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Home , Bishop of Oxford, William Temple (bishop)

THE CHURCH OF THE INCARNATION

A hundred years ago, in the early 20th century, it seemed inevitable that would one day become . Everybody said so. He was generally thought to have the finest mind of his generation, and (though it’s no sort of qualification) he was … the son of a previous Archbishop.

But to become Archbishop of Canterbury you have, first, to become a priest, and young William Temple found it uncommon hard to find a who would ordain him. When he was 25, already an don, he applied to the , who turned him down flat – on grounds that Temple had told him (a) that he didn’t believe in the Virgin Birth, and (b) that his belief in the bodily (that is, the physical) was shaky at best.

Now you may well be thinking that the Bishop of Oxford was right. Aren’t those two rather essential doctrines of Christianity? Well, I’m not so sure. You can certainly make a case for saying that Mary did not have to be a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus (indeed, many of my confirmands have argued that case most vigorously, though I don’t personally subscribe to it). And as to the Resurrection, Temple certainly believed in the Resurrection. What he wasn’t so sure about was whether it had been a physical bodily resurrection or just a spiritual resurrection – the sort of thing you and I hope for after our deaths.

At all events, William Temple (and we’ll come back to him later, because he did, indeed, become Archbishop of Canterbury) … young William Temple believed these were arguable matters for Christians – interesting and highly debatable, but paling into insignificance beside the supreme doctrine of Christianity, which is the Incarnation. Temple’s belief in the Incarnation was absolute and passionate. He believed (as St. John puts it in the very first verses of his gospel) “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … … And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”.

In carno – the Latin words for in the flesh. Hence incarnation. It’s why we are Christians; it’s why we are here this morning. It’s what is unique to Christianity – a God who takes the initiative to become human in order to redeem humanity.

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Jesus’ life, his ministry, his death, and his resurrection, follow from that. C.S. Lewis expressed it simply and beautifully: “The Son of God became a man / to enable men to become the sons of God”.

These two natures of Christ – God and man … they are not separate: the human is never without the divine, nor the divine without the human. Yet Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man – one in substance with the Father in regard to his divine nature, one in substance with us in regard to his human nature.

And this is what enables us – as human beings – to encounter God in real, personal and tangible ways. We do so through Jesus Christ, who is God, but who took our nature and became human as well as God. That’s why we can approach so close to him.

It’s also why the Incarnation is so essential to our faith. We can know many things about God through what you might call general revelation (through observing creation around us; through the ordering of history; through human conscience, perhaps), but without the Incarnation, talking about God is purely speculative, and knowing God personally is impossible.

You cannot be a Christian – you haven’t been able to be a Christian for the past 2,000 years – unless you believe in the Incarnation. You can argue the ins and outs of the Jesus narrative (as young William Temple did), but if you cannot believe in the Incarnation, you cannot be a Christian.

And yet, you may say to me … “Well, that’s funny, because no one seems to talk about the Incarnation very much, do they?” And you’d be right. They don’t. And I, too, wonder why.

So Question One: What is it about and the Episcopal Church that makes (or should make) the Incarnation so important to us?

Like most stories of this ilk, it begins with , King Henry’s Archbishop, the architect and designer of the , and the author of the Book of Common Prayer.

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* * *

Cranmer was much more Protestant than his master the King. Yes, Henry had thrown off the Pope’s authority and all things Roman, but only because he had no other way of getting a divorce. In matters of religion he was instinctively conservative – a Catholic, but not a Roman Catholic. He knew that many of his subjects had Protestant sympathies, including a lot of scholars and university people, and even some powerful courtiers and . But not Henry – the older he got, the more conservative he became in matters of religion.

And yet, first and always, Henry was a politician – a very accomplished one. He’d ruled for a long time (going on 35 years), and to him religion was an element of politics, and politics was a matter of balance. He didn’t want either the religious conservatives (that’s the Catholic party) or the reformers (that’s the Protestant sympathizers) to become dominant. He played one against the other, and always with the object of keeping them in balance – whilst retaining his own personal supremacy, of course.

Please don’t think this had anything to do with freedom of religion. It didn’t. Henry was prepared to allow talk – conversation, discussion – about some aspects of religion, but he wasn’t prepared to offer one inch of leeway on the most important issue of all, which was the nature of the Mass. It was treason – and it remained treason until the last day of Henry’s life – for anyone to write, or to say, or to be suspected even of thinking, that the elements of bread and wine served at the Eucharist were anything other than the actual, physical flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. In other words, Henry required his subjects – by law – to believe in the doctrine of Transubstantiation. If anyone wrote or spoke otherwise, if they denied that the actual Body and Blood of Christ were present in the Host at Mass, they could be burned at the stake. And some were.

This doctrine of transubstantiation had been formally adopted by the Catholic Church more than 300 years earlier, in 1215. And, to put it frankly, it was what made the church such a dark place.

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In most countries of Europe, including England, it was compulsory to go to Mass on Sunday. So people did. But there was no law that made them take part, and in most places, they didn’t really have to. It had become the custom that the only person who actually received communion was the priest himself, and he generally didn’t even say the words of the Eucharistic Prayer out loud: he said them silently, to himself. The congregation – many of whom found the idea of eating Christ’s actual flesh not just distasteful, but extremely frightening … … the congregation stood at the back of the church, as far away from the altar as possible, dutifully in attendance but not participating. This was a sacrificial mass, a Eucharist in which the focus was almost entirely on Christ’s death and his atonement thereby for our sins.

It hadn’t always been so. In the Early Church, the focus had been on the Resurrection. For all its suffering and frequent persecution, it was a joyful church: it had Good News – the Resurrection, redemption, life everlasting. But somewhere around the 10th or 11th century, that had changed. Jesus’ suffering and dying had become the focus, the Resurrection was neglected. In fact, the Easter Vigil, which had been the most important ritual of the entire liturgical year, was dropped altogether. The focus of the Eucharist became that transformation of the bread and wine into the Real (physical) Presence of the crucified Christ. Transubstantiation. A very frightening concept, the more so in a world where sorcery and superstition were rampant.

And this is what Cranmer saved us from. The core of the Eucharistic liturgy he adapted for his new prayer book came from the Sarum Rite, a form of the Mass first written, I think, at Lyon in France, but already, in the 15th and 16th centuries, widely used in the south of England.

The Sarum Rite was not a sacrificial mass. On the contrary, it was rooted in those first fourteen verses of John’s gospel – “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”. And it’s that passage that underlies Cranmer’s Eucharistic Prayer of 1549, when the celebrant asks God the Father “with thy Holy Spirit and Word vouchsafe to bless and sanctify these thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine, that they may be unto us the body and blood of thy most dearly beloved Son

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Jesus Christ”. So Cranmer still believed in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, but it is “real” as in spiritual presence, not physical presence. The Spirit and Word transform the Bread and Wine into a remembrance – a memorial – of what Christ did for us. And Cranmer confirmed that meaning very directly in 1552, in the revision of his Prayer Book, when he had the priest say to each individual communicant: “Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart, by faith, with thanksgiving”. Words we still use. They are the words of one who believes in Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharistic elements, but who believes that presence is spiritual, not physical, and whose greater certainty is that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”. It was (and it is) an incarnational mass – as opposed to the old Roman Rite, which was (and remained until the 1960s) what I can only call a sacrificial mass.

* * *

So it was Thomas Cranmer who set the Church of England on its incarnational course ... … which brings us to Question Two: What did the English church make of it?

Truth to tell, not very much (to begin with, at least) – though it’s hard to be dogmatic about that. You might look at the poetry of George Herbert, or some of the writings of Richard Hooker, and say: “Well, those two understood it, at least” … and I’m sure there were many others.

The problem was this: For three centuries after Cranmer’s time, the idea of the Incarnation, and all the theology that surrounded it, wasn’t really explored by the English Church. It was enough that it was embedded in the Eucharist. Neither the High Church Anglo-Catholics, nor the Low Church Puritans and evangelicals, had much interest in thinking more widely about it – because the Church was in almost constant turbulence, and it was almost always political turbulence. How many important English theologians were there between Hooker (in Elizabeth I’s time) and the Oxford Movement in the mid-19th century? Hardly a one. Lots of changes – up/down, High/Low. Some great preachers and writers (Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, John Wesley). But very little original theology.

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* * *

So Question Three: How and why did the Church rediscover its incarnational roots in the mid-19th century?

It did so in a very surprising way, but one that lifts my spirits whenever I get pessimistic about our 21st century Church. Because it happened through a glorious concurrence of worship and social conscience, and it was driven very largely by a group of young men who were deeply influenced by the Oxford Movement and its Anglo-Catholic attitudes to worship, but equally influenced by the growing gaps in society that were being brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the coming of great wealth to the few and intense poverty to the many. Does that sound familiar?

The things that are best known about the Oxford Movement are the things that are least important – that’s my view, anyway. It started out by being about the status of the Church of England – its relationship to the state, on the one hand, to the Roman Catholic Church, on the other. This was all very exciting for churchmen, but totally boring and irrelevant to the average church-goer. Several of the leaders of that part of the Movement absconded to Rome (, Henry Edward Manning and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins were three of them), and two of those (Newman and Manning) were actually made cardinals. Clergy and academics and writers of broadsheets got very excited. Most people weren’t bothered.

But Phase 2 of the Oxford Movement affected real people because it was about worship – the symbols and rituals of worship. In fact, it was often called Ritualism, especially by its opponents, because it involved all those naughty symbols and rituals the evangelicals deplored and the Catholics adored – “smells and bells”, beautiful vestments, genuflecting, crossing oneself, and so on. I don’t want to short-change the passion and intensity of this argument, but I don’t think these things are terribly important in the long term. What was important were the arguments that underlay it all – arguments about the Eucharist:  whether it was central to worship, as the High Church said, or of only marginal importance, which was the Low Church view;

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 arguments about the nature of the Eucharist – did it contain the Real Presence of Jesus Christ (whether physical or spiritual), or was it just a memorial, an act of remembrance?;  arguments about the beauty of worship, and what constituted that beauty – High Church ceremonial and symbolism, or Low Church simplicity;  and arguments about the authority of Scripture – should worship be limited to what is clearly described and approved in the New Testament (as the evangelicals thought) or could it be more imaginative and inventive (as the High Church wanted)?

This long-running argument about worship – High or Low? – has continued to thread its way through our Church’s politics from that day to this; but today, not with quite the same vehemence, I’m glad to say.

What, in my view, was a great deal more important was Phase 3 of the Oxford Movement, which grew out of the arguments about worship and was, I believe, an essential corollary to them. The unlikely initiator, or convener, of this phase was a man called Edward Pusey. I say “unlikely” because Pusey had been one of the original leaders of the Oxford Movement, along with Newman and Manning and John Keble back in the 1830s, and he was the only one who had been there all along. Keble had retired to a country parish to write his poetry, Newman and Manning had gone off to Rome to receive their red hats. But Pusey stayed, and he it was, in the 1860s, who inspired a group of young men, just coming to the priesthood, to be priests of a very different kind – Anglo-Catholic High Churchmen, yes, but men with a pastoral and spiritual mission that was shocking to many people in Victorian England, and especially within the Church of England … because the mission of these young men was frankly socialist, and because the chief witness they called to testify to this socialist direction was a man called Jesus of Nazareth.

But first, let me tell you a little about Edward Pusey, because he deserves much of the credit for what followed.

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For more than 50 years, Pusey was the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford. Because he was Professor of Hebrew, it was easy to think of him as an Old Testament figure. But he wasn’t. He was the leading proponent of the idea that the doctrine of the Incarnation is at the center of Anglican worship. And he championed the proposition that that same doctrine of the Incarnation must also be at the center of all Christian life.

This was what many of the young men who sat at Pusey’s feet came to believe, and one of the first signs of what was happening was when these young men turned up as priests, not in smart, well-heeled parishes where they were expected, but in the slums – the slums of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and other cities that were engine-rooms (and therefore also victims) of the Industrial Revolution. The bishops were scandalized. Here were the Best and the Brightest young men of the Established Church, preaching and living something that sounded more like Marx’s Communist Manifesto than the Holy Bible (one can only suppose Victorian bishops read the Scriptures rather selectively). At any rate, many of the young men, denied the right to serve in the slums by outraged bishops, went there anyway, often working for no remuneration at all. It was these men, encouraged first by Pusey, then by one of their own, , who later became one of the great bishops of the 20th century … … it was these men who developed critiques of British social policy, local and national. And this is what led, in 1889, to the founding of the Christian Social Union. In the name of the Incarnation, of the Word that became flesh, of Jesus Christ, these men were social radicals, often openly socialist (like Gore), and they were activists.

The Christian Social Union was the arena in which they debated issues such as the just wage, the employment of children, infant mortality, and industrial conditions – all of them political hot cakes. To these men, involvement in these issues was the practical application of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, which had been re-stated in a revolutionary book of essays that started it all. The book was called Lux Mundi (The Light of the World), and it was edited, of course, by Gore. The book’s sub-title was Studies in the Incarnation. From that doctrine, that Christ was Very Man, it followed that His Body the Church must express humanity at its fullest and best as a universal brotherhood, and must stand firmly for social

8 as well as personal righteousness. To put it in more worldly terms, it was impossible to be a true Christian of the Incarnation without applying the teachings of Christianity to the practical affairs of life.

All this radical thinking and social action was fueled by powerful intellectual resources. Pusey House was one of them. It had been established in Oxford soon after the Great Man’s death – it’s still there today, and thriving, I’m glad to say. If you want to hear a High Mass at its highest and best, go to Pusey House in Oxford on a Sunday morning.

Thirty-year-old Charles Gore became the first principal of Pusey House in 1884, and he ensured, from the start, that it, and all its activities, were firmly anchored in the Doctrine of the Incarnation. It still is. One of those who sampled it in undergraduate days was the poet John Betjeman – this would have been in the 1920s – and he wrote about it in his wonderfully irreverent autobiography in verse, Summoned by Bells:

Those were the days when that divine baroque Transformed our English altars and our ways. Fiddle-back chasuble in mid-Lent pink Scandalized Rome and Protestants alike … Despite my frequent lapses into lust, Despite hypocrisy, revenge and hate, I learned at Pusey House the Catholic faith.

Gore resigned from Pusey House after the publication of Lux Mundi, afraid that the scandale created in some quarters by the book and his own very large part in it would reflect badly on the institution. He didn’t go to the slums: instead, he was offered an unrefusable soap-box. He became a of . From that pulpit he pursued a preaching ministry like none other heard in London since John Donne was Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral 250 years before – lines of people would queue up, all round the block, whenever he preached, which was often, and his sermons and other writings became best-selling books in Victorian England.

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Inevitably, Gore eventually became a bishop, and a very influential one, but he took early retirement at 66 so that he could write (as he put it) “big books rather than little books” – and also, it quickly became clear, so that he could get his hands dirty again. Preaching the religion of the Incarnation was one thing, but living it was altogether more important. Charles Gore did … and that included taking it to the furthest reaches of the world, most especially to India, where he had first taken it in much younger days, working through the Oxford Mission in Calcutta. He spent the last year of his life, his 80th year, working in and around Calcutta.

* * * From hereon in, this story gets rather more personal, rather more about my family and the people I have known. You may think I’m a bit obsessed with the Doctrine of the Incarnation … and you may be right, but it’s been a great part of my life and my faith. The Church of England in which I was brought up in the wake of World War II was still in thrall to the teachings of Gore and his colleagues – Gore had been dead only ten years when I was born. My grandfather was a younger contemporary of Gore – and he was one of those priests who, by choice, did his two curacies in the London slums. My father, in turn, was a pupil of Edwyn Hoskyns and , two great scholars of the Incarnation. And Cambridge, the university at which all of us studied in our several generations … … Cambridge, too, was dominated by the primacy of the Incarnation. Indeed, at the end of every celebration of the Eucharist, after the blessing, the altar party in my college chapel – and many other Cambridge colleges, too – still said, together and out loud, those first fourteen verses of John’s gospel, before processing out. It’s an obsession I am very glad to have inherited, and to have retained.

It brings me back to the man with whom I started, William Temple … and to a man who was greatly influenced by Temple and Gore, and who eventually followed in Temple’s footsteps to Canterbury – Michael Ramsey.

Temple and Ramsey – prophets, teachers and bishops – took up where Gore left off. Together with Edwyn Hoskyns, they prolonged the final phase of the Oxford Movement and kept the Church of England in the way of the Incarnation. Temple, alas, died far too early, in 1944, after only two years as Archbishop, but

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Ramsey eventually took up the challenge and spent 13 years at Canterbury, into the mid-1970s. Because they were high profile preachers and bishops, as well as theologians, Temple and Ramsey were the dominant figures of the Church of England through most of the 20th century.

They came to the Incarnation, these two men, with the same basic belief, which was that the Incarnation was – and always was – a part of the divine purpose. It wasn’t something God improvised as a response to man’s sinfulness, in order to save a sinking ship, so to speak. So each of them had to answer the question of timing: why the long delay between Creation and Incarnation? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to con-join the two events, or certainly to bring them closer together. Why the eons between them?

Temple answered that question by emphasizing evolution. Remember, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution had been published within Temple’s lifetime. Christian thinkers like Temple and Gore had to come to terms with it and make it a part of Christian theology. Gore used his essay in Lux Mundi to do exactly that. And Temple, 30 years later, used evolution as the principal reason for the lateness of the Incarnation. The success of God’s coming to earth in flesh and human form depended vitally, he wrote, on the gradual evolution of the human mind over millions of years – because it was only within this developed, relatively mature human mind that the divine mind was able to reveal itself and to summon humanity to share its purpose.

Ramsey’s reasoning was different and, for me, more convincing. For Ramsey, God was best defined as “pure self-giving Love” – and therefore as a God who seeks an imitation, or at least an echo, of his own Love in human response. In other words, God seeks fellowship with his own Creation, and that can only be achieved when God has sufficiently revealed Himself in creation so that humankind can learn to respond by fellowship through prayer and worship and by having a real, direct relationship with God – a relationship between human love and the self-giving Love of God, both of them evident, and united, in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The theological niceties are endless and often baffling. But what is important is that their belief in the Incarnation brought Temple and Ramsey to a place from

11 which they could see no escape (nor did they wish for one), but it was a place that was uncomfortable and often controversial for leaders of the Church of England in the 20th century. For the Incarnation led them, unanswerably, to something that could be, and frequently was, described as Christian . Temple was forthright and open about it. In the early years of the 20th century he’d been a pioneering member of the British Labor Party and the first President of the Workers Educational Association. As Archbishop during World War II he did much to prepare Britain philosophically and spiritually for the massive impact of Clement Attlee’s post-war Labor government which created the and the socialist infrastructure that not even Mrs. Thatcher has been able to unravel.

Ramsey, on the other hand, was not a socialist by nature. In younger days, before ordination, he’d been an effective student politician under the Liberal banner. As bishop and archbishop, he moved quietly but steadily to the left, championing a string of causes that were not to the liking of the Church’s core supporters – what was often called “the Conservative Party at prayer”. He used his platform in the to call for liberalizing the laws against homosexuality; he opposed the war in Vietnam; he called for Britain to take up arms against the white supremacist government in Southern Rhodesia. How could you believe in “the Word made flesh” and not take up causes like these?

* * *

Temple and Ramsey were almost the last of a great line of Anglican church leaders who were both theologians and practitioners of the Doctrine of the Incarnation. I don’t mean that subsequent leaders have believed any less in the Incarnation, and I say “almost the last” because I think that sought to carry on their work during his archbishopric at the beginning of this century. Nevertheless, it poses Question Four: Why is it that we hear so little of the Incarnation these days?

Honestly, I’m not sure why. Partly, perhaps, because, however much is written about it, the Incarnation is, and will always remain, a mystery. In this 21st century world, we find it hard to deal with mystery – or with anything we cannot explain scientifically. I can tell you from hard experience that teaching confirmation class

12 these days is no picnic – because you’re doing battle with unseen opponents … with science teachers who teach certainty, with parents who expect A grades, which means giving the right answer. As Christians, we don’t have a lot of right answers. We deal in faith … and doubt … and mysteries.

So perhaps we should blame the aggressive secularism of our times? That’s certainly the easiest answer, and it’s the one most often used. But remember Charles Gore and his fellow essayists in Lux Mundi : they were confronting exactly the same problems in the 1870s and ‘80s, when new sciences and the industrial revolution were exploding around them. Their response was not to blame anyone. Quite the contrary. They reached back to the Doctrine of the Incarnation for inspiration; and they used that inspiration to reach forward into God’s world with a program of action based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnated God and Man.

And this is the hard thing about the Incarnation. The God made flesh demands that we follow in his footsteps – that we live that life, we don’t just preach it or uphold the theory of it. In many ways, it would be easier to focus our belief and our lives on the Atonement – Christ’s death to atone for our sins, which certainly demands our recognition and our gratitude. The trouble with the Incarnation is that it demands so much more: it demands a life lived in the teachings and in the footsteps of the God who became Man and dwelt among us.

It’s a big challenge, isn’t it, and one we seem loathe to accept. We’re so keen to make everything about our religion accessible and open and easy – so determined not to frighten people away – that we’ve taken to avoiding the hard things. The Incarnation is one of those hard things. At Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, our preachers almost always ask us to focus on the manger – it’s so much more accessible. And before you know it, we’ve got through another Christmas without even mentioning the Incarnation!

Well, hardly mentioning it. The one occasion you can be sure to hear of it is at next Sunday’s Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols. In scripture and in song, it tells the story of the Incarnation. And the ninth lesson, customarily read by the Rector, (for which we all stand), is St. John’s unveiling of the mystery of the Incarnation. “In the beginning was the Word …” Hear it, and ponder it.

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