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  • You’re an Anglican Now, Scot McKnight, Leave the Baptistic Stuff Behind

    I never thought I’d ever see a debate on the subject of the inerrancy of Scriptures in an Anglican context.  But one Dr. Scot McKnight, Professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary and (I think) in the C4SO (the usual source of trouble in the ACNA these days) has put himself front and centre with a piece on the inerrancy of the Scriptures.  This is an important topic, but the way he sets things forth shows me that Evangelicals are too deep into their own stuff, even when they try to escape into places like the ACNA.

    My first exposure to the term was an article in the original Jerome Biblical Commentary, and needless to say they weren’t too hot on the idea.  They also got into the hermeneutical issues surrounding this, which I’ll come back to.  Later on I read Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible, which really was the call to arms (not WO) for the Southern Baptist Resurgence in the 1970’s.

    I think that the Scriptures are God’s authoritative revelation, period.  I used the term “unBiblical” regularly on this site to characterise positions which are either sub-Christian or completely non-Christian; the fact that we have this revelation makes this job possible.  The whole push for the inerrancy of the Scriptures a half century ago was the result of conditions which have changed.

    The undermining of the basic concept of the truth content of the Scriptures came from the advent of German Higher Criticism.  A good case can be made that the whole shipwreck of the Episcopal Church had its genesis in the acceptance of this in the seminaries.  Once this is done the Scriptures lose both their claim to truth and their relevance to Christians now.  This underpinned the modernist attack on traditional Christianity.

    Higher Criticism represented an attempt to beat the Biblical narrative, and how it came into being, into the form of German philosophy.  That may have made it possible to think that our seminaries had assumed the mantle of science, but it was pseudo-science, for many reasons.  One place where the deconstruction of that narrative has taken place is Biblical archeology.  McKnight speaks disparagingly of that, but the process has been going on since at least the days of Roland de Vaux and continues to the present.

    All of this created the shipwreck that hit the rocks after World War II.  The Episcopal Church bled members during the late 1960’s and 1970’s in the aftermath of this.  Evangelical churches picked up some of these pieces, fuelled not only by their affirmation of the truth content of the Scriptures but, in the case of the Pentecostals and Charismatics, the manifested belief that God did the same things to day that he did in the Scriptures.  It’s a lot easier to believe the former when you hold to the latter.

    Liberals, when surveying the wreckage they wrought, realised (if not admitted) the error of their technique.  So they came up with a new approach: postmodernism, where the idea shifts from “the Scriptures say it, but they’re not reliable,” to “the Scriptures say one thing, but really mean another.”  They’ve shifted the debate from an textual reliability issue to a hermeneutical one.  That, I think, is where the real conflict is, but McKnight and others are still deep into the stuff they started with.

    So what is to be done? In one place McKnight gives a clue by saying that “we can talk about “inerrancies”: Origenist, Augustinian, Protestant, Princetonian, and even postmodern!”  I give an example of this in my piece Why Evangelicals Don’t Read Philo Judaeus. Philo very much believed in the inerrancy of the Scriptures but had no problem denying, for example, New Earth Creationism.  I have discussed Origen himself in my piece The Significance of the Literal Meaning of Scripture: An Example from Origen.  Getting rid of the term “inerrancy” really doesn’t accomplish anything except perhaps making him and other refugees from Evangelicalism feel better about themselves.

    We need more than that.  What we need is some kind of agreement on a hermeneutic.  I left out the term “authority” from the discussion because I don’t think that any Protestant church has or can claim authority to interpret the scriptures and make same interpretation stick.  Given Anglicanism’s rootedness in the Apostolic tradition, a Patristic-based hermeneutic would make sense, but getting most seminaries and seminary academics to go along with that will be an uphill battle.

    So in the meanwhile: McKnight and others like him would do well to leave their qualms about things like inerrancy in their Baptistic past and move forward with what they really believe the Bible says and means.

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  • Those Hard Drinking Americans

    When The Atlantic notes it, it’s a problem:

    Right now we are lurching into another of our periodic crises over drinking, and both tendencies are on display at once. Since the turn of the millennium, alcohol consumption has risen steadily, in a reversal of its long decline throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Before the pandemic, some aspects of this shift seemed sort of fun, as long as you didn’t think about them too hard. In the 20th century, you might have been able to buy wine at the supermarket, but you couldn’t drink it in the supermarket. Now some grocery stores have wine bars, beer on tap, signs inviting you to “shop ’n’ sip,” and carts with cup holders.

    Some of the points made were ones I did in my 2011 piece Should Christians Drink?, albeit in a different context.  And I got blowback from that.

    My own family’s history of alcohol isn’t a happy one.  I think that a lot of that was fuelled by the pain of being in my family, which is one reason why I don’t attach Scots-Irish sentimentality to the whole concept.  That led to premature death and more abuse.

    “To be clear, people who don’t want to drink should not drink. There are many wonderful, alcohol-free means of bonding.” That’s part of the problem: the drinkers don’t like abstainers in their midst and will apply the necessary social pressure to dislodge their non-imbibing friends.  It was certainly that way in the hard drinking construction and oil industries I came into forty years ago and I doubt it’s changed with our effete, credentialed elite.

    This country has a drinking problem, and frankly short of abstinence I don’t know of a good way to fix it.  It’s a sad situation, but this country seems to have more than its share of sad situations these days, not the least of which is that a lot that hits social media is enough to drive anyone to drink.

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  • That They May All Be One, Even If Their Educational Level is Different

    This past weekend I reposted two articles The Neoliberal Age: The Decomposition of the Self – Covenant (Part 1 of 2) and The Neoliberal Age: The Decomposition of Anglicanism – Covenant (Part 2 of 2).  As some of you may suspect, the principal reason why I reposted these excellent articles is because they, at last, highlight what is probably my pet peeve about North American Anglicanism, be it in its Episcopal, ACNA, Continuing or Charismatic form: it’s class stratification, or more specifically the elevated socio-economic position of most of its adherents.  (They’re mostly white too.)  As the second article points out (it was really difficult to pick a particular passage out, there are so many good ones):

    Surely, even the most glancing look at the demographic make-up of our parishes would make clear why the social issues Anglophone Anglicans concern themselves with most passionately are indistinguishable from the popular causes of the urban white elite of the day. So it is that when we hear some official pronouncement from a diocesan office or synod, we hear little that is discernably Anglican by any doctrinal or historical measure, nor even Christian. Instead, what we are greeted with is something that is conspicuously identical to the ideological talking points peddled by the political machines. While this problem might be obviously skewed towards parroting the liberal talking points of the day given the state of our hierarchy, our conservative loyalists often do no better in resisting the thought-terminating influence of propaganda. TEC’s turn from being the Republican Party at Prayer to the Democratic Party at Prayer was, after all, little more than a sleight of hand in the parlor room of the ruling class.
    So why is our Anglican witness so mealy-mouthed, complacent, and derivative? Why are we, despite all our practiced journalese, so out of touch with both our Christian siblings around the world and the unchurched neighbors? Perhaps on an institutional level it is because Anglophone Anglicans have never experienced a true crisis of wealth and power until recent decades. Unlike our Christian siblings across the world who have and continue to suffer true persecution and are sustained by the blood of the martyrs, our current troubles are almost entirely self-inflicted. We have always been the church of the elite for the elite — and not just in England. For how small Anglicanism has been in America, a disproportionately large number of American presidents have been Episcopalians. Our stately pretentions run so high that the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Washington D. C. is instead known as the “National Cathedral.” What purchase, after all, do the dusty names of the chiefs of the Apostles have next to the glorious hegemony of the United States? Cuius regio, eius religio is our true ecclesiastical motto — that is, render unto Caesar the things which are God’s.

     

    American non-Catholic (a hat tip to Baptists and Pentecostals who don’t think they’re really Protestants) Christianity is class-stratified from top to bottom, with the Anglicans on top, the Pentecostals on the bottom, and everyone else in the middle.  That stratification is reflected in the educational level and ethnic makeup of the memberships.  There’s really nothing Biblical about Christianity being this way.

    Today American Christianity in general and the ACNA in particular are faced with things like Critical Race Theory and wokeness.  And it’s true that neither of these is Biblical either.  But ignoring the first unBiblical behaviour to deal with the second (and third and…) doesn’t help.  As long as North American Anglicanism doesn’t find a way to deal with its demographic trap, it’s going to face these issues with one hand tied behind its back, irrespective of the Biblical eloquence of those who rightly oppose the import of these ideas.

    It’s all ironic because the ACNA was ultimately birthed by the intervention of several African provinces of the Anglican Communion, which themselves are the demographic (and vis a vis TEC doctrinal) opposites of their North American counterparts.  I really think the ACNA missed a moment when it insisted on autocephaly from these bodies, and it continues to miss it by not even attempting to force the CoE’s hand in turning over the Communion to the Africans.

    Things get worse because many of those attracted to the ACNA from the Evangelical world come to it in the same largely white, upwardly mobile (ecclesiastically and socio-economically) group that shrinks from really pushing back from ideologies that come from the top of our secular society, as that would impede the upward mobility.  That’s the lesson from the recent stink re C4SO and the “gay Anglicans” row.  It’s one I’ve pointed out in my own church, which a few years back had the “Think Younger” idea about new ministers coming in and taking things over.  I had the bad taste to point out that their list of luminaries was overwhelmingly white and didn’t reflect the composition (or the future) of our own church.  Their response was rather mushy.

    This won’t be an easy task.  (Just ask the United Methodists!)  People from different classes look at life differently, and ethnic differences only complicate things further.  To weld these into one church is not simple and is going to involve putting aside stereotypes and conventional wisdom.  If done right, to do so will insure the doctrinal integrity of the church much longer than ignoring this problem.

    Our Lord prayed “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” (John 17:20-21 KJV) We usually think of our denominational differences with this passage, but if we can’t get our act together on issues of educational level (which drive our class differences these days) and the other things that set us apart from each other, does the organisational division really matter?

  • The Neoliberal Age: The Decomposition of Anglicanism – Covenant (Part 2 of 2)

    Clip source: The Neoliberal Age Part II: The Decomposition of Anglicanism – Covenant (Part 2 of 2) The Decomposition of Anglicanism – Covenant This is an essay in two parts. Part one may be found here. By Paul (H. Matthew Lee) “Anglican ministers and bishops are proud and rich, live in wealthy parishes and dioceses…

    The Neoliberal Age: The Decomposition of Anglicanism – Covenant (Part 2 of 2)

  • The Neoliberal Age: The Decomposition of the Self – Covenant (Part 1 of 2)

    Clip source: The Neoliberal Age: The Decomposition of the Self – Covenant The Decomposition of the Self – Covenant This is an essay in two parts. Part two may be found here. By Paul (H. Matthew Lee) “In combating racism we do not make progress if we combat the people themselves. We have to combat…

    The Neoliberal Age: The Decomposition of the Self – Covenant (Part 1 of 2)

  • Anglican Tidbit: Bookplate of Frederic S. Fleming, Rector of Trinity Wall Street

    Below is an interesting artefact: the bookplate of the Rev. Frederic S. Fleming (1886-1956,) Rector of Trinity Wall Street from 1932 to 1951.

    The book it came from was The Divine Liturgy by Herbert Luckock, which I reviewed here.  Given his High Church inclination, I’m sure it was a favourite.

    His signature in the book is here.

    Like other Episcopal ministers, he started out in the corporate world, in his case Nabisco.  He was elected to the episcopate but turned it down, preferring to be a rector.  He was a member of many boards, some of them charitable institutions.

  • The Sad Case of Knoxville’s Catholic Bishop, Rick Stika

    It’s getting complicated:

    I went to Knoxville at Bishop Stika’s invitation. The Pillar reported last month that the Congregation for Bishops in Rome had received complaints about Stika’s leadership in the Knoxville diocese, and was considering initiating an apostolic visitation, or investigation, in the diocese.

    The complaints, which came from both priests and laity in the diocese, focused on an investigation into sexual misconduct on the part of a diocesan seminarian. Priests alleged the bishop had an unusually close relationship to the seminarian, and had interfered with the investigation.

    For me, this is more than passing interest: it was in this diocese (actually it was in the Nashville diocese at the time, the Knoxville diocese is fairly new) that I met my Waterloo with Roman Catholicism, and still have close friends there.  I’ll make a few quotes from the excellent Pillar article and a few comments:

    Several priests said they are concerned that a Vatican investigation won’t look seriously at the constellation of issues the diocese is facing, or the crisis of leadership they perceive. Several expressed concern that Cardinal Rigali, who has sometimes referred to Stika as a “son,” would use influence in Rome to protect the bishop. Many expressed skepticism that, without public accountability, the Church’s process for justice would actually work for them.

    Some lay people told me the same thing. But others said something much simpler: With a diocese they believed to be in crisis, they just had no idea where to go. Or with whom to speak. Or how to get help — help they said was sorely needed — for their local Church.

    This is a key issue for Ultramontane Roman Catholicism in general.  When bad things happen, there are few places to turn because the famous Catholic penchant for subsidarity isn’t reflected in their own structure.  The result is that bishops and parish priests can become “little Caesars” with limited accountability to those whom they’re supposedly serving–the people of God.

    “What was sold was a $25 million cathedral and a $25 million campaign, and it was going to be paid for. Well, we all knew those were fantasy numbers to begin with. But nobody asked the right question,” one priest in a senior leadership position in the diocese told me.

    “If you asked how much the cathedral cost — well, the cathedral cost between $35 and $36 million. I don’t doubt that. What did the project cost? Well, because they had to buy property, they had to do site work, none of that was in the initial proposal. So the bottom line is the project is a $42 million project.”

    “The diocese only approved $25 million, but you ended up with a $42 million cathedral, which basically leaves you with $17 million to fund in a diocese. I mean we are not a rich diocese.”

    East Tennessee in general isn’t a wealthy part of the country, although traditionally Roman Catholicism has had an above average income demographic in this area.  But the gross overrun and inadequate planning reminds me of my own church’s disaster with its denominational office expansion.  The big difference from a numbers standpoint is that Stika’s project was larger by a factor of five than ours.  My guess is that he was trying to make a statement, but all he’s shown that, like my own church, he has champagne taste and beer pocketbook, and is no better a manager of funds than his non-Catholic counterparts.  But anyone who has followed the Vatican’s own financial scandals over the years, complete with dead bodies, knows that.

    Marcy Meldahl was the director of human resources, employment services, and benefits in the Knoxville diocese from 2004 until 2014…

    Meldahl claimed: “The bishop said to trustees of that scholarship fund: ‘I’m going to take that money, put in an IOU, and that IOU will pay you greater interest than what you’re getting now.’ Well, the IOU is only good if there’s going to be money to pay it back.”

    “And that’s the money that’s given to help pay tuition,” she said, “for people who can’t pay for Catholic education. And it’s given for that reason.”

    This is the issue that was the beginning of the end for me with Roman Catholicism, as I explain in this 2007 post:

    Back in the early 1980’s, I was involved in a Catholic Charismatic prayer group.  We were under a great deal of pressure, some of which was of our own making and some of which came from a Church which didn’t really care much for what we were doing.  It was also the days of “if you want peace, work for justice,” the nuclear freeze, and other left-wing emphases which tended to deflect hierarchy and faithful alike from their relationship with God.

    A major turning point for me took place on day when, while discussing things with one of our prayer group leaders, she mentioned that, because of the high tuition, she could not afford to send her eight children to Catholic school.  So they went to public school.

    That revelation was the beginning of the end of me as a Roman Catholic.  I concluded that any church that was too bourgeois and self-satisfied not to subsidise its own needful children to attend the schools it wanted them to attend was too bourgeois to be an advocate for social justice.  So I took my leave on a course that’s best encapsulated in The Preferential Option of the Poor.

    Instead of being a refuge from Blaine Amendment type anti-Catholicism in public schools, Catholic schools around here have turned themselves into private schools for those wealthy enough to send their children there.  Some dioceses actually step up to the plate and fix this problem, but Knoxville, because of the cathedral, is in no position to do so now, even if it wanted to on a large scale.

    I hope that Stika’s difficulties can find a happy resolution, both for himself and especially for his diocese.  But with Catholicism’s murky Ultramontane politics, I’m not holding my breath.

  • A Young Episcopalian Writes About Pentecost

    My last year in Church School was in sixth grade, after which I “graduated,” first into youth choir and then as an acolyte.  For that final year our teacher got the idea for us to put out a “newspaper” (the Jerusalem Daily News, obviously a take-off the Shiny Sheet) which might have been put out after the day of Pentecost, or Whitsunday.  I got to write two of the articles and they looked like this:

    New Sect Founded on Pentecost Day

    At 3:00 this morning a sudden rush of “wind and fire” came upon the apostles of the late Jesus Christ and their guests.  The early rumor was that the apostles and their guests were drunk, but Peter, one of the apostles, said that “they had been filled with the Holy Spirit.”  The new sect was called the Christian Church, and its doctrine is the one set down by Jesus Christ.

    Later in the day 3,000 people were baptized.

    3,000 People Were Baptized

    This afternoon 3,000 people were baptized, becoming members of the Christian Church.
    These people vowed to follow the doctrine of the church, like to take communion and to give prayers.
    After that the newly received people sold all their possessions and left the city.
    Two years ago John the Baptist was doing a similar ceremony in the River Jordan before he was murdered.

    Some comments;

    1. I think they had me write this in two stages.
    2. The business of the “late Jesus Christ” was a journalistic adaptation (I’d hate to see what our media would put down these days.)
    3. The business of “3:00 this morning” showed how much I understood the watch system of the New Testament.  If my parents taken a more proactive stance in my Christian education, I would have been informed that the Holy Spirit fell at 0900.
    4. The idea that the people “sold all their possessions and left the city” is entirely sensible in a wealthy place like Palm Beach.
    5. One of our Rector’s (Hunsdon Cary’s) favourite books to quote was Virginia Cary Hudson’s (relative?) O Ye Jigs and Juleps.  In it she expresses the desire to visit the Holy Rollers, but her parents wouldn’t let her go.  Little did I realize that I would end up in a Pentecostal church (and work for same for 13 1/2 years,) but God has a sense of humor.

  • Book Review: Ella Katharine Sanders’ Jacques Bénigne Bossuet: A Study

    In an effort such as this blog to present Bossuet’s works in English, one thing that becomes clear is that resources about his life and works in English are rather sparse. As Sanders herself notes at the start of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet: A Study, “Yet in England, notwithstanding the widespread and increasing appreciation of French […]

    Book Review: Ella Katharine Sanders’ Jacques Bénigne Bossuet: A Study
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  • Anglican Tidbit: A Bulletin from 1938

    From time to time I’ll present what I call “Anglican Tidbits,” which are little things from the.  Since North American Anglicanism has had an influx of people with little or no heritage in the Anglican world, I think it would be useful.

    The first one is a bulletin from Trinity Episcopal Church in New Orleans, dated 30 October 1938.  It is shown below.


    Some interesting things about this are as follows:

    • The Prayer Book is, of course, the 1928, put into use a decade earlier.  The pagination reflects the 1936 reformatting of the Psalms, which is what we normally see in copies of the book.
    • The Lectionary is the original one, not the 1945 version which most copies of the 1928 book contain.  I discuss the difference between the two here.
    • The hymnal was not the 1940, but the 1916, which can be found here.
    • It’s worth noting that there is no Holy Communion service; it’s Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer.
    • Evidently Trinity was high enough in the pecking order to have a Canon of the Ordinary to come deliver the sermon at the church.

    This bulletin was preserved because my grandmother, Myrtle Warrington, was memorialising her mother, who had passed away recently.  I think at least some of her brothers had been involved in the building of the church.  The Rector, Robert Coupland, had married her and my grandfather in 1916.

     

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