In 1889 Charles Gore, who was to become the Bishop of Oxford, edited a collection of twelve essays written by a group of Anglican scholars later called “liberal catholics.” Gore entitled the book Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation. (No longer under copyright, it is available as a free download on archive.org, in pdf and Kindle formats, among others.) I think that Lux Mundi is one of a dozen or so pivotal works in Anglicanism. It happens to detail some of the characteristics of the movement in our tradition with which I closely identify, liberal catholicism. But more to the point, it argues for an Anglican expression—no, a Christianity— which is greathearted in its orthodoxy, never narrow, unafraid of such new learnings as the theory of evolution and critical approaches to history and to scripture.
The subtitle intimates a lot, claiming a Christianity rooted in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, is rightly kept as one of the two great feasts of the year. God has definitively intervened in the life of the world in the Word-madeflesh. But Christmas does not exhaust Incarnation’s meaning; Easter, the other feast, definitively completes God’s intervention in the person of Jesus Christ, destroying death by death and making the whole creation new. Because of the Incarnation, nothing that is human can be foreign to the believer, and Incarnation’s completion shows resurrection as our truest destiny, and the world’s. Eastern Orthodoxy gives poetic expression to the truth of the Incarnation, in one of the great hymns sung at the Nativity:
Today the Virgin cometh unto the cave
to give birth to the Word,
begotten in a manner that
defies all description.
Rejoice, therefore, O universe,
and with the angels and shepherds
rejoice for Him who by his own will
is a new-born babe:
Who is our God before all ages.
May your celebration of Incarnation’s feast be rich and full of grace. May you know in the birth of the Word, this new-born babe, that Jesus Christ is indeed our God before all ages.
The Right Reverend Wayne Smith
Tenth Bishop of Missouri
Byzantine fresco from Mistra, Greece, mid-14th century
Tags: Bishop's message
