Foundations of the Anglican Church XCVIII

The Hampton Court Conference

The biggest impact that King James had on the Church of England—and perhaps even of English culture way beyond the Established Church—is the edition of the Bible which he commissioned and which was first printed in 1611 and which is popularly known as “The King James.” 

This was not the first English language bible.  Bits and fragments of the Scriptures had been put into the various vernaculars of Anglo-Saxon England as far back as Bishop Aldhelm (d. 709) and the Veneable Bede (d.735).  Alfred the Great, King of Wessex (d. 899) had portions of the Pentateuch, including the Ten Commandments put in Old English.  He also had about fifty of the psalms translated from the Latin Vulgate.  England’s Protoprotestant, John Wycliffe, produced an English translation of the Vulgate in the late fourteenth-century.  It is slavishly faithful to the Latin text even when, much like Pope Benedict’s current Missal, the borrowed syntax makes the English unintelligible.  Because it was translated from the Vulgate and not the original languages (Hebrew and Greek), later Protestant authors such as Tyndale and Coverdale ignored Wycliffe’s work, but Catholic translators preparing the Rheims Douai translation (1582) however borrowed considerably from it. 

The English reformer and Protestant martyr, William Tyndale, published an English version of the New Testament in 1525-26 and the Pentateuch in 1530.  When Tyndale died in 1536—execution by strangling at the hands of the (Catholic) Emperor’s executioner to whom he had been betrayed by agents of Henry VIII who, though he broke from Rome, had no use for Protestants—the work was not yet complete.  Tyndale’s translation betrayed several strong Protestant biases.  For example the Greek εκκλεσια was translated as “congregation” rather than “Church” to de-emphasize the scriptural roots of the Church as institution.  Similarly the word πρεσβγτερ (presbyter from which we get the English word “priest”) became “senior,” and the phrases “to do penance” became “repent.” 

Myles Coverdale was authorized by Henry VIII (after the break with Rome) to produce an English language bible.  This book was published in 1538 and is often called “The Great Bible.”  Coverdale drew heavily on Tyndale’s work, but avoided the problematic vocabulary choices that did not fit Henry’s Catholic (though not Roman) biases. While in exile in Geneva under Queen Mary (Bloody Mary) Coverdale collaborated on a more Protestant translation in English, the Geneva Bible.  This is the translation used by John Knox, William Shakespeare, John Bunyan and John Donne and it served the Church of England well for over fifty years.  It would continue to be used by the Puritan party—because of its Calvinist bias in translation—and would be the first English language bible brought to America first to Jamestown and later to Massachusetts Bay on the Mayflower.

The Geneva Bible pleased the Puritans, but the High-Church party was not overly happy with its Reformed bias and neither was King James.  Remember James did not like the Puritan approach to the Church as James saw the link between episcopacy and kingship: “No Bishops, no King.”  Within six months of his coronation,  James summoned a conference at Hampton Court where it was agreed that a new translation, freed of the Puritan bias against “The Church” and its bishops, be prepared. 

This decision marks a very important development in the Church of England.  In Elizabeth’s day Calvinism and the Puritan faction within the Church of England that held rigidly to Puritan doctrines were allowed pretty free rein in determining the direction of the Church of England.  A “High-Church” party, more minded towards both Armenianism and a more Sacramental worship had smoldered beneath the surface of the Church of England but could not make much progress in balancing the rabidly Protestant direction of the Puritan controlled Church.    (Armenianism taught the doctrine of free will as opposed to Calvinism’s double pre-destination by which a person had been determined by God from all eternity either to salvation in heaven or damnation in hell.)  Elizabeth was no Calvinist but to achieve her political goals she needed the support of the House of Commons in which the Puritan faction long held power.   James set on a different course than Elizabeth’s religion-by-political-convenience.  Under James the Crown would take the theological lead.  This policy would, in the long run, be disastrous but we will get to that story in time.  

At James’ invitation, forty-seven scholars—all but one, clergy—divided into six committees (two each for the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and one for Westminster) divided up the work.  The committees included members of both the Puritan and the High Church parties, though the King made his wish clear that the Bible not be slanted towards the Presbyterian/Puritan ecclesiology.  The scholars were commissioned to work from the ancient languages (Hebrew for the Old Testament, Greek for the New and for the Apocrypha), though they drew on existing English Translations (Tyndale, Coverdale, the Bishop’s Bible, and even the Rheims-Douai) for guidance.  In 1611 they finished their work and printed their Bible.

The King James has served well not only the Church of England or the Anglican Communion, but most Protestant denominations.  Only the mid-twentieth century did other translations become popular among Protestant groups and even today there are various religious groups that will not accept any other translation as the revealed Word of God.   But in the King James were planted the seeds of a religious division that would eventually bring down the monarchy and tear England—and its Church—apart.  

Back to Anglican History: Foundations IV

The installation of Justin Welby as the

105 Archbishop of Canterbury, March

21, 1213

I was happily working away on the history of the Anglican Church/ Communion when Pope Benedict dropped the bombshell of his resignation—the first papal resignation in more than five centuries—and of course immediately switched topics.  I still have a lot I want to write on the subject of papal transitions and issues concerning Pope Francis, but I also want to refocus on the subject of the Anglican Communion and its history as I believe that is important for us as a case study about papal authority.  It will be particularly important for us to note the schism that developed between the Papacy and the Church of England in the third decade of the sixteenth century and to see that schism in its context.  I think the subsequent development from schism to genuine Protestantism of the English Church will also be interesting as will be the recovery of a Catholic identity in the nineteenth century.  
But let me first recap our story.  You can go back to the entries of February 8, 9, and 10^th for the details of the story, but we had barely begun.  To summarize, Christianity came to Britain with the Romans no later than the second century of the Christian era and probably even at the end of the first.  The Roman towns and settlements undoubtedly had small Christian settlements.  Three British bishops were present at the Council of Arles in 314.  The British Church was also represented at the Councils of Sardica (modern day Sofia in Bulgaria) in 347 and the Council of Rimini in 359.  Christianity was well established in England by the accession of Constantine to the Imperial title in 312—and indeed, Constantine had strong ties to Britain—his father, Constantius had served in the military administration there as one of the imperial tetrarchs, or co-emperors and died at Eboracum, modern York.  When the Empire began to implode at the beginning of the fifth century, however, Rome began bringing its legions home to defend the capital and the withdrawal of Roman troops left Britain vulnerable to invasion.   Romans were  no sooner off scene than Germanic peoples, Angles, Saxons and Jutes, began to migrate and settle, pushing the native British Population further and further back into the west.  As the these Germanic settlers were not Christians but pagans, the mass of the Christian population was relocated to what is today Wales in the west and Cornwall in the south-west.   Nevertheless, small Christian communities endured in what had been the Roman towns.
The invaders themselves gradually were Christianized—in great part through the efforts of Irish monk missionaries who started schools and centers of learning in the Scotland and the various Saxon kingdoms.  Faith had come to Ireland not from Patrick and Rome as is commonly thought, but with monastic settlements that seem to have come from Egypt and Syria.  The Irish Church had some very distinct characteristics that differentiated it from the western style Catholicism associated with the Roman Church. 
The Irish and English Churches of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries were in no way subject to Papal or Roman authority.  Rome, at the time, made no claims to any sort of universal jurisdiction.   Let me repeat what I had written in one of those earlier blogs
Of course the English Church—that is the Anglican Church for Ecclesia Anglicana means simply that, the English Church—was in communion with the Roman Church but it was in no way absorbed into it. While it held the Roman Church and its Bishop (the Pope) in honor, it had its own distinct rites and ceremonies, it chose its own bishops, it held its own synods and councils and it formulated its own canons. At the time of Bede, it was its own Church in full and free communion with universal Christendom represented by the five great Patriarchial Sees of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem. As a Western Church it had its strongest ties to the See of Rome, the Western Patriarchate but like the other Churches maintained its autonomy.
That relationship will begin to change with the coming of missionaries from Rome under the monk-bishop Augustine of Canterbury.  That is for our next blog. 

 

The Foundations of the Anglican Church I

The Galilee of Durham

Cathedral,  site of the tomb

of the Venerable Bede

In the previous posting, I raised the issue of whether the newly discovered remains of Richard III—Shakespeare’s evil hunchback king—should be reburied with Catholic Rites or Anglican ceremonial.  Richard was, after all, a Catholic.   But then Anglicans claim that he was Church of England at a time when the Church of England was in communion with the Roman See.  Was there a Church of England  before Henry VIII and his break?  This is an important question for historians because the legitimacy of the Anglican Church hinges on the question: Did Henry VIII found the Anglican Church or did he take the already existing Anglican Church out of communion with Rome?  If the former, the Anglicans are a sort of religious Johnny-come-lately religious movement; if the latter then they have a legitimate identity as one of the ancient Christian Churches.  Should Catholics work for the conversion of Anglicans and Episcopalians—or is our aim to restore communion between the Churches of the Anglican Communion and the Church of Rome? 
Popular opinion thinks of the Anglican Church as being founded by Henry VIII when he split the Church in England from the Pope so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, having tired of his wife Queen Katherine of Aragon—but that just shows us how little we know about the history of the Church, or rather, how much our understanding of the  history of the Church has been shaped  by religious opinions rather than  historical facts.
The term “Anglican Church” was around for at least three hundred years before ol’ Henry ever got peeved with the Pope and the idea of a Church of England, if not the terminology itself, is even much older.  Certainly the Venerable Bede, a Church historian (673-735) had a very clear idea of the English Church as a body with a distinct identity within Christendom that differentiated it from the Roman Church and the other distinct ecclesial communities that comprised the universal Christendom of his time.  To Bede, the English Church was as different from the Roman Church as was the Greek or the Irish Churches of his day.  Bede, in fact, wanted to smooth over some of the differences in religious practices, but he did not want the English Church to lose its unique identity.  Of course the English Church—that is the Anglican Church for Ecclesia Anglicana means simply that, the English Church—was in communion with the Roman Church  but it was in no way absorbed into it.  While it held the Roman Church and its Bishop (the Pope) in honor, it had its own distinct rites and ceremonies, it chose its own bishops, it held its own synods and councils and it formulated its own canons. At the time of Bede, it was its own Church in full and free communion with universal Christendom represented by the five great Patriarchial Sees of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem.  As a Western Church it had its strongest ties to the See of Rome, the Western Patriarchate but like the other Churches maintained its autonomy.  
Christianity had come to England before the end of the second century and perhaps as early as the last decades of the first century.  What is today England and Wales was a province of the Roman Empire and even as the faith had spread to Rome from the Pentecost Preaching of the Apostles, it spread from Rome throughout its empire as merchants and soldiers and government officials and slaves and tourists and sailors moved about the wide empire, settling in countless places and bringing with them the religious beliefs of the Empire, of which Christianity was but one.  There is even an old tradition that Joseph of Arimathea had comes as a missionary after the Ascension of Christ.  Other legends talk about Philip the Apostle sending missionaries to Britain, or perhaps even one or another of the apostles going there themselves.  None of this can be verified, however, and all of these stories have the stuff of legends more than facts about them.  But that is not to say that Christianity may have arrived in Britain even as early as 50 AD, or perhaps a few years before.  We simply do not know the earliest date but we can say that by 150 it is all but certain that there were Christian communities in the Roman towns of Britain.  We know that there were three British bishops present at the Council of Arles in 314. One of these was Restitutus, Bishop of Londinium, today’s London. British bishops were also present at the Council of Sardica (Sofia, in modern day Bulgaria) in 347 and the Council of Rimini (In what is today Italy) in 359.  This tells us that the British Church was not a stand-alone entity but was in communion with the Universal Church represented by the Emperor.  (Yes, it was the Emperor, not the Pope, who represented the oecumene or Universal Oneness of the Church just as it was the Emperor, not the Pope, who had the right and duty to convoke Ecumenical (oecumenical) Councils. Bet you didn’t learn that in fifth grade. 
You see, the “Church” of the first five centuries was not a single Church under a Pope but a communion of local Churches, each with its own bishop, who recognized the authenticity of faith and legitimacy of practice of one another.  There were certain measuring sticks of orthodoxy—the Trinity, the divinity of Christ—as well as a  unity of practices such as the weekly celebration of the Eucharist, baptism as the rite of initiation into the community, and an Episcopal system of leadership where deacons and presbyters assisted the bishop in his ministry. As the centuries moved on the rites of these Churches began to vary more and more in incidentals, but they used, for the most part, the same scriptures in their worship and common patterns, if not the rites themselves, for their liturgies.  By the sixth century these local churches began to coalesce around one or another of the five great patriarchial Sees.  Christians the West, both Europe and North Africa, began looking more and more to the Church and Bishop of Rome for leadership.  Christians in the eastern parts of North Africa looked mostly to Alexandria.  Christians in Greece and Asia Minor—what is today Turkey—as well as southern Italy and Sicily to Constantinople because they were under the political domination of the Emperor there.  Christians in Syria and beyond the Eastern boundaries of the old empire, looked to Antioch.  Christians in the ancient places of Palestine, looked to the Patriarch and Church of Jerusalem.  This period of the history of the Church uniting around the five great Patriarchs is called the Pentarchy.  It surprises us Catholics to think of a period of the history of the Church where the Pope wasn’t running the show but a universal jurisdiction of the Roman See only emerges in the eleventh century.   But we can talk about that at another time; we are getting ahead of our story if we want to focus on England.  Suffice it to say that by the fourth century Christianity was well established in Britain and the Roman Church and its bishop were held in honor but not acknowledged as having direct authority. 

Jesus, the Reason for the Season? Or Not?

There is more to Christmas than Christ, and for some
there's less to Christmas than Christ, much less than
Christ, but that's just fine.

A friend of mine recently told me a story about Christmas and grinches. My friend teaches at a private school somewhere in the Northeast.  The school has adopted a strong secular identity and few of the students come from Christian homes.  There is a policy forbidding so much as a poinsettia plant in the faculty lunch-room or a jolly elf in the library.  Even reading The Polar Express is verboten and a teacher was reprimanded for wearing a green sweater with a red and green plaid skirt.  Boy, anybody who thinks only conservatives are rigid needs to visit this school!!!  Well, my friend told me, one parent was upset because—horror of horrors—there was a Christmas tree near the entrance to the parking lot.  You see, this school rents its property from a Christian Church to whom the parking lot belongs but this particular parent obviously thought that the landlords should refrain from decorating their property because she did not want her child to be exposed to Christmas.  A Christmas tree has no religious significance.   And so let’s take a break from this Founding Father and Christian Nation thing and indulge ourselves a bit in a look at the history of Christmas.  After all Jesus “is the reason for the season.’  Or not.  Now when I say that, I am not being anti-Christian or on the “Take Christ out of Christmas” bandwagon.  I am a devout Roman Catholic—more devout than most I would suggest—but we need to look at Christmas in its wider picture context if we want to consider intelligently the issue of the crèche on courthouse lawns that we have been looking at. 

      While Christians began celebrating the birth of Jesus on December 25^th in the fourth century they built their celebration on already existing “pagan” festivals.  History does not know the actual date of Christ’s birth.  Some argue that the story’s relating to us that “shepherds were keeping watch in the fields by night over their sheep” argues against a December date as in the winter the sheep would be kept in barns through the cold nights.  I am not familiar with sheepherding protocols in first century Palestine but I do know that December in Israel/Palestine has long nights with low temperatures—not as low as Idaho or Colorado and American sheep, but regularly in the 40’s and occasionally below freezing.  And, in any case, contemporary biblical scholarship would not consider night-time temperatures of Bethlehem fields relevant to whatever historical/biographical shreds might be recoverable from the gospel texts.   Suffice it to say that we don’t know the actual date of the birth of Jesus.  Nor do we need to. The Queen’s Birthday is a Saturday in June—any Saturday her government might choose for the festivities—though she was born on April 21^st.  But it rains a lot in London in April (April showers,May flowers, and all that) so it is celebrated another day.  Same with Jesus.  Who knows when he was born, but December 25^th works well as everybody needs a lift from the dark days and longer darker nights of midwinter.  And long before Jesus was even a twinkle in some celestial star (I am speaking here of the man born, not the Word who became incarnate in that birth) people were reveling at midwinter.  According to the historian the Venerable Bede (8^th century) the ancient Anglo-Saxon peoples celebrated Modranecht (Mother’s Night) on December 25^th.   The Celts had Meán Geimhridh—the festival of the winter solstice.  Germanic and Nordic folk had Yule.  Baltic peoples had Ziemassvētki.  The Slavs had Rozhanista.  The Roman/Graeco culture had a variety of feasts in honor of the god Bacchus, the god Saturn, or the Sol Invictus: the unconquered Sun.  Customs varied from culture to culture but certain common features included gift-giving, revelry (usually to excess), hospitality, and the use of light.  The further north, the darker and longer the nights, the more ardent were the celebrations.  Greens were often brought indoors to decorate the home (and probably to freshen the air of the houses closed tight against winter cold) and to keep the awareness of nature when all outside seemed dead and awaiting the rebirth spring would provide. 

     Initially there seems to have been some resistance among Christian theologians to the idea of celebrating the Birth of Jesus as it was too close in concept to the pagan celebrations honoring the birth of various deities.  Of course Kings, Pharaohs, and Emperors regularly had their birthdays celebrated but primitive Christianity distanced itself from such royal celebrations as well because the implication was attributing divinity to the monarch being celebrated.  It does seem by the middle of the fourth century however that the feast was being celebrated at Rome from where it spread eastwards to Constantinople and the Churches of the East.  This makes it somewhat of the exception as most of the ancient feasts began in the Eastern Church(es) and spread westward to Rome.  The Church in the West was always inclined to a more Spartan liturgical style than the more exotic East.  By the end of the fourth century Christmas had achieved great popularity as it was used to combat the Arian heresy that denied Jesus full divinity, equal to the Father.  Christmas became an affirmation of the idea that in the birth of Jesus, God (the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity) became human, uniting in one person the human and divine natures. 

     The name Christmas derives from the Old English Christemaesse—Christ’s Mass—even as other feasts were called after the Mass celebrated on that day—Michaelmas  (St. Michael’s Day, September 11^th ) or Martinmas (St. Martin’s Day, November 11^th). 

     It’s clear that our contemporary Christmas is an amalgamation of Christian and Pagan elements.  Christianity has often adopted and then adapted indigenous customs, “baptizing” them as it were with Christian meaning.  The Chinese Rites controversy of the seventeenth century is one of the more interesting examples of this practice and the rejection by Rome of the use of Chinese practices by the Jesuit missionaries was a huge mistake from an evangelizing point of view.  Pius XII, in one of the first acts of his papacy, admitted the mistake and to remedy it repealed much of the legislation of Clement XI that had outlawed the incorporation of Chinese practices into Catholic liturgy and devotions.  We will have to do a study of the Chinese Rites issue in the future but before we blame Clement XI for his narrow mindedness we need to locate him in the ambiance of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.  This was the same time, incidentally, that Puritans in Boston were outlawing Christmas because of its pagan roots.  And so we should distinguish between the Christian meaning of Christmas (the liturgical celebration of Christ’s birth with its worship services, scripture readings, and sacred songs) and the cultural survivals of pre-Christian practices with evergreens, blazing lights and fires, revelry and (not so sacred)songs.   They both have their place but a Festooned and light-bedecked tree is no more a Christian symbol than is a Halloween Jack-o-lantern or a Fourth-of July firecracker.  So get over the Christmas tree in the Park or the wreath of lights on the lamppost.  And while you’re at it, let Ms. Paula wear that red sweater and plaid skirt: she looks real cute in it.