Advent

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world and those who dwell in it!
Let the rivers clap their hands,
let the hills sing for joy together
before the LORD, for he comes
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity. – Psalm 98.7-9

One of the major points in Tom Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope is that there is confusion in the world about life after death and future hope, a confusion compounded by the church, which has itself muddied the liturgical waters. He remarks:

In some recent schemes one entire section of the Christian year has become fudged. Advent, the four Sundays before Christmas, used to focus on the doctrines of the second coming, of God’s judgement, and of the final destiny of human beings. Today, the lectionaries have changed all that, and various aspects of preparation for Christmas have taken over instead (p. 31).

The liturgical calendar is, of course, entirely Biblical. As part of God’s restoration of the creation, time itself has been redeemed in Christ, as foreshadowed in the practice of the people of Israel. When they were saved from slavery in Egypt and brought into the promised land, their year was to be structured by the major events in their redemption – Passover, the Feast of Tabernacles &c. Time itself is holy. With the coming of the true Israel, the Lord Jesus Christ, the year now by extension follows the pattern of the events of his life: Passover becomes Good Friday, and Lent recalls Jesus’ time in the wilderness, for example. When people point out that Christian feasts occur at the same time as ancient pagan festivals, that is precisely the point: by Christ’s incarnation, life, death and resurrection, the old idols have been toppled. The pagan spring nature-worship is replaced by Easter, proclaiming Jesus as the King who is to be worshipped and who gives new life to the world. The pagan winter festival is replaced by Christmas.

Therefore, as we enter the season of Advent (coming from the Latin, adventum, meaning ‘Advent’), let us make sure that we are a people prepared for the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, turning to him in repentance and faith, a living faith issuing in obedience, so that when he returns, we will go with him to his marriage feast. Let us be a people of hope and joy, not just because preparation for the Feast of the Nativity takes place during Advent (and I concede that such preparation and anticipation should happen) but also because in its own right, the second coming of the Lord Jesus to judge is something to be welcomed with gladness. Have an Advent wreath in your home, and get your children to light the candles – if you have them (children and candles, that is). Sing Advent carols after dinner. Christ’s judgement will be a right judgement. Political corruption will be dealt with. The wrongly accused and persecuted will be vindicated. And this is something the whole created order longs for, because it means the consummation of the renewal of heaven and earth and its liberation from bondage to decay, a renewal in which we ourselves will be caught up as we experience the bodily resurrection.

ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

(The Collect for the First Sunday in Advent)

Faith to remove mountains

“Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea’, it will happen. And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.” – Matthew 21.21-22

In home group this evening, we were talking (amongst other things) about prayer and this verse came up in discussion. I didn’t mention this at the time because my thoughts were (and still are) half-baked, but it occurred to me, as it did a while ago, that this verse has a specific redemptive-historical context, rather than giving a general encouragement to pray, an encouragement which people can easily wrest to make them think that God will give them everything they want if they ask for it, and which can destroy people if they conclude from not receiving what they ask for that they don’t have enough faith.

This promise immediately follows Jesus cursing a fig tree when he is on the way into Jerusalem from the suburbs and he is hungry, but finds no fruit on it, such that it withers at once. This itself immediately follows Jesus entering Jerusalem and finding no fruit there, but rather money-changers and pigeon-sellers in the temple which has become a den of robbers, and chief priests and scribes being indignant when he heals the blind and the lame, and children acclaim him as the Son of David. When Jesus returns to the city, he tells parables, in which, because the tenants of the vineyard (the people of Israel – Isaiah 5) do not give the owner (God, again Isaiah 5) its fruit, they will be destroyed, the kingdom will be taken from them, and given to a people producing its fruits (Matthew 21.33-44). The fig tree therefore represents Israel being cursed because it doesn’t bear fruit. When the disciples ask how it happened, Jesus says that if the disciples have faith, they will not only be able to do what he did to the fig tree but say to ‘this mountain’, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea’, and it will happen. What is ‘this mountain’? Mount Moriah, on which the temple has been built. This is the mountain which will be thrown into the sea. This is about God’s judgement on Israel and the destruction of the temple because of the people’s fruitlessness and her rejection of Christ. I also wonder whether this is an allusion to Psalm 46.2: ‘Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea’. This would fit, particularly if the mountains being moved into the heart of the sea was an expression of God’s judgement – “he utters his voice, the earth melts” – rather than political turmoil, a judgement which Israel in the Psalm does not fear, because God is her refuge and strength.

But this is not the first time this language has been used in Matthew. After the transfiguration, Jesus’ disciples are unable to exorcise a demon from a boy because of their little faith. Jesus tells them that if they have faith like a grain of mustard seed, they would be able to say to ‘this mountain’, ‘Move from here to there’, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you (Matthew 17.14-20). This time, the mountain is not the temple mount. What, then, is ‘this mountain’? The mountain on which Jesus was transfigured. The least we can say about it is that it is a mountain of Israel. And just as the casting out of the demon is about judging and overthrowing the devil and the works of darkness, so the moving of this mountain is again about the overthrow of that ‘faithless and twisted generation’ (v. 17) of Israel. Perhaps we can go further and say that because Moses and Elijah appeared on that mountain, talking with Jesus (signifying his fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets, and that he is the antitype of that which they are the type – a saviour, a prophet), the movement of ‘this mountain’ is about the overthrow of the old order because the new has come in Jesus.

What can we say then about Jesus’ promise to the disciples in each case that if they had faith, they could say to the mountain, ‘Move’ and it would move? It seems to me that Jesus is saying to the disciples that if they have faith (in him), no matter how small it is, they will be completely vindicated against that generation; God will hear their prayers and judge the nation of Israel and his disciples will overcome. They can therefore be confident to pray. All this is through faith in Christ. This, in turn, gives us confidence to pray for God to deliver and vindicate us against our enemies and to judge them, and that the dominion of darkness will be completely overthrown.

“You ascended on high”

At our Reformation Day Psalm-sing a couple of weeks ago, someone said a few words about why the church should recover Psalm-singing, and one of the reasons given was because it teaches us how to pray and praise God, and it pushes our theology in directions in which it wouldn’t otherwise go and which may have been unfamiliar to us. Singing Psalms promotes spiritual maturity.

In Psalm 68, the last of this morning’s appointed Psalms, David sings of the way God rescued his people from the wilderness, leads them into their inheritance, and ascends into his sanctuary, with the prospect of his enemies being crushed: ‘God will strike the heads of his enemies, the hairy crown of him who walks in his guilty ways’ (v. 21). Notice, incidentally, the link with Genesis 3.15, and God’s promise that the seed of the serpent would be crushed. The response of the proclamation of this news (v. 11) will be rulers of the world worshipping the God of Israel and David summons the kingdoms of the earth to praise the Lord:

“Because of your temple at Jerusalem
kings shall bear gifts to you.” (v. 29)

“Nobles shall come from Egypt
Cush shall hasten to stretch out her hands to God.

O kingdoms of the earth, sing to God;
sing praises to the Lord.” (vv. 31-32)

As Christians, we, too, can sing this Psalm: we have been rescued from our slavery from sin and brought into our inheritance by Jesus, who ascended on high into the heavenly sanctuary (Hebrews 9.24) and Paul says, ‘The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet,” (Romans 16.20). Moreover, we can expect that as this news is proclaimed, the consequences will be seen far and wide: kings will be converted, nobles will trust in the Lord, nations will turn to him; we are to call not just individuals, but the kingdoms of the earth to become worshippers of Christ.

Postmillennialism seems to be everywhere in the Bible.

Yesterday’s Papers Telling Yesterday’s News

Well, Saturday’s, actually.

I was sitting in the coffee room between operations this morning and as I was drinking my tea from a polystyrene cup, I flicked through Saturday’s Times. I haven’t read The Times regularly for a while now because it is a little left-wing for my tastes, but I came across three superb pieces.

The first is a refreshingly realistic comment on the US Presidency by Matthew Parris, ‘Calm down! He’s not President of the World’:

When half of mankind seems lifted by hope, nothing looks meaner than to disparage the dream. But what is this Obama mania? The world did not change for ever on Tuesday. No messiah has come among us. Miracles have not become possible. There is no new dawn. Calm down dear, it’s only a US presidential election.

Here’s my entry for Daniel Finkelstein’s Comment Central competition for an eight-word expression of hope for the President-elect of the United States. Eight words precisely. “I hope he will let us down gently.”

But oh, what a long way down: down from the crest of expectation on which Barack Obama now surfs, on to the rough shingle of daily politics. Would that the wave might subside smoothly into the gentle swell of history. Would that it were not destined to break, dashing dreams and spawning new cynicism.

But I fear it will. Writing from Australia, and reading the local and the British press reaction to this election, I am appalled by the unanimity…

So let’s get this straight. Barack Obama has not been elected President of the World; the world is not his constituency; and his responsibilities to the world are secondary. He is President-elect of an important but declining power, and his responsibilities, especially in hard times, are to its citizens. He will anyway be immensely constrained through the mechanisms of the American Constitution, by domestic opinion; his popularity may be at the mercy of the economy; and the American people, though plainly beguiled by his freshness and charm and their own despair at the alternative, have not this week been transfigured into liberal internationalists. In the day they were electing Mr Obama, many states were rejecting gay marriage by clear margins.

And this whole thing could go very sour. A politician who has subtly insinuated himself into the imaginations of millions as a secret friend and the personal champion of all their hopes for the world may find their disappointment the more bitter in the end.

For the full article, click HERE.

The second, ‘You didn’t need a certificate, Korders, old bean’ is a reflection on the recent impeachment of the Iranian Interior Minister for forging his degree from Oxford, but not really. The Wodehouse style is excellent, and while he overstates his case, he does paint an insightful picture of life after Schools:

“What ho, Giley, old bean,” he could have said, if he had only had the wit to pick up the phone. “I’m most awfully sozzers to butt in at this time of the morning, when you are no doubt busy getting outside a plateful of the old eggs and b., washed down with a loud slurp of the steaming, but there’s a little quelquechose that has been worrying me all night, and it just couldn’t wait.”

“Press on, Moody old fellow, press on,” I should have said, mopping my upper lip with a napkin and calling for a large brandy and soda to help loosen the grey troops for a spot of problem-solving. “Do not hold back, give me the full picture, and I shall endeavour to provide what solace I can.”

“Well, it’s like this,” he would have said. “There’s this cove, Kordan…” …

What is he, a Cambridge dog?”

“Not even. Could be anything. Bristol, Durham, Edinburgh. Possibly even a red-brick.”

I shuddered. Bricks, in a place of higher education. The very thought. “So then just don’t take him on,” I would have said. “You don’t have to be embarrassed about it. Here in Britain if they’re not Oxbridge we just boot ‘em out. Don’t even let ‘em in in the first place.”

The full piece can be read HERE.

The final piece, like the Vicar of Dibley, is one of those probably slightly irreverent things which one ought never to admit to finding funny. Gerard Baker parodies the story of the conclusion of the US presidential elections and his messianic reception in the style of the Authorised Version, ‘The Child returned from his travels – and the final battle was joined’:

And lo, in the west there appeared a rival, John, the Son of Cain. Now McCain was a great warrior. He was rich in wisdom and great of age, being, it was said, 936 years old. He had suffered sorely many years before in a war against the Asians. Eight years earlier he had bravely challenged the Evil Pharaoh Bush, but had been castrated by Bush’s feared henchman, Rove. He was straight of talk and, mounted on his trusty steed, a maverick, he began to find followers.

Being advanced in years, McCain needed a mate, a loyal follower who would succeed him when the time came for him to return to the Lord.

He had first considered Joe the Lieber-Man, but he was not of the same tribe as himself, but of the tribe of the Donkey. The tribesmen of the Elephant forbade him to make common cause with this renegade and so McCain sent his men far and wide to find another mate.

And they found him a woman, Sarah, from the North Country. She had dwelled long among the nomads of Wasilla and the North Slope. She was fair of face but unknown throughout the whole land, except among the Moose and the Caribou, who had grown to fear her. At first the scribes scoffed at Sarah. They mocked the way she spake and the vast family she had borne – her children were more numerous than the grains of sand in the desert or the stars in the sky…

All along, the Child smiled warmly and said little but promised salvation, and the people listened…

At last, when the scale of his great victory became clear, the rulers of all the world fell to their knees in unison and praised God, singing.

“Obama in The Highest”.

The whole thing can be accessed HERE.

More Sabbath Liturgy

Order:

Easter greeting (as a toast)
Psalm
Responses
Blessings
Collect

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Psalm 34.8-10 (Tune: Yorkshire)

O taste and you will see the LORD is good!
How happy is the man who trusts in Him!
O fear the LORD, all you He has redeemed!
For those who fear him never suffer want.
Young lions hunger; they may lack their food;
But those who seek the LORD shall have no want.

Psalm 145.15 (Tune: Rockingham)

The eyes of all upon Thee wait;
Their food in season Thou dost give;
Thine opened hand doth satisfy
The wants of all on earth that live.

Responses

Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!

Oh, fear the LORD, you his saints,
for those who fear him have no lack!

The young lions suffer want and hunger;
but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.

(Psalm 34.8-10)

How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

They feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink from the river of your delights.

For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light do we see light.

(Psalm 36.7-9)

Blessings

For my wife:

Many women have done excellently.
but you surpass them all.

Give her of the fruit of her hands,
and let her works praise her in the gates.

(Proverbs 31.29, 31)

For my sons:

May God give you of the dew of heaven
and of the fatness of the earth
and plenty of grain and wine.

(Genesis 27.28)

For my daughters:

May you become thousands of ten thousands,
and may your offspring possess the gate of those who hate them!

(Genesis 24.60)

For us all:

May God be gracious to us and bless us
and make his face to shine upon us,

That your way may be known upon earth,
your saving power among all nations.

(Psalm 67.1-2)

Collects

O God our Father, you prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies; you anoint our head with oil and our cup overflows: may goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our life, and bring us to dwell in your house for ever, through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, the door of the sheep by whom we are saved and find pasture, and who came that we may have life and have it abundantly. Amen.

(Based on Psalm 23 and John 10)

Gracious and merciful LORD, you provide food for those who fear you; you remember your covenant forever; you have shown your people the power of your works in giving them the inheritance of the nations: we give you thanks and praise with our whole heart, and pray that you would grant us to perform your trustworthy precepts with faithfulness and uprightness, for the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom and all those who practise it have a good understanding, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

(Based on Psalm 111)

O God our Father, you have made everything beautiful in its time and there is nothing better than that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil, for this your gift to man: we give you thanks, and eat our bread in joy and drink our wine with a merry heart, for in Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification, you have already approved what we do. Amen.

(Based on Ecclesiastes and Romans 5)

O God our Father, in past generations you allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways, yet you did not leave yourself without witness, for you did good by giving us rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying our hearts with food and gladness: we therefore turn from vain idols to you, the living God, who made the heaven and earth and the sea and all that is in them; we honour you as God and give thanks to you, through your Son whom you raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come. Amen.

(Based on Acts 14, Romans 1 and 1 Thessalonians 1)

Pregnant women, magnets, and justification by faith alone

I am making the most of the Bodleian Library and enjoying the Revd Dr Stephen Hampton’s Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford 2008, ISBN 9780199533367). He shows that, following the Restoration, there persisted a Reformed tradition within the Church of England, despite contrary doctrinal tendencies. This was a peculiarly Anglican Reformed tradition, sharing its heritage with the continental Reformed, but developing it in a particular direction, with its own distinctives arising from its episcopalian context with an appointed liturgy, such that ministers were happy preaching irresistible grace and limited atonement alongside the value of the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer and beautiful church buildings, and endowing the construction of organs in churches. Hampton uses the wonderful phrase, “Reformed divinity with Restoration curlicues.” I confess to being somewhat sympathetic to this tradition. The Reformed element within the post-Restoration Church of England was a minority, but a significant minority, and it included bishops, professors in the Universities such as Barlow, the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in Oxford, and heads of houses including Tully at Teddy Hall. Intriguingly, it also encompassed individuals from a group of natural philosophers at Oxford who would go on to form the Royal Society, including one Robert Boyle, who lends his name to one of the gas laws, beloved (or not) of GCSE and A-level physics students (assuming it’s still in the curriculum): Boyle’s Law states that at constant temperature in a closed system, the product of the pressure and volume of a gas are constant. Anglican Reformed divinity was not only articulated in polemic writings, but also more widely. In Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God (1659), cited in chapter 3 of Hampton’s book, Boyle wrote the following, about the relationship of salvation, faith and good works:

I said, Lindamor, that faith was the grand condition required, in God’s free grant of eternal life. Not that I would ascribe anything to a lazy, speculative; & barren faith, in opposition to the lively one, which is called by the Apostle… faith operating by love; since I am informed by St James, that the divorce of faith and works is as destructive to religion, as that of the soul and body is to life; but that I was willing to mind you, that though true faith… be ever the pregnant mother of good works; yet are not those works the cause, but the effects of God’s first love to us… As, though a needle’s pointing at the pole be, by being an effect, an argument of its having been invigorated by the lodestone, or received influence from some other magnetic body; yet is not that respect unto the north the cause, but the operation of the iron’s being drawn by the attractive material.

Remember, Remember

Until 1859, by Act of Parliament November 5th was kept as as a day of thanksgiving for the “joyful day of deliverance”, when the Roman conspiracy to perpetrate an act of terrorism against the King and Parliament, was thwarted. Moreover, it was the day when William of Orange landed in Brixham, proclaiming, “The liberties of England and the Protestant religion I will maintain.” Accordingly, there used to be some special prayers in the Book of Common Prayer, to be said on November 5. I reproduce them here for your personal devotions:

Instead of the first Collect at Morning Prayer:

Almighty God, who hast in all ages shewed thy power and mercy in the miraculous and gracious deliverance of thy Church, and in the protection of righteous and religious Kings and States, professing they holy and eternal truth, from the wicked conspiracies and malicious practices of all the enemies thereof; We yield thee our unfeigned thanks and praise for the wonderful and mighty deliverance of our gracious Sovereign King James the First, the Queen, the Prince, and all the Royal Branches, with the Nobility, Clergy and Commons of England, then assembled in Parliament, by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter, in a most barbarous and savage manner, beyond the examples of former ages. From this unnatural conspiracy, not our merit, but thy mercy; not our foresight, but thy providence, delivered us: And therefore not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto they Name be ascribed all honour and glory, in all Churches of the Saints, from generation to generation, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Accept also, most gracious God, of our unfeigned thanks, for filling our hearts again with joy and gladness, after the time that thou hast afflicted us, and putting a new song into our mouths, by bringing his Majesty King William upon this Day, for the Deliverance of our Church and Nation from Popish Tyranny and arbitrary Power. We adore the wisdom and justice of thy providence, which so timely interposed in our extreme danger, and disappointed all the designs of our enemies. We beseech thee, give us such a lively and lasting sense of what thou didst then, and hast since that time done for us, that we may not grown secure and careless in our obedience, by presuming upon thy great and undeserved goodness; but that it may lead us to repentance, and move us to be the more diligent and zealous in all the duties of our Religion, which thou hast in a marvellous manner preserved to us. Let truth and justice, brotherly kindness and charity, devotion and piety, concord and unity, with all other virtues, so flourish among us, that they may be the stability of our times, and make this Church a praise in the earth. All which we humbly beg for the sake of our blessed Lord and Saviour. Amen.

After the Litany:

Almighty God and heavenly Father, who of thy gracious providence, and tender mercy towards us, didst prevent the malice and imaginations of our enemies, by discovering and confounding their horrible and wicked enterprize, plotted and intended this day to have been executed against the King, and whole State of England, for the subversion of the Government and Religion established among us; and didst likewise upon this day wonderfully conduct thy servant King William and bring him safely into England, to preserve us from the attempts of our enemies to bereave us of our Religion and Laws; We most humbly praise and magnify thy most glorious Name for thy unspeakable goodness towards us, expressed in both these acts of thy mercy. We confess it has been of thy mercy alone that we are not consumed; for our sins have cried to heaven against us, and our iniquities justly called for vengeance upon us. But thou hast not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us after our iniquities; nor given us over, as we deserved, to be a prey to our enemies; but hast in mercy delivered us from their malice, and preserved us from death and destruction. Let the consideration of this thy repeated goodness, O Lord, work in us true repentance, that iniquity may not be our ruin: And increase in us more and more a lively faith and love, fruitful in all holy obedience, that thou mayest still continue thy favour, with the light of thy Gospel, to us and our posterity for ever more; and that for thy dear Son’s sake Jesus Christ, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

Another prayer:

O Lord, who didst this day discover the snares of death that were laid for us, and didst wonderfully deliver us from the same; Be thou still our mighty Protector, and scatter our enemies that delight in blood: Infatuate and defeat their counsels, abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices. Strengthen the hands of our gracious Sovereign King George, and all that are put in authority under him, with judgment and justice, to cut off all such workers of iniquity, as turn Religion into Rebellion, and Faith into Faction; that they may never prevail against us, or triumph in the ruin of thy church among us: but that our gracious Sovereign and his Realms, being preserved in thy true Religion, and by thy merciful goodness protected in the same, we may all duly serve thee, and give thee thanks in thy holy Congregation, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

In the Communion Service, instead of the Collect for the Day:

Eternal God, and our most mightly Protector, we thy unworthy servants do humbly present ourselves before thy Majesty, acknowledging thy power, wisdom and goodness, in preserving the King, and of the Three Estates of the Realm of England assembled in Parliament, from the destruction this day intended against them. Make us, we beseech thee, truly thankful for this, and for all other thy great mercies towards us; particularly for thy making this day against memorable, by a fresh instance of thy loving-kindness towards us. We bless thee for giving his late Majesty King William a safe arrival here, and for making all opposition fall before him, till he became our King and Governor. We beseech thee to protect and defend our Sovereign King George, and all the Royal Family, from all Treasons and Conspiracies: Preserve him in all thy faith, fear and love; prosper his reign with long happiness here on earth; and crown him with everlasting glory hereafter, through Jesus Christ our only Saviour and Redeemer. Amen.

After the prayer for the Church Militant:

O God, whose Name is excellent in all the earth, and thy glory above the heavens; who, on this day, didst miraculously preserve our Church and State from the secret contrivance and hellish malice of Popish Conspirators; and on this day also didst begin to give us a mightly Deliverance from the open tyranny and oppression of the same cruel and blood-thirsty enemies; We bless and adore thy glorious Majesty, as for the former, so for this thy later marvellous loving-kindness to our church and Nation, in the preservation of our Religion and Liberties. And we humbly pray that the devout sense of this thy repeated mercy may renew and increase in us a spirit of love and thankfulness to thee its only Author; a spirit of peaceable submission and obedience to our gracious Sovereign Lord King George; and a spirit of fervent zeal for our holy Religion, which thou hast so wonderfully rescued, and established a Blessing to us and our posterity. And this we beg for Jesus Christ his sake. Amen.

More from the Church Puritans

With the current problems in the Church of England at the moment, the Puritans, longing to see the church of their day further reformed, provide us with a model for a way forward in our day, as we see error and wrong practice and seek to conform with God’s will in Scripture: remaining within the church and participating in it, continuing to preach the word and separating from the sin, rather than separating from the church and the faithful who remain in it.

Extracts from Patrick Collinson, From Cranmer to Sancroft:

In East Anglia, as in other parts of England and, for that matter, Western Europe, the children of the Protestant Reformation, not merely readers of the Bible but virtual inhabitants of a biblical mental landscape, drew their inspiration and understanding from two strands of discourse which were interwoven in their experience, but interwoven as they moved against each other in almost contrary directions. These strands were two ecclesiologies, both authentically biblical in inspiration. According to the first, the church was equivalent to the whole people in a covenanted relation to God. ‘You have not chosen me but I have chosen you’, with the added inference, ‘whether you like it or not’: an idea which the reception of Calvinism reinforced. This led to the equation of the nation, the church in the sense of the whole circumcised (baptised) community, and Israel as essentially one, the town, be it London or Ipswich, Jerusalem: or rather the reinforcement of that notion, which was older than the Reformation. And since that identification was derived from the prophetical books of the Old Testament, where Israel is castigated for its apostasy, it mattered in a sense not at all that the English nation… failed to live up to these expectations, or to behave as if it really was a chosen and covenanted people of God. That was only to be expected. But the pulpit, with its dire warnings and threats of impending judgement, was by no means complacent, for all that…

The contrary tendency or strand shrank the church for all practical and especially experimental purposes to the pious remnant, that small minority (it was always assumed in those religious milieux which were ancestral to East Anglican Dissent to be a small minority) of ‘Christians indeed’: those who were seen to repent of their sins, to exercise lively faith and (perhaps the critical criterion) to gather with others of the same kind and persuasion in self-selective, exclusive company, various kinds of ‘conventicle’, sometimes covenanted… Calvinism underwrote these attitudes also, with its insistence on selective and prejudicial election.

It is important to appreciate that in the period.. which lies behind 1640 and perhaps behind the late 1630s, the cord composed of these two strands held together and took the strain… The private meetings of the godly few, the conventicle, had a separatist potential and, short of separation, had divisive and socially damaging effects, but it was not, for the most part, actually separatist. Private duties were held not to exclude public, nor vice versa. That is to say that a kind of Dissent, and certainly a religious tendency which was defined by its difference from the religion of ‘most people’, was contained within the national and parochial church, not erected outside it. That is not necessarily to say that it was tidily or comfortably so contained in all circumstances. – pp. 27-28

Among the non-separated, the Puritans most properly speaking… their preachers taught that it was necessary to go to church and even to receive the sacrament alongside supposedly ‘wicked’ and ‘irreligious’ neighbours. The law required it, amd St Paul writing to the Corinthians appeared to commend it. The situation was admittedly gravely deformed. The authorities ought to have separated out the ungodly and unworthy, as Abraham had sent Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness. But if this was not done, the remedy was not in the hands of private men. Thomas Hooker taught that the public congregation was like common pastures, open to every man’s cattle. ‘Suppose they that are in authority will not separate them… yet the saints of God should not separate from the congregation. It is pitiful indeed, and the thing is troublesome and tedious to a gracious heart (and we must mourn for it), but being [so], it is not in my power; I must not abstain’. – p. 123

One of the most uncompromising denunciations of separation came from the pen of a certain Randall Bate… Bate, while professing to love them as persons, rebuked the Separatists for a blind zeal which was self-willed, even Satanic. ‘Men must not separate till the Lord separate for gods people must follow the Lord, not goe before him’. ‘This kind of separation obscures the good providence of god towards the land, which gives some liberty in his service, but with some paines, cost and other crosses, which usually accompany the pure worship of god. This is no small sin, to bereave the Lord of so great mercy in spirituall blessings, as he hath shewed towards our land’. In Bate’s perception, and it was a perception widely shared, what he called ‘totall separation’ (and it would be accurate to call Bate a semi-separatist) was a separation not from evil but from the great deal of good which was to be found in the parish assemblies, to separate indeed from the true children of God…

A telling part of the anti-Separatist polemic was to insist that opponents of Separatism separated not from the Church but from notorious sins within the Church, sins which ranged from intolerable but discardable ceremonies to the moral contagion incurred in the course of unnecessary ‘company keeping’, so-called ‘good fellowship’ which was nothing of the kind. ‘Though a corporall separation cannot be had, yet in spirit thou must separate thyself.’ This was said to be the harder, more painful way. ‘We suffer for separating within the Church.’ – pp. 137-138

Edmund Staunton was said to have declaimed against Separatism as England’s ‘incurable wound’: ‘It will never be well within the Church of God in this Nation so long as Christians are so prone to division and separation’. Arthur Hildersham was called ‘the hammer of schismatics’… Thomas Gataker’s life of Bradshaw (‘and indeed to separatists he was ever very adverse’) quotes him as declaiming in a public sermon: ‘It is the great mercy of God toward us that we have no cause to seek the word in deserts and wildernesses, in woods and caves and desolate mountains, but such worthy edifices as these to assemble in, dedicated only to this use’. Even among Puritans more deeply alienated from the establishment than ministers of the mainstream we find the same aversion from what the radical Scot Alexander Leighton called the ‘quicksands of Separation’. – p. 165

Austin Woolrych also notes, in Britain in Revolution (p. 44), that ‘church-puritans, who constituted the great majority, were aware of the dangers of separation’ and he distinguishes these from those ‘who rebelled against the whole conception of a national church embracing the godly and ungodly alike, and split off to form congregations purporting to consist only of ‘visible saints”, and in whose eyes ‘the only true church of Christ was a community of men and women who, under their chosen pastor, entered into a mutual covenant to ‘walk together in the ways of the Lord’ and to submit to a common discipline.’