THE CHURCH AS HOLY A Paper Written and Delivered by The Rev ...

THE CHURCH AS HOLY
A Paper
Written and Delivered by
The Rev. Canon Marvin Gardner, Ph.D.
at
THE RELATIONSHIP OF ORTHODOX ANGLICANISM
TO THE ONE, HOLY, CATHOLIC AND APOSTOLIC CHURCH
A Symposium
Of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen
St. Louis, MO
August 22-23, 2006
“O GOD, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong,
northing is holy; Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler
and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the
things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.” (Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity)
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It is my great honor and pleasure to speak with you this morning on the note of
holiness as we consider the relationship of orthodox Anglicanism to the One, Holy,
Catholic and Apostolic Church. As you no doubt are aware, the note of Holiness is
not included in the translation of the Nicene Creed as it appears in the Traditional
Book of Common Prayer. Was its exclusion best explained as a printer’s error
Perhaps the omission of the word Holy was a providential foretelling of the desperate
state into which the Anglican Communion has plunged in this Third Millennium
after the birth of Jesus Christ. As for those of us who decided to continue
Anglicanism outside of the Anglican Communion, the presence of actualized holiness
has eluded much of our own short history as well. However, all of us present at the
Symposium are bound together in our separate jurisdictions by our claims and
counterclaims to Apostolicity and Catholicity as well as our common need of a
deeper penetration by the Holy Spirit who is the source of all holiness within any
branch or twig of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Almost 30 years ago, I made my exit from the parish ministry of the Episcopal
Church after spending almost 10 years as a parish priest. During the late 60’s and
early 70’s, I had become absolutely convinced that the ferment of liturgical trial use
was opening the gates of a more Catholic and evangelical future for the Episcopal
Church. I had survived Virginia Theological Seminary with my Catholic theology
intact. I had no doubt as the youngest rector in the Episcopal Diocese of
Washington in 1969 that the next edition of our Book of Common Prayer would
advance the Holiness, Catholicity and Apostolicity of the Episcopal Church through
new, all be it pre-Nicene, rites and ceremonies.
During the early 1970’s, as I grew my small parish in the distant suburbs of
Washington into a center of liturgical renewal, I became increasingly disillusioned
by the events in the Episcopal Church both nationally as well as in the Episcopal
Diocese of Washington. While I had been active in the urban training program in
the innercity and had done more than my share of foot-soldiering in the civil rights
movement, I was uneasy as an ever-changing kaleidoscope of groups came into focus
on the Episcopal Church scene. In rapid succession, the rights of women, youth
and, eventually, homosexuals began to emerge as central organizational concerns
within the Episcopal Church.
Rather than remain in the ferment of the late 70’s in a parish of the Episcopal
Church, I left active parish ministry in the Church, as well as my founding
membership in the Washington Episcopal Clergy Association and my seat on the
Diocesan Council. For the next 18 years, I engaged myself in the specialized
ministry of pastoral counseling, personal growth as a client in psychotherapy, and
graduate work in pastoral theology and clinical psychology. I earned my living as a
staff member in both ecumenical and marriage and family counseling agencies. My
academic interest has been in the relationship between Catholic faith and practice
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on the one hand and British psychoanalytic theory and practice on the other hand.
My last ministry as a non-parochial Episcopal priest was as an associate professor for
three years at Loyola College of Maryland in Columbia, Maryland. There I taught
and did clinical supervision of clergy and vowed religious who were doing Ph.D.
studies in pastoral counseling. Most of my students were preparing to become fulltime
pastoral counselors and psychotherapists within Christian parishes or within
their vowed religious communities.
One day, when I had just turned 50, in a supervision group at Loyola, a
Roman Catholic Franciscan priest in his mid-40’s presented a tape. He was
counseling an AIDS patient as part of his doctoral internship with an area hospice.
The patient, a young man from Baltimore who was in his mid-twenties, spoke on the
tape with great strain and anxiety. He knew that he was in the late end stage of his
life. His Franciscan counselor listened in silence. Then, as the young man signaled
by his hesitant speech that he was afraid, perhaps having feelings of unnamed guilt
and dread, his counselor spoke, “It is time to let go. Release your spirit. Don’t be
afraid.” The dying man was quiet for a few long seconds. Then he said, “But I am
not ready to die yet!” At this point, the Franciscan shut off his tape recorder and
looked around the classroom at the group which was made up of two nuns, a
Seventh Day Adventist pastor, the presenter and myself. I asked the presenter,
“What would you like from the group” The Franciscan answered, “I am so
frustrated. This man has already passed through the stages of denial, bargaining and
anger. Now, he refuses to move into the last stages of acceptance. What must I do”
At that moment, filled as I was by a curious mixture of empathy for the dying man
and antipathy toward the Franciscan, I asked a question: “Is the man who is dying a
Roman Catholic” The answer came back, “Yes, but why do you ask” I replied,
“Does he have a priest who is preparing him for death” The Franciscan looked at
me, his eyebrows raised and his expression one of surprise. “That is what I am
doing” he said in contemptuous tone of voice. “That is why I am asking the group’s
help.” The other group members nodded in understanding. “I am trying to get this
man to accept his death.” With a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye, I
responded, “Oh yes, of course.”
The Franciscan student, the dying young man and the members of the group
had made eternally important choices as to the nature of the holy. They had been
taught by their ecumenical faculty, and had accepted, that holiness was to be
operationally defined in their counseling ministries by the psychological concept of
wholeness. As a result of this unnoticed yet dramatic deconstruction and
reconstruction of the meaning of the term holy, each of these ministers was now
operating with an understanding of holiness which was devoid of transcendence.
Whatever Catholic theology of the holy that these students had left, it had been
separated from the pastoral counseling task. In its place was a psychological theory
developed by a kindly atheist psychiatrist. I appeared to be the only person in the
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supervision group who even noticed the substitution of the psychological for the
theological basis of pastoral care which was clearly in evidence.
It is crucial that orthodox Anglicanism be defined by adherence not only to
the Traditional Book of Common Prayer, but that it also has theological roots in
traditional Anglican theology. For any continuing Anglican body which is rooted in
the Catholic understanding of the Traditional Book of Common Prayer, the
theology of the neo-Thomistic theologian, Francis J. Hall, found in his ten-volume
series, Dogmatic Theology, provides a sound theological foundation. In Volume
VIII of that series, The Church and the Sacramental System, Dr. Hall addresses the
four notes of the Church. There he makes the important point that holiness and
righteousness are related but not synonymous concepts (see page 187). A righteous
person is one who does what is morally correct and who may be described as having
developed a moral character. Holiness, on the other hand, “is to be reconsecrated
and assimilated to God, such consecration and assimilation to God cannot be
completed unless [a person] becomes morally righteous. None the less, holiness is a
different thing.”
The Franciscan in my illustration, and many Christians in general, have
abandoned the understanding of holiness as separation and assimilation to God and
have either substituted moral righteousness for holiness or have abandoned moral
righteousness except as a goal of political activity or psychological development. When
a minister of a Christian body, Anglican or otherwise, substitutes psychological
wholeness for holiness leading to righteousness, a hideous change has occurred in his
ministry. The pastoral care given becomes secularized. The intellectual shift which
takes place is a post-modern deconstruction of the concept of holiness. The postmodern
minister then turns aside from healing the immortal souls of men by
making them citizens of the Kingdom of God for eternity. Instead, this unnoticed
but radical reframing of holiness turns the minister’s focus toward achieving some
version of either self-fulfillment and/or political reform. Holiness becomes wholeness.
On a spiritual level, the Christian who faces death has as his last hope either selfsatisfaction
at his righteous participation in human political and social evolution or
his pride in having achieved some advanced psychological state in the face of a nonexistent
transcendent God. Psychological maturity on one’s death bed replaces spiritual
reconciliation.
Dr. Hall points out that the God who works on earth through His Son, Jesus
Christ, has created an ecclesia, His Body on Earth, to ready men and women for an
eternal destiny through the power of the Holy Spirit. When Christian ministers
recognize that they are ordained to act in the name of such a Church, while
appreciating the value of psychological and political righteousness, they place their
personhood in the service of the Holy Spirit as instruments of holiness leading to
righteousness among God’s people. Such ministers will resist the post-modern
pressure to reduce the human psyche to simply the epiphenomenon of a time
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limited biological process. When holiness has become wholeness and righteousness
has been transformed into developmental self-fulfillment, the transition from
Christianity to Unitarianism has been completed. Pastoral care is limited to
concerns of chronological time, and the Kingdom of God becomes a striving for
utopian possibilities.
If any branch or twig of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is to
have the note of Holy, she must be inseparably united to Christ as His Body. She
must be in the world, but not of it, having been filled with the Holy Spirit at
Pentecost. At the same time, the ordained ministers of the Church, while not
having been fully assimilated into Christ and not having been fully actualized as
morally righteous individuals, will, none the less, view themselves as co-strugglers
against the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Rather than pastoral care being based on
secular assumptions, pastoral care is understood to be the divinely authorized
pursuit of personal and interpersonal sanctity through the grace of the Holy Spirit.
This goal of sanctification by grace, or holiness, is the goal of any orthodox Anglican
Church for every man, woman and child on earth. For an orthodox Anglican, the
sinful Christian believer is Holy while the morally righteous non-believer may be
morally superior but is not a participant in God’s holiness.
If we return to my illustration of the man dying with AIDS, by virtue of his
Baptism, Confirmation and at least insipient faith in Jesus Christ, he has the
possibility of the forgiveness of his sins and of overcoming, by the power of the Holy
Spirit, the power of eternal death. This possibility is his, by grace, if he is open to
faithfully receiving the sacraments of the Church Catholic and desires to be
reconsecrated and assimilated into the Blessed Trinity. The Franciscan priest had
turned aside from the cure of the young man’s soul in order to take on the task of
advancing the young man’s emotional maturity. In effect, the priest offered the
young man the opportunity to die in a manner pleasing to the priest rather than
helping the young man to die in a manner pleasing to God. When God is
secularized, salvation is psychologized and pastoral care is relativized, the God of
holiness is replaced by the peculiar goals of the minister rather than the goals which
God has given to His church, the eternal salvation of souls.
The Church is holy, writes Dr. Hall, in its special endowments; holy in its function
and holy in its destiny. The Church which bears such a note has an inseparable
relationship with the Crucified and Risen Jesus Christ and is composed of the elect
of God who have a potential but not fully actualized moral righteousness. It is the
mission of the holy Church to bring all persons into a saving relationship with Jesus
Christ, the Incarnate Son of the Father. This relationship is effected in Baptism,
affirmed in faith and strengthened by the Seven-Fold Gifts of the Holy Spirit at
Confirmation. It finds its full expression and constant renewal in the Sacrifice of the
Eucharist (see The Church and the Sacraments, pages 190-191). The Church (both
corporately and individually) grows in the manifestation of holiness in making moral
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choices as an outcome of her assimilation into the holiness given to the Church by the
Holy Spirit. While such a Church must also possess the notes of Apostolicity and
Catholicity if she is to be holy, these are the notes which will be spoken of by others
at this Symposium.
For those of us who are traditional Anglicans, it is the Traditional Book of
Common Prayer which contains what is necessary, in addition to the complete Bible
with Apocrypha, to serve as the operational manual for growth in holiness. It is
through the faithful use by Apostolic and Catholic Anglicans that the Holy Spirit
functions to activate the Church’s special endowments, functions as the ingathering
of God’s Kingdom on earth and moves through history towards her eternal destiny.
While the Church must not remain frozen in time and fail to exercise her
necessary prerogative to make appropriate and timely revisions of the Book of
Common Prayer, for greater effectiveness in her holy mission and ministry, such
revisions must maintain her Catholic faith and practice, as well as her Apostolic
succession. In light of the high place that the Book of Common Prayer has among
Anglicans as our instrument of holiness, I would like to review some comments made
by the Rev. Dr. Peter Toon regarding the 1979 Prayer Book of the Episcopal
Church. His comments are particularly relevant in the light of the understanding of
holiness which I have set forth with the assistance of Francis J. Hall.
In his book Proclaiming the Gospel through Liturgy: The Common Prayer
Tradition and Doctrinal Revision, The Rev. Dr. Peter Toon makes the following
analysis of the 1979 Prayer Book. Here are a few of his thoughts which I find to be
relevant to the topic of the Church as Holy:
“Parts of Scripture were deleted simply because of what they positively teach.”
(p. 81)
“. . . a new, modern source of divine revelation is located within the insights,
assumptions of modern sociology, psychology, biology, anthropology, and
philosophy.” (p. 52)
“. . . provides in its ordinal for both female and male candidates to be
ordained priests and consecrated bishops.” (p. 52)
“. . . in the Catechism (p. 853) where one would expect the authority of
Scripture to be taught, it is not.” (p. 75)
“. . . it effectively removed the sacrament of confirmation by insisting that
‘initiation is complete in baptism.” (p. 82)
“In place of . . . classical Trinitarian theism, concepts of God as a limited God
…have been adopted…and process theology (i.e. both are in evolution,
becoming what they will be.) On these alternatives ‘God’ is only as eternal as
is matter itself.” (p. 85)
“The constant use of the word liturgy (work of one people) and the sparing use
of the word worship also carry the same emphasis upon the primacy of the
horizontal (immanent) over the vertical (transcendent).” (p. 85)
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“Within the section called Baptismal Covenant there is also . . . an account of
the Christian life of the baptized which seems to equate the Gospel with the
agenda of the United Nations.” (p. 184)
“. . . In the older tradition the cross is upright; it unites heaven and earth
(God and man) in its vertical beam, and through its horizontal beam it sends
God’s redemption into all space and time. Here the immanent is dependent
upon, and flows from, the transcendent. In the new tradition, the cross is
laid down upon the ground and, through its beams, points in different
directions across the earth sending a message of justice and love; they do not
point to heaven. Here the immanent is supreme, and whatever there is of the
transcendent, it is known in transcendentals and is therefore only a
dimension of the immanent. So the tendency of the modern rites is toward
panentheism/pantheism and away from Trinitarian theism.” (p. 228)
As Dr. Toon makes clear, the problem encountered in the Anglican Communion
regarding the election and consecration of one Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire
is hardly the basis of the current crisis and subsequent schisms in the Episcopal
Church. Unfortunately, in most of the press coverage of the current schisms in the
Episcopal Church, the only consistent meaning of the term “orthodox Anglican” is
that the person or group so designated does not approve of bishops who live in open
relationships with same sex partners. If this is what is meant by the tern “orthodox
Anglican,” then it is possible for all manner of groups who call themselves Anglican
to claim to embody the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, while actually
espousing, in or out of their awareness, faith and practice which does not even come
close to possessing the note of holiness as I have been outlining in my talk today.
As to the choices facing orthodox Anglicans, a term which I hope has been
meaningfully expanded beyond the current issue of the acceptability of open
homosexuality in the Episcopal ranks, Peter Toon and I have chosen different
pathways. As we all know, Dr. Toon is the President of the Prayer Book Society and
a priest within the Anglican Communion. His voice, is, in his own words, that of an
evangelical Catholic or that of a Catholic evangelical. From within he is calling his
Church back to its own disintegrating tradition. Some 13 years ago, I renounced my
orders as a priest and deacon in the Episcopal Church and was incardinated into the
Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic States of the Anglican Catholic Church by the Rt. Rev.
William deJarnette Rutherfoord. Since 1997, I have served as Rector of St. Thomas
of Canterbury Anglican Catholic Church in Roanoke, Virginia. Since 2001, I have
served three Archbishops as Canon to the Metropolitan for Pastoral Affairs. Yet, in
spite of our different responses to the abandonment of traditional and orthodox
Anglicanism, as well as Biblical Christianity by the Episcopal Church, I have arrived
at several conclusions similar to Dr. Toon regarding the future of the Anglican
patrimony, at least as his views were expressed in the closing chapter of his 1993
book which I have quoted in this paper. At that time, Dr. Toon concluded:
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“Let it be clear that I do not know precisely how the Common Prayer tradition
needs perfecting for the use of orthodox, biblical Anglicans. . . the need of ground
rules I would establish would include faithfulness to the teaching of the seven
ecumenical councils and to the Reformation insight of salvation by grace through
faith . . . “ (p. 230)
Dr. Toon goes on to write, “Another possibility—somewhat remote, I fear—is
an association of Anglican parishes using the Common Prayer tradition will be
accepted as an Anglican Rite Diocese and be protected and cared for by either the
Western (Rome) or one of the Eastern Patriarchs (Constantinople, Antioch and
Alexandria—that of Antioch being the most probable). In this case, the Common
Prayer tradition would have to be modified to nestle safely in the embrace of the
appropriate patriarch.” (p. 231).
I wish that a reunited Catholic Anglicanism could arise out of the Ashes of
the Anglican Communion, but fragments of Anglicanism are continuing to emerge
as new ecclesial bodies. While I do not have the gift of prophesy, I do have hope that
the Anglican patrimony will eventually come into relationship with either the
Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Churches in a much more permanent and
stable manner than at present. The current Roman Catholic pastoral provision for
Anglican clergy and parishes is inherently limited in both scope and time. It is
meant to pass away and die within a generation or two. As for the Western Rite of
the Antiochian Orthodox Church, it suffers from its own internal form of
instability. The only long-term future for the Anglican patrimony which I believe is
possible will be along the lines envisioned by Dr. Toon in 1993. The formation of a
10 th Province under the Archbishop of Canterbury is a most unlikely outcome. Even
if this is the case, I believe that I have raised issues regarding the note of holiness
which would make joining such a Province untenable for many Anglicans who do
not believe that insulating such a province from openly gay bishops would produce
anything more than a slight time delay in the course of further disintegration. Any
reunion of Anglican churchmen, which does not address the note of holiness in a
meaningful manner, will not find itself guided and protected from the gates of hell
into which the Anglican Communion has taken only its first steps.
Bibliography
Toon, Peter, Proclaiming the Gospel through Liturgy: the Common Prayer
Tradition and Doctrinal Revision, Largo, Florida, 1993.
Hall, Francis J., The Church and the Sacramental System, Vol. VIII,
Dogmatic Theology, Pelham Manor, N.Y., Reprinted 1973.
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