Geoffrey Rowell

Human Mortality and the Church Triumphant

This special issue coincides with a particularly British centenary. King Edward VII died on 6 May 1910. His unexpected death came at a critical time in British politics. The Government had just locked itself into a constitutional battle over the respective authority of the Commons and the Lords. The death was not only a great personal shock to the British people but, with the British Empire at its height, one of international significance. Whitsunday fell between the King’s death and his funeral on 20 May. Canon Henry Scott Holland of St Paul’s Cathedral preached on ‘The King of Terrors’. He began with an unspoken but clear reference to the King’s body which then lay in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace. Scott Holland spoke of the two ways in which all ordinary people could approach the deathbed where a loved one lay. On the first page of his printed sermon, he spoke of the horror with which people might approach the corpse. On the second page he suggested how the corpse might actually wish to reassure us: that death was not ‘the King of Terrors’ but the means of access to new life in Christ. It was as if the dead person spoke: ‘Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room’. Scott Holland moved on to show how these two emotions, of morbid horror and of joyful hope, characterised not only a nation’s attitude to its dead King but a bereaved people’s attitude to their dead. Scott Holland’s second page has often been read at British funerals as if it expressed the sole Christian conviction about human deaths. As David Edwards has commented, ‘probably no part of any other sermon preached in twentiethcentury Britain has had more influence.’ Yet this selective recitation – however sincerely meant – is an inadequate account of the fullness of Christian convictions about death. The following contributions are also an unrepresentative selection from the historical development of Christian beliefs about death. None come from the Orthodox or Evangelical traditions. The Orthodox might, for instance, have extended comparisons with Eastern approaches to the Descent into hell, an intermediate state, and the communion of saints. An Evangelical contribution might have thrown into relief the implications of a position on the inerrancy of Scripture. For Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus remains the paramount and paradigmatic belief. Reviewing Geza Vermes’ The Resurrection, O’Collins underlines the fundamental significance of the Resurrection for Christians: ‘what happened after the death and burial of Jesus . . . was a new and transformed life for [him]’. The mode in which life after death in Christ is to be understood is an implicit theme

‘Securing the day’s devotion’: the spirituality of John Henry Newman and his Anglican inspirers

Abstract John Henry Newman’s spirituality and understanding of prayer was formed and framed by his years as an Anglican, from 1801 until his move to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, and particularly by the years following his Anglican ordination in 1824. Influenced originally by the aspects of the Evangelical tradition, Newman discovered both the Fathers of the Church and the seventeenth-century Anglican divines. This paper explores the significance for him of the devotional work of three Anglican divines, the Sacra Privata of Thomas Wilson, Bishop of Sodor and Man (1663–1755), the Golden Grove of Bishop Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), and the Preces Privatae of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), as encapsulating models of Christian devotion which, as an Oxford Movement leader, he wished to commend to others.

Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918): life and context

In this issue of IJSCC (vol. 15, no. 1, 2015), we publish three articles concerned with the First World War, the centenary of whose outbreak was widely commemorated in 2014. They were originally delivered as lectures sponsored by the Scott Holland Trust, in October 2014, in Westminster Abbey in London and subsequently in the Chapel of the Resurrection in Brussels, a Christian centre serving the European Institutions. The Scott Holland Trust was founded to commemorate the life, ministry and thought of Henry Scott Holland (1847–1918) by the commissioning of public lectures on themes relating to ‘the bearing of the religion of the Incarnation on political, social and economic life’. Since the first series of lectures, given by R.H. Tawney at King’s College, University of London, in 1922, and published in 1926 as Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, lectures have addressed many different topics. It was appropriate that in 2014 the lectures should address issues related to the First World War, and the three articles published here are revised and refereed texts of the original lectures. There are, of course, many religious, theological and ethical issues arising from the First World War, but the three topics of religion and nationalism, the commemoration of the dead of World War I, and the ambiguous role of military chaplains, are all significant, and we are grateful to our three contributors, Professors Hugh McLeod, John Wolffe and Grace Davie for revising their lectures for publication in this issue of the journal.

An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception

practical assistance’ that the Patriarch came to London (128); the Bishop of Salisbury, made use of the opportunity of his presence to invite him to give a theological interview, including the above-mentioned full Confession of Faith, published by John Wordsworth himself (129). It was more a question of an Anglo-Catholic attempting to prove to the many sceptical fellow-Anglicans that it was not true that the Syrian Orthodox were Eutychians (even the high churchman G.P. Badger had seen the misère of the Syrian Orthodox as divine retribution for their ‘heresy’) and that the wooing of this church, as sanctioned by Resolutions 63–5 of the 1908 Lambeth Conference, was a worthwhile object for the Anglican Communion.

Scotland and the ‘mystical matrix’ of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: an exploration of religious cross-currents

At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century there were significant cross-currents of influence between Scotland and mystical movements in continental Europe. In particular the group of Episcopalian clergy and aristocrats in the north-east of Scotland, designated by G.D.Henderson as ‘the Mystics of the North-East,’ shows strong links with and influences from the continental spiritual writers Antoinette Bourignon and the French Quietist Madame Guyon. But the wider context reveals further links with German Pietism and others concerned with inward religion as precursors of the Evangelical Revival. This article explores the fascinating Sitz im Leben of ‘the Mystics of the North-East’.

‘Living educts of the imagination’ – the Church and literature

In the third volume of his great study of theological aesthetics, Herrlichkeit – The Glory of the Lord, Hans Urs von Balthasar explores a number of examples of what he calls ‘lay styles’. Among those whose styles he expounds and interrogates is the Victorian Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Balthasar writes of how Hopkins, during his years of pastoral activity among the poor had ‘come to see men and women ever more strongly as a sacramental form of God: on the one hand, in their fearful threatenedness. . . and on the other, men and women in their homecoming, as sinners, to God, in the bursting forth from him of love in all its cunning: here the tenderness of the priest and poet are fused into one’. So ‘the Christian neighbour becomes for him a most transparent sacrament of the Incarnate God, a symbolism of Christian fashioning without reverie or giddy enchantment, in which obligation and inclination, ethical self-transcendence and aesthetic rapture have become one.’ Balthasar goes on to point out how ‘the ultimate for Hopkins remains. . . his shipwreck poems, because here the foundering and shattering of all worldly images and symbols yield a final picture of the sacrament of the world: perishing and ascending to God – death as Resurrection: Resurrection not beyond death but in death.’ The Wreck of the Deutschland culminates in a ‘foundering in God’ – ‘man finds nothing more to cling on to, not his longing, nor his reward, nor Heaven nor any of God’s attributes, for beyond all that there is nothing but him alone: ‘Ipse, the only one’ – the self beyond any nature. Here the poet rejoices because the ‘heart right (cor rectum), the ‘single eye’ of the parable, is capable of the highest: to interpret the formless and unformable chaos of the night as form and in the senselessness of pure question to know the who and the why.’ Hopkins is one of the writers studied and explored in this special issue of this journal devoted to ‘The Church and Literature’. As Balthasar emphasises in his discussion, in Hopkins’ writing, as in many others in which there is an engagement with the Church and with a theological perspective, there is an inescapable sacramental dimension. The poet, David Jones, wrote as long ago as 1959 of how the question is raised ‘for all of us in the notion of sacrament and the sign-world in its multifarious aspects’, recognising the power of ‘the technocracy in which we live, and which conditions us all, tends, in all sorts of contexts and at every level, to draw us away from this sign-world’. Jones goes on to affirm that ‘unless man is of his essential nature a poeta, one who makes things that are signs of something, then the central act of the Christian religion [the Eucharist] is totally without meaning’.

Christianizing Crimea: Shaping Sacred Space in the Russian Empire and Beyond

The diamond-shaped Crimean peninsula, jutting out into the Black Sea from the south of what is now Ukraine, is a territory claimed over the centuries by Greek settlers, Scythian tribes, Muslim Crimean Tatars, Cossacks and Russians. In Chersonesos on the edge of Sevastopol is the traditional site of the baptism of Vladimir of Rus. To the north the palace of the Crimean Tatar khans at Bakhchisarai is a reminder of the Crimea’s Islamic inheritance. Crimea’s Jews imbibed local practices, and found a particular unique expression in the Karaim, whose sola scriptura stance repudiated the Talmud. They had a distant outpost in Trakai in Lithuania following the fifteenth-century campaign of Vytautas the Great. Mara Kozelsky’s fascinating, detailed and scholarly study has as its particular theme the religious history of the Crimea, most particularly in the period following its annexation by Russia under Catherine the Great in 1783, through to the presentday post-Soviet period, tracing within that history the Christianizing programme of the Russian Orthodox Church. A particular focus is the reign of Nicholas I (1825– 1855), a devout, Orthodox Christian, and the energetic work of Archbishop Innokentii of Odessa (1848–1857) with his vision of the Crimean mountains as a Russian Athos. ‘The Christianizing of Crimea’, Kodelsky writes, ‘did not require native inhabitants to adopt Orthodoxy, although priests and prelates occasionally expressed this goal . . . instead the church concerned itself with consolidating its authority and reconsecrating sacred landscapes’ (p. 9). Abandoned Byzantine churches were re-opened, sacred sites – holy springs and grottoes – were reclaimed, to affirm Crimea’s identity as an Orthodox holy place. Just as the sacred landscape of the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia provide a local Ethiopian pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, so Innokentii’s vision of a Russian Athos in the Crimea. As Innokentii concluded a lengthy peroration:

‘Navigation for an ocean of interminable scepticism’: the enduring value of John Henry Newman's exploration of the nature of theology and its place in education

The Beatification of John Henry Newman during Pope Benedict XVIs visit to Britain in September 2010 focused attention not only on Newmans life and pilgrimage, but on the continuing significance of his theology. In an age in which the voices of secular humanism are strident, and where it seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to justify the place of theology in the academy, Newmans much earlier wrestling with these questions became the focus of a number of articles in educational journals at the time of his beatification, though not all were based on the reading of primary texts. His thought would repay a much deeper examination: it has a great deal of value for us today, as this article also hopes to show. Like Newman, it touches on many questions – the nature of theology, the place of the Church, the value of tradition, and how all of these relate to an understanding of education which takes seriously the ultimate questions raised by theology and religion.

Ecclesiology and the Pentecostal Churches

As adumbrated in its title, Ecclesiology and the Pentecostal Churches, the present issue of IJSCC focuses on a range of perspectives on ecclesiology to be found in the expanding Pentecostal Churches in a number of parts of the world, rather than on a pre-conceived notion of ‘Pentecostal Ecclesiology’, whatever that might be taken to be. We are most grateful to Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, who has considerable experience and strong research interest in Pentecostal-Charismatic theologies, for agreeing to act as Guest Editor. Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, USA, and Docent in Ecumenics, University of Helsinki, he is a prolific writer with wide research experience, and extensive editorial involvement, most recently as editor of The Spirit in the World: Emerging Pentecostal Theologies in Global Contexts (2009). He has drawn together in this issue contributions from very significant names in the Pentecostal world, and his Guest Editorial is a most interesting analysis on the subject ‘Pentecostal ecclesiology – does it exist?’ We also thank the authors and book reviewers whose work is published here for their generous response, which has given an excellent balance to the issue, both as a source for readers who are already scholars in the field and for those who will come to this collection of articles as a way to deeper understanding of an important development in contemporary ecclesiology. May we also draw attention to a very different ecclesiological scene examined in the very recent special issue (vol. 11, nos. 2–3), in which we published the papers of the Windsor Consultation on Orthodox Ecclesiology (see vol. 10, no. 1 for a report on its proceedings). There is to be a follow-up consultation in Thessaloniki in February 2012, of which a report will appear in IJSCC vol. 12, no. 2 (May 2012) and papers will be published in a later issue of the journal.

Report on a Consultation on Orthodox Ecclesiology St George's House, Windsor Castle 2009

A Consultation on Orthodox Ecclesiology was convened at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, from 7 to 9 December 2009. The programme and participation were organised by Dr Geoffrey Rowell, Professor Sven-Erik Brodd and Dr Christine Hall, in consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia and other Orthodox scholars, and in association with Editorial Consultants and Editorial Board members of the International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church (IJSCC). Support funding was generously provided by Taylor & Francis, publishers of IJSCC; the Olaus Petri Foundation, Faculty of Theology, Uppsala, and a number of organisations, trusts and individuals in the UK and elsewhere. Acknowledging the growing importance ofOrthodox ecclesiology inmany parts of the world, the aim of the Consultation was to explore a wide range of ecclesiological topics that are of current concern and interest to the Orthodox Church, both in its ecclesial life and in its ecumenical relations and to identify openings for exchange of scholarship and for future research projects. Impetus for this came initially from the Faculty of Theology of the University of Uppsala, where a platform to support a number of areas of ecclesiological research is being put in place, andwhich contributed generously to the costs of the Consultation.