Asunder

The first duty of the Catholic party to a mixed marriage is to pray for the conversion of the other spouse, so Carrie Johnson must be quite the bird of pray. We all know that non-denial.

No one would dispute the nullity of Boris Johnson's previous marriages, since he never had any intention of keeping the vows. The Church of England will soon have a Supreme Governor whose first marriage was deficient in the same way.

Every body that has seceded from Petrine Unity has compromised the indissolubility of Holy Matrimony. If those who went into schism after the Second Vatican Council have not already done so, then they very soon will. And Forward in Faith, which has now expressly rejected reunion with Rome, is chaired by a man who divorced and immediately remarried while serving as a bishop, as he continues to do.

All error is Christological. There is Christological error in the Catholic Church, but it can never be the position of the Magisterium, which, on the contrary, vigorously corrects it. By contrast, certain schismatic Eastern bodies remain at least sympathetic to Nestorianism or to Monophysitism, in every case in explicit rejection of a corresponding Eastern Catholic Church. Within Eastern Orthodoxy, the theories of Sergei Bulgakov and Panagiotis Trembelas are only the latest in a long, long line, with no one to correct them definitively.

Classical Protestantism is founded on a merely forensic understanding of justification, according to which righteousness in purely imputed, and not also imparted. That is incompatible with the Chalcedonian Definition, since the full divinity and the full humanity of Jesus make His words and deeds exemplary of what human nature can achieve in that perfect union with God towards which the Church offers constant progress through Her ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Not for nothing are the following the fifty-fifth question and answer of John Calvin's Geneva Catechism of 1541, on the question of why, ostensibly, the Apostles' Creed goes straight from "born of the Virgin Mary" to "suffered under Pontius Pilate": "Why do you go immediately from His Birth to His Death, passing over the whole history of His Life? Because nothing is said here but what pertains properly to the substance of our redemption."

Even the corresponding passage of the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, preferred by Karl Barth, will not do: "What do you understand by the word "suffered"? That all the time of His life on earth, but especially at the end of it, He bore, in body and soul, the Wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race."

In reality, the "long middle" manifests the Incarnation, it providentially incites the Passion, it is confirmed by the Resurrection and the Ascension, it anticipates the Second Coming, and it is absolutely central to the Church's work of evangelisation and catechesis, not least as the Source and Summit of that work, the Holy Mass, is celebrated through the liturgical year, feeding us by Word and Sacrament to progress constantly towards the full potential of human nature in perfect union with God, as demonstrated by the words and deeds of Jesus Christ, True God and True Man.

Liberal Protestants see Jesus as the human being most conscious of God, at least to date. That is capable of completion as the recognition that He is unique in being completely so conscious, due to His human nature's union with the Logos in a single Hypostasis. But in itself, it is not sufficient. It does not meet humanity's need of a Saviour Who is both fully human and fully divine.

And since 1889, most Anglo-Catholics have been Christological heretics, subscribing as they do to Kenoticism, which, in separating certain Divine Attributes from the others and from the Divine Essence, overthrows theism itself. This is done in capitulation to the claim of Biblical criticism to final authority. And that amounts to a denial that the Authorship of God's written Word is both fully human and fully divine, which can only be a denial that the Person of God's Incarnate Word is both fully human and fully divine.

I have already noticed Kenoticism in at least one publication of the Ordinariate, but the remedy is readily to hand. The Chalcedonian Definition is the Holy Spirit's definitive answer to the Incarnate Word's perennially normative question, "Who do you say that I am?" It is the only logically sustainable interpretation of Saint Peter's immediate reply to that question. And we all know what Jesus, in turn, said in immediate reply to that.