A Sinner's Lament - On Catherine Parr

Catherine Parr, the survivor among Henry VIII’s six queens married him in July 1543. She was an accomplished writer, and at some point between her marriage and Henry’s death in 1547 she wrote a spiritual autobiography called The lamentation of a sinner.

At one level, Queen Catherine maintains a dignified privacy even as she confesses her sins. There is no airing of her dirty laundry, or wallowing in her misdeeds. Nothing here would provoke a tabloid frenzy. But the Queen earnestly laments the state of her soul before she understood the true nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Her diagnosis of her spiritual condition prior to her conversion is most grave. It is not merely that she was a sinner: in one sense, she is able to confess that she is ‘not like other men’, and not an ‘adulterer, nor fornicator, and so forth’.

But for Catherine it was her spiritual pride which is at the dark heart of her former life. In this attitude of high-handedness she was guilty of ‘most presumptuously thinking nothing of Christ crucified’ and ‘went about to set forth mine own righteousness’. What’s more, ‘the blood of Christ was not reputed by me sufficient for to wash me from the filth of my sins…but I sought for such riffraff as the bishop of Rome hath planted in his tyranny and kingdom, trusting with great confidence by the virtue and holiness of them, to receive full remission of my sins’.

But the solution to this pride was not to display a greater humility – as if to find a virtue to outweigh it. For one thing, Catherine remembers herself as blind to her spiritual state: ‘If any man had said I had been without Christ, I would have stiffly withstood the same; and yet I never knew Christ nor wherefore He came’.

Rather it was an encounter with the cross of Jesus Christ that led to her change of heart. The cross at once revealed to her the love of God and her own sinfulness. It produced in her a new kind of faith: not any longer a ‘history faith’ but now a ‘lively faith’. What did Catherine mean by the distinction? She writes of ‘a dead human, historical faith, gotten by human industry, but a supernal lively faith, which worketh by charity’. One kind of faith might rightly be called a kind of virtue in that it is attained by human effort. But the faith that enlivens and justifies the sinner is ‘supernal’: it comes from a supernatural source. It is God’s own gift by the Spirit and not in itself a work earning merit before God. As she writes:

Yet we may not impute to the worthiness of faith or works, our justification before God: but ascribe and give the worthiness of it, wholly to the merits of Christ’s passion, and refer and attribute the knowledge and perceiving thereof only to faith: whose very true only property, is to take, apprehend and hold fast they promises of God’s mercy, the which maketh us righteous: and to cause me continually to hope for the same mercy and in love to work all manner of ways allowed in the Scripture that I may be thankful for the same.

What we have in this remarkable document written by arguably the most powerful woman in the kingdom at the time is a confident and joyful testimony to the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone. It reveals not only the doctrine, but the spirituality of faith alone. It is a solafidean spirituality that shines through in the way that the Queen speaks of the intractability of her pre-conversion state; and the way in which she describes the nature of the faith she has now found as emanating from God himself. But above all, it is Catherine’s call to a constant meditation on the cross of Christ as the ‘cunningest lesson in divinity’ which reveals just how deeply embedded this newly found spirituality had become.

This was one woman’s testimony and not an official church document or a formulary of some kind. However, it is evidence that the Reformation teaching on justification was not a piece of arcane theology, or the pretext for a manifestly political break with the Church of Rome. This was a deeply-held conviction: a transforming truth which had the power to captivate people and to give them a new self-understanding.

Sydney and Mates

http://sydneyanglicans.net/life/culture/7-sins-of-sydney-3-loyalty-to-mates


I feel I should put in an explanatory note about how I am working on these 'Sins of Sydney'.
Some people feel I have been too critical of 'our' side.
It would be too easy for the series to degenerate into a series of swipes from a height at the culture we inhabit. But that seems to be cheap to me. In each piece I have tried to include a reference to the way in which churches and/or Christians are themselves part of the 'sin' that we are describing and analysing.

The importance of this is theological and rhetorical and historical.

It's historical because (I hope) it is simply the truth that we have shared in the sins of our city to some extent and there is no point denying it!

It's rhetorical because in our times to admit one's faults is a very important thing to do in order to get a hearing (if indeed they are faults). In addition, we will find it very hard to accurately and precisely speak to society about its sins if we don't understand our own complicity in the social pathologies we discover.

It's theological because the one thing that constitutes the church is that it is a repentent church that has received mercy. There's no need for us to be defensive: we can be genuinely repentant in the expectation that there is no condemnation for those in Christ.

Quite simply: we, of all people, have nothing to hide!

A question for historical theologians

Historical theologians (and you know, some of my best friends are historical theologians...) are a curious bunch. They are dedicated to reach into the obscure pockets of the theological works of the past and telling us what someone REALLY thought. It is onerous and exacting work, and anyone who tries to do constructive theology owes them a debt.

Now, constructive theologians often making grand sweeping statements about the history of theology in order to bolster their case. Two examples:
1) the Barth-sponsored reading of Calvin and the Calvinists, which alleges that there is a marked difference between the two.
2) the Rogers-McKim reading of the Princetonian school (Warfield etc) which alleges that inerrancy was pretty much their invention and borne out of their commitment to Scottish Common Sense Realism.

In both instances, careful historical theology has shown where polemics have stood in the way of understanding what actually occured, and have given us a more nuanced view of the past and more options for discussing significant matters of controversy in the present. The historical theologian can always play the trump card of 'I have really read all of this work in its context and in its original language and in the unpublished manuscript and I can tell you that the true picture is more like X than Y'. It really is hard to get around that kind of breadth of knowledge.

However - there is a point up to which this becomes perfectly useless in tracing the history of ideas. What do I mean? I mean that what we need to deal with is not Augustine as he actually was (for example) but 'Augustine' as the tradition received him. Now, 'Augustine' is somewhat similar to Augustine, but not the same. Sure, find me an unread and untranslated sermon that shows that he didn't really think xyz, but in the final analysis, who cares? What matters is rather what successive generations of theologians have meant when they wrote about 'Augustine'.

An example came up in discussion recently about John Owen. Now, John Owen is probably best known - though certainly not exclusively - for his work on the atonement The Death of Death. A historical theologian friend of mine said recently though that, since this was an early work, it was not fair to judge Owen on this work. Granted. But Owen is not 'Owen'. And ultimately, 'Owen' is more interesting in the history of theological thought than Owen. So is 'Arius', as opposed to Arius.

This is not to say we should embrace unfair readings or short cuts or that more work on these great figures won't yield impressive fruit. But historical theologians need to engage more in tracing how ideas have been passed on, don't they - justly or not. In fact, this raises the point: can we ever really sum up the thought of an individual thinker as a consistent whole in any case? Thinkers are organisms. They change their minds, contradict themselves, forget things and get emotional about stuff. They respond to controversies and battles... are we not better served by asking what their legacy was? Don't we need a reception theory for theological thinkers?

Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology

I am starting to get into Kevin Vanhoozer's Remythologizing Theology. I enjoyed this comment:

The Bible both describes and participates in the economy of triune communicative action. The Bible is noth a unified (one mythos) and many-voicced discourse whose form is theologically significant. As opposed to monologic epics - comprehenisive stories told by an omniscient narrator with a single set of concepts and categories - the Bible communicates its theodramatic story dialogically. To speak of mythos is to remember both that there is a unifying plot and that no one voice, perspective or set of categories alone articulates it. Rather the divine playwright employs a plurality of human voices to communicate what he was doing in Christ to reconcile the world to himself. p. 26

This meshes with the idea I have had for a project on theological anthropology which would engage with the great literary genres as alterative or overlapping mythoi in comparison and contrast to the Biblical mythos. (You have to read Vanhoozer to see what he means by 'mythos' btw).

Sydney and the Pursuit of Luck

Read it here

Faith and Doubt Table-Talk

Details here