Category Archives: Anglican Angst

More on Stephen Sizer

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Stephen asks some questions here and comes to the conclusion that we are besieged by Christian Zionists. I’ve answered the questions in the spirit of Occam’s razor rather than Sizer’s conspiracy paranoia:

Unanswered Questions?

Why is there such a close relationship today between the Christian Right, the political establishment and the State of Israel?

Because Israel is the only functioning democracy in the region.

Why after 40 years, does Israel continue to occupy territory in Lebanon (the Sheba Farms), Syria (the Golan Heights) and Palestine (the West Bank) while Syria has been pressured to withdraw from Lebanon?

Because it is beset on all sides by those who wish to destroy it.

Why is Israel able to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons disregarding every international agreement while Iran is threatened with pre-emptive attack for seeking nuclear technology?

The same reason Western democracies are able to: they have the technology. What Sizer probably means is why is Israel permitted WMDs and Iran isn’t: because Israel is interested in defence, Iran in destruction.

Why has Israel been the subject of more UN Resolutions than any other country in the world?

Why ask such a stupid question? The UN is notoriously biased against Israel.

Why has the USA vetoed virtually every one of them?

The USA still has a remaining vestige of sanity.

Why have Britain and America become the focus of so much hatred from the Islamic world?

Because they have democracies that work and they are not Islamic.

Why are our countries the target for Islamist terrorism – despite our commitment to the rule of international law, democracy and human rights?

Islamist terrorists don’t care about any rule of law other than Sharia.

The answers to these questions remain inexplicable unless we factor in what is now probably the most influential and destructive movement amongst Christians today – Christian Zionism.

They are perfectly explicable; what is inexplicable is why a Christian has to resort to Zionist conspiracies to explain the obvious.

Even Evangelicals can be barmy

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Particularly when they are Anglican. Stephen Sizer is an evangelical Anglican priest; he is a member of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, formed at the Global Anglican Futures conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem in June 2008. He has endorsed the Jerusalem Declaration and supports the Third Province Movement.

Unfortunately, like so many Anglican clergy he cannot resist the temptation to tie his faith to politics; the difference with Stephen is that he is an evangelical who is anti-Israel.

Last weekend the Revd Stephen Sizer, vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water appeared at an anti-Israel meeting with an Islamist called Ismail Patel. Patel has not only accused Israel of ‘genocide’ and ‘war crimes’ but considers Disney to be a Jewish plot and supports Hamas, Iran and Syria.

Sizer is a virulent opponent of Christian Zionism and of Israel, which he has said he hopes will disappear just as did the apartheid regime in South Africa. He has also applauded Iranian President Ahmadinejad for having ‘looked forward to the day when Zionism ceased to exist’.

Nevertheless, the appearance of an Anglican churchman on a pro-Islamist platform in Britain is a new and significant development. The Church of England recently banned its clergy from joining the BNP; should it not equally ban them from siding with the forces of Islamofascism?

Anyone is entitled to a political opinion, even an Anglican. The problem is, when a church leader makes political pronouncements, the implication is that his faith is informing his politics: in this case, it isn’t. It is even worse when an evangelical – someone who believes that decisions made in this life determine a person’s destination in the next – subverts an important message by supporting a less important one.

Even more idiotic, Sizer has aligned himself with Islamism, a barbaric, hate filled death cult.

It is bad enough when the blatantly left wing ACoC and TEC spout this sort of nonsense, but when it comes from within FOCA, it shows that the unhinged can be found just about anywhere.

Words that have become repulsive: Gracious Restraint

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One comes to expect pharisaic phrases from the Anglican hierarchy, but none can set the teeth on edge quite as effectively as “gracious restraint”. It is one thing to bend words to make them convey something slightly different from their natural meaning; it is quite another to make them mean the exact opposite. “Gracious restraint” has become “graceless abandon”.

The bishop of Ottawa, John Chapman is the beneficiary of the usual liberal seminary indoctrination and has executed a perfect parisologist’s pirouette  to subvert meaning, make black white and apply Anglican Alchemy to make sense nonsense.

Thus, in a spasm of tangled antimony he manages to say:

I must be committed to honouring the church’s need to observe gracious restraint and as well, honour the prayer and discernment that has unfolded in the Diocese these last many decades. With these concerns in mind, I proposed to Synod 2008 that I would bring before the Canadian House of Bishops the following intention: That, we, in Ottawa, begin to explore experientially, the blessing of duly solemnized and registered civil marriages between same-sex couples, where at least one party is baptized.

Chapman is in the malodorous company of Ingham and Bird (whom, for Lent,  I have forsworn calling short) and I would be equally critical of all three, if it were not for an impulse to exercise gracious restraint.

Diocese of Ottawa: making wrong things right by doing them

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The Bishop of Ottawa has decided to begin blessing same sex unions. The reason given is:

Just as the Church was not able to come to a clear mind regarding the benefits of the ordination of women to the priesthood until it experienced the priestly ministry of women, Bishop Chapman has taken the process of discernment with regards to same sex blessings to a place beyond discussion.  Bishop Chapman believes that moving forward in the spirit of experiential discernment will allow parishes and congregations to observe and learn; allowing the Church to be better informed moving forward in preparation of next steps at General Synod 2010.

“While the issues are many, the solutions complex and the timelines demand our patience, it is my intention to move forward in our ongoing spirit of discernment,” stated Bishop Chapman. “We must “experience” the issue as a Church before clarity of heart and mind might be attained” adds The Bishop.

This new piece of Angli-jargon,  experiential discernment, gives the game away: the Diocese of Ottawa has abandoned its Christian heritage in favour of mock existentialist soup.

An atheistic existentialist such as Jean-Paul Satre would claim that, since there is no God, humanity does not have a predetermined essence that controls what we are or conditions our views of right and wrong. Rather, through making his own free choices, a person creates his essence – and his own right and wrong – by what he does. We create our own nature; existence precedes essence.

This only makes sense if you assume there is no God; but that has not stopped the Diocese of Ottawa from using the same principle in “discerning” whether same-sex blessings are the right thing to do. Instead of looking in the bible to find out God’s design and plan for humanity,  the diocese is saying “we will create our own moral laws by engaging in a questionable practice until it seems right.” This goes beyond pragmatism: the pragmatist does things and is content if they work. An atheistic existentialist does things to create their “rightness”.

Yet more evidence to show that the Anglican Church of Canada has ceased to be a Christian Church.

The Anglican Church gets no respect

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And it’s little wonder.

Michael Coren points out that:

Just as it’s usually only beautiful people who pretend that good looks don’t matter, it’s generally the rich who tell us that money isn’t particularly important. Well, it is if you don’t have any. And those drowning or swimming for their lives in the current economic storm know that unemployment, pay cuts and evaporating savings are more than mere dents in their hobbies. So when, for example, various Anglican and Roman Catholic leaders in Britain said recently that there were in fact “positive aspects to the recession” they were dismissed as religious clowns and out-of-touch dreamers.

And goes on to say:

The sudden realization that material wealth is transitory and that earning, spending and saving are as much symptoms as they are solutions should lead us to grapple for the greater and grander things in life. Such as God, faith, family, community, the spiritual and the knowledge that this is the land of shadows and that real life hasn’t begun yet.

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Bishop of London impersonating Jack Nicholson

This is entirely true; such worldly enticements as wealth and power are a distraction from life’s important questions: why are we here and what happens when we die? Once the distractions are removed, we are often forced to confront that which we have been assiduously avoiding. Regrettably, the buffoons in charge of the Anglican Church are ensnared in the very net from whose clutches the vulgar masses have been freed – accompanied by a chorus of clerical rejoicing.  The bishop of London, Richard Chartres

is paid a stipend of £57,040 a year. However, he and his family live for free in the Old Deanery, a Grade I-listed Wren house next to St Paul’s Cathedral. The apartment was refurbished for him at a cost of £300,000 in 1995. At the time, Dr. Chartres, a father of four, said the accommodation used by his bachelor predecessor was inadequate and that he needed a larger residence fit for “a public person involved in public life”, rather than a “suburban villa” for an “office wallah”.

And with nary a blush had these words of comfort to offer the “office wallas”:

he suggested that some of those who lost their jobs “seem to be relieved to get off the treadmill” and to consider the other things in life. Dr Chartres suggested that the credit crunch could give Britons a chance to “reboot our sense of what a truly flourishing human life consists of”. The bishop, the third most senior figure in the Church, added: “It is difficult to know whether to sympathise more with those who have lost their jobs or those who are left carrying even greater loads with higher targets and fewer colleagues.”

The sooner the bishop of London is relieved of his ecclesiastical treadmill, the better. Perhaps he would gain some perspective.

According to the Anglican Church of Canada, Jesus was a racist

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The ACoC has published some Lenten Meditations.

Here is one of them:

“… a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the houseof Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ ” – Matthew 14:22-27

This not a story for people who need to think that Jesus always had it together, because it looks like we’ve caught him being mean to a lady because of her ethnicity. At first, he ignores her cries. Then he refuses to help her and compares her people to dogs.

But she challenges his prejudice. And he listens to her challenge and grows in response to it. He ends up healing her daughter. What we may have here is an important moment of self-discovery in Jesus’ life, an enlargement of what it will mean to be who he was. Maybe we are seeing Jesus understand his universality for the first time.

This meditation makes a number of important points:

Jesus did not “always have it together”. This is modern vernacular for saying Jesus was not sinless.

Jesus was prejudiced against a woman because of her race. The woman in question points out his error, Jesus becomes enlightened and understands his “universality for the first time.” Thus, Jesus was not God, made mistakes and had to be set straight. The reference to understanding his universality is undoubtedly an attempt to point out that, once the woman corrected him, Jesus came to the light as proscribed by 21st Century liberalism: inclusivity is all encompassing, paramount and – well, god.

This is an officially sanctioned document from the ACoC: it denies both Jesus’ divinity and the fact that he is sinless. The ACoC seems to be going out of its way to present itself as a non-Christian organisation; I think it has succeeded.

Rowan Williams is out of touch with everything but his eyebrows

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A degree of sanity from a fellow Welshman

A CONSERVATIVE cleric warns that Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams could spark violence against Christians after repeating his claim that elements of sharia law could be incorporated into British justice.

Dr Williams revisited the issues on the first anniversary of the day he originally made the claim.

Now the Welsh head of the Church of England also insists public opinion is increasingly in favour of it.

But Dr Tudor Griffiths, rector of Hawarden, said if Dr Williams believes there is public enthusiasm for sharia law, he is desperately out of touch.

But Dr Griffiths, who is also canon chancellor of St Asaph, warned that when Swansea-born Dr Williams first made his comments it led to an outburst of violence against Christians in Nigeria.

He said: “Many will simply hear that the Archbishop has reiterated his support for sharia law and it will be used as propaganda and will feed violence in some areas of the world.”

How out of touch? Let me count the ways:Add an Image

The 911 way: “the terrorists had no choice”

The Druid way:”Archbishop becomes druid”

The Marxist way: “Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism”

The Darwin way: “Anglicans back Darwin over ‘noisy’ creationists”

The gay way: “Rowan Williams: gay couples reflect the love of God”

The Zulu way: “Concerns are expressed over Indaba group ‘manipulation'”

Diocese of Niagara: a succession of shame

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The rot in the Diocese of Niagara started many years ago and has been passed down through the laying on of hands to each new bishop: John Bothwell, Walter Asbil, Ralph Spence and now Michael Bird.

John Bothwell began his reign of error in 1972.

In the early 1980s a friend of mine believed that God was calling him to become a priest in the diocese of Niagara; since he was a Christian, this was a brave move. Things went well for him academically, but John Bothwell had devised a test to weed out the undesirables in Niagara priests.

Before the final interviews candidates were made to watch a movie. Not just any movie, but a hard-core pornographic movie of homosexual men performing acts upon one another that normal people would rather not think about. The ostensible reason for this was to prepare the would-be priests for real life in the sunny Niagara Peninsular; indiscriminate inclusivity being paramount, any expressions of disgust were predictably used to filter out judgemental and diversity-intolerant candidates. To his credit my friend failed the test. Subsequently, after steeling himself for the inevitable assault on his sensibilities, he did become a priest

The reason that the diocese of Niagara is in the heretical mess that it is in today is because the way was carefully prepared by Bothwell and the subsequent troupe of delinquent, scelestious theomaniacs posing as bishops that followed in his footsteps.

Even though Michael Bird is a prat extraordinaire, not all the credit for Niagara’s heterodox buffoonery can be laid at his doorstep: in order to prosecute his folly, he stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before. Which is just as well considering his height.

Gene's Inaugural Incoherence

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Gene Robinson has been invited to offer prayers at Obama’s inauguration.Add an Image

Bishop Robinson said he had been reading inaugural prayers through history and was “horrified” at how “specifically and aggressively Christian they were.”

This must be the new evangelism at work: a bishop in the Christian church who is horrified by expressions of the faith that he is charged with defending.

“I am very clear,” he said, “that this will not be a Christian prayer, and I won’t be quoting Scripture or anything like that. The texts that I hold as sacred are not sacred texts for all Americans, and I want all people to feel that this is their prayer.”

When he says “The texts that I hold as sacred are not sacred texts for all Americans “ Gene provides a perfect illustration of the muddled relativistic thinking that has permeated the Anglican church. Either a text is sacred (meaning it is inspired by God) or it isn’t. If Gene held the back of his cornflakes box as sacred, that would not imbue it with any sacredness; nor does his viewing the inconvenient parts of the Bible as not sacred change the fact that they are.

Bishop Robinson said he might address the prayer to “the God of our many understandings,” language that he said he learned from the 12-step program he attended for his alcohol addiction.

Or, more accurately, “the gods of our many understandings”.

The Folly of the Cross

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From the Guardian:

Don’t cherish the old rugged crossAdd an Image

A Sussex vicar is right to remove the ‘scary’ crucifix from his church. After all, Christians only go there for reassurance

Rev Souter said the traditional Christian symbol was frightening children and scaring off worshippers at St John’s Church in Horsham, West Sussex.

Rev Souter has endured some criticism from more traditional Christians who were under the impression that the agonising death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus is the sine qua non of their religion; that the sins of the world are absolved by Christ’s blood. That may be so, responded the Rev, but the crucifix was “scary”, so it had to go.

And you know what? I’m with the vicar on this one. People don’t go to church to be confronted with the sinewy dilemmas of faith: they go for reassurance, fellowship, maybe the chance to buy a nice baseball cap with a picture of a fish on it. If you just want to pray for Auntie Maureen’s knee to get better, you don’t want to have to think about some poor bugger nailed to a tree at the same time.

For a while now Anglicans in the West have been working hard on a new religion without all the messy and difficult to explain bits: like the cross, Jesus’ Divinity, Virgin birth, bodily resurrection and atoning sacrifice.

So you can’t really fault a secular journalist for pointing to ground that has already been surrendered by a largely apostate church.

The world has seen what bespectacled, bearded and learned clerics are blind to: Christianity without the cross is an irrelevant, archaic social club. Bereft of meaning, power and conviction it has nothing to offer that the local pub cannot do better.

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 1 Cor:18-19

It appears that “those who are perishing” are the now clergy charged with revealing to others truths they no longer believe themselves.