Jesus Christ in His Incarnate, Mystical and Sacramental Body

On Our Lord's Incarnate Life and Passion: Our Blessed Lord has a true and fully free human will and was truly subjected to temptation to sin from without, from outside His own consciousness in an objective manner, and yet He never succumbed to those external temptations because of His complete perfection of mind, heart and will and His holiness. We could even go a step further and say that the temptations of Christ were interiorised to the degree that they were on the spiritual and moral level and not visible to others. The temptation of Our Lord by the devil was not necessarily something we could see with our eyes, the temptations being put directly into Christ's human mind by the devil, as Saint Matthew 4 indicates. And yet, in the inner sanctuary of Our Lord's Sacred Heart no temptation was allowed to fester, to entice or take root because of His perfect union with the Father. Jesus truly endured human temptation exactly as we do, mentally, spiritually, psychically, but unlike us, He never even considered sin although He was subjected to its possibility by an outside agent. But unlike us again, Our Lord never generated His 'own temptation' as we do through our own weakness and concupiscence, because He was perfectly pure and holy in the interior life, in perfect communion with God. He lacks that concupiscence that makes sin appeal to our fallen and wounded nature, and thus He could directly overcome any temptation - which He did. We differ in that we mortals like sin, fallen man is attracted to sin through disordered passions and desires. Christ had none of that, and so could restore what we had lost in human nature through the ancestral transgression. We are saved from sin and temptation as we are inserted through Word and Sacrament into Christ's life, Christ's victory over evil and Satan.

On the Eucharist, Anglicanism and Orthodoxy: Although we sometimes tend, unfortunately, to be lax concerning our own discipline for the Blessed Sacrament, I think the Anglican discipline, the ancient, traditional and Prayer Book discipline, for communicants envisions an ecclesiology and 'eucharistology' similar to that of the Orthodox Church - in that we expect and formally require communicants to be baptised, confirmed sacramentally by a bishop in apostolic succession (BCP page 299) and in full communion with a catholic body of undoubted antiquity and orthodox substance. There is in our actual canonical and liturgical approach to Holy Communion the intention to hold together the bond of the Church Catholic as the Great Sacrament and the koinonia of Christ's Mystical Body, the Church, in which and only in which the koinonia of Christ's Sacramental Body, the Eucharist, uniquely takes place. Our actual praxis does not always live up to the theology and clear teaching of the BCP. Were we to enforce our own intrinsic discipline legislated by our own liturgy with greater determination and care, we would see, express and live out a deeper level of Church as organic communio, as integral unity of faith and sacramental life. The Anglican discipline presupposes and anticipates a real dogmatic unity in the communion of the Church and her members based in the apostolic succession and the apostolicity of the Church's order and worship, quite similar to the Orthodox view. We no more encourage 'open communion' than the Eastern Churches - at least in principle. For us the Catholic Church is the amalgamation of all those particular communions possessing the Scriptures, Creeds, Sacraments and Apostolic Ministry; those who belong to a catholic church belong to the Catholic Church.

The difference between ourselves and the Eastern Churches is that we are willing to acknowledge the 'branch fact' that the Catholic Church on earth is divided into separate jurisdictions, which, in spite of their visible or organisational disunity, possess an essential and supernatural unity in the Faith of the Undivided Church and the Seven Sacraments. We profess an underlying and overarching catholic unity of the Church located in the sacramental system which even the human sin of schism cannot sunder. The unconfirmed are not to receive the Blessed Sacrament in Anglican Churches (although they sometimes do) because they have not yet been sealed with the Holy Ghost as full members of the Church by the imposition of apostolic hands; they have not yet been fully integrated into the communion of Holy Things in the Church by the confirmational sacrament of apostolicity. This is exactly the same rule as Orthodox chrismation, which treats baptism and confirmation as inseparable. As baptism and confirmation are inseparable, so personal Christian faith and communion in Christ's ecclesial and corporate Body are inseparable. The unity of the Church is grounded in her baptismal, confirmational and eucharistic reality.

So again I think the Orthodox are fundamentally right on this point, and that, in principle, we fundamentally agree with them, although we differ to some degree as to who or what 'the Church' is. I say 'to some degree,' because the Orthodox Churches themselves recognised Anglicanism as orientated towards Orthodoxy, economically and provisionally, as being the kith and kin of the Orthodox, until the women's ordination debacle of 1976 and following. Even today some Orthodox theologians are willing to see Orthodoxy in classical Anglicanism. I recently heard the excellent dialogue between an Orthodox theologian and a protestant professor currently linked on Ancient Faith Radio, in which the Orthodox theologian stated that classical Anglicanism is close to Orthodoxy in its patristic tradition and is in fact the 'Orthodox Church of the West.' That understanding still survives amongst some Eastern Orthodox. I live in hope that we shall someday be recognised as what we truly are.