Ordinary Time

Just worrying away at the Common Worship calendar and lectionary. By my calculation, about half the year, something like 27 Sundays fall in Ordinary Time (5 Sundays from the day following Candelmas / The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (2nd Feb) to the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday and 22 Sundays from the Monday following the Day of Pentecost to Advent).

William Tyndale

The Common Worship collect for the Lesser Festival of William Tyndale, translator of the Scriptures, Reformation Martyr, 1536.

Lord, give to your people grace to hear and keep your word
that, after the example of your servant William Tyndale,
we may not only profess your gospel
but also be ready to suffer and die for it,
to the honour of your name;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

CW Daily Prayer, p505

Happy Trinity Sunday!

In a post prompted by Mr Daniel Newman on the Facebook, a very happy Trinity Sunday!

In celebration, here is the Athanasian Creed, which the Prayer Book directs should be said today (as well as on some other festivals).

Written in Latin this creed was used in the West since the 6th Century. It is not now thought to have been written by Athanasius the Great of Alexandria (c. AD 293 – May 2, 373) who defended orthodoxy at the Council of Nicea in AD 325.

1. Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith;
2. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
3. And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;
4. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
5. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit.
6. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.
7. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.
8. The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.
9. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.
10. The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal.
11. And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal.
12. As also there are not three uncreated nor three incomprehensible, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.
13. So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, and the Holy Spirit almighty.
14. And yet they are not three almighties, but one almighty.
15. So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God;
16. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.
17. So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Spirit Lord;
18. And yet they are not three Lords but one Lord.
19. For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord;
20. So are we forbidden by the catholic religion to say; There are three Gods or three Lords.
21. The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten.
22. The Son is of the Father alone; not made nor created, but begotten.
23. The Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
24. So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits.
25. And in this Trinity none is afore or after another; none is greater or less than another.
26. But the whole three persons are coeternal, and coequal.
27. So that in all things, as aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.
28. He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the Trinity.
29. Furthermore it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
30. For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.
31. God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and man of substance of His mother, born in the world.
32. Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.
33. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.
34. Who, although He is God and man, yet He is not two, but one Christ.
35. One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of that manhood into God.
36. One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.
37. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ;
38. Who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead;
39. He ascended into heaven, He sits on the right hand of the Father, God, Almighty;
40. From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
41. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies;
42. and shall give account of their own works.
43. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.
44. This is the catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved.

Simnel Sunday

Since we finished our Christmas cake on 2nd Feb I've been looking forward in hope to a Simnel cake for Easter, but it turns out that I need not have waited so long. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Mothering Sunday has also traditionally been known as Simnel Sunday and Refreshment Sunday. Families would often get together on this day and Simnel cake would be enjoyed in a lessening of the austerities of Lent. I'm afraid I've no Lentern fast to set aside, but any excuse for some Simnel cake...

Prayers for Reformation Sunday

As Reformation Sunday is only a lesser whatnot in the C of E, there is no Collect for it. Some of these 15 collect-length prayers look pretty good to me. Set prayers and special days are not entirely against the spirit or letter of the Protestant Reformation, of course, though some seem to think they are and it is true that some of the hotter sort of Protestants might have fumed against this sort of thing, perhasp with more heat than light.

John Williamson Nevin (1803-86)

I really like the sound of John W. Nevin’s High Church Calvinism.

Amazon are meant to be winging his book on Calvin’s view of the Lord’s Supper, The Mystical Presence, to me and I can’t wait! B. Gerrish calls it: “The most intriguing discussion of Calvin’s eucharistic thought in English”.

Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Eugene, Wimpf and Stock Publishers, 1993) p3

Nevin went to Princeton Theological Seminary in 1823 and was chosen to teach Charles Hodge’s classes while Hodge spent a two-year sabbatical in Germany. Nevin became a professor at the new Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, where he taught from 1830-1840. In 1840, Nevin assumed the position of professor of theology at the newly-established German Reformed seminary in the small town of Mercersburg in central Pennsylvania.

Along with Philip Schaff he promoted what became known as the known as the Mercersburg Theology.

Nevin seems to have been properly reformed and positive about the sacraments (believing in the “spiritual real [or true] presence” of Christ in the Supper), the Church year and liturgical worship.

According to Michael Farley:

After the liturgical controversy died down, however, Nevin devoted his later years to developing a sacramental theology of the Scriptures, and he even admitted the imbalance of his earlier sacramental writings with respect to preaching. In 1879, he confessed that:

In our past controversies with regard to the Lord’s Supper, we may not have done justice always to what must be considered in this way the true and real preeminence of the Word above all sacraments…[W]e may have failed to intone properly what the presence of the Lord in his Word means, without which there is no room to conceive of his presence among men in any other form. Should this have been so, let us trust that it may be so no longer.

John W. Nevin, “The Bread of Life: A Communion Sermon,” Reformed Quarterly Review 26 (1879): 28.

Bibliography

Nevin, John W., The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinist Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (New York, Lippencott, 1846. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000)

Theodore Appel, The Life and Work of John Williamson Nevin (Philadelphia, 1889) containing Nevin's more important articles.

DiPuccio, William, The Interior Sense of Scripture: The Sacred Hermeneutics of John W. Nevin. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998. – treats Nevin’s sacramental view of Scripture and preaching

Farley, Michael A., “The Liturgical Theology of John Williamson Nevin.” Studia Liturgica 33 (2003): 204-222.

Hart, D. G. John Williamson Nevin: High Church Calvinist. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2005.

The Mercersburg Theology, edited by James H. Nichols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Wentz, Richard E., John Williamson Nevin, American Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

George & Diocletian: What I Learnt Today (Updated)

Though I’m Welsh, I’d like to wish my readers a happy St George’s Day.

One of the few things we know about George is that he wasn’t English. According to Wikipedia he was from Anatolia, now modern day Turkey.

He was probably a soldier martyred under the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian in c. 304 AD.

George was made Patron Saint of England in 1347 by Edward II in preference to Edward the Confessor. He is also the patron saint of Canada, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Montenegro, Portugal, Serbia, the cities of Istanbul, Ljubljana and Moscow, as well as a wide range of professions, organisations and disease sufferers.

George merits a Festival, not only a lesser festival in the C of E calendar.

The Collect:

God of hosts,

Who so kindled the flame of love

In the heart of your servant George

That he bore witness to the risen Lord

By his life and by his death:

Give us the same faith and power of love

That we who rejoice in his triumphs

May come to share with him the fullness of the resurrection;

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Common Worship Daily Prayer p464

Update: Thanks to LG for pointing out this alternative prayer on Revd John Richardson's blog:

Almighty God,

We have been taught by the legend of St George

to fight against dragons and to rescue the helpless.

Deliver us by the truth of the gospel

from that great dragon who leads the whole world astray.

Free us from our slavery to sin and death.

And grant that your light may dawn again on this nation of England.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen

NJ was telling me all sorts of fascinating stuff over coffee today.

Apparently Diocletian pioneered modern bureaucracy and split the Empire into East and West.

One of the new semi-HQs was in York, where the Emperor Constantine was born – so he was English, in a way.

Diocletian also divided the Empire into dioceses with a vicar representing the Emperor in each.

Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus!

1st March is, of course, the Lesser Festival (White) of David, Bishop of Menevia, Patron of Wales, c.601

At the synod at Llanddewi Brefi, 42 miles north east of Cardigan, David is said to have stood on a cloth on the ground which then rose up as a white dove came to sit on his shoulder. A real crowd pleaser. He was then made an Archbishop, which is one way to high office. We Reformed types should note that Saint David denounced the Pelagian heresy.

Those seeking alternative Episcopal oversight may wish to recall that in the Celtic tradition Bishops had the freedom to roam across borders.

Collect

Almighty God,
Who called your servant David
To be a faithful and wise steward of your mysteries for the people of Wales:
In your mercy, grant that,
following his purity of life and zeal for the gospel of Christ, we may with him receive the crown of everlasting life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

On 2^nd March the Church remembers Chad, Bishop of Lichfield, Missionary, 627.

All these feasts in Lent are proving helpful in making me feel less guilty about my Lenten “Aspirations”. Unfortunately David would probably not approve of a pint of SA in his honour. He was allegedly a teetotaler, hence the alternative title of 'Dewi Ddyfrwr' meaning ‘David the water drinker’. In the 10 monasteries he is said to have founded he wanted the monks to eat a strict diet of bread and herbs and harness themselves to the plough rather than using oxen. He liked a nice cold bath.

Inventing Holy Days is a good thing

I'm sure you all read Revd Dr Peter Leithart's blog, but just in case, here he is very briefly making the Biblical case for holy days and adding extra ones without a special command of God. If you don't you're probably a gnostic who thinks nothing much of church history and forgets that God is winning the victory day to day, though you might not know it! Or something like that.

George Herbert Day tip

I feel slightly ashamed (though it might be thought a good thing by some around here) that Revd Dr David Field (independat pastor) just had to inform me (Anglican ordinand) that tommorow is George Herbert day. Or rather, the lesser festival of George Herbert, Priest, Poet, 1633 (White) according to the Church of England.

Dr Field had to further tell me that this prayer can be found on p456 of the red Common Worship: Daily Prayer.

(What do they teach you at theological college? What is Cert Min for? Sorry, Marrian, you probbaly did teach me this. I may have been trying to learn Hebrew from flash cards at the time.)

Collect:

King of glory, king of peace,
who called your servant George Herbert
from the pursuit of worldly honours
to be a priest in the temple of his God and king:
grant us also the grace to offer ourselves
with singleness of heart in humble obedience to your service;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Apparently the optional canticles and refrains: Common of Bishops and other pastors (page 530) may also be used, but I don't think we'll bother. How's that for Reformed and free from the law and under grace and all that? Sausages for supper.

What does one do if a lesser festival falls in Lent, by the way? Which takes priority: the fast or the feast? Can we get off the fasting by observing the feast? What colour alb should David be wearing?

This must call for an outbreak of Herbert poems in the blogosphere from the erudite, please?

Lent Plans

I failed to even make (let alone keep) any new year resolutions this year, which feels like a really wasted opportunity.

I didn't think about it enough or plan it sufficiently in advance and I was put off by the fear of failure or the embarassment of having such patheically poor ambitions.

Resolutions (like all goals) need to be time specific, realistic, challenging and clear.

Here are some possible lent resolutions:

(1) No blog related activity between 8:30am and 6:30pm

(2) No alcohol unless offered in by others (not including the wife!)

(3) No snacking between meals

(4) No milk (in tea or coffee, with cereal etc.)

(5) When wanting any of the above, remember the Lord Jesus and pray.

Obviously these wouldn't apply to a Sunday since it is a feast day not a fast day. And I would still look forward to eating the bread and drinking the wine.

I might also make a point of having lots of extra sausages in Lent to prove that I am properly Reformed and not under law.