Anglican Theologians- a list of some of the ones the Rambling Rector mostly likes

RICHARD HOOKER  1554-1600

“God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright."

Hooker helped to define Anglicanism theologically as a church continuous with historic Catholicism, but critical of both Puritanism on one side and Rome on the other. He defended the historic episcopate and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He also defended strongly the unity of the church and the secular state, a position that is no longer a common theme in Anglican theology.   

 F. D. Maurice  1805-1872

“Of all the spirits, I believe the spirit of judging is the worst, and it has had the rule of me, I cannot tell you how dreadfully and how long... This, I find has more hindered my progress in love and gentleness than all things else. I never knew what the words, "Judge not that ye be not judged," meant before; now they seem to me some of the most awful, necessary, and beautiful in the whole Word of God.”

“The truth is that every man is in Christ; the condemnation of every man is that he will not own the truth, he will not act as if it were true, that except he were joined with Christ, he could not think, breathe, live a single hour.”

Fredrick Denison Maurice converted to the Church of England from Nonconformity, and was a strong exponent of 19^th Century “Incarnational” theology. He was an outspoken advocate for social justice and democratic socialism, and was regarded with suspicion by the intellectual and ecclesiastical elite of his time.

Charles Gore, DD (22 January 1853 – 17 January 1932) was an English theologian and Anglican bishop. Born in 1853, Gore became one of the most influential of Anglican theologians. He helped reconcile the Church to some aspects of biblical criticism and scientific discovery, yet was Catholic in his interpretation of the faith and sacraments

… in 1890 a stir was created by the publication, under his editorship, of Lux Mundi, a series of essays by different writers, attempting to bring the Christian creed into a right relation to the modern growth of knowledge, scientific, historic, critical, and to modern problems of politics and ethics.
	William Porcher DuBose (April 11, 1836-August 18, 1918) was an American priest and theologian in the Episcopal Church in the United States. He spent most of his career as a professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is remembered on August 18 on the Episcopal Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. His middle name, Porcher, is pronounced as if it were spelled por-shay. DuBose’s rigorous incarnational theology set him at odds with the prevailing revivalist mentality of American religion, particularly in the South. One of his most provocative proposals was the idea that even Satan might someday repent and be received back into the kingdom of heaven.
		1875-1941 “In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram —impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.” ― Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness

ROWAN WILLIAMS, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. B. 1950

In a careful, academic way, Bishop Rowan, along with such intellectual heavyweights as Wittgenstein, Ricoeur, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is calling us to a new appreciation for "the profundity of surfaces", to what Ricoeur has famously called a "second naïveté," and to do so without compromising a commitment to scientific method and the achievements of modernity. This calls for "the suspicion of suspicion," a kind of ultra-skepticism that leads to something like faith. 

   Perhaps we need not"...suggests Williams, "...be left with the bald alternativest of false naïveté...and manipulative reductionism." Ricoeur leads us, he believes, to a place of "fruitful and irresoluble  puzzlement." 

Homage to John Repulski

JOHN REPULSKI has been a supportive colleague and an inspired contributor to the worship and ministry of Christ Church Cranbrook, and those with whom he will serve in his new position will be greatly blessed by his presence among them.

What I will miss the most about John is his capacity for musical surprise. This gift of his not just entertained me, it has also humbled me. It has taught me to worship (something I had thought I already knew how to do); reminded me why I am a Christian (which I didn’t think I had forgotten); and helped me prepare to die (which, paradoxically, causes me to feel intensely alive.)

How does he do this? Are there books he reads? Experts he consults? I rather think John is his own book, and his own expert, and that it is a gift from God.

Who else would think of using klezmer  music in the course of an Easter liturgy? This quintessentially Yiddish  music comes from the very exuberant, and utterly destroyed, Jewish culture of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust nightmare. When its exotic riffs burst out from among the rowdy lyrics I find myself leaping over the confines of conventional belief, dancing in a Sabbath chorus-line, dancing in defiance of demonic fascism and of death itself. And all that while sitting in my pew! When klezmer sounds forth at Christ Church Cranbrook, it is God who dances among the choir-pews.

Who else would think of having the male voices in a choir drone a solemn chord in the background while the women render psalm-verses in Gregorian chant? And then alternate the droning and the chant between the male and female voices, thus creating a Yin and Yang antiphony, an exquisite commentary on the harmony and agony of the world? John’s choral interpretations are part Benedictine monastery, part Lord of the Rings, calling us, Frodo-like, to suspend disbelief and see the world enchanted once again.

It could be that such things are done routinely elsewhere, but I think John has one ear tuned to ancient religious practices, and the other to the sound-track of tomorrow’s latest trend. For me, this results in a confluence of all that I most trust about the past, and all that I most enjoy about the present. Surrounded by John’s music, I become “open to the future”, a posture that the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann regarded as the closest our disenchanted age can come to what the apostolic church experienced on that first Easter.

Finally, who else would think to combine the sophisticated mechanics of a world-class pipe organ with the primal simplicity of bagpipes? There is no piece of religious music more familiar, or more often trivialized, than Amazing Grace. It has a special place in the mythology of my own family, and we sang it, plaintively, at both my parents’ burials at the Moravian Church cemetery in Canadensis, PA, while my mothers’ dogs lifted their grieving voices along with ours as we sang the hymn. Many years later, as John accompanied the bagpipes on the organ   the verses increased exponentially in volume, moving from a single bagpipe to a thunderous climax involving many pipers and every organ stop employed.

Was that John’s idea? I don’t know, but it was him playing the organ, and it brought me back to that Moravian cemetery  in the mountains, except that it was me who had died, and my children and dogs who sang.

I am sad about John’s leaving, and I am sad about the issues with his back that have kept him from playing the organ recently. I am sad about the deaths of my parents and my own inevitable end. But, as I contemplate these realities, I feel strangely and intensely alive. How strange is that?

It is strange in the way Easter is strange, the way the most familiar things can sometimes come as a surprise, the way silence merges with chant and becomes an unending hymn.