Issues Etc. coming back

For those who haven’t heard, Issues Etc. is coming back with Pastor Todd Wilken and his trusty sidekick Jeff Schwarz. But the Lutheran radio show about liturgy and worship is not coming back with KFUO, which abruptly sacked the two men back in March.

Instead, there’s plans to launch the show online in affiliation with Lutheran Public Radio and something called Brothers of John the Steadfast. The BJS group is marshalling a blue chip collection of advisors and participants, including Uwe Siemon-Netto (former UPI religion editor), Pastor Martin Noland (formerly head of the Concordia Historical Institute), and Get Religion blogger Mollie Hemingway.

This looks to be a nonprofit foundation and online portal of traditionalists unhappy with the drift of the LCMS. It has the potential to integrate all the efforts that (for continuing Anglicans) are fragmented between VirtueOnline, Stand Firm, and the Anglican Communion Network, among others.

Pastor Noland explains that John “the Steadfast,” Elector of Saxony, was the first German ruler to defend the Reformation, saving the Lutherans from a Hugenot-style massacre. John was also the first to sign the 1530 Augsburg Confession, one of the major pillars of the Lutheran faith.

On the Lutheran Public Radio website, Pastor Wilken offers a glimpse of what is planned, including the reiteration of his old tagline: “As always: Christ centered, cross-focused.” Stay tuned.

Favorite Whitsunday hymn

Today is Pentecost, née Whitsunday, a once major feast that has fallen into some neglect. Over on GetReligion, Lutheran Mollie Hemingway (one of the would-be saviors of Issues Etc.) had a very good article on the limited coverage of Pentecost, the birth of the church. At church today, we celebrated the occasion with birthday cake, although without the rector’s admonishment (as at our previous church) to wear the liturgical red that evokes the tongues of fire of the first Pentecost.

Today was the first time this year my wife and I got a chance to sing Vaughan Williams’ Salve Festa Dies. It is one of five Whitsunday hymns (plus two alternate tunes) in my favorite hymnal. (It is also one of eight Pentecost hymns — including alternate tunes — in the current PECUSA hymnal, although 33% of the verses have been lobotomized).

The music director at our current church refuses to schedule “Hail Thee Festival Day” at Easter, holding off to the last possible usage. My wife and I grew up singing it at all three major feasts — Easter, Ascension, and Whitsunday — so much that the feasts seem empty without it.

In his wonderful hymn companion, Ian Bradley notes that the Whitsunday version “is the most widely used nowadays, appearing in the hymnbooks of a number of different denominations and not just, as it once did, in those of a High Anglican persuasion.”

Dr. Bradley notes that the Fortunatus poem (reprinted in a 13th century Sarum missal) was the Easter version (the one that comes to mind when I hear the tune), translated for the 1906 COE hymnal by George Gabriel Scott Gillett. He concludes

All the Festival Day hymns owe much of their modern popularity to the vigorous unison tune Salve festa dies which Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) composed for their appearance in the English Hymnal in 1906.

Rome to Anglicans: time to end your fudge

Religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill of The Times of London had an explosive posting this week on her blog:

Hard words for Anglicans from the head of the Council for Christian Unity in Rome. Cardinal Walter Kasper has told the Catholic Herald that now, with Lambeth approaching, is the time for Anglicans to decide whether they are Catholic or Protestant.

'Ultimately, it is a question of the identity of the Anglican Church. Where does it belong?' he said. 'Does it belong more to the churches of the first millennium -Catholic and Orthodox - or does it belong more to the Protestant churches of the 16th century? At the moment it is somewhere in between, but it must clarify its identity now and that will not be possible without certain difficult decisions.'

The genius of Anglicanism has always been its ability to straddle the divide, but maybe the Cardinal is right and the Communion's present difficulties reflect the impossibility of continuing to do this.

The posting has attracted many comments, including a variety of political and theological perspectives. But let me quote two:

Hasn't this always been obvious to people [who disagree] that the [Anglican] failure to have a coherent theology is a genius, [but] rather [believe it to be] a crippling flaw.

If Anglicanism is Catholic then why are half the Anglican congregations not very Catholic at all, and if it is Protestant then what is Walsingham all about? Anglicanism does need to make up its mind, and maybe that will require that it become the 3 or 4 Churches it really is. It cannot be either Catholic or Protestant while it is trying to be both.

Another helpfully quotes the Cardinal himself:

Cardinal Kasper has already touched on the subject in his 2004 book, “That all may be one- the call to Christian unity today”

“Thus we are confronted with two different approaches: on the one hand, the universally-oriented, episcopal approach of the Anglicans and some Lutheran churches, inspired by ancient church tradition; and, on the other hand, a more local, community-centred, presbyteral approach.

Behind the two approaches lie different interpretations of the precise intention of the Reformation. Did the Reformers intend to renew the then universal Church, maintaining continuity with its fundamental structure, as the Augsburg Confession (1530) suggests? Or was the development of a new type and paradigm of the Church an inevitable and deliberate consequence of their actions? Is there a fundamental consensus or - as many state nowadays - a fundamental difference?

I would be inclined to agree with the Cardinal — like Gledhill and many of the commenters — that the “Anglican fudge” has reached the end, and that the fissures can no longer be papered over.

In England, there’s enough parishioners to split Anglicanism into 3 or 4 Churches, but in the US you couldn’t. However, part of PECUSA wants to be just like its bigger brother ELCA, so perhaps those two could merge. And the evangelical wing might align with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, assuming they get to keep their bishops. Not sure where us Anglo-Catholics are supposed to go — become Anglican Rite Catholics?

Catholics, music and the Pope

All year I've wanted to post something to the effect that while us Anglo-Catholics are emulating many of the best liturgical practices of the Roman Catholic Church, since Vatican II that liturgy has morphed (or even disappeared) from RCC parishes, at least in the US. (I've held off, hoping to have time to do more research, but that time hasn't materialized).

The incongruity -- of Anglo-Catholics being more “Catholic” in their worship than Roman Catholics -- hit me when visiting two of the oldest Christian churches in the Western United States. Over the past year or two, our family has been visiting as many of the 21 California missions as opportunity permits. These missions -- established from 1769 to 1823 -- were established (mainly) to bring Christianity to the natives of California.

On two occasions, we went to church services. At the Carmel Mission (established 1770) we attended morning mass, while at Mission San Antonio de Padua (est. 1771) we just missed services due to out-of-date information on their service times. At Carmel, they had a great choir and a wonderful organ, but the worship (from Today's Missal) was definitely a Rite II-style contemporary hymn approach. We didn't hear the service at Mission San Antonio, but given that they were putting away the amplifiers for the electric guitar, it seems reasonable to presume that it was praise-type music.

Of course, this week Pope Benedict XVI is visiting the East Coast, including celebrating two mega-Masses. In reading Hymnography Unbound, the bloggress noted how the Pontiff and his American bishops are trying to straddle various musical traditions within the American church.

This week, the story was updated by others who had more time to pursue the details. First, on Wednesday the Washington Post wrote about the musical tensions within the American RCC and how this week's masses fit into those tensions. Then on Thursday, GetReligion (Lutheran) bloggress Mollie Ziegler made sense of the Post article by providing context around all the existing tensions in the church.

I don't know that anyone knows how the revival of interest in traditional liturgy (and music) will play out in the RCC or in the American Anglican tradition. After all, the 19th century Oxford Movement was not anticipated before it happened.

However, what is clear is that the Catholic church (with 50 million American adult members) has a lot more room for specialized tastes than do the Anglican/Episcopal churches (with 3+ million). So in terms of sheer numbers, in the US there will always be a larger pool of Catholics interested in Gregorian chant (if not Wesleyan hymns) than there will be Anglicans or even Lutherans or Presbyterians.

What is a church?

The continuing Anglicans of Virginia who formed CANA have won round #1 in their property fight. Certainly continuing Anglicans around North America are celebrating this victory, even if many rounds of appeals remain.

In reading the hometown news articles — in the Washington Post and Washington Times — I was struck by a fundamental question: what is a church? Here are some of the critical quotes from the latter story:

"We are obviously disappointed in yesterday's ruling," said a statement from Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori about the 83-page decision released late Thursday night.

The decision "plainly deprives the Episcopal Church and the Diocese, as well as all hierarchical churches, of their historic constitutional rights to structure their polity free from governmental interference," she said, "and thus violates the First Amendment and cannot be enforced."

...

Henry Burt, diocesan spokesman, suggested the ruling imperils religious freedom.

"At issue is the government"s ability to intrude into the freedom of the Episcopal Church and other churches to organize and govern themselves according to their faith and doctrine," he said.

In a letter to members of the diocese posted on www.thediocese.net, Virginia Bishop Peter Lee said the 11 churches are still "wrongfully occupying Episcopal Church property" but that "this was not a final decision and the court did not award any property or assets."

Doug Smith, executive director for the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy in Richmond, called the judge's decision "chilling," adding leaders of other mainline denominations represented by his center are "gravely concerned."

"It seems that government is attempting to take over governance of the Episcopal Church," he said. "This preliminary ruling puts every hierarchical denomination on notice that a group of persons who no longer wish to be part of the particular denomination can now split off, form a new group, self-declare they are a branch of the original group and assert rights under law regardless of the denomination's own rules."

Of course, some of this is pure nonsense. The government is not “intruding” — it was, after all, TEC that asked the government to get involved in enforcing a property rights dispute. I’m a firm believer of freedom of religion, but the government retains a clear role in enforcing certain secular rules (such as who owns what property and who owns who what money).

But fundamentally, the TEC apologists make a claim that might be true in England, but not here. A state church is the norm in much of Europe, but a major motivation for the initial settlement of New England was religious freedom.

Also, the leadership of PECUSA is elected and not appointed — suggesting a bottom-up, American view of governance. If churches are voluntary associations of individuals, how does TEC assert a right to tell individual branches what to do — particularly since those branches provided the resources to create their branches?

Finally, the national church doesn’t legal title to the resources — the PECUSA model until recently was a confederation of bishoprics. In dioceses where the bishop holds the title to land, the legal options for the seceders are more difficult, but for much (most) of Protestant America, the individual parish is what a “church” is.