Anglican Mainstream

In other words, some say this, and some say that, and who is to say who is wrong? Yet this is not a recipe for unity but for disaster. Bishop Jones needs to read Richard John Neuhaus on ‘The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy’, and to look at what the revisionist lobby is saying. The midway position on this topic is not one that can be sustained, not least because it is not one that the key protagonists wish to hold.  John Richardson

by Rowan Williams, Guardian

We shouldn't leave politics to managers and economics to brokers – or be afraid to reintroduce 'virtue' to public discourse

Human beings begin their lives in a state of dependence. They need to learn how to speak, to trust, to negotiate a world that isn't always friendly, and involves unavoidable limitations. They need an environment secure enough for them to take the necessary risks of learning – where they know there are some relationships that don't depend on getting things right, but are unconditional. The family is the indispensable foundation for all this.

We are also beings who take in more than we can easily process from the world around us; we know more than we realise, and that helps us to become self-questioning persons who are always aware things could be different. We learn this as children through fantasy and play, we keep it alive as adults through all sorts of "unproductive" activity, from sport to poetry. It is the extra things that make us human.

This is closely connected with understanding and sympathy for others. If you live in a world where everything encourages you to struggle for your own individual interest and success, you are encouraged to ignore the reality of other points of view – ultimately, to ignore the cost, or the pain of others. The result may be a world where people are articulate about their own feelings and pretty illiterate about those of others. An economic climate based on nothing but calculations of self-interest, fed by a distorted version of Darwinism, doesn't build a habitat for human beings; at best it builds a sort of fortified box room for paranoiacs.   Read here

By N J A Humphrey, The Living Church

In his presidential address to the Church of England’s General Synod in London on Feb. 9, Rowan Williams stated his strongly-held belief that the Church desperately needs “to recover … something of the tragic recognition that not all goods are compatible in a fallen world.” If this is the case, he said, “our job is not to secure purity but to find ways of deciding such contested issues that do not simply write off the others in the debate as negligible, morally or spiritually unserious or without moral claims.” He went on to note: “Something of that ‘tragic’ awareness is hard to avoid when we look at the decisions that face us in our Church.”

Rowan Williams’s own awareness of the “tragic” in the life of the Church has been shaped, I believe, through his engagement with the works of that expert of the “tragic” in literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky. In 2007, Rowan Williams was on sabbatical from his duties as Archbishop of Canterbury. While on sabbatical, he wrote Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007; page numbers following quotations are in parentheses). In the days leading up to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, the appearance of a book about the works of a nineteenth century Russian novelist was viewed by some commentators as an instance of Williams’s penchant for diversion from the burdens of ecclesiastical office. Far from having nothing to do with practical matters, however, the book is profoundly relevant both to the one Church and to the Anglican Communion.   Read here

By John Richardson, Guardian

Few of seek it, but those of us who undergo great torment and survive can emerge all the better

Like most people, I have known those to whom life has been exceptionally good, who seem to have sailed through it with all the advantages and few of the problems. Then I have known others who, if there are such things as "fairness" and "fortune", seem to have had an unfair share of life's misfortunes.

Out of the two groups, however, whilst I have sometimes envied the former, I would far rather spend quality time with the latter.

This may be the result of my own background (I do not mean, by this, my faith). But I suspect it is rather a recognition, common to us all, of a positive quality in those who have "been through it", which is missing from those who have not.

Take Nelson Mandela, for example. Part of what makes him admirable is his dignity. Yet I doubt that he was born dignified. On the contrary, I suspect he was made that way precisely by his experience of indignity.

Now it is true that the kind of indignities heaped on Nelson Mandela may have quite a different effect on someone else. It was, we might say, "in the nature of the man" to turn out as he did. Nevertheless, we may surely doubt whether, had his life been "better", what he is today is the man he would have become.

I am sure, therefore, that suffering can improve us.

But there is nothing to guarantee it will. Nor does such improvement depend on suffering per se. This is one reason why I have little time for some of the self-inflicted "sufferings" of Lent. To make life marginally less pleasant, and then to imbue that experience with spiritual meaning, seems to me actually to belittle real suffering – unchosen, uninvited, unwelcome suffering – such as many people endure.

Read here

By Wesley J Smith, First Things

It is astonishing to me the fervor with which some in the life sciences seek to dismantle the very concept of human freedom. If they have their way, we will go from, “The devil made me do it,” to perhaps, “My genes made me do it,” or, “My genes as mediated by my experiences made me do it,” to now apparently, “My chemicals made me do it.”

At least that is what Penn biologist Anthony R. Cashmore seems to be advocating in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in an article in which he claims that human free will is fiction. First, Cashmore claims that our behavior is controlled by a “trinity of forces,” one of which is the “inherent uncertainty of the physical properties of matter.” From the article, “The Lucretian Swerve: The Biological Basis of Human Behavior and the Criminal Justice System (no link, here’s the Abstract):

Read here

by David Yehezkel

Many countries and world leaders have accused Israel of responding disproportionately to aggression from Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. 

By Bill Muehlenberg

(Clip)  For millennia the West was based on the monotheistic religions which viewed creation as the finite result of an infinite God, while the East has been shaped by monism (the belief that all is one) and pantheism. But recently these two opposing worldviews have experienced a massive crossover.

There are various reasons why East and West have lost their distinctive differences, and become so entwined. I here wish to focus on just one area. Western popular culture and the entertainment industry have done much to promote the pantheistic worldview and New Age spirituality.

Whether it be popular films such as the Star Wars series, or bestselling New Age tomes such as The Secret by Rhonda Byrne or A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, on all sides the West is being inundated with Eastern thinking and New Age concepts.

The most recent – and most spectacular – example of this is the runaway hit film, Avatar. It is a classic example of the pantheistic worldview, dressed up to suit modern Western tastes. It is thus quite a part of the New Age revolution which has conquered so much of the West over the past few decades.

Part of the reason why the New Age appeals so much to Westerners is that it offers the Eastern religious system but without much of its more demanding religious and ethical emphases. People are free to choose in the New Age spirituality what they like, and little or no demands are made on them.

Many of the people today who tinker with the East are really just imbibing in the New Age smorgasbord. They pick and choose those aspects which they like, and leave those which they don’t. It is all very Western really, fitting our consumerist lifestyle. Thus Eastern thoughts and concepts have very much become a part of Western life.

And films like Avatar are in many ways just a reflection of this. Instead of a creator God who stands outside of us, and places expectations and demands upon us, in the new Easternised spiritualities of the West, people are free to call the shots and determine what is right and wrong, true and false.

Indeed, they get to be God. That is the real attraction of the New Age worldview. Instead of a transcendent God with whom we must do business, and bow to, we in fact are all a part of the divine already. We just need to realise that we are already God, that we are already divine.

Read here

by Marcia Segelstein for World Magazine

By Gene Koprowski – FOXNews.com

As the Copenhagen climate conference drew to a close Friday, Czech President Vaclav Klaus, long a global warming skeptic, had a message for the world: do not dictate to humanity how to live based on an "irrational ideology," which he sees as the product of political correctness.

Global warming is a "new religion," not a science, he said in an interview with FoxNews.com.

"I'm convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon, global warming is not the real issue of temperature," said Klaus, an economist by training. "That is the issue of a new ideology or a new religion. A religion of climate change or a religion of global warming. This is a religion which tells us that the people are responsible for the current, very small increase in temperatures. And they should be punished."

Klaus, the second president of the Czech Republic since the fall of communism, is often called the Margaret Thatcher of Central Europe. In the interview, he sounded more like Winston Churchill, vowing to defend liberty and freedom from those who would restrain global economic growth.

"I'm absolutely convinced that the very small global warming we are experiencing is the result of natural causes," Klaus told FoxNews.com. "It's a cyclical phenomenon in the history of the Earth. The role of man is very small, almost negligible."

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by Kim Trobee, editor, CitizenLink.com

With the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species fast approaching, Dr. Meyer explains the holes in the theory of evolution and the magnificent ode to intelligent design.

by Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, President of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership

WashingtonPost.com

Hat-tip: TitusOneNine

Why does a rabbi care about whether or not the Catholic Church becomes more welcoming of disaffected Anglicans? In this case, it’s because I welcome all moves which increase diversity within religious community. But whether or not this new move will accomplish that remains to be seen.

What appears to be a move toward greater inclusiveness  may actually facilitate the homogenization of both churches directly affected by this process. People may opt to leave a community rather than work within it to maintain the vitality of their way of being members of a particulate church. They may, because of moves like this one by the Vatican, opt, in a version of the words of the old Pall Mall cigarette commercial, switch rather than fight.

Read more

by Marcia Segelstein, Guest Columnist for OneNewsNow.com

What we worship defines us and controls us.  And sometimes figuring out what we really worship isn’t easy.

Timothy Keller is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and author of the just-released book, Counterfeit Gods.  He writes that while some cultures still practice idol worship in the traditional sense, "internal idol worship, within the heart, is universal."
 
Anything and everything we turn to in order to satisfy our deepest needs and longings can become idols.  Even good things such as family, love, and morality become idols when they take the place of God.  As Keller writes, "If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol."

Romantic love, fulfillment, self-expression and fame all have the potential to become idols.  So do material success, financial well-being, and prestige.  Keller believes the current economic situation offers an opportunity to identify our idols.  If we can’t live without something, then something’s wrong.
 
Keller believes that we all have idols.  Some are subtle and insidious, others not.  Fame, for instance, can do terrible things to people when it becomes all-important. It can grow into an addiction, an idol that takes top priority — over friends, family, decency.  A friend who worked with me at CBS News used to joke that TV cameras projected rays that turned otherwise normal reporters and anchors into self-absorbed, ill-tempered monsters.  One on-air personality once confided to me that her own family said they didn’t know who she was any more. 

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by David Ould

Hat Tip: Stand Firm

On we go with our thoughts on this subject.

Having considered the practical outworking of our theology and the need to be consistent in application, this time a small observation about the language we use.

I was visiting a friend yesterday who pastors a church plant in the west of Sydney. The group of churches of which he is as part has a Statement of Faith which includes the following expression about the relationship between men and women:

equal and different

As complementarians we often speak about men and women being "Equal but Different", indeed a large women-led organisation here has that name. Here’s the thing, though. The "different" part comes across negatively. "Equal" is good, but then we say "but" and so communicate to some that there’s a contrary, negative assertion coming.

But we believe that the distinct complementary roles that God has designed men and women to have are a good thing! So, my friend encourages me, we should speak of Equal AND Different. Both are good things and we should give no cause to understand otherwise. 

by Bill Muehlenberg

Richard Dawkins … has a new book out, The Greatest Show on Earth, and he did an interview with Newsweek about it just recently. In the interview it is clear that Dawkins is still up to his same old party tricks. He continues to pontificate on something he knows nothing about: God.

Strangely, he sees nothing amiss in claiming expertise in something he is clearly way out of his depth on. If I started pretending I was an authority on evolutionary biology (Dawkins’ field) and claimed to have a knock-out argument against it, I would rightly be howled down with derision. I would immediately be accused of being a pompous, arrogant fool.

Yet when Dawkins does exactly the same thing, all his groupies swoon in wonder and delight. So much for the hard-headed rationalism of the anti-God brigade. Indeed, plenty of intellects have also taken Dawkins to task for this appalling arrogance. As left-wing literary critic Terry Eagleton put it,

“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.”

He goes on to castigate all atheists who are so clearly out of their depth: “The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.”
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Yet even this is not my ‘worst case’ scenario, for it is possible to cope with a variety of outside threats, so long as one is inwardly strong. My real worry is that the Western world will be surpassed by the East not only economically but culturally. And the danger here, I believe, would come from an intellectual decline of the West, manifesting itself through a decline in cultural vitality and scientific endeavour. 

The immediate cause of this musings is an article I came across by a gold analyst (here as a pdf), warning of the potential danger of hyperinflation. I am not an economist, and am therefore not in a position to judge his prescience, but I know a Christian who is, and he is making exactly the same prediction for similar reasons, namely that far from being almost out of the recession caused by the credit crunch we are about to have our ‘swine ’flu’ moment as a second wave of problems hits us in the form of runaway inflation. Read more

From Church Times

THE NEXT generation is being betrayed by a utilitarian approach to reason, one that asks “What is the use or profit of this?”, the Archbishop of Canterbury said this week.

Dr Williams was speaking on Monday at Rikkyo Gaukin Univer­sity, an Anglican institution in Tokyo, during a week-long visit to Japan to celebrate the 150th anni­versary of Nippon Sei Ko Kai, the Anglican Church there.

Dr Williams challenged those who contrasted religion and reason, suggesting that theirs was a narrow interpretation of reason: “A way of arguing and testing propositions, usually so as to become better at manipulating the world around us”. This secular approach, he argued, had not proved entirely successful: “A rationality that has brought us into the age of nuclear weaponry and global economic meltdown invites some sharp questions, to put it mildly.”

He criticised the likes of Darwin, Marx, and Freud as having a debt to Christian theology, and yet cutting off the branch on which they were sitting.

Speaking to the university stu­dents, Dr Williams cited St Bernard’s dispute with Peter Abelard, in which St Bernard argued that “the ultimate test of being reasonable was whether you understood what your place was in the universe.”

Separation from God left people defenceless “against the destructive powers that imprison our true humanity”, Dr Williams said. “Reason properly understood here is what ought to deliver us from this shrinking and defacing of what we are in our full dignity.” It would help students to “understand their place and potential in society”.

This was more than “a narrow preoccupation with material re­wards, . . . just preparing students for the job market and rewarding obsessive and competitive patterns of learning behaviour.

“Just at the moment, in the wake of last year’s financial crisis, people throughout the world are asking about what kinds of behaviour are life-giving and sustainable, now we have seen the effects of greedy, individualistic, self-absorbed, and obsessional practice. . . Relating to God requires of us a radical accept­ance of the fact that we are de­pendent beings, that we stand on the edge of mysteries we cannot fathom, and that the true direction of our lives is not necessarily what our own unexamined and selfish ambition might suggest.”

On Wednesday, the Archbishop addressed a congregation of more than 2000 at a eucharist in the Roman Catholic cathedral in Tokyo. He spoke of the troubled past of the European mission to Japan, which had always had “a complicated relationship to politics and power, to trade and money”.

He praised the Church in Japan for its readiness in recent decades to express public grief and penitence over “past errors”, and he urged the Church to continue its “barefoot mission”, displaying the qualities of simplicity, risk, solidarity, and rev­erence for the God in others

Read here

by Stephen Meyer

When James Watson and Francis Crick elucidated the structure of DNA in 1953, they solved one mystery, but created another.

For almost a hundred years after the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859, the science of biology rested secure in the knowledge that it had explained one of humankind’s most enduring enigmas. From ancient times, observers of living organisms had noted that living things display organized structures that give the appearance of having been deliberately arranged or designed for a purpose, for example, the elegant form and protective covering of the coiled nautilus, the interdependent parts of the eye, the interlocking bones, muscles, and feathers of a bird wing. For the most part, observers took these appearances of design as genuine. Observations of such structures led thinkers as diverse as Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Maimonides, Boyle and Newton to conclude that behind the exquisite structures of the living world was a designing intelligence. As Newton wrote in his masterpieceThe Opticks: “How came the Bodies of Animals to be contrived with so much Art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the Eye contrived without Skill in Opticks, and the Ear without Knowledge of Sounds? . . . And these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from Phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent . . . ?”

But with the advent of Darwin, modern science seemed able to explain this appearance of design as the product of a purely undirected process. In the Origin, Darwin argued that the striking appearance of design in living organisms—in particular, the way they are so well adapted to their environments—could be explained by natural selection working on random variations, a purely undirected process that nevertheless mimicked the powers of a designing intelligence. Since then the appearance of design in living things has been understood by most biologists to be an illusion—a powerfully suggestive illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. As Crick himself put it thirty-five years after he and Watson discerned the structure of DNA, biologists must “constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”

But due in large measure to Watson and Crick’s own discovery of the information-bearing properties of DNA, scientists have become increasingly and, in some quarters, acutely aware that there is at least one appearance of design in biology that may not yet have been adequately explained by natural selection or any other purely natural mechanism. Indeed, when Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, they also discovered that DNA stores information using a four character chemical alphabet. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions—the information—for building the crucial protein molecules and machines the cell needs to survive.

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