Everything is Sacred

In this 10 Questions Interview Credo editor Scott Meadows talked with Bryan Hollon. Dr. Hollon is president of Trinity Anglican Seminary and an ordained priest in the Anglican Church of North America. He received his PhD from Baylor University and he is the author of Everything is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac (Cascade Books). The conclusion focuses specifically on principles for contemporary adaptation of medieval exegesis. He has a special interest in how de Lubac retrieves and adapts medieval exegesis. Hollon also teaches courses on a variety of subjects, including C.S. Lewis and prayer. 

1. Could you introduce your book, Everything Is Sacred, and share what first drew you to Henri de Lubac, a French Jesuit priest, as a Protestant?

When I was a doctoral student at Baylor University, two seminars during my first year intersected in ways that shaped my work on de Lubac. In Ralph Wood’s course on the twentieth-century Catholic renaissance, we read mid-century Roman Catholic theologians like Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean Daniélou, and others – alongside great writers of fiction like Georges Bernanos, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. In Barry Harvey’s seminar on modern theology, we read deeply in the Radical Orthodoxy movement, which was led by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, and others.

Milbank claimed that Radical Orthodoxy was the rightful heir to the Nouvelle Théologie movement led by de Lubac and his associates earlier in the century. But when I read this claim, it struck me as untrue. While de Lubac wrote far more on patristic and medieval exegesis than on any other subject, Radical Orthodoxy recommended a Christian engagement with secularism that seemed to need neither the church nor the Bible. Radical Orthodoxy aimed to expose the “inherent nihilism” of secular disciplines conceived apart from God, so its scholarship would aim to expose the philosophical bankruptcy of secular disciplines like economics, politics, literature, and art and then offer an alternative account – grounding those disciplines in a theological context. They described this process as an “ontological extension.” While these were sophisticated thinkers with helpful critiques of secular modernity, the project remained entirely theoretical – arguments on paper with no clear path toward ecclesial practice.

Radical Orthodoxy essentially ignored the most important component of de Lubac’s theological vision. Milbank spoke of how the church “re-narrates” Christ in its engagement with the world, but he never showed how this re-narration actually happens or even how it can move beyond speculation. De Lubac, by contrast, was a churchman through and through. He was interested in the way the church lives in Christ and engages the world through that life. When the church reads the Bible as patristic and medieval Christians did, believers are drawn into the mystery of Christ himself, the eternal Word through whom all things were made. This is how Christ transforms his people and illuminates reality: through teaching, preaching, praying, and singing the Word of God. In other words, de Lubac recommended that the modern church learn from the deeply Word saturated mission and witness of the early church. That’s what drew me to de Lubac and my book project – a practical, ecclesial vision grounded in the church’s actual life rather than academic speculation.

I was and remain attracted to de Lubac's love of Scripture and his conviction that theology must serve the church rather than the academy. Share on XWhat attracted me to de Lubac as a Protestant? I could say many things here, but perhaps most importantly, I was and remain attracted to his love of Scripture and his conviction that theology must serve the church rather than the academy. 

2. Your project focuses on the political theology of de Lubac. Political theology can have a lot of baggage associated with it and can mean many things. So, before we get into de Lubac, what is political theology? 

This is a great question, and you may be happy to hear that I included “political theology” in the title to push back against a common misunderstanding. What I mean is that – we hear “political theology” and immediately think of liberation theology, Christian nationalism, the Religious Right, or various forms of progressive Christianity that assume the church’s political engagement must happen within secular structures and paradigms. These movements treat politics as a semi-autonomous realm where the church competes for influence alongside other interest groups.

De Lubac points us toward a much deeper and enduring understanding of the church’s profoundly political nature. In an essay titled “The Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters,” he argues that “The church’s relationship to the temporal realm is analogous to the soul’s relationship to the body. The soul does not act upon the body from without but instead works from within.” Grace, de Lubac insists, “seizes nature from the inside and, far from lowering it, lifts it up to have it serve its ends.” The church influences the world not by grasping for temporal power but by being what it is: the body of Christ, drawing all things back to Jesus, the Christological center from whom, to whom, and through whom are all things (Romans 11:36).

This gets at what I mean by political theology. In The City of God, Augustine wrote that “a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love” (Book XIX, Chapter 24). If we want to understand the true nature of any community, then we should observe what its members love. What do they pursue? What do they treasure? What commands their ultimate allegiance? The church is unique in the world. It is the only community on earth bound together by the Triune God’s prior love and the love we return to him in response. Christ is therefore our highest love and ultimate authority. He is the heart of our political identity. If we want to understand the true nature of any community, then we should observe what its members love. He is the heart of our political identity. Share on X

For de Lubac, spiritual exegesis is one of the primary means by which God builds his church as a community ordered by his love. This participatory and assimilative reading of Scripture sees all of it pointing to and fulfilled in Jesus, as patristic and medieval Christians did. Through this reading, believers are formed in the mind of Christ and built up in faith, hope, and love. They come to see, as de Lubac puts it, God’s face “mysteriously reflected” in all of reality.

My book explores how spiritual exegesis functions as political theology precisely because it forms a people whose highest love is Christ. Politics can never be ultimate for Christians. Our political loyalties must always remain proximate and penultimate. As Augustine once wrote, and here I am paraphrasing… we must love rightly, and then do as we will. When the church’s loves are properly ordered, with Christ at the summit, its engagement with the world is de facto faithful and naturally subversive of all principalities and powers competing for our affections and allegiance. 

3. For those less familiar, how would you summarize de Lubac’s understanding of the relationship between theology, Scripture, and politics? How does spiritual exegesis function as political theology in his thought?

For de Lubac, theology and Scripture cannot be separated. The great medieval scholastics understood this. Saint Bonaventure spoke of “sacred scripture which is called theology,” and Thomas Aquinas referred to “theology, which is called sacred scripture.” As de Lubac insists, Theological science IS biblical exegesis, so knowledge of the faith amounts to knowledge of Scripture.[1] The political dimension emerges from the way the church engages Scripture in its teaching, worship, and mission. In de Lubac’s work, spiritual exegesis is social and political to the core since it mediates the church’s ongoing historical engagement with culture. De Lubac suggests that “The entire process of spiritual understanding is, in its principle, identical to the process of conversion. It is its luminous aspect.”[2] 

Through spiritual exegesis, the church encounters the historical Jesus as the cosmic Christ who reigns over all creation. The church interprets all of reality through a Christological lens, seeing God’s face “mysteriously reflected” in creation.[3] Theology’s ultimate goal is “a many-faceted wisdom, rooted in the virtues, through which the church participates in the mission of Jesus.”[4] This wisdom isn’t theoretical. It’s participatory – a partaking in “the mind of Christ” that shapes how Christians see, judge, desire, and act.Everything is Sacred Share on X

Again, this formation is inherently social and political.[5] When the church gathers around Scripture and Eucharist, it fixes its gaze on Jesus Christ, the world’s creator and everlasting king. Every act of praise negates false allegiances. As de Lubac writes, “Scripture…is itself wholly ‘the book of the battles of the Lord’…to recognize the one God is to declare total war on all the others.”[6]

But the church’s political mission looks nothing like conventional political engagement. De Lubac was clear: “The church’s proper mission is not to assume the general direction of social movements any more than of intellectual ones, though she may exert on both, in many different ways, an influence without compare.” Thus, the church’s primary social role is “to bring the world back to that communion which all her dogma teaches…and all her activity makes ready.”[7] The church offers the world a vision of itself healed and transformed in Christ.

This formation happens as Scripture is preached by pastors, celebrated in liturgy, and taught through catechesis. As believers learn to read reality in light of Christ, they become a people whose highest love belongs to him alone. Their politics then flow from this participation in Christ rather than from secular ideologies or partisan platforms. They do not engage the world by grasping for power but by being what they are, Christ’s body, which mediates his presence through Word and Sacrament and illuminates all reality in his light. De Lubac’s genius was showing how the church actually engages politics by forming a people through Scripture who participate in Christ’s mission and thus engage the world as his body. Through spiritual exegesis, the church encounters the historical Jesus as the cosmic Christ who reigns over all creation. Share on X

4. De Lubac saw allegory, typology, and the sensus plenior as vital for exegesis. Why did he think this mattered so much for the church in modernity?

De Lubac believed the church in the twentieth century faced a crisis. Catholics were becoming increasingly knowledgeable in science and technology yet increasingly ignorant of the great mysteries of the faith. When faced with world wars and fascist governments, most Europeans, even Catholics, didn’t look to the church for guidance in social and political matters. They poured their hopes and energies into secular movements like Action Française. The church seemed to have retreated into a self-imposed cultural exile, concerned primarily with saving souls and little else. 

De Lubac traced this crisis to twin theological errors that had developed over centuries: extrinsicism and historicism. Both errors, in different ways, treated truth as something external, objective, and static rather than as something in which we participate. He believed that the neoscholastic theology that dominated Catholic thought in the early 20th century treated theology as a separated science, concerned with abstract propositions given by divine revelation. De Lubac once complained that neoscholastic theologians “stroll about theology somewhat as if in a museum of which we are the curators, a museum where we have inventoried, arranged and labeled everything.”[8] Everything was clear and tidy, but nothing was connected to lived reality. Worse, de Lubac believed this extrinsicist theology had endorsed a separation between the natural and supernatural orders. Human nature, they argued, had its own natural end apart from God. This dualism provided justification for a purely natural philosophy and a self-sufficient social order. If nature could operate independently in pursuit of natural ends, why would Catholics need the church’s guidance in political and social matters?

Historicism presented the opposite error. Historical-critical biblical scholars treated Scripture as a collection of ancient texts to be analyzed scientifically. They focused exclusively on what texts meant in their original historical context, reducing biblical interpretation to the recovery of bare historical facts. Maurice Blondel, who had a great influence on de Lubac, criticized this approach for its inability to penetrate beyond observable phenomena to the spiritual reality animating Scripture and history itself.[9]

Both errors cut the church off from its own spiritual sources. He claimed that the Neo-Scholastic extrinsicism treated revelation as a static deposit of truth, while historicism reduced Scripture to ancient documents locked in the past. Neither approach encouraged Christians to encounter the living Christ who continues to speak through Scripture to address the present moment. De Lubac saw spiritual exegesis as the remedy because it addressed both errors at once. Against extrinsicism, it showed that truth isn’t a static deposit but living encounter with Christ through Scripture. Against historicism, it demonstrated that the Bible isn’t locked in the past but continues to address the present moment. 

This was no academic exercise for de Lubac. Europe was in crisis, and in his mind, the church had retreated into cultural exile. Christians needed to recover a way of reading Scripture that could actually form them as a distinct people capable of faithful witness. Spiritual exegesis did precisely this. It gave Christians eyes to see all of reality in light of Christ, virtues to engage the world wisely, and hope to resist despair or compromise with worldly powers.

Importantly, de Lubac never advocated a simple return to ancient methods. He knew historical-critical scholarship had made genuine contributions. But he insisted the church needed a new synthesis – one that combined critical rigor with the participatory ontology of the Fathers. A new synthesis such as de Lubac imagined would help the church overcome modernity’s disastrous dualisms and engage the world faithfully.[10] The apostles practiced allegorical reading, so who are we to object? Share on X

5. What does de Lubac offer Protestants who often stand suspicious of allegory or political theology? How could de Lubac help break moderns free from exclusive use of the literal sense?

De Lubac offers Protestants what they already treasure: Scripture’s own use of Scripture. In other words, the apostles practiced allegorical reading, so who are we to object? Paul interprets the Old Testament Christologically throughout his letters, seeing Christ as the rock that followed Israel in the wilderness (1 Corinthians 10:4) and reading the Sarah and Hagar narrative as allegory (Galatians 4:24). The writer of Hebrews sees the tabernacle pointing to Christ, the true high priest who entered the heavenly sanctuary (Hebrews 8-9). Jesus told his disciples that Moses and the prophets spoke about him (Luke 24:27, 44). I could provide far more evidence than this. 

Likewise, although the Reformers rightly objected to abuses and excesses in allegorical readings of scripture, they embraced typology of necessity – its unavoidable in scripture. Calvin saw Israel’s exodus prefiguring our redemption in Christ. Reformation covenant theology depends entirely on seeing unity between the testaments through Christ. We practice this reading every time we sing about Christ as our Passover Lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7) or preach about baptism fulfilling Noah’s ark (1 Peter 3:20-21) and Israel’s Red Sea crossing (1 Corinthians 10:1-2). The question has never been whether to move beyond the literal sense. We already do that and always have.

If the early church had rejected typology, there could be no canon. Share on X Moreover, if the early church had rejected typology – there could be no canon since the development of the canon presupposed typology as the bridge holding the two testaments together. As Augustine famously wrote, “In the Old Testament the New is concealed, and in the New Testament the Old is revealed.” The canon itself operates through typology. Old and New Testaments hold together by type and fulfillment. Think of Jesus as prophet, priest, and king, the new Adam (Romans 5:14; 1 Corinthians 15:45), a new David, and the Son of David who establishes an eternal kingdom (Matthew 1:1; Luke 1:32-33). Jesus is a greater Moses (Hebrews 3:3), and we could go on and on with examples like this. Consider the many names, places, offices, and events from the Old Testament that Jesus and the New Testament writers use to articulate the meaning of his life and ministry. Scripture interprets Scripture typologically and Christologically.

The ancient fourfold reading of Scripture is ultimately assimilative. It draws us into the story and history of God’s people. Think about what happens in baptism and the Eucharist. Our sacramental practice engages Scripture believing and proclaiming that when we are baptized, we are plunged into the same waters as Noah’s ark and Israel’s Red Sea crossing. Every baptism participates in the water crossings that prepared the way for Jesus’ baptism, and through baptism we are united to Christ’s death and resurrection. When we receive the body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist, we become beneficiaries of all the Old Testament sacrifices fulfilled in Christ. The bread and wine connect us to the Passover lamb, to the manna in the wilderness, and to every offering that pointed forward to the one perfect sacrifice.

Limiting ourselves to the literal sense alone proves insufficient. Contemporary approaches to Scripture can inadvertently trap us in what feels like a closed story. We learn about God’s work in history without participating in it. Christians need more than this. The spiritual senses of Scripture enable genuine participation. When we read typologically, recognizing how the Old Testament prefigures Christ and how Christ’s work continues in us, we discover ourselves written into the biblical narrative, and this changes our perception of the world we inhabit in profound ways. Politics follows from this participatory reading. Paul writes that we take “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Politics belongs to Christ and his body, the church. When we read Scripture this way, we discover that Christ is Lord over all realms of life, and this shapes how his people engage the world.

6. What lessons might de Lubac’s integration of Scripture, church, and society hold for contemporary debates about politics and faith?

Politics can never be ultimate for Christians. Our political loyalties remain proximate and penultimate. Augustine wrote that we should love rightly and then do as we will. In other words, as long as we “love” then our properly ordered wills will guide us faithfully. Thus, when the church’s loves are properly ordered with Christ at the summit, faithful engagement with the world will constitute a healthy witness from that right ordering. As Paul reminds us, “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Our entire lives, including our political lives, fall under Christ’s lordship.

De Lubac understood the church’s primary social and political role as bringing “the world back to that communion which all her dogma teaches…and all her activity makes ready.”[11] The church offers the world a vision of itself healed and transformed in Christ. This happens through the ordinary means of grace we’ve been discussing throughout this conversation. Week by week, Christians gather around Word and sacrament. They’re formed in the mind of Christ through spiritual exegesis. They learn to see all things in light of Christ. Over time, this steady work produces a people whose highest allegiance belongs to Christ rather than to nation, party, or ideology. They seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33), engaging politics as those captivated by a greater King.

The practical implications matter. We begin with formation rather than with policy positions or political strategies. We ask how Scripture shapes us in the virtues needed for faithful engagement. Christian political witness happens primarily through the kind of people the church produces, through lives bearing witness to a different kingdom. For de Lubac, the church engages the world most faithfully by being what it is: Christ’s body, formed by Scripture, ordered to worship, living as a sign of God’s coming kingdom. 

7. How do you see Aquinas’s theology relating to de Lubac’s project of spiritual exegesis and political theology? Are they compatible?

De Lubac understood his own vocation as part of the Leonine revival of Aquinas and considered himself a Thomist. His career focused on what he believed was a more faithful reading of the Angelic Doctor than the neo-scholastic interpretation offered. Scholars debate whether de Lubac got Thomas entirely right on several technical issues, but he clearly identified genuine problems in neo-scholastic theology.

He believed the neo-scholastics created a dualism between nature and grace that had devastating political consequences. Namely, when theologians endorsed the view that human nature has its own natural end apart from God, they provided justification for a self-sufficient social order. If nature can operate independently in pursuit of natural ends, the church becomes increasingly irrelevant to political and social life. The consequences proved catastrophic as many Catholics believed the church’s mission was merely spiritual, concerned only with saving souls. The church retreated into cultural exile, so Europeans poured their hopes into secular movements. Even prominent neo-scholastic theologians like Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange were sympathetic to aspects of politically fascist regimes like Action Française and Vichy France, believing these movements would ensure the safety of the church in a climate of Anti-clericalism.[12] De Lubac’s theological work thus had clear political implications, and he spent much of his time during World War II hiding from the Gestapo.

Additionally, de Lubac’s vision resonates with important epistemological strands in Aquinas’s thought. For Thomas, sacra doctrina is participation in God’s own knowledge. Indeed, Aquinas tells us that “all [theological] knowledge is produced by an assimilation of the knower to what is known, so that assimilation is the cause of knowledge.” For both Thomas and de Lubac, theological knowledge is fundamentally participatory rather than merely extrinsic. The church knows God by participating in his wisdom through Scripture, and this knowledge is ordered to virtue and communion with God. Both reject the notion that theology is simply a system of abstract truths disconnected from the church’s life and mission. The compatibility runs deep because both understand spiritual exegesis as the epistemological heart of theology itself.For Thomas Aquinas, sacra doctrina is participation in God's own knowledge. Share on X

8. As the president of Trinity Anglican Seminary, you recently gave a stirring talk on how the seminary will serve the Anglican Church in North America. What does the future hold for TAS?

Trinity has been forming Anglican leaders since the mid-1970s. We were originally one of eleven Episcopal seminaries, but as the Episcopal Church departed from biblical orthodoxy, we helped birth the Anglican Church in North America in 2009 and now serve as its clear flagship seminary. Our alumni serve in churches and ministries across the globe, and Trinity’s influence on the ACNA and the ongoing realignment of global Anglicanism has been and continues to be profound.

The ACNA faces a challenge unique to its youth as a province. When we formed in 2009, we were essentially starting from scratch in terms of theological education infrastructure. The Episcopal Church, which we had left due to its departure from biblical orthodoxy, possessed generations of accumulated resources: its own seminaries with substantial endowments, conference centers, camps, publishing houses, and countless lay formation initiatives. An entire theological ecosystem had developed over centuries. The ACNA had none of that. We had faithful clergy and congregations, but we lacked the institutional framework for systematic theological education and formation.

Early efforts to address this gap focused on creating partnerships. Rather than building from the ground up, the ACNA attempted to work with existing evangelical and Anglican institutions through a seminary consortium. The results were mixed. Some partner institutions, while theologically orthodox, couldn’t provide adequate Anglican formation nor promise to keep qualified Anglicans on their faculty. Thus, they could not serve as adequate long-term partners to the province. The consortium model helped in the short term, but it couldn’t provide the cohesive, distinctly Anglican formation our province needed for long-term health.

At Trinity Anglican Seminary, we're positioning ourselves as the definitive center for Anglican theological education in North America – not by trying to do everything ourselves, but by building a strong collaborative network. Share on XTrinity is well-prepared to address this need. We’re positioning ourselves as the definitive center for Anglican theological education in North America – not by trying to do everything ourselves, but by building a strong collaborative network. This fall, we launched the Anglican Formation Network, bringing together the ACNA Provincial Office and seven partner organizations to coordinate our efforts rather than duplicate them. The vision is straightforward. We will raise the bar for Anglican formation across the province. We’re creating multiple pathways for Anglican formation including residential, distance, and church-based, because not every future priest can relocate for full-time study. We’re tracking Anglican seminarians, developing vocational discernment programs, and building resources to help clergy preach and teach using the 2019 Book of Common Prayer and our catechism.

Anglican formation involves the whole person shaped by Prayer Book spirituality, character formation in Christian community, and an appreciation for our Reformed Catholic identity. This takes time and requires us to work together. The Anglican Way offers what North American Christianity needs: liturgical richness, biblical orthodoxy, theological depth, and evangelical vitality. Trinity’s calling is to ensure that the leaders we form together are equipped to embody that vision faithfully. 

9. For those considering Anglicanism, what is it about Anglicanism that you find so true and beautiful?

Several years ago, I attended a workshop on the prayerbook led by Archbishop Bob Duncan, whose influence on the 2019 BCP made his insights especially valuable. What struck me most in the workshop was an off-the-cuff observation about Anglican spirituality. He suggested that the Collect for Purity offers one of the best and most concise summaries of the Anglican Way, and I believe he is right. The collect is as follows:

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Anglican way, which is summarized in the collect, commends a particular pattern of life. It presupposes the objective reality of God (it has a dogmatic foundation) and leads the faithful (hearts laid bare before God our maker) on a path of reconciliation and assimilation to God. This path is mediated by God’s own Word, which infuses our liturgical and sacramental rites. The Holy Spirit guides and empowers our faithful participation in Christ’s redeeming work. 

In short, the Anglican Way is one of the great treasures of Christianity because its purpose is to shape us – collectively and individually – into the likeness of Jesus Christ – hearts and minds given to God for his Glory.

At its best, Anglicanism synthesizes spiritual, liturgical, and dogmatic interests so that each finds its rightful place in relation to the others and ultimately in relation to God. Spiritual or ascetical theology without dogma devolves into subjectivism or vague mysticism untethered from revealed truth. Dogma without spirituality is subject to all the excesses of enlightenment rationalism. It becomes cold and lifeless – belief reduced to nothing more than cognitive assent. Liturgy without these other two is ceremonial and symbol with no referent in reality. When Anglicans are faithful to the Word of God, all of these are properly ordered to each other and to the ultimate end of assimilation to God …. so that none becomes disordered or disordering. Indeed, when these three are held together as the Anglican formularies insist we do – then the Anglican way is a powerful means of the Spirit’s transformation of God’s people.At its best, Anglicanism synthesizes spiritual, liturgical, and dogmatic interests so that each finds its rightful place in relation to the others and ultimately in relation to God. Share on X

This is what I find both true and beautiful about Anglicanism: it holds these things together in the right balance when too many other traditions either keep them separated or can’t seem to get the balance right. When it is biblically faithful and robustly orthodox, Anglicanism embraces Word and Sacrament, Scripture and Tradition, evangelical passion and liturgical beauty, personal faith and corporate worship. As others have insisted, Anglicanism at its best offers not a distinct version of Christianity but a distinct way of being a “mere Christian” – at the same time evangelical, apostolic, catholic, reformed, and Spirit-filled. It’s an ancient path for modern believers. It postures us to gladly receive God’s prior love and guides us to return that love through immersion in God’s own Word.

10. Charles Taylor has said that we are living in a secular age. How can Anglicanism put forward truth and even hope in this secular age?

Thomas Aquinas wrote that knowledge “is produced by an assimilation of the knower to the thing known, so that assimilation is said to be the cause of knowledge” (Disputed Questions on Truth, 1.1.). In other words, we know by being conformed to what we know. We know God only as our minds, wills, and affections are conformed or assimilated to Him. For something to be true, then, it must be rightly ordered – aligned with reality… bearing its likeness. Truth in this sense is objective – it is a “given” that precedes us and against which all things are measured. However, it is neither static nor calcified. 

For Christians, truth is the eternal God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Triune God is the ground of all being, the source and standard of all truth. When we speak of becoming true, we mean being rightly ordered to the God who is. It means acquiring a likeness to the one in whom “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). To put this in Johannine language, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love, for Christians, is the means of assimilation. Love unites us to the God who first loved us, and through this union we learn to love Him in return and others in Him. As love conforms us to His likeness, we come to know Him truly, since we can know God only by loving rightly.

However, the modern world makes conformity to God especially difficult. Robert Jenson was right when he said that “the world has lost its story.” We no longer live under a “sacred canopy” – to borrow Peter Berger’s phrase – where shared convictions about God, creation, and human purpose formed the background of social life. Charles Taylor describes this shift in A Secular Age, suggesting that we’ve moved from a world where belief in God was the default to one where transcendence itself seems optional. Now, he contends, we are trapped in an “immanent frame” and closed off from the transcendent – the supernatural realm that our souls were designed to seek. In Christendom, everyone presumed a “given” to which we must conform ourselves. Our ancestors believed that reality itself spoke. The created order testified to its Creator, and human beings understood themselves as creatures with a nature and telos. Society reinforced this understanding through its institutions, art, literature, and law. Christian truth, beauty, and goodness were woven into the fabric of ordinary life.This is what I find both true and beautiful about Anglicanism: it holds these things together in the right balance when too many other traditions either keep them separated or can’t seem to get the balance right. Share on X

The loss of this story has consequences we’re only beginning to understand. Zygmunt Bauman called our condition “liquid modernity” since everything solid seems to melt in our world, and all fixed reference points dissolve. We are now left adrift without anchor or destination. Modern people sense something has gone terribly wrong and don’t need philosophers to tell them this is so. They know they need more than rational answers and simplistic apologetic arguments to find reassurance and rest. What they’re searching for is refreshment for their souls – a place to rest their weary hearts.

I write all of this because faithful, biblically orthodox Anglicanism is a powerful source of hope and healing in this world with no story. Attuned to the biblical wintess as it is, the Anglican prayer book tradition has always understood truth as more than cognitive assent. It rejected the Enlightenment’s fact-value distinction long before that distinction calcified into modern Christianity’s ongoing struggle. The Book of Common Prayer enacts Christianity. Through its liturgy, we encounter God himself. Redemption becomes real through repentance and God’s love flows to us in absolution. Grace continues as the right ordering of our affections takes shape in prayer.

Our churches cannot recreate the lost sacred canopy, since that age has passed. But we can provide respites from the storm. When our congregations are rightly ordered by the gospel through our prayer book tradition, they become harbors of healing for all those lost at sea in liquid modernity. Communities where disordered loves find their proper order and restless hearts discover rest in God. The Anglican formularies make this possible. The Book of Common Prayer shapes us through biblically saturated liturgy. The Thirty-Nine Articles guard the apostolic faith. The Ordinal binds our leaders to sound doctrine, discipline, and holy living. Together they function as the architecture of Anglican life, providing stability, authority, depth, and beauty in an age that desperately needs all of these things.

Week by week, the liturgy immerses us in God’s living Word and trains us in the grammar of reality  – continually ordering our desires in Christ. In other words, Anglicanism offers hope in a secular age because it provides an excellent way of recieving, gaurding, and sharing the apostolic faith. It enables us to be the church faithfully – a community united by Christ in the power of the Spirit to the glory of the Father. By gathering around Word and Sacrament, fixing our gaze on Christ, and bearing witness to the reality in which all things hold together – we have very good news for our secular age. By God’s grace we will have both the courage to be the church and the clarity to communicate what we have found so that a world adrift can hear the good news and find rest. 

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ENDNOTES                                                                                                   

[1] Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 27.

[2] De Lubac, Scripture in the Tradition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 21.

[3] De Lubac, “Internal Causes of the Weakening and Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred,” in Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 231.

[4] De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 1, 35.

[5] De Lubac, Catholicism, 362; also discussed in relation to worship in Bryan Hollon, Everything Is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac (Eugene, OR: Cascade Press, 2009) 195.

[6] De Lubac, The Splendor of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 185.

[7] De Lubac, Catholicism, 362-363.

[8] Henri de Lubac, cited in “Internal Causes of the Weakening and Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred,” in Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 228.

[9] Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 225-239.

[10] For some of my thoughts on this subject and de Lubac’s interest in a new synthesis of the quadriga with modern historical insights click here.  For a comprehensive exploration of de Lubac’s approach to spiritual exegesis and its implications for contemporary theology, see Bryan C. Hollon, Everything is Sacred: Spiritual Exegesis in the Political Theology of Henri de Lubac (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009). The conclusion focuses specifically on principles for contemporary adaptation of medieval exegesis.

[11] De Lubac, Catholicism, 362.

[12] See Henri de Lubac, At the Service of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 36-43; also Richard Peddicord, The Sacred Monster of Thomism (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005), 88-97.

[13] Augustine, Soliloquies II.8. The commonly cited formulation ‘the true is that which is’ (verum est id quod est) is quoted by Thomas Aquinas thought it is a paraphrase of Augustine’s more discursive statement found in the Soliloquies.