Note: I had no intention of posting this sermon, preached at the 9.00 a.m. service at All Saints’ Rehoboth yesterday, partly because so much blog material has already appeared around the Easter theme, and partly because I feel there is a great danger in presuming that people want to hear just anything I produce. I relented, however, because several parishoners presed me to publish it: so here it is.
The O.T. as part of Christian Bible
The Christian sacred writings from a very early date incorporated the Hebrew Scriptures. For the first generations of Christians, the writings of what we call the O.T. were their Bible: there was as yet no “N.T.”. By the time of the second century C.E., however, the presence of holy books of Judaism began to pose serious problems for the earliest Theologians, and, many would maintain, continue to do so. Yet, the decision to include the Jewish books was crucial, providing a context for the astonishing message of Judaism’s offshoot, the infant Christian movement.
The O.T. in the N.T.
So it is that our Christian Bible opens with a statement that God created the heavens and the earth, and goes on “the earth was formless and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep”. The Evangelists, steeped as they were, in the traditions of the OT, doubtless had this verse in mind when they produced the early accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus and wrote, “When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land” (Mk. 15.33). Similarly, when Luke begins his account of the Resurrection of Jesus with the words, “On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women…came to the tomb” (Lk.24.1),” the continuation of the Genesis story is close to the surface: “God said, “Let there be light”. And God saw that the light was good…And there was evening and there was morning, the first day”. (Gen 1.4).
This kind of allusion to the OT is very common, and, in this case, the reference back to Genesis is found in other NT passages. For example Paul writes in II Cor. 5.17, “If any one is in Christ he or she is a new creation; the old has passed away, the new has come”. And the Evangelists in their more figurative way are telling us that as God created “in the beginning”, so now, on that first Easter, God is bringing into being a New Creation. Luke surely is telling us that without God all is chaos and darkness, but when God acts, light shines out, and all is new. The darkness of Good Friday was over shone by the decisive act of God that we call the resurrection; that is, perhaps, why the accounts note the visit to the tomb as the sun was rising and mention the bright light of the messengers’ presence.
It seems to me that that is about all that needs to be said on Easter morning, but it won’t surprise those of you who are regulars at All SS if I go on briefly to enlarge this central point.
Meeting Jesus
Is it possible that the burning faith of that little band arose from the precise placing of a head-scarf which Peter is reported to have noticed? Is even the center of the Easter faith the story of the tomb found empty by the women on that Sunday morning? It is striking that our very earliest witness to the resurrection faith is St. Paul who wrote his letters to Corinth around 52 C.E. What is central for Paul is the meetings of the risen Jesus: he never mentions the empty tomb tradition. Helmut Thielicke, a great German Theologian of the second half of the 20th century puts this well:
“They (the disciples) could never have believed that the dead Jesus had risen from the dead if they had not believed his Word...A miracle has never brought anyone to faith since it is always open to other interpretations. The empty tomb did not bring the disciples to faith. Something very different happened”. He continues: “In the Easter light of [that first day of the week] they suddenly saw that all the words and acts of Jesus pointed to the fact that death could not hold Him. It was of those words and acts that they now had to think.” The Silence of God, 83. (Eerdmans,1962).
The center of the Easter Faith is not a empty tomb but meeting with the living Jesus, and it was those experiences, recounted in Paul and the Gospels that brought about the living faith of the first disciples: as they experienced the presence of Jesus, they became convinced that God had acted to overcome death, giving a whole new kind of life to Jesus which he, in turn, was to share with those who came to believe, and continue to come to believe No amount of historical investigation, no philosophical ingenuities about the nature of the natural order and the possibilities of miracle can give us certainty. The only certainty we have is that we are part of that Community of faith which has staked its life on faith in God’s love for humanity; faith that God in Christ acts to save us; faith that death and evil do not have the final word in this universe. And the only certainty we can have is in sharing this faith.
So we come to the very center, the very nucleus of all the gospel accounts, disparate, and even contradictory as they may be. Moreover, we come, as it were, to the fuse that ignited the explosion that was to shake the Roman Empire. We come to the burning centre, not only of the written gospel manuscripts, but of the Apostolic preaching of the Good News, the Gospel, that, in Paul’s words “God in Christ has reconciled the world to himself” (II Cor. 5.18) .
Life from Death in the O.T.
We began by noting how the gospel passion narratives resonate with the creation story of Genesis. If we go further into the OT and consider the broad sweep of its story, we note over and again how the authors speak of light dispelling darkness, life emerging from death: the father of the founder of Israel, Sarah’s child, was born to “one as good as dead” says the writer; the very survival of the sons of Jacob/Israel was a result of Joseph’s position in Egypt; the remnant of Israel after the captivity in Babylon is an almost unbelievable restoration, but it is well attested by what we know of Cyrus the new Persian ruler and it is eloquently presented to us in the poetry of Deutero Isaiah. The list goes on and on, and prepares us for the greatest of God’s acts on that first Easter.
From Sabbath to Sunday
All the accounts note that it was “early on the first day of the week”. We tend not to notice that little detail, but it high lights a sea change in religion. What might we suppose someone steeped in the Hebrew scriptures and used to Rabbinic methods of exegesis would think if you asked him what is important about the first day of the week? I suspect there would be a very good chance that he would reply, “In the beginning when God created the heaven and the earth...God said, ‘Let there be light, and God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness….and there was evening and there was morning, the first day”. (Gen. 1.1-2) but, he would go, it is the seventh day that is paramount for us, for God rested on the Seventh Day, that is, the shabath. [Coming from Heb √, ‘to rest’]. This is the fulcrum of the week. So what you Christians call Saturday is the day of rest for all of Judaism.
But for the emerging Christian Community, the Sabbath was obsolete. For them it is the first day of the week, Sunday, that becomes the focus of the Christian week and, indeed Year, for everything is dated from Easter Sunday. So it is that on the first day of the week that we meet for Eucharist proclaiming again and again, that this is the day on which God has acted decisively in human affairs: “This is the Day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it”.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Thursday, April 05, 2007
An Address for Good Friday, 2007
St Luke 23.39ff - Jesus Remember Me
This second word from the cross comes, as does the first, in Luke’s account of the passion of Jesus. It shares all the critical problems that attend the seven reported words from the cross such as the virtual impossibility of speech for someone undergoing the inhuman punishment of crucifixion, and then this passage has more. The offer of paradise today contradicts other passages in the NT and reflects a view of life after death that does not appear in Christianity until around the third generation of believers (who were almost entirely converts in the Hellenistic world).
The Anglican attitude to Historical Criticism
It is, I believe, one of the great glories of the Anglican tradition that it does not offer a diet of preaching and teaching that requires one to leave one’s intellect in the Church foyer and enables us to acknowledge these serious critical and historical issues. The great gain is that our Anglican tradition makes it possible for us to use the results of careful critical historical study to recognize that what we are given in the gospel narratives is frequently an insight into how the earliest followers of Jesus remembered him and understood what he had taught. The gospels are rather like a negative, which has had several exposures. (Remember how easy it was to do that with a trusty old Kodak?)
Just because it is historically quite improbable that Jesus delivered some of the sayings attributed to him, it does not mean that they do not have the status of scripture and are important for us. It does, of course require us to ask, “What exactly is the status of the Bible?” But that is a topic for another time.
A Word of Hope
Luke’s first word underlines the centrality of forgiveness; his final one, at the moment of death, expresses absolute trust in God; “I hand over my whole life to you”, he cries: this second saying in Luke’s account focuses on faith and hope. All three of the sayings from Luke contrast in some measure with Mark and Matthew. There is no hint of the despair that we hear in the cry, “Why have you forsaken me?”, which Luke replaces by “Into your hands I commend my spirit”.
It is important for us to remember that we are with a congregation many decades after the searing events of the day, looking back to those events through the vibrant faith in the Resurrection.
Reasons for Despair
They and we look at the terrible state of this world: at misused power, at innocent victims destroyed by that power; we are reminded of the evil done by violent people like the two real criminals being executed at the same time as Jesus; we are appalled by sectarian hatreds, racial divisions and deeply prejudiced views of differences in human sexuality. We look out on all this, often, by means of a flickering screen in our very living room and we may well be tempted to despair, to think either that there is no God and, indeed, never was one, or to feel that God has indeed forsaken us. Perhaps God has in the divine inner councils decided to abandon the wonderful experiment of life. As we look out on the apparently endless series of horrors that we hear of and are in some cases personally involved in, such despair does not seem all that inappropriate.
Luke’s Perspective
But then, we recall that we are standing with that congregation of the late first century C.E. for whom Luke wrote and hearing his version of what Jesus said and did. They and we recognize that awful as these events were, God’s power had not been destroyed: we realize this because we look back at the events of that Friday upheld by faith in what happened beginning on the following Sunday. We look back, that is, through the lens of the resurrection, and so can say with St Paul as he wrote to Corinth, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (I Cor. 1.25).
Hidden Hope
The account of the “penitent” robber is full of hints that there is another side to the horrors we see in the world around us. The man represents humans who have come to the end of the road; for whom addiction, perhaps, seems beyond beating or grief beyond bearing. Neville Ward says of these situations, “Reports that come from the depths suggest a hidden hopefulness.” (Friday Afternoon, p 35). Of course many times hope does not emerge to prevent a suicide or a slide into irreversible depression. But it does happen sometimes, pointing to a deep intuition of the fundamental goodness of creation; an intuition, against all appearances perhaps, that love is greater than hate, hope more life-giving than despair and light, ultimately, resisting extinction in darkness.
The thieves are at the end of life and hope. The first one is full of bitter scorn. In some unfathomable way, the second prisoner, at the very end of the road, on the brink of final loss, finds hope and faith, and his words will bear a closer look.
‘Remember’ in the Old Testament
First of all, he rebukes the other condemned man, recognizing that, imperfect as it is, the human justice system can in some measure differentiate between guilt and innocence. Secondly, the thief uses a biblically charged word: “remember me”. The New Testament writers, steeped as they are in the Jewish scriptures, recognize that ‘remember’ implies much more than merely bringing up a mental image of a past event. It is used often in an address to Yahweh asking God to remember the covenant. This means, “make effective in action now the promises you made to us, that we should be your people”. Luke in his report of this man’s address to Jesus, displays the belief of the post-Easter church that even in depths of pain and despair, God has not deserted us and that the deeply embedded spark of hope can spring to a flame as we turn, as the second prisoner did, to this helpless bearer of the divine love suffering with us.
Critical Quagmire
Finally, Jesus’ answer: the words “Today you will be with me in Paradise” are a critical quick sand, apparently contradicting the later creeds, and using a rare word whose meaning is far from precise. It is this lack of precision in the word paradise that can cut through the thicket (if I may change the metaphor). Although Paradise had come to be applied to the Garden of Eden at the beginning of history and to an idyllic existence beyond the end of history, in its three NT uses it means little more than “close to God”. It is quite typical of the NT to eschew altogether speculation about the state of existence after death. Paul’s basic position is that the dead are “in Christ with God”. The later mediaeval maps of heaven, purgatory and hell were centuries in the future of the NT writers; we may continue to appreciate the magnificent poetry of Dante and Milton, but we should not be bound by their imagery.
Luke’s Message in the Word to the Robber
So Luke’s message for us in this word is that as we look out at this wretched world and as we suffer the pain, fears and awful losses it deals out to us, we can go on in hope with Christ who suffers alongside us; we can go on in hope that in spite of all appearances in the end, in Paul’s words, “God will be all and in all”.
This second word from the cross comes, as does the first, in Luke’s account of the passion of Jesus. It shares all the critical problems that attend the seven reported words from the cross such as the virtual impossibility of speech for someone undergoing the inhuman punishment of crucifixion, and then this passage has more. The offer of paradise today contradicts other passages in the NT and reflects a view of life after death that does not appear in Christianity until around the third generation of believers (who were almost entirely converts in the Hellenistic world).
The Anglican attitude to Historical Criticism
It is, I believe, one of the great glories of the Anglican tradition that it does not offer a diet of preaching and teaching that requires one to leave one’s intellect in the Church foyer and enables us to acknowledge these serious critical and historical issues. The great gain is that our Anglican tradition makes it possible for us to use the results of careful critical historical study to recognize that what we are given in the gospel narratives is frequently an insight into how the earliest followers of Jesus remembered him and understood what he had taught. The gospels are rather like a negative, which has had several exposures. (Remember how easy it was to do that with a trusty old Kodak?)
Just because it is historically quite improbable that Jesus delivered some of the sayings attributed to him, it does not mean that they do not have the status of scripture and are important for us. It does, of course require us to ask, “What exactly is the status of the Bible?” But that is a topic for another time.
A Word of Hope
Luke’s first word underlines the centrality of forgiveness; his final one, at the moment of death, expresses absolute trust in God; “I hand over my whole life to you”, he cries: this second saying in Luke’s account focuses on faith and hope. All three of the sayings from Luke contrast in some measure with Mark and Matthew. There is no hint of the despair that we hear in the cry, “Why have you forsaken me?”, which Luke replaces by “Into your hands I commend my spirit”.
It is important for us to remember that we are with a congregation many decades after the searing events of the day, looking back to those events through the vibrant faith in the Resurrection.
Reasons for Despair
They and we look at the terrible state of this world: at misused power, at innocent victims destroyed by that power; we are reminded of the evil done by violent people like the two real criminals being executed at the same time as Jesus; we are appalled by sectarian hatreds, racial divisions and deeply prejudiced views of differences in human sexuality. We look out on all this, often, by means of a flickering screen in our very living room and we may well be tempted to despair, to think either that there is no God and, indeed, never was one, or to feel that God has indeed forsaken us. Perhaps God has in the divine inner councils decided to abandon the wonderful experiment of life. As we look out on the apparently endless series of horrors that we hear of and are in some cases personally involved in, such despair does not seem all that inappropriate.
Luke’s Perspective
But then, we recall that we are standing with that congregation of the late first century C.E. for whom Luke wrote and hearing his version of what Jesus said and did. They and we recognize that awful as these events were, God’s power had not been destroyed: we realize this because we look back at the events of that Friday upheld by faith in what happened beginning on the following Sunday. We look back, that is, through the lens of the resurrection, and so can say with St Paul as he wrote to Corinth, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (I Cor. 1.25).
Hidden Hope
The account of the “penitent” robber is full of hints that there is another side to the horrors we see in the world around us. The man represents humans who have come to the end of the road; for whom addiction, perhaps, seems beyond beating or grief beyond bearing. Neville Ward says of these situations, “Reports that come from the depths suggest a hidden hopefulness.” (Friday Afternoon, p 35). Of course many times hope does not emerge to prevent a suicide or a slide into irreversible depression. But it does happen sometimes, pointing to a deep intuition of the fundamental goodness of creation; an intuition, against all appearances perhaps, that love is greater than hate, hope more life-giving than despair and light, ultimately, resisting extinction in darkness.
The thieves are at the end of life and hope. The first one is full of bitter scorn. In some unfathomable way, the second prisoner, at the very end of the road, on the brink of final loss, finds hope and faith, and his words will bear a closer look.
‘Remember’ in the Old Testament
First of all, he rebukes the other condemned man, recognizing that, imperfect as it is, the human justice system can in some measure differentiate between guilt and innocence. Secondly, the thief uses a biblically charged word: “remember me”. The New Testament writers, steeped as they are in the Jewish scriptures, recognize that ‘remember’ implies much more than merely bringing up a mental image of a past event. It is used often in an address to Yahweh asking God to remember the covenant. This means, “make effective in action now the promises you made to us, that we should be your people”. Luke in his report of this man’s address to Jesus, displays the belief of the post-Easter church that even in depths of pain and despair, God has not deserted us and that the deeply embedded spark of hope can spring to a flame as we turn, as the second prisoner did, to this helpless bearer of the divine love suffering with us.
Critical Quagmire
Finally, Jesus’ answer: the words “Today you will be with me in Paradise” are a critical quick sand, apparently contradicting the later creeds, and using a rare word whose meaning is far from precise. It is this lack of precision in the word paradise that can cut through the thicket (if I may change the metaphor). Although Paradise had come to be applied to the Garden of Eden at the beginning of history and to an idyllic existence beyond the end of history, in its three NT uses it means little more than “close to God”. It is quite typical of the NT to eschew altogether speculation about the state of existence after death. Paul’s basic position is that the dead are “in Christ with God”. The later mediaeval maps of heaven, purgatory and hell were centuries in the future of the NT writers; we may continue to appreciate the magnificent poetry of Dante and Milton, but we should not be bound by their imagery.
Luke’s Message in the Word to the Robber
So Luke’s message for us in this word is that as we look out at this wretched world and as we suffer the pain, fears and awful losses it deals out to us, we can go on in hope with Christ who suffers alongside us; we can go on in hope that in spite of all appearances in the end, in Paul’s words, “God will be all and in all”.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
The Function of Christian Doctrine
This piece was originally the second in the 2007 Lenten series presented at All SS Episcopal Church in Rehoboth, Delaware. I was partly responsible for planning the series entitled “The Foundations of Christianity”, and, so, when I began preparing this talk, I found myself in a serious dilemma. Had I really suggested that one of the topics should be Doctrine? Serious reflection forced me to admit that I had, indeed, suggested this topic, and I was forced to admit that it was an unthoughtful suggestion, if not, indeed, a very silly one.
Inauguration Date of Church
What is the problem? It is that the foundation of a building is invariably the first course of brick or stone that is put in; if, to recall the Dominical word, it is to be a firm foundation, put into a trench that goes down to a stratum of rock. All the other topics of this course fit (or can be made to fit) into that definition. As the gospel tradition itself suggests, the foundation is the work of Jesus followed closely by that of the first group of Disciples: prayer was clearly there from the start and activity in the world was, and is, essential. Some ingenuity is needed, perhaps, in spite of conservative evangelical insistence, to see the writings of the NT as foundational in quite the same sense since they were the product of the groups that grew (to change the metaphor) from the original work of Jesus and the Apostles. We might date the beginning of Christianity, not from the Crucifixion in, say, 30-32 C.E., but around 120 C.E. when the last bits of our NT were written, and that would make it clear that the N.T. collection of documents is fully foundational. (Interestingly, that would make today’s date, March 8, 1887). This option is, I suppose, not open to a fundamentalist, but on historical grounds it is a very reasonable position to take, noting for example, that it was many decades before the followers of Jesus attracted the nick-name Christianoi.
Doctrine as Scaffolding
Further reflection suggested that it might be better to treat doctrine under the metaphor of scaffolding, rather than foundation. Some interesting reflections flow from this particular metaphor. A building needs scaffolding to grow, but it remains independent of it. Only in extreme cases, the tower of Pisa comes to mind, does the support have to stay in place for a protracted period. As an aside, I wonder if this suggests the obsession with correct doctrine on the part of certain sections of the church results from the felt need to prop up something they sense is falling down? Another reflection: What materials are used as scaffolding? It depends, of course, in what part of the world you are and also very much on technological norms for the time. All the great mediaeval cathedrals were built using wooden frame-works, and in the East bamboo was (and often still is) the material of choice. Another aside: doctrine is heavily influenced by cultural conditions.
Doctrinal Norms & Creeds
We need now to look very briefly at some history. The basic meaning of the word doctrine is ‘teaching’ (L. docere), and since the 4th or 5th centuries the word has been used more or less in the sense of “communally authoritative teachings regarded as essential to the identity of the Christian community”. (Enc. Mod. Christian Thought, Ed. A.E. McGrath, p112). However, the concept of ‘Christian community’ in this definition needs some attention: at least since the major division of the East and West in the 11th century, the plural really ought to be used, and, after the Reformation, we are confronted with an array of communities, sharing some things, but differing from one another in many respects. Clearly the norms of doctrine for the Presbyterian, Lutheran, Quaker and Anglican branches of the church differ very significantly, not to mention the dozens of internal divisions in each community.
One important way in which the agreed norms of the community have been expressed is in the Creeds, the earliest of which are found in the N.T. itself. Perhaps the clearest, and most interesting example is found in Paul’s letter to Rome (10.9), “If you confess with your lips ‘Jesus is Lord’, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”. Paul, of course, is not alone, but he gives the earliest and clearest statement. In the Acts of the Apostles there are numerous references to baptism which imply the formula we find in Paul (8.15; 2.38; 22.16) and others in the rest of Paul’s letters (II Cor. 4.5; Phil. 2.11; etc.). In the light of the later creeds, this early confession is startlingly simple: that it is centered on the action of God is clear if we compare even a more developed baptismal creed, the Apostles’, with Paul’s brief formula. The Apostles creed says, “he rose form the dead”, whereas Paul, and, indeed the vast majority of N.T. references say, “God raised him”. This may seem a tiny, almost nit-picking issue, but it really is not, because it alerts us to the way in which formal doctrine was to develop, moving the NT emphasis from God’s saving activity to the saving function of Jesus. When Paul says, if you confess Jesus you will be saved there can be little doubt that he understands God to be doing the saving, through the agency of Jesus the Messiah.
The Apostles’ Creed
The first more developed creed seems to have been the one used for baptisms in Rome by the middle of the second century, called the Apostles’ Creed. It is a significant expansion of the NT formulae, but stands in striking contrast to the creeds of the 4th and 5th centuries like the one we call “Nicaea”. The Apostles’ Creed makes statements that are largely scriptural quotations and does not give the impression of attempting to give metaphysical explanations for them; for example, it mentions Jesus’ burial, but there is no suggestion of his visiting and preaching to the dead of previous ages. It is noticeable, too, that there is no sign of a phrase like, “begotten of the Father before all worlds” which we find in the 4th century creeds.
Variety of Belief
It seems that in the first century and a half of the church’s life among the local churches of the Mediterranean world, there was a considerable variety of emphasis in beliefs about Jesus and his work. That he was the son of God was universally confessed, but quite early on shades of meaning are apparent. At what one might call the soft end of the spectrum it could be taken, as in Judaism, as a designation of all righteous teachers, with the added insistence that Jesus had the closest relationship with God ever known. At the other end of the spectrum, the “hard” version was moving to positing a metaphysical relationship, the end product of which was to say that Jesus was God, the second Person of a Trinitarian God. This type of theology led to formulae about the two natures of Christ inhering in the unity of his person: technically called Christology. The creeds of the 4th and 5th centuries seem to have been produced to exclude the views of some theologians, men like Arius who advocated the softer option about Jesus’ divinity and Nestorius who held a softer view about the human/divine fusion in the person of Jesus. The two main documents that affirmed what came to be the “orthodox” view were the Creed of Constantinople of 381 (it appears as the Nicene Creed in our P.B.), and the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon, 451 C.E.
From Variety to Orthodoxy
It is not at all clear why it was that the church moved from the earlier, softer approach to doctrine. Possibly the word orthodox itself is suggestive of one reason. The two Greek words that lie behind orthodox are orthos, straight (coming ultimately to = correct), and doxa, opinion. This points to an increasing emphasis on holding correct views about God, Jesus, and salvation, and a move away from worshipping and acting in the new ways initiated by the living presence of Jesus in the early community. It has to be remembered, too, that immense cultural influences were at work as the church moved out into the Hellenistic world where religion and philosophy were closely intertwined. There was, in addition, the Imperial pressure after the conversion of Constantine to codify and remove anything that seemed to point to a fracture of the one, now universal church. As another aside: I think it is interesting to look at the contemporary drive within the federation of churches, springing ultimately from the reformed C. of E., to insist on homogeneity and to set up tests of right opinion. Whatever the reasons, by the 6th century, the church had established a doctrinal framework that became mandatory for all Christians.
This was significantly challenged in the Reformation. Questions arose about the authority of Pope or Scripture. Teaching about the sacraments was challenged. An enormous issue was how the atonement, that is, the saving work of Christ, should be understood. The doctrine of purgatory came in for some heavy bombardment, though hell remained fairly safe since the followers of Calvin required the ultimate punishment for the reprobate, and, even more unpleasantly, as part of God’s plan for those predestined for such an eternal fate.
The Reformers, however, were concerned not only with issues of belief; they also had plans to change many practical things such as the language of the Liturgy, the prohibition of marriage for the clergy, and above all the structure of the Ministry. It is interesting to note just how many things that were once regarded as essential in order to be counted as a good Christian, have changed.
Change in Doctrine and Practice
Today, only a minority of Christian bodies, (I am not speaking of individuals), insist on Pacifism: the Quakers and Mennonites spring to mind, and there may be others. Yet in the first century it was required of anyone seeking baptism. Soldiers were automatically excluded. For more than a millennium, usury, lending money for interest was totally forbidden to Christians, yet today it is the very foundation of our society, religious as well as secular. Incidentally, we have Calvin to thank for producing a rationale for the change. Perhaps one of the most glaring changes has been in the understanding of marriage. Until the 20th century, at least in Western Christianity, divorce was forbidden, though as early as Matthew’s version of the gospel, the absolute prohibition on the lips of Jesus found in Mark, whose book was used by Matthew, has been softened slightly to allow divorce in the case of adultery. One needs to recall, though, that that means a man may divorce his wife if she commits adultery: not the other way round.
Many more examples could be adduced, but it is clear that teaching and rules about patterns of behavior can and do change. Of course, the most traditional sections of the church, the Roman Catholic on the one hand and the conservative Evangelical churches, on the other, tend to hold out longer, though largely in the case of sexual behavior: they don’t have problems with war or capitalism, for example.
Does doctrine concerned with how one has to believe change too? The answer has to be yes and no. Before the 4th century there was acceptable variation, then for almost a millennium a standardized body of teachings, embodied in the major Creeds, the declarations of Councils and, above all, in Papal encyclicals remained unchallenged, though individual Theologians were relatively free to speculate.
The Reformation and After
Then came the Reformation and significant variation once more has become the norm.
Some foundational doctrines remained fairly universal: the existence of the One God; the Trinitarian nature of that God (though this is not so universal – witness Unitarians and the Deists of the 18th century (including, interestingly quite a number of the USA Founding Fathers); the central role in Christianity of Jesus and his designation as Messiah and Son of God (though here again, complete unanimity is absent). George Lindbeck in The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, 1984) writes, “We may assume that some doctrines are permanent. For example, "God is love" (not actually formulated like that in the New Testament until the late Epistle of John). This could be said to be a sine qua non for claiming to be part of the catholic church. No Ecumenical Council has ever decreed it, but doctrines like this are "part of the indispensable grammar or logic of faith". (p. 85).
In general, the statements of the Apostles’ Creed have remained a kind of norm, expressing the dependence of the world on the creative power of God, assuming the activity of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church, centrally, seeing Jesus as the focus of God’s saving activity for us. Belief in the Resurrection of Jesus remains central, but, and it is a sizeable “but”, how that is to be understood has been a matter of fierce debate for the last century and a half, and, at this point, it is necessary to look at some of the history of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Doctrine Today
Such a consideration is crucial for our understanding the status of Christian Doctrine today. The work of geologists, biologists and historians and those of other scientific disciplines more than ruffled the waters of the doctrinal pond as the nineteenth century progressed. The veracity of Genesis was the first casualty as it became certain that the world was not a mere six thousand years old. Christiann orthodoxy had by the beginning of the 19th century adjusted to astronomy, adjusted to the fact that the moon was not just a few hundred miles away; that the sun was hundreds of thousands of miles away. The adjustment had been relatively smooth because most of the early astronomers were committed Christians, and because the new astronomical knowledge could be seen as adding to the majesty of God and the perfection of the divine plan. Geology and biology were much more upsetting: the former because the study of rocks and fossils undermined the inerrancy of the Bible, the latter because the study of life and its origins seemed to remove divine providence from the equation and at a stroke to question the idea of purpose in the universe and in individual lives.
Summing Up
At the start of the 20th century, several positions on Doctrine, which are operative today were emerging.
(1) The hard liners (RC church, Conservative Evangelical, particularly among Baptists, but found in all major denominations) moved into a barricade mode; the “new learning” was seen as dangerous and it was essential to emphasize and stand on Christian Fundamentals. Of course, there were great differences between the Roman Catholic and Protestant positions, not the least being the active hostility to democratic ideas clearly expressed in the Papal establishment, but there was agreement that the tide must not be allowed to come in.
(2) The moderates, found mainly, but not exclusively in the C of E, the Methodists and Congregationalists, remained firm about the central doctrines of the creed but allowed that adjustments had to be made in the way we read the bible and understand the physical universe. Very often in this approach, a distinction is made between the spiritual truths of the Bible and Christian doctrine, and the historical and physical facts found there.
(3) As the 20th century progressed, these rather tentative alternatives to rigid dogma began to loosen up further. The powerful cultural influences that were involved in the early formation of dogmas (as we may now call them) were exposed, the earlier variety of doctrinal positions was revealed, and the result was that significant reinterpretation and reapplication of basic tenets were frequently debated.
(4) Perhaps, the most radical approach in the contemporary debate is to insist that much of the early language of the Christian religion is metaphorical, much like the parables. Thus the statement that Jesus is the Son of God should not be understood as giving us information about the inner workings of the Godhead (as though it were an engineer’s drawing), but as pointing to the fact that he had, and has, a uniquely close relationship with God, who in a metaphor (which we mostly forget is a metaphor) can be understood as the Father of Jesus, and of us all as brothers and sisters of the Messiah.
One of the most interesting attempts to make sense of doctrine in a world-view radically different from the one in which it developed is the work of George Lindbeck: doctrine is like syntax or grammar in a linguistic system. If you want to be understood, follow the rules; if you want to be considered a Christian follow the doctrines. But the rules will be different if you want to be a conservative RC rather than a liberal Anglican.
Lindbeck writes:
"Religious change or innovation must be understood, not as proceeding from new experiences, but as resulting from the interactions of a cultural-linguistic system with changing situations. Religious traditions are not transformed, abandoned, or replaced because of an upwelling of new or different ways of feeling about the self, the world, or God, but because a religious interpretive scheme (embodied, as it always is, in religious belief and practice) develops anomalies in its application in new contexts. . . . Prophetic figures apprehend, often with dramatic vividness, how inherited patterns of belief, practice and ritual need to be (and can be) reminted." (Lindbeck, 39, italics added).
Anglican Primates, listen up. Where are your Prophets?
(5) In closing the scaffolding metaphor may be pressed into service once more. It suggests that Doctrine and Dogma are necessary, but not necessarily immutable. Scaffolding gives shape, it supports, and can be taken down and put up again for repair or restoration, but it is not the building in which we “live and move and have our being”.
Unhappily, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence that some in the Anglican Communion are mistaking the scaffolding for the building.
Inauguration Date of Church
What is the problem? It is that the foundation of a building is invariably the first course of brick or stone that is put in; if, to recall the Dominical word, it is to be a firm foundation, put into a trench that goes down to a stratum of rock. All the other topics of this course fit (or can be made to fit) into that definition. As the gospel tradition itself suggests, the foundation is the work of Jesus followed closely by that of the first group of Disciples: prayer was clearly there from the start and activity in the world was, and is, essential. Some ingenuity is needed, perhaps, in spite of conservative evangelical insistence, to see the writings of the NT as foundational in quite the same sense since they were the product of the groups that grew (to change the metaphor) from the original work of Jesus and the Apostles. We might date the beginning of Christianity, not from the Crucifixion in, say, 30-32 C.E., but around 120 C.E. when the last bits of our NT were written, and that would make it clear that the N.T. collection of documents is fully foundational. (Interestingly, that would make today’s date, March 8, 1887). This option is, I suppose, not open to a fundamentalist, but on historical grounds it is a very reasonable position to take, noting for example, that it was many decades before the followers of Jesus attracted the nick-name Christianoi.
Doctrine as Scaffolding
Further reflection suggested that it might be better to treat doctrine under the metaphor of scaffolding, rather than foundation. Some interesting reflections flow from this particular metaphor. A building needs scaffolding to grow, but it remains independent of it. Only in extreme cases, the tower of Pisa comes to mind, does the support have to stay in place for a protracted period. As an aside, I wonder if this suggests the obsession with correct doctrine on the part of certain sections of the church results from the felt need to prop up something they sense is falling down? Another reflection: What materials are used as scaffolding? It depends, of course, in what part of the world you are and also very much on technological norms for the time. All the great mediaeval cathedrals were built using wooden frame-works, and in the East bamboo was (and often still is) the material of choice. Another aside: doctrine is heavily influenced by cultural conditions.
Doctrinal Norms & Creeds
We need now to look very briefly at some history. The basic meaning of the word doctrine is ‘teaching’ (L. docere), and since the 4th or 5th centuries the word has been used more or less in the sense of “communally authoritative teachings regarded as essential to the identity of the Christian community”. (Enc. Mod. Christian Thought, Ed. A.E. McGrath, p112). However, the concept of ‘Christian community’ in this definition needs some attention: at least since the major division of the East and West in the 11th century, the plural really ought to be used, and, after the Reformation, we are confronted with an array of communities, sharing some things, but differing from one another in many respects. Clearly the norms of doctrine for the Presbyterian, Lutheran, Quaker and Anglican branches of the church differ very significantly, not to mention the dozens of internal divisions in each community.
One important way in which the agreed norms of the community have been expressed is in the Creeds, the earliest of which are found in the N.T. itself. Perhaps the clearest, and most interesting example is found in Paul’s letter to Rome (10.9), “If you confess with your lips ‘Jesus is Lord’, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”. Paul, of course, is not alone, but he gives the earliest and clearest statement. In the Acts of the Apostles there are numerous references to baptism which imply the formula we find in Paul (8.15; 2.38; 22.16) and others in the rest of Paul’s letters (II Cor. 4.5; Phil. 2.11; etc.). In the light of the later creeds, this early confession is startlingly simple: that it is centered on the action of God is clear if we compare even a more developed baptismal creed, the Apostles’, with Paul’s brief formula. The Apostles creed says, “he rose form the dead”, whereas Paul, and, indeed the vast majority of N.T. references say, “God raised him”. This may seem a tiny, almost nit-picking issue, but it really is not, because it alerts us to the way in which formal doctrine was to develop, moving the NT emphasis from God’s saving activity to the saving function of Jesus. When Paul says, if you confess Jesus you will be saved there can be little doubt that he understands God to be doing the saving, through the agency of Jesus the Messiah.
The Apostles’ Creed
The first more developed creed seems to have been the one used for baptisms in Rome by the middle of the second century, called the Apostles’ Creed. It is a significant expansion of the NT formulae, but stands in striking contrast to the creeds of the 4th and 5th centuries like the one we call “Nicaea”. The Apostles’ Creed makes statements that are largely scriptural quotations and does not give the impression of attempting to give metaphysical explanations for them; for example, it mentions Jesus’ burial, but there is no suggestion of his visiting and preaching to the dead of previous ages. It is noticeable, too, that there is no sign of a phrase like, “begotten of the Father before all worlds” which we find in the 4th century creeds.
Variety of Belief
It seems that in the first century and a half of the church’s life among the local churches of the Mediterranean world, there was a considerable variety of emphasis in beliefs about Jesus and his work. That he was the son of God was universally confessed, but quite early on shades of meaning are apparent. At what one might call the soft end of the spectrum it could be taken, as in Judaism, as a designation of all righteous teachers, with the added insistence that Jesus had the closest relationship with God ever known. At the other end of the spectrum, the “hard” version was moving to positing a metaphysical relationship, the end product of which was to say that Jesus was God, the second Person of a Trinitarian God. This type of theology led to formulae about the two natures of Christ inhering in the unity of his person: technically called Christology. The creeds of the 4th and 5th centuries seem to have been produced to exclude the views of some theologians, men like Arius who advocated the softer option about Jesus’ divinity and Nestorius who held a softer view about the human/divine fusion in the person of Jesus. The two main documents that affirmed what came to be the “orthodox” view were the Creed of Constantinople of 381 (it appears as the Nicene Creed in our P.B.), and the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon, 451 C.E.
From Variety to Orthodoxy
It is not at all clear why it was that the church moved from the earlier, softer approach to doctrine. Possibly the word orthodox itself is suggestive of one reason. The two Greek words that lie behind orthodox are orthos, straight (coming ultimately to = correct), and doxa, opinion. This points to an increasing emphasis on holding correct views about God, Jesus, and salvation, and a move away from worshipping and acting in the new ways initiated by the living presence of Jesus in the early community. It has to be remembered, too, that immense cultural influences were at work as the church moved out into the Hellenistic world where religion and philosophy were closely intertwined. There was, in addition, the Imperial pressure after the conversion of Constantine to codify and remove anything that seemed to point to a fracture of the one, now universal church. As another aside: I think it is interesting to look at the contemporary drive within the federation of churches, springing ultimately from the reformed C. of E., to insist on homogeneity and to set up tests of right opinion. Whatever the reasons, by the 6th century, the church had established a doctrinal framework that became mandatory for all Christians.
This was significantly challenged in the Reformation. Questions arose about the authority of Pope or Scripture. Teaching about the sacraments was challenged. An enormous issue was how the atonement, that is, the saving work of Christ, should be understood. The doctrine of purgatory came in for some heavy bombardment, though hell remained fairly safe since the followers of Calvin required the ultimate punishment for the reprobate, and, even more unpleasantly, as part of God’s plan for those predestined for such an eternal fate.
The Reformers, however, were concerned not only with issues of belief; they also had plans to change many practical things such as the language of the Liturgy, the prohibition of marriage for the clergy, and above all the structure of the Ministry. It is interesting to note just how many things that were once regarded as essential in order to be counted as a good Christian, have changed.
Change in Doctrine and Practice
Today, only a minority of Christian bodies, (I am not speaking of individuals), insist on Pacifism: the Quakers and Mennonites spring to mind, and there may be others. Yet in the first century it was required of anyone seeking baptism. Soldiers were automatically excluded. For more than a millennium, usury, lending money for interest was totally forbidden to Christians, yet today it is the very foundation of our society, religious as well as secular. Incidentally, we have Calvin to thank for producing a rationale for the change. Perhaps one of the most glaring changes has been in the understanding of marriage. Until the 20th century, at least in Western Christianity, divorce was forbidden, though as early as Matthew’s version of the gospel, the absolute prohibition on the lips of Jesus found in Mark, whose book was used by Matthew, has been softened slightly to allow divorce in the case of adultery. One needs to recall, though, that that means a man may divorce his wife if she commits adultery: not the other way round.
Many more examples could be adduced, but it is clear that teaching and rules about patterns of behavior can and do change. Of course, the most traditional sections of the church, the Roman Catholic on the one hand and the conservative Evangelical churches, on the other, tend to hold out longer, though largely in the case of sexual behavior: they don’t have problems with war or capitalism, for example.
Does doctrine concerned with how one has to believe change too? The answer has to be yes and no. Before the 4th century there was acceptable variation, then for almost a millennium a standardized body of teachings, embodied in the major Creeds, the declarations of Councils and, above all, in Papal encyclicals remained unchallenged, though individual Theologians were relatively free to speculate.
The Reformation and After
Then came the Reformation and significant variation once more has become the norm.
Some foundational doctrines remained fairly universal: the existence of the One God; the Trinitarian nature of that God (though this is not so universal – witness Unitarians and the Deists of the 18th century (including, interestingly quite a number of the USA Founding Fathers); the central role in Christianity of Jesus and his designation as Messiah and Son of God (though here again, complete unanimity is absent). George Lindbeck in The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, 1984) writes, “We may assume that some doctrines are permanent. For example, "God is love" (not actually formulated like that in the New Testament until the late Epistle of John). This could be said to be a sine qua non for claiming to be part of the catholic church. No Ecumenical Council has ever decreed it, but doctrines like this are "part of the indispensable grammar or logic of faith". (p. 85).
In general, the statements of the Apostles’ Creed have remained a kind of norm, expressing the dependence of the world on the creative power of God, assuming the activity of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church, centrally, seeing Jesus as the focus of God’s saving activity for us. Belief in the Resurrection of Jesus remains central, but, and it is a sizeable “but”, how that is to be understood has been a matter of fierce debate for the last century and a half, and, at this point, it is necessary to look at some of the history of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Doctrine Today
Such a consideration is crucial for our understanding the status of Christian Doctrine today. The work of geologists, biologists and historians and those of other scientific disciplines more than ruffled the waters of the doctrinal pond as the nineteenth century progressed. The veracity of Genesis was the first casualty as it became certain that the world was not a mere six thousand years old. Christiann orthodoxy had by the beginning of the 19th century adjusted to astronomy, adjusted to the fact that the moon was not just a few hundred miles away; that the sun was hundreds of thousands of miles away. The adjustment had been relatively smooth because most of the early astronomers were committed Christians, and because the new astronomical knowledge could be seen as adding to the majesty of God and the perfection of the divine plan. Geology and biology were much more upsetting: the former because the study of rocks and fossils undermined the inerrancy of the Bible, the latter because the study of life and its origins seemed to remove divine providence from the equation and at a stroke to question the idea of purpose in the universe and in individual lives.
Summing Up
At the start of the 20th century, several positions on Doctrine, which are operative today were emerging.
(1) The hard liners (RC church, Conservative Evangelical, particularly among Baptists, but found in all major denominations) moved into a barricade mode; the “new learning” was seen as dangerous and it was essential to emphasize and stand on Christian Fundamentals. Of course, there were great differences between the Roman Catholic and Protestant positions, not the least being the active hostility to democratic ideas clearly expressed in the Papal establishment, but there was agreement that the tide must not be allowed to come in.
(2) The moderates, found mainly, but not exclusively in the C of E, the Methodists and Congregationalists, remained firm about the central doctrines of the creed but allowed that adjustments had to be made in the way we read the bible and understand the physical universe. Very often in this approach, a distinction is made between the spiritual truths of the Bible and Christian doctrine, and the historical and physical facts found there.
(3) As the 20th century progressed, these rather tentative alternatives to rigid dogma began to loosen up further. The powerful cultural influences that were involved in the early formation of dogmas (as we may now call them) were exposed, the earlier variety of doctrinal positions was revealed, and the result was that significant reinterpretation and reapplication of basic tenets were frequently debated.
(4) Perhaps, the most radical approach in the contemporary debate is to insist that much of the early language of the Christian religion is metaphorical, much like the parables. Thus the statement that Jesus is the Son of God should not be understood as giving us information about the inner workings of the Godhead (as though it were an engineer’s drawing), but as pointing to the fact that he had, and has, a uniquely close relationship with God, who in a metaphor (which we mostly forget is a metaphor) can be understood as the Father of Jesus, and of us all as brothers and sisters of the Messiah.
One of the most interesting attempts to make sense of doctrine in a world-view radically different from the one in which it developed is the work of George Lindbeck: doctrine is like syntax or grammar in a linguistic system. If you want to be understood, follow the rules; if you want to be considered a Christian follow the doctrines. But the rules will be different if you want to be a conservative RC rather than a liberal Anglican.
Lindbeck writes:
"Religious change or innovation must be understood, not as proceeding from new experiences, but as resulting from the interactions of a cultural-linguistic system with changing situations. Religious traditions are not transformed, abandoned, or replaced because of an upwelling of new or different ways of feeling about the self, the world, or God, but because a religious interpretive scheme (embodied, as it always is, in religious belief and practice) develops anomalies in its application in new contexts. . . . Prophetic figures apprehend, often with dramatic vividness, how inherited patterns of belief, practice and ritual need to be (and can be) reminted." (Lindbeck, 39, italics added).
Anglican Primates, listen up. Where are your Prophets?
(5) In closing the scaffolding metaphor may be pressed into service once more. It suggests that Doctrine and Dogma are necessary, but not necessarily immutable. Scaffolding gives shape, it supports, and can be taken down and put up again for repair or restoration, but it is not the building in which we “live and move and have our being”.
Unhappily, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence that some in the Anglican Communion are mistaking the scaffolding for the building.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Anglican positions on Divorce
At the beginning of the 20th century, divorce in most western countries was not easy. The R.C. church practiced (and still does) the dubious method of nullity, on which even its own canon law was not as clear as it might be. A common nullity verdict has often been based on the “Pauline Privilege” applied to a “mixed marriage”, but canonists are not unanimous that this is a valid procedure.
If divorce was not easy in secular circles, it was impossible for clerics, and for lay people, carried with it excommunication. Until quite recently any member of the clergy getting a divorce was inhibited for a significant period, and if he (there were only males then) remarried, he would be suspended from the ministry sine die.
Relaxed Attitudes in 20th Century
In most Protestant branches of the church, a much more permissive attitude to divorce, even among clergy, developed in the second half of the 20th century. This relaxation has also happened in the Episcopal Church.
The change has not been merely a slipping of standards, and yet another example of a “sliding away from classic Anglican theology and morals” (John Rodgers in The Living Church, Feb. 27, 2000, 8). On the contrary, it has been the application of classic Anglican principles. The change in policy (which departs radically from scriptural prescription) is the result of prayerful consideration of the realities of marriage breakdown. Such psychological, social, and personal realities, (like the realities of scientific revelation) have been taken seriously.
Roman Catholic and Orthodox Views
This position is not that of the R.C. church. The classic catholic position since the 13th century is that since marriage is a sacrament, “the marital bond between husband and wife is an, objective, ontological reality that cannot be dissolved”, (Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, 179b). That means that divorce is not only wrong; it is impossible. (Compare the analogous argument about the ordination of women - an ontological impossibility). Conservative Evangelicals who, in spite of deep distrust of Rome and a rejection of many of its theological positions, agree on some moral issues like abortion and homosexuality; they also share a generally fundamentalist approach to scripture, but interestingly, Evangelicals do not, by and large, share the R.C. view of marriage and divorce, (nor its stringent and continuing rejection of contraception).
An alternative view of marriage, which is common in Eastern Orthodox thought, is to regard it not as an ontological bond, but as a moral one, which depends for its stability on a high level of mutual trust. Thus, though ideally a marriage should not break down, the realities of human sin mean that if trust is irretrievably broken, the marriage is “morally dead”.
Change in Anglican Communion
The Episcopal Church has made the change in typically Anglican fashion, piecemeal, with local arrangements first and changes in the National Canons much later. This same process may be seen in the wider communion. The C of E Synod has considered a measure to allow the remarriage of divorced clergy under certain circumstances. The process is not tidy and it can be read as “sliding away” from some imagined neatly formulated position. But is not a sliding away from classical Anglicanism.
No Homosexuality: No Divorce?
Finally, the analogies between policies for divorced people and those for homosexual people need to be noted. There is as much (indeed, more, since there are specific Dominical words) explicit biblical warrant for forbidding divorce and remarriage as there is for excluding homosexuals. There is also quite as strong a tradition in the matter.
If the Anglican Communion cannot bring itself fully to incorporate homosexual persons into its life and structure, those branches of the Communion that have liberal divorce policies ought, perhaps, in all justice and consistency seriously to consider the status of divorced persons among them. If those autonomous churches in the Anglican Communion cannot include homosexual persons, would it not be just for them to inhibit all divorced clergy, discontinue the practice of marrying divorced persons in church, and seriously consider revoking their status as communicants?
If divorce was not easy in secular circles, it was impossible for clerics, and for lay people, carried with it excommunication. Until quite recently any member of the clergy getting a divorce was inhibited for a significant period, and if he (there were only males then) remarried, he would be suspended from the ministry sine die.
Relaxed Attitudes in 20th Century
In most Protestant branches of the church, a much more permissive attitude to divorce, even among clergy, developed in the second half of the 20th century. This relaxation has also happened in the Episcopal Church.
The change has not been merely a slipping of standards, and yet another example of a “sliding away from classic Anglican theology and morals” (John Rodgers in The Living Church, Feb. 27, 2000, 8). On the contrary, it has been the application of classic Anglican principles. The change in policy (which departs radically from scriptural prescription) is the result of prayerful consideration of the realities of marriage breakdown. Such psychological, social, and personal realities, (like the realities of scientific revelation) have been taken seriously.
Roman Catholic and Orthodox Views
This position is not that of the R.C. church. The classic catholic position since the 13th century is that since marriage is a sacrament, “the marital bond between husband and wife is an, objective, ontological reality that cannot be dissolved”, (Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, 179b). That means that divorce is not only wrong; it is impossible. (Compare the analogous argument about the ordination of women - an ontological impossibility). Conservative Evangelicals who, in spite of deep distrust of Rome and a rejection of many of its theological positions, agree on some moral issues like abortion and homosexuality; they also share a generally fundamentalist approach to scripture, but interestingly, Evangelicals do not, by and large, share the R.C. view of marriage and divorce, (nor its stringent and continuing rejection of contraception).
An alternative view of marriage, which is common in Eastern Orthodox thought, is to regard it not as an ontological bond, but as a moral one, which depends for its stability on a high level of mutual trust. Thus, though ideally a marriage should not break down, the realities of human sin mean that if trust is irretrievably broken, the marriage is “morally dead”.
Change in Anglican Communion
The Episcopal Church has made the change in typically Anglican fashion, piecemeal, with local arrangements first and changes in the National Canons much later. This same process may be seen in the wider communion. The C of E Synod has considered a measure to allow the remarriage of divorced clergy under certain circumstances. The process is not tidy and it can be read as “sliding away” from some imagined neatly formulated position. But is not a sliding away from classical Anglicanism.
No Homosexuality: No Divorce?
Finally, the analogies between policies for divorced people and those for homosexual people need to be noted. There is as much (indeed, more, since there are specific Dominical words) explicit biblical warrant for forbidding divorce and remarriage as there is for excluding homosexuals. There is also quite as strong a tradition in the matter.
If the Anglican Communion cannot bring itself fully to incorporate homosexual persons into its life and structure, those branches of the Communion that have liberal divorce policies ought, perhaps, in all justice and consistency seriously to consider the status of divorced persons among them. If those autonomous churches in the Anglican Communion cannot include homosexual persons, would it not be just for them to inhibit all divorced clergy, discontinue the practice of marrying divorced persons in church, and seriously consider revoking their status as communicants?
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Sermon for First Sunday in Lent
All Saints' Church, Rehoboth, Delaware. February 25, 2007
Readings for Lent I: Deut. 26.1-11; Rom. 10.5-13; Luke 4.1-13
We don’t often get a reading from the Book of Deuteronomy: even its name was a sort of conundrum until T.S Eliot’s poems appeared in a musical featuring one of his favorite feline friends. The name comes from two Greek words, “second” and “law”, and biblical scholars since the middle of the nineteenth century have understood it to be a reissuing of many older traditions, not only laws but summaries of Israel’s history and exhortations to a full acceptance of the religion of the One God, Yahweh. The book is in many ways different from the first four books of the Torah because it was produced under the influence, not of the scribal, priestly group, but by the followers of the Prophets, therefore emphasizing the need for social responsibility, and downplaying sacrificial rituals.
Its interest in the nation's history is well illustrated in today’s snippet, where the Book’s authors assume that Moses is speaking; this, by the way, was not regarded as forgery, for in ancient literature it was legitimate to say for someone centuries later what they might or ought to have said. The putative Moses speaks: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation.” Then follows one of several potted histories that we find in Deuteronomy and the book of Joshua, more or less, its companion volume. From this passage and from a myriad others in the O.T. it is clear that the recalling of their history was central to the existence of Israel, and central to that story was a faith in the God who had brought them into existence.
As their history progressed, however, all did not go well. More and more they related how God had made them a chosen people, with the increasingly clear corollary that God was not interested in the other 99% of the world. They listened to part of their history and they ignored voices which reminded them that God had chosen them to be “a light to the nations”. Perhaps their exclusiveness is understandable, because their history showed them the implacable evil of the power of the great as they were, time and again, subjugated to powerful empires. At the same time, their prophets had to remind them that within their own society, the power of the rich and great caused immense suffering within their own nation. The frequently quoted wisdom that “those who do not take note of their history, are condemned to repeat it”, is not entirely true of Israel. They repeatedly took note, in many passages like today’s first lesson, and in many of the Psalms; the problem was not a failure to read, but a misreading of their history. There is much more that can be said, but we need to turn to today’s gospel and consider Luke’s version of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.
Luke is more interested in what he takes to be a precise historical setting than any other Evangelist, indeed, of any other N.T. writer. At the very beginning he places the narrative of John the Baptist’s father “[i]n the days of Herod, king of Judea”; when Joseph and Mary have to go to Bethlehem for the census, he very precisely notes who was the Emperor and who the governor of Syria, and he carefully places the beginning of the Baptist’s work: “in the fifteenth year of Tiberius” when Pontius Pilate was governor and Herod [not “the Great”] tetrarch of Galilee. After the story of the baptism that follows today’s reading Luke notes that Jesus “was about thirty years of age”, and then gives one of the two (differing) genealogies, family histories of Jesus; the other one is at the very beginning of Matthew’s gospel. These passages are totally ignored by the Lectionary, and so only bible students tend to know even of their existence. They are however of immense and primary importance for understanding the objectives of the two writers. Matthew begins with Abraham, and comes, interestingly to Joseph. Jesus is clearly a Jewish Messiah. Luke, on the other hand begins with Jesus, supposedly the son of Joseph, and goes back 76 generations to Adam, noting David and Abraham on the way, and ending, “son of Adam, the son of God”. So Luke looks back on the history of Israel and sees Jesus as the son of Adam, that is human kind, and via humankind, the son of God.
There is continuity here, but also a startling break. Jesus, Luke seems to suggest, gives us an opportunity for a new history. He is a new Adam, a new humanity a new son of God. It is clear that this not an eccentric idea peculiar to Luke: Paul calls Jesus a second Adam in the letters to Rome and Corinth (Ro. 5.14; I Cor 15, 22 & 45), and even more strikingly proposes a new creation brought about by Jesus, the Messiah (II Cor. 5.17).
Such a view of Jesus disallows the reading of Israel’s history as an inclusive chosen race; it embraces, on the other hand, the Prophetic vision of Israel as a “light to the nations", and with this in mind we might take a new look at the temptation story given us by Luke. The context is vital. We have seen what immediately precedes this story (the lineage of Jesus) and we should note what immediately follows when Jesus emerges from his desert retreat. Luke says he came out “in the power of the Spirit”, went to the Synagogue in Nazareth, read from the Prophet Isaiah, proclaiming the work of the Servant of Yahweh to bring good news to the oppressed and freedom to those who are enslaved (Isa. 61. 1-2). Then the dramatic statement, “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your ears” (Lk. 4.20).
The testing in the desert has a triple thrust. Considered as ways to start a new history they might look something like this: start the new history so that it will be a record of social action, feeding the poor. Or, secondly, begin a new history where power can be used for good and you will not repeat the errors of the past. Then finally, establish yourself as the king who has within himself the divine power to write a theocratic history.
For Luke, the issue is not whether Jesus is the Son of God, but what kind of son. The Devil in these scenes is much more like the Satan of the Book of Job. There, Satan is a rather shady character on Yahweh’s Council of Advisors: rather like the Head of MI5 or the CIA. So the Devil’s function is not so much to tempt (in our contemporary usage) to sin, but to test the character and the will of God’s servant. The answers that Jesus gives tell us both how Luke thinks of Jesus and how he as the new Man will inaugurate a new trajectory for history.
Can it be an accident that all the answers are quotations of or allusions to the Book of Deuteronomy? They point to the divine plan that Israel has not yet managed to put into action. God, and God only must be at the center. Social action is required and is noble, but it must be subordinate to perpetual awareness of our absolute dependence on the gracious God and we must have a conviction that life has a spiritual dimension as well as a material. [That is to say, ‘we cannot love by bread alone’].
The answer to the second test is a refusal to embrace political solutions and to engage in power plays, but it is the final test and answer that clinch for us who Luke thinks Jesus was and what Luke thinks Jesus’ mission is.
The third answer is based on Deuteronomy 6.16, which refers to Israel’s rebellion while in the Wilderness. It underlines the obedience of the new Son, the new Adam, in contrast to the disobedience of Israel. It also suggests, again, the centrality of God: Jesus preaches the Kingdom of God, not the kingdom of Jesus. To put it another way, Jesus is to be the author of the new history: he is not to be its central theme.
As we look back at the history that actually evolved, we have to wonder whether not heeding our history is condemning us to repeat it. The church has had an irresistible itch to get into power plays; the church has had the conviction that it alone has access to truth, and, thus, the right to decree who is in and who is out, and the wrangles of theologians over who exactly Jesus is, have obscured the centrality of God and the work of God’s Servant.
Yet, there is also cause for rejoicing that renewal does happen, that reformation is possible and Easter, for which this Lent is a preparation, declares that Resurrection, life from death, is part of God’s plan, bringing order from chaos, and the continued possibility of a new history.
Readings for Lent I: Deut. 26.1-11; Rom. 10.5-13; Luke 4.1-13
We don’t often get a reading from the Book of Deuteronomy: even its name was a sort of conundrum until T.S Eliot’s poems appeared in a musical featuring one of his favorite feline friends. The name comes from two Greek words, “second” and “law”, and biblical scholars since the middle of the nineteenth century have understood it to be a reissuing of many older traditions, not only laws but summaries of Israel’s history and exhortations to a full acceptance of the religion of the One God, Yahweh. The book is in many ways different from the first four books of the Torah because it was produced under the influence, not of the scribal, priestly group, but by the followers of the Prophets, therefore emphasizing the need for social responsibility, and downplaying sacrificial rituals.
Its interest in the nation's history is well illustrated in today’s snippet, where the Book’s authors assume that Moses is speaking; this, by the way, was not regarded as forgery, for in ancient literature it was legitimate to say for someone centuries later what they might or ought to have said. The putative Moses speaks: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation.” Then follows one of several potted histories that we find in Deuteronomy and the book of Joshua, more or less, its companion volume. From this passage and from a myriad others in the O.T. it is clear that the recalling of their history was central to the existence of Israel, and central to that story was a faith in the God who had brought them into existence.
As their history progressed, however, all did not go well. More and more they related how God had made them a chosen people, with the increasingly clear corollary that God was not interested in the other 99% of the world. They listened to part of their history and they ignored voices which reminded them that God had chosen them to be “a light to the nations”. Perhaps their exclusiveness is understandable, because their history showed them the implacable evil of the power of the great as they were, time and again, subjugated to powerful empires. At the same time, their prophets had to remind them that within their own society, the power of the rich and great caused immense suffering within their own nation. The frequently quoted wisdom that “those who do not take note of their history, are condemned to repeat it”, is not entirely true of Israel. They repeatedly took note, in many passages like today’s first lesson, and in many of the Psalms; the problem was not a failure to read, but a misreading of their history. There is much more that can be said, but we need to turn to today’s gospel and consider Luke’s version of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.
Luke is more interested in what he takes to be a precise historical setting than any other Evangelist, indeed, of any other N.T. writer. At the very beginning he places the narrative of John the Baptist’s father “[i]n the days of Herod, king of Judea”; when Joseph and Mary have to go to Bethlehem for the census, he very precisely notes who was the Emperor and who the governor of Syria, and he carefully places the beginning of the Baptist’s work: “in the fifteenth year of Tiberius” when Pontius Pilate was governor and Herod [not “the Great”] tetrarch of Galilee. After the story of the baptism that follows today’s reading Luke notes that Jesus “was about thirty years of age”, and then gives one of the two (differing) genealogies, family histories of Jesus; the other one is at the very beginning of Matthew’s gospel. These passages are totally ignored by the Lectionary, and so only bible students tend to know even of their existence. They are however of immense and primary importance for understanding the objectives of the two writers. Matthew begins with Abraham, and comes, interestingly to Joseph. Jesus is clearly a Jewish Messiah. Luke, on the other hand begins with Jesus, supposedly the son of Joseph, and goes back 76 generations to Adam, noting David and Abraham on the way, and ending, “son of Adam, the son of God”. So Luke looks back on the history of Israel and sees Jesus as the son of Adam, that is human kind, and via humankind, the son of God.
There is continuity here, but also a startling break. Jesus, Luke seems to suggest, gives us an opportunity for a new history. He is a new Adam, a new humanity a new son of God. It is clear that this not an eccentric idea peculiar to Luke: Paul calls Jesus a second Adam in the letters to Rome and Corinth (Ro. 5.14; I Cor 15, 22 & 45), and even more strikingly proposes a new creation brought about by Jesus, the Messiah (II Cor. 5.17).
Such a view of Jesus disallows the reading of Israel’s history as an inclusive chosen race; it embraces, on the other hand, the Prophetic vision of Israel as a “light to the nations", and with this in mind we might take a new look at the temptation story given us by Luke. The context is vital. We have seen what immediately precedes this story (the lineage of Jesus) and we should note what immediately follows when Jesus emerges from his desert retreat. Luke says he came out “in the power of the Spirit”, went to the Synagogue in Nazareth, read from the Prophet Isaiah, proclaiming the work of the Servant of Yahweh to bring good news to the oppressed and freedom to those who are enslaved (Isa. 61. 1-2). Then the dramatic statement, “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your ears” (Lk. 4.20).
The testing in the desert has a triple thrust. Considered as ways to start a new history they might look something like this: start the new history so that it will be a record of social action, feeding the poor. Or, secondly, begin a new history where power can be used for good and you will not repeat the errors of the past. Then finally, establish yourself as the king who has within himself the divine power to write a theocratic history.
For Luke, the issue is not whether Jesus is the Son of God, but what kind of son. The Devil in these scenes is much more like the Satan of the Book of Job. There, Satan is a rather shady character on Yahweh’s Council of Advisors: rather like the Head of MI5 or the CIA. So the Devil’s function is not so much to tempt (in our contemporary usage) to sin, but to test the character and the will of God’s servant. The answers that Jesus gives tell us both how Luke thinks of Jesus and how he as the new Man will inaugurate a new trajectory for history.
Can it be an accident that all the answers are quotations of or allusions to the Book of Deuteronomy? They point to the divine plan that Israel has not yet managed to put into action. God, and God only must be at the center. Social action is required and is noble, but it must be subordinate to perpetual awareness of our absolute dependence on the gracious God and we must have a conviction that life has a spiritual dimension as well as a material. [That is to say, ‘we cannot love by bread alone’].
The answer to the second test is a refusal to embrace political solutions and to engage in power plays, but it is the final test and answer that clinch for us who Luke thinks Jesus was and what Luke thinks Jesus’ mission is.
The third answer is based on Deuteronomy 6.16, which refers to Israel’s rebellion while in the Wilderness. It underlines the obedience of the new Son, the new Adam, in contrast to the disobedience of Israel. It also suggests, again, the centrality of God: Jesus preaches the Kingdom of God, not the kingdom of Jesus. To put it another way, Jesus is to be the author of the new history: he is not to be its central theme.
As we look back at the history that actually evolved, we have to wonder whether not heeding our history is condemning us to repeat it. The church has had an irresistible itch to get into power plays; the church has had the conviction that it alone has access to truth, and, thus, the right to decree who is in and who is out, and the wrangles of theologians over who exactly Jesus is, have obscured the centrality of God and the work of God’s Servant.
Yet, there is also cause for rejoicing that renewal does happen, that reformation is possible and Easter, for which this Lent is a preparation, declares that Resurrection, life from death, is part of God’s plan, bringing order from chaos, and the continued possibility of a new history.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Darwin, Evolution and the Churches
Lecture 4 in ALL series – Science, Religion & Literature in 19th Century
It might be best to begin by saying something about the plural in the title of this lecture. This will involve briefly covering some of the ground with which I began our introductory lecture.
The religious scene in mid nineteenth century Britain is complex and often confusing. The Church of England was “by law established”, and its polity was very much intertwined with the state. Parliament was (and still is) the final council of the C of E., the existence of which goes back to Parliamentary Acts, supplemented by orders in Council by the Monarch (as in the issuing of the Prayer Book of 1559). It was the achievement of Elizabeth I to give some sort of settlement to this new national church, which had definitively separated from the jurisdiction of the Pope, and yet retained many “catholic” elements: Episcopacy, a fixed Liturgy, the so-called ecumenical creeds and a spirituality closer to the Fathers than to the European reformers. At the same time, there were many influences from the Continental reformation: married clergy (thought Elizabeth herself disapproved), vernacular services, a rejection of many ”popish” doctrines, particularly prayers for the dead and the whole structure of Purgatory.
The Elizabethan Settlement held, but only just. There were enough dissatisfied reformers who wanted to go much further both in doctrine and practice. They triumphed briefly during the Commonwealth with Cromwell as Lord Protector (1649-1660). James II took things in the other direction and tried to restore the authority of Rome, precipitating the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For almost two centuries a relative balance obtained. The Test and Corporation Acts excluded Dissenters from public life and the number of RCs dwindled. By the beginning of the 19th century, however, reform was becoming urgent. In 1828 the Test Act was repealed and 1832 the first Parliamentary reform act was passed. The removal of the Test Act allowed dissenters to stand for Parliament and a significant number were returned in the election after 1832.
The Free Church Groups
The Baptists were the biggest group outside the C of E, followed by Congregationalists; Methodists did not officially break from the established church until Wesley’s death, and did not begin to grow until well into mid century, but together those outside the church began campaigns to remove remaining impediments: marriage to be allowed in ‘chapels”; new civic burial grounds; the removal of church rates, which took until 1868, and finally, education. Measure after measure to admit nonconformists (as they were now being called) to the Universities met prolonged opposition. When finally a law was passed inb1854, Dean Burgon, a dinosaur if ever there was one, wrote: “Oxford, I fear, has seen her best days…She can never more be…the great nursery of the Church. She will become a cage of wild beasts at last….and the Church (and Oxford itself) will rue the day when its liberties and its birthright were lost by a licentious vote of a no longer Christian House of Commons.” (Quoted in Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution, p. 139).
Although the cries of pain and rage over new knowledge came from all Christians at first, the strongest opposition came from nonconformity and the Evangelical group within the C of E. It was because, on the whole, they had not begun to come to terms with a revised reading of the scriptures. Whereas, increasingly by the mid century, liberal clergy and Dons would say that you did not have to believe that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish and survived, or that the world was actually created in six days, lay people, especially dissenting lay people held fast to an inerrant bible.
The Origin of the Species
Into this mix came Darwin’s Origin of the Species. As we have seen, this was by no means the first airing of such views. Nor was it the cause of the first waves of doubt in the century, which had come from Geology and the critical study of the Bible. It was, however, the event that became the symbol of what seemed to the faithful the accelerating erosion of the faith. Its thesis was elegant and accounted for observations that had been accumulating since the time of Lamarck. Darwin had in 1844 produced a long and carefully argued statement of the evidence and the theory which “included nearly every detail of the final theory” (Asa Briggs, p.481), but he hesitated to publish and was only persuaded to do so when he learned that, quite independently, A.R. Wallace had reached virtually identical conclusions. So he produced the book, frequently characterized as “one of the most important books of the nineteenth century”. Its opening was in itself enough to add new shocks to storms rolling over the religious and social scene. “The view which most naturalists until recently entertained, and which I formerly entertained - that each species has been independently created - is erroneous”. The first part of the book draws conclusions from the facts of selective breeding: the work of horse breeders and pigeon fanciers. He then detailed a mass “of detailed and carefully checked information.” (Briggs, p. 482). Not only were the species not fixed, but the changes could be accounted for by the ‘relentless struggle for existence’, so a selecting process, the famous ‘natural selection’, determined the emergence of new forms ‘under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life’.
Reactions - Scientists
It is important to recall that the cries of horror came from scientists as well as theologians. Darwin’s geology professor, Adam Sedgwick, was appalled; he wrote that “there is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as physical and that a man who denied this (as he assumed Darwin was doing), was ‘deep in the mire of fallacy’” (Briggs, p. 483). Sir Richard Owen was the most prestigious, but not the only scientist to take a stand against Darwin’s theory. Perhaps, more significant is that the popular view that all scientists in the nineteenth century were agnostic or even atheist just cannot be sustained. Chadwick points out that scientists were highly educated people, “and if they were told that science ‘disproved religion’ they knew that it did not. Most of them jettisoned belief in the historical information of Genesis before they knew about evolution.” (Chadwick, II p.6). Of course, it was precisely in being able to jettison the older reading of the bible that differentiated most scientists from the defenders of dogmatic theological positions. This is a phenomenon that can be studied at first hand in our contemporary culture!
Huxley is reported to have said several years after the original uproar that, without any doubt, if a general council of scientists (to transfer ecclesiastical terminology) had been held in 1860, “Darwin’s views would have been condemned by an overwhelming majority.” As it was, Asa Briggs points out it was not the church scientific, but the Church Militant which was first off the mark.
Reactions - The Religious Establishment
Among the leaders of the religious establishment, the alarm was palpable. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford became the spokesman for the opposition, and began the attack with an article in the Quarterly Review. He maintained “that Darwin was guilty of ‘a tendency to limit God’s glory in creation’; that ‘the principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God’; that it ‘contradicts the revealed relations of creation to its Creator’; that it is a ‘dishonouring view of nature’, and so on” (Vidler, op.cit. p. 117). Basil Willey reminds us that Bishop Wilberforce was not an eccentric, clinging to traditional positions long gone. Rather, he was a typical exponent of the ‘broad principles on which the Protestantism of Englishmen rests’. Wilberforce had become the leading champion of moderate but rigid High Churchmanship against the dangerous forces of liberalism. (Willey, More Nineteenth Studies, p.167). I suppose that everyone knows the story of the clash between Huxley, Darwin’s great champion, and Bishop Wilberforce at a meeting of the British Association in 1860; it is, however, too good not to tell yet once again. The several reports of the meeting do not all agree in detail, and tend to paint Wilberforce as an ignoramus, but this was not universal as Darwin himself admitted:
“Darwin himself thought Wilberforce's criticisms fair or at least faceable. `I have just read the "Quarterly" ' he wrote to Hooker in July, 1860. `It is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties... A letter to Lyell on 11 August is significant:'... This morning I recommenced work and am at dogs; ... By the way, the Bishop makes a very telling case against me, by accumulating several instances where I speak doubtfully; but this is very unfair, as in such cases as this of the dog, the evidence is and must be very doubtful.' Darwin's first work, on recovering his health, was in the areas picked out as weak spots of his theory by Wilberforce.34 At the same time he is beginning to be more critical of Wilberforce's criticisms, as being unreasonably stringent in view of the inevitably doubtful nature of the evidence. Huxley had made this point at the outset. “ (Web Article: The Encounter R.J. Lucas).
Two points need to be made: firstly, Darwin is talking about the review article here, and it is more than likely that the Bishop’s language was less measured in a debate; and, secondly, once Darwin’s theory was in the public realm, it gave new direction to researches (you don’t see what you are not looking for), and many gaps soon began to be filled. It has taken a century for genetics to give us the final clincher.
The Wilberforce-Huxley Encounter
Still, all this being allowed, it remains true that the main issue was the strongly held view that the Bible gives us accurate factual knowledge and with that firmly held position, a theory of evolution however water-tight would have been (and still is) attacked. So to return to the British Association meeting, the most likely account goes like this: Wilberforce appears to have said to Huxley, “If anyone were wiling to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be equally willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?”. This reflects a very sentimental Victorian attitude to women. Huxley is said to have muttered to his neighbor quoting the O.T., “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands", and the report of his answer was: “If …the question is put to me, would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” Whereupon there was inextinguishable laughter among the people.” (Quoted in Chadwick, II p.11).
It might be best to begin by saying something about the plural in the title of this lecture. This will involve briefly covering some of the ground with which I began our introductory lecture.
The religious scene in mid nineteenth century Britain is complex and often confusing. The Church of England was “by law established”, and its polity was very much intertwined with the state. Parliament was (and still is) the final council of the C of E., the existence of which goes back to Parliamentary Acts, supplemented by orders in Council by the Monarch (as in the issuing of the Prayer Book of 1559). It was the achievement of Elizabeth I to give some sort of settlement to this new national church, which had definitively separated from the jurisdiction of the Pope, and yet retained many “catholic” elements: Episcopacy, a fixed Liturgy, the so-called ecumenical creeds and a spirituality closer to the Fathers than to the European reformers. At the same time, there were many influences from the Continental reformation: married clergy (thought Elizabeth herself disapproved), vernacular services, a rejection of many ”popish” doctrines, particularly prayers for the dead and the whole structure of Purgatory.
The Elizabethan Settlement held, but only just. There were enough dissatisfied reformers who wanted to go much further both in doctrine and practice. They triumphed briefly during the Commonwealth with Cromwell as Lord Protector (1649-1660). James II took things in the other direction and tried to restore the authority of Rome, precipitating the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For almost two centuries a relative balance obtained. The Test and Corporation Acts excluded Dissenters from public life and the number of RCs dwindled. By the beginning of the 19th century, however, reform was becoming urgent. In 1828 the Test Act was repealed and 1832 the first Parliamentary reform act was passed. The removal of the Test Act allowed dissenters to stand for Parliament and a significant number were returned in the election after 1832.
The Free Church Groups
The Baptists were the biggest group outside the C of E, followed by Congregationalists; Methodists did not officially break from the established church until Wesley’s death, and did not begin to grow until well into mid century, but together those outside the church began campaigns to remove remaining impediments: marriage to be allowed in ‘chapels”; new civic burial grounds; the removal of church rates, which took until 1868, and finally, education. Measure after measure to admit nonconformists (as they were now being called) to the Universities met prolonged opposition. When finally a law was passed inb1854, Dean Burgon, a dinosaur if ever there was one, wrote: “Oxford, I fear, has seen her best days…She can never more be…the great nursery of the Church. She will become a cage of wild beasts at last….and the Church (and Oxford itself) will rue the day when its liberties and its birthright were lost by a licentious vote of a no longer Christian House of Commons.” (Quoted in Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution, p. 139).
Although the cries of pain and rage over new knowledge came from all Christians at first, the strongest opposition came from nonconformity and the Evangelical group within the C of E. It was because, on the whole, they had not begun to come to terms with a revised reading of the scriptures. Whereas, increasingly by the mid century, liberal clergy and Dons would say that you did not have to believe that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish and survived, or that the world was actually created in six days, lay people, especially dissenting lay people held fast to an inerrant bible.
The Origin of the Species
Into this mix came Darwin’s Origin of the Species. As we have seen, this was by no means the first airing of such views. Nor was it the cause of the first waves of doubt in the century, which had come from Geology and the critical study of the Bible. It was, however, the event that became the symbol of what seemed to the faithful the accelerating erosion of the faith. Its thesis was elegant and accounted for observations that had been accumulating since the time of Lamarck. Darwin had in 1844 produced a long and carefully argued statement of the evidence and the theory which “included nearly every detail of the final theory” (Asa Briggs, p.481), but he hesitated to publish and was only persuaded to do so when he learned that, quite independently, A.R. Wallace had reached virtually identical conclusions. So he produced the book, frequently characterized as “one of the most important books of the nineteenth century”. Its opening was in itself enough to add new shocks to storms rolling over the religious and social scene. “The view which most naturalists until recently entertained, and which I formerly entertained - that each species has been independently created - is erroneous”. The first part of the book draws conclusions from the facts of selective breeding: the work of horse breeders and pigeon fanciers. He then detailed a mass “of detailed and carefully checked information.” (Briggs, p. 482). Not only were the species not fixed, but the changes could be accounted for by the ‘relentless struggle for existence’, so a selecting process, the famous ‘natural selection’, determined the emergence of new forms ‘under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life’.
Reactions - Scientists
It is important to recall that the cries of horror came from scientists as well as theologians. Darwin’s geology professor, Adam Sedgwick, was appalled; he wrote that “there is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as physical and that a man who denied this (as he assumed Darwin was doing), was ‘deep in the mire of fallacy’” (Briggs, p. 483). Sir Richard Owen was the most prestigious, but not the only scientist to take a stand against Darwin’s theory. Perhaps, more significant is that the popular view that all scientists in the nineteenth century were agnostic or even atheist just cannot be sustained. Chadwick points out that scientists were highly educated people, “and if they were told that science ‘disproved religion’ they knew that it did not. Most of them jettisoned belief in the historical information of Genesis before they knew about evolution.” (Chadwick, II p.6). Of course, it was precisely in being able to jettison the older reading of the bible that differentiated most scientists from the defenders of dogmatic theological positions. This is a phenomenon that can be studied at first hand in our contemporary culture!
Huxley is reported to have said several years after the original uproar that, without any doubt, if a general council of scientists (to transfer ecclesiastical terminology) had been held in 1860, “Darwin’s views would have been condemned by an overwhelming majority.” As it was, Asa Briggs points out it was not the church scientific, but the Church Militant which was first off the mark.
Reactions - The Religious Establishment
Among the leaders of the religious establishment, the alarm was palpable. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford became the spokesman for the opposition, and began the attack with an article in the Quarterly Review. He maintained “that Darwin was guilty of ‘a tendency to limit God’s glory in creation’; that ‘the principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God’; that it ‘contradicts the revealed relations of creation to its Creator’; that it is a ‘dishonouring view of nature’, and so on” (Vidler, op.cit. p. 117). Basil Willey reminds us that Bishop Wilberforce was not an eccentric, clinging to traditional positions long gone. Rather, he was a typical exponent of the ‘broad principles on which the Protestantism of Englishmen rests’. Wilberforce had become the leading champion of moderate but rigid High Churchmanship against the dangerous forces of liberalism. (Willey, More Nineteenth Studies, p.167). I suppose that everyone knows the story of the clash between Huxley, Darwin’s great champion, and Bishop Wilberforce at a meeting of the British Association in 1860; it is, however, too good not to tell yet once again. The several reports of the meeting do not all agree in detail, and tend to paint Wilberforce as an ignoramus, but this was not universal as Darwin himself admitted:
“Darwin himself thought Wilberforce's criticisms fair or at least faceable. `I have just read the "Quarterly" ' he wrote to Hooker in July, 1860. `It is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties... A letter to Lyell on 11 August is significant:'... This morning I recommenced work and am at dogs; ... By the way, the Bishop makes a very telling case against me, by accumulating several instances where I speak doubtfully; but this is very unfair, as in such cases as this of the dog, the evidence is and must be very doubtful.' Darwin's first work, on recovering his health, was in the areas picked out as weak spots of his theory by Wilberforce.34 At the same time he is beginning to be more critical of Wilberforce's criticisms, as being unreasonably stringent in view of the inevitably doubtful nature of the evidence. Huxley had made this point at the outset. “ (Web Article: The Encounter R.J. Lucas).
Two points need to be made: firstly, Darwin is talking about the review article here, and it is more than likely that the Bishop’s language was less measured in a debate; and, secondly, once Darwin’s theory was in the public realm, it gave new direction to researches (you don’t see what you are not looking for), and many gaps soon began to be filled. It has taken a century for genetics to give us the final clincher.
The Wilberforce-Huxley Encounter
Still, all this being allowed, it remains true that the main issue was the strongly held view that the Bible gives us accurate factual knowledge and with that firmly held position, a theory of evolution however water-tight would have been (and still is) attacked. So to return to the British Association meeting, the most likely account goes like this: Wilberforce appears to have said to Huxley, “If anyone were wiling to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be equally willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?”. This reflects a very sentimental Victorian attitude to women. Huxley is said to have muttered to his neighbor quoting the O.T., “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands", and the report of his answer was: “If …the question is put to me, would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion – I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” Whereupon there was inextinguishable laughter among the people.” (Quoted in Chadwick, II p.11).
Monday, February 19, 2007
The Faith/Doubt Scenario Lecture 3
I broke off last week somewhat in the middle of a consideration of the impact of Geology and, in particular,
Charles Lyell’s significant contribution in his two volume Principles of Geology.
Lyell upset the biblical time scale irremediably, but worse was to come. His thesis gave a rational explanation of why fossils of sea creature could be found on the top of mountains, without recourse to a Noachian flood of immense proportions. It also made clear that many species had perished, a notion totally unacceptable to long-held views about the immutability of the species. “The inhabitants of the globe”, he wrote, “like all other parts of it are subject to change. It is not only the individual that perishes but whole species.” (Quoted in Basil Willey, More Nineteenth Century Studies, p 84). This phrase is virtually quoted in stanzas LV and LVI of the poem, and we know that in 1837, Tennyson was ‘deeply immersed’ in, and troubled by, a study of Lyell’s work. That the species are ‘subject to change’ shows that what one might call proto-evolutionary ideas were around decades before Darwin published.
Vestiges of Creation
They were suggested in 1844 (though without Darwin’s meticulous work that explained the precise mechanism of change) in a somewhat cranky book published in 1844, The Vestiges of Creation. It was published anonymously and occasioned wild speculations about the identity of the author: Prince Albert was a favorite candidate but speculations also suggested Lady Lovelace, Byron’s daughter, Thackeray or even Charles Darwin who was thought to be writing something in this field. The book was a very mixed bag: its central thesis was more or less in line with ideas that were beginning to percolate to the reading public, but also contained a mish mash of fable and hearsay: spontaneous generation of life by passing an electric current through inorganic matter; the possibility of hatching a rat from a goose egg; and wild pigs do not get measles, so measles in humans result from eating bacon (from domesticated pigs). (Chadwick TVC I, p. 565f.) The book writes Chadwick, “embarrassed serious students of evolution. It embarrassed literate Christian geologists because it encouraged illiterate Mosaic cosmogonists…The book embarrassed the tiny handful of serious students working towards a tolerable and scientific theory of organic development. Huxley never forgave Chambers (for that was the author’s name. not revealed until some time after his death) for making truth ridiculous.” (TVC I, p.566).
Whereas Tennyson was greatly troubled by Lyell’s work on geology, what Robert Chambers (much later revealed as the author) had to say seemed reassuring. Quite apart from the ludicrous claims, Chambers fell back on the older arguments. God worked through the ‘natural laws’ he had established, and “what is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws, which are in like manner an expression of His will?”
Analytic & Critical History
The other great cause for outrage to traditional positions came, as it were, from within, particularly from German biblical scholars. In the usual accounts of the impact of science on religion, the focus tend to be on the natural sciences, geology, physics, biology and, though, often forgotten, astronomy. [See Norton Ed. of In Memoriam, pp. 147 ff. with interesting lines from The Princess. In the light of this, it is important to note that the approach to history and history writing had been undergoing a sea change. Methods analogous to the empirical approach of the natural sciences began to be used. Texts were analyzed with statistical probabilities in mind; traditional attributions of authorship were, therefore, often called into question, and forgeries revealed What might be called a scientific approach to history and ancient documents did not begin with the biblical texts, but with classical. Students began to ask about, for example, the Odyssey: did it really represent an early stage in Greek history? Was it by a single author? How did it compare with other great orally transmitted epics and so on.
The Old Testament
As early as the late 18th century, scholars began to turn their attention to the Hebrew scriptures, beginning with the first five books of the bible known as the Pentateuch. Both Jewish and Christian tradition was in no doubt that all five were written by Moses, and it was this article of faith that was first to go. Critical analysis revealed that the books were a composite of at least four documents though later students preferred to speak of “traditions’, and to consider more than four). These theories explained facts that earlier generations had ignored, and problems that had been rationalized away. Preeminent was a new understanding of why so many incidents and stories appeared more than once. Perhaps the most striking example is the two creation stories right at the beginning of the Book of Genesis: it appeared that the very first chapter of the book was probably almost the last piece to be written as the Pentateuch reached its final form after many editings. Of course this was only the beginning: the prophetic books, the Psalms and the records of the later history of the Hebrews in the books of Kings and Chronicles were soon subjected to minute inspection and, indeed, dissection. Not surprisingly, in the flush of enthusiasm for a whole new understanding of the scriptures, some rather wild theories were propounded, giving the beleaguered traditionalists a few straws to clutch. Chadwick writes, “Germany entered this phase in the history of ideas nearly half a century earlier than England. On his arrival Prince Albert cold not help regarding English clergymen a obscurantist.” (TVC I, p.530).
Allegory & Moral Objections
The reaction in England was somewhat delayed partly because few academics thought it worthwhile to learn the language, and those who did and showed some interest in and sympathy for the new ideas clearly were regarded by the Oxbridge/Cathedral axis of power as suspect at least and as heretical at worst. The Old Testament has in some measure been a problem from the start: the 3rd century commentator, Origen, struggled with the law that Christians clearly did not any longer keep, and turned to allegory: shell fish really referred to sensual sins that clung lie a limpet. its stories of Joshua killing all the Canaanites, Jepthah sacrificing his daughter because of vow to Jehovah (Jud. 11.30 ff.),and the generally war-like and revengeful character of the said Jehovah. By the way, the very name Jehovah was shown to be an absurd reading of the Hebrew text, resulting from putting together the consonants of the name of God revealed to Moses, YHWH, with the vowels of aedonai (Lord). The vowels were written above Yahweh to remind the reader not to utter to sac red name.
The New Testament
Still, the Old Testament was one thing, the New quite another matter and it was not long before the waves of radical criticism were lapping at the very rock on which the church was built, at least from a Protestant perspective. Slowly the new critical views filtered through. George Eliot’s translation of one of the seminal works, The Life of Jesus by D. F. Strauss, certainly did a good deal to raise the anxiety level. As Owen Chadwick says: “The unsettlement of scholarship-and also of the public mind was greater over the New Testament than over the Old…because it touched the centre of Christianity”. (Victorian Church II, p. 60). That the First five books of the O.T. were shown not to be by Moses, but to be made of multiple sources of varying dates several centuries after his death (even if that could any longer be dated at all), was unsettling, but to be told that the four gospels were almost certainly not by the Evangelists to whom they are attributed, that Jesus made mistakes of fact (e.g. David wrote the Psalms) was devastating. As time went on the rear-guard actions of conservative scholars looked less and less credible, but for more than the first half of the century, all this shook up faith and strengthened doubt.
There is nothing in In Memoriam that seems specifically to refer to the corrosive effects of critical, historical, criticism in the way Tennyson’s passages about geology and evolution do, but the turmoil in Lecture Room and Pulpit contributed significantly to the growing cloud of doubt that one frequently feels swirling round as one reads.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Fading Faith & Honest Doubt - Lecture 2
Introduction
Alec Vidler in his excellent short volume in the Pelican History of the Church series (V), quotes Margaret Maison (Search your Soul Eustace, p 209): “Never has an age in history produced such a detailed literature of lost faith, or so many great men and women of religious temperament standing outside organized religion”. (Vidler p. 113). Alfred Tennyson does not quite fit into the category of lost faith, but from his Cambridge days on and in most of his writing the issue is often near at hand. Some close friend, perhaps Emily Sellwood, whom he was eventually to marry (after a broken engagement of over a decade), tells him “doubt is Devil-born”, to which he responds that his great friend Hallam was “perplext in faith, but pure in deeds”. Then follows what have been, perhaps, the most quoted lines of In Memoriam:
Lives more faith in honest doubt
Believe me, than in half the creeds (XCVI, 11 & 12).
Tennyson was not fully in the company of the likes of Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and many others who quite publicly rejected traditional and established Christianity, while often, we need to be reminded, retaining what might be called a generalized religious temper of mind. Morality remained paramount, but its necessary connection to religion, and especially the traditional view of many orthodox believers that rejection of a Christian position inevitably led to immorality, was vehemently rebutted. T.S Eliot’s justly famous essay on In Memoriam, proposed the often quoted view that the poem is religious in tone, not “because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience.” (Quoted in the Norton critical Edition of In Memoriam, p. 138). One hesitates to take issue with so great a name as Tom Eliot, but a sorely tried faith, a faith that recognizes that it is under attack and honestly faces up to the truths behind the attack, is perhaps more than a “poor thing”. In Tennyson, one feels, that the conflict is in progress whereas in so many of his intellectual contemporaries it was taken for granted that it was over and religion lay in its final throes. Without doubt, Tennyson’s faith was far removed from Nicene-Chalcedonian orthodoxy as the very final stanza of the poem suggests (note the neuter, “which”):
That God* which ever lives and loves
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves. *(in whom AHH now lives)
The Intellectual Scene as the 19th Century began:
Causes of the Convulsions
We have seen some of the factors that led up to the nineteenth century intellectual convulsions, a scene well illustrated by Simon Winchester in his book, The Map That Changed The World; pages 11-16 give a good over-view.
We now need to consider in more detail some of the specific writing, controversies and strongly held positions. A great deal of the “battle” raged in the newspapers and journals of the day: the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh Review, The Christian Observer, The Guardian, and, of course, The Times. The discourse was frequently unmannerly and strident. The most strident voices came, on the whole, from the defenders of tradition, Bishops, Deans and Dons. Alec Vidler has an excellent comment on this situation:
It may also be surmised that the strident tones and proclivity to heresy-hunting…characteristic of many Victorian divines may have hidden from themselves as well as others…anxiety about their own faith…Men talk with shrill excitement when they are least sure of themselves and most fearful that those who disagree with them may be right. (op.cit. p. 113).
From where did the defenders of the Faith perceive the threats to be coming? By and large they had come to some kind of rapprochement with the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions. The universe might be a massive and intricate machine, but it was one created by God, and the architects of the new world-view were almost all at least Deists, and remained fully involved in the life of the church. It is worth recalling that Newton wrote more pages of theology and commentary (particularly on the Book of Revelation) than on all scientific, writings in physics, mathematics and astronomy.
So what was it? Two main areas of debate were emerging as the nineteenth century opened. The first was the field of the Natural Sciences where the rate of discovery based on empirical observation moved into high gear. The second, more immediately threatening, because it seemed like an attack from within, was the rapid expansion of a critical, historical approach to the Bible. What was being discovered and written about in these fields added to the disquiet already voiced by men like Carlyle, about the morality of a God portrayed in the Old Testament: there was, too, among many thoughtful people an increasing unease about traditional atonement theories which seemed to suggest an angry father demanding the punishment of an innocent son.
The Emergence of Geology
It is commonly assumed that the focus of the great debate was the work of Charles Darwin, whose decades of patient research and observation resulted in the publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859. The facts show otherwise. The well-known stanzas LV & LVI demonstrate that views about evolution were current long before Darwin published, written as they were in the early 1840s. But long before the major battle over evolution began, another branch of science was causing immense anxiety to the traditionalists. It was the work of the early geologists, making a major appearance in the poem in stanzas LVI & CXXIII, for example, which really began to rock the boat of faith at its moorings.
Geology was a new science at the beginning of the 19th century: the third edition of Enc. Brit. 1797 had no entry for it, but by the time of the fourth edition in 1810 a lengthy article is found. Many factors lay behind the emergence of this new interest in the formation of the earth. Suggestions were being made that the shell-fish like stones that were frequently picked up as a farmer ploughed might even be organic in origin: their named changed from “figured stones” to fossils; the frenzy of canal building in the late 18th and railway building in the early 19th centuries exposed deep cuttings which to one or two ingenious minds suggested strata of differing kinds, rock, pebble, marl and so on; so on, particularly, to coal deposits, which were discovered to be much more vast than those exploited since Roman times. The seams needed to be identified and the canals were needed to carry the coal to the new industrial centers at half the cost of a horse wagon and much more quickly. In many ways the economic factors facilitated the scientific enquiry that followed.
Collision with the Bok of Genesis
The data thus revealed were the basis of the new science, and its most complete exposition to date was given by Charles Lyell, later, Sir Charles, who between 1830 and 1833, published the two volumes of Principles of Geology. The main thesis was that the present state of the earth’s surface could not be accounted for by current theory, mainly that of the “catastrophists”, which posited a series of immense upheavals over a rather short period (to fit in with the biblical time-table established by The Book of Genesis, of which, more later). It was to be explained, rather, by the continuous operation of natural forces like wind, tide, volcano and earthquake over protracted periods of time. Here was the most startling clash with biblical data so far in the history of science. Galileo’s observations about the moons of Jupiter did not explicitly contradict the bible and Newton’s mechanical universe could be fitted into a theistic scheme. But tens of millions of years since the creation: that was impossible. Had not Bishop Ussher of Armagh in his erudite and prolix Annalis Veteris et Novi Testamenti of 1658, shown conclusively that the first day of creation began at 9.00 a.m. on Monday, October 23, 4004 B.C.(E.)? Lyell’s time-table, if correct, overturned Genesis, and that was an affront to the almost universally held views about the authority of the bible.
Winchester has an interesting footnote to page15 relevant to this:
Few outside the world of rigid Christian fundamentalism today accept the strict interpretation of Ussher’s arithmetic…[but] a 1991 survey showed that fully 100 million Americans [he means the USA!] still believed that “God created man (sic. )pretty much in his own image at one time during the last ten thousand years…This might suggest that aspects of the religious climate into which William Smith was born-and that he was to help start changing-are now starting to return.
Immutability of Species
Lyell upset the biblical time scale irremediably, but worse was to come. His thesis gave a rational explanation of why fossils of sea creature could be found on the top of mountains, without recourse to a Noachian flood of immense proportions. It also made clear that many species had perished, a notion totally unacceptable to long-held views about the immutability of the species. “The inhabitants of the globe”, he wrote, “like all other parts of it are subject to change. It is not only the individual that perishes but whole species.” (Quoted in Basil Willey, More Nineteenth Century Studies, p 84). This phrase is virtually quoted in stanzas LV and LVI of the poem, and we know that in 1837, Tennyson was ‘deeply immersed’ in, and troubled by, a study of Lyell’s work. That the species are ‘subject to change’ shows that what one might call proto-evolutionary ideas were around decades before Darwin published. They were most clearly articulated (though without Darwin’s meticulous work that explained the precise mechanism of change) in a somewhat cranky book published in 1844, The Vestiges of Creation. It was published anonymously and occasioned wild speculations about the identity of the author: Prince Albert was a favorite candidate among many others. Whereas Tennyson was greatly troubled by Lyell’s work, what Robert Chambers (much later revealed as the author) had to say seemed reassuring. Chambers fell back on the older arguments. God worked through the ‘natural laws’ he had established, and “what is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws, which are in like manner an expression of His will?”
The other great cause for outrage to traditional positions came, as it were, from within, particularly from German biblical scholars, and we will take this up in the next lecture.
Alec Vidler in his excellent short volume in the Pelican History of the Church series (V), quotes Margaret Maison (Search your Soul Eustace, p 209): “Never has an age in history produced such a detailed literature of lost faith, or so many great men and women of religious temperament standing outside organized religion”. (Vidler p. 113). Alfred Tennyson does not quite fit into the category of lost faith, but from his Cambridge days on and in most of his writing the issue is often near at hand. Some close friend, perhaps Emily Sellwood, whom he was eventually to marry (after a broken engagement of over a decade), tells him “doubt is Devil-born”, to which he responds that his great friend Hallam was “perplext in faith, but pure in deeds”. Then follows what have been, perhaps, the most quoted lines of In Memoriam:
Lives more faith in honest doubt
Believe me, than in half the creeds (XCVI, 11 & 12).
Tennyson was not fully in the company of the likes of Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and many others who quite publicly rejected traditional and established Christianity, while often, we need to be reminded, retaining what might be called a generalized religious temper of mind. Morality remained paramount, but its necessary connection to religion, and especially the traditional view of many orthodox believers that rejection of a Christian position inevitably led to immorality, was vehemently rebutted. T.S Eliot’s justly famous essay on In Memoriam, proposed the often quoted view that the poem is religious in tone, not “because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience.” (Quoted in the Norton critical Edition of In Memoriam, p. 138). One hesitates to take issue with so great a name as Tom Eliot, but a sorely tried faith, a faith that recognizes that it is under attack and honestly faces up to the truths behind the attack, is perhaps more than a “poor thing”. In Tennyson, one feels, that the conflict is in progress whereas in so many of his intellectual contemporaries it was taken for granted that it was over and religion lay in its final throes. Without doubt, Tennyson’s faith was far removed from Nicene-Chalcedonian orthodoxy as the very final stanza of the poem suggests (note the neuter, “which”):
That God* which ever lives and loves
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves. *(in whom AHH now lives)
The Intellectual Scene as the 19th Century began:
Causes of the Convulsions
We have seen some of the factors that led up to the nineteenth century intellectual convulsions, a scene well illustrated by Simon Winchester in his book, The Map That Changed The World; pages 11-16 give a good over-view.
We now need to consider in more detail some of the specific writing, controversies and strongly held positions. A great deal of the “battle” raged in the newspapers and journals of the day: the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh Review, The Christian Observer, The Guardian, and, of course, The Times. The discourse was frequently unmannerly and strident. The most strident voices came, on the whole, from the defenders of tradition, Bishops, Deans and Dons. Alec Vidler has an excellent comment on this situation:
It may also be surmised that the strident tones and proclivity to heresy-hunting…characteristic of many Victorian divines may have hidden from themselves as well as others…anxiety about their own faith…Men talk with shrill excitement when they are least sure of themselves and most fearful that those who disagree with them may be right. (op.cit. p. 113).
From where did the defenders of the Faith perceive the threats to be coming? By and large they had come to some kind of rapprochement with the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions. The universe might be a massive and intricate machine, but it was one created by God, and the architects of the new world-view were almost all at least Deists, and remained fully involved in the life of the church. It is worth recalling that Newton wrote more pages of theology and commentary (particularly on the Book of Revelation) than on all scientific, writings in physics, mathematics and astronomy.
So what was it? Two main areas of debate were emerging as the nineteenth century opened. The first was the field of the Natural Sciences where the rate of discovery based on empirical observation moved into high gear. The second, more immediately threatening, because it seemed like an attack from within, was the rapid expansion of a critical, historical approach to the Bible. What was being discovered and written about in these fields added to the disquiet already voiced by men like Carlyle, about the morality of a God portrayed in the Old Testament: there was, too, among many thoughtful people an increasing unease about traditional atonement theories which seemed to suggest an angry father demanding the punishment of an innocent son.
The Emergence of Geology
It is commonly assumed that the focus of the great debate was the work of Charles Darwin, whose decades of patient research and observation resulted in the publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859. The facts show otherwise. The well-known stanzas LV & LVI demonstrate that views about evolution were current long before Darwin published, written as they were in the early 1840s. But long before the major battle over evolution began, another branch of science was causing immense anxiety to the traditionalists. It was the work of the early geologists, making a major appearance in the poem in stanzas LVI & CXXIII, for example, which really began to rock the boat of faith at its moorings.
Geology was a new science at the beginning of the 19th century: the third edition of Enc. Brit. 1797 had no entry for it, but by the time of the fourth edition in 1810 a lengthy article is found. Many factors lay behind the emergence of this new interest in the formation of the earth. Suggestions were being made that the shell-fish like stones that were frequently picked up as a farmer ploughed might even be organic in origin: their named changed from “figured stones” to fossils; the frenzy of canal building in the late 18th and railway building in the early 19th centuries exposed deep cuttings which to one or two ingenious minds suggested strata of differing kinds, rock, pebble, marl and so on; so on, particularly, to coal deposits, which were discovered to be much more vast than those exploited since Roman times. The seams needed to be identified and the canals were needed to carry the coal to the new industrial centers at half the cost of a horse wagon and much more quickly. In many ways the economic factors facilitated the scientific enquiry that followed.
Collision with the Bok of Genesis
The data thus revealed were the basis of the new science, and its most complete exposition to date was given by Charles Lyell, later, Sir Charles, who between 1830 and 1833, published the two volumes of Principles of Geology. The main thesis was that the present state of the earth’s surface could not be accounted for by current theory, mainly that of the “catastrophists”, which posited a series of immense upheavals over a rather short period (to fit in with the biblical time-table established by The Book of Genesis, of which, more later). It was to be explained, rather, by the continuous operation of natural forces like wind, tide, volcano and earthquake over protracted periods of time. Here was the most startling clash with biblical data so far in the history of science. Galileo’s observations about the moons of Jupiter did not explicitly contradict the bible and Newton’s mechanical universe could be fitted into a theistic scheme. But tens of millions of years since the creation: that was impossible. Had not Bishop Ussher of Armagh in his erudite and prolix Annalis Veteris et Novi Testamenti of 1658, shown conclusively that the first day of creation began at 9.00 a.m. on Monday, October 23, 4004 B.C.(E.)? Lyell’s time-table, if correct, overturned Genesis, and that was an affront to the almost universally held views about the authority of the bible.
Winchester has an interesting footnote to page15 relevant to this:
Few outside the world of rigid Christian fundamentalism today accept the strict interpretation of Ussher’s arithmetic…[but] a 1991 survey showed that fully 100 million Americans [he means the USA!] still believed that “God created man (sic. )pretty much in his own image at one time during the last ten thousand years…This might suggest that aspects of the religious climate into which William Smith was born-and that he was to help start changing-are now starting to return.
Immutability of Species
Lyell upset the biblical time scale irremediably, but worse was to come. His thesis gave a rational explanation of why fossils of sea creature could be found on the top of mountains, without recourse to a Noachian flood of immense proportions. It also made clear that many species had perished, a notion totally unacceptable to long-held views about the immutability of the species. “The inhabitants of the globe”, he wrote, “like all other parts of it are subject to change. It is not only the individual that perishes but whole species.” (Quoted in Basil Willey, More Nineteenth Century Studies, p 84). This phrase is virtually quoted in stanzas LV and LVI of the poem, and we know that in 1837, Tennyson was ‘deeply immersed’ in, and troubled by, a study of Lyell’s work. That the species are ‘subject to change’ shows that what one might call proto-evolutionary ideas were around decades before Darwin published. They were most clearly articulated (though without Darwin’s meticulous work that explained the precise mechanism of change) in a somewhat cranky book published in 1844, The Vestiges of Creation. It was published anonymously and occasioned wild speculations about the identity of the author: Prince Albert was a favorite candidate among many others. Whereas Tennyson was greatly troubled by Lyell’s work, what Robert Chambers (much later revealed as the author) had to say seemed reassuring. Chambers fell back on the older arguments. God worked through the ‘natural laws’ he had established, and “what is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws, which are in like manner an expression of His will?”
The other great cause for outrage to traditional positions came, as it were, from within, particularly from German biblical scholars, and we will take this up in the next lecture.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Religion & Science in 19th Century Britain
I am currently teaching a course for an Academy of Life Long Learning dealing with the debate/conflict between science and religion in mid nineteenth century Britain, particularly as reflected in Tennyson’s poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." Here is the general introduction to the course; I hope to add further, shorter notes as the Semester progresses:
The Wider Background
There is widespread agreement that the first half of the 19th century was an era of significant distress and disruption, socially, politically, and, above all in religious belief and practices. Our ultimate objective is to provide the setting for Tennyson’s monumental work, In Memoriam, which reflects many of the tensions so often lumped together as the “science and religion” issue: to do this, however, we need to go back to earlier settings. The tensions and turbulence hardly erupted out of a clear sky, and, to get a good understanding of the turmoils that engulfed the mid-Victorians, it will be helpful to look at some of the clouds that were already gathering long before the eighteen year-old Victoria came to the throne left vacant by the death of her Uncle, William IV.
Any procedure along these lines at once poses the question: how far back can we, should we, go? Perhaps we can take for granted that immense changes began at the Reformation, ending it as it did centuries of a more or less monolithic order for all of Europe. It is easy to assume that the Reformation brought monumental changes to the religious scene, and in some ways that is accurate, but at the deeper levels of theological principles, and, particularly, what might be called the foundational Christian positions, there was not all that much change (except, perhaps, in the case of Calvin who ratcheted up the Augustinian position quite a few notches): views of God as Unity in Trinity; of Jesus Christ as human and divine whose death continued widely to be understood as some punitive transaction that freed humankind (and both sides in the post reformation era continued to say “mankind”); of heaven and hell (though Purgatory had a rough time in Protestant circles); the view that the earth was created in 4004 B.C., this and much more remained unchallenged. The main changes in the reformed position were the new understanding of the structure and authority of the church, and, almost as a corollary to that, the status of the scriptures, where an infallible book now took the place of an infallible Pope or Council of Bishops.
The Age of Reason
It was, however, these two factors that were central in the intellectual developments of the 17th and 18th centuries. The almost universal consensus of the mediaeval period gave way to new questionings of the fixed and final authority of the Church/State of the 12th-15th centuries. Copernicus and Galileo led the way, but lest this introduction to the period with which we are concerned turn into a full-blown history of the Renaissance and the rise of science, it is necessary to jump a century or two.
As we over-fly the territory, we should note how two Englishmen dominated European thought from the 1680s on. Gerald Cragg writes, “In the early part of the eighteenth century, the prestige of English thought stood very high. This was largely due to ….two men: Isaac Newton, who had unlocked the secrets of the physical universe, and John Locke who had laid bare the inner nature of man. English ideas, when transplanted to continental countries, often proved revolutionary in their implications.” (The Church & The Age of Reason 1648-1789 - Penguin 1960, p 157).
Since Newton’s pure reasoning had produced such an elegant and (apparently) final picture of how the Universe worked, it is not surprising that the century that followed has become known as the age of reason. The centre of gravity moved from its Newtonian home to France where thinkers like Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot worked at the diffusion of new ideas, producing the Encyclopaedia. Cragg writes: “[The authors] were not primarily interested in communicating a specific body of knowledge; rather, they aimed at effecting a fundamental revolution in the prevailing pattern of thought.” (op. cit. p 236). This they achieved in great measure, among the intelligentsia of Europe: there was a distinct move from accepting positions on ecclesiastical authority, a move to question accepted historical evidence just on the weight of its supposed origins (Edicts on which much Papal authority was based had been shown to be forgeries), and, in general, a move to a science that was free of theological presuppositions.
Long before the 19th century began, experimental science was asking questions and providing new answers. Quite a few of the aristocratic class had laboratories in their stately homes, Robert Boyle, whose law about the behavior of gasses is well known, is a good example, the earliest experiments with static electricity were under way and in medicine a few tentative steps were being taken. It was not only in the natural sciences that things were stirring. The very understanding of history was changing. New documents were coming to light, old forgeries were being exposed, and, above all, the first signs of critical history appear, where it becomes clear, for example, that the mere number of witnesses is no guarantee of accuracy.
Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
Thus, by the beginning of the 19th century much had changed since the end of the middle ages, and the stage was set for the clashes of what might broadly be called ‘secularism’ and the defenders of traditional religion. The situation in Great Britain, however, was significantly different from affairs on the continent. The whole of Europe was still staggering from the effects of French revolution; in Britain, this led to the strengthening of traditional positions, with a good many recriminations against liberals, and a determination to void such excesses. All this has to be viewed in the light of the struggle for survival being fought against Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Religious Scene
The wider religious scene at the beginning of the new century is as complex as its understanding is essential for our purposes. For much of the 18th century, the C of E could not be called a dynamic force in English life. It was decidedly Erastian in orientation, that is to say, there was almost a symbiosis between State and Church: The Convocations had lapsed and Parliament rarely dealt with church issues (that was to change significantly in the next century); the great Cathedrals kept the services going, but were hardly shining lights; in quite a few rural areas good parsons looked after the members of the parish, lamenting that there seemed to be an increasing number of Dissenters. But, still “[The Church of England] claimed to be a national communion, big enough to contain all shades of thought and feeling, with its rules and ordinances part of pour happy Constitution and State’.” (Asa Briggs, The Making of Modern England, p 69). Among churchmen (people), there was a lively and very present awareness that the English church was “as by law established”. Ever since the time of Elizabeth I there had been groups who felt that the English reformation had not gone far enough, some though no where near far enough. Some, by the time of James I, despairing of any change in the Royal support for the establishment had, to the great relief of many in England, had departed to the new world, taking with them strong Calvinist principles and a narrow vision of a New Jerusalem; there they were to become in future centuries one of the deeper religious strains in the developing of a biblical fundamentalism and an anti-scientific attitude.
Fears of ‘Popery’
At the other end of the spectrum, the establishment continued to fear the re-establishment of a Roman Catholic monarchy. Elizabeth’ reign was plagued with plots to replace her, perhaps the most well known being the one cooked up by Sir John Babbington, aimed at putting Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary (the Scottish Queen) on the English throne. But the threat did not end with the death of Elizabeth. There followed the Stuart kings, Charles I & II, bracketing the civil war and the decade or so of the Common wealth under Cromwell – clearly a time when the “More Reformation” party, (or more accurately parties) were in the ascendant. Charles II died n February 1685, reputedly proclaiming himself a papist on his death-bed. His son, James II, clearly wanted to restore the link with Rome and precipitated what is called the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which brought the Hanoverians into power.
Even this was not the end of the story. In 1715 and again in 1745 attempts were made to restore a Stuart in the throne. They both failed, but had results that strongly influenced the religious scene in England into the 19th century. Michael Wheeler writes, “ Protestant accusations the Catholics would ‘never peaceably submit to a Protestant government’ were often repeated I the n nineteenth century, especially in the times of crisis”. (The Old Enemies – Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture. CUP 2006, p 113). Among these crises were the gradual repeal of discriminatory laws, the re-introduction of Roman Catholic Bishops, and the perceived infecting of the C of E with ‘popish’ errors clearly visible in the defection to Rome (‘going to Aunty’) of controversial figures like Jon Newman, later made a Cardinal. Thus as we move into the 19th century we have the C of E. ‘by la established’, but on one wing a significant number of dissenters, suffering under penal laws of exclusion and on the other, a lingering minority, who lived with even bigger legal exclusions, and hankered after re-connecting with Rome.
Methodism
Asa Briggs remark that the established church managed to hold a very broad spectrum of theological opinion and ecclesiastical practice is certainly not over-stated. The center was occupied by what are frequently called “latitudinarians”, and though by 1800 they were more a hang-over of the rationalism of the previous century, they still minimized the speculative element in religious thinking and preferred moral duty to theological theorizings. The most dynamic group was the Evangelicals. The main evangelical movement had begun outside the C of E with the work of John Wesley who founded the “Methodist Societies”, but it took strong root within the established church, a minority movement but a very vocal one, inveighing against vice, insisting on a rigid keeping of Sunday (which they always mis-named as “the Sabbath”) and a general disapprobation of any kind of display in religion. As a result, outside their own circles, they were unpopular, accused of removing the few comforts that the working-man had (things like a pint of beer and a stroll in the Park on Sunday).. They were thought by most good, average Church of England members of the working class to be priggish and stuffy; (and, it might be added, by the vast majority of the upper and upper-middle classes); they would not have fox-hunting clergy, dancing clergy, idle clergy, academic-like preaching clergy. Nevertheless, their influence was immense. Marian Evans whom we know as George Elliott was brought up in a strongly evangelical household, allowed as a girl to read only censored versions of Shakespeare. This edition was produced by an evangelical clergyman, Dr. T(homas) Bowdler. It is possibly apocryphal and could easily be checked that Bowdler change the line in Othello, “Thy wife has played the strumpet in thy bed”, to (surely you guessed), “Thy wife has played the trumpet in thy bed.” Tennyson was brought up in a country Vicarage; his father was not an evangelical, but as a die-hard Tory had a very narrow view of life and an unquestioning loyalty to the dogmas of the reformed C of E.
Church of England – Evangelicals & Tractrians
The Evangelicals within the C of E remained fiercely protective of the established church: Chadwick writes, “Leading evangelicals were attached to the doctrine and discipline of the C of E. They exalted the prayer book, valued the establishment, [&] resented assaults upon a state church.” (The Victorian Church I, p 441). Another group, at deadly enmity with the evangelicals was not by any means as respectful of the establishment. They were the high church party, variously called the Tractarians (after a series of Tracts on theology and church polity that they wrote) or the Puseyites, after one of the leading Oxford Professors who was a major influence in their formation and continuing influence.
From the point if view of intellectual positions, the evangelicals tended from the start to an anti-intellectual stance: a trait that is still much in evidence among their contemporary descendants. The Tractarians, on the other hand, were much more scholarly, but it was a scholarship that stoutly resisted the trends of the 18th century and even more strongly what was to happen in the decades after1830. We tend to assume that only the evangelicals were, what since the early 20th century has been called Fundamentalists: the fact is that at the beginning of the 19th century almost all churchmen (as both halves of the human race were invariably called) held rigid views about the divine inspiration, and, thence, the accuracy of the Bible.
As we progress in reading In Memoriam, we shall revisit in more detail some parts of this background, especially considering the impact of the study of geology and Lyell’s Principles of Geology and an (at first) an anonymous work, The Vestiges of Creation, which appeared in 1844.
Brief Notes on the Format and Composition of In Memoriam
Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809, the fourth of what was to be a family of eleven siblings. The family history is even more convoluted than was typical for the English upper middle classes at the time. The Poet’s grandfather came from yeoman stock, but trained as a lawyer and became wealthy and, in his own eyes at least, the founder of a “county” family, that is, a substantial, land-owning Tory Squire (to whom his villagers were expected to touch their forelock). “By 1815 his properties at Grimsby alone were offered for sale at £200, 000 (about $1.8m in today’s currency), and at his death in 1835 he owned lands and manors all over northern Lincolnshire”. (Robert B. Martin, Tennyson – The Unquiet Heart Oxford 1983 p 7). Alfred’s father was the oldest son, but not the ‘old man’s’ favorite and was virtually disinherited. He was sent to Cambridge and ended up as the Rector of a rural Lincolnshire parish, Somersby.
Behind it all lay a family ‘secret’: there was a tendency for epilepsy in the Tennyson genes. At this time in history, there was some kind of stigma attached to epilepsy, almost as though it indicated moral degeneracy; for some quite inscrutable reason, its symptoms were attributed to gout. One of Alfred’s brothers was institutionalized from childhood, and several others became addicted to opium or alcohol in the efforts to control the seizures. Martin writes, “What is most probable is that among Alfred Tennyson’s ten brothers and sisters, some had attacks that resembled epilepsy”. (p 10) Alfred in later life thought he too might have the tendency and it was probably that fear, among many other factors, that delayed his marriage until he was 41. He records occasions of “trance-like” states, which were often important for his poetry. There is little doubt that for most of his life Tennyson suffered from depressive episodes and he tended to hypochondria.
He looked back on his early year in Trinity College Cambridge and the few years before that as a relatively happy time. His greatest joy was the friendship he made with a fellow Trinity student, Arthur Henry Hallam, two year his junior. Bernard writes, “The external circumstances of their lives were so different that it is surprising the most celebrated friendship of the century should ever have begun at all”. (p 69). It may not be surprising, however, that they met when both were submitting entries for the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for English verse in 1829. The two became close friends. Hallam visited Somersby, and enjoyed the informality of a large family. Eventually, he became engaged to Emily, Alfred’s younger sister. The friendship of the two men continued, and they took a memorable holiday together in Spain, involved in an amateurish plot to help some Spanish exiles over-throw King Ferdinand. The intrigue came to nothing, though they were put in some danger. The trip, however, was of immense significance to Tennyson and inspired one of his greatest poems, In the Valley of Cauteretz.
In 1831, Dr. Tennyson died after a rapid, though not unexpected decline. This put an end to Alfred’s Cambridge career, and he never did receive his BA. But he and Hallam continued to correspond and to meet from time to time. In the summer of 1833 Hallam and his father were travelling in Europe. On September 13 they were in Vienna and Arthur felt unwell; two days later he died of a brain aneurism, the result, it appeared from the post mortem, of a congenital vascular abnormality. Tennyson received the news in early October. Martin writes, “Unlike Emily, Alfred did not visibly sink under the weight of Hallam’s death…although it certainly affected him long after she had recovered from it...His one remaining resort was to poetry, used as a narcotic for an existence made temporarily meaningless. On the very day that Gladstone heard that Hallam was dead, Tennyson began the first of the lyrics he was ultimately to collect as In Memoriam”. (p 184)
In this way began a process that went on for nearly seventeen years; poems written in different places, occasioned by memories, anniversaries and recurring questionings about divine providence and the possibility of immortality, mounted up. Friends urged him to publish, but he remained reluctant. In the end he began to assemble the many pieces, providing the barest structure with three celebrations of Christmas and ending with the celebration of the marriage of Cecilia, one of his sisters, not, it may be noted that of Emily, who had been engaged to Arthur Hallam. The quirks of the final structure are clear when one notes that the Prologue was written at the very end after the compilation had been made, but the Epilogue, an epithalamium or ‘marriage song’, dates from 1842.
The Wider Background
There is widespread agreement that the first half of the 19th century was an era of significant distress and disruption, socially, politically, and, above all in religious belief and practices. Our ultimate objective is to provide the setting for Tennyson’s monumental work, In Memoriam, which reflects many of the tensions so often lumped together as the “science and religion” issue: to do this, however, we need to go back to earlier settings. The tensions and turbulence hardly erupted out of a clear sky, and, to get a good understanding of the turmoils that engulfed the mid-Victorians, it will be helpful to look at some of the clouds that were already gathering long before the eighteen year-old Victoria came to the throne left vacant by the death of her Uncle, William IV.
Any procedure along these lines at once poses the question: how far back can we, should we, go? Perhaps we can take for granted that immense changes began at the Reformation, ending it as it did centuries of a more or less monolithic order for all of Europe. It is easy to assume that the Reformation brought monumental changes to the religious scene, and in some ways that is accurate, but at the deeper levels of theological principles, and, particularly, what might be called the foundational Christian positions, there was not all that much change (except, perhaps, in the case of Calvin who ratcheted up the Augustinian position quite a few notches): views of God as Unity in Trinity; of Jesus Christ as human and divine whose death continued widely to be understood as some punitive transaction that freed humankind (and both sides in the post reformation era continued to say “mankind”); of heaven and hell (though Purgatory had a rough time in Protestant circles); the view that the earth was created in 4004 B.C., this and much more remained unchallenged. The main changes in the reformed position were the new understanding of the structure and authority of the church, and, almost as a corollary to that, the status of the scriptures, where an infallible book now took the place of an infallible Pope or Council of Bishops.
The Age of Reason
It was, however, these two factors that were central in the intellectual developments of the 17th and 18th centuries. The almost universal consensus of the mediaeval period gave way to new questionings of the fixed and final authority of the Church/State of the 12th-15th centuries. Copernicus and Galileo led the way, but lest this introduction to the period with which we are concerned turn into a full-blown history of the Renaissance and the rise of science, it is necessary to jump a century or two.
As we over-fly the territory, we should note how two Englishmen dominated European thought from the 1680s on. Gerald Cragg writes, “In the early part of the eighteenth century, the prestige of English thought stood very high. This was largely due to ….two men: Isaac Newton, who had unlocked the secrets of the physical universe, and John Locke who had laid bare the inner nature of man. English ideas, when transplanted to continental countries, often proved revolutionary in their implications.” (The Church & The Age of Reason 1648-1789 - Penguin 1960, p 157).
Since Newton’s pure reasoning had produced such an elegant and (apparently) final picture of how the Universe worked, it is not surprising that the century that followed has become known as the age of reason. The centre of gravity moved from its Newtonian home to France where thinkers like Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot worked at the diffusion of new ideas, producing the Encyclopaedia. Cragg writes: “[The authors] were not primarily interested in communicating a specific body of knowledge; rather, they aimed at effecting a fundamental revolution in the prevailing pattern of thought.” (op. cit. p 236). This they achieved in great measure, among the intelligentsia of Europe: there was a distinct move from accepting positions on ecclesiastical authority, a move to question accepted historical evidence just on the weight of its supposed origins (Edicts on which much Papal authority was based had been shown to be forgeries), and, in general, a move to a science that was free of theological presuppositions.
Long before the 19th century began, experimental science was asking questions and providing new answers. Quite a few of the aristocratic class had laboratories in their stately homes, Robert Boyle, whose law about the behavior of gasses is well known, is a good example, the earliest experiments with static electricity were under way and in medicine a few tentative steps were being taken. It was not only in the natural sciences that things were stirring. The very understanding of history was changing. New documents were coming to light, old forgeries were being exposed, and, above all, the first signs of critical history appear, where it becomes clear, for example, that the mere number of witnesses is no guarantee of accuracy.
Beginning of the Nineteenth Century
Thus, by the beginning of the 19th century much had changed since the end of the middle ages, and the stage was set for the clashes of what might broadly be called ‘secularism’ and the defenders of traditional religion. The situation in Great Britain, however, was significantly different from affairs on the continent. The whole of Europe was still staggering from the effects of French revolution; in Britain, this led to the strengthening of traditional positions, with a good many recriminations against liberals, and a determination to void such excesses. All this has to be viewed in the light of the struggle for survival being fought against Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Religious Scene
The wider religious scene at the beginning of the new century is as complex as its understanding is essential for our purposes. For much of the 18th century, the C of E could not be called a dynamic force in English life. It was decidedly Erastian in orientation, that is to say, there was almost a symbiosis between State and Church: The Convocations had lapsed and Parliament rarely dealt with church issues (that was to change significantly in the next century); the great Cathedrals kept the services going, but were hardly shining lights; in quite a few rural areas good parsons looked after the members of the parish, lamenting that there seemed to be an increasing number of Dissenters. But, still “[The Church of England] claimed to be a national communion, big enough to contain all shades of thought and feeling, with its rules and ordinances part of pour happy Constitution and State’.” (Asa Briggs, The Making of Modern England, p 69). Among churchmen (people), there was a lively and very present awareness that the English church was “as by law established”. Ever since the time of Elizabeth I there had been groups who felt that the English reformation had not gone far enough, some though no where near far enough. Some, by the time of James I, despairing of any change in the Royal support for the establishment had, to the great relief of many in England, had departed to the new world, taking with them strong Calvinist principles and a narrow vision of a New Jerusalem; there they were to become in future centuries one of the deeper religious strains in the developing of a biblical fundamentalism and an anti-scientific attitude.
Fears of ‘Popery’
At the other end of the spectrum, the establishment continued to fear the re-establishment of a Roman Catholic monarchy. Elizabeth’ reign was plagued with plots to replace her, perhaps the most well known being the one cooked up by Sir John Babbington, aimed at putting Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary (the Scottish Queen) on the English throne. But the threat did not end with the death of Elizabeth. There followed the Stuart kings, Charles I & II, bracketing the civil war and the decade or so of the Common wealth under Cromwell – clearly a time when the “More Reformation” party, (or more accurately parties) were in the ascendant. Charles II died n February 1685, reputedly proclaiming himself a papist on his death-bed. His son, James II, clearly wanted to restore the link with Rome and precipitated what is called the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which brought the Hanoverians into power.
Even this was not the end of the story. In 1715 and again in 1745 attempts were made to restore a Stuart in the throne. They both failed, but had results that strongly influenced the religious scene in England into the 19th century. Michael Wheeler writes, “ Protestant accusations the Catholics would ‘never peaceably submit to a Protestant government’ were often repeated I the n nineteenth century, especially in the times of crisis”. (The Old Enemies – Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture. CUP 2006, p 113). Among these crises were the gradual repeal of discriminatory laws, the re-introduction of Roman Catholic Bishops, and the perceived infecting of the C of E with ‘popish’ errors clearly visible in the defection to Rome (‘going to Aunty’) of controversial figures like Jon Newman, later made a Cardinal. Thus as we move into the 19th century we have the C of E. ‘by la established’, but on one wing a significant number of dissenters, suffering under penal laws of exclusion and on the other, a lingering minority, who lived with even bigger legal exclusions, and hankered after re-connecting with Rome.
Methodism
Asa Briggs remark that the established church managed to hold a very broad spectrum of theological opinion and ecclesiastical practice is certainly not over-stated. The center was occupied by what are frequently called “latitudinarians”, and though by 1800 they were more a hang-over of the rationalism of the previous century, they still minimized the speculative element in religious thinking and preferred moral duty to theological theorizings. The most dynamic group was the Evangelicals. The main evangelical movement had begun outside the C of E with the work of John Wesley who founded the “Methodist Societies”, but it took strong root within the established church, a minority movement but a very vocal one, inveighing against vice, insisting on a rigid keeping of Sunday (which they always mis-named as “the Sabbath”) and a general disapprobation of any kind of display in religion. As a result, outside their own circles, they were unpopular, accused of removing the few comforts that the working-man had (things like a pint of beer and a stroll in the Park on Sunday).. They were thought by most good, average Church of England members of the working class to be priggish and stuffy; (and, it might be added, by the vast majority of the upper and upper-middle classes); they would not have fox-hunting clergy, dancing clergy, idle clergy, academic-like preaching clergy. Nevertheless, their influence was immense. Marian Evans whom we know as George Elliott was brought up in a strongly evangelical household, allowed as a girl to read only censored versions of Shakespeare. This edition was produced by an evangelical clergyman, Dr. T(homas) Bowdler. It is possibly apocryphal and could easily be checked that Bowdler change the line in Othello, “Thy wife has played the strumpet in thy bed”, to (surely you guessed), “Thy wife has played the trumpet in thy bed.” Tennyson was brought up in a country Vicarage; his father was not an evangelical, but as a die-hard Tory had a very narrow view of life and an unquestioning loyalty to the dogmas of the reformed C of E.
Church of England – Evangelicals & Tractrians
The Evangelicals within the C of E remained fiercely protective of the established church: Chadwick writes, “Leading evangelicals were attached to the doctrine and discipline of the C of E. They exalted the prayer book, valued the establishment, [&] resented assaults upon a state church.” (The Victorian Church I, p 441). Another group, at deadly enmity with the evangelicals was not by any means as respectful of the establishment. They were the high church party, variously called the Tractarians (after a series of Tracts on theology and church polity that they wrote) or the Puseyites, after one of the leading Oxford Professors who was a major influence in their formation and continuing influence.
From the point if view of intellectual positions, the evangelicals tended from the start to an anti-intellectual stance: a trait that is still much in evidence among their contemporary descendants. The Tractarians, on the other hand, were much more scholarly, but it was a scholarship that stoutly resisted the trends of the 18th century and even more strongly what was to happen in the decades after1830. We tend to assume that only the evangelicals were, what since the early 20th century has been called Fundamentalists: the fact is that at the beginning of the 19th century almost all churchmen (as both halves of the human race were invariably called) held rigid views about the divine inspiration, and, thence, the accuracy of the Bible.
As we progress in reading In Memoriam, we shall revisit in more detail some parts of this background, especially considering the impact of the study of geology and Lyell’s Principles of Geology and an (at first) an anonymous work, The Vestiges of Creation, which appeared in 1844.
Brief Notes on the Format and Composition of In Memoriam
Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809, the fourth of what was to be a family of eleven siblings. The family history is even more convoluted than was typical for the English upper middle classes at the time. The Poet’s grandfather came from yeoman stock, but trained as a lawyer and became wealthy and, in his own eyes at least, the founder of a “county” family, that is, a substantial, land-owning Tory Squire (to whom his villagers were expected to touch their forelock). “By 1815 his properties at Grimsby alone were offered for sale at £200, 000 (about $1.8m in today’s currency), and at his death in 1835 he owned lands and manors all over northern Lincolnshire”. (Robert B. Martin, Tennyson – The Unquiet Heart Oxford 1983 p 7). Alfred’s father was the oldest son, but not the ‘old man’s’ favorite and was virtually disinherited. He was sent to Cambridge and ended up as the Rector of a rural Lincolnshire parish, Somersby.
Behind it all lay a family ‘secret’: there was a tendency for epilepsy in the Tennyson genes. At this time in history, there was some kind of stigma attached to epilepsy, almost as though it indicated moral degeneracy; for some quite inscrutable reason, its symptoms were attributed to gout. One of Alfred’s brothers was institutionalized from childhood, and several others became addicted to opium or alcohol in the efforts to control the seizures. Martin writes, “What is most probable is that among Alfred Tennyson’s ten brothers and sisters, some had attacks that resembled epilepsy”. (p 10) Alfred in later life thought he too might have the tendency and it was probably that fear, among many other factors, that delayed his marriage until he was 41. He records occasions of “trance-like” states, which were often important for his poetry. There is little doubt that for most of his life Tennyson suffered from depressive episodes and he tended to hypochondria.
He looked back on his early year in Trinity College Cambridge and the few years before that as a relatively happy time. His greatest joy was the friendship he made with a fellow Trinity student, Arthur Henry Hallam, two year his junior. Bernard writes, “The external circumstances of their lives were so different that it is surprising the most celebrated friendship of the century should ever have begun at all”. (p 69). It may not be surprising, however, that they met when both were submitting entries for the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for English verse in 1829. The two became close friends. Hallam visited Somersby, and enjoyed the informality of a large family. Eventually, he became engaged to Emily, Alfred’s younger sister. The friendship of the two men continued, and they took a memorable holiday together in Spain, involved in an amateurish plot to help some Spanish exiles over-throw King Ferdinand. The intrigue came to nothing, though they were put in some danger. The trip, however, was of immense significance to Tennyson and inspired one of his greatest poems, In the Valley of Cauteretz.
In 1831, Dr. Tennyson died after a rapid, though not unexpected decline. This put an end to Alfred’s Cambridge career, and he never did receive his BA. But he and Hallam continued to correspond and to meet from time to time. In the summer of 1833 Hallam and his father were travelling in Europe. On September 13 they were in Vienna and Arthur felt unwell; two days later he died of a brain aneurism, the result, it appeared from the post mortem, of a congenital vascular abnormality. Tennyson received the news in early October. Martin writes, “Unlike Emily, Alfred did not visibly sink under the weight of Hallam’s death…although it certainly affected him long after she had recovered from it...His one remaining resort was to poetry, used as a narcotic for an existence made temporarily meaningless. On the very day that Gladstone heard that Hallam was dead, Tennyson began the first of the lyrics he was ultimately to collect as In Memoriam”. (p 184)
In this way began a process that went on for nearly seventeen years; poems written in different places, occasioned by memories, anniversaries and recurring questionings about divine providence and the possibility of immortality, mounted up. Friends urged him to publish, but he remained reluctant. In the end he began to assemble the many pieces, providing the barest structure with three celebrations of Christmas and ending with the celebration of the marriage of Cecilia, one of his sisters, not, it may be noted that of Emily, who had been engaged to Arthur Hallam. The quirks of the final structure are clear when one notes that the Prologue was written at the very end after the compilation had been made, but the Epilogue, an epithalamium or ‘marriage song’, dates from 1842.
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