers:

Replacement theology is another name for the theological notion of supersessionism. Supersessionism is the belief that God's covenant with the Christian Church has superseded or replaced God's covenant with Israel. R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) outlines different varieties of supersessionism, I commend it to you.

Many contemporary theologians (including many Anglicans) think in terms of the extension of God's covenant not the replacement of the covenant. There are, however, contemporary theologians who are explicitly supersessionist. Supersessionism sounds to my ears to be anti-semitic.

As for Roman Catholics, the Catechism reads: "The covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them." The catechism is clearly not supersessionist. There are, however, Roman Catholic theologians who do seem to imply a "replacement theology."

Dispensationalism is interesting in this regard. Dispensationalists believe that God's dealings with humanity fall into seven dispensations. The dispensations are sequential. The fifth dispensation was Mosaic Law. This was followed by the dispensation of Grace. On the surface, this looks like replacement theology, but the sixth dispensation is followed by the Millennial Kingdom, which includes a prominent role for Israel. Donald Wagner wrote an article published in the Christian Century detailing some of the recent history of dispensationalism. You can read his article here http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=216

Dispensationalism and its anti-semitism is convoluted. Prominent dispensationalist, John Hagee is a case in point. While supporting the founding of the modern nation of Israel, he also believes that the Holocaust was God's plan. Time Magazine ran an article on this subject: see, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1816791,00.html.
In short, you don't have to be a dispensationalist to avoid supersessionism. Further, dispensationalism has its own problems with anti-semitism.

Charles+

Anglican, Christianity, dispensationalism, Episcopal, Religion, Religion, supersessionism, theology, zionism

NT Wright on The Colbert Report

Anglican Bishop of Durham NT Wright was on The Colbert Report last week. It went well, but I thought that the Cookie Monster interview went better.
David+

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Father Matthew Presents: The Ascension and Mary Poppins

Episcopal priest video blogger, Matthew Moretz, at Christ's Church, Rye, NY, looks at the Ascension of Jesus and can't help but think about Mary Poppins. Why? You'll see. Who knew that there were parallels! "Father Matthew Presents" is a regular video series produced on a semi-regular basis. You can find out more about his church and view sermons and stuff at www.ccrye.org. You can contact Fr. Matthew at curate@ccrye.org. Peace be with you!

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You know, I can almost hear the outcry on this one. How DARE he compare as important an event as the Ascension of Jesus to something like Mary Poppins that is Just a story? (For my opinion on how inadequate the statement "just a story" is, see The Feast of CS Lewis). I do not believe in any case that Fr. Matthew is saying that Mary Poppins was an intentional Christian Allegory. Instead, Matthew is making a mythopoeic argument, that since we are formed in the image of our creator, when we sub-create (As in writing, music, art, etc.), we do so under the influence of our God-made image. According to this philosophy, the recurring myths of the dying god, the flood, etc. are in various cultures because they reflect the truest myth, that of Christianity.

In following this idea, you can read various authors from Tolkien to Rowling to Travers and see the strains of Christianity in them without having to insist that the author intended allegory.

David+

Further Information:

Wikipedia - Ascension

Wikipedia - Mary Poppins

The Kibitzer - NT Wright on the Ascension

Wikipedia - Shary Bobbins ;-)

Anglican, ascension, Episcopal, Father Matthew Presents, mary poppins, mythopoeic, Podcast, Podcast, Religion, Religion, theology, YouTube

Father Matthew Presents the Sacraments: Ordination

Want to know what Ordination is all about? Only have three minutes? Well, you're in luck! Episcopal priest, Matthew Moretz, at Christ's Church in Rye, NY continues his series "Father Matthew Presents the Sacraments" with a look at the sacrament of ordination: the way deacons, priests, and bishops are made. You can find sermons and church info at www.ccrye.org. You can contact Fr. Matthew at curate@ccrye.org. Peace be with you!

Further Information:
Ordination rites in the Book of Common Prayer
WIkipedia - Ordination

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Church History Q&A

Q&A:

From what I have been taught, the Catholic/Anglican/Orthodox seem to be the way the Christian church ran itself for a very long time. However the Evangelical mode of an Altar Call, or sinners prayer at the seat at the least. And then believers Baptism. When did this method get started?

I know of the Baptist History "Trail of Blood" but I have heard that it was both true, and not true. (From Baptists themselves).

What can you share with me about the subject?

The Church split East and West in 1054. The East-West Schism, or Great Schism, (1054) divided medieval Christendom into Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek) branches, which later became the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, respectively.

The Church of England (Anglican) split from Rome in 1534 by decree of King Henry VIII.

In Europe, beginning about 1517 or so, Martin Luther and John Calvin (and a few lesser names) protested the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church and called for reform--their movement became known as the Protestant Reformation. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, etc., (all Protestants) have their origin in the Protestant Reformation.

In the USA, revivalism or "awakenings" (the first Great Awakening occurred in the 1730's), gave rise to Altar Calls, etc. Believer's Baptism was a "Baptist" doctrine. Baptists (so called because of their conviction that only adult believers were to be baptized and the proper mode of baptism was immersion) were English Seperatists. When the Protestant reformation came to England, some thought the reform effort was unsuccessful and wanted to "seperate" from the Church of England.

The "Trail of Blood" was a pamphlet written by James Carroll and was part of the "Landmark" movement in Baptist history. Carrol claimed (seemingly) every heretic in Church history as a proto-Baptist--Waldensians, Cathari, Donatists, et. al. No modern historian would make such a claim. But many Baptists believed Carrol (who was from Lexington, Kentucky if memory serves).

Charles+

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Gene Robinson on the Today Show

Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire was on the Today show this morning:

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New Podcast Item

New Podcast Item

Sara Miles, an Episcopalian, reads her essay on her conversion from atheism on the NPR program "This I Believe."

The podcasting feed can be found on the sidebar or at: http://podcast.askthepriest.org and is listed in the iTunes, Odeo and podcast.net directories.

More information & podcasting software can be found at http://www.ipodder.org

Anglican, Christianity, Episcopal, Podcast, Religion

Feast Day of Julian of Norwich

Today is the feast day of Julian of Norwich on the Episcopal Calendar. This is especially important to me as I am an associate of the Order of Julian of Norwich and we had a big festival mass this morning at the monastery.

A page of special materials from the order for the feast day may be found here.

Julian's writings are lesser known than many other Christian Writers, but her influence is vast. Thomas Merton once wrote:

"Julian is, without doubt, one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older, and whereas in the old days I used to be crazy about St. John of the Cross, I would not exchange him now for Julian if you gave me the world and the Indies and all the Spanish mystics rolled up in one bundle. I think Julian of Norwich is, with Newman, the greatest English theologian."

David+

This is an excerpt from Fr. John-Julian's (OJN) upcoming book on the Episcopal Saints, Stars in a Dark World.

Saint Julian of Norwich

1342 - ca. 1420

May 8

We don’t know her true name; we don’t know her birthplace; we don’t know the exact date of her birth; and we don’t know the date of her death. All we know for certain about Saint Julian of Norwich is that she spent a significant portion of her life as an an­chorite, a recluse, at Saint Julian’s Church in England’s Norwich, that she was granted by God a series of sixteen visions or “showings” (as she called them) of the Crucified Christ, and that she was the first woman to write a book in English – her Revelations of Divine Love – which recounts her visions and her own twenty-year process of coming to understand their meaning.

Since almost all we know of Julian comes to us from her own book, we can surmise from that evidence that she was born sometime in late 1342. There are those who be­lieve that the grammatical pattern of her work suggests that she grew up in the north of England, but most agree that she was probably a Norwich native.

Since she became an anchorite – that is a recluse who was literally sealed in one closed room – adjacent to Saint Julian’s church in Norwich, it is likely that she came from a well-to-do or noble family (since virtually all female monastics at the time were of noble birth, and anchoresses had to prove that they had the means and income to support themselves before they could be enclosed). There is also some strong evidence that she may have been the daughter of Norwich’s eminent Sir Thomas Erpingham, a close friend and associate of King Henry V, and who (according to Shakespeare) com­manded the British longbows at the famous British victory at Agincourt. [1]

There is also some ambiguous evidence that Julian may have been a widow at the time of her seclusion – surviving local records from the time mention a gentlewoman “Julian” whose husband was killed in a duel only two weeks after their wedding. She may also have been a “Beguine” – that is, a woman who lived a pious, religious, and celibate life but did not take formal religious vows and lived in her own family home.

Finally, her name – Julian – may have been her original baptismal name, but it is just as likely that she followed the contemporary custom of taking as her name-in-reli­gion the name of the saint attached to whose church her anchorhold was built – that being Saint Julian of LeMans.

Although the anchoritic life of seclusion seems almost incomprehensible to us to­day, it was highly revered in Julian’s day, and parishes vied with each other to have “a saint” living in a cell attached to their church. We have record of some 1500 recluses in England, and over 50 in Julian’s Norwich alone. The life of an anchorite was considered the most holy, most ascetic, and most pious life possible in late medieval England, and historians often note that in those years in which the great organized religious orders were in decline and increasing corruption, often the truly devout soul needed to find a different and personal avenue of asceticism, the highest of which was the solitary an­choritic life.

Julian lived in Norwich, which in her day was England’s “second city” and central to the wool and cloth trade with Flanders. The Black Death hit Norwich in 1348 when Julian was about 6 years old, carrying away over half of the population (a higher pro­portion than elsewhere in England because of the close trade exchanges Norwich had with the Continent). And the plague struck again twice during her lifetime. In 1381, when Julian was about forty, Norwich was a primary center for the first popular rebel­lion in English history – the Peasant’s Revolt – which had been provoked by attempts to set a maximum limit on laborers’ wages and the imposition of a poll tax. The revolt was finally overthrown in London and in East Anglia when the local rebels were crushed by the militant (and military) Bishop of Norwich, Henry le Despenser, and their leader, John Litester, was executed.

In early May in her thirty-first year (confusion in surviving manuscripts makes it uncertain whether it was May 8 or May 13), Julian was struck with an apparently terminal illness. When she was expected to die, her parish priest was sent for and he placed a crucifix before her, telling her to cast her eyes upon her Savior. When Julian did so, the crucifix came alive for her and she began to receive the fifteen showings in which she experienced being present at the Crucifixion of Christ, and then listening to and speaking with Christ afterwards. She apparently wrote an account of her revela­tions shortly afterwards, and then twenty years later she expanded that short account to include the conclusions of her two-decade-long study and meditation on the meaning of her visions.

It is probable that Julian was not an enclosed anchoress at the time of her visions, but became so thereafter, spending between 20 and 50 years in her anchorhold and living to be over 70 years old. The peripatetic mystic, Margery Kempe, records a visit to Julian in about 1413 to ask her advice, and she adds “she was excellent in such coun­seling”.

Julian’s book was apparently not broadly circulated during her lifetime or for some years afterwards. We do know that it was published in its first printededition in 1677 by Serenus Cressy who wrote in his introduction: “I was desirous to have told thee somewhat of the happy Virgin, the Compiler of these Revelations: But after all the search I could make, I could not discover anything touching her, more than what she occasionally sprinkles in the Book itself.” We also know that Julian’s book was carried to the Continent by some of the 16th-century Roman Catholics who fled England. After that, very little is heard about Julian’s writing for almost 300 years until 1911 when Grace Warrack published the first modern edition. Then in 1979, Father Robert Llewe­lyn, a retired Anglican priest became chaplain of the Julian Shrine Chapel at St. Ju­l­ian’s, and interest in Julian began to build. Since then there have been at lest six new translations of Julian’s Middle English manuscripts and a virtually uncountable num­ber of commentaries, as well as the establishment of the Anglican Order of Julian of Norwich, a contemplative, mixed monastic community of monks and nuns in the U.S.

The uniqueness of Julian’s writings includes her incredible optimism in the face of the cultural chaos and confusion of her day, and her ability to transcend that confusion. Her phrase, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” is not a Pollyanna-esque blindness to reality, but the results of a deep faith that God is indeed in control of all, even in the midst of apparent evil. Julian repeatedly states that there is no wrath or anger in God, a proposition that is upsetting to Puri­tans and biblical literalists. And preceding modern psychology by centuries, she points out that the wrath we think we see in God is really in ourselves.

Julian may be most famous for her unapologetic treatment of Christ as Mother, no doubt the finest and most sophisticated treatment of the subject in all of Christian lit­erature. What is absolutely unique in Julian is her protestation that it is not that Christ is like a mother, but that all mothers are like Christ: Christ is the proto-mother and all earthly motherhood is an imitation and reflection of Him.

Sin, which so absorbs so many ecclesiastical writers, is given short shrift by Julian when she declares with the Scholastics that sin has “no manner of essence nor any por­tion of being”, that it is “no deed”, but is rather an absence of goodness. She declares that all human beings have a “godly will” within them which “never consented to sin nor ever shall” and “is so good that it can never will evil, but always good.” She fre­quently uses “blindness” as the analogy for human weakness.

As great a spiritual master as Thomas Merton has written: “Julian is without doubt one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older…” Our last evidence of Julian’s life is in 1416, and her death is usually assumed at about 1420.

Bennet, Judith M.; Women in the Medieval English Countryside…; Oxford U.P; Oxford; 1987.

Cowan, Tom; The Way of the Saints; G.B. Putnam’s Sons; NY; 1998.

Cross, F.L. & Livingstone, E.A., eds.; The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church; Oxford U.P.; Oxford; 1988.

Dupré, Louis & Wiseman, James A., eds.; Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism; Paulist; Mahwah, NJ; 1988.

John-Julian, tr.; A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich; iUniverse; NY; 2000.

King, Ursula; Christian Mystics: The Spiritual Heart of the Christian Tradition; Simon & Schuster; NY; 1998.

Ollard, S.L. & Crosse, Gordon (eds.); A Dictionary of English Church History;Mowbray; Oxford; 1912.

Rolt-Wheeler, Ethel; Women of the Cell and Cloister; Methuen; London; 1913.

Ward, Maisie, ed.; The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman; Sheed & Ward; London; 1933.

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[1] There is some evidence that Mother Julian mayhave been Julian Erpingham, the sister of the famed knight Sir Thomas Erpingham. If this is true, she would have been married twice and had three children before becoming an anchorite. Her revelations (and the “Short Version” of her book) would have happened at the time of the death of her first husband in a duel (1373), and the “Long Version” and her entering the cell would have happened shortly after the death of her second husband (c. ±1393). He death would have come in 1414, meaning that she would have spent about 21 years as an anchorite.

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