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A Word of Knowledge

More questions answered: Part 1; Part 3

The 39 Articles of Religion

There is a page in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer that is somewhat misleading. It is page 863 and all it says is "Historical Documents of the Church." To be sure, all that follows are historical documents, but among them are the 39 Articles of Religion. Page 863 makes them seem little more than a historical curiosity when in fact they are so important to us that our Constitution requires them to be in the Book of Common Prayer and a duly elected General Convention of the Episcopal Church adopted and ratified them on September 12, 1801, and they have never been repealed! Admittedly some of the language is archaic and a couple of articles are even obsolete but they do express the confines of the Anglican Faith. One cannot stray very far from them and consider themselves an Anglizan yet if you do, no one is there to slap your hand. One could describe The Articles as the Conscience of the Church.

The Articles come from a time when Christianity collapsed into a number of factions. Each faction produced explanations of their doctrinal positions. The Lutherans issued the Augsburg Confession. The presbyterians, the Westminster Confession; the Romans, the declarations of the coucil of Trent and the Anglicans, The 39 Articles of Religion. Unfortunately, each of these documents show only where we differ one from another and not what we agree on. The Articles themselves have never been binding on anyone and were primarily meant to be a boundary beyond which Clergy could not go.

So what role do they play? We are first and foremost, a creedal Church. The Creed is the foremost guide in interpreting Scripture and ordering our lives but was formulated at an earlier time when the Church was really One. As to what the Creed implies in more specific areas The Articles are the only official doctrinal formulary that we have and it is not likely that any governing body anywhere in the Anglican Communion will ever attempt to edit them. So part of being an Anglican is that we are members of the historic, One, Holy and Catholic Church and we would do well to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest all historical documents, especially The Articles.

The Communion of Saints

The Communion of Saints is an ancient Christian Doctrine that we refer to each Sunday when we recite the Nicene Creed. It refers to the spiritual union of all Christians living and the dead, those on earth, in heaven and, in Roman belief, in purgatory. They share a single "mystical body", with Christ as the head, in which each member contributes to the good of all and shares in the welfare of all.

The earliest known use of this term to refer to the belief in a mystical bond uniting both the living and the dead in a confirmed hope and love is by Saint Nicetas of Remesiana (ca. 335–414); the term has since then played a central role in formulations of the Christian creeds.

The term is included in the Apostles' Creed, a major profession of the Christian faith whose current form was settled in the eighth century, but which originated from not long after the year 100, the basic statement of the Church's faith. The doctrine of the Communion of Saints is based on 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul compares Christians to a single body.

The words translated into English as "saints" can refer to Christians, who, whatever their personal sanctity as individuals, are called holy because they are consecrated to God and Christ. This usage of the word "saints" is found some fifty times in the New Testament.

The Heidelberg Catechism defends this view, citing Romans 8:32, 1 Corinthians 6:17, and 1 John 1:3 to claim that all members of Christ have communion with Him, and are recipients of all His gifts.

The persons who are linked in this communion include those who have died and whom Hebrews 12:1 pictures as a cloud of witnesses encompassing Christians on earth. In the same chapter, Hebrews 12:22-23 says Christians on earth "have come to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect."

Inasmuch as it is a fundamental Christian belief that this life is not the end of the story, we can’t make too big a distinction between the living and the dead… they are but different forms of the same existence. Therefore it matters little whether you ask your Priest to pray for you or you ask Saint Anthony to help you find your car keys. The notion of eternal life and the communion of the Saints is the basis for asking Mary to intercede for us with her Son as we say The Rosary each Wednesday.

Another way in which we live out this basic Christian Doctrine is in the memorializing of the more famed Saints of old in the Christian Calendar. At Grace Church we tend to remember those Saints and celebrate their lives and witness at our Wednesday Eucharist.

Unction

After our recent Q and A sermon, it was pointed out that I had not mentioned the sacrament of Unction. This sacrament is founded on the authority of James 5:14-16 and supported by Mark 6:13. Its purpose is the restoration of the sick to health of body, mind, and spirit. It is not to be confused either with "faith healing" or with "psychological treatment," and there is nothing magical about it. It is a sacrament of the Church and can only be administered to the members, and by the priests, of the Church. Its effect is to strengthen the sick person, in spirit and in body; it does not necessarily cure him and is in no way a substitute for the work of the physician.

The sacrament uses pure olive oil blessed by the Bishop of the Diocese or his suffragan. If the Bishop is unavailable, it may be blessed by the Priest. In the Orthodox church, it is blessed by 7 priests! They don't take any chances!

Unction is a prayer for recovery. The 1549 Prayer Book included unction of the sick but it was dropped in 1552. It was not restored in the 1928 Prayer Book because the subject was still under consideration by the Lambeth Conference. The Conference gave sanction to a form for unction in 1930. With the advent of the 1979 Prayer Book, a form was included called, "Ministration to the Sick" on page 453, which includes an actual Unction prayer and a prayer for blessing the oil. There is also a wonderful collection of prayers for the sick at the end of this section of the prayer book.

There is a tradition in Latin Christendom that the purpose of unction is to prepare us for death. But that is not supported by Scripture or by the ancient rites of the Catholic church. It is a medieval abuse and is declared as such in Article 25. This practice has been called 'extreme' unction but has no place in the Anglican Communion because there is no other unction except that of unction of a King at his coronation. There is, however, in the 1979 prayer book, a form that can be used at the time of death but in no way is to be taken as our version of "extreme unction."

Unction is different than 'faith-healing' or the gift of healing with which the Holy Spirit endows some lay people and clergy. All priests have the right and duty of administering unction, but not all priests have the 'gift of healing.'

Technically, when the sacrament of unction is offered during The Eucharist, it should be done prior to the Great Thanksgiving. For purely practical reasons, I do it after the Holy Eucharist has ended. I anoint with olive oil blessed by the bishop making the sign of the cross and saying, "I anoint you with oil in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, claiming the promises of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all pain or suffering of body, soul and spirit, being put to flight, blessing of health and wholeness be restored unto thee!"

Women in Ministry

In 1976 the Episcopal Church decided it could no longer bar women from the Priesthood. Much hashappened since then on the subject of women in ministry. The latest is that a couple of months ago, The Church of England paved the way for women to become Bishops in their jurisdiction.

Some have very serious theological misgivings about women in Holy Orders not the least of these are those living in the Roman jurisdiction. We have long held that the Bishop of Rome (the Pope) is to be looked on as holding a place of Primacy, first among all Bishops and when we began ordaining women as Priests he called us on the carpet and a delegation of 35 Anglican Bishops had an audience with him to receive his Godly admonitions. The Papacy treats us as very much a part of their flock which has not always been the case.

At the time of the Reformation Rome declared Anglican Orders to be invalid because the service of ordination left out the concept of the Priest offering Sacrifice. To their embarrassment however, it turned out that the missing clause was not in the historic Latin Rites either. So if Anglican orders were invalid, so were Roman Orders. The subject was quietly swept under the carpet until 1960 when Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher met with Pope Pius XIII, the first to do so since the Reformation. At that historic meeting, the Pope began the practice of de facto recognition which has generally been observed throughout the Roman Church. He did this by presenting the Archbishop with an Episcopal ring. Since that time joint Anglican and Roman Catholic dialogues have resulted in complete agreement on the subject and a more formal recognition would have ensued were it not for the ordination of women in Holy Orders. The position of the Vatican today is that while we are in complete harmony on the nature of Holy Orders we are in disagreement as to who can be ordained as a Deacon, Priest or Bishop. The Vatican issued a statement that said, “This decision will have consequences on the future of dialogue, which had up until now, borne much fruit.

It seems to this writer that Rome will in all likelihood change on this subject within the next few decades because of great internal pressures. In the U.S. alone, there are half as many Roman Catholic Priests than there were 50 years ago yet twice as many Catholics. There are Parishes throughout the U.S. where the Pastors are lay people. There are countries where Catholics are lucky to get communion once a year. They will, if they are to be true to their understanding of the Catholic faith, have to face the issue of ’who’ can be a Priest and their views will have to change if they are to survive. Already they allow married male Catholic Priests from other jurisdictions to join them and fully function. So married Priests are not out of the question and neither are women for in the Diocese of San Bernardino, CA the vast majority of Lay Pastors of Roman Congregations are women.

Origins of the Nicene Creed

The Nicene Creed was formulated at the First Ecumenical Council at Nicea in AD 325 to combat Arianism, a view that said Jesus was created and not eternal, and it was expanded at the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in AD 381 to balance its coverage of the Trinity by including the Holy Spirit. It is the only creed that was promulgated by any of the seven ecumenical councils and thus it is the only creed that is truly ecumenical and universal. The New Testament and the Nicene Creed are deeply entangled with each other. The wording and the concepts in the Nicene Creed come from the New Testament - in fact, one of the most important debates at the Council of Nicea concerned whether it is proper to include a word in the Nicene Creed that does not occur in the New Testament. On the other hand, at the time that the Church issued the official canon of the New Testament, it customarily compared writings to the Nicene Creed to determine if they were orthodox. So you are correct if you say that the Nicene Creed proceeds from the New Testament, and you are correct if you say that the New testament is certified by the Nicene Creed. To put it more precisely, the Nicene Creed and the canon of the New Testament were formed together as part of the same process.

The Nicene Council did not invent the Trinity in the early fourth century, as some people imagine. A full century before the Nicene Council, Tertullian wrote a voluminous explanation and defense of the Trinity and was viewed by his third-century contemporaries as defending the orthodox Christian faith to nonbelievers.

More questions answered: Part 1; Part 3