Craig book significant, scholarly and accessible
a review by George Porter
Apostle to the Wilderness: Bishop John Medley and the Evolution of the Anglican
Church
Barry L. Craig
Madison: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2005.
Wilderness constitutes one of the dominant themes in Canadian identity. Historians,
as well as artists and sociologists, 
are confronted with this facet of who we
are and how we have come to be the way we are. The story of the Anglican Church
is indelibly etched on this wild evolution, and Barry Craig brings out some of
the finer lines of this etching with his book on the life, work and thought of
Victorian Bishop John Medley - first bishop of the Diocese of Fredericton. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the formation of the Anglican Church in the Maritimes or in general New Brunswick history.
Craig, an Anglican priest and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Thomas University, packed a wealth of information and analysis of the evolution of both Bishop Medley and his context within developing nineteenth century Anglicanism in the doctoral thesis that became this book. His writing is a rare combination of scholarship and accessibility and this relatively short book is a significant contribution toward understanding the man who played such an important part in the shaping of the Anglican Church in a wild land.
Bishop Medley's formative impact on the new diocese would be difficult to exaggerate and still reverberates with almost mythic grandeur in twenty first century New Brunswick. From a stone effigy in Christ Church Cathedral to the very stones of Gothic Revival church buildings, his memory is enshrined in the province's Anglicanism. The diocesan youth camp bears his name, and his portrait hangs in most parishes. Having said as much, surprisingly little has been written about Medley's early life and formation. Craig draws attention to some of the limitations and weaknesses in existing accounts of the life of the bishop and, drawing on a variety of sources, spends the first chapter of the book filling in more details of a biographic sketch.
Craig identifies ways in which these formative years shaped the complex person and bishop Medley eventually became. Important among these experiences, Medley's Oxford education stands out. It both provided exposure to evangelical leanings at Wadham College and occasioned his connection to the Oxford Movement. Also known as Tractarians, several key figures in this 'high church' (anglo-catholic) renewal movement became colleagues and friends of the future bishop. A number of key doctrines and practices resonated with him, including a strong commitment to episcopal Apostolic Succession. This would be a doctrine that sustained him in the course of later controversies with 'low church' (evangelical) groups in his future diocese.
Controversy did indeed mark Medley's pioneering episcopacy. Medley was a persistent advocate abroad for Church of England support for the struggling colonial parishes, and within the diocese he did not shrink from engagement when concerned about basic doctrine or practice. In his own small booklet, The Episcopal Form of Church Government; Its Antiquity, Its Expediency, and Its Conformity to the Word of God (1845), Medley wrote that failure to speak out when clear, core teachings were in question generated the danger of forming a "false, delusive, dangerous security, which is built upon quiet possession of error,' and that this meant 'raising an edifice upon the slumbering ashes of a volcano, which will explode with violence more terrible in proportion to the false peace which has before prevailed." In the same booklet he wrote that love and truth "are links of one chain" and "they rest upon the same foundation," so that "[w]e cannot be really charitable to others, unless we are true to them and to ourselves."
Craig depicts the intellectual context of Medley's thought as inhabiting a region somewhere between rejection of the agnostic rationalism of the Enlightenment and not quite full embrace of Romanticism. He suggests that the bishop moved away from an earlier affinity with romantic ideas toward "a more directly pragmatic approach to the Church."
Medley remained a clear advocate of biblical authority and patristic tradition, embracing the ultimate mystery of spirituality while rejecting excessive subjectivity. This sense of mystery captivated Medley's imagination when it came to physical structures of worship. Craig notes that Wadham College had been the educational home of Christopher Wren and that Medley shared with him his "architectural interest, if not his taste." Medley was, in fact, a strong advocate of the more romantic Gothic Revival style being the most suitable for houses of worship. He saw one of his episcopal tasks in his new world diocese to provide suitable church buildings. Speaking to the mother church in England to request help in building such places of worship, Medley said in Other Little Ships: Sons of the Church, "we will build with the sword of the Spirit in one hand, and the trowel in the other."
Nevertheless, though theologically conservative, he equally strongly contended for freedom and tolerance when it came to less clear doctrines or practices. Craig argues that despite affinities with their approaches, Medley was not simply just another Tractarian. Indeed he could not easily be labelled at all. When he eventually became bishop he proved to be a strong advocate for formation of synods, including lay representation, and demonstrated respect and provided encouragement for his evangelical and Loyalist opponents. He warned the clergy of the diocese "to abstain from bitter language and contentious provocations of one another" as more befitting what Craig terms "the context of a struggling colonial diocese [where] toleration was more valuable than doctrinal rigorism."
Craig describes a similar approach to ritual and sacramental concerns. He refused to follow either Roman Catholic or Lutheran directions in defining too closely the operational mechanisms of sacramental grace. Mystery remained at the heart and mystery resists too careful formulation. This left Medley freer to advocate tolerance of liturgical differences. Craig notes that Medley thought he had been quite successful in this work for tolerance, saying in his last charge that perfect agreement in the church about these matters, no matter how desirable, was "not to be expected." He told the clergy that in the final analysis Anglicans were to "hold fast to primitive doctrine, primitive order, and practical piety ... [even] while there is a considerable diversity as to the means by which reverence is promoted."
The Rev. Canon George M. Porter, D.Phil. is Chaplain to the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton) and St. Thomas University, Youth Action Director for the Diocese of Fredericton, a member of Wycliffe Associates (Wycliffe College, University of Toronto), and Diplomate Fellow, Oxford Society of Scholars
