Gracious God, the Beyond in the midst of our life, who gavest grace to thy servant Dietrich Bonhoeffer to know and teach the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, and to bear the cost of following him: Grant that we, strengthened by his teaching and example, may receive thy word and embrace its call with an undivided heart; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

–One of the prayers appointed for his feast day today

This is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without Church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without contrition. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the Cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows Him.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His son: ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered Him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

The Civil War changed virtually every aspect of American society, from religion to gender roles. Drew Gilpin Faust, president of and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, has devoted her new book to exploring how the war changed American death. In the Civil War, over 2 percent of the nation’s population died””which, as Faust points out, was roughly equivalent to the entire state of Maine being killed, or twice the population of Vermont. The Victorian choreography of “the good death” was inadequate for dealing with the mind-boggling numbers, the stench, the mangled corpses of men too young to die. Americans had to overhaul their notions of what death could and should look like, and even what kind of God could be said to be present””or absent””during such death.

Many of the concrete changes in American dying that Faust documents involve the government’s role in military death; indeed, it was the Civil War that created governmental responsibilities that we now take for granted, such as next-of-kin notification, which neither the Union nor the Confederacy viewed as their job in 1861. At the outset of the war, the Union had no organized method for burying, or even identifying, dead soldiers. That began to change with the 1862 passage of a law giving the president power to purchase land for a national cemetery for soldiers; cemeteries were established at Chattanooga, Stones River, Knoxville, Antietam, and, of course, Gettysburg.

In the years during and after the war, the government developed a more aggressive system for counting the war dead (the figures of Union soldiers killed were constantly revised until the 1880s, when the War Department settled on 360,222) and paying pensions and survivor’s benefits. The erstwhile Confederacy didn’t have a government anymore, and certainly didn’t expect the Union to give money to Confederate war widows, so states stepped in.

Read it all.

The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers ”˜I’ve read it already’ to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. We have all known women who remembered a novel so dimly that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they had once read it. But the moment they became certain, they rejected it immediately. It was for them dead, like a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, or yesterday’s newspaper; they had already used it. Those who read great
works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.”

–C.S.Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

One notes that the requirement that a full majority of all the Bishops entitled to vote in the House of Bishops—both active and retired (or “resigned”, as they now say)—has been with us since the very first abandonment canon was adopted in 1853. I shall return to this legislative history in a later comment about the procedural violations that have occurred in the cases of Bishops Schofield and Duncan. But my next post (when it is ready) will show how the (ab)use of the abandonment canons has lately been greatly expanded, to the detriment of the Church and its polity.

Read it all carefully.

George Harley was a medical doctor from the USA who went as a missionary to Liberia with his pregnant wife. He had obtained his medical degree from Yale University and his Ph.D. in tropical diseases from the University of London. He served in a remote jungle area, which he reached after walking seventeen days with his pregnant wife. After five years there no one had responded to the gospel. Every week they met for worship, and the people were invited to come, but no African joined them. Then his son died. He himself had to make the coffin and carry it to the place of burial. He was all alone there except for one African who had come to help him.

As Harley was shoveling soil onto the casket, he was overcome with grief, and he buried his head in the fresh dirt and sobbed. The African who was watching all this raised the doctor’s head by the hair and looked into his face for a long time. Then he ran into the village crying, “White man, white man, he cry like one of us.” At the following Sunday service the place was packed with Africans.

Harley served in Liberia for thirty-five years. His achievements in numerous fields are amazing. He produced the first accurate map of Liberia. He was given the highest award Liberia could bestow. But before all that he had to give his son. When a bishop from his Methodist denomination pointed that out to him, his response, referring to God, was, “he had a boy too, you know.”

–From Ajith Fernando, The Call to Joy and Pain: Embracing Suffering in Your Ministry (Crossway, 2007), pp.96-97; and brought to mind because Bishop Mark Lawrence related this story in yesterday’s confirmation sermon at Christ Saint Paul’s, Yonges Island, South Carolina

The Contributors are:

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University

Diane Purkiss, Fellow and Tutor at Keble College, Oxford

George Bernard, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton

Take the time to listen to it all.

I am working on a post that will trace the history and the abuses of the “Abandonment of Communion” canons of The Episcopal Church. In the course of my research, I came across some documents that seem to suggest that we have all been through this before. The occasion was the formation, by a group of “low church” dissenters led by the assistant Bishop of Kentucky, the Rt. Rev. George D. Cummins, of the Reformed Episcopal Church in December 1873. A minister in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, the Rev. Marshall B. Smith, wrote a brave letter to his diocesan, the Rt. Rev. William Bacon Stevens, on June 6, 1874, in response to the address the latter had given at the Diocesan Convention that year. In the letter, the Rev. Smith (who had assisted in the formation of the REC) quotes the following part of his Bishop’s address:

“Since we last met in Convention an event has occurred which is unprecedented in the history of our Church. One of its Bishops has abandoned its communion and transferred, as he declared, the work and office which, by consecration, he received from this Church, to another sphere.

That other sphere has proved to be the establishing of a ‘Reformed Episcopal Church….’

Read it all.

The key tension in King’s life was over how to push relentlessly for change but within an existing moral structure. But by the late-’60s many felt the social structure needed to be torn down. The assassin’s bullet set off a conflagration.

At King’s funeral, the marshals told the throngs that nobody should chew gum because it would look undignified. But niceties like that were obsolete.

Building the social fabric after the disruption of that period has been the work of the subsequent generations – weaving the invisible web of family, neighborhood and national obligations so that people stay in school, attend to their kids and have an opportunity to rise if they play by the rules.

Progress has been slow. Nearly a third of American high school students don’t graduate (half in the cities). Seventy percent of African-American kids are born out of wedlock. Poverty rates in Memphis have scarcely dropped.

Martin Luther King Jr. at least left behind a model of how to repair the social fabric. He was scholarly, formal, assertive and meticulously self-controlled in public. If Barack Obama’s campaign represents anything, it is the triumph of King’s early-’60s style of activism over the angry and reckless late-’60s style. King was in crisis when he was gunned down. But his inspiration is outlasting his critics.

Read it all.

I repeat my advice”¦to read the scriptures with prayer, to keep close to the important points, of human depravity, atonement, and the necessity of divine teaching. If a man is born again, hates sin, and depends upon the saviour for life and grace, I care not whether he be an arminian or a Calvinist. If he be not born again, he is nothing, let him be called by what name he will.

–John Newton (1725-1807)

As Abernathy tells it”“and I believe he is right”“he and King were first of all Christians, then Southerners, and then blacks living under an oppressive segregationist regime. King of course came from the black bourgeoisie of Atlanta in which his father, “Daddy King,” had succeeded in establishing himself as a king. Abernathy came from much more modest circumstances, but he was proud of his heritage and, as he writes, wanted nothing more than that whites would address his father as Mr. Abernathy. He and Martin loved the South, and envisioned its coming into its own once the sin of segregation had been expunged.

“Years later,” Abernathy writes that, “after the civil rights movement had peaked and I had taken over [after Martin’s death] as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” he met with Governor George Wallace. “Governor Wallace, by then restricted to a wheel chair after having been paralyzed by a would-be assassin’s bullet, shook hands with me and welcomed me to the State of Alabama. I smiled, realizing that he had forgotten all about Montgomery and Birmingham, and particularly Selma. ”˜This is not my first visit,’ I said. ”˜I was born in Alabama”“in Marengo County.’ ”˜Good,’ said Governor Wallace, ”˜then welcome back.’ I really believe he meant it. In his later years he had become one of the greatest friends the blacks had ever had in Montgomery. Where once he had stood in the doorway and barred federal marshals from entering, he now made certain that our people were first in line for jobs, new schools, and other benefits of state government.” Abernathy concludes, “It was a time for reconciliations.”

Read it all.

Read them both carefully.

Update:
There’s a second article now online at Episcopal Life, which goes into more detail about the ruling and the legal strategy that TEC intends to pursue in the second portion of the trial in May.

O God, who from the family of your servant David raised up Joseph to be the guardian of your incarnate Son and the spouse of his virgin mother: Give us grace to imitate his uprightness of life and his obedience to your commands; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

“And when they arrive before the Cross the daylight is already growing bright. There the passage from the Gospel is read where the Lord is brought before Pilate, with everything that is written concerning that which Pilate spake to the Lord or to the Jews; the whole is read.

Then a chair is placed for the bishop in Golgotha behind the Cross, which is now standing; the bishop duly takes his seat in the chair, and a table covered with a linen cloth is placed before him; the deacons stand round the table, and a silver-gilt casket is brought in which is the holy wood of the Cross. The casket is opened and (the wood) is taken out, and both the wood of the Cross and the title are placed upon the table. Now, when it has been put upon the table, the bishop, as he sits, holds the extremities of the sacred wood firmly in his hands, while the deacons who stand around guard it. It is guarded thus because the custom is that the people, both faithful and catechumens, come one by one and, bowing down at the table, kiss the sacred wood and pass through.”

–Descriptions of Holy Week observances by Egeria, 4th century pilgrim to the Holy Land

The ancient and saintly fathers and theologians have contrasted the living wood with dead and have allegorized that contrast this way: From the living wood came sin and death; from the dead wood, righteousness and life. They conclude: do not eat from that living tree, or you will die, but eat of the dead tree; otherwise you will remain in death.

You do indeed desire to eat and enjoy [the fruit] of some tree. I will direct you to a tree so full you can never eat it bare. But just as it was difficult to stay away from that living tree, so it is difficult to enjoy eating from the dead tree. The first was the image of life, delight, and goodness, while the other is the image of death, suffering and sorrow because one tree is living, the other dead. There is in man’s heart the deeply rooted desire to seek life where there is certain death and to flee from death where one has the sure source of life.

–Martin Luther, “That a Christian Should Bear his Cross With Patience,” 1530

In evil long I took delight,
Unawed by shame or fear,
Till a new object struck my sight,
And stopp’d my wild career:
I saw One hanging on a Tree
In agonies and blood,
Who fix’d His languid eyes on me.
As near His Cross I stood.

Sure never till my latest breath,
Can I forget that look:
It seem’d to charge me with His death,
Though not a word He spoke:
My conscience felt and own’d the guilt,
And plunged me in despair:
I saw my sins His Blood had spilt,
And help’d to nail Him there.

Alas! I knew not what I did!
But now my tears are vain:
Where shall my trembling soul be hid?
For I the Lord have slain!
A second look He gave, which said,
“I freely all forgive;
This blood is for thy ransom paid;
I die that thou may’st live.”

Thus, while His death my sin displays
In all its blackest hue,
Such is the mystery of grace,
It seals my pardon too.
With pleasing grief, and mournful joy,
My spirit now if fill’d,
That I should such a life destroy,
Yet live by Him I kill’d!

–John Newton (1725-1807)

The story of the salvation of the dying thief is a standing instance of the power of Christ to save, and of his abundant willingness to receive all that come to him, in whatever plight they may be. I cannot regard this act of grace as a solitary instance, any more than the salvation of Zacchaeus, the restoration of Peter, or the call of Saul, the persecutor. Every conversion is, in a sense, singular: no two are exactly alike, and yet any one conversion is a type of others. The case of the dying thief is much more similar to our conversion than it is dissimilar; in point of fact, his case may be regarded as typical, rather than as an extraordinary incident. So I shall use it at this time. May the Holy Spirit speak through it to the encouragement of those who are ready to despair!

Remember, beloved friends, that our Lord Jesus, at the time he saved this malefactor, was at his lowest. His glory had been ebbing out in Gethsemane, and before Caiaphas, and Herod, and Pilate; but it had now reached the utmost low-water mark.

Stripped of his garments, and nailed to the cross, our Lord was mocked by a ribald crowd, and was dying in agony: then was he “numbered with the transgressors,” and made as the offscouring of all things. Yet, while in that condition, he achieved this marvellous deed of grace. Behold the wonder wrought by the Saviour when emptied of all his glory, and hanged up a spectacle of shame upon the brink of death! How certain is it it that he can do great wonders of mercy now, seeing that he has returned unto his glory, and sitteth upon the throne of light! “He is able to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.” If a dying Saviour saved the thief, my argument is, that he can do even more now that he liveth and reigneth. All power is given unto him in heaven and in earth; can anything at this present time surpass the power of his grace?

It is not only the weakness of our Lord which makes the salvation of the penitent thief memorable; it is the fact that the dying malefactor saw it before his very eyes. Can you put yourself into his place, and suppose yourself to be looking upon one who hangs in agony upon a cross? Could you readily believe him to be the Lord of glory, who would soon come to his kingdom? That was no mean faith which, at such a moment, could believe in Jesus as Lord and King. If the apostle Paul were here, and wanted to add a New Testament chapter to the eleventh of Hebrews, he might certainly commence his instances of remarkable faith with this thief, who believed in a crucified, derided, and dying Christ, and cried to him as to one whose kingdom would surely come. The thief’s faith was the more remarkable because he was himself in great pain, and bound to die. It is not easy to exercise confidence when you are tortured with deadly anguish. Our own rest of mind has at times been greatly hindered by pain of body. When we are the subjects of acute suffering it is not easy to exhibit that faith which we fancy we possess at other times. This man, suffering as he did, and seeing the Saviour in so sad a state, nevertheless believed unto life eternal. Herein was such faith as is seldom seen.

Recollect, also, that he was surrounded by scoffers. It is easy to swim with the current, and hard to go against the stream. This man heard the priests, in their pride, ridicule the Lord, and the great multitude of the common people, with one consent, joined in the scorning; his comrade caught the spirit of the hour, and mocked also, and perhaps he did the same for a while; but through the grace of God he was changed, and believed in the Lord Jesus in the teeth of all the scorn. His faith was not affected by his surroundings; but he, dying thief as he was, made sure his confidence. Like a jutting rock, standing out in the midst of a torrent, he declared the innocence of the Christ whom others blasphemed. His faith is worthy of our imitation in its fruits. He had no member that was free except his tongue, and he used that member wisely to rebuke his brother malefactor, and defend his Lord. His faith brought forth a brave testimony and a bold confession. I am not going to praise the thief, or his faith, but to extol the glory of that grace divine which gave the thief such faith, and then freely saved him by its means. I am anxious to show how glorious is the Saviour””that Saviour to the uttermost, who, at such a time, could save such a man, and give him so great a faith, and so perfectly and speedily prepare him for eternal bliss. Behold the power of that divine Spirit who could produce such faith on soil so unlikely, and in a climate so unpropitious.

”“From a sermon of C.H. Spurgeon preached on April 7, 1889

St. Bernard was so terror-stricken by Christ’s sufferings that he said: I imagined I was secure and I knew nothing of the eternal judgment passed upon me in heaven, until I saw the eternal Son of God took mercy upon me, stepped forward and offered himself on my behalf in the same judgment. Ah, it does not become me still to play and remain secure when such earnestness is behind those sufferings. Hence he commanded the women: “Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.” Lk 23, 28; and gives in the 31st verse the reason: “For if they do these things in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?” As if to say: Learn from my martyrdom what you have merited and how you should be rewarded. For here it is true that a little dog was slain in order to terrorize a big one. Likewise the prophet also said: “All generations shall lament and bewail themselves more than him”; it is not said they shall lament him, but themselves rather than him. Likewise were also the apostles terror-stricken in Acts 2, 37, as mentioned before, so that they said to the apostles: “0, brethren, what shall we do?” So the church also sings: I will diligently meditate thereon, and thus my soul in me will exhaust itself.

”“Martin Luther (1483-1546)

In 1896, when two scholarly papyrus-hunters, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, arrived at the same spot, now called el-Behnesa, they found the village depopulated for fear of Bedouin raids, with nothing to show for the departed glory but a single Corinthian column. “A thousand years’ use as a quarry for limestone and bricks had clearly reduced the buildings to utter ruin,” wrote Grenfell. The most prominent features nearby were some low hills, the dumps where rubbish had accumulated long ago. And here the papyrologists struck gold – or rather manuscripts.

There were seams of fragmented papyrus buried in the sandy soil in little drifts, preserved by the dry desert climate. Some held lines of Greek poets that had been lost to the world. More detailed the daily lives of the Greek-speaking citizens of this ancient Roman territory on the banks of the Nile. Others reflected the growth of Christianity that had so impressed the fourth-century pilgrim. In all there were 500,000 papyri, and they are still being deciphered and published. The 72nd volume has been printed, and 40 more are expected.

Read it all.

Nevertheless, it is true that agreement among exegetes is capable of surmounting antiquated contradictions and of revealing their secondary character. It can create new avenues of dialogue for all the great themes of intra-Christian controversy: Scripture, tradition, magisterium, the papacy, the eucharist, and so on. It is in this sense that there is, indeed, hope even for a church which undergoes the afore-mentioned turmoil. However, the actual solutions which aim for deeper assurance and unity than merely that of scholarly hypotheses cannot proceed from there alone. On the contrary, wherever there develops a total dissociation of Church and exegesis, both become endangered: exegesis turns into mere literary analysis and the church loses her spiritual underpinnings. That is why the interconnection between church and theology is the issue: wherever this unity comes to an end, any other kind of unity will necessarily lose its roots.

Read it carefully and read it all (emphasis mine).

Around about the year 381, a nun called Egeria made the difficult journey from the Atlantic coast of Spain or France to the Middle East. She wrote of her pilgrimage in a vivid book of travels, describing how she was welcomed to the great Syrian Christian centre of Edessa by the bishop who marvelled how her faith had brought her “right from the other end of the earth”. The high point of her journey was the places made holy by the life of Christ, and particularly the holy places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. She carefully noted how Christians worshipped there and especially the pattern of services for Holy Week and Easter. From that ancient description is derived the pattern of the great traditional services of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter that are still at the centre of Christian celebration of the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord.

Read it all.

That, in the opinion of this Conference, unity in faith and discipline will be best maintained among the several branches of the Anglican Communion by due and canonical subordination of the synods of the several branches to the higher authority of a synod or synods above them.

–Resolution IV of the 1867 Lambeth Conference

We, Bishops of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church, in visible Communion with the United Church of England and Ireland, professing the faith delivered to us in Holy Scripture, maintained by the primitive Church and by the Fathers of the English Reformation, now assembled by the good providence of GOD, at the Archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth, under the presidency of the Primate of all England, desire, first, to give hearty thanks to Almighty GOD for having thus brought us together for common counsels and worship ; secondly, we desire to express the deep sorrow with which we view the divided condition of the flock of Christ throughout the world, ardently longing for the fulfillment of the prayer of our Lord: ”˜ That all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me’; and, lastly, we do here solemnly record our conviction that unity will be most effectually promoted, by maintaining the faith in its purity and integrity, as taught in the Holy Scriptures, held by the primitive Church, summed up in the Creeds, and affirmed by the undisputed General Councils, and by drawing each of us closer to our common Lord, by giving ourselves to much prayer and intercession, by the cultivation of a spirit of charity, and a love of the Lord’s appearing.

–Lambeth 1867

Read it all and all the comments.

The revelation of his hidden world comes at a time of deep tension within the Episcopal Church of the United States over the issue of homosexuality. Since the church ordained an openly gay bishop in the Diocese of New Hampshire in 2003, a dozen congregations in various parts of the country have withdrawn from the American branch of the church and aligned themselves with theologically conservative African or South American branches of the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part.

Those African and South American branches have described homosexuality as “an offense to God.”

At St. John the Divine, where inclusiveness toward those of all backgrounds and sexual orientations has long been fundamental to the culture of the congregation ”” in part as a result of Bishop Moore’s leadership ”” the reaction was more complicated.

“I’d like to say that we all have secret lives ”” and that’s why we come here,” said Mary Burrell, a longtime member of the congregation. “We are all sinners, trying to find our way.”

Read it all.

My father was born in 1919, the beneficiary of vast wealth. He was a grandson of William H. Moore, who, as one of the Moore brothers of Chicago, had made a fortune in corporate mergers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Until he went away to St. Paul’s School, at twelve, my father spent every fall until Christmas at Hollow Hill, a gentleman’s farm in New Jersey. He went to a private school in nearby Morristown, and played with friends he kept for a lifetime, taking long walks and riding his horse on the farm’s hundred acres, tending his dog and his pet roosters, playing tennis and golf. In January, the family migrated to Palm Beach, where they lived in an Addison Mizner villa, Lake Worth on one side of the house and a wide ocean beach on the other. There, between fishing and boating trips with the captain of his father’s yacht and occasional golf with his father, my father was tutored until the family returned home at Easter””to Hollow Hill and to their enormous Manhattan apartment, on the eighteenth floor at 825 Fifth Avenue, which had a view of the sea-lion pond in the Central Park Zoo.

By his fifth form, or junior year, my father was beginning to pray on his own and to ask theological questions. In a diary otherwise marked by adolescent confusion, he is clear and certain when he writes about religion, as when Dr. Drury, the headmaster, gave a “spirited & awfully good sermon.” The idea of confession scared him, he told me later, but there was no question that he would be among the boys who made appointments with Father Wigram, a member of a contemplative order founded during the Oxford Movement, when he visited St. Paul’s in the fall of my father’s final year.

Since I always thought I knew the story of my father’s conversion, I never asked him to tell it. But six weeks before he died, at our last dinner out together, I realized I might not have another chance.

“He was a very, very old man,” my father said, describing Father Wigram. He emphasized the second “very” just as he would have in telling me a story when I was a child, but now I was a grown-up woman and he himself was a very, very old man, his huge, familiar hands frail but forcefully gripping the table where we sat, in the dark-panelled dining room of the Century Club. It was late October, he told me, and the leaves had fallen from the trees. Father Wigram had arrived and was receiving students.

“So you went into the room?”

“Yes,” my father said quietly. “And we talked.”

“About what, Pop?”

“Oh,” he said, his eyes slowly blinking, “about everything.”

Read it all.

Last spring, something was stirring under the white steeple of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

A motley group of young and clean-cut, goateed and pierced, white-haired and bespectacled filled the center’s Barrows Auditorium. They joined their voices to sing of “the saints who nobly fought of old” and “mystic communion with those whose rest is won.” A speaker walked an attentive crowd through prayers from the 5th-century Gelasian Sacramentary, recommending its forms as templates for worship in today’s Protestant churches. Another speaker highlighted the pastoral strengths of the medieval fourfold hermeneutic. Yet another gleefully passed on the news that Liberty University had observed the liturgical season of Lent. The t-word””that old Protestant nemesis, tradition””echoed through the halls.

Just what was going on in this veritable shrine to pragmatic evangelistic methods and no-nonsense, back-to-the-Bible Protestant conservatism? Had Catholics taken over?

No, this was the 2007 Wheaton Theology Conference, whose theme was “The Ancient Faith for the Church’s Future.” Here, the words spoken 15 years ago by Drew University theologian and CT senior editor Thomas Oden rang true: “The sons and daughters of modernity are rediscovering the neglected beauty of classical Christian teaching. It is a moment of joy, of beholding anew what had been nearly forgotten, of hugging a lost child.”

Read it all.

Read it all.

I will consider posting comments on this article submitted first by email to Kendall’s E-mail: KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Almighty God, who in the place of Judas chose your faithful servant Matthias to be numbered among the Twelve: Grant that your Church, being delivered from false apostles, may always be guided and governed by faithful and true pastors; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

In 1899 a relatively obscure priest working in a City Mission in the slums of South Boston was compiling a book on prayer from articles he had written for the Saint Andrew’s Cross, a magazine of the recently established lay order of the Protestant Episcopal Church known as the Brotherhood of St. Andrew. Seven years before, this celibate priest had left the Order of the Cowley Father’s whose House was just across the Charles River in Cambridge. Although he left the order over a dispute between his superior, Fr. A. C. A. Hall and the Order’s Father Superior in England, the young priest never left the inward embrace of the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience””even less did he leave behind the spiritual disciplines of the religious life he had learned so well under Fr. Hall’s steady hand. Somewhere between his pastoral and social work among the sordidness and squalor of the South End””replete with red light district, street waifs, immigrants and vagrants”” and his late night vigils of intercessory prayer or early mornings spent in meditation, not to mention the full round of parish duties, he found the time to write. In the final chapter of his little book, With God in the World, he wrote words that now appear as strangely prescient for his own life: “Men””we are not thinking of butterflies””cannot exist without difficulty. To be shorn of it means death, because inspiration is bound up with it, and inspiration is the breath of God, without the constant influx of which man ceases to be a living soul. Responsibility is the sacrament of inspiration. . . . The fault of most modern prophets is not that they present too high an ideal, but an ideal that is sketched with a faltering hand; the appeal to self-sacrifice is too timid and imprecise, the challenge to courage is too low-voiced, with the result that the tide of inspiration ebbs and flows.” He was to parse this belief taking root in his soul, with the phrase “the inspiration of responsibility”. Within two short years he would have the opportunity to test these words with his life.

His name was Charles Henry Brent, born the son of an Anglican clergyman from New Castle, Ontario in 1862. How Charles Brent, a Canadian by birth, came to be a priest in of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and under the episcopacy of the renowned Phillips Brooks, and later, the almost equally celebrated Bishop William Lawrence, is itself an interesting story we haven’t time to explore. Suffice to say that God seemed to be grooming through the seemingly quixotic twists and turns of providence a bishop not merely for the church or for one nation, but for the world””a man, of whom it could be said, he was Everybody’s Bishop.
The event that brought Brent face to face with the words he himself had written came on the morning of October 8, 1901. An unexpected telegram came from the House of Bishops meeting at General Convention in San Francisco. In short it asked him whether there were any hindrances under God that, if elected, would prevent him from becoming the first Episcopal bishop of the Philippine Islands. After consulting three intimate friends, and more than a little searching of soul, he sent these words westward over the wire””“Willing and rejoiced to sacrifice myself to the utmost for the missionary cause. Possible family complications. Consult Lawrence and Hall who know the situation.” Elected in October, consecrated in December, Bishop Brent sailed for the Philippines on May 1902. He had just turned forty. During the next decade this son of a rural rectory, naturally inward and reserved, with the soul of a mystic and poetic cast of mind, would become an international figure whose spiritual and diplomatic counsel was sought by governors, generals and presidents, and yet walked with humble step through the mountain huts and Igorot villages in the northern islands of Luzon and the Moro pirates of Zamboanga and Jolo.
During the seventeen years he was Missionary Bishop of the Philippines Brent established an Episcopal Cathedral in Manila for American and British citizens; schools for the children of American governmental and military personnel; missions stations and schools among the Chinese immigrants in Manila, the Igorot tribes in the Luzon, as well as among the Moro Muslims in the southern islands; was the frequent confidante of the successive Governor-Generals of the islands, (including William Howard Taft later to be U. S. President), and military men of every rank, (including confirming General Pershing); was an indefatigable herald for the missionary enterprise in the American church wherever he found a platform””from diocesan gatherings, Episcopal Seminaries, General Conventions, to dinners with the wealthy. In 1910 he was a key figure in the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh. The many prolonged ocean voyages to promote the missionary enterprise, as well as to secure the necessary funds and missionaries for the work and growing institutions of his diocese, he used to write lectures for such places as Harvard University and The General Theological Seminary, as well as many of the thirteen books published during this era of his life for an eager and growing readership in the U. S. and England. He was also drawn into the complexities of the international opium trade, having seen first hand its rapacious affect on the peoples of the Philippines. From the initial meeting of the Opium Commission at Shanghai in 1909 to the subsequent gatherings in Hague and Geneva as late as 1924, he was a tireless crusader for abolishing the international trade that was destroying so many lives in the far corners of the world, including those in his old parish in the South End of Boston. He became a widely read writer on the international dimensions of this narcotic problem and a respected voice whose wisdom was drawn upon by statesmen and presidents long after he left the Pacific.
It is not surprising that with the outbreak of the First World War a churchman of such international experience and reputation would find himself called upon by Canadians, Americans and Europeans alike. While in France as a special representative with the War Council of the Y.M.C.A. he was asked by his old friend, General Pershing, who was Head of the American Expeditionary Force, to oversee the Chaplaincy Ministry to U. S. soldiers in Europe. Since the U.S. military had no chaplaincy program he had no prior blueprint for the work. He created the program from scratch. In this capacity he organized the Chaplains School, established plans for ecumenical services and enabled chaplains of various denominations from Roman Catholic priests to Baptist ministers to carry out effective duties among the troops. Of this work General Pershing wrote, “By his [Bishop Brent’s] loyal spirit of cooperation and by his masterful attainments, he has rendered services of most conspicuous merit and lasting value to the American government.” (Zabriskie, p. 132)
Having been elected bishop of Western New York just prior to the United States’ involvement in the war, and having chosen to accept the call based upon his conviction that his health would not last long if he continued in the tropics, he agreed to accept the position, provided the diocese would wait for him to finish his work in the war effort. Thus when he came to the Buffalo on February 16, 1919 he was an internationally known figure. Even the young American soldiers returning home knew him as the Bishop in Khaki: Their Bishop. From 1919 until his death on March 27, 1929 in Lausanne the diocese was called upon to share their bishop with the world. They had called a living apostle to be their bishop””and soon to be known as the Apostle of Church Unity. Amid parish visitations and confirmations, diocesan meetings and General Conventions, requests came for him to serve the larger Christian world in international gatherings. Frederick Ward Kates wrote of this partnership between a local diocese and a recognized world figure: His mind, heart, effort, and vision embraced all mankind. Diocesan and National boundaries were simply landmarks, not mind limits or heart limits. He knew no geographical borders restricting the duty Christians owe all mankind. Thus the diocese, under Bishop Brent’s leadership and the magnificent inspiration he gave it, was happy and proud to make its contribution to the world’s need. If Bishop Brent went abroad on some Christian mission, Western New York churchmen felt the diocese went abroad with him.”
Chief among the duties that called him away from his diocese was his role as a crusader for Christian unity. Delegate to the Meeting of the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work in Stockholm in 1925; Chairman of the first Faith and Order meeting also held in Stockholm; and President of the World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne in 1927, he presided over gatherings that included such theological luminaries as Karl Barth and Bishop Charles Gore; Orthodox Patriarchs from Greece, Asia Minor, and Syria: Christian Professors and churchmen from China and Japan, as well as from every country of Europe. One of those present who would one day serve as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William Temple, wrote of Brent’s chairing of this monumental meeting for Christian unity, “His position as the pivotal person of the Conference was plain, and his quiet, firm and often humorous control of the discussions was most effective.”
In the serendipitous sovereignty of God it is fitting that the Bishop was traveling with friends when he took his last breath. On their way to the Mediterranean in the spring of 1929 for what his physician, Sir Thomas Barlow, saw as needed R&R he passed through Switzerland with Ambassador and Mrs. Houghton and Dr. Barlow. They spent the night in Lausanne. At 2:30 a.m. the Bishop awoke in discomfort. Sending for Sir Thomas, the doctor found him breathless and his pulse growing fainter. He urged upon his friend to remember his charge “”¦not to forget what I said to you, that I wish to be buried where I die.” He then said, “Things are fading away.” Fitting last words from one who on Holy Week in 1906 while on retreat at the House of the Resurrection, Baguio, in the Philippine Islands, had written””“We must enter heaven and sojourn there a space every day in order to understand the meaning of life and do the work that lies before us in the world. The courts of heaven are but a step away. Wherefore
Lift up your hearts.
We lift them up unto the Lord.
His body was dressed in a purple cassock, placed in a plain oak casket and buried in Bois de Vaux cemetery in Lausanne, Switzerland. The tree lay where it fell. There was no home to which to take his body: No one place could claim him””be it New Castle, Boston, Manila, Paris or Buffalo. Though a man for all nations, he only sojourned in this world he served: The courts of heaven for him seemed always only a step away.

* * * * * * * *

I’ve been assigned the task of speaking this morning on Charles Henry Brent as an Anglican Treasure. This is at once an easy and most demanding task. Easy in that Bishop Brent excelled not only in so many dimensions of The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion, but was also widely esteemed in the Church Universal and, for that matter, in the political world of his day””being called upon by governors, generals and successive Presidents of the United States for counsel, ministry and diplomatic service. Yet mine is also a difficult task in that he is so little known by Episcopalians today that I have found myself tempted to set out in several separate yet inter-related directions. It is an odd indictment of how little we have embraced our heritage when a man who is arguably the most important figure the Episcopal Church has produced since the celebrated preacher Phillips Brooks (himself seemingly read more often by preachers outside his church than those within) is so little known by those who minister in his adopted province within the Anglican Communion.
He was of course as I have all too briefly described above, a celebrated missionary bishop””the first Bishop of the newly acquired U. S. Territory of the Philippine Islands from 1901””1917. It may be recalled from whatever meager geography lessons we may have had in school, this group of islands stretched for twelve hundred miles from Formosa to Borneo. Some here this morning may have first encountered Bishop Brent through John Booty’s book in the Church’s Teaching Series, The Church in History, published in 1979. Dr. Booty began his chapter on the Church as a “Missionary Community” with an excellent retelling of Brent’s ministry beginning with his work in the Philippines and leading to Brent’s work as a prophet of ecumenism, or as Dean Zabriskie had referred to him a generation earlier in his rightly praised biography, Bishop Brent, An Apostle of Christian Unity. His lectures delivered at The General Seminary under the Paddock Lectureship and subsequently published in 1906 under the title Adventure with God would itself be worthy of our time this morning. Take for instance this one paragraph from this passionate call to missionary service as indicative of its vibrancy and vigor: When the highest post of honour in a leading school for girls is the presidency of the missionary society, and when the head master of a great school for boys publicly proclaims that he would rather see one of his pupils a foreign missionary than in the Presidential chair, surely the vision of adventure for God is a living force in our midst!” (p. 30 Adventure for God) As a poetic visionary able to cast a vision for a truly Christian romance towards the missionary vocation he is without peer, though it is hard not to conclude that his missiology would have been helped by a thorough reading and assimilation of his contemporary Anglican missiologist Roland Allen.
Others of my generation may well have first made an acquaintance with Brent through James Addison’s The Episcopal Church in the United States 1789””1931. Addison, not without justification, portrays Brent as a man for all seasons, equally at home in slums of 1890 Boston, the native huts of Moro tribesman, the lecture halls of Harvard or the cathedrals of Europe. He was writes Addison, “many-sided in character and of varied powers”¦ [who] in a life-time of sixty-seven years, touched nearly every aspect of God’s work in the world, and ”˜touched nothing that he did not adorn.’” (Addison, p. 363) In fact as those who have read Brent’s writings on spirituality and prayer can attest, we could easily spend the morning fruitfully in a delightful look at his understanding of prayer as an adventure with God in the world!””which of us after all can pray his collect for mission incorporated into the 1979 Book of Common Prayer’s Morning Prayer service and fail to be inspired at one and the same time towards devotion and mission?

Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the arms of your saving embrace; So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching out our hand in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.

This is but one of a seemingly innumerable number of prayers found in his published works and unpublished diaries that are crafted in the fusion of a saint’s vision and a poet’s pen. As he urged his readers in his little devotional book, With God in Prayer, the practice of such writing of prayers is available to all and it is “”¦an act of reverence to present to God the best expression of our thought that we can. An artistic prayer, a prayer carefully prepared, so far from being less is more spiritual by virtue of its literary finish.” (Brent, p. 10)

Bishop Brent: The Metaphysic of Leadership

It is however as a Spiritual Leader that I wish to present Bishop Brent for your consideration. What is most to be remembered here, or should I say, excavated, for that is often what is necessary for the student of pastoralia in the Episcopal tradition today, is that Bishop Brent is not merely a model for leaders to emulate, as important as this is, he was also a philosopher of leadership. In several of his published works he leads us into thinking philosophically, even christianly, about leadership. It is in this dual role that I wish to present Brent as an Anglican treasure””1) as model for leadership in his life and work; and 2) as a philosopher of Christian leadership, dealing not merely with pragmatic practices of successful leadership (as we find so inundating the field of leadership writing today), but with a metaphysic of leadership, its power, motive and purpose. As an Anglican spokesman for the growing field of writing, we will find his contribution will not be in multiplying the number of psychological case studies, interpersonal dynamics, conflict resolution styles, sociological analysis of institutional life, anthropological descriptions of leadership styles or even methodologies for goal-setting, strategies or statistics. Frankly, our need in the matter of leadership theory is greater and more fundamental than what any of these can offer, even while it may include regular attention given to them.
Leadership has been described as the Abominable Snowman of the social sciences, its “”¦.footprints are everywhere, but it is nowhere to be seen.” Robert Greenleaf, some years ago called ours as an “era of the anti-leader” and ours as a “leadership-poor society”. A brief excursion into the movies of our day will demonstrate again and again how the person without title or position, the maverick, the one outside the established order or institution is the one who saves or delivers. James MacGregor Burns, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Leadership, writes, “One of the most universal cravings of our time is a hunger for compelling and creative leadership.” When theorists write books on why leaders can’t lead (see Warren Bennis’ book by that title), and church consultants feel compelled to include chapters in books reminding church leaders “that leaders do lead” (see Lyle Schaller among others), we clearly have a leadership problem. Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, in their ground breaking collaboration some years ago, entitled Leaders, addressed the illusivity of leadership: Never have so many labored so long to say little. Multiple interpretations of leadership exist, each providing a sliver of insight, but each remaining an incomplete and wholly inadequate explanation. Most of these definitions don’t agree with each other, and many of them would seem quite remote to the leaders whose skills are being dissected. Definitions reflect recent fads, fashions, political tides and academic trends. They don’t always reflect reality and sometimes they just represent nonsense. It’s as if what Braque once said about art is also true of leadership: ”˜The only thing that matters in art is the part that cannot be explained’” Indeed, if there is not widespread agreement upon what leadership is, or how it’s achieved, few would deny the truth of what Admiral James Bond Stockdale stated in his profoundly searching article, “Educating Leaders”: Throughout our society we need people up front who are bored to death with business as usual, but are imaginative, classically educated (by which he means history, philosophy, and literature), and yearn to have a chance to be trail-blazers, to confront the unexpected.” The Episcopal Church, like others of the mainline denominations need people who are bored to death with business as usual.
Certainly we have no lack of leaders who want to blaze a new path in regard to issues of morality, or newly dressed ancient heresy, but for creative leadership in the “flat world of the 21st Century” or for imaginative models for mission and ministry in an ever changing a secularist world we almost pine in spiritual inertia. Maintenance models of ministry abound. And from far too many national church offices (TEC is not alone in this) comes a dreadful proliferation of pragmatic blueprints, acronyms, moralizing guilt-laden guidance and ever new buzzwords that would deaden the moral sensibilities of the best among us. While the church in the Southern Globe makes bold initiatives, and Evangelical and Pentecostal churches in our own country continue to develop vision and leadership for evangelism and ministry that seek to win the world for Christ and inspire our often most devoted youth and young adults, we rehearse in treadmill fashion the issues of social justice which rarely produce a more just society nor a more diverse or truly inclusive church. While our House of Bishops and Executive Council take steps to hinder adaptations of our polity that may well have enabled us to negotiate the Scylla and Charbidys near which we sail as a province, and thwart in the councils of the church any movement that may enable Anglicanism to craft an ecclesiology for this new millennium into which we have entered, this age of globalism, we as a national church continue our numerical decline and societal insignificance. We seem laden with those in leadership position who mirror managers, who write and interpret rules, who protect the institutional status quo despite their anti-establishment rhetoric or ethos.
The historical reasons for much of this lies outside the purpose of this presentation or paper, so far outside in fact, it could well be argued that the above paragraph is a detraction from the positive points I wish to make, Nevertheless, I include them here in order to bring some needed specificity to the statements I have made as to why we need a voice from the past, and within our Anglican and Episcopalian tradition, that might help us out of the ennui into which we have drifted. Indeed, Charles Henry Brent is a thoroughly Anglican thinker and leader, rooted in the best of our heritage; he is incarnational and catholic to his core, yet open to the fresh breezes of the Holy Spirit flowing in the worldwide church of his day and within an ever changing environment. He remained undaunted by and unwaveringly in touch with all the scientific and technological discoveries that a new century could thrust upon him.
So without further delay, let us turn to an exploration of his philosophy of leadership, which I believe can have seminal and formative influence for all of us who are caught in this crisis of leadership in our church and society. Chief in our analysis will be his lectures on Leadership delivered at Harvard University in 1907, and published under the title of the same, simply, Leadership. While I have studied and interacted with other books of Brent in which he expresses various aspects of the philosophy and practice of leadership, including The Inspiration of Responsibility, The Sixth Sense, Presence, among others, it will be primarily this book based on his lectures to young Christian men at Harvard that will form the foundation of our presentation. Here one can discover a classical and thoroughly Christian philosophy of leadership, without which we too easily fall into mere pragmatism””that is reflecting upon what works and what succeeds rather than what is true, what is right, and what is godly. To quote once more from Stockdale’s article on “Educating Leaders”””“Every great leader I have known has been a great teacher, able to give those around him a sense of perspective and to set the moral, social, and motivational climate among his followers.” This is what Brent accomplishes in these lectures and what makes them eminently worthy of serious study. The old adage “leaders are born not made” was far from true in the case of Bishop Brent. “He was called”, writes Eleanor Slater (one of his first biographers), “a born leader, but to say this of his leadership is to undervalue it”¦.He gave himself tolerance, sympathy, humor, judgment. Without these he would have not been a true leader. He was even less a born leader than most men. Sensitive, diffident, self-conscious, he seemed at first conspicuously lacking in the self-confidence and temperamental drive essential for effective leadership. It was only as he built up in himself reliance on something more than himself that he began to transcend these limitations.” It almost goes without saying what that reliance on something outside himself was, his mystic communion with Christ through meditation, prayer, formative reading of Holy Scripture, study, Eucharistic fellowship.
While these aforesaid disciplines are well documented in his numerous writings, as well as in his life by several biographers, it is in his lectures on Leadership that Brent articulates the primary characteristics of the leader. These qualities are not elitist. In fact the qualities in the leader, he writes, “Are those which you find in any good man, only in the leader they exist in a marked degree.” (Leadership, p. 12) A leader is one who keeps in advance of the crowd, (by which he means the common person), without detaching himself from the crowd””examples of this characteristic he finds in leaders such as Lincoln, Moses and of course, quintessentially in Jesus. The leader must influence others “to see what he sees, to feel what he feels, to desire what he desires” attaching them, (the crowd), “to his ideal self.” Unlike the demagogue who is also of the crowd, the leader appeals not to the baser emotions of the human spirit; rather he touches their higher desires, and awakens their dormant virtue. Conversely, the demagogue reveals an arrested development. Bishop Brent, however, is concerned with four aspects of the leader’s inner life: His or her Motive, Will, Character, and Vocation.

The Power of the Single Motive

Motive is the pivotal concern for the leader. He or she may have numerous motives, some difficult to discern, but, “one central motive controls every personality”¦.One motive either converts, ousts or absorbs all others until its rule is absolute.” (Leadership, p. 49) For this reason, writes Brent, “Too much time or pains cannot be spent in ensuring that we gain a worthy one. It is a life companion and the master of our destiny.” (Leadership, p. 55) Brent quotes Jesus’ teaching regarding the disciple being unable to serve too masters, as well as “the light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body will be full of light.” No motive becomes dominant without an inner conflict which Brent refers to as a war similar to Christ’s Temptation in the Wilderness. While there may be many things in life we are not responsible for, whether our temperaments or our ideas, “we are responsible for our motive”¦..Having once deciphered a worthy motive all our life can be spelled out in its alphabet.” (p. 54) It is the leader’s truest and safest guardian.

Accordingly, motives can be classified under one of two possible headings””Competitive or Social. The Competitive motive views leadership as an opportunity to display one’s self, and one’s own importance. This motive desires rank, title, position or authority for self-aggrandizement. Brent finds ample illustration of this in the disciples’ discussion in the Gospels as to which of them was the greatest. They are victims here of the Competitive motive, “thinking of others always with a view to comparison and the measuring of relative (supposed or real) merits. It is of a jealous disposition and cannot remain unperturbed at the success of others.” (Leadership, p. 60) Leadership dominated by this motive can drive others but cannot lead them for the other is seen as a potential rival. When Jesus asks the disciples what they were thinking as they discussed their greatness along the road, or in the upper room, they grew silent””“The competitive motive cannot bear the scrutiny of an honest eye.” And should one persist in this motive the leader’s need for self-importance and reputation in the eyes of others will eventually cripple his or her leadership.
The Social Motive, conversely, is the single motive. Like the Competitive Motive it may aspire to greatness, yet as Jesus taught his disciples, its greatness lies in its service of others. “But whosoever will be great among you shall be servant of all.” Jesus, as St. Paul indicated in Philippians 2:5-11, and as he himself suggested when he said, “I am among you as one who serves,” is the singularly greatest demonstration of this motive in leadership. He identified himself with the least and the lowest in order to lift them up. He was one with the multitudes, so much so that even still all that some can see of Jesus of Nazareth is his humanness””from manager to cross he was one with those he came to serve””who gave himself as a ransom for many. He came not to dazzle or “to make others feel small but to make them feel and be great.” (See John 14:1-2, Leadership, p. 67) In fact he shunned position, rank, and prestige as unnecessary to success, teaching by his example “that it is not the place that makes the man, but the man that makes the place. A small man makes a great place the same size as himself, and the great man makes the small place as great as he is.” (Leadership, p.68) The Social motive is therefore characterized by humility and helpfulness. This humility keeps the leader, whether he is a leader in religion as was Moses, in science as was Darwin, or in politics, as was Lincoln “always and everywhere one of the crowd”¦. Pride and self-importance separate: humility unites.” (Leadership, p. 70 ff) So too with helpfulness. “In light of the social motive,” Brent states, “Leadership; is helpfulness””the ability to help the weakest and most neglected and least to the utmost and to the last.” The social motive is strikingly similar to what Robert Greenleaf and Henri Nouwen, some seventy-five years later would call, “Servant Leadership”. Greenleaf writes, “The servant-leader is servant first”¦.It begins with the natural feelings that one wants to serve, to serve First. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or acquire material possessions.” (Servant Leadership, p. 13)
Brent notes that the social motive values place or titular position not for its prestige but “for its opportunity, and is willing to fit in wherever the best opportunity lies.” This offers a substantive criticism for the curse of professional careerism that one sees too frequently in the Church today. For leaders possessed of the social motive, self-importance is repulsive””for “their ambition is to serve.” (Leadership, p. 80) Brent’s own vocation illustrates this in his refusing calls to leave comparative obscurity as Bishop of the Philippines for calls to the Dioceses of Washington, Baltimore, New Jersey, and Western New York, (the latter of which he finally accepted for reasons far removed from the motive of personal advancement). “Possessed of this unifying principle [the social motive] ”¦a man has the earliest and most essential qualification for Leadership.” (Leadership, p. 89)
In his little devotional handbook, With God in Prayer, Brent counsels us in the movements of our morning’s prayer, that””“The magnitude of a man is measured by the magnitude of his motive. Set your motive. Make it (a) simple, (b) strong, having in it the purity of childhood and the virility of manhood.”
O Savior, who in the completeness of Thy manhood art still Babe
Of Bethlehem and Child of Nazareth, restore in me the simplicity
I have tampered with, the transparency I have obscured, the child-
likeness I have lost, that the shattered fragments of my innocence
may be assembled anew in the beauty of Thy sanctity; who with the
Father and the Holy Ghost art God forever and ever. Amen. (p. 29)

The Power of the Human Will

If motive is that which “oxygenizes” every aspect of our character and the only dimension of our being “we are altogether responsible for”, the leader must add to the unifying quality of the Social motive the force and power of the human will. Brent in pages charged with contending examples illustrating the will’s weakness and eccentricity, then marshals his argument to buttress the power of the will in human personality, force and achievement. The leader, while recognizing the limitations and weaknesses of the human will must not allow him or herself to excuse failure, sloth, mere wishfulness, or lack of effort to some predetermined circumstances or destiny. The ire of Pelagius he argues (quoting an unnamed source) was rightly “raised by the manner in which many persons alleged the weakness of human nature as an excuse for carelessness or slothfulness in religion; in opposition to this he insisted on the freedom of the will.” Brent then continues to suggest that while avoiding Pelagius’ errors, the spiritual leader must rightly assess the power and gift of the human will. As an Anglican with evangelical convictions, I for one would have appreciated a fuller exploration as to how the Christian leader navigates this matter than Brent offers us. What he does conclude is that “God’s inner working can never be dishonourned by attributing to the greatest endowment with which He has gifted personality the power which is resident in it. The sole function of the will is to act, to do, to achieve, morally, spiritually, physically. It has no other raison d’etre.” (Leadership, p. 93) Ironically, the first act of the will is to choose its motive. Once this is done the will is then guided and channeled by the motive. Therefore, leadership for Brent is purposeful. In a seminal and summarizing aphorism he states that “Purpose is force inspired and unified by motive, stimulated by desire and backed by will.” (Leadership, p. 94)
This resolve, as he notes elsewhere, is for the Christian linked indissolubly with the grace of repentance. Since we do not honor God’s power by depreciating the power of the human will to achieve great accomplishments, neither should we separate it from the grace of penitence and prayer. So this brings the leader to the place of prayer””Lord, give me the repentance which is of the will, that, not only in desire but also in intention and effort I may embrace what is good, especially those virtues which once I neglected or refused, and so endued with power to accept Thy pardon; through Jesus Christ our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen. (p. 53-54 With God in Prayer) Such repentance and resolution won through penitence and prayer is a promise to oneself, and “a promise is one of the most sacred things of life” upon which the whole structure of society is built. (Leadership, p. 94-5)
When viewed through the whole prism of his writings and thought this discussion of the power of the human will for Brent should not be seen in isolation from the incarnation and redeeming work of Christ, and the grace which comes to us through the Spirit””that is, among other means of grace, prayer, meditation, and Eucharistic fellowship.
The conditions most likely to make the will a transformational instrument in the life of a leader is (1) to aim at the seemingly impossible; and (2) to win its freedom by acting as if it were free. “Fate, environment, heredity, luck””all that you can conjure up as making against freedom of will””form an ocean through which our will must make its way. We can never change these adverse things perhaps; but we can steer a course through their currents.” (Leadership, p. 112) This involves the will unified by the social motive to a life of obedience to God. This obedience invigorates one to greater service, and enables the leader to exercise restraint towards his or her privileges and opportunities thereby placing them as instruments of the higher self to initiate actions for the good of others””especially the broad spectrum of humanity. “The world is waiting for men endowed with the gift of leadership, who will show their sense of vocation by ruling out of their lives all [selfish] interests”¦men who will not hesitate to close the door of privilege against themselves if, so doing, they see an opportunity of serving the masses.” (Leadership, p.121)
One needs to look no further then Jesus””for such motive made forceful through will””willing obedience, service, restraint and initiative for even the weakest and the worst. This sort of “Leadership means pain” as the life of Christ so clearly demonstrates. “The will to do involves the will to suffer.” (Leadership, p. 124) As Jesus himself testified to his disciples: “I lay down my life”¦.No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have the power lay it down.” This was not, however, without transformational purpose, for as our Lord promised elsewhere, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all men unto me.” This for Brent was sufficient testimony to the power of the human will.

The Power of the Blameless Life

We come now to Brent’s third qualification in the leader’s life””after the social motive and the power of the human will””the force of his logic brings the reader to what he terms the Blameless life. “The first and greatest fruit of the alliance between motive and will is blamelessness, moral integrity, in short, character, first ideally then actually.” (Leadership, p. 129) There is something deeply attractive to us in the leader who exhibits real moral character. Humanity is drawn to it as sparks fly upward; as metal is drawn to a magnet. The leader, even more so than the man or woman in the crowd, is expected to be a person of moral integrity. In pages that seem to presage the argument of C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, Brent asserts a universal moral appetite that is seen in cultures throughout history and in every corner of the world, whether primitive or sophisticated. The attractiveness of righteousness is akin to the attractiveness of beauty”” to the ideal of the rose or the satisfaction experienced in Greek sculptures. “The development of ethics is a human development. There is a similarity of fundamental ethics all the world over. Even where there could not have been correspondence between race and race this is so.” (Leadership, p.138)
This is therefore a metaphysical requirement in the leader, this moral dimension or character. He sums up this quest on behalf of the followers succinctly: “The sole point I wish to make is, that human nature as such is drawn toward righteousness, and that moral integrity is held by the crowd to be an essential characteristic of the Leader. Either he has virtue or else it is attributed to him by his followers. (Leadership, p. 146)
Fortunately, this pursuit of the righteous or the blameless life is for Brent understood under the template of the “prodigal-son attitude”. It is something sought in repentance, and through the grace of Jesus Christ, rather than merely possessed in nature. Once again the aspiration toward this quality of leadership finds devotional expression in his writing on prayer. “The setting of the motive and the broad acceptance of God’s law is the preliminary step toward a righteous life. But detail may not be neglected. The best gifts become ours by being severally coveted and not by being merely admired. (1 Cor. xii. 31) Ideals must be wooed before they are won. We must embrace them when they are most shy, until they turn and embrace us. In no other way may we hope to possess them. Contemplation of virtue must be followed up by daily aspiration and effort to achieve it. The graces that we are most destitute of are those to be first courted.” (With God in Prayer, p. 31-32) For Brent Jesus Christ is not merely the fullest exemplar of the righteous Leader drawing us by the very blamelessness of his life, he is clearly the dynamic and motive for subsequent leaders. Where other teachers expected the power of the moral life to be found in their philosophy, the power of Jesus’ teaching on leadership is found in his person. “ In him was life; and the life was the light of men; I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” As Brent understood it the resurrection of Jesus let loose a dynamic in the life of his disciples. While this dynamic is incorporated with what he termed the “prodigal-son attitude”, it is also the “dynamic of sonship”.
The Christian leader must seek through the dynamic and motive (the social motive) of Jesus Christ to conform his or her life (this will involve a struggle to be sure) to the highest ethics””“but there is no power on earth more electrical in its action.” Indeed it is true for the nation as well as the Church that their very framework depends upon the suppositions that those who are administering trusts are morally sound. (Leadership, p. 161) When such is proven not to be the case there is a shaking of the peoples’ trust. It is such an assumed qualification that those who do not possess moral integrity attempt to counterfeit it. Followers are however often keen at sniffing such things out even when they do not always speak of it. Every leader ought to meditate a season on these words Brent has put before his readers “”¦we are apt to live in blissful self-deceit that concludes we have not been found out in our foibles, frailties, and sins. But the scrutinizing eyes of the people have been busy, and there are few of us indeed who have not long since been found out in those very imperfections we are most sure no one has detected. The more conspicuous a man’s vocation”¦the more searching the judgment he undergoes, the more insistent the demand that he conform his life to a high standard.” (Leadership, p. 165-166) The great leaders of Church and State have been those whose moral integrity shone greater than all other dimensions of their leadership such was the case with men memorialized by those of Brent’s generation””Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Phillips Brooks.
The person of moral integrity, who seeks to live a blameless life, characterized by righteousness, possesses an essential qualification for leadership. This cannot fail to have its effect on others. A leader after all can bear the sins of others with impunity; it is not so with his own sins. As the great preacher Phillips Brooks once confessed to a friend, “How wretched I should be if I felt that I was carrying about with me any secret which I should not be willing that all the world should know!” Brent augments Brooks’ comment with the words, “”¦not merely “wretched’, but fettered, for everyone that commith sin is the bondservant of sin. Now to be a Leader it is first of all requisite that a man should be free.” (Leadership, p. 169-170)

This talk concludes in the subsequent blog entry–KSH.