Introduction to Anglican Christianity 1.3

Part III: The Anglican Communion

Despite my fancy rhetoric, the limited structures of Anglicanism cannot be seen just as a slightly reformed version of the Roman Catholic Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury is not equivalent to the Pope, and the Anglican hierarchy is just a little more flat. Remember that I said earlier, that bishops are figures of unity. In the ancient world, for example, the Church at Carthage could be said to be in communion with the Church at Alexandria only if their bishops recognize the validity of each others' episcopal ministries; that is, they understand one another to to be properly ordained and consecrated as bishops, and that they both teach the Catholic faith as witnessed in the Bible and the Creeds.

Bishops function as shepherds and teachers of the Faith in the context of their wider college of bishops, united under an Archbishop, Metropolitan, or Patriarch. The five ancient Patriarchates were located in the cities of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome. Bishops who had departed from the Faith might be deposed and replaced by an orthodox bishop, but usually not without a fight, a colorful trial, and a banishing.

The point is, in the ancient churches, in Anglicanism and (I believe) in Orthodoxy, a bishop is a bishop is a bishop. The bishop is the chief shepherd of his diocese, and his priests function there by his will and in his name. The college of bishops might depose a bishop as a heretic or correct him in a council, but outside of that, bishops function in a flat organization, and the episcopacy is a ministry that they share together. This is why Anglican bishops outside of the Church of England don't swear obedience to the Archbishop of Canterbury; it would not be expected, nor asked for, nor in any way proper.

Wherever the British Empire planted a flag, the Church of England planted a mission. In many places, indigenous churches emerged, and were especially active in evangelism in the wake of decolonization: this is why the most representative Anglican today is a black woman living in the two-thirds world, even though the word itself used to mean "English person."

The Anglican Communion was established by default, when the first British colony gained independence (sometime around 1776, I think). I think you can guess when the other member churches were established. The Communion consists of 44 member churches across the world, each with its own bishops and system of canon law. There is no unified church law across the Communion, and there is no binding decision-making body. They do have the Bible, the Creeds, the Councils, and the 39 Articles of Religion (the principles of the English Reformation) - and some member churches hold them more loosely than others. Does the problem become apparent?

Next: Re-Alignment

The Unity of the Church, part I

Catholic Christians understand the Unity of the Body of Christ to be a primary concern for all Christians. I have written before that I believe many folks to be "inappropriately scandalized" by the fact of Christian division. If you are a baptized person, it should bother you. Lots. At least enough to do something about it.

For evangelical protestants, the unity of the Church looks like people getting along and sharing prayers and ministry. This is as true and important, as far as it goes. I think many evangelicals would also say that doctrinal unity - specific assent to particular theological points - is an important aspect of unity (perhaps the most important) and is a prerequisite to shared mission in many cases and perhaps a prerequisite to sharing a life of prayer and friendship.

Catholic Christianity is concerned with doctrine, mission, and getting along, but for us, it looks very different - it looks like questions of church order. Of course sacramental validity fits in there as well. For evangelicals, the thing we understand as church order often seems arbitrary, but I'll try to explain.

While it may seem to many that the ancient church consisted of a "mixed economy" of alternative and competing Christianties (much like today's Protestant milieu), from the very beginning churches were differentiated by geography, not by their particular version of the Faith. The "local church" was the assembly of all Christians in a particular place, not a small "congregation" grouped by preference or affinity. Within the first several decades after Christ's Ascension, an order that historians call the "monarchical episcopate" had emerged - instead of the local church in each city being ruled by a college (or council) of presbyters, there emerged one overseer, or bishop, from that college. He was understood to present Christ as shepherd to the Church, and became a focus for unity of the wider Church. It also quickly became important that these bishops have the right relational pedigree; in an age where teachers of alternative Christianities kept cropping up and claiming special revelation or access to secret teaching that had been passed down from Jesus through some shadowy characters in a fashion that was impossible to confirm, it was important to know that a bishop had been discipled (apprenticed or formed in the Christian faith) by someone who was known to be a close associate of the Apostles. The bishop's power and prerogative to ordain was considered to be derivative of the authority Jesus invested in the Apostles, and when priests acted in Christ's name to preside at the Eucharist and to grant absolution of sin, they were understood to derive their authority from their bishop. It was also understood that these bishops and therefore their priests would have been formed according to the Rule of Faith, which later became known as the official creeds of the Christian Church - I mean specifically the so-called Apostles' Creed.

When a community could claim that pedigree, one knew that the community in question professed and practiced the true Christian faith, and that this was a community that Jesus transformed by his ongoing action through the sacraments.

So when we consider the question of Christian unity, we believe it to have several expressions:

1. Is this a community of Christians that derives from apostolic continuity, or did it spring up from someone else's peculiar Bible reading, or particular version of Christianity? Unity in the Church requires continuity with apostolic Christianity.

2. Do the bishops of particular communities recognize one another as teachers of the apostolic faith, who have been consecrated in the apostolic succession?

3. Does the community profess and teach the Bible according to the Creeds?

After answering these joint questions of doctrine, church order and sacramental validity, then we concern ourselves with what it means to get along well with one another, and to recognize one anothers ministries as Christian communities, and start agreeing together about what it means to be Christian people.

Thesis

If 21st century Christians in the West were to take the prayers and practices of the ancient Church as their model, their first response to the government's War on Terror rhetoric would be, "How can I die well?" rather than, "How can I live the safest life possible?"

Getting Ready for Next Week

"So tell me... what do you think that the religion depicted in these "praise choruses" might have in common with the religion of the martyrs who died for the name of Christ?"

A Thought for Trinity Sunday

"Since the days of the apostles the worship of the church was meant to serve as a critical vehicle for imparting doctrina, that is, ordered teaching, about the Christian faith. Christian leaders found that worship was too good an opportunity to waste on anything but supplying the believer with concrete foundations of how to think and live Christianly. Hence there was a reciprocal relation between worship and doctrine, between the act of praise and the task of theology."

D.H. Williams, "Similis et Dissimilis: Gauging our Expectations of the Early Fathers," from the 2007 Wheaton Theology Conference.

Imperial Lifestyles

The Church is different from that which is not the Church. While this has not been true in all times and places, it seems to be an important aspect of the Church's identity that it serve in some way as a contrast society. The first Christians professed that Jesus is Lord and this meant that Caesar was not. The ancient manual of Christian ethics and church discipline, the Didache (from the late 1st and and early 2nd centuries) taught that "there are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways." Christianity was not - and is not - a matter of being dedicated to some grand ideas or particular theories about the way the world really works, but rather "the Way." Belonging to Jesus looks like some concrete commitments that mean something in the real world of human bodies and the way our lives are organized.

This has been the understanding that has driven the monastic impulse for the greatest part of the Church's history. When the Church at large in a particular culture gets so comfortable with its relationship to the state or the values of its host culture that it begins to lose the distinctive contours of its own story, some Christians will set out and ask themselves - and God - the question, "What does it mean to concretely belong to Jesus and live according to his story at this time and place in history?"

The stories we tell and seek to embody in our common life are Jesus stories - stories of a man who was God, who healed, exorcised, forgave, and prophesied. A church that does not do these same things begins to lose its coherence as a community that has continuity with the Jesus story. Telling and practicing this story will present lives that are lived in contrast to the stories and bodily practices of the Empire.

The Empire says that it's politics are all important, and that appropriate participation in them will save you. So does the Church. They aren't both right.

The Empire - and I'm not talking about the U.S. Government, but rather the entire Western consumerist construction - tells a story about abundant life that includes a spouse, 2.5 kids and a white picket fence that surrounds a house that looks like a Pottery Barn catalog. I live in the promised land of the Empire - the suburbs.

Why is it that people who are coming out of there and going back - the educated people, the ones with good jobs - just as lonely and unhappy as everybody else?

I'm out of time this morning - tomorrow I'll write on how and why this story is failing the people around me, and what we're doing about it.

What Makes a Cult?

Eastertide

It's popular for folks to call Mormonism a cult. It's not really true in either sociological or theological usage.

If you want to talk about a "cult," it just makes more sense to talk about the new religious groups with charismatic leaders who exercise lots of intricate control over the lives of adherents, and separate them from their families. The word itself comes from the Latin word for worship and adoration. In scholarship, words and phrases like "cult of the Saints" or "cult of the Mass" or "the cultic practices of the ancient Christian church" are not pejorative, but rather descriptive. "Cult" simply refers to the things done in worship. As a matter of fact, would you like to read about the cultic practice of my own church? Here it is. How about of the Church of England? Immanuel Baptist Church?

I suspect that Mormonism can be more properly thought of as a heretical offshoot of Christianity, like prosperity preachers or "oneness Pentecostalism." It has very little in common with Christianity, but it shares some cultic practices (ahem) some bits of common vocabulary. Does calling it a "heretical offshoot" make me sound any more generous or less bigoted than if I called it a "cult"? Probably not, but it's more accurate, and I think that's good enough for me.

More on this next time...

Favorite Saints Meme

Eastertide
Mark the Evangelist

Anthropax has tagged me with this fun little meme.

I should note that, being a good Postmodern Anglo-Catholic Anarchist (read: Anabaptist), I'm defining "saint" as a noteworthy holy person of the Christian faith. As a matter of fact, I have a liturgical desk calendar into which I write additional commemorations. Harrumph.

My four favorite saints:

Peter (I love the story of denial and restoration)
Ignatius of Antioch (what Ignatius taught me)
Clement of Rome (what Clement taught me)
Ambrose of Milan (because he put a knot in the tail of early Christendom)

(Favorite Blessed: Skipping this one, obviously)

One person I think ought to be canonized:

Geoffrey Anketel Studdert-Kennedy, Anglican Priest and Chaplain, 8 March 1929.

Speaking of saints and fathers, everybody's seen this, right?

Okay, now who would be some interesting folks to tag...?

Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk (even though he's not attracted to Catholicism, I'll bet he's got some "saints" he looks up to)
Katie (who's not blogged in awhile)
Mike Aquilina (who's always happy to be asked about these things)
Jeremy (who needs to blog about something besides denominational politics. Ha!)

Evangelism and Marketing

Third Sunday of Easter

Argument:

To discuss evangelism without an explicit ecclesiology is to reduce Christian proclamation to marketing tactics.

Explanation:

The bottom line of an "instrumental" ecclesiology is that whatever form "church" takes in a given culture is nothing more than the best means to a particular end. The problem with this is that if "the church" has a particular existance as an institution created and upheld by the Trinitarian God, there are bits of its "DNA" that we will lose if we can't find it in the goals we have constructed.

Example:

If celebration of the Eucharist a key component for the very being of the Church, but a particular congregation cannot see how it contributes to its goals for ministry or spiritual formation, they will drop it just because they don't "get it."

Recapitulation:

A church with an instrumental ecclesiology will engage in faithful, formative practices only insofar as its leadership can give rational account as to why those practices are "good ideas." There can be no such thing as taking anybody else's word for anything, and the Spirit can never offer the Church a provisional "just because."

Instead of being shaped by the Christian tradition, such a church will only be shaped by those bits of it that it has deliberately picked out and reshaped in terms of its own rationality.

That may or may not be a problem; I see at least two valid opposing arguments in such a discussion...

Quote of the Day

Eastertide

"Sadly, I find that when I give potential converts the thirty-second Jesus spiel (to save them from hell) and then release myself of any long-term commitment to spiritually disciple them, they become victims of shallow root syndrome. Human life goes on - cursed as it was before, dysfunctional as it was before, painful as it was before - and this simple sentence, minus the transformation that comes from internalizing God's truth over the long haul, sets them up for spiritual failure. Their roots do not go down deep enough; their roots don't know how to find or drink water."

- Sarah Cunningham, Dear Church: Letters from a Disillusioned Generation (Zondervan, 2006), p.85.

And of course, the real crisis is realized when we find the courage to ask the question, what if the people who are offering the spiel and doing the work of discipleship don't know how to internalize and live the truth over the long haul?

Holy Week and the Triduum

Holy Week

I won't be blogging until Eastertide, so I have links and event details for you.

The Great Vigil of Easter

Vine and Branches Christian Community and St. Patrick's Anglican Church are having a joint celebration of the Easter Vigil on April 7th at 8pm, at the South Elkhorn Christian Church. The biggest worship celebration of the Christian Year is not Easter Sunday morning, but rather the night before: ancient Christians would keep vigil, saying prayers and reading Scripture and exorcising converts all night before dawn, at which time the entire community would receive Holy Communion with the newly baptized (or re-admitted!).

This won't go all night, but we will be offering the public scripture readings that narrate the history of God's saving work that culminated in the execution and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Pete will be saying Mass, and Alan preaching the homily.

If you're interested in learning more about the Christian story as the Church enacts it, or you're Christian unfamiliar with more "liturgical" expressions of the faith, this would be a great introduction. Do contact me if you'd like any more details, or check out the "Facebook event" here.

About Jesus

This week I'm listening to some N.T. Wright lectures that remind me why I'm a Christian, and why I love Jesus. Check these out from the N.T. Wright page (right-click and choose "save as" for these .mp3 downloads; each is 8-10 mbs):

Jesus and the Kingdom
Jesus and the Cross
Jesus and God
Jesus as the World's True Light

Here are some previous Holy Week and Easter Triduum notes I've written or linked:

My Maundy Thursday sermon (or download the audio here)

Michael Lee on Good Friday: "The Long Shadow of the Infinite"

Alan Creech: Veneration of the Cross

Holy Saturday

An icon and a prayer from the Great Vigil

The Great Vigil 2005: "Signs of Life"

May you have a blessed and appropriately penitential Passion Week.

Polycarp: "To Save Your Whole Body"

+Polycarp of Smyrna

The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians is thought to date around the time of Ignatius' martyrdom, about AD 110. The text itself isn't earth-shattering, and begins in a Pauline fashion: "Polycarp and the presbyters with him to the church of God that sojourns at Philippi: may mercy and peace from God Almighty and Jesus Christ our Savior be yours in abundance." The rest of the letter is essentially an exhortation in which Polycarp reminds the Philippian church of the ethical content of much of the New Testament, with ample quotations.

It may have been the case that he wrote them on the occasion of their distress over a local finanicial scandal involving one of their priests. (He also mentions their request for copies of Ignatius' letters.) I think his statement on the scandal is noteworthy:

"I have been deeply grieved for Valens, who once was a presbyter among you, because he so fails to understand the office that was entrusted to him. ... I am deeply grieved for him and for his wife; may the Lord grant them true repentance. You, therefore, for your part must be reasonable in this matter, and do not regard such people as enemies, but, as sick and straying members, restore them, in order that you may save your body in its entirety. For by doing this you build up one another."

I am always struck by the simple, organic ecclesiology present in some of these writings. Polycarp does not give the church permission to throw up their hands and walk away, but makes very clear that the errant member is still very much a part of them. We can't help but in some way to bear the sins and errors(as well as the joys!) of those with whom we are joined in the Christian community.

Lord, help us. Teach us to build up one another, and never to write off or dismiss one another, but rather work to "save our body in its entirety."

Technorati Tags: apostolic fathers, Polycarp

See also Aquilina on Polycarp

I Think I Just Leveled Up...

Ordinary Time

When anticipating a difficult ecclesial situation, it's a good idea to carry the fiddleback chasuble, which gives you +3 traditionalism. Sometimes I like to use the Mace of Tertullian, but the problem with that is while it gives a -2 debuff on all stats for heretics, nearby Pentecostals get +3 enthusiasm, which can really hurt you in the field if they cast the right spells.

Against the Rapture

Epiphany

Consider this my post for the feast of Epiphany. Heh.

Garrett asked me to weigh in on the Left Behind computer game last week. I downloaded the demo and was quite pleased with its campiness, but didn't get very far because 700-odd megabytes of RAM isn't enough for comfortable game play. And they don't make it for Mac, either. Guess they figure most of those folks will be Left Behind anyway, haha. Hippie liberals.


As far as the game's morality? It's atrocious. The post-rapture followers of Jesus must kill or convert as many people as they can in that world. I think it's pretty clear these folks have little idea of what "follower of Jesus" might actually mean, and that's all I've got to say about that. Noakes had a little fun with it a few months ago, read that here.

As most of you will know, I think the pseudo-Christian doctrine of the Rapture is a deviant position, and that the entire system of premillenial dispensationalism is heretical. It was developed and popularized in the last couple of hundred years by the emerging fundamentalist movement in Western Christianity. As I've said before, We can thank the Enlightenment and Scottish "Common Sense" philosophy for the Western (but mostly American) insistance on treating the Bible like it's a strange hybrid of a math book and Nostradamus' prophecies. It has never been a mainstream Christian belief - it's unfortunate that so many American Christians believe that anything popular in America is mainstream.

It's just bad, m'kay? Let me try to express why:

1. It's a convoluted and novel way of reading the Bible. You have to assume that the biblical writers wanted to predict the far-flung future rather than give the people of God the imaginative tools they needed to live faithfully at the time of writing.
2. It re-directs Christians from their responsibility before God to enact the Kingdom in the world he's saving, and instead to engage in revenge fantasies like this Left Behind game. That's just not very Christlike, m'kay? It causes Christians to believe - falsely - that what they do in this life doesn't matter, and that what does matter is converting lost soul to believe in the Rapture.
3. People get converted to waiting for the Rapture rather than following Jesus. Yes, I've met them.
   
4. It's not in the Bible. Did we establish this, yet? Look it up.
5. The ancient heresy of Gnosticism provides the context for the doctrine: that the physical world is irredeemably bad, and that the only good is "spiritual" and non-bodily (more here). You know what? Christ's coming forever hallowed the flesh.

How might we read Revelation? It's a prophecy of the Lamb's victory against Caesar's empire, depicted in imaginative, traditionally apocalyptic language. As Barbara Rossing, author of The Rapture Exposed, puts it:

Revelation warns that the unsustainable, unjust practices of the empire will lead to its end. It's not so much a punishment as the consequences and logical end of its actions. The angel of the rivers cries out that this result is "axiomatic."

That axiom of judgment can serve as a warning, a wake-up call, for us to see the consequences of our actions, to get us on the path that God wants for us. The Bible's threats of judgment are meant to lead to repentance, not to a kind of predictive gloating by which one plans to escape and then watch the torments of others. That kind of voyeuristic violence is one of the worst features of the Left Behind series. The adherents of that view plan to watch the judgment, but they believe they're not going to suffer it.

Tom Wright offers some stories:

God and the world are not far away from each other in biblical thought. Heaven and earth are not separated by a great gulf. A few years ago I wrote art for an American periodical called Bible Review, and I did one deconstructing the Left Behind nonsense, you know, the misreading of 1 Thessalonians 4, and I basically did an exegetical job on 1 Thess. 4 and said, “this is why you don’t read it this way.”

One letter in response said, “How does Mr. Wright think he’s going to get to heaven if he doesn’t get raptured?” I happened to be lecturing in a church in Grand Rapids shortly after that, and I asked the adult Sunday School class, “Is it true in this highly educated technological society, are there many people who still think heaven is a space within our cosmos located some distance up in the air?” And they said yes. I think we all know that‘s not right, but we’ve not tried to conceptualize what is right. Heaven and earth are the twin and interlocking spheres of Creation, of God’s good world. Together they are good, meant to interlock and impact upon one another. How that happens has always been deeply mysterious: in Genesis, they heard the Lord God walking in the cool of the day, looking for them. This is deeply mysterious… (link)

And from that article in Bible Review:

The American obsession with the second coming of Jesus — especially with distorted interpretations of it — continues unabated. Seen from my side of the Atlantic, the phenomenal success of the Left Behind books appears puzzling, even bizarre. Few in the U.K. hold the belief on which the popular series of novels is based: that there will be a literal “rapture” in which believers will be snatched up to heaven, leaving empty cars crashing on freeways and kids coming home from school only to find that their parents have been taken to be with Jesus while they have been “left behind.” This pseudo-theological version of Home Alone has reportedly frightened many children into some kind of (distorted) faith.
...
The Ascension of Jesus and the Second Coming are nevertheless vital Christian doctrines, and I don’t deny that I believe some future event will result in the personal presence of Jesus within God’s new creation. This is taught throughout the New Testament outside the Gospels. But this event won’t in any way resemble the Left Behind account.

Read the rest here or download as a .pdf here.

My argument is not that Rapture-philes are necessarily vindictive people, or that they are on the whole "bad Christians." I am arguing that

1. The Rapture is heretical
2. Believing in it places us along a path of spiritual formation that will actually make us less like Jesus, and less attuned to his purposes of salvation and redemption.

And yes, those are hefty charges.

Come back next time, when I'll discuss how the Rapture has replaced the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the creeds as a test of biblical and doctrinal orthodoxy within American Christianity.

See also my own naughty revenge fantasy.

Technorati Tags: tim lahaye, jerry jenkins, left behind, christian publishing, tyndale, premillenial dispensationalism, fundamentalism, fundamentalist christianity, biblical interpretation, barbara rossing, tom wright, n.t. wright, heaven, judgment, salvation, eschatology, gnosticism, heresy, epiphany

More on "catholicity"

Advent
John of the Cross

Father Alan writes below:

"catholicity" is sort of a term with a definition - unlike "emerging" - not quite up for debate I don't think. It's about being a universal Christian - one who accepts the whole Church, the whole Faith. That's what I think of, and generally, that's what it means.

Now, for Protestants who have never seen anything past 500 years ago as far as the Church and its teaching goes, that may well mean catholicity means a lot of dipping back into what came before. That might look like some Protestants are just "gussying up" to some. And it may be the case for some of them.

I do think, though, that there is something else going on, and a good bit of it in some circles of the "emerging church." People are actually beginning to see some things in some arenas, which have been hidden or "lost" for a long time. And that is a good thing. If it's just about playing dress-up, then it won't go very far, but it's not all about that everywhere we see Catholic-y stuff going on in non-Catholic churches.

So, we're not talking about "C"atholicity - which might mean, trying to be like Catholics. We're talking about catholicity, which seems to be about honestly trying to tap into the Truth of the whole Church - not just trying to imitate externals that may be attractive.

Now, there is the matter of some in the Roman Catholic arena who will say that it's impossible to BE catholic without being Catholic. I would say, I agree that it's not possible to be catholic without recognizing the Roman Catholic Church and the rich Truth contained within its borders. But I obviously wouldn't think that saying there's only one ecclesiastical "place" one can be catholic is altogether accurate.

This is what I hope the move to "catholicity" is all about - not changing around our aesthetics, but learning to drink deeply of the deeper and wider Christian stream rather than picking a particular sectarian tradition or even confining oneself to the Roman Catholic Church (which I don't mean in a negative sense). I think of something a chaplain friend told me once (I wonder who said it?), that "all theology done in schism is heretical." Kind of like, "only the whole Church can know the whole Truth." I believe that, and that's why I appreciate it when I know that Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox read and appreciate (and criticize!) one another's writings and dialog with one another.

It's also one of the major reasons I identify with Anglicanism: I believe that stance is kind of built in. Not the mainline, "liberal Christian" version, and not really the straight-up evangelical version. But it's in there. (But that's a whole 'nother discussion...!)

Technorati Tags: emerging church, lexington

Polycarp: "To Save Your Whole Body"

+Polycarp of Smyrna

Polycarp to the Philippians

The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians is thought to date around the time of Ignatius' martyrdom, about AD 110. The text itself isn't earth-shattering, and begins in a Pauline fashion: "Polycarp and the presbyters with him to the church of God that sojourns at Philippi: may mercy and peace from God Almighty and Jesus Christ our Savior be yours in abundance." The rest of the letter is essentially an exhortation in which Polycarp reminds the Philippian church of the ethical content of much of the New Testament, with ample quotations.

It may have been the case that he wrote them on the occasion of their distress over a local finanicial scandal involving one of their priests. (He also mentions their request for copies of Ignatius' letters.) I think his statement on the scandal is noteworthy:

"I have been deeply grieved for Valens, who once was a presbyter among you, because he so fails to understand the office that was entrusted to him. ... I am deeply grieved for him and for his wife; may the Lord grant them true repentance. You, therefore, for your part must be reasonable in this matter, and do not regard such people as enemies, but, as sick and straying members, restore them, in order that you may save your body in its entirety. For by doing this you build up one another."

I am always struck by the simple, organic ecclesiology present in some of these writings. Polycarp does not give the church permission to throw up their hands and walk away, but makes very clear that the errant member is still very much a part of them. We can't help but in some way to bear the sins and errors(as well as the joys!) of those with whom we are joined in the Christian community.

Lord, help us. Teach us to build up one another, and never to write off or dismiss one another, but rather work to "save our body in its entirety."

Technorati Tags: apostolic fathers, Polycarp

Post Script: Oh, and I'm a little behind on this. I'll offer some reflections on +Ignatius of Antioch soon, if you're on the edge of your seat. If you're interested in highlights from part II of the Epistle to Diognetus, go see Mike.