These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Desiderius Erasmus, reformer of the Church

The illegitimate son of a priest, Erasmus was possibly born in Rotterdam. He attended school in Gouda and Deventer and was strongly influence by the Brethren of the Common Life.
He gave Jesus a central place in his devotions. In 1486 he became an Augustinian canon. Ordained in 1492, he left the Augustinians to study at the College De Montaigu, Paris, in 1495. Travel to England from 1499 – 1500 led to a close friendship with the notable scholar John Colet and careful study of the New Testament in Greek. His publications grew in number and variety, as did his fascination with the challenge of translating the Bible. Between 1506-1521, his spent time in Paris, Louvain and Italy, as well as making a return to England, and developing a fruitful friendship with Thomas More, celebrated in his book Enconium Moriae. As well as becoming the first teacher of Greek at Cambridge. His prestige was not only academic and pastoral. He was made a royal councillor in Brussels during 1516.

Between 1515 – 1525 Erasmus produced the second earliest Greek New Testament and this went through at least 4 editions. One of these editions was used by Luther in his translation of the New Testament. Erasmus’s NT also played a part in the King James translation of the NT. His work on the Greek was not without critics. Since Erasmus’s work older Greek versions of the whole or parts of the NT have been found and these finds have corrected the many mistakes in Erasmus’s texts.

From 1521, he lived in Basel with J. Froben, the noted printer. There he could write with fewer interruptions. When the city became Protestant, he moved to Freiburg from 1529 – 1535 before returning to Basel, where he died while editing the works of Origen. Advocacy of social, political, educational and religious reform made him an influential leader in the Europe of his day. He corresponded widely with people in a wide range of positions and status. An English edition of his letters is currently being prepared. He was strongly opposed to the corruption of traditional Catholicism and the Papacy, which he saw as indispensable of the European heritage. He sought to clarify their central emphases. Seeking to correct abuses in the church, he wrote a variety of popular and scholarly books, ranging from devotional works, such as his Enchiridion (1504) to editions of the Fathers. Initially, he welcomed Luther’s teaching and writing as complementary to his own. He, however, grew disturbed at its increasingly polemical nature and potential to undermine Catholic unity. That was made plain in De Libero Abitrio, to which Luther replied in De Servo Abitrio. Erasmus replied with Hyperaspistes. It was clear that they were far apart on many theological issues and reflected wider divisions in popular and scholarly Catholicism. Erasmus was convinced of the importance of education and that return to the sources was vital for authentic reform. He could be a cutting critic, as well as an inspirer of devotion. He provided reliable editions of some of the leading Fathers, as well as writing popular books on basic Christian belief and behaviour. Though he cherished the Catholic heritage, some more traditional Catholics regarded him as a corrupter of the faith.  His work was censured by the University of Paris and his books were totally banned by Sixtus V in 1590. The Roman Index banned some books, but permitted others, when they were carefully edited.  His importance has been widely recognized in the 20th century.

Ian Breward

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Irenaeus, Christian thinker

Irenaeus of Lyons (Lugdunum) in Roman Gaul, one of the foremost apologists of the early church, came from Smyrna on the coast of Asia Minor where, as a boy, he heard his lifelong hero, the great Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. Given that Polycarp died a martyr in 155 CE it is assumed that Irenaeus was born c. 140. As a relatively young man he went to Lugdunum, apparently as a missionary to the Celts. Lugdunum, founded in 43 BCE near the confluence of the Rhone and Saone rivers, was the capital city of the Roman province of Gallia Lugdunensis and one of the most important cities, after Rome, in the Western part of the Empire. It included a thriving community of traders from Asia Minor and, indeed, the martyr lists from the 177 persecution reflect many Greek and some Latin names but no Celtic. Following the martyr’s death of Pothinus, bishop or at least senior presbyter of Lyon and the nearby town of Vienne, Irenaeus became himself bishop or at least senior presbyter. He certainly styled himself as bishop and that is how he is now recognised. He first came to prominence beyond Gaul when he went to Rome early in his episcopate and developed a reputation as a mediator in a number of disputes, the best known perhaps that between the Roman church and the churches of the east over the dating of Easter. His very name reflected his reputation in the early church.
His extant apologetic writings, for which he is most widely known and appreciated, are the five books of the On the Detection and Refutation of Knowledge Falsely So-Called (better known as Against Heresies) – which survives only in a Latin translation from the 3^rd or 4^th century – and Epideixis or Proof of the Apostolic Preaching – which exists only in an Armenian translation of unknown date. The former is directed against the so-called Gnostics of his time, particularly those belonging to the school of Valentinus. The Valentinians are regarded now – and were possibly so regarded by Irenaeus himself and this is perhaps why he regarded them as particularly dangerous – as the closest to ‘orthodoxy’ on the orthodox-heterodox scale. The first book outlines the beliefs of the Valentinians and their predecessors while the second offers rational proofs against these. The third offers proofs from the Apostles (the canonical Gospels) and the fourth those from the sayings of Jesus, particularly the parables. The fifth offers proofs to be used against the claims of the Gnostics drawn from others sayings of Jesus and the writings of the Apostle and includes some eschatological reflections. Irenaeus was himself a convinced millenarian. It is in the fourth book that Irenaeus offers some of his most important theological writing on the unity of the Old and New Covenants (Testaments) and of the necessary and critical relationship between Creation and Redemption, between God as Creator and as Redeemer. The Epideixis, a much shorter book and only discovered in 1903, was written for converts and offers a simple summary of the Rule of Faith with supporting biblical texts. Irenaeus also wrote on the biblical canon, on the succession of bishops as a guarantee of orthodoxy – he was a doctrinal conservative and literalist biblical commentator whose motto was semper eadem – and on apostolic authority. While not always given his due perhaps as an important apologist and theologian in his day, the preservation of his major work in Latin indicates that he was appreciated not only in the East but also in the West.  His feast day is celebrated in the East on 26 August and in the West on 28 June.

David Mackay-Rankin

 

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

 

Ephrem the Syrian, person of prayer

Ephrem has justly been described as the greatest poet of the Early Church.  He wrote in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus), and for most of his life served as a deacon in Nisibis on the eastern border of the Roman Empire.  Ten years before his death in 373 he became a refugee when his town was transferred to the Persian Empire. He ended up in Edessa (modern Sanliurfa in SE Turkey), where he is recorded as having organised food for the poor during a famine shortly before he died.  A considerable number of his poems survive, along with a few prose works, which include Commentaries on Genesis and on a Harmony of the four Gospels.  Most of the poems are stanzaic and were intended to be sung; a later poet, Jacob of Serugh, has a delightful poem describing how Ephrem introduced the practice of having choirs of women (some of his poems are in fact written in the voice of women).  These poems survive in a number collections of varying sizes, ranging from 4 to 87 poems; the collections have general titles, but only rarely (as in the case of the collection ‘On Paradise’) do these correspond to all the poems in them. Thus the large collection ‘On Faith’ ends with a small group of five poems ‘on the Pearl’ and its symbolism.   Two of his narrative poems were translated into Greek (and thence into other languages):  one is on Jonah and the Repentance of Nineveh, while the other is on the Sinful Woman who anointed Jesus (based on Luke 7), where Ephrem introduces into the narrative the Seller of Unguents; a motif picked up in many subsequent literary treatments of the episode.

Besides being a highly accomplished and original poet who uses some fifty different metres with great skill, Ephrem was also a profound theologian, who found poetry a much more satisfactory vehicle than prose for conveying his theological vision of the relationship between the material and spiritual world, and the elaborate spider’s web of multi-dimensional interconnections that a person the interior eye of whose heart is pure and luminous has the possibility of discovering in both Nature and Scripture.

Although Ephrem’s fame as a poet soon spread to the Greek- and Latin-speaking world (in a work of 392 Jerome mentions him), it was only in the sixth century that a biographical account of his life was written.  Since the author wished to present Ephrem to a sixth-century audience he presents him as it were in modern dress:  thus instead of a deacon he has become a monk, and he is credited with visiting both St Basil (in Cappadocia) and St Bishoi (in Egypt).  Though without any historically basis, these episodes can be said to be symbolically true, in that Ephrem’s spirituality has much in common with that of the Cappadocian and Egyptian Fathers.

Sebastian Brock

 

For further reading:

The Harp of the Spirit:  Poems of St Ephrem the Syrian, Introduction and translation by S.P. Brock (3^rd edition, Cambridge [UK]: Aquila, 2013).

St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, Introduction and translation by S.P. Brock (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990).

Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns, Introduced and translated by K.E. McVey (Classic of Western Spirituality;  New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1989).

S.P. Brock, The Luminous Eye. The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992).

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

 

Pope John XXIII, reformer of the Church

Pope St John XXIII (born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, 1881-1963) came from humble beginnings, through a diplomatic ministry in the Roman Catholic Church, to become Pope at the age of 77, from 1958-1963. He was canonized in 2014. Far from being the caretaker in that role which others imagined, less than three months from his election, he called the Second Vatican Council together and presided over its first sessions (1962), Pope Paul VI bringing it to a conclusion after three more sessions, in 1965. Unusually, his saint’s day is not the date of his death, but the day the Council began (September 11). The Uniting Church remembers on his ‘heavenly birthday, June 3, and we grant him the title ‘Reformer of the Church’. His own favourite papal title was ‘Servant of the servants of God’. Many called him ‘Good Pope John’. He charmed people with his gentle sense of humour.

The Vatican Council was indeed a reforming council, well beyond expectation. It benefitted from a century of serious scholarship and pastoral thought across Europe and the Catholic world. He invited representatives of other churches as non-voting observers. There was lively debate on the floor of St Peter’s, and in the coffee shops around Rome. His stated intention was to ‘open the windows [of the Church] and let in some fresh air.’ The unimagined result was change in the whole of the western church. Key documents were composed and promulgated, the first being on ecumenism (Unitatis redintegratio), which propelled the Roman church into relationship with others, defining non-Catholics as ‘separated brethren’.  From dialogue, we have all learned to state more clearly what we believe, what unites and what still divides us as Christians. The Church’s primary purposes and its structures were redefined in Lumen Gentium, including its evangelical mission in the world. The liturgy was radically challenged, vernacular forms of language replacing Latin, word and sacrament given a new balance, and new rites composed. The centrality of Scripture was emphasized and a new three-year lectionary created. On all of this scholarship and wisdom, other churches have drawn on in their own ongoing reforms.

Pope John was a Christian visionary. His passionate sense of humanity was summed up in his remark, ‘We were all made in God’s image, and thus, we are all Godly alike.’ Many of the gains of the Council must be attributed to the gifts of Pope Paul VI, but it was Good Pope John who summoned his Church, and all of us, to reform and renewal in the humble spirit of Christ.

Robert Gribben

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

 

Winifred Kiek (née Jackson) (1884-1975), Christian pioneer

Winifred Kiek was born on 27 July 1884 in Chorlton upon Medlock in the County of Lancaster to the north of Manchester, the second child of John Robert Jackson, a wholesale tea dealer, and Margaret Jane, née Harker. The family were Quakers. Elders in her local meeting encouraged Winifred in her ministry. In 1907 she graduated from the Victoria University of Manchester with a Bachelor of Arts degree, won the university prize in logic, and worked as a teacher in the mixed department at Manley Park Municipal School. While travelling in the Swiss Alps in 1909 she met Edward Sidney Kiek (1883-1959), a student for the ministry in the Congregational Church, and after his ordination in 1910 they were married and Winifred became a Congregationalist. Winifred started a family and served as a minister’s wife and lay preacher. In 1919 Edward accepted the position of principal of Parkin College, Adelaide, and Winifred studied theology. In 1923 she was the first woman in Australia to graduate with a Bachelor of Divinity degree from the Melbourne College of Divinity. In 1926 the Colonel Light Gardens Congregational Church asked Winifred to fill the vacant pastorate and on 13 June 1927 she was ordained, the first woman minister in a Christian church in Australia and in a dominion of the British Empire.

Winifred served as minister of Colonel Light Gardens Congregational Church in 1926-33 and Knoxville Congregational Church in 1938-46. She preached regularly in other churches and published sermons in the Christian World Pulpit. She also published a work of religious and parenting advice entitled Child Nature and Child Nurture (1927). Winifred served her denomination with distinction: twice as vice-chairman of the Congregational Union of South Australia in 1944-45 and in 1948-49, and in 1945 as acting chairman. In 1941-46 she was president of the Congregational Women’s Association of Australia and New Zealand, and in 1949 she was a member of the International Congregational Council held at Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA.

Winifred promoted the ordination of women. She was a member of international associations of women ministers. She was also a leading minister and office bearer in many women’s societies including the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the National Council of Women; in 1935-38 she was president of the Women’s Non-Party Association of South Australia. During the 1950s Winifred Kiek served as liaison officer in Australia for the commission on the work of women in the churches of the World Council of Churches and published We of One House (1954). In 1963 the state-based women’s inter-church councils formed Australian Church Women and in 1965 awarded the first Winifred Kiek Scholarship, a training program for young women from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands in church work and community service. After her husband retired from Parkin College in 1957, Edward and Winifred shared interim pastorates in Queensland and New South Wales; she conducted her final service on 9 March 1975. Winifred Kiek died at ‘Spindrift’, the family holiday home in Victor Harbor, on 30 May 1975, aged 90.

Rev Dr Julia Pitman

 

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

 

John Flynn, Christian pioneer

 

John Flynn (1880-1951) was a Presbyterian minister, missionary, and founder of the Australian Inland Mission. He was born in Moliagul in Victoria, Australia. In 1902, after four years with the Education Department of Victoria, Flynn joined the home mission staff of the Presbyterian Church, working amongst remote communities.

First, through his successful publication, Bushman’s Companion (1910), and then through the Oodnadatta Nursing Hospital, Flynn began a long career of developing services and ministry to bush dwellers. He was ordained in 1911 when he was assigned for two years to what was known as the Smith of Dunesk Mission based at Beltana, South Australia. In 1912 he reported on the needs of remote Aboriginal and white communities in the Northern Territory, presenting a vision of the church’s mission to the sparsely populated areas of inland Australia.

For the next 39 years, as superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission, Flynn was guided by the motto “For Christ and the Continent” and by putting need before creed. In 1928 he founded the mission’s Aerial Medical Service at Cloncurry, Queensland, later known as the Royal Flying Doctor Service.  This fulfilled his dream of a “mantle of safety” for outback Australians. From 1939 until 1942 Flynn was moderator general of the Presbyterian Church of Australia. His image is on the Australian $20 note and there are many memorials to Flynn around Australia.  At Moliagul there is a memorial with the inscription, “Across the lonely places of the land he planted kindness and gathered love.”  The John Flynn Memorial Church in Alice Springs is his official memorial.

William Emilse

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Joo Ki Chul & Son Yang-won, martyrs                                         

In 1905 Japan annexed Korea as a first step as a first step in establishing a Japanese Empire in Asia. As time went by, the Japanese insisted that all Koreans should engage in acts of allegiance to the empire. This included in participating in rites in which they were required to engage in acts of obeisance at the Shinto shrines erected in each centre across the country. Many Korean Christians and most missionaries interpreted these acts of obeisance as worship of the Japanese Sun-god, and therefore as a breach of the First Commandment. They therefore resisted either passively or actively the Japanese demands. Co-incidentally this pressure from the Japanese attracted many Korean nationalists to the Christian Church.

Joo Ki Chul  was born in Changwon in 1897, and grew up and learned the Gospel from the Australian missionaries who worked in the South-eastern province of the country. He became a Christian and was later trained and ordained as a Minister of the Gospel in the Presbyterian Church of Korea. He served in two major churches in the Province, and became an outspoken critic of the Japanese demand that all people do obeisance at the Shinto shrines. He was then called in 1937 to a large church in Pyong Yang, where his outspoken refusal to comply with the Japanese demands came under closer scrutiny. Over the next decade, Joo Ki Chul was imprisoned four times, the last time never to be released. He was tortured and abused, and finally died a martyr to his faith, in 1944. He could have compromised. He chose to follow his Lord, who had also refused to compromise.

Many other Korean Christians suffered imprisonment or death at the hands of the Japanese imperial authorities, or suffered in other ways in order to keep their worshipping communities together.

Five years after liberation from the Japanese in 1945, the North Korean army invaded the South. Many more leading Christians were murdered by the North Korean forces, or their sympathizers in the South, simply because they were Christians.

Of these, perhaps the best known was another Presbyterian Minister, Rev Son Yang-won. He had spent time in the Kwangju prison under the Japanese, inspired by the story of Rev Joo Ki Chul. He also wished for martyrdom but was released from prison at the end of the Japanese War, and became the pastor of the large leprosarium at Soonchun. Before the outbreak of the Korean War there were very active insurgents in the region. A group of them carried out murder and mayhem among the local Christian leaders. Two of those whom they murdered were sons of Pastor Son. Having been denied martyrdom himself, Pastor Son adopted the young man who had played the key role in the murder of his sons, rescued him from the hands of the anti-communist authorities bent on executing him, and raised him as his own son.

by John Brown

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christian thinker

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 into a scholarly and academic family which, though not actively “church-going” was steeped in the humanitarian and liberal traditions that were prevalent in the Christian church within Germany in the later part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries.  Like all his siblings, he was intellectually astute, was a talented musician and well grounded in the art and literature of his time.  At the same time, he rejoiced in the love of family and friends, and appreciated deeply the beauties of the natural world.
He seemed to be set for an academic career, and became lecturer in Systematic Theology at Berlin University.  In the 1930s, however, Bonhoeffer became an opponent of Hitler’s National Socialism in Germany.  He quickly understood that the policies of this political movement focused on mere human endeavour and a complete denial of the presence and power of God.  His opposition to the policies of Hitler led ultimately to his imprisonment and death.
Before that happened, however, Bonhoeffer became a leader in the Bekennende Kirche (the “Confessing Church” which was opposed to the pro-Nazi “German Evangelical Church”), and he participated in the preparation of the “Barmen Confession”.  This document rejected the doctrines of the “German Evangelical Church” – that the church was subordinate to the state, and the Word and the Spirit were subordinate to the church – and reasserted the Lordship of Christ over the Church, and the submission of the Church to the Holy Spirit and Holy Scripture.
Bonhoeffer’s influence within the worldwide Church comes from his commitment to Christian discipleship as a fundamental component of Christian community.  Even before his formal ministry began (in Barcelona in 1928) he had gathered a group of friends with whom he discussed issues of faith, including questions about the difference between religion founded on human experience and community based on living in the way of Christ.  Following his martyrdom in 1945, friends in Germany, England and the United States took pains to ensure that his written works were made more widely available.  Books like The Cost of Discipleship (a book of addresses on the Sermon on the Mount) and Life Together (a handbook of Christian community) provide insights into Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the ways in which we are called to follow Christ.
Bonhoeffer’s poems and prayers also provide the essence of his theology and faith.  Together in Song provides a poem (song number 240: “All go to God when they are sorely placed”) in which Bonhoeffer brings together an awareness of our need for God, of God’s need for us, and of God’s grace in denying no-one the benefits of Christ’s death and resurrection. And a section of a prayer recorded in Letters and Papers from Prison gives insight into Bonhoeffer’s confidence in and reliance on God’s presence and love:

O God, …

In me there is darkness,

But with you there is light.

I am lonely, but you leave me not.

I am feeble in heart, but you leave me not.

I am restless, but with you there is peace.

In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;

Your ways are beyond understanding, but

You know the way for me.        (language updated)

 Graham Vawser