Two Timely Christmas Sermons from Pusey House

I noted on a past Feast of Holy Innocents that Christmas has its dark side.  We often try to push that aside in strenuous efforts to be merry, but on this Holy Innocents Day of 2020, one would have to engage in significant denial to ignore it.

So I am glad to have come across Christmas sermons this year that tackle the current difficulties and the present darkness head on.  Two of those come from the Principal of Pusey House, George Westhaver during their Christmas Eve Midnight Mass.

Although I could only watch the opening of his sermon live due to my preparations for a Christmas Eve service, I was able to watch it the remainder of the evening and was edified.  I hoped it would be posted for all to see and read and have not been disappointed.  The transcript is here.

Dr. Westhaver expounded on John 1:5 – “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

I said two sermons from Pusey House because Westhaver refers to a sermon from Dr. Pusey.  That sermon, too, well addresses the relevance of Christmas to great difficulties and may be found here.

Although I hope the difficulties of my readers have not been too great, I also hope these sermons encourage you in the midst of a trying time as they have me.

Do have a blessed Holy Innocents Day and a happy Christmas season. 

Letter of Dr. Pusey Discovered

One never knows what one may find in an old book.

The Librarian of Pusey House and her assistants has just experienced this and with joy.  From the pusey.librarian instagram account:

“In possibly the most exciting volunteer shift ever to take place at Pusey House Library, our preservation assistant Kathryn has discovered a letter from Dr. Pusey to his mother, just lurking casually in one of Pusey’s old books!”

Quite a find indeed.

Pusey’s The Doctrine of the Real Presence

I remember many years ago seeing a very large commentary on Psalm 119.  If I recall, it was by a Puritan and was in two thick volumes.  I immediately commented that it’s amazing what a man can do when not distracted by television.  Of course some Puritans tried not to get distracted by any sort of fun, but anyway…

Reading E. B. Pusey’s The Doctrine of the Real Presence As Contained in the Fathers now prompts me to think that it’s amazing what a man can do when not distracted by the internet.  Yes, the internet can assist research (when it’s not concealing it, but do not get me started on that), but it is more impressive to become a human google, and the internet can only do so much to bring that about.

As I read this great work, I cannot but conclude that Dr. Pusey was the 19^th century equivalent of Google for Oxford in the area of the church fathers.  His research is amazing.  He quotes any number of fathers I have never even heard of.  If you want to read what the fathers said about the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, there can hardly be a better book.  Pusey gives a multitude of extended excerpts from the Fathers far more than he gives his own thinking.  His last and very long chapter is almost entirely such excerpts. He lets the fathers speak for themselves even when it might seem to weaken Pusey’s contentions.

Speaking of which, one may be surprised that he spends many pages disputing against the Romish doctrine of transubstantiation.  His teaching and the teaching of the fathers of the Real Presence is not to be confused with the error of the Church of Rome.

If one is the least bit interested in reading the fathers concerning the Eucharist, I cannot recommend this book enough.  I am thankful that I’ve been reading this going into the Ascension season as it has impressed me with the wonderful truth that while Christ intercedes for us before the Father in Heaven, yet is also “very present”, including in the Holy Communion.

Henry Parry Liddon and the Political Sermon that Wasn’t

I’ve just completed readingThe Life and Letters of Henry Parry Liddon by John O. Johnson. Before reading it, about all I knew about Liddon is he was a friend of Dr. Pusey and wrote his biography.

So I was deeply impressed and moved to read of Liddon himself.  What a godly and dedicated man!  His example moved me to reexamine what I am doing with my life.  And he was gifted man as well.  He was recognized as one of the best preachers in England, and his sermons often packed out large churches.  Yet he was modest and self-critical.  And he turned down a bishop’s mitre a number of times.

Liddon was involved in the politics of the day, especially as they touched the Church of England.  He and Gladstone were good friends.  Yet he rarely discussed politics during his sermons.

In Life and Letters, there is a diary entry from Liddon that reflects this wisdom as well as his English humor (and which follows up yesterday’s post well.):

December 3^rd[1876] – A large number of people came to St. Paul’s this afternoon expecting a political sermon.  I disappointed them.

Would all Christian leaders so “disappointed”.

A Balance of the Tractarians – Learned Yet Not Over-trusting Learning

I’ve recently discovered a jewel of a book in my personal library – The Vision Glorious by the late, great Geoffrey Rowell.

Oh I have been aware of that prominent book on the Oxford Movement.  But I was unaware I already possessed a copy.  You see, about a third to half of my library was purchased from an Anglican priest a few years ago who was moving to England and realized moving his library was not practical.  And now and then, I discover things both new and old.

Anyway, I am reading The Vision Glorious now and have noticed an interesting paradox of the Tractarian leaders, particularly Pusey and Keble.   They were profoundly learned and had prestigious positions at Oxford that acknowledged and reflected that.  And, of course, their voluminous writings and lectures very well reflect that.  Yet at the same time they profoundly distrusted modes of thinking that placed too much trust in human reason, logic, and even learning itself as ways to comprehend the things of God.

Not that they did not value learning. Their production, including The Library of the Fathers and much more, showed they did greatly.  But they had the humility to realize learning and the human intellect had its limits.  And they were not shy in pointing out the errors that come from trying to dissect and explain the mysteries of God too much.

Keble felt that both prominent errant views of the Eucharist, transubstantiation and denial of the Real Presence, came from such over-trust in human reason and logic:

Transubstantiation on the one hand . . . the denial of Christ’s real presence on the other. . . .  The two errors in the original are perhaps but rationalism in two different forms: endeavors to explain away, and bring nearer to the human intellect, that which had been left thoroughly mysterious both by Scripture and tradition.

And he urged to avoid “slighting divine mysteries because we cannot comprehend and explain them.”

As for Pusey, Rowell finds he also admonishes, particularly in the unpublished Lectures on Types and Prophecies, that overreliance on human comprehension and reason impoverishes faith.  Pusey:

By striving over-much at clearness, and practically admitting only what they could make, as they thought, intelligible to themselves, men have narrowed [the Creed]far below that of the ancient Church, or of our own in former days.

For it is “not the things which we know clearly, but the things which we know unclearly [which] are our highest birth-right.”

Many of us from different churchmanships would do well to take these admonitions to heart.  I’ve seen a kind of very Reformed Bible Church mindset which rightly exalts study of scripture, but then falls into a pitfall of an inflated sense of one’s knowledge and a weakened respect of mystery. Thereby conceit oft gets inflated and faith constricted.  And, of course, those from liberal theological backgrounds tend to put human intellect as a judge over the things of God.  Such pretentious presumption becomes putrid.

Better is the approach of Pusey and Keble, to strive for the learning God allows to us while having respect and awe for the mysteries He has revealed yet veiled. 

Unusual Takes on Epiphany Readings from Pusey House

A friendly tip: when one listens to a sermon from the current Principal of Pusey House, do not allow your mind the usual drifting. Otherwise, you will surely miss something. For George Westhaver’s sermons are brief, fast-paced, and packed!

And so it is with his first sermon of Hilary Term this past First Sunday after Epiphany (the text of which may be found on the Pusey House recent sermons page).  His unusual takes on two Epiphany readings are especially edifying.

On the Gospel from the end of Luke 2, Dr. Westhaver suggests that the wisdom of the 12-year-old Jesus may have come more from his being unclouded from sin than from his divine nature.

This had not occurred to me.  But it is in line with Dr. Pusey’s view, noted in Westhaver’s DPhil thesis, that sin can and does cloud the intellect.  Accordingly, Westhaver in his sermon contends, “We don’t know what a human mind free from the pollution of sin is capable of.”

Then he presents the anxious search of Mary and Joseph for the boy Jesus as a type of our search for Him.  This, too, is an unusual take today but in line with Dr. Pusey’s thinking.  For, as the aforementioned thesis examines, Pusey advocated a revival of typological interpretation of scripture and rightly thought our study of scripture is impoverished if we are not alert for types.  Westhaver’s take in his sermon demonstrates how types can enrich interpretation:

The events of the Gospel are not just stories about Him, they are stories about us. We should not be surprised that before Christ has fully grown up within us, before he has fully taken possession of us, that he may appear to be lost to us. We find ourselves in the situation of the bride in the Song of Songs, ‘I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways will I seek him whom my soul loveth’.^[1]  The experience of the saints through the ages has been that there are times when Christ seems lost to us, and the only way to find him is with a kind of struggle and anxiety. 

The Gospel does give us some pointers to help us in the search. We may still expect to find our Lord in his temple, His Father’s House, in the place of worship, not only there, but certainly there. We don’t need to be afraid of our questions and doubts – He will listen to us with the same attention he gave the Doctors, his attention is His love. We can also expect him [to] address us with penetrating questions, His love for us, questions which are no less difficult than the journey, questions which are part of the answers He will give us, also in Love. 

Turning to the Gospel for the Feast of Epiphany itself, the sermon also uses Herod and the travels of the Magi as types.  Herod represents our fallen selfish nature that prefers King Me to King Jesus.  And, as the Magi were directed to avoid Herod after they met Jesus, so we need to avoid selfish grasping King Me after we meet King Jesus.

Herod is not just a figure in history. We too have to avoid Herod, because we all have something of Herod in us.  Herod did not want to have a rival, and it is part of our condition that we don’t want to have another king, even a king as wise and as good as Christ. Even after we have seen and adored Christ, we still have something of Herod in us, and so we must avoid our Herod-nature.  If we want to the transformed minds which share in the divine freedom and light, then we need to turn away from the Herod-nature in us.

Did I mention George Westhaver’s sermons are packed?  So do read it for yourself.  And, as you are able, avail yourself of the wealth of erudition and activities at Pusey House, both past and present.

Yes, Hilary Term is off to a very good start at Pusey House.

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[1]Song 3.1-2

Understanding Scripture and Righteous Living – a Two-Way Street

With this being the week of Bible Sunday in Advent, I think it a good time to mention something of import I noticed while studying in Oxford this past Michaelmas Term.  Dr. George Westhaver, Principal of Pusey House, in his thesis on Pusey’s lectures on “Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament,” notes at length that Pusey considered righteous living and right interpretation of scripture to be inseparable.  And not just that faithfully studying scripture aids righteousness, but that righteousness is necessary to the study and interpretation of scripture.

Yes, Pusey clearly thought this applied to the scholarly sphere.  He was at times frank in attributing immorality as one of the causes of the rise of rationalism in the scholarly study of the Bible.  He would even name names as he did in the case of Johann David Michaelis: “Deep insight into religion were indeed inconsistent with the intemperate habits and low moral character of Michaelis.”

I had not thought much about unrighteousness clouding one’s ability to understand scripture.  But now that Dr. Westhaver has brought Pusey’s contentions to my attention, I am now seeing that scripture contends that time and again.  Of course, a classic passage is Romans 1:18ff.  Right of the beginning of St. Paul’s withering indictment of mankind he states men “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.”  And because they reject God and his righteousness, they become “futile in their thinking” as God gives “them up to a debased mind.”

If my mind were not debased by jetlag at the moment, I could surely post any number of other scriptures along these lines.  I know I keep coming across them in my Bible study now that I am more alert to them.  But to those who wish to study and even teach scripture and its interpretation, this is all the more incentive to live right, is it not?  Even if only God knows our unrighteous thoughts and dealings, others will be affected as our study and teaching become a cloudy and polluted stream.

I have not seen this for some years, but some Bibles, particularly King James Bibles, used to state at the front, “This Book will keep you from sin, and sin will keep you from this Book.” I used to laugh at that as old fashioned, but I now see there is a lot of truth in that. Dr. Pusey and scripture itself contend that prevalent sin can keep us from rightly understanding that Book as well.