Getting back to our roots
I’m pleased to see the GMC add the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition of the Faith to their standards of doctrine. The full inheritance of orthodox Christology comes from the early Ecumenical Councils, especially the first four (I Nicea, I Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon). There are things also to be affirmed in the next three (II Constantinople, III Constantinople, II Nicea). The point is the era of wrestling over the definition of orthodoxy stretched into the Eighth Century.
The English Church was launched from both Rome and Iona at the turn of the Seventh Century. It came rapidly to flower, and under Theodore of Tarsus, contributed to the deliberations leading up to the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680-1. By the early 700s, the leading scholar of the Western Church was from the back of beyond (Northumbria); his name was Bede.
So, how does this tie into a renewal of Methodism? Well, John Wesley’s own view of Methodism was as a revived form of Anglicanism. We get our basic theology, our sacramental practices, our standards of ordination, from the Church of England. Wesley lived and died an Anglican priest, and frequently referred to the Church of England as “the best reformed church in Europe.” Note exactly what he was saying there. Wesley affirmed the Reformation, but thought that the C of E did it better than the Lutherans and Calvinists and so on. And what was the vision of Anglicanism by Wesley’s time? The Church of England was to be a reformed Catholicism. In other words, purge out the medieval accretions that obscured our initial light, but by all means get back to our roots. And what were our roots? Seventh-Eighth Century English Christianity.
That doesn’t mean we get in the way of the Bible. Oh, no. But neither do we create out of the Bible a modern synthesis and say that is where we come from. A lot of Protestantism/Evangelicalism/frontier Awakening religion has done just that. (Progressive religion has been more open and blatant about making stuff up, but that doesn’t mean the trads haven’t done so, too.) We read our Bibles with a shortened focus and it distorts the balance of the teaching. We need to read our Bibles with a long focus along the whole history of the Church. We need to read our Bible with all the saints of all the former ages and all the tribes and nations who have followed Jesus.
Methodism is a restatement in modern terms of the English Church Tradition. I have said for years that I could do a Sarum Mass from the High Middle Ages (in English) and other than a few references to Mary and the saints, nobody could tell it wasn’t from the back of the hymnal. Thomas Cranmer’s beautiful liturgy was not just Reformed, it was a reformed use of the liturgy we had enjoyed in England for centuries. And that was the liturgy that Wesley touched up for the use of his American Methodists in 1784. That is who we are.
That doesn’t mean we are stuck in some old-fashioned mode, or even restricted to English (we are a worldwide movement, after all). But we are following a line of advance, a tradition all the same. Even Wesley’s distinctives, of sanctification (which goes all the way back to Clement of Alexandria, among others) and of the classes and bands (which is just monasticism for the masses), are not innovations, but recoveries. Along the way, we have spiritual forebears that are uniquely ours: Gregory the Great; Cuthbert; Theodore of Tarsus; Hilda; Bede; Dunstan; Alfred the Great; Richard of Chichester; John Wyclif; Julian of Norwich; Thomas Cranmer; John and Charles Wesley. Along the way, our tradition has contributed to others’ and received from theirs as well: Boniface to Frisia; Alcuin to the Carolingian Church and Empire; the Dissenters as well as the Bohemian Brethren to Wesley.
The English Church was launched from both Rome and Iona at the turn of the Seventh Century. It came rapidly to flower, and under Theodore of Tarsus, contributed to the deliberations leading up to the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680-1. By the early 700s, the leading scholar of the Western Church was from the back of beyond (Northumbria); his name was Bede.
So, how does this tie into a renewal of Methodism? Well, John Wesley’s own view of Methodism was as a revived form of Anglicanism. We get our basic theology, our sacramental practices, our standards of ordination, from the Church of England. Wesley lived and died an Anglican priest, and frequently referred to the Church of England as “the best reformed church in Europe.” Note exactly what he was saying there. Wesley affirmed the Reformation, but thought that the C of E did it better than the Lutherans and Calvinists and so on. And what was the vision of Anglicanism by Wesley’s time? The Church of England was to be a reformed Catholicism. In other words, purge out the medieval accretions that obscured our initial light, but by all means get back to our roots. And what were our roots? Seventh-Eighth Century English Christianity.
That doesn’t mean we get in the way of the Bible. Oh, no. But neither do we create out of the Bible a modern synthesis and say that is where we come from. A lot of Protestantism/Evangelicalism/frontier Awakening religion has done just that. (Progressive religion has been more open and blatant about making stuff up, but that doesn’t mean the trads haven’t done so, too.) We read our Bibles with a shortened focus and it distorts the balance of the teaching. We need to read our Bibles with a long focus along the whole history of the Church. We need to read our Bible with all the saints of all the former ages and all the tribes and nations who have followed Jesus.
Methodism is a restatement in modern terms of the English Church Tradition. I have said for years that I could do a Sarum Mass from the High Middle Ages (in English) and other than a few references to Mary and the saints, nobody could tell it wasn’t from the back of the hymnal. Thomas Cranmer’s beautiful liturgy was not just Reformed, it was a reformed use of the liturgy we had enjoyed in England for centuries. And that was the liturgy that Wesley touched up for the use of his American Methodists in 1784. That is who we are.
That doesn’t mean we are stuck in some old-fashioned mode, or even restricted to English (we are a worldwide movement, after all). But we are following a line of advance, a tradition all the same. Even Wesley’s distinctives, of sanctification (which goes all the way back to Clement of Alexandria, among others) and of the classes and bands (which is just monasticism for the masses), are not innovations, but recoveries. Along the way, we have spiritual forebears that are uniquely ours: Gregory the Great; Cuthbert; Theodore of Tarsus; Hilda; Bede; Dunstan; Alfred the Great; Richard of Chichester; John Wyclif; Julian of Norwich; Thomas Cranmer; John and Charles Wesley. Along the way, our tradition has contributed to others’ and received from theirs as well: Boniface to Frisia; Alcuin to the Carolingian Church and Empire; the Dissenters as well as the Bohemian Brethren to Wesley.