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Smyth’s Spankings Come Back to Haunt British Evangelicals
It’s not getting better, even with the departure of the current Occupant at Canterbury:
The long knives are out. John Smyth’s sadistic behavior which has claimed the Archbishop of Canterbury, could claim as much as 30 percent of the Church of England’s evangelicals, a confidential source told VOL.
There has been a conspiracy of silence — Omerta — to protect those accused of abuse, VOL was told. “Up to 30% of the CofE is tainted.”
Evangelicals have grown rapidly in number and influence these past thirty years on the assumption that they “put bums on pews.” It has similarities with the prosperity gospel preachers who, one by one, have fallen from their prominent perches.
My reaction–and one David Virtue reproduced–a while back was this:
Pilavachi isn’t unique in his being drawn to kinky sex practices; the Anglican Evangelicals have had their woes with John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher and the Iwerne Camp fiasco. What is wrong with these people?
I think that is the question that British Evangelicals should be asking themselves. I’m not sure I have a good answer for that, but one thing is obvious: the reputation that Evangelicals have to “put bums in pews” is being tarnished by putting bums somewhere else they’re not supposed to be. But perhaps a conversation starter is in order.
In addition to the usual prurient reasons, I think some of this comes from the idea that “suffering builds character.” While it can do that (James 1:2-4,) and corporal punishment is certainly a fast way to induce suffering, it seems to me that if you, almost an adult, got that from someone who was supposed to be your spiritual mentor, what ends up getting built is pain and resentment. A regimen to build maturity needs to be built more constructively, which is one reason why people on this side of the Atlantic join the military and go to places such as Parris Island. (Fun fact: I had a student who was in the Marines and one of her last duty posts was being a DI at Parris Island. She was definitely up to it.)
A more Christian approach for this problem–and one Anglicans on both sides of the Atlantic should seriously consider–is to spend time with people who really have suffered in life from poverty and learn from their experience. That’s been my life in the Church of God these last two score, and it’s been an education. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that, after a lot of deprivation, people tend to err on the side of creature comfort, even in relief operations.
One thing is for sure: Evangelicals in the UK need to take their lumps on this and get back to doing what their name implies: evangelising the island, because they’ve got a competitor who does a lot worse than spanking.
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Lack of Post? Not Really!
My posting on this blog is sparser than it used to be, and especially these last few months. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been inactive online; I’ve been doing a lot of posting, but not here. So perhaps it’s a good idea to bring everyone up to date.
It’s worth reminding everyone that this blog wasn’t the first site I put out on the internet. That honour goes to vulcanhammer.net; this one came the following month in 1997. My objective with that site and its progeny has been to disseminate technical information for the geotechinical (soil mechanics and foundations) industry. Ultimately the idea was that a) that information would be useful for people in developing countries (and students here) to raise their standard of living without a paywall and b) to be a Christian outreach in the process, with this site as an auxiliary to aid in that. Eventually I just put the relevant Christian material there along with everything else.
Six years later I started the site Chet Aero Marine, which initially documented my family history in the sky and later on the water. This site has experienced quite a lot of “mission creep” (like some of our weapon systems) and one of these expansions was as a home for the sites for my Fluid Mechanics Laboratory course at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. But now it is the platform for my latest adventure: teaching engineering at Lee University, and specifically Statics.
I’ve discussed the need for an institution like Lee to have an engineering program. But at a time in life when most academics are looking to “hang it up” I plunged into a course which, although I took it a long time ago and used it in my family business, have never taught it. So there’s a lot of course prep, and if you look at the course site I’ve developed you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I feel very strongly that engineering in particular is a good thing for Christian colleges to do. In an day when the liberal arts are as politicised as they are, we need a balance, and an engineering program is one way to accomplish that. Engineering programs also produce graduates which can have an income to pay back their student loans and give the practitioners a decent living, and that’s more than many majors can say. And, of course, by putting at least some of my course material online, others can benefit, as they have done with my other courses for many years.
In the process of all of this engineering education has its peculiarities. I’ve been at this since 2001, and was in practice before that. I’ve been an advisor both to curriculum development and further accreditation of the program. As one of my colleagues at UTC noted, it’s not very often you get to do that in the early stages of a program, and for the opportunity I am grateful.
Finally I, like the great Saint-Venant, believe that engineering is a kind of ministry whose benefits will make people’s lives better. Too much Christian benevolence is focused on relief, and while relief is important (as those just to the east of me in North Carolina will tell you) prevention of the effects of disaster can have a greater impact at lower cost. Traditionally that job has been the state’s, but that isn’t always the case, and with governments becoming more erratic in their regard for their people we can expect other people and organisations stepping up to the plate with civil and other projects.
Lee also requires a devotion at the start of class; I’ve drawn from the many stories that I communicated to my students at UTC online and also from my last devotional book Month of Sundays.
So perhaps stop by and check this out; I’m also teaching Dynamics at Lee this Spring. As they say in late night, there’s more to come.
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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.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 