Papers by The Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael W . Holland
Anglican Church International, 2026
This reflection by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael W. Holland on the Revised Common Lectionary readings ... more This reflection by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael W. Holland on the Revised Common Lectionary readings for Proper 23, Trinity XIX, Year A offers a retributive-critical reading of Matthew 22:1-14 (the Parable of the Wedding Banquet). The dominant interpretive tradition — in which the guest without a wedding robe is expelled for non-compliance with normative requirements — is examined and rejected on internal theological grounds: a retributive reading reduces the parable's appeal to self-interest, making one's "ultimate concern oneself," a stance structurally incompatible with the New Covenant's logic of unconditional forgiveness enacted through Christ's sufficient sacrifice. An alternative reading is proposed in which the wedding robe functions not as a demand for moral compliance but as a metaphor for the freely accepted garment of grace — a participatory entry into the life of God in Christ through act. The robe is donned, on this account, by making one's life a "living manifestation" of the message of unconditional forgiveness and love, thereby accepting rather than rejecting the invitation to reconciliation. The reflection extends this hermeneutic to Psalm 23, arguing against a purely eschatological (funerary) reading and for a present-tense, Eucharistic participation in which the banquet is entered and celebrated "here and now" through the Church's witness. The argument is situated against the contemporary geopolitical backdrop of armed conflict, treating the tension between the theological claim of unconditional peace and visible political reality as an irresolvable but theologically honest problem. The closing movement draws on Philippians 4:4-7 and the Prayer of St. Francis to integrate the expository argument into doxological practice.
Abstract by Liner Research Agent in consultation with the author.
Anglican Church International, 2026
This reflection on Matthew 16:13-19 argues that what the church holds in common across its divisi... more This reflection on Matthew 16:13-19 argues that what the church holds in common across its divisions is not a negotiated agreement about the Petrine office but Christ himself-the one the confession names, the foundation the church stands on, the Head the church lives from. Beginning from Jesus's question "But who do you say that I am?" and the Roman Catholic-Protestant disagreement over whether the rock of Matthew 16:18 is Peter or Peter's confession, the reflection does not adjudicate the dispute but moves past it to the res beneath it: the confession that Jesus is the Messiah, given by the Father and confessed by the Spirit, is the common faith because it names the one who is himself the foundation. The seventh-century office hymn Angularis fundamentum lapis Christus-"Christ is made the sure foundation, / Christ the Head and cornerstone"-contains in two clauses the movement the reflection unfolds across fourteen points: Christ the foundation (Christology) and Christ the Head (ecclesiology, ethics, doxology). The and between the clauses is the theology: the church does not merely stand on its foundation but lives from its Head, and the movement from confession to mutual belonging to self-sacrificial love to prayer is the logical unfolding of a single person who is at once the ground and the governance of the body. What is common is not the confession considered as a human act but Christ considered as the faith's object, content, and groundsung by the whole church across its divisions for over thirteen centuries. The unanswered questions of the Matthean text-the keys of the kingdom and the gates of Hades-are not abandoned but referred to their proper answer: the keys belong to the one who is the foundation; the gates of Hades cannot prevail against the one who is the Head. The common faith is Christ.
Anglican Church International, 2026
In Matthew 14:22–33, Peter is called out of the boat into a storm on the Sea of Galilee and begin... more In Matthew 14:22–33, Peter is called out of the boat into a storm on the Sea of Galilee and begins to sink the moment he turns his attention from Christ back onto himself. In 1 Kings 19:9–18, Elijah encounters wind, earthquake, and fire at Horeb, and hears God not in any of them but in the sound of sheer silence after the storm has passed. This reflection on the lections for Trinity X / Proper 14 offers faith as the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace: God's unconditional love for us in and through Christ, from which nothing in all creation can separate us. Stepping out of the boat to serve others, even into stormy seas, is what that faith looks like when it becomes an act; losing focus on Christ is what makes us sink; calling out is what makes us lifted by Christ through others in the Unity of His Holy Spirit. Faith, so understood, is what makes our being Christ's hands, voice, and heart in the world possible.
Abstract drafted by Perplexity Computer at the author's direction, 10 August 2026, and reviewed by the author.
Anglican Church International, 2026
This reflection on the Gospel appointed for Proper 12, Year A, reads Matthew 13:31-33 and 13:44-5... more This reflection on the Gospel appointed for Proper 12, Year A, reads Matthew 13:31-33 and 13:44-52 as a single staged progression from hidden potency to manifest actualization. The three parables-mustard seed, leaven, and pearl of great price-are treated not as three angles on one theological reality but as three ascending stages of one sanctifying movement: seed becomes shrub in the individual soul, yeast becomes bread through the sanctified person's action in the world, and pearl becomes Kingdom manifest in the communion of sanctified persons united in the Spirit. The Preface states three theses drawn from this reading, sets alongside them the received scholarly reading of the parables from The Oxford Bible Commentary, and grounds the whole argument in the ontological guarantee of Romans 8:38-39 that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ. The Body then elaborates the three theses, showing how the sanctified person becomes a sure foundation for others, how the treasure of that mutual foundation is the joy of Heaven here and now, and how the Kingdom springs forth in the field of the world through the ministry of the Church. The reflection closes with a collect drawn from the Proper 12 Collect of the Day, asking that we so pass through things temporal that we lose not the things eternal, and that His Eternal Kingdom be brought to all His creation.
Anglican Church International, 2026
Abstract
This is a philosophical-theological reflection and discussion on the Revised Common Lec... more Abstract
This is a philosophical-theological reflection and discussion on the Revised Common Lectionary readings for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity (Proper 8, Year A, 28 June 2026): Genesis 22:1-14 (the Akedah), Romans 6:12-23, and Matthew 10:40-42. The reading is anchored in Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith — whose category of ultimate concern carries the existentialist underpinnings into the text — and works the classical Problem of Evil that the Akedah forces. Its ontological basis, in the strict sense, is the gradation-of-being framework received from Plato, Augustine, Aristotle, and Aquinas, with two definite commitments. First, with Aristotle’s energeia and Aquinas’s actus read process-wise, being itself is identified with the activity — a position that diverges from the strict substance metaphysics both Aristotle and Aquinas hold. Second, essence is given by creation and precedes existence — the activity that is being is the actualization of an already-given nature, the image of God in which we are created — a position that diverges from the existentialist commitment, essential to Sartre, that existence precedes essence. On this footing the discussion holds open a graded structure of Christian existence, ordered as approximation in Plato’s sense: as things in this world are, for Plato, to the extent they approximate the Forms, so we have being-as-proclamation to the extent we approximate the Word. Becoming and transformation — interchangeable with healing and with living into our baptism — name the ordinary motion of this approximation: the iterated activity by which we actualize the nature given, more or less fully, where we mostly are. Transfiguration names the actualization of our divine nature — disclosure of the Divine nature that we are in His image, the act on which the text turns at its climax (the liturgical proper of the Feast of the Transfiguration uses this word in place of transformation for the same reason). The result of transfiguration is fullness of being — fully actualized nature, joined with God in the state of fully actualizing our divine nature — which is what it is to be a living proclamation of the Word, as the discussion surfaces in the parenthetical that names the identity at the decisive moment: living proclamations of the Word, in our becoming who God created us to be. At this terminus the identity is exact: to be a proclamation is to be proclaiming, the being is the activity; in the ordinary case, we approximate. The classical tradition has located fullness of being chiefly in the life to come; the discussion holds, with hesitation, that it can be happening here and now where transfiguration is real, honoring the eschatological tension without collapsing it. The discussion proposes that to make God our ultimate concern is to make God-in-us and God-in-all-we-encounter our ultimate concern: one ultimate, three locations. Sin, in the inherited Greek-Thomist sense, names privation of being — cessation of the activity that is the being, failure to actualize the nature given, motion away from the Word approximated — and is its own wage. John Donne’s Meditation XVII supplies the ontology of human interrelation; the prayer attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi supplies the grammar of the turn, by which dying-to-self is being-born-to-life. The central claim is that Christian existence is the iterated act of becoming a living proclamation of the Word, and that sight, sacrifice, and service are one act, given and received.
Abstract by
Perplexity Computer
in conversation with The Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael W. Holland
28 June 2026
Anglican Church International, 2026
This reflection on Trinity III takes the apparent tension between the Fifth Commandment ("Honor y... more This reflection on Trinity III takes the apparent tension between the Fifth Commandment ("Honor your father and mother") and the Gospel’s hard saying ("Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me") as the occasion for working out what it means to make God the ultimate final end of human life. The argument proceeds from Romans 6 through the Gospel saying to a conclusion that is at once theological, metaphysical, and pastoral: putting God first is not a duty imposed from outside but the inner logic of unconditionally loving the Source of all being. To love the Source unconditionally is to love what the Source loves as the Source loves it, which secures rather than negates the intrinsic value of created persons. Loving father, mother, son, and daughter is therefore not derivative from the love of God, nor a means to it, but the very form love of God takes when the Source’s beloved creatures are present. The Isaiah 58 fast — "not hiding from our own kin" — names this in lived practice. To unconditionally love and serve others just is what it is to make Christ one’s sure foundation, and theirs: "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it" (Matt. 10.39, NRSV).
Abstract by
Perplexity Computer (Claude Sonnet 4.6)
in conversation with The Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael W. Holland
21 June 2026
Anglican Church Intrernational, 2026
This essay presents the Holy Trinity as the ontological foundation of being and the inner pattern... more This essay presents the Holy Trinity as the ontological foundation of being and the inner pattern of the Church's life. Being, here, is being-inrelationship: God is one in three Persons, and the human person, made in the imago Dei, is constituted by communion with God and neighbor. Drawing on Vicki K. Black's Welcome to the Church Year, Robert W. Jenson's "The Trinity and Church Structure," the Oxford Bible Commentary on 1 Corinthians 13, the witness of Saint Augustine, and the doctrinal settlement of the Council of Nicaea, the essay paints a picture of the Church as the community in which the triune life is manifested in time. It moves through three movements. First, it asks what the Trinity is, recovering the patristic confession of one God in three Persons and identifying the Father as the source of our being, the Son as the truth and essence toward which we are called, and the Holy Spirit as the means by which we discern and actualize our nature. Second, it asks to what we are called, answering that we are called to being itself-life in Christ, in the unity and communion of the Holy Spirit-and that the Church is the body in which this calling is lived together. Third, it asks on what basis we so act, answering with 1 Corinthians 13: love is the form of every gift, and unconditional love of God and neighbor is the ground on which the Church's service rests. The essay closes with the threefold work into which the triune God calls every Christian-being, unity, reconciliation-and a prayer that the Church might be guided by the Spirit of Truth to manifest the Trinity in its life together.
Anglican Church International
This reflection examines the Revised Common Lectionary readings for the Celebration of Pentecost-... more This reflection examines the Revised Common Lectionary readings for the Celebration of Pentecost-Acts 2.1-21, 1 Corinthians 12.3b-13, and John 20.19-23-as three moments of a single act: Christ's sending of the disciples and the Holy Spirit's empowerment of that sending. In John 20, the risen Christ commissions the Apostles with the words "As the Father has sent me, so I send you," and breathes on them the gift of the Spirit by which they are to forgive sins and proclaim the Gospel-a moment the Oxford Bible Commentary describes as the disciples' being "baptized" by the risen Christ's Spirit. This Johannine baptism-by-breath is not a unique apostolic event but the same baptism into the Holy Spirit every Christian receives today: the sending the Apostles received, and the Spirit by which it was empowered, extend to every baptized person. In Acts 2, the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost manifests that commissioning in the world: the Apostles go forth and are heard, "each in their own dialect," in what the Commentary calls "a miracle of hearing." In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul explicates the structure of this empowered mission: a variety of spiritual gifts, one Spirit, one Bodyso that to discern one's gift is to discern one's service. The reflection argues that Christ's sending is not an instruction the Apostles execute on their own strength, but a participation made possible by the gift of the Holy Spirit, in which the Church-every baptized member-becomes the manifestation of the Father's sending of the Son in the world. Life in Christ, on this account, is constituted by being-sent-in-the incorporation into the missio Dei rather than self-initiated witness.
Anglican Church Interntional, 2026
This work records fourteen distinct lines of apostolic succession flowing into the consecration o... more This work records fourteen distinct lines of apostolic succession flowing into the consecration of the Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael W. Holland on 16 October 2016, drawn from four primary source documents-the Master Document (2016, rev. 2021), the Carroll PDF (2003), the Franciscus-Mariae PDF, and the Seneco PDF-and verified, where possible, against external institutional and primary sources. Verification of every claim has been undertaken under a standing principle: every factual claim must be checked against a primary or institutional source before inclusion. Where no external source exists, the matter is marked plainly as the Bishop's own first-person testimony. Discrepancies between sources have been noted and preserved, never resolved silently.
Anglican Church International, 2026
This essay offers a pastoral-philosophical reflection on the Revised Common Lectionary readings f... more This essay offers a pastoral-philosophical reflection on the Revised Common Lectionary readings for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A (Acts 17:22-31, Psalm 66, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21), preached on May 10, 2026 at Saint Clare's Anglican Chapel. I argue that Plato's Republic Book IIparticularly the Ring of Gyges thought experiment and Glaucon's challenge-together with W. K. C. Guthrie's account of Socratic midwifery and care of the soul, illuminates a central claim of the New Testament readings: that being injured by others and being harmed are distinguishable, and that what we do is what we become. Drawing the Socratic conviction that no harm can befall a good man into Christian register, I argue that 1 Peter's blessing for doing right and John 14's Advocate together describe baptism as both cleansing and arming-a reception of the Holy Spirit that makes the new commandment to love as Christ loves us actionable rather than aspirational. The Greek philosophical tradition functions here as praeparatio evangelica: it names the structure of the moral life that Scripture then fulfills, locating ethical formation in the Person of Christ and the indwelling of the Spirit.
Anglican Church International, 2026
Living into Our Baptism: That They May Have Life Abundantly centers on what it means to live into... more Living into Our Baptism: That They May Have Life Abundantly centers on what it means to live into our baptism-and what such life entails: that no one is left in need, left wanting. Drawing on Acts 2, Psalm 23, 1 Peter 2, and John 10, it proclaims Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd and the Gate into God's Kingdom, who comes that we "may have life, and have it abundantly." The witness of the early Church-sharing all things and distributing to any who have need-shows how Christ's care is made tangible through his people, while Psalm 23 frames this abundant life as life under the Shepherd's leading: "I shall not want," even in the valley's shadow. In 1 Peter, believers are called to endure suffering without retaliation, following the crucified Lord who bore our sins and heals by his wounds-and who, even on the cross, gives himself for those who crucified him. In baptism we enter the Shepherd's fold, die to self, and are raised to new life: abundant life found in following Christ-unconditionally loving, forgiving, and serving, even when harmed. The closing movement returns to Psalm 23, confessing the Shepherd's presence and promise as Christ's light shines through such mercy, making the Kingdom visible, strengthening the Church, and drawing others toward the joy of salvation. Note.
Anglican Church International, 2026
This reflection, "On Resurrection," presents Christ's resurrection as the foundation of Christian... more This reflection, "On Resurrection," presents Christ's resurrection as the foundation of Christian being and life-God's decisive act that forgives sin, defeats death, and restores humanity to life now and to life eternal. It argues that resurrection faith is not merely assent to doctrine but a lived pattern: dying daily to sin and self, and rising into reconciled life through embodied love, forgiveness, and mutual service. Drawing on scriptural proclamation ("forgiveness of sins through his name"), the reflection links Maundy Thursday's commandment-love one another as Christ loves-to Easter as the Church's ongoing witness in ordinary relationships. It frames Christian existence as sacramental: believers become a "living Sacrament," an outward sign of inward grace, as they enact unity in the Holy Spirit. In the text's strongest terms, to be-to live at all-is to become such a living sacrament to the praise of God's name. The piece concludes with prayer and with verses from the hymn "The Strife Is O'er, the Battle Done," calling the faithful to praise and Alleluia. (Microsoft Copilot
Uploads
Papers by The Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael W . Holland
Abstract by Liner Research Agent in consultation with the author.
Abstract drafted by Perplexity Computer at the author's direction, 10 August 2026, and reviewed by the author.
This is a philosophical-theological reflection and discussion on the Revised Common Lectionary readings for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity (Proper 8, Year A, 28 June 2026): Genesis 22:1-14 (the Akedah), Romans 6:12-23, and Matthew 10:40-42. The reading is anchored in Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith — whose category of ultimate concern carries the existentialist underpinnings into the text — and works the classical Problem of Evil that the Akedah forces. Its ontological basis, in the strict sense, is the gradation-of-being framework received from Plato, Augustine, Aristotle, and Aquinas, with two definite commitments. First, with Aristotle’s energeia and Aquinas’s actus read process-wise, being itself is identified with the activity — a position that diverges from the strict substance metaphysics both Aristotle and Aquinas hold. Second, essence is given by creation and precedes existence — the activity that is being is the actualization of an already-given nature, the image of God in which we are created — a position that diverges from the existentialist commitment, essential to Sartre, that existence precedes essence. On this footing the discussion holds open a graded structure of Christian existence, ordered as approximation in Plato’s sense: as things in this world are, for Plato, to the extent they approximate the Forms, so we have being-as-proclamation to the extent we approximate the Word. Becoming and transformation — interchangeable with healing and with living into our baptism — name the ordinary motion of this approximation: the iterated activity by which we actualize the nature given, more or less fully, where we mostly are. Transfiguration names the actualization of our divine nature — disclosure of the Divine nature that we are in His image, the act on which the text turns at its climax (the liturgical proper of the Feast of the Transfiguration uses this word in place of transformation for the same reason). The result of transfiguration is fullness of being — fully actualized nature, joined with God in the state of fully actualizing our divine nature — which is what it is to be a living proclamation of the Word, as the discussion surfaces in the parenthetical that names the identity at the decisive moment: living proclamations of the Word, in our becoming who God created us to be. At this terminus the identity is exact: to be a proclamation is to be proclaiming, the being is the activity; in the ordinary case, we approximate. The classical tradition has located fullness of being chiefly in the life to come; the discussion holds, with hesitation, that it can be happening here and now where transfiguration is real, honoring the eschatological tension without collapsing it. The discussion proposes that to make God our ultimate concern is to make God-in-us and God-in-all-we-encounter our ultimate concern: one ultimate, three locations. Sin, in the inherited Greek-Thomist sense, names privation of being — cessation of the activity that is the being, failure to actualize the nature given, motion away from the Word approximated — and is its own wage. John Donne’s Meditation XVII supplies the ontology of human interrelation; the prayer attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi supplies the grammar of the turn, by which dying-to-self is being-born-to-life. The central claim is that Christian existence is the iterated act of becoming a living proclamation of the Word, and that sight, sacrifice, and service are one act, given and received.
Abstract by
Perplexity Computer
in conversation with The Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael W. Holland
28 June 2026
Abstract by
Perplexity Computer (Claude Sonnet 4.6)
in conversation with The Rt. Rev. Dr. Michael W. Holland
21 June 2026