“To all who received [Jesus], who believed in his name,” John’s gospel tells us, “he gave power to become children of God” (Jn 1:12). In Christ we have been given a new identity: We are sons and daughters of the Most High God, children deeply cherished and unconditionally loved by our heavenly Father. Our status and significance in life derives not from our performance, but from our position in Christ. Who we are and what we are, is grounded in the truth that we now belong to God. We are God’s children by adoption and heirs of God’s promises. This new identity offers us a sense of value that does not come from anything that we have done for God, but rather from what God has done for us. No longer are we preoccupied with the way others see us. Our worth comes from how God sees us. No longer are we seeking the approval of others. We are seeking only to comprehend and embrace the wonder of being children of God!

When the Enemy depreciates us, recalling to us the failures and deficiencies of the old self, we have only to assert the truth about our new self:

I have been given power to become a child of God! (Jn 1:12)
I am no longer a slave, but a friend of Christ! (Jn 15:15)
I have bought with a price. I belong to God! (I Cor 6:20)
I am a child of God by adoption! (Rom 8:15)
I am no longer under condemnation! (Rom 8:1)
I have been redeemed and forgiven! (Col 1:14)
I know that nothing can separate me from the love of God! (Rom 8:28)
I am a brand new person in Christ Jesus! (II Cor 5:17)
I am a citizen of heaven! (Phil 3:20)

This is the first gift of the Spirit that is given to us: a new identity that is undeniable and that can never be taken away from us. We are God’s children by adoption, joint heirs with Christ! This is who and what we are now, and will be forevermore. “See what love the Father has given us,” the author of I John exclaims, “that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are!” (I Jn 3:1)

Anglo-Catholicism and Evangelicalism both began as reform movements aimed at bringing Anglicans back to their roots. This is easily forgotten today, as both movements have become more concerned with aping their corollaries in the wider Christian world than with celebrating Anglican distinctiveness. Nevertheless, the early Evangelical movement in Anglicanism was deeply concerned with communicating the Gospel by means of both impassioned preaching and liturgy. The great Evangelical Charles Simeon wrote gushingly of his love for the prayer book and his belief that “a congregation uniting fervently in the prayers of our Liturgy would afford as complete a picture of heaven as ever yet was beheld on earth.” He distrusted Evangelical efforts that were not grounded in the prayer book. He also joined his fellow Evangelical John Wesley in having a special devotion to Holy Communion, something that had fallen out of fashion in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

In the beginning, the Anglo-Catholic movement was equally imbued with the spirit of the Elizabethan Settlement. There is a fierce desire apparent in the early Tracts for the Times to associate the Church of England not only with its pre-Reformation past but also with the great lights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Much of what is available from the reformers and divines today was re-published and circulated by early Anglo-Catholics, from the commentaries and sermons of William Beveridge to Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Moreover, the early movement was deeply concerned with maintaining the prayer book as the standard for doctrine and faith. Early Anglo-Catholics objected to schemes that would allow for non-subscription to the 39 Articles by those obtaining university posts. Even Tract 90, which was admittedly an effort to find ways around uncomfortable parts of the Articles, was nevertheless an indication of how committed the Oxford Fathers were to explicating the Catholic character that they believed Anglicanism has always had.

The point is, both Evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism can legitimately claim a stream of continuity with classical Anglicanism. Moreover, both parties, as reform movements, are able and fitted to make sure that modern Anglicans do not lose an important part of our theological heritage. Evangelicals are well poised to remind us of the ultimate authority of Scripture within the Church, the all sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and the need for personal conversion. Anglo-Catholics, on the other hand, remind us of the power and importance of the Sacraments, the nature of the Church as a divine institution, and the guiding principle of Anglicanism that we judge all of our doctrine and practice by how it relates to the early Church. A full and true Anglicanism has to have all of these things to function.

The resurrection of Jesus can be understood from the perspective of the past, the present, and the future.

Let’s start with the past. The resurrection of Jesus Christ occurred at a point in human history. It is not an event whose reality is acknowledged by academic historians as a fact, but it is the definitive historical event for faithful Christians.

We believe that God really raised Jesus from the dead even if the constraints of academic historiography prevent history professors from talking about God’s involvement in human life in professional journals and scholarly books.

As members of the Christian community we have already accepted the validity and profundity of the witnesses who came before us. Those earliest witnesses experienced an empty tomb and they experienced the risen Lord himself. In the pages of Scripture they tell us that they have seen him, touched him, and even eaten with him.

We can and do accept their testimony and base our lives on it. We take their word for it when the rules of academic evidence and publishing will not allow professional historians to do so.

Think of it this way: I trust what my wife tells me about her family of origin, her school days, and her experiences in college. I trust what she tells me about how she spends her day. Her testimony does not rise to the level necessary for academic history. But I am confident of its truth because of my confidence in her. So too I trust the witness of the Christian community about the resurrection of Jesus precisely because of my confidence in who they are and whose they are.

Next, let’s think about the resurrection from the perspective of the present. Jesus is risen. He is alive now, this moment. He is alive in a way that makes my life pale by comparison.

I really encounter him on a regular basis. In the Blessed Sacrament. In the Scriptures. In the sisters and brothers of my parish family. In the poor and the marginalized. In the movements of the Holy Spirit in my own life. The risen Lord is at work guiding me and transforming me through the power of the Holy Spirit. The real power of the Christian life arises from our experience of Jesus himself in our daily lives.

Finally, we turn to the future. As the Nicene Creed says, “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” The resurrection – our resurrection – is on our horizon. We are promised a new life. A new kind of life. Eternal life. A life that has passed through sorrow, sickness, and death and will never undergo them again.

Jesus is the first fruit of the new era awaiting the entire creation. The resurrection is the source of our hope. A life stirred and energized by hope can endure all things and can change the world.

This pamphlet uses familiar Episcopalian language for liturgical ministers. Many newcomers to St Gregory’s find this language new; others ask how Episcopalian ministers differ from those in their home denominations. Such questions have special importance in today’s ecumenical context, where grassroots relations, including sharing church members across old boundaries,can build a practical local basis for reunion. In fact the Church’s ministry has sparked debate, redefinition, reform and schism throughout history, and language confusion has played an important role. A word-study can help untangle this, and uncover the longtime unity of ministry which almost all churches share today. The following summary may serve Episcopalians and non Episcopalians who must sometimes wonder whether we are talking about the same things.

Much past conflict has arisen from confused analogies to Old Testament ministers, and chiefly to the COHEN. This hereditary Hebrew clergyman originally cast lots to determine God’s judgment decrees (tôrah), and so came to oversee temple sacrifices by seeing to it that people offered these as God had commanded. It is important to recognize that the biblical cohen only consulted, while others sacrificed; even after the exile he offered no sacrifices except on the Day of Atonement, when he scattered sacrificial blood in the sanctuary. Active religious leadership, as we would recognize it, belonged instead to the king, who was anointed (messhiach in Hebrew, christos in Greek, hence MESSIAH or CHRIST in English) with divine power, and bore the title “Son of God.” During the Jewish monarchy the cohen obeyed the king in all religious matters, even when the king commanded idolatry! After the Maccabean restoration, and only then, the chief cohen took on part of the missing king’s religious authority, while people waited for real royalty to return.

Rabbis of Jesus’ time debated how that might happen. Some awaited a single warrior king, like David; others, a renewed kingly nation (laos in Greek, hence the English “laypeople”) pure as the cohen is pure. Both groups called this deliverer “royally anointed” (Messiah/Christ). The gospels indicate Jesus dismissed any suggestion he was a king; nevertheless New Testament writers naturally use the language of popular messianic hope to describe Jesus’ victorious death and resurrection. Paul’s usage proved influential in New Testament times, and long afterward. He probably never met Jesus in the flesh (2 Corinthians 5:16) and never discusses Jesus’ teaching; instead, Paul treats familiar rabbinical questions in the light of his own new faith. Paul reckons that God declared Jesus king (“Son of God”) at the resurrection (Romans 1), and that Christians share Jesus’ kingly work and identity as members of the messianic body (Galatians 6; Colossians 1; 1 Corinthians 10 & 12). In other words, Paul argues that through Jesus, God has fulfilled both rabbinical notions of the hoped-for Messiah.

Other New Testament writers combine the images of king and cohen to similar effect. The Letter to the Hebrews says Jesus the royally anointed (Christ) has taken over the cohen’s one active sacrificial job by offering his own blood in God’s true sanctuary (Hebrews 10). In other words, Jesus’ death has restored the ancient kingship with all its true religious authority, of which the post-Maccabean high-priesthood had consciously preserved a living shadow. Later letters underscore Christians’ share in Jesus’ messiahship, as a royal cohen-ish people (Ephesians 4; 1 Peter 2). In sum, first century Christians saw the ministries of anointed king, purified laos, and sacrificial cohen as the united work of Jesus and his Church.

Christian institutions developed independently of these scriptural images, however, and reshaped them. At first Jesus’ followers at Jerusalem made his brother James their leader, much as Muslims would one day vest authority in a succession of Mohammed’s blood relatives, called caliphs. There James presided over “the Twelve,” a body Jesus had chosen to symbolize a restored laos of twelve tribes: together these decided institutional questions for the growing churches. And from there the gospel spread among Jewish synagogues throughout the Roman empire,carried by countless APOSTLES. (Unlike later ages, the New Testament period did not reserve this name for”the Twelve,” but simply continued here the familiar Greek Old Testament translation for the Hebrew shaliach, meaning anyone on an authorized errand.) At the same time the apostle Paul and his fellow-apostle helpers added new gentile synagogues to their number. Suddenly, however, the Christian caliphate with its council of the Twelve vanished, after James’ murder and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 a.d., leaving Christian synagogues elsewhere to work in conventional synagogue ways. Hence the Christian liturgical ministers we know spring from Jewish synagogues, and not from any distinctive creation by Jesus or the early Church.

Anglicanism lacks a recognizable pattern of piety. It is necessary to have a Communion-wide pattern of piety, for shared devotional practices unite us to one another, just as they deepen our corporate memory and also give us something to pass on to our children. Above all, a shared pattern of piety witnesses to those outside the Communion. It tells them who we are, where we locate our corporate memory, how we articulate our Christian vision, and why they themselves should participate in our way of life.

Patterns of piety are located in liturgical celebrations. These happen on Sundays in the Divine Service, but must also continue on appointed days of feasting and fasting. These days of feasting and fasting are located in the Church Calendar, and their celebration must be given greater emphasis by the bishops. Otherwise, our heritage remains a thing of texts, historically occasional reception, and the hermeneutical imagination, rather than a thing of bodies, successive generations, and the liturgical imagination.

The Anglican conception of itself as a via media must be historicized, for it has had different connotations in different contexts. It cannot be reified as an ahistorical type which asserts its own validity by always already assuming that the history of Anglican theology has been nothing but the outcome of an overriding desire to avoid theological extremes, regardless as to what these supposed extremes may or may not have been.

Not all developments within Anglicanism have been the result of synthesizing extremes. The Elizabethan settlement, in particular, was not a synthesis of “Puritan” and “Roman Catholic” into “Anglican,” but a refusal of both in favor of a monarchical and episcopal ecclesial body that was deeply grounded in humanist scholarship and concerns.

There is nothing uniquely Anglican about avoiding theological extremes, for these extremes are contextual to the ecclesial community in question. The perfect illustration of this is the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility, which sought to avoid the extremes of ultramontanism, which saw the pope as God’s own mouthpiece, and conciliarism, which saw the pope as nothing more than the first bishop among other bishops of equal standing. For Roman Catholics, papal infallibility is a via media doctrine. On the one hand, papal infallibility rejects two radically different understandings of the papacy; on the other hand, papal infallibility synthesizes these two extremes beyond themselves into its own centrist position. This is representative of how practically every sociologically identifiable group seeks to manage itself: avoiding, at particularly tense moments, potentially damaging extremes within the community and working out these differences through some sort of compromise. For Anglicans to claim that they are the via media and that this locates the history of Anglican theology as the history of occasional compromises between extremes is to simply state that which is sociologically obvious for every other group as well. Thus, via media – when conceived of merely as the avoidance of “extremes” – is not a uniquely Anglican definer.

So, several weeks back we find an Episcopal parish in Virginia presenting the essentially apostate John Dominic Crossam in a lenten program. Now we find out that on Good Friday another parish in the diocese had John Shelby Spong preaching his heresies, which seem to have gotten worse than ever. What is the matter with Bishop Johnston, that he thinks there is anything at all OK about giving these guys lectern time, much less allowing them to preach?

There is no way in hell that a man who denounces the Nicene Creed has any business doing anything that bears the slightest resemblance to teaching in this church. Those of us with a little theological sophistication can tell that Crossan and Spong and their ilk are shovelling theological crap of their own excretion, but the average parishioner (and for that matter cleric) shouldn’t be made to sort through this dung heap. The failure to defrock Spong needs to be rethought; unfortunately Crossan isn’t one of ours that we can discipline him, but the failure of the lofty persons at 815 to denounce these presentations leads one to suspect that either they share the same inability to repeat the Creed and mean it, or that they are so absorbed in keeping their grip on church buildings that they’ve lost interest in what is said inside them, other than when it comes to a-heterosexual approval. It’s hardly out of the question that both are true.

This is where the deeper rot in the church lies. I can see how we can disagree on sexual morality and on the ministerial authority on women, even to the extent of disagreeing with Paul’s teaching. When we cannot step up to a commitment to the most basic statements of theological principle, to which we all state allegiance every Sunday, it sends the message that we are intellectual frauds. In a Catholic or Orthodox church, the priest who allowed this nonsense would be called on the carpet by the bishop and would stand a real risk of being inhibited and deprived of office. And they would be entirely right to do so. Our bishops should be doing likewise, lest we be reduced to The Dilettante Episcopal Church.