06Nov

Celebration of the Word for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost–All Saints Sunday

Today’s music is appropriate for the celebration of the Feast of All Saints, which falls on Nov 1, and is often transferred to the following Sunday. All Saints is a church holiday celebrated by Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and many other Protestant communities, and it commemorates the witness of the holy men and women of God throughout history whose lives (and often deaths as martyrs) serve as a witness to God. (Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate a similar holiday but closer to Easter).

Pentecost 22nd Sunday 2022

Call to Worship: Psalm 149:1
Hymn: “For all the Saints” by the congregation of Immanuel Congregational Church, in the public domain at Archive.org.
First Reading: Job 19:23-27a, King James Bible.
Psalm 17:1-9, King James Bible.
Motet: Tomas Luis da Victoria (1548-1611): “O quam gloriosum”, sung at St. Mary of the Visitation Catholic Church in Ottumwa, Iowa. The choir is the Cantus Angelicus Choral Society. This was in the public domain, at Archive.org. Translation: “O, how glorious is the kingdom, in which all the saints rejoice with Christ! Arrayed in white robes, they follow the Lamb, wherever He goes.”
Second Reading: 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17, World English Bible.
Organ interlude: “At the Lamb’s High Feast we Sing” (Salzburg)
Gospel: Luke 20:27-38, World English Bible.
The Lord’s Prayer: Chanted by unknown congregation, uploaded to YouTube by “LabourerFaith”, and used in accordance with Creative Commons License.
Blessing: The Aaronic Blessing from Numbers 6 (King James Version).
Organ postlude: Marc Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704): “Te Deum Prelude in D Major”, performed on the 1907 Voit organ at Diakoniekirche Luther in Mannheim Neckarstadt West, uploaded to YouTube by “RomanticChurchOrgan” and used in accordance with Creative Commons License.

The Bible passages were recorded by Librivox, and are in the public domain. Readings correspond to the Revised Common Lectionary. All audio files are given with attribution where known.

17Aug

“Today We Remember Our Manners”

The “Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary” or “The Falling Asleep of Mary” is kept on August 15, in some fashion, by many churches. The Roman Catholics celebrate the “Assumption of Mary”, the Orthodox communities honor the “Dormition of Mary”. Much could be said about the various ideas surrounding the departure of Mary from her earthly life. However, when Aug 15 rolls around, the primary thing that leaps to my mind is an old sermon that was delivered by the late Canon John Andrew, in his retirement from the position of rector of St. Thomas Church in New York City. The message instilled in me, a Protestant, a greater appreciation for Marian devotion.

“Today we remember our manners” He intoned. “We pay our dues. We thank God for the gift to the world of the Mother of Christ whose departure for God we celebrate.”

I recall Father Andrew urging Christians to avoid two errors. On the one hand, it is “stingy” to pay her no respect at all: “She gave Christ birth, and bore him into the world of you and me. She taught him to talk. She taught him to say his prayers. I wonder if it was she who first taught him the ‘Our Father’? There was no thought in the early Church that by honoring Mary, spite would be done to her Son and Savior. Christ would lose no iota of worship for having his Mother honored in this way and it a gross begrudging to think otherwise.”

On the other hand, “What can make you uncomfortable, and rightly so, are the sentimental flights of fancy and the sugarcoating of the enthusiasts who took her role out of all proportion to her human state of creatureliness, and tinseled her with quasi-divinity. She must shudder at the attempt.”

“All we celebrate today is Heaven’s welcome of her when her earthly life was over.”

Amen.

(A transcript of this sermon from August 2013 is available at St Thomas’ sermon archive).

29May

RIP Ravi Zacharias

It is a rare person who can step onto a college campus, wade into a crowd of cynics, and hold forth a defense of classic Christianity with wit, compassion and reason. Mr. Zacharias was unexcelled at this particular form of Christian apologetics. As another giant of apologetics, Alister McGrath, wrote in a tribute:

“Ravi Zacharias (1946–2020) will be remembered for his landmark contributions to Christian apologetics, especially his concern to connect the gospel with the life of the mind. … Zacharias’s approach was to demonstrate that Christianity makes rational sense on the one hand, and is able to offer deeply satisfying existential answers to life’s grand questions on the other.”

Born in India to a family of Christian converts, he did not initially embrace the faith and nearly committed suicide as an atheist at age 17. While in the hospital, a bible given to him by a youth pastor turned his life around.

On the RZIM website, his daughter Sarah Davis noted, “He perpetually marveled that God took a seventeen-year-old skeptic, defeated in hopelessness and unbelief, and called him into a life of glorious hope and belief in the truth of Scripture—a message he would carry across the globe for 48 years.”

He left India and later studied in Canada and the U.S, receiving a master of divinity at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois, where he was influenced by John W. Montgomery and Norman Geisler.

In turn, he became a prolific writer and speaker, and founded Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, with the mission of “helping the thinker believe and the believer think.” His efforts have influenced many others, ranging from current Evangelical leaders, to a devout roommate of mine in medical school, to football star and motivational speaker Tim Tebow.

Notable milestones of his career include rising to prominence at a conference for evangelists hosted by Billy Graham in 1983, speaking at the Veritas Forum at Harvard University in 1992, and speaking to the academic community of Virginia Tech after the tragic shooting incident in 2007. He controversially accepted an offer in 2004 to engage in a major dialogue with the Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City.

He died of cancer at age 74.

Remembering Eric Liddell

A longstanding tradition dating to the early church is to gather at the anniversary of the death of a martyr. Today we remember the witness of a remarkable man from the 20th century.

Seventy-five years ago today, Eric Liddell breathed his last, succumbing to a brain tumor while in Japanese custody at a prisoner of war camp in occupied China. “It’s complete surrender,” he is said to have uttered, referring to his Christian missionary work.

Liddel is best known to most people via Ian Charleson’s portrayal in the classic movie “Chariots of Fire”. This academy award winning drama covers an early part of his life when he had decided to run competitively, ultimately representing Britain in the Olympics. “I believe that God made me for a purpose. But He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure” he tells his disapproving sister in the film. (His sister’s objection to Liddell’s running is one of several points of creative license—she actually supported his athletic career).

After years of training, Liddell was selected to represent Britain in the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Learning that the heats for the 100 meter dash were to be held on Sunday, he refused to run as he felt that this would dishonor the Sabbath. He instead ran and won the 400 meter dash.

In 1925, Liddell returned to China, where he had been born, and took up the role of a missionary. He taught at an Anglo-Chinese school for wealthy Chinese students, was superintendent of the Sunday School at Union Church in Tianjin, and built the Minyuan Stadium, modeled after the Chelsea’s football grounds.

In 1932, following his ordination to ministry, he married Florence Mackenzie, a daughter of Canadian missionaries. The couple had three daughters. As World War 2 broke out, a pregnant Florence left China for Canada. Eric then took a position at a rural mission station in Xiaozhang, alongside his brother, a physician.

When the Japanese took over, Liddell went back to Tianjin for a time. In 1943 he was sent to the Weihsien internment camp along with other missionaries and foreigners. He became an organizer of prisoners and a respected leader among them. Children called him “Uncle Eric”. In 1945, he became ill, and was found to have a brain tumor. He died February 21, and was buried beneath a small wooden cross in the garden behind the Japanese officers’ quarters.

Langdon Gilkey, who would later become a theologian, said of Liddell: “Often in an evening I would see him bent over a chessboard or a model boat, or directing some sort of square dance – absorbed, weary and interested, pouring all of himself into this effort to capture the imagination of these penned-up youths. He was overflowing with good humour and love for life, and with enthusiasm and charm. It is rare indeed that a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.”

18Mar

Why We Should Honor St. Patrick

”The difference between Patrick’s magic and the magic of the druids is that in Patrick’s world all beings and events come from the hand of a good God, who loves human beings and wishes them success.”

”With the Irish — even with the kings — he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.”

Whether or not you are Irish, or Roman Catholic, or even Christian, it might be argued that you in fact owe a lot to St. Patrick. Christians—of all varieties—should be especially grateful to him. While it is hard to tease fact from myth, it is clear that this giant of the faith was instrumental in converting the Celtic people of Ireland to Christianity.

These Christians in turn would be instrumental in planting centers of learning in continental Europe after the collapse of Rome. This is an argument that was made in a delightful little book I read many years ago: Thomas Cahill’s How The Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Anchor Books, 1995). His introduction summarizes his thesis:

”Ireland, a little island at the edge of Europe that has known neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment—in some ways, a Third World country with, as John Betjeman claimed, a Stone Age culture—had one moment of unblemished glory. For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the Mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly refounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.”

Not all will agree with the strongest form of this assertion (after all, some of the classic writings of antiquity may have survived the predations of barbarian hordes; furthermore some credit is probably owed also to Islamic scholars and the Byzantine empire). Nonetheless Irish monks clearly played a role that had been been overlooked and under-appreciated.

Today I tip my green plastic hat to the Irish, and to the man who in middle age returned as a missionary to a people that he could easily have despised for kidnapping him at age 16.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

23Feb

Agreeing to Disagree

I recall an old slogan:
“In essentials, unity.
In nonessentials, diversity.
In all things, love!”

The early bishop and martyr Polycarp, whose feast is celebrated on Feb 23, was involved in a dispute that is a model of Christian brotherhood in the midst of disagreement. The dispute is known by the obscure name “Quartodecimanism” from a Latin term meaning “fourteenth”.

The controversy arose because Christians in Jerusalem and Asia Minor, following guidance from the Apostle John, chose to celebrate Passover on the 14th day of the “first month”. They felt that the crucifixion of Jesus should carry the emphasis, and that this day should be the principle feast for Christians. On the other hand, churches in and around Rome had changed the principle celebration to the following Sunday (as is the commonplace today for most Christians). The dispute became quite heated at times, leading almost to excommunications.

We have a record of how Polycarp and his opponent treated each other on this issue:

And when the blessed Polycarp was at Rome in the time of Anicetus, and they disagreed a little about certain other things, they immediately made peace with one another, not caring to quarrel over this matter. For neither could Anicetus persuade Polycarp not to observe what he had always observed with John the disciple of our Lord, and the other apostles with whom he had associated; neither could Polycarp persuade Anicetus to observe it as he said that he ought to follow the customs of the presbyters that had preceded him. But though matters were in this shape, they communed together, and Anicetus conceded the administration of the eucharist in the church to Polycarp, manifestly as a mark of respect. And they parted from each other in peace, both those who observed, and those who did not, maintaining the peace of the whole church.

(Eusebius, quoting a letter by Irenaus, available at earlychurchtexts.com)

Eventually the debate was settled, and the Roman practice prevailed, though a few holdouts persisted into the fourth century. Today Easter Sunday is the biggest feast on the Calendar for Christians throughout the world.

Other sources:
Campbell, T. (1907). Pope St. Anicetus. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved February 25, 2018 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01514a.htm

09Oct

Jacob’s Ladder and Cosmology

NGC-604 Nebula, located in M33 Galaxy; The destruction of an old star provides the materials for the birth of new stars.

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. (Genesis 28:12)

The recently observed feast of St Michael and All Angels (or “Michaelmas”, Sept 29, 2018) reminded me of something. The Old Testament reading from Genesis 28 conveyed the eerie and interesting story of Jacob’s dream of a nexus between Heaven and Earth, which occurred while he was on the run—he was a fugitive fleeing for his life after tricking his brother Esau. God showed him a vision of spiritual emissaries ascending and descending upon earth, and reassured him: “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go”. When the terrified Jacob awoke, he thought,

”How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

A few years ago I was participating in a very interesting observatory experience atop the peak of Mt Lemmon in Arizona. My family shivered under blankets and looked at distant galaxies and nebulae through the very powerful telescopes operated by the University of Arizona.

Later, our astronomer gave what was clearly supposed to be an inspiring pep talk. First he tried to drive home the nearly unimaginable immensity of our universe. Our sun is one of 250 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is one of at least a couple hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. We are latecomers to an evolutionary process that has been ongoing for billions of years before our arrival on the scene. Our matter, the stuff of which we are made, was forged out of the explosive destruction of older stars. Our bodies, while we still draw breath, are furthermore bathed in, and replenished by, cosmic particles blown off by ancient supernovae. While this reflection may tend to make one feel insignificant, like a mere lonely speck in the vastness of the greater Cosmos, we can take some heart: “We are made of the same stardust,” he concluded, “and therefore in a very real way, we are connected to each other.”

Well-meaning as this is, the stardust platitude is a cold comfort to offer people in exchange for trading in Theism. (I don’t believe that embrace of the insights of science demands a rejection of God, but some do). Scientific materialism, as a worldview, offers little psychological benefit beyond the existentialist’s “freedom” of finite beings facing oblivion—you are a cosmic accident, so suck it up and and you can be your own “God” for a little while. Nothing actually matters, and no rules really apply to you. There is no Creator. Nothing is all that special about Earth or your place in it. There is no afterlife. You will be long forgotten by fellow humans, probably within your lifetime, but —“Hey, stardust!”

Christianity teaches that while humans indeed are small, this is not the entire story. We have a dignity that we don’t even begin to comprehend, and don’t deserve. Whatever else can be said about the mysterious account of “Jacob’s Ladder” it is this: Our world is indeed loved and cared for by the God of the Universe. We are more than just bits of congealed stardust in a forgotten and remote part of the Cosmos. Behind the scenes, powerful emissaries from the spiritual realms travel back and forth, signifying that God desires and maintains a connection with us. (Maybe we will learn that we are only one of trillions of worlds teeming with sentient life, but we are by no means abandoned). If God has this kind of connection with the remote and diminutive planet Earth, then take heart! He knows and loves you!

Praise be to God!

28Aug

Luther’s Gift of Music

Martin Luther and his family by G.A. Spangenberg (1866) Musée de Leipzig

“Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise.” (Martin Luther, 1483-1548)

The reformer Martin Luther was not merely a scholar and theologian, but also a talented musician and composer. He sang and played the lute (as pictured above). As the father of the Protestant Reformation, he pushed for music instruction throughout Germany. He guided and shaped music as an expression of the reformed faith. We can give him credit for many of the musical innovations we now take for granted, such as congregational singing of hymns.

Luther collaborated with Johann Walter, singer, composer, and choirmaster to the Elector of Saxony, and together they published the first Lutheran hymn books. These hymns were instantly popular and spread quickly and widely. Among the most popular German publications in the middle of the 16th century were the Achliederbuch (1524), Enchiridion (1524), and Geystliche Gesang Buchleyn (1524). The Rev Kurt Egbert wrote:

Luther’s hymns were very popular and were sung at home, in the fields, in the marketplace, on the way to work and at group gatherings of various kinds. In the churches the singing was led by the choir (not accompanied by the organ). As hymnals were made available to the congregations, the hymns were often sung antiphonally. The stanzas were divided between the congregation, choir and organ. This is a practice which only recently has become fairly popular in Lutheran churches after a long period of neglect.(The 1983 essay “Martin Luther, God’s Music Man” is available here)

Luther’s reform of music initially allowed the use of as much or as little Latin as each church saw fit. He imported Roman Catholic music freely, often changing or translating the text into German. In 1523 he undertook to write a German version of the Mass.

He often wrote powerfully of music’s ability to elevate the human spirit. In Luther’s famous 1538 Foreword to Georg Rhau’s Collection, “Symphoniae iucundae”, his joyous thoughts crescendo to a passion that looks beyond this world to a heavenly dance:

I would extol the precious gift of God in the noble art of music, but I scarcely know where to begin or end… This precious gift has been bestowed on men alone to remind them that they are created to praise and magnify the Lord. But when natural music is sharpened and polished by art, then one begins to see with amazement the great and perfect wisdom of God in his wonderful work of music, where one voice takes a simple part and around it sing three, four, or five other voices, leaping, springing round about, marvelously gracing the simple part, like a folk dance in heaven with friendly bows, embracing, and hearty swinging of partners.

An explosion of musical creativity continued in the Lutheran churches for the next few hundred years. Riches of beauty flowed from the pens of such luminous composers as Dietrich Buxtehude, Samuel Scheidt, Heinrich Schütz, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Felix Mendelssohn. The Anglican Church, receiving Luther’s insights, evolved its own beautiful musical traditions in the capable hands of William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, and others.

Among the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, Luther’s enthusiastic embrace of music stands in stark contrast to the attitudes of some of the others. To be sure, Luther felt that music should serve the word—he advocated singing one note per syllable, for example—but he didn’t eliminate music. Many of the reformers who followed Luther took a dimmer view of music. Some banned organs and other musical instruments in their churches, and even eliminated music altogether in favor of the spoken word. In Geneva, John Calvin permitted only the a capella singing of metrical psalms. While I will not denigrate the faith, devotion, and spiritual insights of the other reformers, music in the Protestant Church clearly owes a deep debt to Martin Luther.

As a recent essay summarizes:
For Luther to “say and sing” was a single concept resulting from the inevitable eruption of joyful song in the heart of the redeemed. In contrast to some other reformers who saw music as always potentially troublesome and in need of careful control and direction, Luther, in the freedom of the Gospel, could exult in the power of music to proclaim the Word and to touch the heart and mind of man. (Paul Schilf, PhD at Christ Lutheran Church, Sioux Falls)

I recall that when I was a junior in college I visited an Anglican church whose worthy choir was performing Anton Bruckner’s “Os Justi” (not a reformed work, of course). As the treble voices soared, the man next to me muttered, “You would have to have ears of wax not to be moved by that.” Martin Luther expressed a similar sentiment:

“A person…who does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.”

09May

95 Theses: Spiraling Out of Control

Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology, and ordinary lecturer at Wittenberg, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place. Therefore he asks that those who cannot be present and dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter.

When Martin Luther posted his “95 Theses” on the church door at Wittenberg, he may have intended no more than an academic dispute among faculty at the local university. At the time, he was Professor of Moral Theology, and the “Theses” were in Latin, the language of the academy. There is debate about when, or even if, this nailing of the theses occurred.

The drama of Luther walking through Wittenberg with his hammer and his nails is very, very unlikely to have happened,” says Professor Andrew Pettegree, an expert on the Reformation from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. “The castle church door was the normal noticeboard of the university. This was not an act of defiance on Luther’s part, it was simply what you did to make a formal publication. It would probably have been pasted to the door rather than nailed up.” (Time).

Luther’s bold statements were circulated widely among scholars, and soon “went viral” (The Economist). His work was translated into German, without Luther’s knowledge, and thanks to the printing press, within weeks his ideas had circulated throughout Germany and beyond.

“They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses. But writing in scholarly Latin and then translating it into German was not the best way to address the wider public. Luther wrote that he “should have spoken far differently and more distinctly had I known what was going to happen.”

You are surprised that I did not send them to you. But I did not want to circulate them widely. I only intended to submit them to a few close friends for discussion, and if they disapproved of the Theses, to suppress them. I wanted to publish them, only if they met with approval. But now they are being printed and spread everywhere far beyond my expectation, a result that I regret. It is not that I am against telling the people the truth, in fact that is all that I want, but this is not the proper way to instruct the people. For I have doubts about some of the Theses, and others I would have put much differently and more cogently, and some I would have omitted, had I known what was to come. Still, the spread of my Theses shows what people everywhere really think of Indulgences… (Martin Luther, Letter to Christoph Schuerl, March 5, 1518)

Nonetheless, he persisted in advocating his views, and at first, not much happened. The Bishop of Brandenburg merely passed Luther’s letter and the Theses on up to his superiors in Rome. Pope Leo’s initial reaction was “Brother Martin is a man of fine genius, and this outbreak is a mere squabble of envious monks.” Later he wrote, “It is a drunken German who wrote the Theses; when sober he will change his mind.”

However, as the furor for reform continued to brew, Luther was quickly viewed by the church hierarchy as a threat. He was called to recant his views, refused, and was excommunicated.

Whatever Luther’s original intent, the 95 Theses brought sudden fame to Luther and his ideas, and precipitated a break with Roman Catholicism. Events quickly spun out of the control of either Luther or the Pope. The Indulgence controversy was the soil out of which a political, social, and ecclesiastical revolution grew. A quiet academic dispute went viral. The ideas of Luther challenged the established order and remade Europe.

Addendum:

The traditional date of the start of the Protestant Reformation, October 31, 1517, more properly reflects the day that Luther mailed a letter, along with a copy of the Theses, to Albert, the archbishop of Brandenburg. This letter read, in part:

Under your most distinguished name, papal indulgences are offered over all the land for the construction of St. Peter … I do not so much complain about the quacking of the preachers which I haven’t heard, but I bewail the gross misunderstanding among the people which comes from these preachers … Evidently the poor souls believe that when they have bought indulgence letters they are assured salvation. They are likewise convinced that souls escape purgatory as soon as they have placed a contribution in the chest.

The first and only duty of the bishops is to see that the people learn the gospel and the love of Christ … for on no occasion has Christ ordered that indulgences should be preached … what a horror, what a danger for a bishop to permit the loud noise of indulgences among his people, while the gospel is silenced …

20Apr

Saint Anselm of Canterbury

(Statue of Anselm at Canterbury Cathedral, taken May 2010, by Ealdgyth, obtained from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons 3.0 license)

If you have taken a philosophy class somewhere, you probably encountered this great thinker from antiquity, and his famous definition of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. In his work, proslogion, he endeavored to demonstrate God’s existence in what has since been labelled the “ontological argument”. Basically, If you can conceive of something like God, defined as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”, but God doesn’t actually exist, then anything that does exist would be greater. Hence God must exist in reality and not just in thought. It’s clever, though it can be (and has been) punctured by others, such as Immanuel Kant. Variants of the argument have been put forward by Descartes, Leibniz, and Goedel. Even today the argument provides grist for reflection. Few would regard it as an absolute proof of God, but perhaps in its best forms it demonstrates that belief in God isn’t unreasonable, as the loudest screamers of the atheist community would insist. ¹

Another sign of the importance of St. Anselm is that in the divide between East and West in Christianity, the theological focus in the West since St Anselm has been upon the mystery of the atonement. In his book Cur Deus Homo (“Why God Man?”) Anselm reflects upon the atonement. Jesus is regarded by the church universal as a being with two natures–“fully God and fully Man”. As St Athanasius put it centuries earlier:

…For the right Faith is, that we believe and confess,
that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;
God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds;
and Man of the substance of his Mother, born in the world;
Perfect God and perfect Man,
of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.

(You may read the Athanasian creed in its entirety here).

Anselm started with this accepted christology and asked, “why?” His answer became a powerful reflection upon the nature of the atonement. The thesis is essentially that we humans owe a cosmic debt that we cannot pay. Only God is qualified to pay off that debt, but can’t do so because He doesn’t owe it. With Jesus you have one who both owes the debt and can pay it.

Anselm (1033-1109) joined the Benedictine monastery at Bec in Normandy, in 1060, rising to become Abbot. Not long afterward, England was conquered by Anselm’s king, William the Conqueror. Many of Anselm’s friends went to England, and he made trips to oversee property belonging to Bec. In 1093 Anselm became Archbishop of Canterbury. His years in Canterbury were stormy, as he clashed with the English monarch over what is known to history as the “investiture controversy”, and twice had to go into exile. After his death he was canonized, and is today regarded as the father of scholasticism. He is considered one of the “doctors of the church” (from Latin docere, “to teach”), men regarded as great intellects who profoundly influenced Western Christianity.

In addition to the heady philosophical treatises, we have the following prayer from Saint Anselm:

O Lord my God,
Teach my heart this day where and how to see you,
Where and how to find you.
You have made me and remade me,
And you have bestowed on me
All the good things I possess,
And still I do not know you.
I have not yet done that
For which I was made.
Teach me to seek you,
For I cannot seek you
Unless you teach me,
Or find you
Unless you show yourself to me.
Let me seek you in my desire,
Let me desire you in my seeking.
Let me find you by loving you,
Let me love you when I find you.

(Read more at BeliefNet).

We also have a song of St Anselm,
Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you:
you are gentle with us as a mother with her children;
Often you weep over our sins and our pride:
tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgement.
You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds:
in sickness you nurse us,
and with pure milk you feed us.
Jesus, by your dying we are born to new life:
by your anguish and labour we come forth in joy.
Despair turns to hope through your sweet goodness:
through your gentleness we find comfort in fear.
Your warmth gives life to the dead:
your touch makes sinners righteous.
Lord Jesus, in your mercy heal us:
in your love and tenderness remake us.
In your compassion bring grace and forgiveness:
for the beauty of heaven may your love prepare us.
(From James Kiefer).

A Prayer for the Feast Day of Saint Anselm

Almighty God, who didst raise up thy servant Anselm to teach the Church of his day to understand its faith in thine eternal Being, perfect justice, and saving mercy: Provide thy Church in every age with devout and learned scholars and teachers, that we may be able to give a reason for the hope that is in us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Further information about Saint Anselm:

For Further Reading
Resources about the Satisfaction Theory of the Atonement:

Saint Anselm, Cur Deus Homo. (Full text available online).
Theologian and popular teacher RC Sproul has discussed this issue in an essay.

Resources about the “Ontological Argument”, including modern restatements:

Saint Anselm, proslogium, available online courtesy of Fordham University.
A repository of items at Lastseminary.com.
Waterloo Univ statistics professor Christopher Small’s blog and essay. (Discussion of the more recent version of the ontological argument by the mathematician Goedel).
Der Spiegel. (A computer program validates Goedel’s argument).

¹ One of the funnier misrepresentations of an ontological argument, which I can no longer find, is a statement to the effect of, “I can f**k around with language and therefore God exists, now go to church.”

Brother James’ Airs

Category: Saints and Heroes of the Faith