A Time for Everything: Lent: Part 2

Themes: Easter, History

Time, time time…

By the time I get around to finishing this series of articles on an Evangelical observance of Lent, the season will have passed. In Search of Lost Time. But in order to understand Lent, we will not merely need to find the time, we will have to delve back into the memory of the Church, to recall the times when Lent was observed differently and for different reasons. In this episode we will have much to do with history.

First of all, you’ve got to remember that for many years celebrations like Easter or Lent weren’t fixed in stone. They almost certainly don’t originate in the very earliest period of the Church. Different Churches around the Roman Empire disagreed about precisely when to celebrate Easter, and had very different ideas about when to fast and what their fasting should involve. The idea of celebrating Christmas comes along later still. Most scholars would agree that probably the earliest Church period (the time of the Apostles and the generations immediately afterward) celebrated Easter every week! Every Friday became a remembrance of Jesus death (marked by some sort of fast) and every Sunday was celebrated as a reminder of his Resurrection: the Lord’s Day (Actually, that’s basically what we still do with our Church meetings on a Sunday). Gradually these weekly remembrances were supplemented with a larger Church calendar

In some form, the practice of observing Lent was established by the time of the Council of Nicea (325AD). The fifth Canon (Rule) of Nicea reads:

“And let these synods be held, the one before Lent, (that the pure Gift may be offered to God after all bitterness has been put away), and let the second be held about autumn.”

(The Canon concerns the need for the churches to hold twice-yearly Synods to review appeals against unfair excommunication of Bishops, if only we had such a need!)

The word translated into English as  ‘Lent’ in the Nicene Canon is the Greek tessarakoste, i.e., ‘fortieth day’. The word appears to have been formed on analogy with pentekoste (Pentecost, i.e., ‘fiftieth day’). Around the time of the Council of Nicea it seems that churches around the Roman Empire were beginning to divide up the year into periods of time marked by reflection upon different events within the history of God’s redemption of his people. This might sound like a weird thing to us Digital-Moderns, but it certainly wasn’t strange in a society where time was marked out by the quality of events and activities rather than quantities. Time passed in the cycles of sowing and harvest. Years were counted against the lives and rules of Emperors (“in the third year of Caesar Augustus…”) . And all of these events correlated to religious activities: sacrifices, offerings, pilgrimages, fasts, feasts. That was how time passed, not primarily because the Earth sashayed around the solar system, or a metal arm rattled around a dial.

The Fifty Days after Resurrection Sunday (what we call Easter Sunday)  was known as ‘Paschal time’ or ‘Eastertime’. In traditional Churches you’ll still see the weeks after Easter counted out: 2nd Sunday after Easter, 3rd Sunday after Easter, right up until the 50th day after Easter: the Day of Pentecost (lit. fiftieth Day). This whole period was coming to be regarded by the  Church in the Nicene period as a time of celebration of Jesus’ resurrection and rule.

At the same time, a similar thing was happening with the period before Easter. These days, or weeks, were increasingly regarded as a special time of preparation for the celebration feast of Easter. Different churches in different parts of the Roman Empire observed different periods of preparation, so the reference to ‘Lent’ in the Nicene Canon doesn’t necessarily refer to a 40 day fast. But, clearly, people were taking some sort of pre-Easter time out to prepare.

One of the most famous participants at the Council of Nicea was the theologian Athanasius, a Bishop in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Athanasius had a habit of writing a ‘Festal Letter’ to the ministers of the churches in his region each year, many of which have been preserved. We get a detailed description of his practice of Lent in his Sixth Festal Letter.

We begin the fast of forty days on the first day of the month Phamenoth (Feb. 25); and having prolonged it till the fifth of Pharmuthi (Mar. 31), suspending it upon the Sundays and the Saturdays preceding them, we then begin again on the holy days of Easter, on the sixth of Pharmuthi (Apr, 1), and cease on the eleventh of the same month (Apr. 6), late in the evening of the Saturday, whence dawns on us the holy Sunday, on the twelfth of Pharmuthi (Apr. 7), which extends its beams, with unobscured grace, to all the seven weeks of the holy Pentecost. Resting on that day, let us ever keep Easter joy in Christ Jesus our Lord, through Whom, to the Father, be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen. All the brethren who are with me salute you. Salute one another with a holy kiss.

Essentially, Athanasius is describing a 40 day fast (not including Saturdays and Sundays) for the period before Easter Sunday. Christians didn’t (and still don’t) fast on the Sundays of this period because they are all ‘mini-Easters’: days in which Jesus’ resurrection is celebrated. The fact that Athanasius has to spell out the details of how the Lenten period should be observed probably suggests that people were still trying to reach a consistent practice among different churches.

What is most significant about these Festal Letters, however, is not the details about dates, but Athanasius’ reasoning for why Christians should get involved in this practice. Whereas, much later medieval understandings of Lent revolved around the idea of ‘penance’, for Athanasius, Lent was about preparation, about ‘palate cleansing’ for the feast which was up and coming.

Coming to grips with penance and preparation, what these things mean, and what they have to do with Christian discipleship is at the heart of coming to an Evangelical understanding of Lent.  But that’s for another time, right now, here’s  Athanasius in full flight, it’s a beautiful thing:

The whole creation keeps a feast, my brethren, and everything that has breath praises the Lord, as the Psalmist [says], on account of the destruction of the enemies, and our salvation. And justly indeed; for if there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, what should there not be over the abolition of sin, and the resurrection of the dead? Oh what a feast and how great the gladness in heaven! how must all its hosts joy and exult, as they rejoice and watch in our assemblies, those that are held continually, and especially those at Easter? For they look on sinners while they repent; on those who have turned away their faces, when they become converted; on those who formerly persisted in lusts and excess, but who now humble themselves by fastings and temperance; and, finally, on the enemy who lies weakened, lifeless, bound hand and foot, so that we may mock at him; ‘Where is thy victory, O Death? where is thy sting, O Grave?’ Let us then sing unto the Lord a song of victory.

(Athanasius, ‘Sixth Festal Letter’ in Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff, online at ccel.org)

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The Frustration of James Fraser

Themes: History

Do you ever get so overwhelmed with the number of different things you should do, that you end up sitting on your hands and doing nothing? That’s me right now.
I’ve been tormented over the past couple of weeks by a series of short reflections I’m supposed to be writing for my elective ‘Reformed Greats’. Each piece is supposed to be a 500-800 word appreciation of a text/author from the Reformed theological tradition. It really isn’t supposed to be very hard but I’m sweating over it. My problem is that I approach each one as though it is a 3000 word essay. I’m currently working on an appreciation of James Fraser of Brea’s 1679 Treatise concerning Justifying Faith and it’s already 3000 words long. Aaagh. I think I need to throw the whole thing out and start again.

James Fraser is an interesting character though. He was part of the Covenanter Movement in Scotland – a group that led opposition to the King’s desire to make the Church of Scotland resemble the Church of England in its government and theology. This particularly focussed on introducing a Prayer Book that resembled the Book of Common Prayer, and of course, forcing the Scots to accept Bishops. The result was a long period of wars, rebellions, and people perpetrating atrocities against each other. The Scottish struggle played a major part in the outcome of the English Civil War in the 1640-50s. After the Restoration of the Monarchy, the 1670′s became known as ‘The Killing Time’ due to the number of field executions by Royal forces of those who could not accept anything less than a Reformed and Presbyterian Church of Scotland. James Fraser was among a group of Covenanter leaders who were imprisoned in the Castle on Bass Rock, a ‘desolate rock of the sea’. During this imprisonment he wrote the Treatise. For large sections of the work he had no reference books or conversation with friends, he relied solely on his Bible. It’s a high cost strategy, but getting yourself thrown in gaol is a very effective way to avoid the pain of having to reference your work.

The section of the Treatise which I’ve read and am supposed to be ‘appreciating’ addresses the extent of Christ’s atonement. It’s entitled, “Appendix: Concerning the Object of Christ’s Death”. Fraser seeks to shed some light on the difficult question of whether Christ died for all people or just for the elect whom he actually redeems. The question is particularly pertinent for Moore Theological College Students. The College has a reputation from defecting from the full Reformed position at precisely this point (we are known as “4 1/2 point” Calvinists because a number of distinguished faculty have not been entirely comfortable with the classic statements of Limited Atonement). I suppose that’s a discussion for another day.

What does James Fraser think? Well, if you wanted to find out by reading the Appendix to his Treatise, you’d be in trouble. There are very few copies of his work in print. The nearest library holdings according to WorldCat are in Ireland and Quebec (it’d make a nice present to the College Library if you ever see one in a 2nd-hand bookshop). Fortunately the National Library of Australia has access to a digital reproduction which you can access through the NLA website if you’re a member of the Library.
What’s that, you’re not a member of the NATIONAL LIBRARY!! Shame on you. (Neither was I until last week). The good news is that you can become a member for FREE and they’ll even mail out your library card so you can show off to your friends. Go here.

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William Perkins

Themes: History, preaching

I’m currently up to my eyeballs in reading for the Reformed Greats intensive unit at College. I was doing some research on William Perkins when I came across this little gem describing Perkins’ preaching:

“He used to apply the terrors of the law so directly to the consciences of his hearers, that their hearts would often sink under their convictions; and he used to pronounce the word “damn” with so peculiar an emphasis, that it left a doleful echo in their ears a long time after.”

After reading his description of God damning infants, it’s not hard to understand why his preaching left such an impression. But lest you think that Perkins was a man consumed by visions of hellfire without a consciousness of God’s comfort in Christ, it’s worth knowing that he was renowned for his pastoral work. He began his ministry preaching to prisoners in Cambridge goal, without pay, simply because he cared for them. He famously led a young condemned man to the comfort of faith by kneeling beside him and crying with him to ‘”show what the grace of God can do to strengthen thee.”

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Review: Wolf Hall

Themes: History, Reading, Reviews

Wolf Hall (by Hilary Mantel) surprised nobody by taking out the Booker Prize last week. I’ve been reading it over the last month and finally knocked it on the head yesterday. So, I was reading it while the Booker committee deliberated. I like to think that this might have affected them in some small way…
Actually, I was a little surprised to hear that it won the Booker. On my completely unobjective and inattentive survey, it’s the longest novel to get the gong in quite some time. It seems they generally they don’t award literary honours to long books. I guess when you’re a literary critic and you’ve got a whole pile of aspiring fiction in your library-bag the delight of something well-written and not tedious is virtually irresistible. I wonder also, whether long novels inevitably fall under the suspicion that the writer might have enjoyed churning the wheels of authorial invention, may have actually found it relatively easy… That would seriously mess with our visions of tortured genius.

Having said that, I can’t imagine that Wolf Hall was an easy novel to write. On the contrary, it is an incredibly and painstakingly well-researched recreation of an historical character. The novel follows the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, the organisational and legal genius behind Henry VIII’s civil and ecclesiastical reforms. (As a side note, there are more Thomases in Wolf Hall than you could reasonably swing a sword at – but that is the fault of Tudor England, not Hilary Mantel. Who would have thought that so many men named ‘Thomas’ would be involved in shaping modern Anglophone society)
Tudor Britain was a society gripped by a series of transformations within which the lineaments of our contemporary world began to take shape. It is the lives and loves of some of the men and women in these pages that effected a legacy of change to which our current global culture continues to be heir. Wolf Hall is a chance to meet these characters and dwell with them in the daily weave of life. It’s a rich experience. You shouldn’t for a moment expect a hagiography though. Mantel leaves us in no doubt that Cromwell was both a ‘Bible Man’ and also a ruthless political operator. Something of a cross between Tony Soprano and the Anglican Church League (I leave you to decide which is which).

Wolf Hall is not just an historical novel, it is a novel about history. It is about the ways in which our paths are directed by choices other people made, the way our lives are intertwined with characters who walked ahead, sometimes out of sight, but whose presence still vibrates in the air as we pass. Mantel achieves this through a series of very daring effects: she situates the reader on the shoulder of Cromwell, not giving us a first person narrative, but free access to his thoughts and feelings. For a while we know Thomas, we live closer to him, than even his beloved wife. It is the most intimate form of ‘indwelling’. This is an opportunity to experience a knowledge of the world given through transmissible experiences rather than directly collated our own nervous encounters. Wolf Hall takes fiction seriously.

But perhaps too seriously? Wolf Hall will never be accused of insulting the reader’s intelligence. I’ve been studying and reading books about this period of history for a few years now, and I honestly think Mantel assumes more Tudor history than she communicates. But this is also the effect which makes Wolf Hall brilliant. Mantel has consciously written a novel in which the tension that drives the narrative doesn’t come from the narrative itself, but what the reader will bring to the narrative.
The secret of Wolf Hall lies in what the book isn’t about: Wolf Hall.

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Chinese Election

Themes: Doctrine, History

A friend of mine who spent 2008 in China tells me that my blog is blocked there by the internet censors. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m more saddened that a billion Chinese readers are currently being deprived of my wisdom and insight, or flattered that the Chinese Communist Party regards me as a potential threat to the country’s peace, stability and mental hygiene.

The up-side is that I now feel no obligation to refrain from publically commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre (4th July 1989). As a 10 year old I remember watching the news through that period, old enough to remember the confusion about what was happening, hoping that someone, somewhere in the Chinese leadership would make it all right. In many ways, watching the news with my parents through the 2nd half of that year was my initial education in politics. I learned about ‘democracy’ because people were willing to face down tanks to experience it. I remember the tension as we all wondered whether the soldiers of the Red Army could bring themselves to shoot their fellow citizens.
Later that year, 9th November 1989, we watched the fall of the Berlin Wall. I remember the sledge-hammers, the graffiti, and the euphoria.

There was nothing internal to either of those events that could enable us, as they were unfolding, to foresee how they would be resolved. The Chinese State rolled over those lonely protesters with as little trouble as the tanks in the Square and today the Party appears stronger than ever. But Communist East Germany was ended and then a couple of years later, so was the whole Soviet Union.
But, maybe, it could have been China that was reborn. Maybe there could still be a wall through the heart of Berlin?

With hindsight comes the opportunity to trace out some of the historical causes behind the events. We reverse engineer the results and design models to account for the data. With hindsight we can see why what is, would always have been. Or at least, we think we can. We judge the actions and affairs of those who have gone before us, assign values to their struggles, weigh what we know of their motives against their outcomes. We are the teachers of history. We teach those of the past to know themselves.

But what then would you say to that single man staring down a Red Army tank? He was an evolutionary dead-end. He picked the spiky end of the historical pineapple. He chose his moment poorly. He did not know that history was against him. If he knew what we now know, he would not have done what he did. He would have stayed away.

How do you really love the Lost? How do you love and esteem something that has no future, that in itself was a terrible folly, that given the chance we would seek to prevent from ever coming to be?
Gallipoli or Changi or Tiananmen Square or the friend who commits suicide?
How do you really love it for what it is in itself, without denying the time or the person a substantial reality in themselves? How do you love this person without making his or her life just a symbol of some more substantial universal truth? (Mateship, Courage, Justice, etc).
Or is that really all they were or are?

I wonder if something like these questions are at the heart of the human aspect of the Christian doctrine of Election.

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Soda-water, Unitarianism, and Australia

Themes: History

What do soda-water, Unitarianism, and Australia all have in common?

The answer is a delightfully weird man named Joseph Priestly, who had a hand in the beginnings of them all.

I’m interested in Non-Conformist/Dissenting heroes to balance out my Anglican-eye view of Church history – with Joseph Priestly, I reckon I’ve struck solid gold.

The ‘Non-Conformists’ were groups of people, who, for reasons of conscience, could not remain within the Church of England. The Act of Uniformity passed by the British Parliament under King Charles II in 1662 had legislated that all Christian services had to be performed in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer. It also re-established the system of Bishops, and Episcopal ordination that had been abolished by Cromwell and the Puritans. The result was that around 2000 Non-Conformist clergy were forced to leave the Church. At that time there was no welfare State, and some of these men were well past being able to find other professions. It led to hardship and impoverishment for many godly people.
Furthermore, the Parliament passed a number of other Acts that excluded Non-Conformists from holding public office, from receiving University Degrees from Oxford or Cambridge (the only Universities), from having any form of religious meeting, or from going within 5 miles of their former Churches. The restriction on being able to hold Non-Conformist religious meetings was lifted by the Act of Toleration in 1689, but the other restrictions persisted until 1829.

The long and short of it is this, Joseph Priestly was a very smart kid who grew up bearing a certain weight of religious discrimination. I reckon he would have been like those kids from ‘parent controlled schools’ – weird and socially awkward, but super-smart.

Anyway, Priestly discovered soda-water en route to discovering oxygen. He was a member of the Royal Society and was considered a possibility for the post of scientific officer on board the Endeavour, sailing with Captain Cook to the South Seas. As it turned out he presented soda-water as a light refreshment for Captain Cook, and it went along on the grand Antipodean adventure instead. Priestly thought soda-water might provide a cure for scurvy. Scoffers insist he was wrong but there has been a lot less scurvy since we all started drinking fizzy drinks.

Some people remember Priestly as the discoverer of Oxygen, I suppose that is a big deal. I can’t help thinking however, that Oxygen was already there, hanging around whether he discovered it or not. Soda-Water, on the other hand, wasn’t, and it is deliciously refreshing.
Unfortunately, Priestly completely failed to see the commercial appeal of soda-water and it was left to Johann Jacob Schweppe to make bucket loads of cash out of the invention.

I suppose I should mention that he supported the founding of the Unitarian Church, turns out he was about as orthodox as a float full of Uniting Church ministers at Mardi Gras (Not Very).

The real reason I like Priestly is his sincere belief that the democratisation of science would have revolutionary implications in politics, ethics, and theology.

“The English hierarchy has reason to tremble even at an air pump or an electrical machine”.

Listen to this podcast from the BBC to find out more.

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