Teachers of the Faith

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

This week we are continuing our exploration spiritual directions for our new parish.  Our concentration this week will be Teachers of the Faith.  Teachers of the Faith is a very large category in our list of those we honour in our church year in the Anglican Church.

They start with Justin and Irenaeus in the 2^nd to 3^rd centuries and continue with Hilary, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, and Leo the Great in the 4^th and 5^th centuries before we reach our more modern saints Gregory the Great (7^th century); Anselm (12^th century); Thomas Aquinas (13^th century); and the return of Francis de Sales (17^th century).

All of these lead up to the two men I am going to talk about today: the only two Teachers of the Faith that we commemorate who are truly Anglican: Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker.

Thomas Cranmer 21 March

Archbishop of Canterbury, 1556 — Commemoration

March

Thomas Cranmer was a Cambridge scholar who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1533 and guided the Church of England through its first two decades of independence from the Papacy.

When he assumed his office he was already committed to protestant views, but political conditions forced him to keep his sympathies a secret. For over a decade he studied the issues which divided not only protestants from Catholics, but also the protestant movement itself. His studies bore fruit when the political situation allowed him to begin serious reformation of the liturgy. He had a large hand in drafting The Book of Common Prayer, which was authorized in 1549. Three years later he oversaw a second edition of this Book, which he revised in such a way as to make its protestant doctrine unmistakable.

Soon afterwards he and his Prayer Book were overtaken by events when Queen Mary I came to the throne and restored England to communion with the Pope. Cranmer was imprisoned and endured a long, humiliating trial for heresy, at the end of which he recanted his protestant opinions in hopes of clemency. The Queen refused to hear his pleas, and he was burned at the stake on this day in the year 1556. As the flames licked around him, he thrust out his right hand — the hand which had signed his earlier recantations — so that it might be the first to be burned; and that was the posture in which the onlookers last saw him, as the fire engulfed his body.

Richard Hooker 3 November

Priest, Teacher of the Faith, 1600 — Commemoration

November

Richard Hooker was an English priest who died in 1600, and we remember him today as a theologian who defended the Church of England and its choice of “the middle way” between Roman Catholic and Puritan ideologies.

Hooker entered Oxford University in 1567 and for eighteen years devoted himself to scholarship and reflection on the subtle points of theology. He became deputy professor of Hebrew, was ordained to the priesthood, and appeared to be set on a purely academic career. But his learning, moderation, and commitment to the Church of England brought him to the attention of the authorities, and he was appointed Master of the Temple, an office of great prestige because it made him the chief preacher to the legal community of London. He held this post for six years, then resigned to become the rector of a parish near Salisbury. A few years later he moved to a rectory in the diocese of Canterbury, where he died at the age of forty-six.

He was a quiet man, loving to his wife and children, glad in his piety, and happy in his ministry. But the Church remembers him primarily for the one great work that he wrote — a majestic study entitled Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

This work was addressed to a group of English protestants who were nicknamed Puritans because they sought to purify the Church of England according to their own narrow reading of the Bible. Against this movement Hooker argued for a more liberal outlook, which coordinated the testimony of Scripture, the course of Christian history, and the values of human reason, in order to defend the English Church as a communion for all the people, not just a small group of “saints.” The experience of our tradition has confirmed his teaching, and today we honour his work as a true cornerstone of Anglican history.

When I first started looking at the Teachers of the Faith, I had in mind some kind of scholarly professor holding lectures about Anglican theology.  I was wonderfully surprised when I read about them to find out that this doesn’t describe them at all (well maybe some of the older ones like St. Thomas Aquinas).  What I found is that there are three key terms to describe a Teacher of the Faith.

1: The three-legged stool of Anglican theology.

How many of you have heard of this?  How about scripture, tradition and reason?  Anglican theology is supposedly based on a balance of these three.  Just like a three-legged stool with one leg too short or too long, it won’t stand properly unless all are considered equally.

2: The via media or the middle way.

The Anglican Church is neither protestant nor Roman Catholic.  We are somewhere in the middle.  Or more correctly, we are many places in the middle from almost Roman Catholic to almost protestant.  Just as we are many places between conservative and liberal.  But if we get too far from the middle, we stop being Anglican and become something else.

3: Renewal.

This is the one that really surprised me.  I knew about the three-legged stool and I knew about the via media, but I didn’t expect to find renewal.  Both of our Anglican Teachers of the Faith, and many of the others, worked very hard to find new ways of expressing their faith through worship and in their lives which did not stray from that middle path.  They carefully studied the scripture, their tradition, and the culture or their time and brought new expression to the church which set it on the path to the tradition that we currently enjoy.

So if we were to dedicate our parish to the Teachers of the Faith, it would commit us to studying our tradition, the scripture and our local culture.  We would be called to find new expressions of worship and faith that would help us bridge the gap between our current traditions and the spiritual and worship needs of our communities.  It would set us on a path of study and renewal.

I continue to hope that this decision will not be an easy one.  It should require prayer and discussion and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  So I pray:

Holy and Gracious God, be with us as we do our best to discern where you are calling us as a new parish.  Give us your support and your guidance that we may know our part in your purpose here in our communities and how you wish us to show our love for you in our lives.  This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.