Ecclesiastical bibs and bobs

• Orthodox Holy Saturday. From the Canon at Matins: In hades as well as in the tomb and in Eden the unique divinity of Christ was inseparable from the Father and the Holy Spirit. This was done for our salvation and we praise him: blessed art thou, O Lord, for thou savest us.
• Easter at St Peter’s, London Docks.
• Chronicles has a go at the mainline. What follows is very familiar to regular readers but for the benefit of new people here it is: of course the mainline churches collapsed because there was no principle of authority really. Catholics East and West believe in an infallible church; Protestants left and right in a fallible thus fungible one. Mainliners coasted for a few centuries on the moral capital from Catholicism, inertia and mere social convention, although Modernism really got started in the ‘Enlightenment’. The Anglicans and Congregationalists seem to have been hit especially hard by that, with many Congregationalists turning into Unitarians (non-Christians) and lots of Anglicans (like Washington and Jefferson) becoming private nonbelievers but still giving lip service to orthodoxy following the old Prayer Book. Now it seems the other mainliners have caught up with them.
• Why were English Protestants hit especially hard by the ‘Enlightenment’? Methodism and Anglo-Catholicism both were trying to remedy this. The English Calvinists caved. I understand the Congregationalists self-destructing but the Anglicans, although at the top their church was compromised by its dependence upon the state and the religious indifference (latitudinarianism) that resulted (essentially the forerunner of everything MCJ complains about), were at heart still mediæval village Catholics who wanted the Prayer Book services done right like their ancestors had the Mass (Anglo-Catholicism didn’t come from nowhere), and the creeds and Articles at least gave credal orthodoxy. Protestantism is self-refuting but the Scots including American Presbyterians seem to have held together slightly better than the English. P.S. Thank God that politically the English ‘Enlightenment’ wasn’t like the French! It produced the Constitution that Ron Paul defends: a framework of freedom for the faith to flourish in (all right, I’m done) and not anti-religious. Hooray for Edmund Burke.
• On being firm but kind to the erring and ‘ritual rascality’.
• An Australian Anglican priest who’s a man’s man and pro-Palestinian. From here.
• Conversation-stoppers for overeducated evangelicals. LOL. From Mere Comments.
• A popular topic here: the PNCC. My comment.

Labels: Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, England, history, humour, libertarianism, Palestine, the Catholic faith