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Ministerial Character, Intention, and the Sacraments–North American Anglican
This has been a lot hotter issue in the past than it is now, but it’s an important one. Bossuet discussed it in his History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches; my comment on the subject is as follows:
Especially interesting are the Vaudois, who were in reality an unauthorised, non-celibate religious community in Catholicism more than a stand-alone church; their main fault is that they believed that unworthy priests did not administer valid sacraments. (Anyone who has been in church work knows that gauging the worthiness of ministers can be a dicey proposition at best; I think the Vaudois were unreasonable in that regard.)
This is not to say that we should not be vigilant in weeding out ministers of bad character; it means that they are able to administer sacraments and do other good things, shall we say, in spite of themselves. On that point, getting rid of the sacraments doesn’t really solve the problem, especially when we consider those who have evangelised in the past and then fallen. They have a lot to answer for, but at least someone involved is going to heaven…
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Just a Reminder of What Happens to People Who Resign in the UK
As a follow-up to my post Justin Welby Throws the Towel In, a reminder of what happens to people who resign in the UK is in order:
Be seeing you!
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Justin Welby Throws the Towel In
You can read his resignation letter above.
In my own church we have a successful minister who, at a previous church to the one he’s in now, had a campaign for his church entitled “Trading Your Title for a Towel.” When he resigned his church for another appointment, I noted that the only thing he could do was throw the towel in.
That’s what Justin Welby has done. When he was appointed, quite a few in the ACNA felt a thrill up their leg at the idea of an “evangelical” becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, as they hoped it would ultimately result in the ACNA being in communion with Canterbury, a long-time goal for many.
Well, as was the case in 1783, we’re on our own, and I think that reality has sunk in around the ACNA and elsewhere.
I’ve never been enthusiastic about Justin Welby. I could not believe that the same government that passed the Equalities Act would appoint an orthodox Archbishop, and subsequent events have not disappointed. He has compounded that with a corporatist management style (not appropriate for a church.) His undoing was his misplaced confidence in the police; the UK’s law enforcement apparatus’ inverse priorities are all too evident these days.
I doubt that the government that appointed him–especially with Labour at the helm–will do anything but worse in the orthodoxy department, and the decline of the Church of England will continue.
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Divine Healing and the Collect for St. Luke
Today is St. Luke’s Day, and I am reproducing the collect for same from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. It specifically calls on God to “(m)anifest in thy Church the like power and love, to the healing of our bodies and our souls…”
Bodies? Recently we’ve been regaled on Twitter with a cessationists’ conference where they discuss what the Holy Spirit isn’t doing these days. One of those is supposedly divine healing. This brings up a good number of Scriptural problems, but it also brings up another question: was cessationism as understood today the faith of the Reformers? The short answer is no, and things like this–which date from the early years of the English Reformation–are evidence of same.
It also refutes people who think that, in typical Evangelical style, there was the Apostolic Age, then centuries of total darkness until ______________ showed up.
I discuss these issues in more detail in Born to be Alive: The Spirit Poured Out.
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The Meaning of “Reformed Catholic”: A Response to Gerald McDermott–The North American Anglican
I find the debate over Anglicanism’s position between Protestant and Catholic somewhere between unenlightening and tiresome, because it doesn’t really get us to what Anglicanism is supposed to be. Subsequent events have shed some light on the subject but it’s ignored by many who should know better.
As someone who has been both in my lifetime, I feel i’m in a good position to comment on this issue, and I’ll try to get to the point:
- Some think Anglicanism is Catholic because of its episcopal government. But churches in the Wesleyan tradition (the Methodists and my own Church of God) have bishops and centralised government and are anything but Catholic, although people like J.R. Graves have tried to argue to the contrary. (The Lutherans are also subject to this criticism, with the same response.)
- Others think that it is Catholic because it requires (or used to require) liturgical worship. This panders to a tradition that thought it was putting the Bible at the centre of worship when in fact it was putting the pulpit and the preacher in that place.
- Still others think that “High Church” is a clear sign that we have creeping/creepy Catholicism in the church. Being one of the now diminishing survivors of the pre-1979 BCP PECUSA church, High Church certainly was ceremonial (to excess in many ways) but it wasn’t really Catholic. “Swimming the Tiber” in 1972 showed just the opposite; the RCC handled its liturgy in a way whose informality surprised, as I noted in There’s Catholicism and Then There’s….
- Ultimately we must deal with Anglicans who have moulded, in Tractarian fashion, their 1928 BCP liturgy around what they think is really Catholic. The way Roman Catholicism is really practiced depends to some extent on who is at the top. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI tried (in different ways and with different degrees of success) to pull the drift under Paul VI back to a more traditional form of Catholicism. The current Occupant of the see of St. Peter is trying to undo that, but what he’s aiming for is left-wing Protestantism, not traditional Protestantism. I have characterised those Anglo-Catholics as “more Catholic than the Pope” who yearn for unity with Rome but are better off staying where they are while waiting to see if the “mother ship” can stay off of the reef.
- One thing that has complicated this debate is defining “Protestantism.” This is not a univocal idea; even at the start we have the Lutherans and the Reformed at odds with each other, a process that influenced Anglicanism’s early development. To say that Anglicanism is really Reformed is, IMHO, a misnomer; any group of churches who put a confession and repentance/absolution in all of their central liturgies is obviously not counting on unconditional predestination and election to carry their people through.
As long as we continue to dicker over this point, Anglicanism will continue to be a way station rather than a destination for many people.
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An Anglican Healing
The news came as a shock for Jenn Murff and her husband Justin. In June of 2022, they learned she had a tangled mass of blood vessels in her brain known as an arteriovenous malformation or “AVM.” On a scale of 1-6, it measured a five. It was so large and complex, they couldn’t find a neurosurgeon qualified or willing to perform the delicate, high-risk procedure. Without it, the mass could rupture causing permanent brain damage.
Watch and Read “Abundant Healing Saves Woman with Grade Five Arteriovenous”Although he’s sporting a decidedly “Sydney Anglican” look in the video, Justin is none other than the Ven. Canon Justin Murff, whose article in VirtueOnline I recently reviewed in The ACNA is Really at a Crossroads. This is a wonderful testimony and a nice lift in these uninspiring times.
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A Reminder of What Happens “When Church Becomes Pointless”
One of the oldest posts on this blog–one that has survived platform changes over the years–is When Church Becomes Pointless. Written in 1997, it was primarily directed at the Episcopal Church, where I was raised, but as evident then and now it can happen to any church.
That time was an interesting one in Episcopal History. (What time has been boring the last half century?) The Episcopal Church took a major fall in its attendance since the tumultuous days of the 1960’s and 1970’s, and by the time I posted the original piece the downward trend had levelled off or even shown a small uptick. That didn’t last long: in 2003 the church opted to ordain V. Gene Robinson as bishop and that began an era of conflict and more downward trends that resulted in much litigation and the formation of the ACNA. The decline has continued, mostly now driven by the church’s aging demographics.
Driving the downward trend was the existence of serious unbelief in what the church traditionally taught, and few believed less and talked about it more than the bitter Southerner John Shelby Spong. So how would people react to being told this from the pulpit? In my original piece I set forth the following:
Let’s suppose that you really believe that a) the basic teachings of Christianity are false and b) that you’re idealistic enough to want to “do good” under the new rules. What’s the quickest way of getting going? Well, to start with you have the usual plethora of political groups, environmental organizations, the government, the United Nations, and countless other organizations that have nothing to do with the church but which propagate your message. All your church is succeeding in doing is to add one more organization to the confusion. It would be simpler to simply dispense with the church and proceed with the secular organizations.
So let’s take this a step further; suppose you are sitting in an Episcopal pew listening to John Shelby Spong go on about why the basic truths of Christianity have no basis in reality and that those who teach them are a bunch of morons. Suppose that you finally realize that you think that Spong is right; that all that you’ve said when you’re repeated the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed is false and that the life you have is all you’re expected to get. What should you do? You should first realize that life is short and that, if you’re going to live you’d better hurry. So the sensible thing for you to do is to get up, gather your family, walk out of the church, get into your Lexus or Mercedes, and head to Atlantic City or Las Vegas or South Florida or wherever you need to go to live it up while you still can.
That was based on the experience of the first drop, and the second, to use the BCP/KJV’s expression, was like unto it.
So how did this take place? The demographic of the Episcopal Church–and its Main Line counterparts–explains part of this, but another important factor was the introduction and propagation of modern Biblical criticism in Episcopal seminaries, starting in the last part of the nineteenth century. Although we’ve moved from modern to post-modern criticism where we shift from “the Bible isn’t reliable enough to say anything” to “the Bible says (a) but really means (b),” the corrosive influence remains the same. It starts with the academy but then filters down through the clergy to the laity, who are the last to get the memo but the first to wonder “what happened?” when things change.
So how to the people who brought us this justify their idea, both after the first drop and certainly after the second? There are two shared assumptions of left and right that underlie this, neither one of which hold water:
- People “need” church. Both left and right are right about this for a certain universe of people. However, as we say in the Church of God, I have come here to tell you today that for a wide swath of the populace this assumption is wrong, and that swath is getting wider. They may need church and they certainly need God, but they either don’t know it or don’t want to face it.
- The church needs to be “in sync” with the culture. One the left it involves adopting all of the causes of the secular left, which leaves us with the differentiation problem noted above. On the right the imperative to evangelise pushes the church to adopt the forms of the world, but eventually there comes the point where they “cross the line” and adopt the culture’s idea, and that’s where a good portion of Evangelicalism is at these days. What neither side understands is that, if the church is leading the culture, this works; when it’s following, it does not.
So what is to be done? With churches like the Episcopal, there isn’t much with the institutional inertia that can be done. With those churches who are “further upstream” from this process, they need to recognise two things: a) they don’t need to bend to every demand of the academy, which is trapped in a system designed for scientific pursuits but applied to non-scientific ones with poor results, and b) they need to figure out where to stop in moulding themselves to fit the culture, especially in the name of the income stream.
This is where we’re at after all these years; may God help us to discern his true will and do it.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 