The Rock, February 1998
In England Now
'Tis an ill wind that blows nobody any good!
One welcome by-product of the "Liberal Revolution" of the past few years has been the way that it has brought people like us "Rockers" together.
The apparent triumph of so-called Liberalism and the readiness of its champions to ride rough-shod over anyone or anything standing in their way has brought together a Faithful Remnant in a way that would never otherwise have happened.
By Faithful Remnant I mean those Christians who are committed to safeguarding the "faith once delivered to the saints" as opposed to those others who regard "the faith" as something which can (and should) change with the times in order to make it more credible (or "acceptable") to present-day thought.
By our being "brought together" I don't just mean that you and I draw comfort from a general feeling that there are others in the world who are being discriminated against or persecuted like we are.
I mean the much more positive and tangible "bringing together" which comes from meeting and corresponding with entire strangers simply because we happen to be part of the same Faithful Remnant.
Let me give you two examples of how this happens in practice which took place during the past week. On Thursday morning a man in clerical attire came to the daily eucharist at St Stephen's and made his communion.
Talking to him afterwards I discovered that he was a Minister of the Presbyterian Church of Australia. That body is one of those communions which have tried the experiment of women ministers and then having realised after a number of years that this practice is not only unscriptural but also contrary to our Lord's will for his Church, have ceased the experiment altogether.
In this matter, then, they would see themselves as having turned back to an orthodoxy from which they had strayed. Over breakfast he and Geoffrey Kirk and I had a long talk together, and it became clear that our visitor held a view very like our own not only on the matter of Orders but also the Sacrament of Holy Communion. It had taken the experience of following one false trail to enable him to realise that the Liberal Agenda included other errors as well.
That was one experience. Three days later on Sunday we received an unscheduled visit from Fr Öle, a priest from Norway, where those of our integrity have been quite seriously persecuted not only for refusing to accept women bishops but also for being outspoken against abortion and other moral issues.
Father Öle is presently working in Paris writing up a thesis. He had decided to spend the weekend in England "doing Forward in Faith". On Saturday he went to a meeting at our Church of Christ the King in Gordon Square and on Sunday came to our church of St Stephen and St Mark, Lewisham, knowing it to be haven of orthodoxy. He arrived in time for the Sunday Mass and concelebrated with us.
News has got around the world that St Stephen's Lewisham is a great foregathering place for Rockers-and-Remnants who are visiting England and particularly those who find themselves in London on a Sunday. Because there is an excellent train service (even on a Sunday) and the church is very close to the station few weeks go by without finding one or more such people, lay and clergy have made their way there. We often have such visitors from Norway, Sweden, the USA, Australia, Canada and other parts of the world.
It needs to be said that one of the things they don't find at St Stephen's is what some people like that are looking for, - a service conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer. There are indeed several churches of our "integrity" in London which use such a rite, but St Stephen's, in common with many other Forward in Faith parishes, uses the modern Roman rite for all its services.
What they do find is the Catholic faith proclaimed, read, taught and celebrated without any attempt to "tone it down" in order to make it accord more easily with popular sentiments or beliefs.
There are literally dozens of other churches you can go to in order to find "catholicism-and-water" if that's what you want.
Our conviction is that, whilst the manner and terms in which the truths of the Catholic faith are presented and explained in different times and places and cultures can and should be adapted to make it easily understood by their hearers, the truths themselves cannot, and should not, change.
So valuable, I believe, is this bringing-together of the faithful that I totally disagree with those who yearn to "put the clock back" to 1980, 1950, 1920 or one of the many other dates which people seem to refer to as if it had been a Golden Age which we should be trying to replicate.
Given that the two most recent of those dates were well within my own lifespan I can assure anyone who supposes that these were Good Times, that the Church was then in an even more parlous situation than it is today with the added complication that hardly anyone realised it.
In more recent years, say since 1960, the malign powers at work in the church have broken cover and come out into the open. From their writings it is obvious that they are preaching an entirely different gospel from the one which has been committed to us.
Theirs is a faith which is based not so much on what God has revealed to us about himself, but what man, supposes he has discovered about God by using introspection and his own native wit .
Natural Theology, as this latter process is called, has always had a complementary part to play in deepening our understanding of what God has revealed to us about himself; but as a starting-point for knowing God it is doomed to failure.
Trying to define God from the "outside" in that way is like looking at a painting by Rembrandt or Rubens and describing it in terms of its spectrometral analysis: so much percent red, so much cyan, so much yellow. This description might be a completely accurate one in its own terms, but would leave us ignorant of the true value or nature of what we were looking at.
Today we Revelationists, to coin a phrase, know that only a wholesale return to what God has perfectly and finally revealed in Jesus Christ will get things back on the rails again; which distinguishes us from the self-searchers who are equally convinced that only an intimate understanding of human nature combined with a wholesale abandonment of anything in the Scriptures, the Creeds or the Councils of the Church that is not "relevant", will serve their purpose of making the Christian faith acceptable to the modern man.
The result of such a clear-cut division between the two parties, Revelationists and Self-searchers, has made it much easier to identify who the real Remnant are and to work together with them.
Revelationists include those in the Free Synod of Sweden, the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, the Traditional Anglican Communion, Forward in Faith, Cost of Conscience, Credo Cymru, Reform and many others. We who belong to such bodies have been able to put up a common defence for the faith in a way that the Lambeth Conference, dominated by North American Bishops, and with many of its African dioceses dependant upon money from the United States, has not been able to do for many years.
It is a mark of Divine Providence that at the very moment when we need to be able to communicate easily, quickly and cheaply with each other there has arrived on the scene the Information Technology revolution ("IT").
The Internet, Fax, the Worldwide Web, low-priced computers and Desktop Publishing packages, together with e-mail facilities have meant that it is possible to keep in touch, almost on a daily basis with Christians of our integrity all over the world.
"Parochialism" and "congregationalism", and the belief that the Church of God ended at the west door of St Grizelda's-by-the-Gasworks were the great curse of Anglicanism in years gone by - far more than they ever were with our Roman Catholic brethren; but there is now no excuse for people to remain ignorant about what is happening to our brethren throughout the world, and to keep in constant touch with them.
That is not the only benefit of IT. Teaching and information resources are available on Compact disk at a fraction of the cost of buying the equivalent number of books.
Here is an example for you. The other day someone gave me a Compact Disk entitled The Master Christian Library Version 5. This has on it not only all the ante- and post-Nicene Fathers' writings on it but large portions of Aquinas' Summa Theologica, the entire Vulgate, all the written works of John Wesley, six different translations of the Bible, six volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Calvin's Institutes, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and over three hundred other major works.
To buy such a collection of books would run to many hundreds, if not thousands of pounds. But there it is, all on a single disk and costing a fraction of that amount. No doubt some of you will know about other, perhaps even better available selections.
Suddenly to find that one's reference library has been enhanced to the tune of 330 books, any one of which can be searched for a particular reference in a fraction of the time it would take with a conventional book, and the findings of that search printed out is a real "serendipital" experience.
Disks such as that would not be expensive to make and reproduce in bulk. I would like to suggest that we of the Faithful Remnant should produce a collection of our own writings.
We could begin, for instance, with the entire contents of The Rock, Christian Challenge, and New Directions from the first to the current issue. Add to this some of the two thousand files on the Trushare and Kingdom Bulletin Boards, plus the many other catechetical and other teaching material which have been produced by organisations such as the Church Union, Forward in Faith, Cost of Conscience (to name but three) in the last twenty five years or more and you have a really worthwhile collection of material.
Two difficulties stand in the way of such a project, and for once, money is not one of them. The first, relatively easy to surmount is to find someone who will actually do the work. Thanks to the necessity laid upon us we have a number of highly skilled computer-literate priests who are able to produce journals like The Rock, Christian Challenge, and New Directions at a fraction of what it would have cost in real terms only ten years ago.
The second difficulty is more problematical. Experience suggests that in the present climate people are just not prepared to buy, let alone use, such materials even if they are available. Here things are somewhat different from previous generations.
The early Tractarians, for example, were almost entirely reliant upon the printed word for getting their teachings across to people. Their disciples would ride many miles on horseback to deliver bundles of each Tract as soon as it was published to the hundreds of faithful people in their neighbourhood who wanted to read it. Today there seems to be a marked reluctance on the part of the Faithful Remnant to read, study or learn about anything in the least bit intellectually demanding.
This is a pity, for experience suggests that there is no better way of generating bonds between those of the same mind than to have a common study-programme. It is the whole basis underlying Bible-study groups, Lent courses and many other such teaching aids. Just at the very moment when we are in a position to get the vital documents of the faith into the hands of the people who need to read them we find that they have given up on serious study. That is not how Remnants survive!
Let me quote another historical precedent from two centuries before the Tractarians. It came home to me how essential it is for minorities to bond together with each other when I recently read Antonia Fraser's recent book The Gunpowder Plot (Mandarin Paperbacks 1997) and certain aspects are extraordinarily relevant to the situation in which we presently find ourselves.
It matters not for the present purposes whether we find ourselves in sympathy with the Recusants or with their persecutors, or the justice of either's cause. Let me briefly outline what they were facing..
After the Reformation many families in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland remained faithful to what they saw as the "true faith" - that is the pre-Reformation depositum fidei as subsequently defined and purged of some of its worst abuses by the Council of Trent.
For holding firm to their faith they were alternately persecuted (under Edward VI), rewarded (under Mary Tudor) and tolerated under Elizabeth I until Pius V's incredibly stupid Papal Bull of 1570 effectively turned them all into political traitors, whereafter they were more or less remorselessly persecuted.
With the arrival of James I in 1603 there was some real hope amongst the Recusants that the penal laws enacted against them might be repealed or at least relaxed. So confident were some of them that this would be so that they declared, ill-advisedly, that James before his accession had committed himself to this.
In fact the laws were not repealed and a few foolhardy men lost patience with always being "reactive" and decided to become "proactive" instead. Led by Catesby and Fawkes they hatched the Gunpowder Plot which even by today's standards if it had succeeded would have put the IRA's most violent bombing campaigns in the shade.
The important things to know are not just that the plot didn't succeed (and probably never could have done) but that the Recusants themselves were to a man and woman, clergy and lay, deeply opposed to it from the start.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, those who held firm to the faith they believed in went to extraordinary lengths to keep in touch with each other and to continue to practise and teach their faith to their children, their servants, and to anyone else who would listen to them.
They met in secret to hear Mass (itself a serious offence); they published and distributed books of theology and devotion printed on the continent and smuggled into the country in cargoes of other goods; they prepared for the worst by creating innumerable hiding places ("priest-holes", many of which can still be seen today); but above all they never gave up hope even when things were going terribly wrong for them.
As a result, the faith which they strove to preserve survived the persecutions and was found to be alive and well in the more tolerant ages which succeeded the Stuarts.
No doubt there were those who longed to "put the clock back" to some imaginary pre-Tridentine Golden Age. But the wiser of them realised both that there never had been such an Age and that what they had managed to come through with was all that was necessary to rebuild the Faith which they had so assiduously defended.
The moral of that chapter of history is that survival depends not so much upon numbers as upon the steadfastness and perseverance of the Faithful Remnant and how well they are instructed in the faith which they have taken it upon themselves to defend.
There are two things above all others which threaten the survival of such a Remnant.
One is that they will simply compromise their beliefs in order to gain peace. They give up the struggle in other words and retire into a private backwater. At this price, peace is not worth having, since the very thing they have committed themselves to sustain, their raison d'être has been lost.
The second is that the Faithful Remnant will lose touch with each other and this makes them the easiest of targets to pick off or marginalise.
Whole tracts of the Anglican world have become marginalised from the faith in that way But, thank God, there are other places where the Faithful Remnant not only survive but continue to grow. What that Remnant needs to become, almost as much as anything else, is a literate remnant.
The means for doing so are ready to hand. It only needs the determination for this to become a reality.