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When God Pulls the Plug
Jim Workman’s piece in The Living Church Foundation on "Turning Away from God" is a good treatment on the subject of institutions and God, and certainly relevant for the present state of the Episcopal Church. But it’s also a reminder to everyone that institutionalism isn’t God’s original plan for his people.
God established the proper centre of worship at the temple in Jerusalem. The major flaw with the Northern (Israelite) Kingdom is that they moved that centre of worship to places such as Bethel. Had they done otherwise, they would have had to acknowledge the political supremacy of Judah, which they were not prepared to do. Eventually they wandered in and out (mostly in) of idolatry, and eventually they fell.
But the temple wasn’t an absolute guarantee for Judah either; when it prostituted itself through idol worship to the neighbours, God used same neighbours to destroy the temple and the Southern Kingdom. God can and will pull the plug on any institution if that institution is not faithful to him and his commandments.
It’s that simple.
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Yahweh in the Morning: Clap Your Hands
This week Emmanuel adds a little "percussion" to their music with Clap Your Hands.
Actually, Emmanuel does use some percussion in their music other than that. But the whole business of percussion in Christian music is one that the "Jesus Music Era" had to tackle, both on its "evangelical" (Calvary Chapel, coffeehouses, etc.) side and on the Roman Catholic side as well.
There were (and still are) a good number of people who believed that percussion had no business in Christian music, that it was simply too carnal. On the other hand, there were those who, seeing a generation turned on to music that had a steady beat to it, felt that it was necessary to put it in to reach out to people. In the 1970’s the "leader of the pack" in that regard was Petra, which shocked a good number of people with their hard rock sound. Between the two were many variations and degrees.
On the Catholic side the aversion to percussion (other than the ubiquitous tambourine) was more uniform, although it’s surprising that one of the earliest productions–Peter Scholtes’ They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love–features a good deal of it (just take a look at the album cover!) NALR artists were also known to "let their hair down" on occasion.
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D. James Kennedy Had His Moments, Too
The passing of D. James Kennedy is a loss for Christianity. Kennedy literally revolutionised personal evangelism with his Evangelism Explosion course of study. And he lived his own course, taking the initiative to share the Gospel when the opportunity presented itself.
Well, most of the time.
I used to be very active in the deep foundation construction equipment business. One of my colleagues was a Rhode Islander contractor and equipment designer/distributor named Charlie Guild. Like many people in the geotechnical field, Charlie was an evolutionist, which caused him difficulty with Christianity. This bothered another mutual friend, a construction material salesman named Earl Seck, who was a member of Kennedy’s church. Earl worked for a long time to set up a meeting between Charlie and Pastor Kennedy, which he finally did in the latter’s office in Ft. Lauderdale.
Charlie and Kennedy went back and forth for a long time about evolution and other issues. The meeting was coming to an end when Earl asked Kennedy, "Don’t you have a couple of questions to ask Charlie?"
Kennedy paused. The light came on.
The "questions" Earl had in mind were the Two Diagnostic Questions, the centrepiece of Evangelism Explosion. They are as follows:
- Have you come to that place in your spiritual life where you can say for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven?
- Suppose you were to die tonight and stand before God and He were to say to you, “why should I let you into My heaven?” What would you say?
Kennedy asked Charlie the questions, presented to him the Gospel, and lead him to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. Charlie was a superlative Christian man until the time of his death a few years ago.
By the way, how would you answer those questions? If you’re not sure where you’re going, click here and find out what Charlie learned.
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From Each According to His Ability. To Each According to His Need. Maybe.
In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx set forth his famous dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. In the land where everything else is upside down, it should be no surprise that Palm Beachers can obtain free discount prescription card. And from the county no less!
This, however, points up to an interesting phenomenon: one reason the rich get richer is because they control their spending relative to their income. Marx, himself no proletarian, is a case in point. Part of Marxist theory is that the surplus value of the poor would be exploited to the point where their income would never match their needs. But Marx himself spent just about every penny he could get his hands on (including everything Engels sent him from Manchester) and ended up having to hock the family silver, turning himself into what one commentator called a “perpetually bankrupt duchy.” Little wonder Marx saw outgo surpass income so easily.
Living in Palm Beach, I saw fortunes squandered literally to negative net worth. But I also saw things such as I describe in The Event of the Season. There’s a lesson in that, but in a culture where conspicuous consumption–once only the pastime of tasteless nouveaux riches–is now de rigeur, it’s hard to keep things on an even keel.
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John Shelby Spong: Calling the Bluff of a White Supremacist
Gary L’Hommedieu‘s article The ‘Honesty’ of John Shelby Spong” is an interesting analysis, but there’s one point he might want to carry further with a little information. The point is this:
According to Bishop Spong, Rowan Williams was “appointed to lead”, by which Spong means to manipulate the political process of the Anglican Communion. Such after all is the birthright of Westerners. They lead; others follow. His attitude toward the majority of Anglicans, and thus toward the majority of people on earth, is one of monumental condescension. This is one of the things that couldn’t have been made up, except perhaps by a White Supremacist in another era: by virtue of their inferior nonwestern socialization the majority of the Anglican primates are inferior nonetheless, and they ought to be treated so by their betters. That their pre-scientific animist “prejudices” should be given credence in the councils of the Church is indecent and shows a failure of moral leadership.
Spong’s attitude became all too apparent at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, when he actually got into a near shouting match with the Africans.
Spong, as he likes to remind us, is a Southerner, and thus is a descendant of white supremacists of another era. (This is not an uncharitable generalisation; white supremacy was simply assumed by most people raised on that side of the racial divide in the South from the days of slavery to the 1960’s.) His transformation from that to radical is, in part, an attempt to achieve upward intellectual (and perhaps social) mobility. Unfortunately his attitude towards the Africans shows that he is all too willing to take a leaf from his ancestors’ playbook when it suits his purpose.
The problem with racial supremacists of any kind is that most theories of racial supremacy are propagated by races working from a position of weakness relative to their neighbours. That weakness stems from one of two sources. The first is that the race is seriously outnumbered and surrounded by the neighbours; the best examples of this are the Germans (World Wars I and II) and the Afrikaners (apartheid.) The second is that the race has internal problems that are most easily papered over by creating a myth of superiority, and Spong’s ancestors fall into this category, as documented in Evangelicals and Politics: Somebody Finally Gets It.
But perhaps, if we get beyond Spong and look at TEC in general, we see signs that both of the causes may be at work, thus a need to fabricate superiority. The result is predictable:
The bitter irony of the Episcopal Church, even if it is not yet recognized by the majority, is that it has become the quintessential Ugly American. There is an instinctive sense of cultural, if not racial, superiority that is unobscured by fashionable rhetoric and staged moral confrontations. Everyone else can see it. Americans cannot. The Asian and African Primates clearly see the Western Primates as the latest expression of the White Man’s Burden voicing its indignation that its genius and good intentions are being questioned. This is the hubris of the present Episcopal Church which the retired Bishop of Newark has spread out on the world’s table.
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The Old British Car and the Anglican Communion
The whole back and forth about Who can expel The Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion reminds me of the old British car, i.e., those products of that rickety chandelier called British Leyland (MG, Triumph, Rover, Jaguar, Austin, Morris and Wolseley) in the 1960’s and 1970’s. When these cars ran, they were the best, but when you needed them the most, they broke down.
As I understand it, the Anglican Communion has four instruments of unity:
- Archbishop of Canterbury
- Lambeth Conferences
- Primates’ Meeting
- Anglican Consultative Council
There are two logical conclusions from this:
- To be a member of the Anglican Communion, one must be a part of all four of these.
- If a province is expelled from one of these by any means, it’s out of the Anglican Communion.
Canon Brooks’ contention only makes sense if one assumes that expulsion from the ACC reduces a province’s affiliation from four to three. But this would also work if, for example, the CofE decided to formally break communion with one of the provinces. Given the current leadership of the CofE, this is unlikely.
Is this any way to run a Communion? It’s almost as silly as the old Polish parliament, which required unanimous vote to do anything. But the Anglican Communion again is like the old British car, designed for the cool climes of Albion but overheats when sent to places like Texas and Florida.
One thing’s for sure: the Anglican Communion is the ricketiest chandelier in Christianity right at the moment.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 