Today is my wife’s birthday. We spent it the right way — some shopping, some coffee, some unhurried time together. I watched half a lecture for Church and Sacraments this morning and called it good. Some days that’s exactly the right call.
For anyone who hasn’t been here since October: I’ve finished two more courses at Cranmer Theological House — the 39 Articles and Liturgics — and I’m now into DT 701, Church and Sacraments. It’s the most substantial course so far, and the reading has been doing the most work on me.
Specifically, Bishop John Franklin Spalding’s The Church and Its Apostolic Ministry — lectures delivered in Denver in 1887. Spalding argues esse: that valid apostolic orders are constitutive of what the Church actually is. The counter-position — bene esse — holds that orders are highly preferable but not determinative of being.
I’ve landed on bene esse. Article 19 doesn’t make episcopacy a mark of a true Church, and the late Bishop Grote and Bishop Sutton hold the same ground.
Tomorrow the plan is to finish reading Darwell Stone, Outlines of Christian Dogma.
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