Not all Baptists

I feel like the title of this blog post should be a hashtag: #Notallbaptists. I’m inspired to quickly jot down a blog post praising my brothers and sisters in the Lord who are Baptists AND who don’t reject traditional Trinitarian theology and doctrine of God. I say this because my last post was of a YouTube video I made in response to the Baptist Trinitarian controversy that seems to still be ongoing. And not long before that, I was discussing kerfuffles about Aquinas, often perpetrated by the same people. I suspect and pray that the perpetrators are outliers.

I want to write this in honour of the many Baptists I’ve been friends with over the years, mainly from high school onwards, people who love Jesus and their church, family, friends, and world, seeking to be loving persons committed to our Lord who want to see others find Him and His salvation. People committed to seeking God where he may be found, especially in Scripture. And, to my knowledge, nary a heretic in sight, from what I can recall.

Of course, this is going on in the ranks of Baptist seminary profs, so we need to look beyond the ordinary Baptist in the pew these particular Baptists in academia, whose fellowship I have enjoyed.

A close friend in PhD days always comes to mind in the midst of these kerfuffles. Here was a man committed to Reformational doctrine — sola scriptura, sola fide, you know, that sort of thing. And, being a Baptist, he wasn’t simply a credobaptist, but he could tell you why in terms of the history and structure and ecclesiology of Baptist churchmanship, looking beyond a few easy proof text verses deployed in online debates to what makes his view on Baptism actually … Baptist (unlike mine, being Anglican).

Anyway, this same guy arrived thinking to work on the Apostolic Fathers, eventually settled on Biblical Studies, but never turned his back on patristics. He loves Augustine. Went eagerly to a City of God reading group organised by Oliver O’Donovan. Said things like, “Augustine makes my heart sing.” Also, a big fan of St Thomas Aquinas. And he knew Latin, so he’d sit down with the Vulgate every once in a while.

Not your Twitter stereotype, is he? (Not on Twitter, either.) He now brings his grace and wisdom to a church in the Southern USA, and I hope great things continue to happen for him.

More recently, I’ve been building an army of friends, a network developing initially through the Davenant Institute and #WeirdAnglicanTwitter. Amongst this growing army of friends are two excellent Baptist scholars, fellow Canadians — Fellowship Baptists, in fact, as were some very close friends in high school. So that’s a comfort. Anyway, I’ll name names since they’re on Twitter and Doing Various Good Things, not just academically but for Christ and His Church (which is what Christian academics ought to be doing), and these men are Ian Clary and Wyatt Graham.

They have a podcast that you should listen to, called “Into Theology”. They are on the cusp of finishing off reading through St Augustine’s Confessions together. So right away — #Notallbaptists. Augustine FTW.

Ian teaches at Colorado Christian University. He’s done a bunch of research into Baptist history, which is great. I like to see Baptists being Baptists and Anglicans being Anglicans. But I also like us being brothers in Christ. So, another thing you’ll learn by spending time on his Twitter feed is the fact that he prays the daily office from the Book of Common Prayer, and sometimes he posts prayers from it on Twitter. Which is just great and warms my Anglican heart. Besides Baptist stuff and the BCP, you’ll see some Bavinck, some Aquinas, the new Coleridge statue, and various other things. As I say, #Notallbaptists.

Wyatt teaches at Heritage Seminary, Redeemer University, and Ryle Seminary. He’s the president of The Gospel Coalition Canada and the ON/QC chapter of the Evangelical Theological Society. He also uses St Gregory of Nyssa and St Athanasius to teach the Psalms. And he live-tweeted his way through St Bernard’s On Grace and Free Will. Like a lot of Reformed guys, tweets Bavinck — he’s reading James Jordan right now, too, though. As I say, #Notallbaptists.

A third member of my growing army of friends is Tim Jacobs, an Aquinas guy. But I’ll just pause here. You get the idea.

The second reason I’m writing this post is that I find these men encouraging because it felt like, for a while, the only evangelicals I know about who were into the Fathers and the medieval divines were fellow Anglicans, or American Methodists, except, like, DH Williams. And now I also know the work of Gavin Ortlund. This is great — if there is to be retrieval of the riches of ancient and medieval theology to benefit the whole church, it needs people working on it beyond the Anglicans, however great my predecessors’ achievements may be (consider the work of Henry Chadwick, Oliver O’Donovan, JND Kelly, Rowan Williams, Alistair Stewart, Tim Vivian, Christopher A Hall, and others if you’re interested in Anglicans and patristics).

So I’m thankful for the blessing these Baptist brothers are to me and to Christ’s church.

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Reformed catholic? (Part one)

I think I might be Reformed?

The labels we give ourselves are not always that important — what matters in, say, a religious/spiritual “label” is that a person is seeking to know and live according to the truth. Sometimes getting the words just right can be a bit of an unhealthy obsession, though — either because you are trying to overdefine yourself, or because you are trying to watch out for every possible misinterpretation someone else could have. Beyond religion (or, rather, in the false religions of fandom):

“Not a mere Trekkie — a Trekker.” This, when I liked Star Wars more than Star Trek, led to, “What do you call a Star Wars fan?”

Anyway, why might I cautiously say I might be Reformed? What do I mean by this? Why the hesitation? Why do I couple Reformed with catholic? Am I a Calvinist papist?

For most of my life, like so many in the pre-schismatic Anglican church, I was happily and proudly Anglican, embracing the 39 Articles and BCP (and Solemn Declaration of 1893) as doctrinal norms, but fighting with the article about predestination. So, by no means a Calvinist. In fact, the common view for many of us in the Anglican Church of Canada, at least, whether liberal, conservative, evangelical, charismatic, was that we are our own thing, our own branch of Protestantism, growing in our own crooked path beside Lutherans and the Reformed, but perhaps twisting our path on some patterns clser to Rome than either, especially the Reformed.

As a teenager, the whole “Calvinism” vs “Arminianism” debate was a Thing. I remember a friend’s dad — a Baptist fellow and big fan of John Piper — asking me whether the Anglican Church was Calvinist or Arminian. And I happily said neither. I mean, when pressed, the 39 Articles skew closer to Dordt than to Arminius, but to slap the word “Calvinist” on a doctrinal standard that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the Augustinianism of the western church — well, that seems misguided. Not that my answer at age 17 was anything like that!

But I recall asking an Anglican ordinand about this sort of thing, and he said he preferred calling himself Reformed to Calvinist. The Reformed tradition is bigger than John Calvin and is not simply his church, although he is one of its early founders. This makes sense.

But when I was asking that ordinand about such things, I was also meeting a variety of people within Anglican circles (we’re still pre-schism here, folks) who were probably New Calvinists, some of whom read more Presbyterians than Anglicans, who said things like, “Luther started the Reformation, and Calvin ended it,” who were laying claim to Anglicanism for themselves in a way that seemed to say to me, “Any vision of Anglican theology that is not New Calvinist is not real Anglicanism.”

I wasn’t interested.

As we entered the age of social media, I had my chance to play with my religious descriptors. “East-leaning, Franciscan Anglican” was one that I recall using on Facebook. I knew “Anglican” would never be enough. Anglican could mean almost anything doctrinally. And after some of the liturgical free-for-alls I’ve met, it may sometimes mean nothing liturgically, to boot!

But then I spent six/seven years in Edinburgh (9 months of this time I was going back and forth between Edinburgh and Rome). My regular Sunday church of which I eventually became a member was the Free Church of Scotland, a Reformed denomination if ever there was one. Reformed and evangelical. And, when we started, super-old school with naught but a cappella Psalms. I also frequently attended Greek Orthodox Vespers and had the local Orthodox priest as a spiritual mentor.

By the time we went to England in 2017, I was still not Reformed, but I was no longer allergic to them.

However, the church we attended with greatest frequency in Durham led to some problems in terms of self-identification. People said some crazy stuff up at the front, such as how grace does not make us holy, it only justifies us (in a narrow, forensic sense), and we stay otherwise the same. That was whack. At the same time, I was reading a lot of mediaeval canon law and Eastern Orthodox stuff, not to mention a deep dive into St Benedict. Was I even Protestant anymore? A friend of mine wondered if these labels were that helpful these days, and to help guide me pastorally, gave me his edition and translation of Alexander de Hales’ commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, specifically the sections on grace. Well, Alexander helped with the question of grace, but not the question of Protestantism!

And my brother unhelpfully said that I sounded like a catholic Anglican. That’s probably still my go-to.

Fast forward, please, to my year of unemployment, 2019-2020. During this year, I sent out tendrils everywhere seeking academic work. One place was Davenant Hall — Brad Littlejohn, the President of the Davenant Institute, did his PhD at Edinburgh a few years ahead of me, so I knew him from the time we overlapped. I was also nudged by a friend to consider doing a Cascade Companion on my favourite monastic author; these two things dovetailed in reading Brad’s Cascade Companion to Richard Hooker, Richard Hooker: A Companion to His Life and Work.

Brad Littlejohn’s work on Richard Hooker opened my eyes to what my ordinand friend had said so many years previously, about the bigness of the Reformed tradition. It also helpfully laid to rest some notions about early Anglicanism and Richard Hooker you’ve probably heard, most notably that he consciously pursued a “middle way” (via media) between Roman Catholicism and the Reformed. In fact, Richard Hooker was very much part of a large, Reformed world on both sides of the Channel. In essence, Hooker believes that those “Catholic” of Anglicanism as simply part of healthy, Reformed Christianity. I’ve no doubt misrepresented both Brad and Hooker; read the book for yourself.

Well, that made me more comfortable with the idea of being Reformed and Anglican — I didn’t have to become a New Calvinist or move to Sydney or agree with the style of preaching at St Helen’s Bishopsgate in London. *whew*

In January 2021, I started teaching for Davenant Hall, and engaging with a lot of the wonderful people associated with the Davenant Institute. My first course was “The Theological World of the Nicene Controversy”, and my second was “Augustine: The Major Works.” And now, although I’d read huge quantities of Augustine before, I read Augustine on predestination at great length for the first time (I’d read On Grace and Free Will ages ago [2006?], actually), and I really couldn’t see a way around Augustinian predestinarianism. I’d rather it were otherwise, for I have a soft spot for St John Cassian, and ever will. I will always take note of what Cassian is attempting to do in Conference 13 and why that pursuit of balance between divine sovereignty and human responsibility is important. But I simply think that Augustine is right. [Enter trolls in the comments, I assume?]

And so, over the past year, as a guy who thinks he believes in predestination, I’ve been interacting with these really great people, a lot of whom are Reformed, and I’ve even read some Bavinck, and then also, at a quicker pace, James K A Smith’s Letters to a Young Calvinist, and I’ve been seeing the breadth and diversity of the Reformed tradition, how these great thinkers old and new engage with the patristic and medieval heritage in a thoughtful way, seeking retrieval where possible, but always letting Scripture win while also pressing our forebears in the faith in terms of logic and reason.

And so I’ve learned about people like Franciscus Junius and Peter Martyr Vermigli and their relationship with Scholasticism, besides seeing living Reformed thinkers engaging with Thomas Aquinas and Maximus the Confessor and Hilary of Poitiers and all the rest — all of this in a time when I’ve also been revising my book about medieval manuscripts of a patristic pope, teaching the Fathers, teaching the medieval church, and maintaining my usual round of Orthodox thinkers.

And one of the terms I’ve seen a few times is Reformed catholic. And I’m starting to like it.

“to glorify God and enjoy him forever”

One of my favourite things to come out of Reformed Christianity (right up there with Scottish a cappella Psalm-singing) is the first question of the Shorter Westminster Catechism:

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

For some reason, the Lutheran artist FLAME seems to think that this statement has something to do with affections, as in his song “Used to Think” on the album Extra Nos:

They say that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever (That’s cool)
You know what that sound like to me on a practical level is coming to together (Bridge)
Serving your neighbor, enjoying creation
To me Luther said it better (He did)
Instead of focused on affections
No diss to Jonathan Edwards
If our faith justifies us
And God saved and baptized us
We set our gaze outside of us
Extra nos, but

Now, my expertise is neither Lutheranism nor Reformed Christianity. I am an Anglican who spends a lot of time reading ancient and medieval stuff. And Malcolm Guite.

Nonetheless, this is, in fact, extra nos, outside of us, which is FLAME’s big thing in the album Extra Nos. As FLAME puts it, “If our faith justifies us / And God saved and baptized us / We set our gaze outside of us.” First, the Westminster divines did their seventeenth-century duty and piled up Bible verse upon Bible verse for both “glorify God” and “enjoy him forever”; whether you think they used Scripture wisely, I’ll leave up to you. You can read the whole catechism here.

Clearly, though, it’s the use of “enjoy him forever” that is troubling to FLAME.

This is too bad, because the dude has a Master’s in theology, and he seems pretty down on a whole lot of stuff. So I would have thought that St Augustine of Hippo’s De Doctrina Christiana would be under his belt. In St Augustine’s scheme of how the universe and the human heart operate, there are res (“things”, if you will) that we use (utor) and res that we enjoy (fruor). Ultimately, every res that is not God exists to be used, and the purpose of its use is for us to enjoy God.

God is the only res we are meant to enjoy in the Augustinian understanding of enjoyment.

The enjoyment of God and God alone, in fact, sets our gaze outside of ourselves automatically. It drives us from merely enjoying a sunrise to enjoying God through a sunrise. It drives us from merely enjoying ice cream to enjoying the God who gave us taste buds. We do not simply enjoy music, we enjoy God through the music. And St Augustine, from comments in Confessions, seems to have been a music fan who struggled with this.

The point of the Augustinian concept of enjoyment is not seeking some sort of emotional or affective experience. It is about seeking him of whom St Augustine says, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” It is not about, “Am I enjoying God? What can I do to enjoy God more?” It is about realising that God is the only proper res for us to enjoy.

So that’s just one point.

Another point is FLAME’s highly significant choice of words here: “We set our gaze outside of us.” In the Christian-Platonist framework of Augustinian theology, the final end of man, the telos of the human race, is the beatific vision of God Himself. We gaze outside ourselves upon the glory of God (sometimes now in a foretaste, but most likely not until the eschaton).

According to ancient physics (Platonic, Epicurean, and others), when we gaze upon something, we actually make contact with it. This is why, as explained by Father Andrew Louth in an excellent article called “Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium,” so many late antique liturgical objects are silver — the shining light hits the eye in a particularly powerful way, drawing your gaze to the liturgy and thus to God. (I recommend St Maximus the Confessor if you’re interested in Byzantine conceptualisations of how we meet God in the liturgy.)

And so, when we set our gaze outside ourselves and on God, instead, this is driving towards the Beatific Vision, something we’ll never fully encounter this side of glory according to St Augustine. But this vision is not a static thing the way we think of vision today. It is immersive and an encounter. A crude analogy is that the vision of God is more like when I saw Dune on the weekend in an AVX cinema than it is like when I looked at a portrait of Henry VIII in Rome. I was drawn into Arrakis through sight, sound, and touch, as my chair itself rumbled with the story on-screen.

This gazing outside ourselves which itself is a means of entering into intimate communion of God is, I would argue, precisely what St Augustine means when he talks about us enjoying God. If you are truly, truly enjoying something, you are not thinking about the affective experience. The experience has swallowed you up.

Setting aside the question of proper and improper enjoyment, I know I have had moments of sitting at, say, a choral eucharist or other musical event where I was completely lost to myself. It was sublime in the truest sense of the word. That, only more so, is what Augustine means. And it can only be found extra nos. Outside ourselves.

I say this not as some sort of anti-FLAME or anti-Lutheran or pro-Reformed statement. I say it because most of us Latins, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, are hopelessly Augustinian. Deeply, deeply Augustinian. Indeed, I joke sometimes how remarkable it is that when Martin Luther rejected the tradition and went back to read the Scriptures for themselves, his interpretation was astonishingly like St Augustine of Hippo’s.

I say this because this statement from the Westminster Shorter Catechism, from my limited vantage point as an Anglican scholar of late antiquity, has a lot of St Augustine lurking behind it, and I think it’s precisely the sort of thing a Lutheran should support.

Introducing Late Antiquity on YouTube

My latest YouTube video is a response to someone recently stating that the Later Roman Empire was a decaying civilization into which no one bought. I disagree. So I started a foray into Late Antique history which may last several videos (if not the rest of my life!). It’s not yet strictly ecclesiastical history/the history of Christianity, but the series of videos will get there.

If you find yourself interested in more Late Antiquity and simply cannot wait, I have written a series of posts under the heading “Discover Late Antiquity” over at my other blog.

Watch “King Arthur, Symbol, and the Christian Embrace of Narrative Fiction” on YouTube

My latest offering on YouTube is about Arthurian literature and how it represents an embrace of narrative fiction by Christians, with a discussion of symbol and a sacramental worldview that includes a digression about The Lord of the Rings.

Watch my latest video, “Maybe there is a literal meaning” on YouTube!

In this video, I try to nuance the concept of the “literal” meaning of Scripture in response to Jonathan Pageau. I bring Augustine’s theory of signs and things as well as Maximus the Confessor on the Bible, closing with my own literal-symbolic reading of the Ascension narrative from Acts 1.

God is not a thing — but is he a res?

St Augustine, by Philippe de Champaigne.

A few weeks ago I had the delightful opportunity of teaching my excellent group of students at Davenant Hall De Doctrina Christiana by St Augustine, or On Christian Teaching. In De Doctrina, St Augustine deals with the important question of language (for how can we read and interpret Scripture without thinking about what it actually is?). His basic approach to language is that it is part of the wider universe of signs, or signa, all of which point to things, or res. Some signa are natural, like smoke being the signum for the res that is a fire. Others are human conventions, such as language. All signa are res, but not all res are signa. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Language is made up of oral signa that disappear as soon as they come into existence. To represent these oral signa, we have invented writing, itself a further system of signa that represent the res that are the signa of spoken words.

Augustine then goes into a discussion of how all res can either be enjoyed (frui) or used (uti). Ultimately, in Augustine’s view, God is the only res that we are to enjoy. All other res exist for the purpose of being used to help us enjoy God more. At a certain level, all res may even be seen as signa that point us to God, depending on how you look at it.

And the ultimate signum that shows us the way to God is the incarnate God Himself, the perfect signum for the res that God is.

But wait —

Is God a thing?

One of my students expressed his surprise at Augustine having included God amongst the res. This student even has a copy of a book called God Is No Thing, after all. As people who think that Thomas Aquinas is the height of theological awesomeness like to point out, God is not even a being. God is being itself (FYI: St Augustine agrees, see De Trin 5) — ipsum esse.

Not being deep into scholasticism, I won’t judge the accuracy of that.

God is not a thing inasmuch as God is not a being among beings. God is not an object among objects. God, then, is not a thing among things.

However, for St Augustine’s argument about signa and how they work, God is a res — he is the signified of a signifier. Or is the signified of a signifier actually our own false mental image of God, and Godinhimself is something more distant?

Augustine feels this, and we’ll leave this post here confronting the vast mystery of the divine:

Have I spoken of God, or uttered His praise, in any worthy way?  Nay, I feel that I have done nothing more than desire to speak; and if I have said anything, it is not what I desired to say.  How do I know this, except from the fact that God is unspeakable?  But what I have said, if it had been unspeakable, could not have been spoken.  And so God is not even to be called “unspeakable,” because to say even this is to speak of Him.  Thus there arises a curious contradiction of words, because if the unspeakable is what cannot be spoken of, it is not unspeakable if it can be called unspeakable.  And this opposition of words is rather to be avoided by silence than to be explained away by speech.  And yet God, although nothing worthy of His greatness can be said of Him, has condescended to accept the worship of men’s mouths, and has desired us through the medium of our own words to rejoice in His praise.  For on this principle it is that He is called Deus (God).  For the sound of those two syllables in itself conveys no true knowledge of His nature; but yet all who know the Latin tongue are led, when that sound reaches their ears, to think of a nature supreme in excellence and eternal in existence.

De Doctrina 1.6, NPNF2, vol. 2, p. 524

Reflections on John 15:9-17

Here are my reflections on yesterday’s Gospel reading, prepared for my worshipping community, Thunder Bay’s Urban Abbey.

This week, we have another encounter with that word abide – I translated it last week with the simple definition of remain. My old Greek prof from undergrad reviewed my reflection and the passage, and tossed out a few more of these simple translations, saying that this verb also has the sense of persisting and standing fast. Hold tight; don’t let go, that sort of thing. Allow me to break all the rules of defining words and translation practice and bundle all of these together. Here, then, is John 15:9:

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you;

abide in

persist in

stand fast in

remain in

hold tight to

don’t let go of

my love.

How are we to abide in Jesus’ love? He tells us in John 15:10 – keep his commandments. This doesn’t sound particularly … gushy? gooey? lovey? Indeed, it even sounds harsh to our ears, living in an age of democracy, of questioning everything, of failed authorities at every turn. Show our love to Jesus by keeping his commandments? The dictionary game won’t get us out this time – indeed, injunctions and orders sound almost worse. Let’s look at how Jesus considers our keeping of his commandments — If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

In English (and Greek), that’s a very straightforward future more vivid construction. It’s not saying anything about how much he loves us or about earning his love or whatever, but simply cause and effect. “If x, then y.” – “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” These two things are mutually feeding off each other. Christians are disciples of Jesus the Christ. We are his apprentices; he is our master. He has given us, through the apostles and apostolic writings, commands – “turn the other cheek”; “love your neighbour as yourself”; “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”; “give to everyone who asks”; “pray like this”.

If we consciously choose not to follow his commandments, not to do those things that please him or that we know he knows are best for us, to what extent can we be said to be abiding, persisting, standing fast, remaining in his love? When we are wilfully disobedient to the teachings of our master, are we really holding tight to his love? Or have we let it go?

Here, we can easily start lengthy moralising. I will save us from such (although all of us need to hear some moralising sometimes—and recall that Jesus’ commandments are not burdensome, as we read today in 1 John 5:3). I want to circle back to the love being discussed here, that love we are abiding in. Let’s put both verses 9 and 10 together:

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

First of all, in verse 9, Jesus compares his love for us to the love the Father has for him. And then, in verse 10, he inverts it and speaks of his keeping of the Father’s commandments and abiding in the Father’s love. God is love; that was in last week’s reading from 1 John 4:8, in fact. I have spent a significant portion of 2021 teaching the Trinitarian theology of the ancient church—names like Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine (you’ve met them in these reflections!). Absolutely foundational for us to understand the Trinity is the fact that God is love. Love requires three elements, according to St Augustine:

1. The lover.
2. The beloved.
3. The love that exists between the two.

If God is love, there has never been a time when he did not exist as Trinity—love requires a beloved. God the Father is eternally begetting the Son outside of time through the fullness of His love, and the love of the Father and the Son together is made perfect as the Holy Spirit in that timeless eternity proceeds from the Father. God, moreover, is perfect, spotless, sinless, stainless. He is unfailing in his love.

Jesus says that he loves us in the same way that God the Father loves him. A perfect, unfailing, spotless, unwavering, steadfast, superabundant, unfathomable love. And consider what he chose to do for us out of this love: he left his eternal throne in glorious perfection and endless beauty with the Father, took on flesh, was hungry, tired, sore, pooped, was spat upon, abandoned, slandered, beaten, stripped naked, hung upon a cross. And then God died. This is how much God the Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, love us!

This is Good News!

And the moral exhortation part of this reflection is simply this: Go and do likewise. Keep Jesus’ commandments out of love for him, as a means of abiding in his love. And how do we keep his commandments? Let’s just consider John 15:12-13:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

Let us love one another. To the death.

Prayer-Book Augustinianism

I had the blessed opportunity to attend a lecture by Sarah Coakley at the Vancouver School of Theology back in 2018 about Trinitarian theology and mysticism. During the Q & A, somehow liturgy comes up (amongst Anglicans, not very surprising), and Coakley said something that has lurked within me ever since — setting aside the BCP would be a great loss, in part because of the rich Augustinian theology of the collects.

This struck me this week in particular because the Prayer Book collect is this:

ALMIGHTY God, who through thine only begotten Son Jesus Christ hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life: We humbly beseech thee, that as by thy special grace thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Canadian BCP 1959/62

The opening to this prayer is taken from the Use of Sarum, with origins at least as early as the Gelasian Sacramentary (7th-c):

O God, by Your only-begotten Son you have overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life; grant us, we ask you, that we who celebrate the solemnities of our Lord’s resurrection, may by the renewing of Your Spirit arise from the death of the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

My modernised version for congregational use.

I have to confess that I prefer the medieval version, but perhaps I am too cautious of moralism.

I did not ask Professor Coakley to elaborate with examples, of course, but I wonder if this collect, or collects of this sort, are what she means by “Augustinian”. According to Barbee and Zahl, The Collects of Thomas Cranmer, the very opening of this prayer is anti-Pelagian, for the -ism associated with the name of Pelagius argues that we can by our own merit live good enough lives to reach heaven, thus rendering null and void the mystery of the cross.*

Cranmer then writes his own petition for the collect. In his version, we actually have an interesting little phrase that was excised in 1959/62, “as by thy special grace, preventing us, thou dost…” Preventing us in contemporary English sounds like God’s grace is stopping us from doing something. In fact, though, it is a thoroughly Augustinian concept that has been hijacked in modern theology — prevenient grace.

Prevenient grace in the context of 1549 when Thomas Cranmer wrote the prayer (thus eleven years before Arminius was even born) is the idea that the grace of God goes before us (pre-vent, go before, praevenio) and thereby empowers us to choose the good. The term has been adopted by Arminian side of the Arminian-Calvinist debate, it would seem, but here in Cranmer’s collect, it rides closer to Augustine and Luther than Jacobus Arminius.

How does it do so? Well, Cranmer is using the phrase “preventing us” to describe God’s “special grace” in its activity in our lives. And, by that preventing grace, God does “put in our minds good desires”. The question if the resistability or otherwise of God’s grace does not arise, but what we do see is that our good desires are a direct result of the action of God’s grace in our minds.

The petition proper is also itself of the school of Augustine — “so by thy continual help we may bring the same [ie. good desires] to good effect”.

I think that the phrase “preventing us” renders this prayer solidly with Augustine — but does it exclude other perspectives? No, it does not. The nineteenth-century Russian St Theophan the Recluse continually haunts my thoughts on grace and prayer:

It is most important to realize that prayer is always God-given: otherwise we may confuse the gift of grace with some achievement of our own.

In The Art of Prayer, ed. Igumen Chariton of Valamo, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, p. 98

This is not the only time he says something like this. He repeats it in similar words throughout the book. The fifth-century Greek writer, St Mark the Monk (who made it into the Philokalia) says similar things about grace. I think this is worth considering because when we think about “grace” and how we need God’s help to think and do good, we think we are being particularly Augustinian and/or Reformed. And this collect, I would argue, is certainly part of that tradition, expressing these ideas in an Augustinian fashion, so Professor Coakley is assuredly correct in this characterisation.

Yet the wider tradition also sees a necessity for grace in our lives. And I think Prof. Coakley would emphatically agree, particularly that we have a tendency to drive a wedge between “East” and “West” that does not really exist when we look at the deeper agreements of our theological traditions.

*I have not read Pelagius, Caelestius, or Julian of Aeclanum myself, so I set aside judgement as to whether this is a fair statement of what they believe, simply noting that it is what the -ism associated with Pelagius is understood to be.

St Augustine on the Scriptures

I turned to Augustine, Ep. 137 to Volusianus for Christology, and found this first:

For such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures, that even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else from early boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and talents greater than I have, I would be still daily making progress in discovering their treasures; not that there is so great difficulty in coming through them to know the things necessary to salvation, but when any one has accepted these truths with the faith that is indispensable as the foundation of a life of piety and uprightness, so many things which are veiled under manifold shadows of mystery remain to be inquired into by those who are advancing in the study, and so great is the depth of wisdom not only in the words in which these have been expressed, but also in the things themselves, that the experience of the oldest, the ablest, and the most zealous students of Scripture illustrates what Scripture itself has said: “When a man hath done, then he beginneth.” (Ecclus. 18:6)

If I live long enough, I think somewhere in the list of books I want to write is one on the doctrine of Scripture according to the Fathers.