MetaCatholic

(This post is part of a series on the 39 articles of the Church of England)

It feels good to be getting along to the end of this series on the articles, now that I arrive at the thirty-fifth. Again, this article demonstrates something of the huge change in culture between the Church of the Reformation era, and today’s.

XXXV. Of the Homilies
The second Book of Homilies, the several titles whereof we have joined under this Article, doth contain a godly and wholesome Doctrine, and necessary for these tunes, as doth the former Book of Homilies, which were set forth in the time of Edward the Sixth; and therefore we judge them to be read in Churches by the Ministers, diligently and distinctly, that they may be understanded of the people.
(A listing of the Second Book of Homilies follows)

The homilies not only provided what were then thought of as model sermons. they served to provide sermons for those priests (and there were initially many) who were not licensed to preach, because they were regarded as insufficiently learned – especially in the new expressions of doctrine of the Reformers. The emphasis on a learned clergy, and efforts to create them, slowly obviated the need for the homilies, as the licence to preach eventually became universally part of the priest’s licence. I guess, though, that the Reformers’ judgement on those parishes who allow lay people untrained in theology, and without a bishop’s licence, to preach on a fairly regular basis, would nonetheless still be unprintable.

It is also worth noting that these homilies, taken as patterns, reveal some significant differences with much contemporary preaching, not least in the complete detachment from the Scriptures set for the day. This set up a model which has overall had a negative effect, especially when combined with the relative limitations of the Sunday lectionary in the BCP. In evangelical parishes there was an increasing abandonment of the lectionary in order to preach sermon series from scripture. In the rest of the church there was an increasing detachment from specific scriptural passages, which made the relevance of scripture seem less obvious than it might have done in the hands of a skilled interpreter. The newer lectionaries have been helping restore the link between preaching and the scriptures that have just been corporately read. Such a practice should better inform the individual scripture reading people might engage in in the week.

Stressing the need for a learned clergy was not an unmixed blessing. On the positive side, it produced not only a thoughtful theological approach to scripture and ministry, but also encouraged a general fascination with learning. Anglican parish clergy were noticeable in every field of knowledge, not least the natural sciences, until increasing professionalization and specialisation took over in the nineteenth century. Of course, there was for a long time an effective Anglican monopoly on learning in both universities: college fellows normally had to be ordained, and one had to be Anglican to gain a degree until the middle of that same nineteenth century that saw the disappearance of Renaissance man as an educational ideal.

On the negative side, this was one of the features that set the typical priest on the side of the gentry and apart from the normal run of people in the parishes. It was class division by twinning education with religious affiliation and money. Both the disenfranchised dissenters and the extremely unlearned clergy that came over with the bog-Irish were by contrast pretty much on the same level as their people. Clerical learning, initially intended to serve the gospel, became part of the social pattern that estranged the clergy from the emergent working class.

The church regularly exhibits the desire to fight yesterday’s battles, and having digested the divorce from ordinary people that accompanied this stress on learning, has looked for a broader base from which to call its clergy, and far greater diversity in the methods and modes of training offered. Ironically, of course, this has happened at the same time that more and more people enter higher education, a higher education whose often unspoken tenet and cultural milieu is one that assumes real learning and religion are fundamentally incompatible. The church has, responding to past criticisms, so turned its back on elitism, that it has allowed the elite to assume that Christianity has nothing for them, and propagate that view in the universities and the media.

Preaching and theology need to escape from this false dichotomy that has paralysed too much of their history. Deep learning and good communication need to go together. It is usually the person who has understood something most deeply who can express it most simply. The obfuscating terminology that has affected so many arts and humanities subjects in the post-modern world (so that they can compete with the technical language of science) should have no place in theological discourse, far less spill over into preaching. (Radical Orthodoxy, please note.) At the same time, we must resist all those who would treat “theology” as a dirty word, and try to reduce Christian doctrine to cosy nostrums, and cast a sprinkling of angel dust over secular moralities. The challenges of truly proclaiming the gospel in simple terms to a complex world demand nothing less the greatest learning we can aspire to.