C4CC(18): Hocus Pocus (1)
In which I start to really put my finger on how the church has gone wrong…
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“In all probability those common juggling words of hocus pocus are nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of Rome in their trick of Transubstantiation.” John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1694
If the Eucharist really is at the centre of Christian life and witness, how then has it come to be so disregarded within the churches? Let us consider the Dark Ages – something of a misnomer really – when Christian culture broke down except for the monasteries. The monasteries became the place for continuity of memory and they laid the foundations for the Medieval Renaissance (c. 1150 – 1300) by clearing the great northern forests and raising the productivity of the land. This led to a population increase and a cultural revival. Also at the end of this period, in 1054, was the break between the churches, between the eastern church, which was historically Greek speaking, and the western church which was Latin speaking.
In the Medieval Renaissance there was a great flourishing of learning with the development of the great Western universities – Oxford, Bologna and especially Paris. Everyone at each university was either a monk or a priest, but they reincorporated much of the learning that had come in either via contact with Islamic scholars, or from the refugees from the Eastern Orthodox church, and in particular the works of Aristotle were rediscovered. So there was a rich historical heritage from the monks, carried through the Dark Ages, and there was new thinking coming in partly from Islam and partly from the Eastern Orthodox church. This was a moment of great cultural fusion, the establishment of a distinctively 'Western' intellectual system, and the genius who united the streams of thought together was Thomas Aquinas. In brief, there was a change in the way in which the world was understood. Whilst Aquinas represents a creative and faithful union of these different intellectual traditions, he was not revered at the time in the way he is now, and the wider culture, helped by other leading thinkers such as John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham embarked upon a theological shift that has had profoundly negative ramifications for how we have lived ever since.
The catastrophe for Christianity came because the centre of gravity for theological study was moved from the cloister – from a community formed around the Eucharist – into the academy. Theology is not in the end an academic subject. Theology is not something that can accept the norms and the authorities which are accepted in the academy and remain true to its own vocation. In this movement theology took the first steps to a divorce from the practice of Christian life and worship. This was a change in the way that theology was understood, and the consequence was that it changed the way that God was understood. The long term consequence of this movement was the development of an abstract understanding of the faith, which has had all sorts of barbarous consequences. Western atheism, for example, is the direct consequence of theology forgetting what it is there for, and accepting the bizarre notion that the defence of the belief in God did not rest in Scripture or revelation, but rested on academic, philosophical proofs. This process went on over centuries and culminates in the aggressively secular environment that Western Christians endure today. It has meant is that theology and the teaching of theology has been absorbed by modernism, by the philosophical agenda arising in the seventeenth century, with the corollary that theology or faith is now seen as a private preference – all well and good but keep it to yourself. Theology in the West became utterly rotten, and the nadir arrived in the first half of the twentieth century.
Theologians are discovering that they have so lost touch with the living faith that it does not make any sense for what they are doing any more. Theology is being forced back into the Church because the academy is coming into its own, and theology is being replaced by religious studies and inter-cultural context and all the other post-modern nostrums and distractions. What this means is that real theology is coming back where it belongs, finding its true home once more in the Church. Theology properly understood is simply prayer (the one who prays is a theologian) and it is not an elitist activity. Theology is about getting to know Jesus better. Fortunately, this is starting to be understood, but there remains a very great deal to be done. Consider the training of the clergy: faithful ministers are not produced if the only biblical study they receive is secular and academic. The way in which clergy are trained in the Church of England (and also in many other denominations) is through the academic study of texts. This is why faith and spirituality in the Church of England has withered, and why the Church is dying.
Theology is tremendously important for the church, but not theology understood as an academic subject, as an abstract intellectual exercise. Theology is not about what we do inside our heads and the arrangement of our mental furniture; it is about the way that we structure our lives around different priorities. In short, the study of theology is the formation of our judgement, training in phronesis. For Christians, God has the highest priority, and so theology is how we talk about God. If we take God to mean all that is most central and meaningful, it is how we shape our lives around what is most central and meaningful. That is what theology does, it teaches us to shape our lives in ways that our fruitful and abundant. Theology is at its heart very practical. It is about the way that we pray and grow in faith. It is how we understand who we are.
It is not possible to understand Christianity unless we are taking part in the process of worship. “Theology is prayer, and prayer is theology”, “the one who prays is a theologian”. That is what theology is – it is a by-product of genuine prayer, of getting to know God better. The church fathers taught that the Eucharist is the marker of what is true theology – it is in the Eucharistic community that we discern the truth, it is through breaking the bread, sharing the wine, it is in this context that we learn the truth about what the Christian faith is. At the time of the Medieval Renaissance, theology moved from being the property of the worshipping people, into the academy, and began a journey to becoming a purely rational, intellectual pursuit. Hence the slang meaning of the word – an abstruse topic of interest only to specialists with no relevance to the real world. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
At this point reason begins to be placed in an idolatrous position. Theology becomes an intellectual exercise and, not coincidentally, the link with Jesus is lost. The specific link with Jesus – His life, His teachings, His ministry and the revelation that we have received about it, church tradition and the Scriptures – these were slowly lost sight of. The academic centre of gravity moved further and further away from a proper foundational rooting in devotion and the study of Scripture. It was because the church first embraced the idolatry of reason through the development of academic theology, and therefore lost sight of wisdom, that our culture developed in this way. Slowly, the church itself became asophic – and slowly, the wider society has turned away from Christ.