Archbishop of Canterbury's website. 13 October 2015
‘To the Glory of God’ – Archbishop’s sermon at Virginia Theological Seminary
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Of the old chapel that burnt in 2010, I remember–
A seminarian at the lectern in shock as New Testament scholar Reginald Fuller leaped to his feet with his open Greek NT to correct a bad translation. “He does not do this in every service,” a friend reassured me.
An Ascension in stained glass made for the chancel just two decades after the Civil War. Jesus’s eyes looked heavenward, and his right foot, its heel just lifting from the ground, unmistakably had six toes.
A St Peter standing earthbound to his right of his Lord, who just as unmistakeably bore the visage of General Robert E.Lee, the commander of the CSA’s Army of Northern Virginia. “Look up there,” said a seminarian from South Carolina, “Robert E. Lee is at the right hand of God.”
(Why? Was this was a donor portrait, an expression of Alexandria’s pride in a native son, competition with Lee Chapel (which had the general’s embalmed horse), a sign of the Seminary’s own southern evangelical resistance to the northern high churchmanship of General Theological Seminary (New York), or possibly all four? Officers of the Seminary only smiled when asked about this.)
The words “He is not here” were carved in the Holy Table. The Seminary’s chapel reflected the Edward VI Anglicanism of the founding bishop, William Meade of Virginia. But apart from the church historians, the faculty had been liberal since the ferment in the Diocese of Virginia of the 1920s. Not many years later, a battle over even the church history appointments led evangelicals to found the Trinity School for Ministry in Pennsylvania.
Hearing some who had only recently been Southern Baptists or Methodists say that they had needed much scriptural persuasion to accept that bowing to a passing cross in chapel was reverence, not idolatry.
Hearing too, for the first time, not the last: “Where two or three Episcopalians are gathered, there will be a fifth [of bourbon whiskey].”
Noticing that, after the Thursday night eucharist– then a new word– the seminarian who flashed a pocket flask was offering that fifth in his rooms. And what I heard there, stays there, of course.