Anglican Mainstream

By Alan Wilson, Guardian

By Albert Mohler

We are entering a new phase in the battle over the Bible’s truthfulness and authority. We should at least be thankful for undisguised arguments coming from the opponents of biblical inerrancy, even as we are ready, once again, to make clear where their arguments lead.

Back in 1990, theologian J. I. Packer recounted what he called a “Thirty Years’ War” over the inerrancy of the Bible. He traced his involvement in this war in its American context back to a conference held in Wenham, Massachusetts in 1966, when he confronted some professors from evangelical institutions who “now declined to affirm the full truth of Scripture.” That was more than fifty years ago, and the war over the truthfulness of the Bible is still not over — not by a long shot.

From time to time, the dust has settled in one arena, only for the battle to erupt in another. In the 1970s, the most visible battles were fought over Fuller Theological Seminary and within the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. By the 1980s, the most heated controversies centered in the Southern Baptist Convention and its seminaries. Throughout this period, the evangelical movement sought to regain its footing on the doctrine. In 1978, a large number of leading evangelicals met and adopted a definitive statement that became known as “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.”

Many thought the battles were over or at least subsiding. Sadly, the debate over the inerrancy of the Bible continues. As a matter of fact, there seems to be a renewed effort to forge an evangelical identity apart from the claim that the Bible is totally truthful and without error.

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By R R Reno, First Things

For a long time as a young teacher, I believed the danger of prostituting their minds by believing falsehoods was the preeminent, or even singular, intellectual danger my students faced. So I challenged them and tried to teach them always to be self-critical, questioning, skeptical. What are your assumptions? How can you defend your position? Where’s your evidence? Why do you believe that?

I thought I was helping my students by training them to think critically. And no doubt I was. However, reading John Henry Newman has helped me see another danger, perhaps a graver one: to be so afraid of being wrong that we fail to believe as true that which is true. He worried about the modern tendency to make a god of critical reason, as if avoiding error, rather than finding truth, were the great goal of life.

Like Plato and St. Augustine, Newman presumed that human beings fundamentally seek to know the truth. Our hearts are restless, not with fear of error, but a desire to rest in God, who is the fullness of all truth. The fulfilling activity of intellectual life is to affirm truth rather than recoil from falsehood.

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From Church Times

UNIVERSITY theology departments are facing a turbulent autumn with rounds of staffing cuts and closures.

The Student Christian Movement (SCM) said that it was “very con­cerned” over the plans of some uni­versities to axe courses and shed staff. Redundancies are likely to occur in departments across the country, as the higher-education sector suffers from swingeing government spend­ing cuts.

The reduced budget for universities means that an estimated 200,000 students will be left without university places this autumn.

Bangor University has announced that its School of Theology and Religious Studies will close, and the course will be “phased out”. The de­partment will merge with the equi­valent department at Trinity Saint David.

A spokesperson for Bangor Uni­versity said: “This is part of a new strategic approach to the subject in Wales, which is designed to safeguard and strengthen theology teaching, and which will result in the creation of a national centre of excellence in teaching and research in theology and religious studies.”

At the University of Birmingham, which has one of the largest and strongest theology and religion de­part­ments of any university in the UK, up to a third of staff could be cut. An ongoing review of the department will report this autumn. Eleven members of staff are earmarked for redundancy.

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By Ed Tomlinson

It has been wisely noted that the real schism within Anglicanism is between those believing in a revealed faith and those believing faith is still being revealed. Broadly speaking the first group get tetchy when they perceive others to be unfaithful to the revelation as found in scripture and affirmed by tradition, whereas those believing faith is open to change get frustrated when people seem inflexible.

As the battles within Anglicanism work themselves out so the liberal majority, spurred on by overwhelming cultural support of the zeitgeist, are winning the day. Increasingly Anglicanism is coming down on the side of ‘a faith being revealed’, seen in its embracement of women’s ordination, same sex relationships et al, and is becoming more and more liberal as a result. This change in the very nature of what the Anglican church is will have far reaching implications. Depending on your own theology you will either believe such change to be enlightened and wonderful or else abhorrent and even unchristian!

Leaving the implications and rightness/wrongness of current trends aside a bigger question needs facing. If liberalism is winning the day and represents the mind of modern Anglicanism (which the latest General Synod makes manifest) then does this affect the way we approach the creed? My challenge comes in the appropriateness of modern Anglicans stating ‘we believe in one holy Catholic and Apostolic church’ when all recent actions and decisions run contrary to that fact.

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By James D. Berkley, The Layman

“The misconceptions and heresies of our day take root not because they are completely preposterous,” according to Edith Humphrey, “but because they are twisted versions of something deeply significant that has been forgotten.”

Humphrey, New Testament professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, spoke at a meeting hosted Tuesday evening by Presbyterian Action for Faith and Freedom. Her subject, “Marriage: A Treasure to Be Kept,” was timely, because of the many same-sex marriage measures facing the General Assembly.

“Today, our films, our music, our art, our hearts cry out, ‘It is not good to be alone!’” Humphrey observed, “But loneliness is everywhere. … We are in the midst of a post-modern movement that has lost its sense of community, that does not recognize any shared norms, and that no longer has confidence that true communication can take place.”

Humphrey noted that this phenomenon is reflected in “business items on marriage, sex, and the standards of fidelity “that persist in returning to the PCUSA General Assembly.”

“Well then, what is it about sex, about the erotic, that is so enticing?” Humphrey asked. After she and everyone else in the room chuckled, she continued: “But really! Isn’t it that a physical encounter with someone else has the promise of taking me out of myself … at least for the brief moments of passion? There is something primal, visceral, exquisitely promising about the coming together of two so that they make one body.”

Humphrey acknowledged the many possible approaches to marriage now afoot, and the arguments, Scriptural and sociological, that accompany the radically departing viewpoints. She commended godly arguments that “refute those who are revising or distorting the Scriptures in order to provide a false foundation for the acceptance of easy divorce and same-sex behavior in the Church.”

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By Albert Mohler

Anne Eggebroten visited Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and what she found there shocked her. As a matter of fact, she was so shocked that she wrote about that experience in the July 2010 edition of Sojourners magazine. Readers of her article are likely to experience a shock of their own — they will be shocked that Eggebroten could actually have been surprised by what she found there.

In “The Persistence of Patriarchy,” Eggebroten writes about “the wide reach” of complementarian views of manhood and womanhood among conservative Christians. Her article is subtitled: “Hard to believe, but some churches are still teaching about male headship.” Hard to believe?

Can anyone really be surprised that this is so? In some sense, it might be surprising to the generally liberal readership of Sojourners, but it can hardly be surprising to anyone with the slightest attachment to evangelical Christianity. Nevertheless, Anne Eggebroten’s article represents what I call a “National Geographic moment” — an example of someone discovering the obvious and thinking it exotic and strange. It is like a reporter returning from travel to far country to explain the strange tribe of people she found there — evangelical Christians believing what the Christian church has for 2,000 years believed the Bible to teach and require. So . . . what is so exotic?

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By Matt Anderson, LifeSite News

The Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster has announced it will host its annual Theology of the Body lecture on September 14 in honor of Pope Benedict XVI’s scheduled visit to Great Britain that month. The lecture, entitled “In the Service of Woman – Men are Called to Greatness,” will be given by Brian J. Gail, author of the Christian novel Fatherless.

Edmund Adamus, the Director of Pastoral Affairs for the Diocese, told LifeSiteNews.com that the event “will hopefully play some small but not insignificant part in setting the proper and better scene and ambience in which to receive the Vicar of Christ.”

Both the theme of the talk and its speaker, he said, were chosen to highlight the modern secular crisis: the topic for the talk, for example, is intended to serve as a response to the blurring of gender differences that runs rampant in Great Britain and the world.

“More and more people are beginning to realize that the feminization of masculinity and the laddish culture that haunts the development of young girls and women is not providing the answers to life’s deepest questions about human love and relationships," said Adamus.

This loss of gender identity, he said, leads to a loss of personal identity; to regain it, men must be willing to respect and sacrifice for the women they love. “In paying due honor and respect to all women in all circumstances … we as men grow towards the fullness of our manhood in Christ – we become heroes," he said.

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By Bill Muehlenberg

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. Unfortunately in the secular West, the rejection of God – which was meant to bring freedom – has simply resulted in bondage: bondage to bad ideas, bad thinking and bad worldviews.

A reigning worldview in much of the West – at least on most university campuses – is postmodernism. Along with its half-sister, deconstructionism, it has had a very strong, and negative, impact. A major casualty of pomo and decon is the very concept of truth.

The concept of objective, universal and unchanging truth is now more or less rejected, and in its place are simply ‘truths’. We all have our own truth, and no one’s truth is better than another’s. You have your story, I have mine, and that is all there is.

Metanarratives, or grand, overarching stories which are universally true, have been rejected for individual or cultural stories. We are told to be suspicious of such mega-stories, and of all claims at having the correct interpretation of things.

Indeed, deconstructionists insist that there is no one correct interpretation of a text (which can be anything: an idea, a book, a work of art, or a piece of music). Meaning is given to the text by the reader – there is no objective meaning to the text. Readers define and create textual meaning.

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By Bill Muehlenberg

Homosexual activists both within and without the church are seeking to rewrite the Bible to push their agenda. They use many ploys to convince us that the Bible has no problem with homosexuality, and that traditional understandings are simply mistaken.

I have discussed some of these ploys elsewhere, but here I will address another one. This has to do with misunderstanding and misusing the purity and holiness laws found in the Old Testament. It is quite common for these revisionist to throw out the challenge that the laws forbidding homosexuality in the Old Testament also forbid things like eating animals which do not chew the cud, or fish without scales.

These critics who think they are quite clever argue,’ if it is now OK to eat all foods, why forbid homosexuality?’ As but one example, I recently received this comment: “Bill, it’s not just the homosexual Christians we should be worried about. What about the cray-fish eating Christians, or indeed the mixed-fabric wearing Christians. Both these ‘Christian’ types distort God’s holy directions as laid out in His bible. What do you suggest we do, Bill?”

While this fellow thought he was being cute, all he did was reveal that secular homosexual activists know nothing about biblical theology or Old Testament legislation. Sadly of course, many believers do not know much more either, so it is worth looking at this whole issue in some detail.

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By Julian Mann

Talk a lot about 'diversity' and 'community' and 'partnership' without being too specific about what you mean by the words.

Go to the nearest Mosque, especially if there is not one in your parish, stand outside it next to the imam and try to get yourself photographed in the local paper – with an inclusive smile on your face.

Practise that in front of the bathroom mirror.

Get involved in an 'apology for the Crusades' initiative in your local school.

Inveigle yourself onto the local radio and give 'thoughts' claiming that an inclusive god of 'love' is not really too bothered about what people believe and how they behave – provided they're inclusive.

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By Matt Kennedy, Stand Firm

Dr. Gagnon is the big dog when it comes to debates about sexual behavior and the Bible and this video is a great illustration of how thoroughly outclassed his opponents are.

When you go to the introduction you will see some other videos on the bottom. Click the video at the bottom right entitled, "Marriage and the Bible,". That is Dr. Gagnon's lecture. It is well worth the trouble. He deals in a very careful and detailed way with scripture, tradition, and the customs of the ancient world.

…David Wells for example wrote a string of important volumes during this period, including his seminal 1994 volume, "God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams".

In it he said this: “The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music, and those who want to squander the church’s resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing to stanch the flow of blood that is spilling from its true wounds. The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church, His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common.”

Os Guinness also penned a number of important critiques during this period, including his 1993 work, "Dining with the Devil". There he wrote, “The very brilliance and power of [modernism’s] tools and insights mean that eventually God’s authority is no longer decisive. There is no longer quite the same need to let God be God. In fact, there is no need for God at all in order to achieve extraordinary measurable success.”   Read here

Presiding Bishop Jefferts-Schori is to preach and preside at Southwark Cathedral on Sunday June 13.

From AAC

† "I am the way, and the truth and the life…"

"My understanding of idolatry includes the assumption that I can know and comprehend the way in which God saves people who are not overtly Christian. I understand that Jesus is my savior, I understand that Jesus is the savior of the whole world. But I am unwilling to do more than speculate about how God saves those who don't profess to be Christians. I look at the fruits of the life of someone like Mahatma Ghandi and the Dalai Lama and I see Christ-like features …"

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, Virginia Theological Seminary, May 25, 2007

KJS: Christians understand that Jesus is the route to God. That is not to say that Muslims, or Sikhs, or Jains, come to God in a radically different way. They come to God through human experience-through human experience of the divine. Christians talk about that in terms of Jesus.

RY: So you're saying there are other ways to God.

KJS: Human communities have always searched for relationship that which is beyond them, with the ultimate,with the divine. For Christians, we say that our route to God is through Jesus. That doesn't mean that a Hindu doesn't experience God except through Jesus. It says that Hindus and people of other faith traditions approach God through their own cultural contexts; they relate to God, they experience God in human relationships, as well as ones that transcend human relationships; and Christians would say those are our experiences of Jesus; of God through the experience of Jesus.

RY: It sounds like you're saying it's a parallel reality, but in another culture and language.

KJS: I think that's accurate.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefforts Schori interview by Robin Young on NPR's "Here and Now", Oct 18, 2006

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Rev. Professor Christopher Seitz, ACI

A reflection on the Pentecost Letter of the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church

The central teaching of Jesus Christ in John’s Gospel concerning the Holy Spirit is found in chapters 14 and 16 of the Fourth Gospel. The Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church is representative of the view that the Holy Spirit (or “the Spirit”) is responsible for endorsing a new understanding of sexual relationships as appropriate for members of the same gender. The warrant for this view more widely held is John 16: God the Holy Spirit is ‘leading the church into a truth’ the church has not known until now, and continues not to know elsewhere, as God has spoken this to The Episcopal Church (“The Spirit does seem to be saying to many within The Episcopal Church that gay and lesbian persons are God’s good creation, that an aspect of good creation is the possibility of lifelong, faithful partnership, and that such persons may indeed be good and healthy exemplars of gifted leadership within the Church, as baptized leaders and ordained ones”). This could either be a matter of timing – so technically God the Holy Spirit speaks only one truth on this matter, and so those who have not heard the Holy Spirit will hear the Holy Spirit leading them into new truth eventually (“Above all, it recognizes that the Spirit may be speaking to all of us, in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree. It also recognizes what Jesus says about the Spirit to his followers, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come” [John 16:12-13]) – or it could be that the Holy Spirit endorses diversity of hearings (“That growing awareness does not deny the reality that many Anglicans and not a few Episcopalians still fervently hold traditional views about human sexuality”) . This latter understanding seeks grounding in the Presiding Bishop’s understanding of the Pentecost event of Acts 2 (“Pentecost is most fundamentally a continuing gift of the Spirit, rather than a limitation or quenching of that Spirit”) as contrasted with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s reading of Pentecost as a “single understanding of gospel realities”(as she puts it) in a letter to which she is responding in defense of her own position.

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by Marvin Olasky WORLD magazine

One of the Bible's great statements about courage comes in chapter 5 of Esther. The Jewish queen of Persia has told Uncle Mordecai that she can't go before the king: If she does, she'll probably die. Mordecai responds with admonition—you won't escape by hiding—and then a line that has sent chills down my spine: "Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?"

Today's three great cultural flashpoints are abortion, same-sex marriage, and evolution. We can hedge on them and justify our hedging: Playing it cool here will help me gain for Christ people who would otherwise walk away.

Over the past 15 years I've tried to explain some of the problems of Darwinism. Last year I raised questions about the "theistic evolution" that Francis Collins espouses, but didn't offer answers—and several WORLD readers have pressed me for more. OK. Read more

By Edward Tomlinson

By Juan R. Vélez, MercatorNet

One of the leading intellectual lights of Victorian England will be beatified in England later this year. An unholy row has broken out over his significance.

In September of this year Pope Benedict XVI will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890), the famous convert from Anglicanism who was one of the leading intellects in Victorian England. Liberals and Conservatives each wish to claim Newman for their side. Which was he? MercatorNet interviewed Fr Juan R. Vélez to find out. Fr Vélez is co-author with Michael Aquilina of a forthcoming book, “Take Five: Meditations with John Henry Newman.” He is also preparing a biography on Newman titled “Passion for Truth: John Henry Newman.”

MercatorNet: The Pope was accused recently of hijacking Cardinal Newman to prop up the cause of conservative Catholicism. Liberal or conservative? Which was he?

Newman did not think in the terms “liberal and conservative”. What he did think about was the danger of rationalism: he saw rationalism as an enemy of Christianity. By rationalism he understood the philosophy which substitutes man’s ideas and conclusions for God’s revelation. He strongly contested the notion that religion is something man made which has no lasting claims. He was against subjectivism in religion. As a young Anglican clergyman at Oxford until the time he was named a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, he fought against a subjective religion that was not based on objective truths revealed by God to men.  Read here

By John Richardson

While you're here, why not join my Facebook group, Fans of the Thirty-nine Articles?

"A group for members of the Church of England, and the worldwide Anglican Communion, who think the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion published in 1562 are a great summary of the core doctrines which reformed the Church of England then and which ought to be at the foundation of its teaching and preaching today."

Matt at StandFirm has done this excellent post. The commentary below explores both the non-problematic cultural aspects (of which there were a few) but also the broader and essentially post-Christian theological and philosophical agenda which TEC here has openly adopted. Read here.