Lighting the Way

Church lights (candles) symbolize God’s Presence in the sanctuary and the spiritual enlightenment His Gospel brings our lives. Roman practice differs slightly, but in the main carries the same symbolism. Looking at the chancel (by the communion rails) in most churches, we see two major lights. First on the Gospel (left side) we see a small red light mounted on the wall. This is the Altar Lamp that burns in honor of the constant Real Presence in the reserve Sacrament (consecrated wine and host) kept in the tabernacle / aumbry - a small, ornate box centered on the back portion of the Holy Table. or on a wall nearby.


The other major lights are the candles on the Holy Table, divided into two groups, signifying Jesus in both His divine and human natures. At many parishes, you’ll see two groups of three each on the back of the Table, called “Office Lights,” lit when conducting the offices of the Church, such as Morning/Evening Prayer, Holy Matrimony, or Funeral services. In other parishes, there will simply be two larger pillar candles beside the Holy Table which are lit for the same purpose.


The two lights in front of these - or directly on the table - are the Communion Lights, used during the Eucharist. All the lights echo Christ’s words, when He said, “I am the Light of the World” (St. John 8:12) and other passages referring to God’s light, such as St. Matt. 4:16 and St. Luke 2:32.

The last light in many churches is the Paschal Candle. This is a large white candle normally kept our of sight, or next to the baptismal font. The candle is blessed every year at the Easter Vigil service, having the year inscribed on it and (traditionally) five grains of incense inserted into in in the shape of a cross. It is often decorated with other signs of the resurrection as well. Some parishes - especially those with elaborate Holy Saturday / Easter Vigil services - have special rituals surrounding the entrance of the Paschal candle. These rituals can include chanting the Exultet (normally done by a deacon), dipping the base of the candle in the baptismal font, and using this candle to light the tapers that will ignite the rest of the office and communion lights. (This practice is especially important in parishes that light a Paschal fire near the entrance of the church door for the vigil.) The candle is brought to the front of the church from Easter until the Ascension (when its removal visually symbolizes Christ's immediate light being taken from our presence). Then the candle is either stored or kept near the font. However, for baptisms and funerals (which, for Christians, is the completion of our baptismal death into Christ), the candle returns to a prominent place. I should also note that this is a Western / Latin Rite practice. The East uses a different type of candle. However, this practice antedates Jerome - and was clearly a common practice long before the Council of Nicea.


The candles recall times when ancient Christians met at night to avoid discovery and needed the lights to worship, but are retained to remind us of those days and to focus us on our Heavenly Father of Lights. Scriptural authority is solid for their use—found in Ex 25:31 & 40:25, Lev 24:2 & II Chron 13:11— and reminds us—we carry the Light of Christ!

Anglican Adiaphora

The good Bishop of Durham discusses adiaphora in relationship to the problems of the American Episcopal corporation in the wider Anglican Communion.

And also internationally. We have for years in the Anglican Communion operated a tacit rule of agreeing to differ about many things but trying not to do or say things which will cause other Anglicans to stumble. The Lambeth Conference has been the main instrument of this process: broad agreement can be reached on major issues while the provinces retain autonomy in their own lives. Thus, for instance, the Lambeth Conference agreed that it was all right to admit children to Communion prior to Confirmation, which then opened up the question for any individual Province to discuss, as most now have. Our own General Synod repeated Lambeth’s point, so the issue was then passed down to dioceses. Our own Diocese in turn agreed, so the issue has now become a matter for individual parishes. That is a model of how you discern that something is adiaphora, and how you deal with the issue once that has been decided, respecting consciences all the way through. It highlights again this key point: the question of whether a particular issue is adiaphora or not cannot itself be adiaphora. It wouldn’t have done for the Parish of St-Muddy-by-the-Sea to decide independently that the question of unconfirmed children receiving Communion was adiaphora and then proceeding to take its own decision without reference to its diocese, its province, or the whole Communion.,

[SNIP]

The principle of adiaphora was itself, in fact, a matter of life and death. The doctrine that some things are adipahora, and some aren’t, is not itself adiaphora. The decision as to which things make a difference and which do not is itself a decision which makes a huge difference. Some of the early English Reformers claimed explicitly that they were dying precisely for the principle of adiaphora itself, for the right to disagree on certain points (not on everything). That for which you will give your life is hardly something which doesn’t make a difference.

Read the whole thing here.

On the new ACNA's Party Divisions

CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters features a senior devil called Screwtape writing to his nephew, a junior devil named Wormwood, giving him advice on how to entrap a human called “the Patient.” In my reading I noticed again this passage (from letter XVI) as relevant today as 67 years ago when first published:

I warned you before that if your patient can’t be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don’t mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is the better. And it isn’t the doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice. The real fun is working up hatred between those who say “mass” and those who say “holy communion” when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker’s doctrine and Thomas Aquinas’, in any form which would hold water for five minutes.

And all the purely indifferent things-candles and clothes and what not-are an admirable ground for our activities. We have quite removed from men’s minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials-namely, that the human without scruples should always give in to the human with scruples.

You would think they could not fail to see the application. You would expect to find the “low” churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his “high” brother should be moved to irreverence, and the “high” one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his “low” brother into idolatry. And so it would have been but for our ceaseless labour. Without that the variety of usage within the Church of England might have become a positive hotbed of charity and humility,

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE

If you've never read The Screwtape Letters, I highly advise it. There are reading guides aplenty, and a Sunday School discussion group would be excellent. This book will give you excellent insight into the ways the EVIL ONE uses our religious impulses against us, even in the true religion of Christianity.

The mainline denominations flagged and failed under the weight of making party distinctions the sine qua non of ordination - while ignoring whether the candidate for ordination was actually a Christian. Dogmas like the physical resurrection of the Christ, the Triune Godhead, and original sin could be thrown under the bus so long as you held to something sounding like a distinctive of your denomination.

So the Anglicans let in all sorts of poppycock in the name of the Oxford Movement (which also re-introduced plenty of fine practices). Just harp on the tactile succession of bishops and the place of the church as steering society, and you're in! You don't have to actually believe the faith of the apostles...just get in line and touch somebody who touched somebody who touched somebody that might have believed the witness of the Apostles and carried on that deposit. You'll be qualified to teach with apostolic authority (even if you teach contrary to their doctrine) and you may get to touch some special people yourself (when you aren't lapsing into alcohol abuse). Do enough of this, and you get to be the presiding bishop-ess and teach people about a new divinity known as mother jesus!

The Reformed allowed universalism to creep into their midst through an appropriation of God's sovereignty in the salvation of humanity. As long as you held that it was God who made the decision, you could attribute to him whatever decision you wished - ignoring Jesus' warning that not many will enter into eternal felicity or trod that narrow road. And of course the desire for a highly-educated clergy meant that often times the pastor could outwit the congregation into thinking that Church has been wrong about all sorts of things...as long as s/he footnoted enough and threw enough jargon at them. You may even get to start changing language about God, once you've skewed the whole concept of language in your favor.

Lutherans turned their confessionally robust Christ into a zeitgeist infused prophet by virtue of the kenotic theory. Once Christ is no longer Lord, you needn't reverence or obey him...that's "law" and not grace. And so you end up knowing God through a defanged Jesus, and suddenly God is no longer the Most Holy, Undivided, and Consubstantial Trinity, but a being of your own making...maybe even a Goddess! The resultant antinomianism speaks for itself.

Are we noticing a pattern that all of these wrong turns, mis-steps (which is another translation of the Greek word the New Testament uses for TRESPASSES and TRANSGRESSIONS) lead to the same place? Abandoning God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ for some strange goddess! Has the church - the new Israel - still not learned the lessons about dancing around the asherah (Ashtaroth / Astarte) poles?

All this is to say that if we are to serve Christ faithfully, and not simply seek to be bound to a party-line, then we must recover the fullness of the Catholic Orthodox Faith that has been shared by all Christians - especially as seen in the Apostles, Niceno-Constanipolitan, and Athanasian Creeds.