In the newsfeed, a column by Andrew Brown idly speculates about the reasons for the "decline of" the Church of England. If this sort of argument is not merely hateful it is naive. There is "decline in" every great and enduring institution in a living society. People die, needs evolve, things end, buildings sit. So long as "declining" endeavors are managed well, and there is offsetting innovation, adaptation, growth, and occasional revival, this is not usually a crisis. More useful questions-- are the "new starts" healthy enough to eventually take the place of what is lost? if not, why not? Answers to those questions would be more useful.

...Faith... unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom. By this mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul become one flesh [Ephesians 5:31-32]. And if they are one flesh and there is between them a true marriage... it follows that everything they have they hold in common, the good as well as the evil. Accordingly the believing soul can boast of and glory in whatever Christ has as though it were its own, and whatever the soul has Christ claims as his own... By the wedding ring of faith [Christ] shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are his bride's... The believing soul by means of the pledge of its faith is free in Christ, its bridegroom-- free from all sins, secure against death and hell-- and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ its bridegroom. Who then can fully appreciate what this royal marriage means? Who can understand the riches of the glory of this grace?

-- Martin Luther (1520) The Freedom of a Christian. Translated by W. J Lambert, revised by Harold Grimm.

Daniel-- It is actually an embarrassment that we did not long ago consider the chiastic texture of these passages. We have hitherto neglected this advantage of the fluid word order that English lacks, and instead paid most attention to the resource-- word choice-- in which our own language is the obvious kephale. Yet in a fully inflected language like Greek, an able dialectician can use these "turned phrases" not just as ornaments as they tend to be in English, but as a useful way of advancing thought (or saving time) by balancing and subordinating ideas. In studying just St Paul's end of a few "phone conversations" from the 1C, there will be many moments where the rank order of his concerns is just what we need to know, but will not find pedantically stated, and any chiasm he constructs is a clue we can ill-afford to overlook. I will think more about your outlines, but at first glance they confirm that kephale and other relational ideas are all subordinated to a holiness-in-unity that characterises each of the dyads that he compares.

It has always struck me as worse than perverse that I attended church for decades but only encountered basic useful tested instruction about how to live with these curious minds we have in a course I took at Harvard. After all, you can't easily open a Bible at a random page that does not, as the Quakers say, "speak to our condition," and it is hard to see how one could possibly succeed at the many demands of an intentional Christian life without some idea of how to marshal the mental resources to do it.

Indeed, many don't have the ideas they need and they don't succeed. I think of a woman who was deeply embittered by a wrong done to her early in life that had undeniably tragic consequences for her life as a Christian. Many of us thought that we were wise to tell her that she needed to forgive-- to "let go and let God"-- to recover the full use of her wonderful mind and heart. But we would have been truly wise if we could have better explained to her how to get her anguished and angry mind to actually do it. It seemed to her that everyone to whom she confided had become a parrot chattering "Forgive! Forgive!," not fully knowing or caring what he was asking her to do. Forgive an evil that stained the soul? It was like suggesting that she flap her arms and fly to Cockaigne to sip an elixir from some spring hidden there among black orchids atop a high purple mountain. We were babbling rumours of a foreign country that we had never seen ourselves. In her darkest moods, she suspected that we only said such things to solve the problem that she had become for us, rather than to help her to actually do this mysterious thing. Such an isolating thought only made her darkness darker.

Sitting in Sanders Theater taking notes on Positive Psychology, I realised, among several other things, that some stimulus to study forgiveness in itself apart from her painful schema was part, though not all, of what she had been missing. That study need not have been Psychology, experimental or otherwise-- certain moral philosophy and belles lettres have done the trick for others-- but it did need to be study of the psyche that could help her observe and detach herself from thoughts that wander into the mind like neighbourhood animals through an open kitchen door. And she needed to have some sense of what her mind could be like if it were free.

At the moment, such psychologists in the experimental tradition as Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ellen Langer, and Barbara Frederickson among others have the clearest syllabus of ideas about the mind as it is at its best. So it does not surprise me that just a few days after she acknowledged her struggles with depression, the "ABCD," Katharine Welby spoke about a brief course in happiness for churches that sounds like a small cousin of the course that I myself took, though I suspect that when it's over the participants will remember a bit more fun in class and have fewer binders of scientific articles on the shelves. The Positive Psychology on which such happiness courses are based is not to be confused with therapy for actual mental disorders, though it may be that in helping people to buffer themselves against the shocks of life it makes potential disorders less likely, less severe, or less long. About that we do not really know for sure. All I know is that droves of people find the courses to be immensely helpful, and course reunions are very popular.

Here I see would be customs officers setting up imaginary roadblocks to search the traffic for contraband. A few (especially over here) may worry that psychological ideas will be smuggled into Christendom. A few more (especially over there) may worry that archaic Christian ideas may be smuggled out into decent secular society. But Wisdom is the Church's business, as zealots on either side of the line can find it hard to accept. And whilst there was nothing religious about the Harvard course, it was hard to deny that the Christians in the course brought a certain fluency to its discussion groups that thoroughly secular students less often had.* Evangelical students who excelled at certain exercises (eg forgiveness, gratitude, journaling) could not have been more effective at shattering certain stereotypes about what Christians are like. So, I am inclined to say to any planning such courses for churches--  "Never mind the customs officers and their roadblocks. Just fly over them. Wisdom is the Church's business."

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* Interestingly, the students from Christian or Jewish families who practised Buddhism were the other group that seemed to have an inside understanding of what was going on.