Militant Christianity: A Sermon preached in Balliol College Chapel
15 October 2006
As well as having a monopoly on the Chancellorship of the University, this College has been good enough to provide two of the nine Principals of Pusey House: the first, Charles Gore and the third, Stuckey Coles. If you have not reached that eminence in this generation, it is only a matter of time because you now provide the House with the Sacristan and his Deputy, as well as a full serving team at the High Mass last Sunday. As you would confidently, if not smugly, expect, they executed their task “with the tranquil consciousness of the effortless superiority of the Balliol man.”
The Book of Common Prayer, which marks the zenith of England’s literary and cultural accomplishment, but which teeters on the nadir of its Eucharistic theology, has within its rites a Prayer for the Church Militant. We are bidden to “pray for the whole estate of Christ’s Church militant here on earth.” Of course, at its most neutral and prosaic, that can mean little more than the Church, the Body of Christ, active in the world. But it is also a word which sounds a different and more combative note, even a militaristic note. That ought not to be surprising. The pages of the Old Testament resonate with the sound of “ancestral voices prophesying war,” with rumours of wars, and wars fought and won, fought and lost, the clash of mighty armies. The trumpet call of war sounded in our first reading this evening which brought the siege of Jericho to a shattering end as the walls came tumbling down: “The trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpet, the people raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.” The timid compilers of our modern lectionary, intent on out-doing Dr Bowdler, end the lesson there to save us and our tender sensibilities from the following verse: “Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and asses, with the edge of the sword.”
That is an inescapable part of our background and history as a people. Yet it is not the whole story: it is only part of the narrative. We might say that the New Testament’s dominant note is one which resonates with the words, the deeds and actions, the selfless sacrificial death of the Prince of Peace, of the Word become flesh so that we might know the love and the mercy of God: In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent us his Son to be the expiation for our sins.”
These top notes of peace, however, are not the only ones that we hear. Christ’s love is all-embracing but it is not a sentimentalised niceness; it is not an undifferentiated acceptance or acquiescence of our lapsarian state. In the second reading this evening from the Gospel according to S. Matthew the words of Jesus as reported there are both violent and uncompromising: “And you, Caperneum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades.” This is the language of Christ but not a language echoed by the contemporary Church that has ditched the language of Christianity in favour of the enfeebled sound-bites of a vague humanism and cultural correctness. This is the lingua franca of a Church that is little more than a well-meaning discussion group, a hand-wringing circle of effete do-gooders with overly tender consciences. The Church is not like that: or, rather, the Church ought not to be like that. The Church is not merely another agency for aid and palliative care. The Church is more radical and demanding than that. The Church is a sign of contradiction in the world and ought not to be “dejected by the obstacles which a luxurious and scoffing age may oppose,” as Dr Pusey presciently warned.
In that second reading from S. Matthew’s Gospel we cannot escape the severity and the demands of Christ. On the Day of Judgement the conduct and the moral choices of each one of us, the very secrets of our hearts, will be exposed in the light of God’s judgement. There will be nowhere to hide. There will be no excuses. We will understand that moral choices depend upon right reason and an informed conscience not upon personal preference and self-indulgence. Culpability will meet with condemnation. We comfort ourselves with the knowledge and the assurance that the judgement will be just: justice will be done. God is mercy and God is love. He cannot and will not act against his nature. But there is an unavoidable reciprocation. There is an acceptance of the unique claims of Christ. We heard it in the second reading: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son … Come to me … I will give you rest. Take my yoke … learn from me.” Elsewhere he asserts that unique claim on mankind when he says, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”
It is the uniqueness of that claim that is in danger of being lost in a society that describes itself as multi-faith and that does not differentiate between their claims. Needless to say, the Church has been not merely complicit but a keen participant in this realignment. The Church has found it more convenient, more comfortable to emphasise her social, cultural and educational role than to insist upon her divine mission to propagate the Faith once delivered to the Apostles and to convert the unbeliever. But how can you convert the unbeliever in a society of equality of faith. In the face of strident claims from elsewhere Anglicans have lost their nerve; indeed, with their internal tensions and divisions seem engaged in a prolonged nervous breakdown. The Church of England has ceased to be the Church Militant and has become the Church Hesitant.
Fortunately, current controversies have begun sharply to point up the spurious claims of a multi-faith society and to remind us that all appeasement is pointless. What good did the apology for the Crusades do? That generous Papal initiative is rendered somewhat flawed and ludicrous and even more futile if you contemplate the possibility of the representatives of world-wide Islam apologising for the sack of Constantinople; of the Grand Mufti of Damascus and the Ayatollah Sheikyemani and the leaders of the Muslim world expressing regret for centuries of Muslim aggression which has blighted the lives of Christians in the Middle East and the Balkans. When will the Ecumenical Patriarch be able to celebrate the Divine Liturgy in the Church of Hagia Sophia for the first time since Mehmet II rode through its bronze doors on 29 May 1453?
Perhaps it is time to recover our confidence, to refuse to compromise with the secular expectations and ethical tendencies of the times, to assert more boldly and energetically the claim of Christ and his saving power for all people. As followers of Christ we are called to be in the world but not of the world, not seduced by its meretricious and squalid values and tawdry vanities. Our mission is to witness beyond the merely temporal and material. That is the responsibility of all Christians and from the foundation of Pusey House the Priest Librarians have been charged with a responsibility to teach the Catholic Faith as the Church of England has received it and to call to holiness of living all those who bravely cross our forbidding threshold.
And we claim, as all Christians claim, that it can uniquely be achieved through adherence to Christ. Whereas other religions correspond to one particular need, or one particular mood, of man, be it a system of personal morality or ethics, a form of spiritual fervour, a mystical tendency, Christianity is about man’s full humanity and his potential for divinity.
Our Lord taught the world about its need of redemption, its need for revelation and manifested them within himself. He taught the world that the Old Covenant which God had made with the Jewish people was being abolished, and that God in Christ was once more choosing out for himself a people to be his own. This time, however, it was not to be one nation, not one race, not one tribe, it was to be a universal community and communion of souls won by his blood. He offered the world not a code of ethics, not a mystical experience, not cultural or racial exclusivity but salvation.
Our Lord’s claim is not merely to satisfy this or that passing need of our common life, this or that situation which we encounter in our common humanity. Rather, he offers us a new and more abundant life of sacramental grace and power, of common purpose and common destiny, of sanctification in this troubled and precarious world and the glory of the world to come.
Let the world seek to reject him if it will, but let us seek to win the world for the love of God in Christ Jesus. Then the world will know what it is that we know: that the love of God is a love affair like no other.
Father William Davage Custodian of Dr Pusey's Library