The Christian Moral Life. Timothy F. Sedgwick
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Jesus reveals the nature of God. Those who acknowledge Jesus are then brought into a new or deeper relationship with God. What Jesus reveals he effects. In following Jesus, Christians become the people of God. As such they form the church, which is the sacrament of Christ in the world.
Altogether, Christian faith is a practical piety that is corporate, incarnate, and sacramental. These three characteristics of practical piety are integrally related. Practical piety as a way of life is what is meant by discipleship. This way of life is never individual. To be formed in God is to love one another. Such a faith is never individualistic but always corporate. Corporate Christian faith is incarnate; God is in the very fabric of things. To relate to the pattern in this life there must be something to reveal the pattern. For Christians, Jesus is this revelation. As such he is the sacrament of God, drawing us into the practical piety of faith. As a way of life, Christians in turn become the sacrament of Christ to the world.
Faith as a Way of Life
In English Christianity, faith as a way of life always has an intimate quality to it. The church was experienced and understood as tied to the village or neighborhood. Religion was not an austere authority from afar, as Rome and the pope came to be for many Catholics as well as Protestants. Nor was the church viewed as realized more fully in the “religious,” in the male and female monastic communities set aside from the world for a life of prayer. Instead, Anglicanism came to see Christian faith from the perspective of fairly small communities whose life was gathered up, celebrated, and formed through common worship. The circumstances of England and of the English Reformation made this possible.
The break with Rome closed the monasteries in 1536, but a Benedictine spirituality remained integral to Anglicanism. Benedictine communities had been central to religion in England.5 There in these communities daily life had been formed around what were called the disciplines of prayer, study, and work. Each day was structured around a lectio divina, a set of offices of worship centered in the reading of scripture, saying the Psalms, and offering common prayer. Gathering together seven times a day, the monks would begin with matins or morning prayer before sunrise and end with compline at the end or completion of the day. Worship punctuated the day with a rhythm so that prayer, study, and work formed a harmonic chord.
Prayer was not separate from daily life but the celebration and offering of all of life in God. In turn, study was not academic but medita-tive. Specifically, the study of scripture was a matter of standing before scripture in order to listen and experience how God has been present in the changing times of life, in the whole cycle of events from birth to death, in joy and in sorrow. Work as well was a form of prayer and study. Whether in the work of the garden or in managing community matters, work was life in God, without which prayer and study were together like a soul without a body, form without content.
Much of Benedictine spirituality was itself claimed in the Protestant vision of Christian faith as given in the daily life of a people shaped in the worship of God. The central hallmark of Protestantism was an open Bible. Scripture is the Word of God where the revelation and power effecting grace in our lives is given. This experience of God’s presence given through scripture was focused in the understanding of “justification by grace through faith.” These words may be most simply defined as being made just or right in relationship to God, not by our works but as simply given, as grace. This we know by faith, that is to say, in a trust in such grace that comes in hearing the Christian story. Given this fundamental conviction, the Bible was to be read in the language of the people and made available to all for study and worship. In turn, worship was common worship, a regular gathering of the people of God to hear God’s Word, to acknowledge God’s grace, and to offer their daily lives in God. In this larger context the Protestant protest against clericalism and emphasis on the laity and lay vocation makes sense. The presence of God’s redeeming life is not in religious life separate from daily life but in our common life.
These Protestant convictions shared the deepest understanding of the forms of worship that had shaped Benedictine monastic communities. Instead of rejecting wholesale the Roman Catholic forms of worship, Thomas Cranmer created a Book of Common Prayer that appropriated Roman Catholic forms of worship reformed by sources from the early church and from the Protestant Reformation.6 Like the monastic communities, the English Book of Common Prayer structured worship in terms of a daily office of worship. Instead of seven offices there were two, Morning and Evening Prayer. In turn, the reading of scripture was organized around a lectionary, so that with daily reading the Old Testament would be basically read once a year while the New Testament would be read every four months, the Psalms every month.7 Here, as with the Benedictine communities, worship was a daily affair of listening to scripture and the offering of thanks and prayers for “our daily bread” and that of the world.
The Book of Common Prayer also reformed the Eucharist so that it was the celebration of the community in its life given in Christ.8 In Holy Eucharist the worshiping community offers its life, individually and together, to God. This is a matter of commendation. As the life of Jesus reaches its culmination in his commendation of himself to God, in his crucifixion and death, Jesus represents and presents to us life lived in relationship to God. The Eucharist is hence Holy Communion: dying with Christ, the worshiper is raised into relationship with God. In the Book of Common Prayer, the concern was in enabling participation in this worship and not, as Richard Hooker emphasized, in “the manner how.”9
It is easy to create a romantic picture of Anglican worship. No doubt the reality of worship was often far removed from this vision of forming a holy and godly people, what I have called a practical piety grounded in the worship of God. However, the Book of Common Prayer offered a point of reference, in the book itself and in its use as the worship required by law as the public worship in England. Christian faith was a corporate, practical piety that understood the Christian life sacramentally and incarnationally. Faith is enfleshed in our daily lives. The Christian life is a matter of holiness, of living in and deepening the experience of God’s presence in our lives together. This we know and do in Christ.
Something of this ideal of an Anglican vision of Christian faith is expressed in George Herbert’s seventeenth-century classic, The Country Parson.10 The church stood at the center of village life. On Sunday mornings the community gathered together in worship to offer to God their lives together. And what they did on Sundays was re-created every day. In the morning and evening while they worked in the fields, shops, and homes, the church bell would ring. They knew that the priest, with perhaps a few others, would be celebrating the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. In this way they knew that their lives were held in the daily round of prayer. This was made possible because the parson was a daily part of their lives. He knew them and celebrated with them times of joy and times of sorrow. They were the church, and he was their pastor.
English Christianity and its heirs, the Anglican and Episcopal churches throughout the world, have at their best offered this vision of Christian faith as a matter of practical piety without confusing faith with right belief. In large measure this is the result of necessity.11 The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries threatened any peace as Protestant churches sought independence from the established religion of Roman Catholicism. The peace and unity of England, like those of its neighbors on the continent, were threatened. The break with Rome following Henry VIII’s annulment in 1533 left England with the question of religious alignment. The monarchy succeeding Henry VIII, that of Edward, turned towards Protestantism. In turn, his successor, Queen Mary, repealed the legislation of Edward and pressed for a Roman Catholic nation.
It is almost impossible for us now to comprehend the conflicts over religious faith in this period of time. This is because religious faith was viewed as essential to the life of a nation. That is why one church was established by the state. Religious faith bound individuals together in interlocking sets of duties and responsibilities. Relationships were formed that extended civility, respect, and accountability in order to establish a commonwealth — literally, something of worth shared in common. A nation depended on the establishment of one religion. Religion was the soul of the nation.
The conflict between Protestantism