The King of Terrors and Other Essays

The King of Terrors

&

Other Essays

By

John Heidt

Edited by Michael Heidt

Copyright, Michael Heidt, 2013

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction - Why I Remain an Anglican

Chapter 1 - Against Secularism

These Nightmare Years

Ending the Secular Captivity of the Churches

War Without End

Chapter 2 - Rediscovering Communion and the Nature of the Church

To be or not to be Schismatic, is that really the Question?

Anglo-Catholic or Catholic Anglican?

Where have all the Catholics Gone?

Communio in Sacris

Dispensing with the Branch Theory

Beyond Denominationalism

What Anglican Communion?

The Catholic Church, Communion of the Holy

Authority and Communion

A Question of Authority

An Open Letter to the Presiding Bishop and House of Bishops

An Open Letter to His Eminence, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster

Chapter 3 – The King of Terrors and Other Things

The King of Terrors and the Theology of Henry Scott Holland

Towards a New Catholic Sociology

The Interpretation of Scripture Within the Anglo-Catholic Movement

Archbishop Rowan Williams, an Assessment

Enthusiasm and the Catholic Clerical Union

Chapter 4 – The Problem of Evil and the Sacrificial Love of God

Pain and Grief

All You Need is Love

At the Name of Jesus

God in the Flesh

Chapter 5 - Human Sexuality and the Consecration of Bishops

Against Spiritism

In Praise of Hypocrisy

Poles Apart

Religions in Collision

Chapter 6 - Against the Ordination of Women

Why Some Cannot ordain Women as Priests

Unholy Disorder

A Matter of Justice

Sacraments and Salvation, an Open letter to the Bishop of Dallas

Mitered Pharaohs and the Tyranny of Canon Law

Foreword

When a review of twentieth and twenty first century Anglican Church history is written, it would be tragic if the Reverend Canon John Heidt were not mentioned. In many ways it would be difficult for an historian to describe not only Dr. Heidt himself, but also the remarkable impact he made on the life of our part of God’s church.

Was he a scholar? If one has read virtually anything that he has written, the obvious answer is yes. However, what type of scholar was he? Indeed, he was a systematic theologian - but not only that. He was an observer of the world and the humans who had shaped Christian thought, and by using theological principles was able to evaluate movements, trends, and fads as a physician examines a patient.

Mere observation, however, would not describe his methodology. He was a rare theologian in the sense that he observed and participated in a variety of cultures and responded theologically. His articulations do not reek of gloomy judgmentalism coupled with condescension nor do they justify what one might call a natural evolution due to enlightenment. In all things he saw that theology is life, and his entire life was a type of celebration of the Incarnation.

Seen by some as a Traditional Anglo-Catholic, which was certainly my experience of him when as a teenager I first met him, nonetheless one must then explain how the Rock Masses in his English parish reflected that. For those who take a limited view of Anglo-Catholicism this would seem incongruous at best, but perhaps that is the closest way to define Fr. Heidt - ultimately no one could define him!

Born in Wisconsin in a less than affluent set of circumstances, and educated at Yale and Nashotah House Seminary, Fr. Heidt married in Denton, Texas, after serving in several parishes. Together with his wife, Katherine, he began married life in Oxford, England, where he studied under the eminent Anglican theologian, Austin Farrar.

Although his studies and ministry would take him from Wisconsin, to Texas, to England, and then back again to all three places, one principle was clear: All theology is ultimately expressed in a pastoral way. While it is true that what he spoke was consistent with what he wrote and taught, it was the way he articulated the truth that is most memorable. To say he was a bit eccentric would be to present an unworthy caricature. To say that he was erudite would be to minimize his charm. In fact, he was one of those rare intellects who could explain deep truths by sprinkling philosophical, theological, anecdotal, and humorous gems together to form a seamless gift to the recipient.

To say more would be an offense to his humility, but to say less than I have would be to downplay the significant contribution he made to the people on several continents who knew him personally or through his writing. This collection of essays gives a glimpse into that contribution.

I am just one of the many young men who were mentored by Fr. John Heidt as we discerned a calling to the priesthood, and I am delighted to work with FJ's (as he was sometimes called) son Fr. Michael Heidt, who has taken on the joyful task of selecting the material for this book.

The Parish Press is honored to participate in making these essays and reflections available to a generation that needs to read them.

The Rt. Rev. Keith L. Ackerman

Eighth Bishop of Quincy (Rtd)

I once joked with Canon Heidt that he wrote much better than he spoke. He enjoyed that observation and often reminded me of it. But it was true. This collection of some of his writings is evidence of that.

He accepted an invitation to serve as my Canon Theologian at a turbulent time in the Anglican Communion. Whenever I needed to issue a statement on some new development or controversy in the life of the Communion, I would always run it by Canon Heidt before making it public. In every case, he would turn around a sentence, or restructure a paragraph, and otherwise edit what I was attempting to say in such a way that it was always more clearly and more convincingly expressed. He was not only a brilliant systematic theologian, but he also understood the ecclesiology of Anglicanism as an authentic expression of the catholic faith.

When he died, I told the clergy and people at his requiem that we were all diminished by his death. Now I can say that we are all enriched and enlightened by this short collection of his essays.

They speak to us today as strongly as when he first wrote them, and I commend them to you.

The Rt. Rev. Jack Leo Iker

Third Bishop of Fort Worth

Introduction

Why I Remain an Anglican

Given the disarray of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America (ECUSA) some of my friends and colleagues are jumping ship, abandoning ECUSA to join the Roman Catholic Church, one of the Eastern Orthodox Churches or perhaps the Continuum. Yet I for one have no desire or intention of becoming a Roman Catholic or, for that matter a Lutheran or a Methodist or a Baptist, or even a Buddhist, Druid or Mohammedan.

I have always been an Anglican in the Episcopal Church. God immersed me in this Church - into its various dioceses and particular parishes. I know nothing else. From Episcopalian priests and teachers I learned the Christian faith and came to know Jesus Christ. From within the Episcopal Church I received the Catholic religion - a religion that courses through my veins and is in the very air I breathe. The Catholic religion informs all my thinking, it moves my heart towards others when I would rather stay within myself; it compels me to do what is right when it would be easier to do what is wrong or nothing at all. Catholicism defines my character. I can be nothing else. No one can take it away from me, no argument can dissuade me from my inheritance, no church can betray who I am.

Should we all then stay where we are and be content with whatever church or religion God has been pleased to place us? If so, then those are right who say that one religion is just as good as another. But this betrays the Lordship of Jesus Christ, makes conversions obsolete by denying the Great Commission and deprives all evangelists of their mission.

Surely this cannot do and few if any really believe it in their heart. There must be some way of evaluating one religion over another, some standard for deciding that some other religion or church may be better than the one I now confess. What shall it be? As a Catholic Christian the only standard I can find is catholicity, wholeness, completeness or, in plain English, comprehensiveness.

Where beyond Ecclesia Anglicana, the Anglican Church, may I find a greater Catholicity? As an Anglican I am already fed by what other churches have to offer: Scripture and the Catholic doctrine of the undivided church, sacraments given by Jesus Christ and his church through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, a spiritual discipline formed by the saints. I need nothing more; I can be satisfied with nothing less.

Catholicity or comprehensiveness is Anglicanism’s primary characteristic. This is its virtue; it is also its danger. For it is easy to confuse Catholicism with a vague universalism and comprehensiveness with an eclecticism which believes that differences make no difference. Without some kind of control, bizarre doctrines and esoteric rituals can run rampant. From time to time we must reign in the wild horses of heresy with the use of scripture and the apostolic tradition. Yet even when we think that we have defeated the enemy at the gate, the stampede of secular paganism still continues to assault the church, knocking on the doors of the faithful, rapping at the windows of officialdom, and gathering up uninstructed innocent converts in its embrace.

Within the confines of the Episcopal Church fighting the battle for Catholic orthodoxy these days can be very difficult, and I shall sometimes have to disassociate myself from many of ECUSA’s official actions and perhaps even place myself in a different Anglican province. Yet I cannot be anything other than an Anglican. As a follower of Jesus Christ I cannot become a pagan secularist. Nor can I abandon the apostolic ministry and sacraments by associating myself with one of the Protestant sects. My only alternative is to join up with some group of Christians who, like me, lay claim to Catholicity. So all that is left is Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism.

But both these options are out of the question. As a thoroughgoing Catholic I am bound to deny all denials and negations of catholicity. Yet if I should join one of the Orthodox Churches, I would have to deny that I have ever been part of the real church, and if I became Roman Catholic I would have to deny that I have ever been a real priest or received and given real sacraments. But my catholicity and my priesthood I can never deny. And even if I should leave the Episcopal Church, or Anglicanism itself, what difference would it make in the continuing battle for orthodoxy? Not one less women would continue to act as though she was a Catholic priest, not one gay marriage would be cancelled and Episcopalian bishops would doubtless continue to deny the central tenets of scripture, creed and apostolic tradition.

No, it is not easy these days being an Anglo-Catholic in the Episcopal Church. For that matter it is not easy being a Christian wherever we are. We are under attack on all sides, whether from within or without God’s holy church. It is this church, founded by Christ, which has the fullness of faith and the means of salvation, that is complete in itself as the Mystical Body of Christ, that is, in a word, Catholic. Anglicans are a part of that and there I remain, called by God, with all those who love Him, to fight for the Faith against the manifold assaults of the enemy.

This short collection of articles, essays and reflections is a part of this perennial struggle, which is nothing less than the proclamation of catholic truth. May God grant us the increase.

Chapter One: Against Secularism

These Nightmare Years

Watching once again that horrible Nazi logic now being so vividly portrayed on Channel 4’s Nightmare Years I suddenly recalled Hitler’s claim near the end of the Second World War that if he was brought down by the Allies he would bring all Western civilization down with him. Unexpectedly my twelve year old daughter, who was watching some of the program with me, provided the living proof that his promise has been fulfilled when I asked her if she had studied the Nazi terror in school. After a little thought she said that she did not think so, but then added, At the moment we are studying the Black Death.

Then I realized that what still seems almost contemporary to me is ancient history for a younger generation, not simply because these horrific events happened fifty years ago but because they happened in a different world from our own. We no longer live in the world of Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin. We fight on different issues and think different thoughts. We are new Europeans attempting to build a new civilization on the ruins of the old, no longer able to imagine another Holocaust nor a war among European nations. To find such destructive tyranny we must go more than half way round the world to Tiananmen Square and the Killing Fields of Cambodia or more recently to the hills of Iraq.

Yet a century which invented the word genocide to describe its unique destructive bent, is not going to give up its penchant for tyranny and persecution so easily. Having realized at last that weapons of mass destruction are detrimental to economic growth, we no longer physically annihilate entire countries, nations and races. Instead, we have developed a new form of tyranny and persecution more devious and subtle than ever before. We have embraced a full-fledged secularism bent on destroying the human soul which spreads its lethal poison through saturation advertising instead of saturation bombing and relies on ill-informed public opinion rather than ministries of propaganda to further its deadly message.

Nowhere is secularism’s destructive character more clearly seen than in its effect upon the Jews. Even when I was growing up in America most Jews I knew had already lost interest in their racial and spiritual identity, seldom going to synagogue and ignoring most of their nation’s dietary and ritual laws. Far from the Holocaust being the final solution that Hitler desired, it inspired Zionism and out of the ashes of the Holocaust Israel was born, but whereas Hitler only tried to destroy the Jewish people, secular America was destroying everything that makes someone a Jew, and in doing so was achieving what nearly 4,000 years of persecution had never managed to do. Secularism, at least in many parts of the world, was wiping out the Jewish consciousness of a younger generation, and in slightly different ways it has been having the same effect on Italians and Germans and Eastern Europeans. Even the Irish Americans have had to develop a St. Patrick’s Day parade down New York’s Fifth Avenue in order to remember their cultural identity.

Unlike all that has gone before, secularism strikes at the very heart of our humanity, destroying all that is special or unique about us. Proclaiming that we can organize our lives apart from God, it ends up alienating us from ourselves and one another. And then, to make it possible for us to continue making money off one another, it demands that we submerge our differences and forget all that makes us unique. Individuality is sacrificed to fads and fashion and all signs of local and national character are swept away. Everything from shillings to regional accents is sacrificed for the sake of economic and political efficiency until all that makes us important and special gives way to the unremitting progress of a mechanized materialism.

The old world is destroyed and a soulless world takes its place. Art is subsumed within the abstract because there is nothing concrete worth portraying. Music becomes discordant or banal for lack of spiritual harmony. Theatre devotes itself to the absurd and television to a perpetual portrayal of sexual relationships that produce neither children nor lasting friendship. No longer believing he is made in the image of God, Western man is suffering from an identity crisis he is unable to resolve. He is being persecuted by an uncontrollable ideology of his own making.

The destructive power of secularism is at its most virulent in its persecution of the church. Being a popular attitude rather than an organized tyranny, it has proved more potent than any of the church’s previous enemies, striking silently and unceasingly at the heart of the spiritual, not by making any direct assault upon religious belief or practice but by tolerating every form of religion, no matter how bizarre, as equally irrelevant to the real world. Unlike the former atheist regimes which tried to stamp out religion, secularism merely moves it off center stage into the private feelings of individuals where it can have little if any effect on either society or personal character. Blinding us to the supernatural, it confines our perceptions to organized mechanisms of political and economic systems over which we have no control.

Unable to satisfy the religious feelings of a privatized people, organized religion has become irrelevant in a secular society, and no amount of tampering with the organization will make the slightest bit of difference. Our very souls are being destroyed and, contrary to the naiveté of certain ecclesiastical liberals, they are not going to be saved by updating traditional forms of worship and ministry or by revamping traditional beliefs in order to appeal to a secularized world. Far from winning the world over to our side such collusion with the enemy will only enslave us more thoroughly to its secular values. Or, as G.K. Chesterton once said of the sixteenth century reformers, in attempting to make the world Christian we will only succeed in making Christianity worldly.

By going over to the enemy the church is now in disrepute, but the human spirit itself is not so easily deluded. Secularism may kill the spirit but it rises again in every generation. For example, the 1960s witnessed a resurgence of spiritual energy which failed for lack of direction, and the New Age is another similar resurgence which will fail for lack of a sound theology. Nevertheless, these and other movements are, I believe, the birth pangs of a new Age of Faith, for secularism has had its day and the secularists are beginning to know it.

The secular heart has turned cold and its spirit depressed. A secular enlightenment has led to psychological darkness and a boredom which by now even the committed secularist is finding boring. In its spiritual despair the world is beginning to look to different forms of religion, but it is looking for a triumphal religion, not a despairing one, and it will only be interested in a church on the move rather than one in retreat. Those trying to escape from the secular darkness desire and need a way of affirmation, not a way of negation. And though it is true that every man-centered triumphalism leads eventually to the demonic spectacle of the Nuremberg rallies, a triumphalism centered on God is now needed to lift our spirits and restore our confidence.

I for one am happy to be a triumphalist, and I am looking forward to taking part in the great triumphal Festival of Faith being organized by Anglicans in the Wembley Arena, for though I understand that it is being organized by those who are opposed to the ordination of women as priests in the Church of England, that is surely not the point. The real purpose of a triumphal celebration such as this must be to oppose the secularization of the church and of the world it is meant to serve. It should be yet one more sign on the horizon of a new millennium when we shall throw off the spiritual shackles of secularism as we once threw off the terrors of Nazism and, more recently, the tyranny of communism.

Ending the Secular Captivity of the Churches

Francis Schaefer, the great Christian apologist and evangelist, argued throughout his ministry that there could be no tree evangelism or renewal of faith without first examining all the secular presuppositions underlying our contemporary culture. As David Virtue recently pointed out in Touchstone, Schaefer contended that the floodwaters of secular thought overwhelmed the church because Christian leaders did not understand the importance of combating these presuppositions. If Schaefer is right, then traditionalist Christian groups such as the Episcopalian 1st Promise or Ekklesia organizations need to understand that their primary task is cultural before it is ecclesiastical, and that the primary weakness of our leaders is not so much their heresies as their naiveté about the world in which we are trying to live out our faith.

We need to engage ourselves in that battle against false secular presuppositions which Schaefer believed was so vitally important for the renewal of the church and the evangelization of our society. We must stand on the conviction that if the modem world is right then the church must be wrong, but if the church is right then the world must be wrong, not for a lack of sanctity, there is quite a bit of that around, but for a lack of sanity. We live in a schizophrenic society which, having divorced itself from its Christian roots, is, like a woman divorced from her husband, now vainly trying to regain its pagan virginity.

Secularism

Secularism is itself an inarticulate religion diametrically opposed to a scriptural and traditional Christianity, a religion only now seeking expression in various forms of pagan spirituality and morality. What we call post-modernism is an attempt to spiritualize an anti-Christian secularism injected into Western society by the rationalism of the enlightenment. But because it is a spiritual development of religious intensity, with a whole panoply of religious myths and cultic practices, it has appealed to those who through most of their lives thought that materialism rather than secularism was poisoning our society, and that any form of spirituality was a possible antidote. In its pseudo Christian guise, this new semi-articulate paganism can easily fool the very elect - especially those elected to be bishops. Having devoted much of their lives to translating the bible and the creeds into the presuppositions of secularism, they are now encouraging their followers to use Christian prayer and sacraments to receive the grace of pagan gods. But it is not our task to translate the Gospel into the presuppositions of our society but, as in former times, so to husband our culture as best we can that society will begin to reflect the Gospel.

Establishment

As Orthodox Christians, our primary responsibility is not simply to pull out of whatever ecclesiastical institutions we happen to find ourselves, but to disentangle ourselves and the contemporary church from the presuppositions of the secular society in which we are called to live out the gospel.

This can be especially difficult for those who have inherited an establishment mentality. In countries with an established church, such as England or Sweden, the vacillation between a form of Caesaropapalism and a virtual congregationalism, has made the proper relationship between church, state and society ambiguous at best, though this ambiguity may be somewhat mitigated by a political status which allows the church to see itself as the appointed moral governor and critic of society. In other countries, such as in the United States, where there is no such political establishment, a kind of cultural establishment has taken its place. In America the king need not be Anglican because there is no king, but it is no accident that a third of our presidents have been. This cultural establishment may not have been all that critical so long as the culture seemed to be, at least in its formal rituals