Recovering the Past: Celtic and Roman Mission

by John Finney

John Finney's account of Celtic and Roman evangelism will challenge and change the way we evangelise

Genres: Nonfiction, Church History, History

Paperback

First published January 31, 2011

Reviews

[Rares Antonio]

Recently there has been considerably heightened interest in English, Scottish and Irish paganism and druidism within modern media. It is now my understanding that what they had foolishly been attributing to paganism is more truthfully nostalgia of Celtic christianity, and not the self-indulgent ideas of 'connecting with the forests, fairies and magic' that spiritually vapid millennials and Gen Z use to concoct a Tik-Tok centric personality after visiting stone henge once and pressing their foreheads against a wet rock.
Very little is written on Celtic paganism and druidism, and from what IS know, it in no way resembles some idealised fairytale of communal living in cottage-core habitations populated by a hyper-conscious group of pacifists. More realistically, there probably wasn't much of a difference to the Vikings when regarding brutality, the same severed hands and feet tied to oak trees in the name of Woden littered the countryside and human sacrifices to wood and wind Gods proliferated equally. I just wanted to dispel any notion that 'Celtic Paganism' is what is being fantasised about in the 21st Century before I review, thanks.
I have not given a rating to this book because I am unqualified to rate it. I would find it easy to say that this book is a 'good introduction' to some niche topic surrounding celtic paganism, christianity and both Roman and celtic mission; but it isn't, it is more an amalgamation of essays on topics ranging from the Venerable Bede, Roman ecclesiastical structure, Celtic christian missionaries, monasteries and monks, Augustinian arrival in England, Pelagic heresies, comparison in mission styles, similarities and differences between Celtic, Roman and Orthodox christianity etc. etc. etc.

Finney is broad in his research topics, and at some points disoriented with the topics he writes, but when covering such a wide range of subjects it is hard to be concise and flowing, so I respect that.
This book gave invaluable information on the likes of Bede, Augustine, Pelagius, St. Patrick, St. Columba and other Irish saints, early monastical communities, missionaries, Iona & Lindisfarne, the current state of Christianity in the British Isles, Celtic poetry and prayers and modern mission. It has been an extremely informative book that I couldn't even begin to summarise at 8pm on a Sunday night, but I learnt a lot.

I'll leave with the quote I liked the most even though it is not from Finney:

St Patrick's Breastplate:

' Against all Satan's spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart's idolatry,
Against the wizard's evil craft,
Against the death-wound and the burning,
The choking wave, the poisoned shaft,
Protect me Christ, till thy returning'

Lovely thank you.

[Andy Hickman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Recovering the Past - Celtic and Roman Mission” by John Finney
Enjoyable read. Insight into a pivotal time of history, its influence and its impacted on our modern Western church. ****

“Their [Celts] spirituality was that of those on the edge.” (p6)

“[T]here were many others, who founded Christian communities in place after place and whose names we do not know.” (p30)

“All in all it has to be said that the Celts were the main evangelists of England. The monastic pattern seems to have been more successful at evangelising the society in which they were set.” (p31)

“Post-modernism rejects me if I attempt to persuade another person to jump into my meta-narrative. Things must be discovered by people for themselves. The Church must therefore .. be one which lives mission.” (p45)

“The changes are all moving from a Roman to a Celtic model. The best modern evangelism goes where people are and listens, binds together prayer and truth, celebrates the goodness and complexity of life as well as judging the sinfulness of evil, and sees truth as something to be done and experienced as well as to be intellectually believed. It walks in humility.” (p47)

“[T]he criticisms which were made by those of a ‘Roman’ disposition about the Celtic Church – it was seen as too experiential, too dismissive of legal frameworks and doctrinally suspect.” (p48)

“[The Roman bishops] main task was pastoral and administrative. But the Celtic bishop was the prime evangelist.” (p55)

“Where the Romans stressed order and clarity, the Celts loved poetry and revelled in colour and design.” (p60)

“Poetry was close to the heart of the Celt and verse was the usual form of writing in an age when the need to memorise was often more important than the need to read.” (p61)

“The Celtic monastery with the abbot as its head and the bishops as evangelists was a fine vehicle for missions. The bishops led teams out to evangelise and they came back to the monastery for refreshment and renewal.” (p62)

“[A] catechism St Boniface used for Saxons who found Christ in his ministry in German:
‘Do you forsake the devil?’ .. ‘And all the devil’s works and words?’ (p88)

“To this day the Coronation Service has Anglo-Saxon overtones. The people affirm the choice of the new monarch and he or she is also invested with an almost priestly character. They are seen as not only the people’s choice but also as chosen by God.” (p90)

“.. the theology of Augustine of Hippo had passed the Celtic Church by.” “Up to now each country had devised its own liturgical services within very broad limits. Gregory the Great introduced something novel. He wanted everywhere to have the same rite.” (p105) “The fact that we still have .. in the Book of Common Prayer goes back to the reforms of Gregory and the fact that they came to be accepted throughout the Western Church. But it did not come about without opposition.” (p106)

“Rome wanted a universal pattern of dioceses governed by bishops. The Celtic subordination of bishops to abbots and, worse still, abbesses, was totally unacceptable.” (p106)

“The Celtic churches were thought to be of doubtful orthodoxy, sloppy or perverse in their liturgical practice, and lacking in a scrupulous observance of canon law.” (p107)

“Many of the people in and around the Black Sea are of Celtic origin – in Galatia, St Paul may have heard Celtic spoken as the native language.” (p116)

“Reading through the Celtic writings one is constantly made aware of the fact that for them theology was not a subject for study but an expression of faith. It was from their personal experience of the three persons of the trinity that they came to make that understanding of the Christian faith central to their thinking and their praying. It was from the beauty of the world around them and their awareness of the goodness of which human beings are capable that they came to proclaim the basic optimism of the Christian message – and this was to be very different from the Roman attitude.” (p118)

“While Augustine .. began to see sexual desire as the main channel whereby Adam’s taint passed from generation to generation. This had practical consequences which as a bishop he had to enforce since he saw baptism as cancelling Adam’s legacy of original sin, it was important that babies should be baptised as soon as possible – otherwise they would be damned. Pelagius was aghast.” (p121)

“Pelagius (‘On Predestination’, c.865) .. finds the Augustinian thesis that every child is damned to hell until and unless it is baptised totally repugnant.” (p124).

“The cross was pivotal to Celtic theology. On the Celtic crosses they carved the circle of the sun to represent nature, but central to the whole was the symbol of the crucifixion.” (p125) “.. for them the cross spoke of freedom and protection and peace rather than of any ‘theory of the atonement’.” (p126) “.. instead of a pantheon of gods who were trying to fight or love or rick each other, there was the ordered pattern of the Trinity, three persons in harmony and unity.
The Being of God was central to their preaching. In place of the confused multitude of gods they spoke of the communal unity of the Trinity, the Alone who is not alone, the social individual. The ‘perichoresis’, the mutual interpenetration of the persons of the Trinity, is symbolised for them in the convolutions of the Celtic knot.” (p126-127).

“Thus the Celtic/Byzantine acceptance of the basic wonder and glory of the creation chimes in well with modern ecological concerns, and their exultation in the Triune God is in accord with a generation which is well prepared to accept mystery and paradox.” (p131)

“When a large group of people are not Christian, living in a society which has attitudes and an ethos which is not Christian, then the Celtic model of evangelism is more effective. Such evangelism needs to make room for the ‘peregrinati’ (monastic as they wandered from place to place): in modern terms these are travelling evangelists and church-planters and the religious orders and places like Lee Abbey and Iona who are experimenting with small houses set in inner-city areas.” (p141)

[Toby · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm rather suspicious of any book - and it's a fault particularly of Christian books - that takes the past, sees some, often superficial, similarities between then and now before going on to declare that Paul/Augustine/Luther etc. "faced a situation very similar to our own." No they did not. History doesn't work like that. Yes it's true that very few people in seventh century England were Christians. It's also true that very few people in Twenty First Century are Christians. However the seventh century English were devoutly religious, and the modern Englishman/woman certainly isn't. Replacing one set of gods with another requires a leap, but nowhere near as much as replacing no gods with one who, as far as many are concerned, past his sell-by-date 150 years ago.

However, once you get past the slightly irritating attempts to jump 1500 years as though nothing of note happened in the meantime, this book does have things to offer. Reading it twenty years after its publication makes it an interesting exercise in itself when it comes to missiological history. This is pre-Mission Shaped Church and the surge in church planting that has happened in the past decade. The former bishop of Pontefract must feel some satisfaction at that. Not that he was a lone voice in the wilderness, in fact the wilderness twenty years ago was fairly crowded with prophets calling for this kind of strategy. It just takes the Church of England rather a long time to catch up.

For anyone familiar with the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic church, this book will not offer any new insights. For those unfamiliar it covers the essential basics and is therefore a very helpful introduction. John Finney tries to weave a course between extolling the Celtic Christian mindset whilst off-handing the modern romanticism that sees the Celts as little more than nature-loving spiritual seekers who spent their days trying to "find themselves". He sometimes ties himself in knots but despite this there is something in the Roman-Celtic split that runs more deeply in Christian spirituality and divides us still today.