Author: leanderharding

Cathedral of All Saints, Albany

The Biography Of Two Revisionists

This originally appeared in the ATR. The biorgraphical materials supplied by two famous revisionists, Marcus Borg and Karen Armstrong show how strongly biography influences the basic intellecutual stance of a thinker. I sometimes think that the biggest obstacles to classical orthodox faith are emotional rather than strictly intellectual. The series of lectures on which the book is based is advertised by the Episcopal Media Center in its most recent catalog as “five outstanding lectures given at Washington National Cathedral by some of today’s leading theologians”

The Changing Face Of God, Frederick W. Schmidt, Editor.
Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 2000.

Review by Leander S. Harding

This is a short little book consisting of the talks given as a lecture series at the National Cathedral in Washington. The premise of two of the most famous of the lecturers, Karen Armstrong and Jesus Seminar member Marcus Borg, is that traditional creedal Christianity is implausible and unbelievable and that they are leading the way in envisioning “the changing face of God.” I found their essays in particular a wearying, depressing combination of neo-Kantian reductionism and effusive enthusiasm for a kinder, gentler, vaguer religion. These two essays could be used as exhibit A of the current class of those who can be described, as my old systematics professor used to say, as believing in God the good and kind gas.

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Homosexuality And The American Religion

This was originally published on Titusonenine and picked up and excerpted by both First Things and Christianity Today.

Harold Bloom, an iconoclastic literary critic at Yale, wrote a book published in 1992, with the title “The American Religion.” Using an argument developed by Msgr. Ronald Knox in his magisterial work on “Enthusiasm” and by the Presbyterian theologian Phillip Lee in his book “Against The Protestant Gnostics” Bloom makes a convincing case that the real American Religion that is the unofficial but actual spiritual mythos which gives shape to the American worldview and energy to the American religious quest is some form of Gnosticism. The Gnostics, ancient and contemporary, teach that the true and deepest self is a spark of divinity which has become lost and imprisoned in a corrupt world. The drama of salvation is the drama of rediscovering this secret self and reuniting this spark with the divine one. This is accomplished by access to a secret knowledge or “gnosis” which is unavailable to the uninitiated. Gnostic versions of Christianity have been a problem for the church from the earliest times. The struggle with Gnosticism caused St. Irenaeus (130-200 A.D.) to write his chief work “Adversus omnes Haereses.” Gnosticism is hard to kill and has many contemporary fans including the scholars of the Jesus Seminar who champion the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

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The Ministry And The Center

This sermon was reprinted in the Festschrift for my teacher and former professor of systematics at Andover Newton Theological School, Gabe Fackre. Dr. Fackre’s systematic is called “The Christian Story” and he and his wife have authored a very useful book for use in parishes called “Christian Basics”

The Ministry And The Center
A Sermon Preached At The Evensong Of The Joint SEAD And Confessing Christ Conference, On November 4, 2000, In St. John’s Episcopal Church, Stamford, Connecticut, by
The Rev. Dr. Leander S. Harding

What is the central task of the church? What is the central task of the church’s ordained ministers?

The official answers to these questions have varied little over centuries: To preach the Gospel, to administer the sacraments, to pronounce blessing and pardon. In practice in the time I have been an ordained servant of the church there have been at least three competitors for the answer to the question what should the clergy do and what should be their central occupation.

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What The Clergy Need To Know

This was written for a SEAD series. It bears on some of the responses to my article on “Are Ordinations Too Elaborate?”

What Do The Clergy Need To Know?
by
The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

The invitation to reflect on this question causes me to be glad and grateful that I know some things and wish devoutly that I knew better some other things. I am very aware that what I have to say about this question has a great deal to do with my context in ministry. I was trained in seminary to provide pastoral care, liturgical leadership, preaching and teaching(in about that order of significance) for a settled Christian people. I now find myself increasingly, in a missionary context in a culture which is at once sophisticated and superstitious, and in which many people have never heard, or barely heard or misheard, the fundamental Christian proclamation. The big thing that clergy need to know is that the calling is shifting to a more explicitly missionary, evangelical calling. I doubt we need an utterly new seminary curriculum but we do need to approach the seminary experience with a sharpened sense of the missionary shape of ordained service in the contemporary church.

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Phillip Turner On The Windsor Report

Nevertheless, it must be noted that many on both the left and the right do not begin their ecclesiological discussions here. Many on the left begin with the church as a prophetic vanguard commissioned to fight within various political systems for the rights of those who are disadvantaged by those systems. Many on the right view the church primarily as the guardian of certain saving truths contained in Holy Scripture and in various creedal or confessional statements. These perspectives, different thought they are, lead those who hold them to similar visions of themselves; namely, as advocates and/or guardians who must, before all else, hold to principle.The authors of WR, though they care mightily about truth and justice, see both as contained within and witnessed to by something more basic; namely, a form of common life that is a sign of God’s will for the entire creation. Thus, they see unity, communion, and holiness of life as providing something like a circle of grace within which sinful people who have been brought into a new form of life by incorporation into Christ can struggle within the conditions of finitude and sin to bring about a faithful witness to God’s purposes for the world. Thus, unity, communion, and holiness of life are constitutive of the calling of the church. Truth and justice (along with love) are the fruits that arise within this circle of grace and so give light to the world. For the authors of WR, the matter of primary importance is for the church within its common life to be characterized by these three distinctive marks. Apart from them, the church loses its assigned character and so fails in its vocation.

Read the whole of this very helpful piece here. [Editor’s note: this link is broken. We apologize for the inconvenience.]

Are Ordinations Too Elaborate?

This was originally published in the NECA (National Episcopal Clergy Association newsletter.) I understand the editor got hate mail about it from at least one bishop famous for an emphasis on lay ministry. It also touches on the discussion below

Are Ordinations and Celebrations of the New Ministry Too Elaborate?

There is a criticism which is often heard in our church these days that ordinations are too elaborate. The ceremonies and festivities that surround an ordination or the celebration of a new ministry are thought to imply an inappropriate significance for Holy Orders. If I may put words in the mouths of the critics, the complaint is that,”After all, baptism is the central and most important fact of Christian life. It is through baptism that one becomes a Christian and through baptism that the church reconstitutes its life. The ministry of the baptized is the fundamental ministry, and the ministry of the ordained is to be servants of the servants of God. By elaborate ordinations and celebrations of new ministry we give the impression that Ordination is more important than baptism, that the clergy are the real Christians. Our ordination and institution ceremonies reinforce an outmoded clericalism, have distasteful overtones of authoritarianism, and undermine the ministry of the laity. Look at the Celebration of New Ministry in the Prayer Book. The people give the new priest a Bible, stoles, Prayer Books. In the end nothing is left. Everything has been given away.”

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The Power And Dignity Of The Priesthood

This was published in an edition of the Sewanee Theological Review devoted to ministry. It touches on the discussion on this site about the priesthood.

The Power and Dignity of the Priesthood

A Talk given at the Annual Meeting of The Society for the Increase of the Ministry
At Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, November I, 1995, By the Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.

Copyright © 1994

Much has been written about the perception of a crisis in the priesthood. The Cornerstone Project was developed by the Episcopal Church Foundation in order to help strengthen ordained leadership at a time when clergy are reporting themselves to be discouraged, confused and highly stressed. One of the most recent findings of the Cornerstone Project is that the parish priests in the project had difficulty articulating a theology of priesthood. The staff found that the priests in the project could discuss theological readings with competence but that when they spoke about their parish ministries they did not tend to speak in theological categories. I was one of a group of clergy, theologians and Cornerstone staff who attended a conference at the College of Preachers in June of 1995 to attempt to understand the meaning of this finding and to suggest a course of action. The thoughts that I am going to share with you tonight represent my contribution to that discussion.

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Bishop Tom Wright On Just About Everything

Tonight, in the first of a new series of ‘Belief’, I’m in conversation with the Right Reverend Tom Wright who since 2003 has been Bishop of Durham. Before that, he was successively Dean of Lichfield and Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey. But well before that, he spent the first 20 years of his ordained life in academic positions, including 5 years at McGill University in Canada. He’s written over 30 books, most recently ‘The Resurrection of the Son of God’. Primarily, his scholarly reputation rests on a sustained study of the 2 figures at the heart of the Christian Gospel – Jesus and Paul. He’s a conservative in matters of doctrine, and regarded as the most senior Anglican Evangelical. At a time of much division around the subject of homosexual clergy, he’s had a place on the Eames Commission, deputed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to find a way of reconciling the warring factions within the Anglican communion.

BBC News, Joan Bakewell talks with Bishop Tom Wright.

The Passion And Parenthood

This was originally published in a Godly Play newsletter.

The Passion Of Jesus Christ
And The Passion Of Parenthood

The sacrifice of Christ is pondered in endless books and hymns and works of art. It is a “big story” generating much wonder and wondering. There is at least one part of it that I think I understand. I believe that at the heart of the sacrifice of Jesus is the suffering of rejected love, which the saviour meets with an unswerving passion.

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