The Evangeliad (30:4-5)

(Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:4-5 (corresponding to Luke 14:10-11)

So when you're invited to come to a feast,

Go straight for the seat that's honored the least.

And then your host, when he enters the house,

Might seat you higher than everyone else.

He'll see your humility, want you to be

At his very side as you go through the feast,

And so give you the most honored place,

Exalting the lowly to everyone's praise. 

For abasement awaits all those who would try

Their own name and station to glorify,

But those who humble themselves, they will find

An exaltation to the highest of heights."

Is There Only One True Church? (Part 1)

I recently had a discussion with my sister—a devout Roman Catholic, of the very best kind—about how one could plausibly assess the contention made by her church to be the one true church and the exclusive, fully legitimate heir of Christianity’s apostolic foundations (a title to which, contrary to the Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches also lay claim). I was, as one might imagine, skeptical of such claims, though I love Catholicism and Orthodoxy for their rich traditions of piety and their steadfast adherence to the core doctrines of the patristic age. But unlike some Protestant skeptics, who are content to brush off the exclusivist claims of apostolic churches as mere hubris, I desperately want to know the truth of the matter: Which church, if any, is closest to what Jesus intended? Is there a “one true church” among the proliferation of Christian denominations, and if so, how might one discern it?

Terminology

It might be useful to start with a couple notes on terminology. I’m using the term “denomination” to designate each Christian group. Some communions don’t think of themselves as denominations, either because they see themselves as the one true church, rather than one among many (à la Catholics and Eastern Orthodox), or because they prefer to think of themselves as a “movement” (like some recent Protestant arrivals, such as Calvary Chapel). Unfortunately for their preferences, “denomination” is a word that entirely fits the bill, so it’s the one I’m going to use. It simply means “a group with a name,” as they all quite obviously are.

I’m also going to use the term “apostolic” in this piece, which refers to denominations that can trace their lineage and governance back in a direct line to churches founded by the apostolic generation of the first century. For the purposes of this piece, I will refer to denominations which feature an undeviated line (that is, being always in communion with the apostolic foundation from which their line was originally traced) as “apostolic churches.” These would include the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Oriental Orthodox churches. These are distinguished from what I’m calling “apostolic communions,” which maintain an unbroken line of descent and governance from apostolic foundations (usually mediated through ecclesiastical structures like the office of bishop), but deviated by separations in communion from their original apostolic source. Major examples of this would be the Church of the East (formerly called Nestorian), the Old Catholic churches, and the Anglican Communion, all of which preserved the lineage of traditional ecclesiastic orders even during their breaks with the apostolic sees from which they came, and so can trace the succession of their ordinations in a direct line back to the apostles.

One True Church?

Two broad types of claims are usually made. When an apostolic church claims a position as the one true church that Jesus founded, it is usually appealing to its history of direct descent from the apostles. Every other church, in their view, branched off from the one true church either by abandoning a crucial element of Christian doctrine or by choosing to break communion with the apostolic foundation over some other matter. Ironically, all of the apostolic churches generally hold this view with regard to themselves: namely, that they are the ones who stayed connected to the apostolic foundation, and everyone else chose to break off at some point. They hold that communion could be reestablished, but only if everyone else gave up major parts of their theological distinctives in order to align with the practices of the "original" group. You can imagine the apostolic church as a giant iceberg which has, over time, split into several smaller icebergs, and all the penguins on each iceberg believe that theirs is the original piece, from which all the others broke off.

The other type of claim comes from a small set of Protestant churches which regard their own doctrine and practice as representing the one true church. In this view, most of Christian history was an exercise in going astray, starting immediately after the apostolic age, and it was only when their own branch’s founder rediscovered the core of true doctrine that authentic Christianity re-emerged. Such churches base their claim primarily on the principle of biblical adherence, arguing that their own practice best matches that laid out in the New Testament. While this now tends to be something of a fringe position in Protestantism, a fairly broad swath of Protestant churches had their beginnings in a belief like this. My Baptist communion would not usually claim to be the only true church nowadays, but one doesn’t need to read that far back in Baptist history to find such a claim being made.

It might be tempting, on looking at the churches making these claims, to dismiss them with a wave of the hand. It seems a little silly, after all, that all the churches in each group are making the exact same claim about themselves, despite the many manifest differences between them. They can’t all be right, and thus many observers are content to shrug the matter off. 

But if there is one true church--or even just a church that most closely accords to God's intention--then I would very much like to know. It seems rather important that if there is one, then I should try to be a part of it. So I’m working through how one might assess the rival claims of all these different churches. Is there a communion of Christians that constitute the one true church in the world today? Or, on the other hand, is it the case that the one true church is simply the mystical Body of Christ, composed of all faithfully believing Christians, regardless of which visible communion they belong to? Either way, it seems an important question to try to get right.

Assessing the Evidence: Historical, Biblical, Experiential

Three main types of arguments are used to back up the claim that one’s own church is the right one:

1.) Historical arguments: “We’re directly descended from the original church and never separated from it, so that must mean we’re the true church.”

2.) Biblical arguments: “Our theological distinctives offer the clearest presentation of New Testament doctrine and practice of any church body, so that must mean we’re the true church.”

3.) Experiential: “The Holy Spirit works in our midst in such-and-such a way, and we experience this or that kind of miracle, clearly showing that God’s supernatural stamp of approval is on us.”

Each of these arguments faces challenges: for the historical and experiential arguments, it’s commonly the plurality of denominations that causes the most difficulty for making an exclusivist case, since there are usually other groups that can boast similar historical records and miracle stories. For the biblical argument, it’s the ambiguity of certain aspects of biblical interpretation that causes the most difficulty—it’s hard to make the case that your interpretation on a particular point is clearly the right one when, again, there are other denominations making equally impassioned and theologically plausible arguments for their own view of the same passages.

(To be continued…Next time we’ll examine each of the three types of claims using the case study of our quirky big sister in the faith, the Roman Catholic Church.)

The Evangeliad (30:1-3)

(Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:1-3 (corresponding to Luke 14:7-9)

Jesus looked round the room, then spoke these words,

Advising the men on what he'd observed:

"When you are invited to a feast, my friends,

Don't seek out the table's most honored end.

You want for yourselves a prestigious spot,

But vanity's shame will be all you got

When you're moved by the host to the lowest seat,

Where common folk and humility meet.

For what if a guest more honored than you

Should come through the door, then isn't it true?--

The host would come and unseat you himself,

To give the best spot to somebody else.

Changes to My Blog

After several years of posting on a daily (or near-daily) basis, I'm going to scale back my presence on this blog, moving to a weekly pattern. The quotes, photos, and prayers will be going away, at least for a little while (reasons for this shift can be found below). Nevertheless, a few things will remain the same:

- I will continue posting new sections of my Evangeliad poem, partly because I've found that keeping a scheduled posting habit has kept me moving on the project, and it likely has at least a couple more years to go. Those poems will now be posted near the end of each week. 

- Sermon podcasts will no longer be posted directly to this blog, but you can easily access them by going to my church's website (calaisbaptist.org), and clicking the "Sermons" tab. There is a permanent link to the church website on the sidebar of this blog (if you're viewing the desktop version of the page).

- I will also occasionally post essays, though not on an every-week basis. Essays were one of the staples of this blog a few years back, and I had moved away from them because of time constraints, but I found that I greatly enjoyed the handful of essays I wrote after coming home from my England trip. Every once in a while, then, you can expect to see an essay (and maybe, just maybe, a new hymn!).

Two main motivators are driving this shift: first, my schedule has changed significantly in the past two years, making an every-day posting habit difficult to maintain. I'm now working part-time teaching classes and writing books in addition to my pastoral ministry (in fact, I have a new book manuscript under contract right now, and it will command much of my time until December). Reducing the time given to the blog will enable me to take one small thing off the mountain of little demands that make up my life. At the same time, it will also free up the blog to highlight some of the projects that develop on a more sporadic basis.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, I'm committed to radically cutting down the amount of time I spend looking at digital screens this year. This week marks two years since the beginning of my oblate novitiate (and nearly a year as a full monastic oblate). I'm working to bring some of the practices of my life more in line with the wisdom of the monastic tradition, which is characterized by patience, listening, and leaving margins of silence and contemplation in one's daily life, to more readily recall oneself to the awareness of God's presence. The ubiquity of screens in our modern life--from smartphones to laptops to TVs hooked up to streaming platforms--tends to work the other way, filling up all the available margins with an incessant stream of articles, shows, games, posts, and trivialities. I'll still have to use my computer for necessary research and communication, and I'll still engage in watching an occasional show, movie, or sporting event as a communal activity with others, but that's where I'm drawing the line. For the next year, I'll be reducing my exposure to screens down to just two roles: necessary tasks and communal hospitality. 

Cutting back on some of my blog-posting schedule will enable me to stay away from the computer more consistently, and the creative pieces that I'll continue to post--poems, and the occasional essay or hymn--are things that can be entirely composed elsewhere (by hand or with my gloriously old-fashioned word-processor, which features nothing but a four-line text display). So look for (at the very least) a weekly Evangeliad post, and an occasional extra piece every now and then. I'll of course have weeks during vacations where I'm not posting anything, and I'll probably not announce those breaks formally anymore; just look for the normal posts to resume in a week or two weeks' time if there's a gap. I'll also certainly continue using the blog to keep readers apprised of new books and articles that may be coming out shortly, so keep an eye out for that.

Sermons

Glimpses of Grace: The Restorer of Eden (Gen. 2-3)

(click here to listen or right-click to download)

Glimpses of Grace: The Ark of God (Gen. 6)

(click here to listen or right-click to download)

The Evangeliad (29:43-38)

(Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 29:43-48 (corresponding to Luke 14:1-6)

Once, in the home of a chief Pharisee,

Where Jesus had come to talk and to eat,

They watched all the things he would do and would say,

To catch him in error on that Sabbath-day.

And there in their midst stood a man in pain,

Stricken with dropsy, swollen, aflame;

So Jesus regarded the man and the crowd,

And their silent question he uttered aloud:

"Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath-day?"
But they were silent, had nothing to say.

So Jesus reached out, and with a touch,

He healed the man and bade him get up.

Then after sending the healed man away,

He looked at the crowd and had this to say:

"If on the Sabbath your ox or your son

Fell down a well, the decision is done--

You'd pull them right out, and not even wait,

For such precious things must be saved straightaway."

Then no word of rebuke would anyone say,

Nor lift up their eyes to challenge his gaze.

Photo of the Week

So is my word that goes out from my mouth: 

It will not return to me empty,

but will accomplish what I desire

and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

- Isaiah 55:11

Quote of the Week

"If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus. If you want to know what love is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what grief is, look at Jesus. And go on looking until you’re not just a spectator, but you’re actually part of the drama which has him as the central character."

- N. T. Wright

Sermon

 As I get back into my regular posting schedule, I'll continue including audio files of my Sunday sermons here, usually in the Thursday slot. We're just starting a series looking at prophecies and foreshadowings of Jesus in the Old Testament, seeking to see the portrait of the Savior that emerges from the many ways that God prepared his people for their Messiah. It's called "Glimpses of Grace," similar to the partial series of essays by the same name here on the blog. This first sermon looks at the portrait of Christ which emerges from Genesis 1.

Glimpses of Grace: The One Through Whom the World Was Made (Gen. 1)

(click here to listen or right-click to download)

Photo of the Week

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

- Matthew 9:36-38

Quote of the Week

"The essence of Christ’s peace lies in his perfect knowledge of the Father. So it is with us: if we know the Eternal Truth all the torments of this life will be confined, as it were, to the periphery of our being, while the light of life proceeding from the Father will reign within us."

- Sophrony Sakharov

Reflections on My English Pilgrimage, Part 3

This will be the last of my reflections on my English pilgrimage; next week the blog will resume its normal schedule of posts. While the previous reflections have centered on history and theology, this one is more personal, albeit with connections to the life of the church that I hope will prove edifying to my readers.

As with any pilgrimage, one of the goals was to seek out the presence of God and, hopefully, gain some experience to shed insight or inspiration on my walk with the Lord. One need not travel to England or Israel to gain that experience, of course--God is everywhere, and just as readily encountered in the woods around one's home as in Jerusalem. But the practice of pilgrimage can provide a focusing effect on one's seeking, an opportunity to step away from the pressures of home life and to pursue God in places that still ring with the stories of countless saints who have also encountered the living Lord there.

While I certainly hoped to encounter the presence of God in a way that would challenge, convict, and shape me in my road of discipleship, one of my other goals for this pilgrimage was also to try to figure something out about myself. As anyone with a passing familiarity with this blog has probably already noticed, I'm something of a fence-straddler when it comes to the old divisions between high-church and low-church forms of worship. I write essays about evangelical theology and post them alongside Eastern Orthodox icons; I write hymns in the Baptist tradition and liturgies hearkening back to Anglican and Orthodox forms. The truth is, I don't quite know where I fit. Who knows, it probably has something to do with my deep-running psychological formation as a TCK in my early childhood (which produces something of a sense of perpetual, journeying rootlessness in one's life). But in short, I've always loved the whole breadth of the Christian tradition and yet never felt entirely at home in any one segment of it. It may be that I, like many younger evangelicals, am drawn by the gravity and grandeur of the ancient forms of the faith, in what appears to be a common generational trend. But unlike many of my peers, I've never sought to make a move away from my home tradition and into another one.

Whatever the cause of it, this sense of belonging everywhere-and-nowhere in the Christian church has long been a part of my experience. I've been a Baptist most of my life, both by heritage and conviction, but I've also been blessed to have deeply formative experiences in the Anabaptist, Wesleyan-Holiness, Reformed, Anglican, Pentecostal, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions. I'm a committed Baptist pastor who is also, on the side, in fellowship with an Anglican apostolate and a Benedictine monastery. An odd duck, to be sure.

One of the ways this is expressed in my life is in the dichotomy between my worship with my home church and my worship elsewhere. My home church, where I serve as pastor, is my spiritual family, and nothing else comes close in that regard. It is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, if we were to look at the issue in the abstract and consider only the forms of worship involved, a striking pattern emerges: in my pastoral ministry, I worship in a low-church context; but on those infrequent occasions when I'm off on my own and the choice is mine, I almost always seek out high-church worship. I look for an Anglican high mass or an Orthodox Divine Liturgy to attend. I vary my customary worship--heartfelt praise songs, hymns, and extemporaneous prayers--in favor of more ancient forms: liturgies, collects, and creeds. While I'm gifted at leading low-church worship services, and truly enjoy them and find them spiritually fruitful, I had gradually come to wonder whether perhaps, if I were simply a worshiper and not a leader, I would feel at home in a high-church tradition. This was a question I had the opportunity to put to the test in my English pilgrimage, but the answer surprised me a little.

Almost all of the worship services I attended in England were high-church services (usually of the Anglican variety). And I loved it. As I wrote last week, the most profound emotional and spiritual experiences of my entire trip came during high-church Eucharist services. But after a couple weeks of this, I found myself looking around for a nice low-church service I could attend. I was yearning for heartfelt praise songs and the warm personal connection of an evangelical fellowship. Maybe it was just that I had been away long enough to feel lonely and ready for a taste of home; I don't know. But God graciously provided exactly what I longed for, in the most unexpected way. 

It was Saturday, and I had just left the conference in Oxford and was making my way toward Norfolk. I got off at a train stop in Peterborough to see yet another old cathedral. I wasn't attending worship in Peterborough Cathedral--not only did I not really feel like another high-church service at the time, but the cathedral itself had been redecorated as a children's museum instead of a place of worship (which was something of a letdown). Feeling bereft of God and longing for some worshipful singing and open-hearted prayer, I stepped back out of the doors of the church to hear a group of evangelical Christians singing together on the cathedral green. They were singing "Faithful One" (a worship song beloved in English evangelicalism, and one which has long been a favorite of mine). I sat down in the grass and sang along with them until they were told to stop by cathedral security guards. Then I went up to meet them and they prayed for me and my journey, and it was like drinking water from a deep, cool well. God had granted me just what I needed in that moment.

So where does that leave me? Still fence-straddling, I suppose. No, something better than that. It emphatically did not confirm my infrequent speculations that maybe I belonged in a high-church tradition. I found that I couldn't do without the beauty of low-church worship either. So all this has convinced me that I will never be satisfied with anything less than the entire Body of Christ. My home is the whole church, every part of it. Wherever brothers and sisters are gathered, whether raising their hands in song or bowing in an ancient creed, I am no stranger there. From my Baptist church at home to the little Orthodox chapel I attend on vacations, I will take joy in all the ways that the Bride adores her Beloved. And perhaps that's as it should be.

Reflections on My English Pilgrimage, Part 2

The second set of reflections I've been ruminating on have to do with the Eucharist (that is, communion). If I had to look back and say which experiences most captivated me and produced the most profound spiritual effects in my interior life during the trip, they were all centered on the Eucharist. While I attended nearly as many church services as it is possible to attend while in England (many churches, following a pattern set down in the English Reformation, hold twice-daily prayer services and offer communion several times a week), three such experiences stood out to me: a communion service in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral at the end of my walking journey across Kent, another at the high altar of Lichfield Cathedral on the Feast of the Transfiguration, and a third in the nave of Southwark Cathedral on my final day in England. In each case, the moments of consecration and reception in the communion liturgy struck me with raw and unexpected emotional power, in a way that has stuck with me over the succeeding weeks.

My own Baptist tradition celebrates communion on a monthly basis (which is itself a far more frequent schedule than some earlier Baptist groups would have offered), but I'm also connected with a few groups that make it the central feature of the church's weekly worship. The latter position, in my opinion, tends to accord best with the earliest practice of the Christian church, as witnessed in both the New Testament and the apostolic fathers. Most of the churches which now hold a weekly Eucharist tend to hew to a high-church, sacramental position, while those that offer communion more infrequently generally hold a low-church, symbolic view of the rite. And while many of the debates between these two wings of the church rotate around the question of whether communion represents the real presence of Christ (and if so, in what way), I'd like to draw attention to a different feature of the early Christian practice with regard to the Eucharist. 

One of the curious features of the earliest post-NT accounts of communion liturgies is that none of them put significant stress on the institution narrative or the question of body/blood relative to the presence of Christ. That is, none of the mentions of Eucharistic celebrations from the late first, second, or early third centuries delves deep into the words of Christ at his Last Supper with his disciples, beyond the observation that he commanded this ritual. This is something of a surprise, since nearly all modern liturgies place their greatest attention on this aspect, and the interconnectedness of Communion and the Last Supper is clearly visible in both the gospels and the letters of Paul. So why the strange absence of a historical reference to Jesus's passion?

As I was looking over the earliest sources at the patristics conference, something struck me. When the Didache and Justin Martyr and Irenaeus speak about communion--all while strangely omitting the sort of body/blood reflections on the Last Supper which we would have expected--they all nevertheless do have a shared theme in common. Each of them connects the celebration of communion with the idea of creation, and often with a secondary connection to the idea of the New Covenant. The idea being presented, then, is this: that just as the Old Testament covenants with Noah and Moses were oriented around the presentation of sacrifices that represented the gift of created things being offered back to God, so the New Testament covenant is oriented around these symbols of New Creation: bread and wine, drawn from the stuff of creation but mystically representing the body and blood of Christ, who is himself the first instantiation of the New Creation. To eat the offerings of the Old Covenant (as was part of the ritual practice) was to gratefully accept the goodness of God's creation as our sustenance. Now, however, as human beings who have entered the New Creation through Christ's death and resurrection, we must be fed and sustained by the stuff of the New Creation--Christ himself. Since we belong to a new and different world, our spiritual sustenance comes from that world, from the work of God in New Creation, offered to us through Christ our Lord. As Irenaeus puts it, communion is "the new oblation of the new covenant" and "the means of subsistence, the first-fruits of his own gifts" (Adv. Haer. 4.17.5). This perspective undergirds the early Christian sensibility about the necessity of communion as a continuing part of Christian worship: we offer back to God the goodness of what he has given to us in a pure sacrifice (Mal. 1:11), and we then receive it as our food, the food of the New Covenant and the New Creation. Since Jesus himself is the first-fruits of that New Creation in a way that nothing else in creation is, it necessarily must be a representation of his own flesh which we consume. His body is so far the only physical element of the New Creation which has sprung forth into the world, and so if we are to offer and eat the fruits of New Creation (just like the old sacrifices offered the fruits of created things), it must be his body which is offered in the rite. We are being re-made as creatures of the New Creation, looking forward to the eschatological fulfillment of all things, and so we eat the bread of the New Creation in expectation of the fullness that is to come.

I'm not sure this particular perspective in early Eucharistic theology has really been properly considered by contemporary scholars, so it's something I'm continuing to think about. It may have further ramifications for our life in Christ, or it may not, but at the very least, it's certainly a point of interest. To receive communion is to take part in an eschatological sacrifice, a foretaste of the New Creation that is to come, and the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. And that is something worth reflecting on.

Reflections on My English Pilgrimage, Part 1

Part of the ruins of St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury

In thinking over my English pilgrimage, I have three sets of reflections that have been rattling around in my brain, and I'll share them here in a series of posts, this week and next. First, about Christianity and the West; second, about the Eucharist; and third, about my own relationship to the church. So for this post, I'm looking back at the story of Christianity's re-emergence in Britain in the early medieval period, and what a burst of light in the so-called "Dark Ages" can tell us about our own day.

As a scholar of church history, and with a particular focus on the history of missions in early Christianity, I wanted to explore sites associated with the re-evangelization of Britain in the seventh century. Re-evangelization, you say? Well, yes. Britain had already received the gospel before that date, back when the native Britons were under the sway of the Roman Empire, and several of the sites I visited attested to that ancient heritage. There was St. Alban's Cathedral, marking the spot where--according to tradition--the first Christian martyr in England was killed, sometime in the late third or early fourth century. And there was St. Pancras Old Church in London, marking an old Roman encampment where, some believe, the first Christian church in Britain was erected after Constantine's edict of toleration in 313 AD. This Roman Christianity spread through the local population, such that the Britons largely became a Christian people over the succeeding years.

But paganism was about to mount a swift comeback in Britain, and it came in the form of a settler-invasion: the Angles and Saxons, Germanic stock from across the North Sea, settling first in Kent and East Anglia and gradually sweeping across the island. By the time the late sixth century rolled around, the Britons had been pushed back into Wales, and all of what is now England was once again pagan, bereft of the gospel. 

St. Chad, Lichfield Cathedral

It's at this point that my interest in the story picks up, because England would be the beneficiary of two great waves of missionaries, coming from the south (Rome) and the north (Irish monks in Scotland). While only one of the sites I visited on this trip attested to the legacy of the Celtic monks from the north (Chad's preaching in Mercia, where Lichfield Cathedral now stands), many of them were associated with the surge of evangelization from the south. Both the Roman and Celtic mission movements were spectacular: in the seventh century AD, in a time when the transmission of people and information was far, far slower than it is today, the message of the gospel raced across the hills and heaths of England at an astonishing pace. One needs only take a look at the handful of cathedrals I visited to see the story in real time: 

- Canterbury Cathedral, built on a site sacred to the memory of the original Roman missionary to the Anglo-Saxons, Augustine of Canterbury, who arrived there in 597 AD;

- Rochester Cathedral, marking the mission of Augustine's friend Justus, who planted the faith there just a few years later; and which cathedral is also the resting place of Paulinus, yet another member of the Roman mission team, whose ministry of evangelization in the early seventh century took him all the way northward, into York and Northumbria;

- St. Paul's Cathedral, which likely goes all the way back to the ministry of Mellitus, a fourth member of that same Roman mission team, consecrated by Augustine to plant a church in London;

- Christ Church Cathedral, marking a Christian abbey founded in the latter half of the seventh century by the Anglo-Saxon princess Frideswide;

- Ely Cathedral, also founded as an abbey in 672 by the Anglo-Saxon princess Etheldreda;

- Lichfield Cathedral, marking the seventh-century ministry of Chad, who had pressed the Celtic Christian evangelization of England deep into the last remaining pagan territory, adding to the legacy of a whole generation of Celtic missionaries like Cuthbert, Aidan, and Mungo.

Memorial to St. Paulinus, Rochester Cathedral

All that to say: many of the greatest churches of the land attest to a dramatic turning of the tides that came within the span of a single century. Britain had fallen from Christianity to paganism, and that violent conversion was, to all eyes, utterly complete. And then, in the blink of an eye, the whole thing was transformed completely, and the gospel made its second passage across the land in a way that transformed Britain entirely. It was a startling turn of events, and not by any means a guaranteed outcome--some of the other Germanic peoples of central, eastern, and northern Europe would take another half-millennium to fully convert to the Christian faith. Something swift and striking was afoot in seventh-century England, and it gives me hope for today.

We too live in an age where it looks like the former place of Christianity in our society is vanishing before our eyes. Like the earliest British Christians, we've seen tides of unfaith roll into our civilization with all the alarming power and swiftness of an invasion. Not only atheism, but paganism itself is making a startling return, and one gets the sense in visiting some of these old churches that one is really just walking through the ruins of a bygone age. The Christian world has fallen, and a new Dark Ages opens before us. Many readers will feel this sensibility about the course things are taking in America, but it is far more visible in western Europe, where the old churches built to call all the people to worship largely stand empty, save for a handful. Like Britain in the sixth century, it looks like Christianity's time has come and gone, and a pagan and disinterested populace looks everywhere for solace except to the old faith.

Marker in Ely Cathedral

But the sixth century was not the end of the story. Let's not forget just how fast the story changed, and how complete was the transformation effected by that change. There is no falling away so far and so completely that God is not mighty enough to bring us back. Even now, I wonder if we're not already seeing the seeds of a significant revival, as more and more public intellectuals begin to voice their doubts about the explanatory power of atheism. Walking around Oxford, the greatest university in the world, it is almost impossible not to bump into the question of God around every corner. It might be the case, just maybe, that the bleakness of European atheism in the twentieth century will fade in the memory as a blip in the storyline, like the pagan resurgence of sixth-century Britain, and that the twenty-first century will one day be remembered for a host of missionary-saints, with new cathedrals shooting up to embrace the sky. Bottom line: it's worth remembering that the West has seen a "post-Christian" age before, back in sixth-century Britain (and it's far from the only one). But it wasn't really post-Christian after all. It turned out, in the most marvelous way, to have been a pre-Christian age, a mere pause in the music before the symphony thundered on. 

A London Day before Heading Home

The final part of my trip was a little stopover in the London area before my flight home to Maine (where I'm now trying to recover from jet lag). As with much of the trip, I wanted to take the opportunity to see a few important church history sites, so I spent the day checking off a few more cathedrals (St Albans, Southwark, and St Paul's) and zipping around the Tube to see churches and memorials associated with some of my post-Reformation heroes.

Stayed at the Highbury Centre, the same place my friends and I had stayed
during a college semester in London some 20+ years ago

At the Isaac Watts memorial in Abney Park

John Wesley's memorial and historic chapel

John Bunyan's memorial in Bunhill Fields

St. Mary Woolnoth, John Newton's church

The old pub on Fleet Street that G. K. Chesterton frequented

Southwark Cathedral, where Shakespeare was a parishioner

The Lancelot Andrewes memorial in Southwark Cathedral

Metropolitan Tabernacle, Charles Spurgeon's old church

Holy Trinity Church in Clapham, the church that William Wilberforce
and his friends attended in London

The altar in St. Paul's Cathedral, where (in a previous edifice)
John Donne had served as rector

Norwich and the Eastern Cathedrals

After my conference in Oxford wrapped up, I took a couple days to head east, into East Anglia and Norfolk, which, like Kent, were early centers of the Anglo-Saxon reception of Christianity in the 7th century. I stopped at cathedrals in Peterborough, Ely, Bury St Edmunds, and Norwich, but the real goal for me was to reach a much smaller church, and one that came a little later in Christian history: St Julian's church, Norwich. This medieval church had been home to one of the great Christian writers of the Middle Ages, an anonymous woman now know only for the church in which she lived as an anchorite (a hermit-like monastic in permanent residence in a cell attached to a church): Julian of Norwich. Her book, Revelations of Divine Love, has long been among the books I've most highly treasured, with words that elucidate the love of God to me. So amid all the cathedrals and their splendor, I spent most of my time in the reconstructed Church of St Julian (there's a guesthouse nearby where I stayed), and was privileged to have church there Sunday morning. Next up, after a bit of birding here in the Norfolk area, it's back to London for a whirlwind look at some of the city's church history sites, and then a flight back home.

Peterborough Cathedral 

Norwich Cathedral

St Edmundsbury Cathedral 

Ely Cathedral 

A rose growing outside the Lady Julian's cell

This Week in Oxford, Part 2

Most of the week was spent at the patristics conference in Oxford. I presented my paper on Thursday--"The Advantage of Rusticity: Patrick's Dissent from Patristic Interpretations of Great Commission Texts (Confessio 40)"--and it seemed to be well-received. Here are a few more pictures from around the city. Next, it's off for a few days to see a site associated with one of my favorite medieval writers, Julian of Norwich.

The Radcliffe Camera (part of the Bodleian Library),
an iconic Oxford landmark 

The Examination Schools, where most of the
conference's sessions were held 

Paying my respects to C. S. Lewis at his grave
in Headington Quarry, just outside Oxford

The conference's opening session 
in Christ Church Cathedral

Christ Church College and Cathedral
(where John & Charles Wesley studied and were ordained)

This Week in Oxford, Part 1

With my walking pilgrimage complete, it was off to Oxford for the International Conference on Patristic Studies, and naturally I've taken time to explore some of the history of the city in between conference sessions. I'm staying in Magdalene College, C. S. Lewis's old teaching post. Here are a few shots of some notable Oxford spots:

Magdalene College Chapel 

On the cloistered quad of Magdalene College 

Pulpit from which Lewis preached his
"Weight of Glory Sermon," at University Church
(John Wesley also preached here)

Martyrs Monument, commemorating the executions
of great Reformers like Thomas Cranmer

The pub where Lewis & Tolkien used to hang out

Keble College Chapel