Some Principles for Interpreting the Bible

I was thinking about how we might be able to look at patristic exegesis for ourselves today, particularly in deploying spiritual exegesis without it becoming simply arbitrary – and how, even when arbitrary, there can be some guardrails to ensure spiritual exegesis and its application are nonetheless helpful in the quest for theological and spiritual truth and participation in the life of God.

I have brainstormed six headings for this little investigation:

Regula fidei
Caritas
Ad litteram
Moralia/Theologia/Symbola – Consideratio and some contemplatio
Typologia
Allegoria

Regula Fidei

Any exegesis we make should be in line with the rule of faith, the canon of the faith, the regula fidei – encapsulated in the creeds today. This approach emerges from St. Athanasius of Alexandria in his Orations Against the Arians, where he argues that Arian exegesis of Proverbs 8 must be false because it undermines the rule of faith. In essence, he is following the logic of Irenaeus’ use of the rule of faith in its application not just to specific doctrines and dogmas but to the exegesis of the sacred text itself.

Now, this may seem to be putting the cart before the horse. After all, as the Articles of Religion state, the three creeds are proved by most excellent warrant of Scripture, not the other way around, right? Well, be that as it may, it is also the case that our earliest regulae fidei are themselves concurrent with discussions of what counts as Scripture, and it is fairly clear that the two questions coinhere. That is to say, if something goes contrary to the regula fidei, it can’t be Scripture, and vice versa.

Furthermore, if we take it as given that the creeds are proved by Scripture (and therefore true), a sound interpretation of Scripture will not run counter to the creeds

This principle of the rule of faith comes first because we are heirs to Scripture and members—embodied, living organs—of a wider body than just ourselves and our tools. Whatever else we do, it is done as part of the living community of the faithful.

Caritas

This principle is from Augustine, Confessions and On Christian Teaching (De Doctrina). The principle is that if our interpretation of a disputed/ambiguous passage promotes love and charity with our neighbour, then it cannot be “wrong” in a particular sense, for it is, at least, promoting the greatest Christian virtue.

The inverse is also true—if a reading of Scripture promotes un-love, then it is false.

Now, this position can be misused today, which is why it has to work in tandem with the rule of faith. Our culture today is confused about what counts as love—at times, simply saying, “Doing x is morally wrong,” can be considered un-love. At other times, speak truth in a crude way is considered “Love.” To my mind, neither of these is correct. The moral teaching of Scripture and tradition is not loving or unloving based upon how it makes people feel.

The very possibility of someone misusing Augustine’s teaching in this way is disturbing, to be sure, but also quite real.

Ad Litteram

The next principle is doing the work of reading the text, not simply ad litteram but also ad grammatica. That is to say, reading the texts in their historical-grammatical context. What is the genre? What does the story mean in terms of its historical meaning?

The great allegorists of the patristic era were engaged in this kind of reading as the foundation for their spiritual interpretations. Origen spends a lot of time looking at grammar and semantics to establish the meaning of the text. Bede finds lessons in the historical sense of Scripture. Gregory of Nyssa establishes the historical account of the Life of Moses before the allegory. Augustine shows us in his sermons as well as exhorting us in On Christian Teaching that we should establish the basic, historical meaning of the text first.

This means using the tools available to us—Augustine used Jerome’s On Hebrew Names, for example. The tools today are more abundant, but the task is essentially the same. It also means taking history seriously. While Origen is famous for those moments when he denies the historicity of the biblical story, those moments are rare. He almost always affirms the reality of the story in Scripture, the event as the sure foundation of the allegory.

Moralia/Theologia/Symbola – Consideratio and some contemplation

With these three tasks done, we can actually do a lot of teaching without having to move along into typology and allegory. These stages are what Evagrius would consider the lower levels of theoria or contemplatio, and what the last of the fathers, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, calls consideratio.

At this level, we are doing what most preachers do. What are the moral, theological, and symbolic meanings of this text? What does it show us about how to live? What does it teach us about who God is and what God has done? What symbolic resonances does it have with other parts of Scripture and the world around us?

This is the kind of preaching that St. John Chrysostom is most famous for, but all of the ancient preachers did it, whether they were also allegorists/typologists, or not. With this knowledge, we are raising our vision above just a bunch of historical data and facts to the grand overarching reality of the God who acts then and now, speaks then and now, is actus purus and here with us today. Sometimes we can miss doing this, thinking that a bunch of historical facts and grammatical data are exegesis.

As much as I like history – whether we’re thinking Mesopotamia or the Roman Empire, I enjoy learning this stuff – stopping with the historical data and not seeing God in it is to miss the whole point of sacred Scritpure. God speaks to the exegete and the congregation through Scripture, and the preacher discerns his voice in this way.

To do this well is a form of contemplatio, that inner seeing of the mind, or theoria, that the mystics promote. It is also St. Bernard’s consideratio, the idea that you look around you at the world and other humans and discern your right relationship to them (as opposed to using them as a ladder to God, which Bernard would think of as a level of contemplatio). All of this is good and beautiful and true, and we should never reject it.

We begin the ascent of Mt. Sinai.

Typologia

Typology is seeing something in the Old Testament fulfilled in the new, usually Christ. The technical terminology is used in 2 Peter of Noah’s Ark as a typology of baptism. This approach is used by Jesus himself of the bronze snake Moses raised up in the Desert. When used responsibly, typology sees Christ as the key to all the mysteries of the Old Testament but also acknowledges that sometimes a piece of wood is just a piece of wood.

This type of exegesis is popular with Presbyterians to this day. In the ancient church, it is prominent in the On Pascha by Melito of Sardis and informs a vast swathe of the hymns of St. Ephrem the Syrian, such as the Hymns on Paradise and the Hymns on the Incarnation, as well as finding manifestation in the hymns of St. Romanos who is a Greek recipient of St. Ephrem’s tradition.

Typology is a legitimate form of spiritual exegesis that Our Lord and the Apostles used. It helps bring together the full narrative of Scripture, intersecting with the person of Christ.

Allegoria

The finding and making of allegory (allegoresis) is the most controversial level of spiritual exegesis, although some find typology equally so. It was practised by Christians who were also what we often call “mystics” today – Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, Ambrose, Augustine, Bede. These “mystics” were also all similarly “ascetics.” This union of the mystical and the ascetical strikes me as significant.

Anyway, with the guardrails of the above all in place, I believe that even a modern preacher can start to prayerfully find allegories in Scripture, so long as the main goals of all exegesis and all preaching are kept in mind.

All of these have two goals:

1. Caritas
2. Divine participation

Caritas

Caritas is both method and goal in exegesis, as it is likewise in the contemplative tradition. I’ve already spoken of Augustine in this regard. In The Cloud of Unknowing, a 13th-century work strongly influenced by the Carthusians, there is a statement that if someone does not come away from contemplation or what we today might call “mystical experience” with a greater love for fellow human beings, that person has not truly encountered God in any meaningful way.

So also with the interpretation and application and preaching of Sacred Scripture. The goal is to fulfil the great commandments, to love God above all else, and our neighbour as ourselves. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Divine Participation

For the Fathers, from the Apostolic Fathers to Bede and even Bernard (to keep the old Cistercian view alive!), salvation is not merely getting out of Hell free. It’s not simply “going to heaven.” The redeemed life itself is not simply the life of a bad person whose spot in future glory is secured. That is to say, it’s not simply transactional: God accepts my faith and puts me into a right relationship with him.

Rather, God accepts my faith (which He himself has given), puts me into a right relationship with him, and transforms me through this relationship, since a right relationship with God means participating in divine life. This divine participation means growth in holiness and love for God and for neighbour. It means finding the disciplines easier as time goes on. And it is always preceded by God’s grace, surrounded by God’s grace, resting on God’s grace. God’s unmerited favour towards us empowers us to be united with him and filled with him.

This is the purpose of understanding Scripture for the individual Christian – to know God more and more. This is why St. Gregory of Nyssa saw the Life of Moses as an allegory of the whole Christian life – to empower Christians to climb Mt. Sinai and find God there in the cloud of unknowing. This is why Origen likened the church to the bride in Song of Songs. We are drawn to our divine love and find wholeness in his embrace. This is what Scripture is for – it is for empowering us to live the with-God life, transfigured by our encounter with Christ.

Christ, after all, is the God Word, and thus the words about Him have real power in our lives. We need good expositors to open them up and help us find Him.

This spiritual approach to scripture is likened by St. Maximus the Confessor, in his Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, to a different mountain from Sinai. For Maximus, it is Mt. Tabor, the mount of Transfiguration that is the goal of understanding Scripture. The bare words are taken away, and the divine reality of Christ shines forth from behind them.

The Church Year

It’s Palm Sunday today. We are about to enter the busiest season of the church year. The Book of Common Prayer has a collect, epistle reading, and Gospel reading for every day from now until next Sunday, Easter. While many won’t be able to make it to church every day this week, there are quite a few of us who will make it to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, maybe also a vigil on Easter Even/Holy Saturday.

One year in high school I had an orchestra concert one of the nights of Holy Week (Maundy Thursday, maybe?). I commented to a fellow musician that my dad wouldn’t be able to make it because there was church every day that week as we remember the different events from Palm Sunday to Easter. The response was that we should remember those things every day.

Well, yes, of course.

But we can’t actually have a church service that covers every. single. thing. every. single. day. Or even every. single. Sunday.

Instead, we have the Church Year, the big version of sacred time. Sacred time, of course, has multiple layers. In terms of marking it, we have the daily rhythms of Morning and Evening Prayer, the weekly rhythm of every Sunday being a mini Easter (and in some traditions, fasts on Wednesday and/or Friday), and the yearly rhythm of the many feasts and fasts.

My brother and I already have a podcast episode about the meaning of the seasons and feasts, so I wish to go a different direction, one that turns us back to my trombone-playing comrade of c. 2001.

The absolutely central reality of Christianity is the fact that God became man so that man might become God. Our manifold sins and wickedness are healed by this reality. Our great potential is fulfilled by this reality. Our understanding of Who God Is is bodied forth by this truth. Everything surrounding this reality — the events of Jesus’ life on earth, the preparation and history of God’s people leading up to it, the record of those events, the ongoing life of Christ in the Church through the centuries — is bound to the fact that God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Indeed, from the beautiful reality of the Incarnation comes also the beautiful doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity.

Because God became man, we are disciples of the God-Man, Jesus the Christ. We, Christians, are bound to the divine life. We participate, in our own small way, in eternity. We grasp at infinity, and God gives us what we can handle. Because God took on humanity in every way except sin.

As Christians, as disciples of Jesus, we are called to remember this reality and keep it at the forefront of our devotion. Our devotion is not to a set of ideals or “values”. Our devotion is not to some generic unmoved mover we call “God”. Our devotion is not to the Bible. Our devotion is to the very specific, very real God Who became a man so that we might participate in the divine life. Our worship and our prayer and our moral lives and our everything is meant to be devoted to Christ Jesus Our Lord.

And as humans, we need this to be constantly brought before our hearts and minds, imprinted on our souls, filling us to overflowing.

As humans, we live in the ebb and flow of time. Every twenty-four hours, the earth completes a rotation, a day comes and goes. From the earliest days of our faith, we have ordered our days and our prayers with this rhythm — one of our earliest hymns is a hymn to Christ for eventide, the “Phos Hilaron”. We also have a cycle of daily hymns from Prudentius in the fourth century, not to mention the daily cycle of prayer mentioned in second- and third-century sources such as Tertullian, Origen, The Apostolic Tradition. We fill certain times of day with the remembrance of the God who became man so as not to lose sight of him.

But that’s not enough. Our cycle, based upon the harmony of the universe revealed in Scripture, also includes the seven-day week. And on a specific day of the week, our salvation was wrought for us as Christ trampled down death by death and rose from the dead. And so every Sunday, the first day of the week, we celebrate the resurrection. We keep Jesus and his salvation for us at the front of our minds in our communal gatherings.

But God’s salvation is too big to cram it all into a single day each week. We just can’t do it. And so we have the year-long cycle. Every 365 1/4 days, the earth completes a circuit around the sun. And so we remember the deeds wrought by Christ to save us in the course of the year, commemorating his deeds and teachings, recalling the teachings of his apostles and prophets as well.

This yearly cycle enables us as Christians to keep our hearts and minds focussed on Jesus and his saving grace, his saving acts, his saving of us. God became man so that man might become God. We need to remember this. If left to our own devices, many of us may simply preach through the book of Romans for six years. Or examine only the moral teachings of Jesus. Or double down on the Psalms.

But the church year fixes our eyes not just on the teachings of Jesus but on the God-Man Himself. The church is forced through its cycle of seasons and feasts and fasts and readings from the lectionary to confront the God-Man Himself and not shunt Him off to the side.

Christianity is not about the teachings of Jesus. Its about Jesus Himself. We need to keep Him, the Person of Jesus the Christ, God the Word Incarnate, at the centre of our vision, of our ethics, of our worship, of our Bible-reading, of our prayer.

The Church Year does that for us. This is the pastoral role of the church year. This is why we have the feasts and fasts, why we have seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphanytide, Gesimas, Lent, Eastertide, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, as well as Michaelmas, All Saints Day, the saints’ feasts, the feasts of our Lord. These are there to keep us focussed on Him and His salvation for us.

Christianity is not about ideology, ideals, or ideas.

It is about God becoming man so that man might become God.

Have a blessed Holy Week.

The Comprehensiveness of the BCP

I am currently undergoing training to officially become a lay reader. The other night, our training consisted of learning/talking about the two main service books of the Anglican Church of Canada, The Book of Common Prayer (1962), and The Book of Alternative Services.

While my priest was discussing the BCP, the idea came to me that the BCP is thorough and comprehensive, showing us what to do, in large part because of its early modern, Reformational origin. I’m the sort of guy who likes to emphasise the continuity of the BCP with the past — from Hippolytus to the Use of Sarum and laterally to Luther’s Mass — but I realised that some of what I like about it arises in part (but not in whole) from its emergence as the first English liturgy at a time of great religious upheaval.

Consider the task before Cranmer. The Prayer Book is not simply a rendering into English of the Use of Sarum. It is, to a large extent. But there are also some shifts — some new prayers here and there, some old prayers cut, greater Scripture reading in the daily office, some rephrasing and rewording in traditional collects, and so forth.

These shifts and changes are sometimes doubtless targeting the Roman Church of the sixteenth century, at least in terms of how people worshipped and believed if not the formal teaching of said church. But the fact that the absolution, for example, comes with an explanation of how this is something Christ commanded, clearly signals that the uneducated or those infected with enthousiasmos are also targeted. That is, the Prayer Book doesn’t just correct late medieval/Renaissance errors, it seeks to instruct the whole People of God.

This makes sense, for the people of God will be hearing the liturgy in a language such as they understandeth for the first time in centuries (in English, the first time ever for those not learned in Latin). The Prayer Book, then, is on the leading edge of instructing the people in the faith alongside things like The Book of Homilies (regardless of how one feels about the latter). The Prayer Book is a manifestation of lex orandi, lex credendi — the law of prayer is the law of belief.

Therefore, the people of God are taught wonderful things as they go to church week in and week out, or even day in and day out:

• Humans “are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under [God’s] table”
• But it is a divine “property … always to have mercy”
• Humans have committed “manifold sins and wickness”
• But God has “manifold and great mercies”
• Indeed, God “of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption; who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world”
• As a result, “by the merits and death of thy Son Jesus Christ, and through faith in his blood, … all [God’s] whole Church may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion”

Alongside these truths, one could go through the Collects of Thomas Cranmer and put together the attributes of God as well as a rich theological anthropology.

And at Eucharist on Sundays and Black Letter Days, they will hear the drama of Scripture year after year. Such as go to Morning and Evening Prayer will encounter the entire Book of Psalms every month and the entire Bible every year. Suddenly, from being banned in England, the English Bible becomes the most precious thing this world affords.

It is truly a wonderful book, teaching the theology of the catholic faith to the people of England through the life of prayer, assembled together, that it may get into their lifeblood and thus become truly common.

And it is meditations such as this that have led me to turn back to the ancient liturgies and now to offer a course on them. Sign up while you still can!

Christian Spirituality Podcast

Image from Santa Pudenziana, 4th c., Rome (my photo)

As I seek to get back into the rhythm of at least weekly blogging, I’d thought I’d let you know about yet another place you can find me here on the Internet (besides YouTube, Twitter, Instagram [@mjjhoskin], and the podcast Devotion to Christ: Anglican Spirituality, a Tradition for Today which I co-host with my brother). I decided to launch a solo podcast! It’s called Christian Spirituality: Chapters in the History of the Faith. You can find it on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and wherever podcasts pop up.

I wanted to do a podcast that would lean into my skills as a church historian. I also wanted a focus for my YouTube channel. While thinking on these things, I realised that having some sort of specific angle of approach would help me focus which topics to choose. Why not the spiritual life?

I realise “spirituality” is the topic of my other podcast, which approaches its topic from the angle of the Anglican tradition. This is different, though. On this podcast, I am moving mostly chronologically from the apostles onwards and discussing different sources, moments, events, practices, movements, figures, aspects of church life, etc., specifically from the perspective of the spiritual life.

One hope is simply to illuminate the history of the church regardless of how I or the viewers may feel about any specific aspect. Knowing the history is in and of itself, if you ask me.

Another hope is that meditating on any of these topics may bring life and light into the spiritual life of my listeners. This is not detached, purely professional history, folks. Sorry. I’m hoping to use history to make you love Jesus more.

Seems like the best use one can make of the past, quite frankly.

Episodes so far: “What is spirituality?”, “The Apostolic Age”, “The Apostolic Fathers”, “Martyrdom: The Spirituality of Death, Part One”, and “Martyrdom: The Spirituality of Death, Part Two”. Part One of the Martyrdom chapter focusses on St Ignatius of Antioch and Part Two reviews things through the lens of St Augustine’s sermons on the martyrs.

Listen, like, and subscribe, my friends! Let others know, too!

Why Augustine?

Not only am I back to blogging (hopefully at least once a week), I’m back on YouTube! Tonight’s video is an exploration of why you should spend time with St Augustine of Hippo, looking quite a bit at City of God and also plugging my upcoming Davenant Hall course “Augustine the Preacher”. Check it out!

So, what’s Sunday morning for, anyway?

Worship at Notre Dame de Paris

In the inevitable dust-up over whether to cancel church on Christmas or not, some strange and interesting things have been said that should make all of us back up a little and say, “So, what’s Sunday morning for, anyway?”

There was this one Twitter thread (that I won’t make you endure) that said some very revealing things about how we imagine the gathering of the ekklesia and how we imagine worship. It was by a pastor of a church that will not be gathering itself together on Christmas morning. The primary reason: Getting everybody together in one building at the same time isn’t the only way to worship God.

We grant that. Of course.

But not all worship is the same sort of thing. This church cancels Sunday services multiple times a year to remind people that this is not the only way to worship. Instead, they could have a barbecue. Or help out the poor in some way. And so forth. There was an equivocation between the praise and worship of the assembled people of God and every act in our lives being done to the glory of God.

This pattern of thought is troubling because if assembling the saints for worship is the same as any other Christian action, why even go on Sunday? Many people with small children find the Sunday morning experience less than pleasant. Out the door on time. Back for lunch/naps. Recover over the afternoon. But if brunch can be worship — hey, presto! Stay home!

But I think everyone knows that what we do on a Sunday morning is, by definition, not the same as other acts of worship (unless they’re the same thing as we do Sunday but on a different day of the week). What do we do on Sunday morning? According to the Book of Common Prayer, “we assemble and meet together”:

• to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at his hands,
• to set forth his most worthy praise,
• to hear his most holy Word, and
• to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul.

And, since this is from the preamble to the penitential rite in Morning and Evening Prayer, we also assemble to confess our sins.

First off, then: What we are doing on Sunday morning is objectively different from a barbecue, building houses for the poor, working at a soup kitchen — different even from other explicitly “religious” things, such as a Bible study or theology lecture.

For me, it’s the communal thanks and praise that really shift Sunday away from other things. Worship, adoration, latreia — if we wanna get all historical here, adoratio and latreia imply something specifically, consciously worshipful. Adoratio can sometimes also cover the same ground as proskynesis — getting down on the ground like a dog before the emperor or the Shahanshah (Persian King of Kings). Late Romans even had a special ceremony called adoratio purpurae wherein you got to touch the purple hem of the emperor’s robe.

Your heart can sing as you raise a roof. You can do it to the glory of God. And you can even do it, in a certain sense, as a more pure act of worship than what may be being offered up in your local megachurch discotheque — I mean, Sunday service — or cathedral concert — I mean, choral evensong. But it’s still not. the. same. thing. Literally a different human act from having the Lord open your lips that your mouth may show forth His praise.

And I think that everyone knows this. Opening presents on Christmas morning, when done to the glory of God, still isn’t the same, even if you whisper, “O God, make speed to save me,” when your kid is given more Hotwheels. And, “O Lord, make haste to help me,” as you gaze upon a gift you hate.

If you aren’t at church on Christmas morning, your time of family worship, with Scripture and some carols and prayers, maybe an Advent wreath, is similar to what goes on at church and may even include all the elements listed in the BCP. But it still isn’t the same. Why? The assembly of the saints.

Second, then: The BCP kicks off its list of churchy purpose with “we assemble and meet together.” I’m all for the validity of Lollardy — I mean, private devotion among friends, family, neighbours, without priestly supervision. I think singing hymns and carols around the family piano is even a species of the same thing that goes on at the Lord’s house when we all assemble together.

But do you see what I did there? We all assemble together. It’s good, but it’s still a different thing. When we assemble and meet together at the kyriakon, at the “church”, it is a theological act — it may even be the constitutive act of the church-as-people. I mean, ekklesia means assembly, after all. The entire community is invited and encouraged and exhorted. Some denominations require attendance at this assembly as part of their discipline, even.

And so we assemble and meet together, and those things that we do while there are all consciously Godward — praise, thanksgiving, the scriptures, supplication, repentance (which is a joyful turning from sin towards God who heals us [bad paraphrase of Met. Kallistos Ware {memory eternal!}]).

We are constituted as the body of Christ by being together. And while we are together, we fulfil our telos, which is to glorify God and enjoy him forever (right now being part of forever).

Anything else we do — no matter how worshipful — is literally a different thing.

This is not to bind consciences about Christmas morning. But it is meant as a reminder about why we gather on Sundays in the first place.

My most recent YouTube video: Syriac!

In my most recent upload to YouTube, I give a wee, rough introduction to Syriac. Enjoy!

Books I talk about:

Ancient

Hymns on Paradise by St Ephrem the Syrian, trans. Sebastian Brock

The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, trans. Sebastian Brock

Modern

Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom

Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian

Anglican Tradition and the Bible

The other night I listened to Alastair Roberts read Homily 1, “A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading of Holy Scripture” from the 16th-century Anglican Book of Homilies (Book 1 first published 1542). I had lots of thoughts, most of which have escaped me, but here are two:

First, go and read the Bible. If you’re feeling a bit like you aren’t into it or haven’t read it for a while or anything like, go listen to Alastair read the homily. It’s only 18 minutes long, and it will fruitfully exhort you to read the Bible.

Second, one of the thoughts I had was how this reinforces ideas about Anglican worship and spirituality that I’ve heard people say and observed from inference. In particular, this homily reinforces the Reformation-era Anglican idea that the words of Holy Scripture are themselves powerful.

Reading the Bible or listening to someone read the Bible is good for you.

Sometimes you meet people (or read them on Twitter, I guess) who seem to think that a church loves the Bible because congregants spend a lot of time listening to a person talk about the Bible. I’m not saying those people don’t love the Bible. Nor am I saying that Anglicans love the Bible more.

However, Homily 1 represents a robust trust in the power of sacred Scripture to transform hearts and minds, to make us holier, to make us more Christ-like. In the Bible we encounter God, and God can transform us.

This trust is reflected liturgically in the Anglican tradition’s historic cycle of services. Historically, the Anglican liturgical tradition on a Sunday would have included Morning Prayer, followed immediately by Communion (or Antecommunion), and then Evening Prayer in the evening (naturally enough), coupled with a requirement for clergy and encouragement for laity to pray Morning and Evening Prayer every day, and for the lay folk to join their local cleric in the church if possible.

This centrality of Morning and Evening Prayer to Anglican worship is well worth noting, because these services differ most from their medieval Sarum precursors precisely in the question of Scripture. If you grab a Roman Breviary or Benedictine Breviary, you will find that the passages of Scripture selected for the daily office are … brief, in large part because of how complicated the Roman church’s daily office is, partly also because, for monks, at least, there is an expectation that you will read the Bible at some other part of the day. I would also hasten to add that medieval liturgy has all sorts of Scripture in use in different parts of the various services and offices; when you simplify your liturgy and reduce the number of offices, this needs rebalancing — as the BCP does.

In the BCP, on the other hand, the passages for Morning and Evening Prayer are quite substantial. If you follow the Prayer Book lectionary for daily prayer, you will read the entire Old Testament every year, the New Testament twice a year, and the Psalms every month. That’s a lot of sacred Scripture!

And if you look at the rubrics, there is no expectation that there will be preaching at any service outside Holy Communion. What matters are the words of Scripture themselves. Yes, Anglicans believe in preaching the Word (the Homily discusses that as well). But we also believe in the naked power of the raw Word of God, bringing us into contact with the God Word Himself Who lies behind the word written.

This sturdy belief in the power of the Bible is implicit in the Prayer Book, and explicit in Homily 1.

More of us should read or listen to these.

The Desert Fathers and Anglican Devotion

Launcelot Andrews (1555-1626)

It’s pretty easy to make an argument for any Protestant to read the Church Fathers at large. Do you believe in the Trinity? Recite the Nicene Creed? Well, then, read St Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, St Augustine. Do you believe that Jesus is fully God and fully man? Well, then, read Sts Cyril of Alexandria, Leo the Great, and Maximus the Confessor. Grappling with the question of religious images? Read St John of Damascus. Are you pondering why God became man? Well, then, read St Irenaeus of Lyons. Want to read the Bible better? Read St Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana.

From the perspective of Anglican devotion, St Augustine’s theology of grace gives us good insights into the theology of the Prayer Book collects. Sts Hippolytus and John Chrysostom show us something about the history of our Eucharistic liturgy — as well as the “Prayer of St Chrysostom”. At the heart of the Anglican daily office lies the Psalter: Here, Sts Athanasius and Augustine are a great help.

Spending time with these Fathers will only help us do a better job of being Anglican, Protestant, whatever.

But what about the Desert Fathers? What do we gain from celibate men and women who cut themselves off from normal society, were consciously sleep deprived, ate only once a day, and were professional pray-ers? What can ancient monks do for the devotional lives of Anglicans? And lay Anglicans, at that?

This question is particularly strong for people of my generation who grew up in Anglican churches, at least in Canada, that had a strong Sunday liturgical tradition of Holy Communion and even hymns, but whose devotional world, Monday-Saturday, was the same as that of the Baptist down the road. A lot of room to be truly healthy and holy, but not a lot that was specifically Anglican. At a certain level, hey-ho, that’s fine! Holiness is the goal, not Anglicanness.

But if a standard, evangelical “quiet time”, maybe with some charismatic elements tossed in, is what your devotional life is used to, then the Desert Fathers can be quite foreign, I can assure you.

They can also be quite reassuring and challenging in a good way, though. When I was an undergrad, like a lot of young people, I briefly flirted with the idea of not being purposely and consciously Anglican. And yet whenever I came up against something with which I disagreed, whether from Roman Catholics or evangelicals, I found myself simply Anglican. So I read the 39 Articles again and decided that, regardless of what it meant for other Christians to be Pentecostals, Ukrainian Orthodox, Baptists, or Free Methodists, I was, quite honestly, Anglican. It was silly to pretend otherwise.

Thus, one Lent I chose for my devotional exercise the praying of one office from the BCP (1962) every day. This ended up being Compline, and this time also ended up being my time of “conversion” (if you will) to the Prayer Book. Anyway, that was the same year I met the Desert Fathers and fell in love with their wacky monomaniacal devotion to the Triune God.

This compline-desert confluence is where the Desert Fathers help out the Anglican. The daily office, especially Morning and Evening Prayer, is fairly central to the Anglican devotional tradition. At the heart of the office, alongside the set canticles common to each day, are a monthly rotation through the Book of Psalms and a yearly cycle through the Bible.

Reading the Desert Fathers and learning about their rule of prayer is actually, at base, a simply encouragement for an evangelical Anglican who wants to discover the divine office, for here you will meet the antiquity of your own devotional practices. Not in a “Ha ha, Alliance Church!” sort of way, but in a reassuring way, that this is part of our own heritage and bigger than any single Christian tradition.

At the heart of the devotional life and prayer of the Desert and the tradition that flows from it, whether Benedictines and Cistercians in the West or Mount Athos and St Catherine’s, Sinai, in the East, is the Psalter, coupled with trying to live the words of Scripture. I’ll share some of the Desert Fathers’ wisdom on psalmody later, but their approach to the Psalms can really help transform the impact Psalmody has on the praying of the divine office.

I confess to not having read all of Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living, but it strikes me that one central aspect of his book is intentionality in what we do, as well as not attempting to seem holier than we really are. A large quantity of desert literature deals in this question of intention, using the term “watchfulness” (check most of Philokalia, Vol. 1). Watch your thoughts, watch the reasons you choose to do things, watch your feelings, watch your thoughts, watch your actions, watch your feelings, watch your thoughts. Seek purity of heart. Clear the mind of all but Christ.

And if you do decide to get down with the Anglican divines, you’ll discover that ascetic practices (fasting, regulating sleep, etc) are there in William Law and Jeremy Taylor, and the spiritual sense of Scripture peaks through Lancelot Andrewes. The Desert is not so far, after all.

Who are the Desert Fathers? Why study them with me?

To promote my upcoming course on the Desert Fathers, I put together this little video: