Category Archives: Anglican

Anglicans synthesising muddle from the Bible

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Canadian Bishop Sue Moxley had this to say about bible study at ACC-14:

We began this morning with Morning Prayer as we were to have a closing Eucharist at 4pm. The Bible Study focus was Mark 16: 1-8. One question was “If you were Mark, would you have ended with verse 8, or would you have ended the Gospel differently?” That was a nonstarter as some members refused to even think about tampering with the Gospel. The last question was “What will you be taking home to share in your churches about the Gospel of Mark or how Anglicans read the Scripture?” That discussion included the realization that Anglicans with different views of Scripture can read and share ideas together as long as no one thinks they have the only truth of the reading.

This approach to reading the bible is symptomatic of the muddle we find ourselves. It treats the bible as a thesis whose meaning is in question. Then, in using what appears to be a Hegelian dialectic of discussing thesis and antithesis, we come to a synthesis – an Anglican middle ground.

The problem is, the bible does not present a truth which changes depending on who perceives it or the culture in which it is read: it is a statement by a person – God – who had something particular in mind when he caused it to be written. When Bishop Sue says “as long as no one thinks they have the only truth of the reading” she is making at least two mistakes:

The first is that a reader of scripture can have a “truth of the reading”. It is the writer that has the truth of the reading and it is the reader’s job to understand that truth.

The second is the implication that if a reader firmly claims to have understood the truth that the writer was conveying, he is necessarily wrong. He could be mistaken, of course, but the purpose of discussing a reading is not to come to a middle ground of dissenting views, but to determine what meaning the writer intended.

Rowan Williams and most of the Western Anglican church is determined to find reconciliation through this kind of synthesising to a middle ground. It isn’t going to work.

Anglican Israel bashing

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One of the resolutions from ACC-14 in Jamaica displays the usual one-sided condemnation of Israel:

The Anglican Consultative Council…

laments the fact that current Israeli policies in relation to the West Bank, in contravention of UN Security Council resolutions, have created severe hardship for many Palestinians and have been experienced as a physical form of apartheid.

calls on Israel to:

end its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip

freeze immediately all settlement building with the intention to abandon its settlement policy in preparation for a Palestinian state

remove the separation barrier (wall) where it violates Palestinian land beyond the Green Line

end home demolitions, and

close checkpoints in the Palestinian territories

The hypocrisy is made all the more remarkable by the tortuous series of unnatural mental acts that the Anglican hierarchy goes through in order to see both sides of the case for performing unnatural homosexual physical acts, yet has no hesitation in being fiercely and vituperatively prejudiced when it comes to Israel.

Melanie Phillips has this to say:

Yet again, the Anglican establishment has singled out Israel for scapegoating, defamation and demonisation. A Resolution on the Middle East passed three days ago by the Anglican Consultative Committee parrots, as usual, Arab and Muslim propaganda against Israel – now the default position of Anglicanism as it genuflects to the force that is intent upon destroying it. Not all Anglicans by any means support this resolution which has been passed in their name: Anglican Friends of Israel has protested:

24

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10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. (Season Opener)
Terrorists known cryptically as TEC-ACoC take hostages in Jamaica.

12:00 a.m. -1:00 a.m.
Hostages are identified: Truth; Gospel; Honesty; Integrity (the original one).

1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Terrorists assail hostages with a newly developed mind-numbing bio-weapon: the Indaba. Civilians all over the Island are wailing and clutching at their heads.

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Counter-terrorists are dispatched from far flung reaches of Christendom with a single purpose: rescue the hostages.

3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Terrorists and Counter-terrorists do battle; Indabas are wielded to dreadful effect. The carnage is terrible.

4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Counter-terrorists wheel in the big gun: the Fourth Moratorium.

5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
The Fourth Moratorium suffers defeat through trickery and sleight of hand. One of the counter-terrorists, although he speaks 5 languages, didn’t know what “litigation” means and no-one bothered to explain it.

6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Counter-terrorists wheel in the other big gun: Section 4 of “The Covenant”.

7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Battle rages around Section 4; the Indabas go at it hammer and tongs decimating all in their path.

8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Section 4 falls.

9:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.
Terrorists counter attack with Resolution A.

10:00 p.m. – 1:00 a.m. (Mid-Season Cliffhanger)
Resolution A suffers apparent defeat but is actually smuggled out of the room and secreted in Resolution C which has disguised itself as Resolution B.

1:00 a.m. – 2:00 a.m.
Resolution C calls for the hostages to remain in terrorist custody until they die from too much conversation.

2:00 a.m. – 3:00 a.m.
Arch-terrorist Rowan the Enforcer deploys the ultimate weapon: he speaks.

3:00 a.m. – 4:00 a.m.
It is all too much after the Indaba attack: terrorists and counter-terrorists alike writhe on the floor in agony. Some bite off their own tongues. Rowan the enforcer smiles benignly

4:00 a.m. – 5:00 a.m.
A temporary truce is called while all descend on the local population to pillage their food supplies.

5:00 a.m. – 6:00 a.m.
Back at it. Stunned journalists try to make sense of the carnage.

6:00 a.m. – 7:00 a.m.
Truth; Gospel; Honesty; Integrity are battered and still hostage.

7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m.
The terrorists have won: the hostages will be subject to extreme interrogation techniques to break down their resistance – dialogue, group discernment and if all else fails, the Listening Process, said to be capable of boring the balls off a buffalo in 30 seconds.

8:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. (Season Finale)
The terrorists begin to write accounts of the battle that make them appear like the good-guys. Everyone goes home wondering what just happened.

Did anyone understand that? It doesn’t matter: what is important is the violence, blood, gore, torture, screaming and the fact that 24 will be returning for another season next year.

Imagine there’s no Anglican Church

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Reverse psychology evangelism from Liverpool:

The bells of Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral are to ring out to John Lennon’s anti-religious anthem Imagine.

The bells will play the 1971 song, which begins “Imagine there’s no Heaven”, as part of an arts festival on 16 May at 1200, 1230 and 1330 BST.

A cathedral spokesman said: “Allowing Imagine to be pealed on our bells does not mean we agree with the song lyric.”

The song has drawn criticism from some religious figures as Lennon himself has called the anthem “anti-religious”.

Liverpool Cathedral said it had carefully considered the “sensitivities” surrounding the song’s lyrical content.

“But we recognise its power to make us think. As a cathedral we do not shrink from debate. We recognise the existence of other world views,” added the cathedral spokesman.

This, of course, opens a whole new technique for evangelism in the 21st century: you make the atheist’s case for them instead of the case for Christ – to make people think. I wonder why no-none thought of that before. I expect Liverpool Cathedral helped pay for the atheist bus advertisements.

What is wrong with this picture

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The fiasco at ACC-14 in Jamaica has been roundly criticised by so many people, it’s hard to select particular comments. Here are some:

Philip Ashey:

It is a deficit of leadership. With all due respect, whether his actions were disingenuous or simply inept, the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot lay the blame for today’s missed opportunities for healing, reconciliation and the failure to adopt a text for an Anglican Covenant on anyone but himself.

Jesus said “Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘No'” (Matthew 5:37). Such integrity is at the heart of Godly leadership. How sad that it is missing in the leadership of the Anglican Communion. Pray for the leadership of our beloved Communion.

Robert Lundy:

This is the state of affairs in the Anglican Communion. Wise, learned, and, capable people abound in the councils of the Church. But when the time comes for them to address critical issues including ones of doctrine, morality, the authority of Scripture, the uniqueness of Christ as Lord and saviour of all, and Christians suing Christians, they call for more conversations and delays, rather than action.

Charles Raven:

Throughout the Jamaica meeting it was clear that the revisionist leaning Lambeth leadership was determined to control the outcome. For instance, Philip Ashey, a Ugandan representative resident in the United States was not allowed to take his seat despite being validly selected under existing ACC rules and precedent, causing Archbishop Henry Orombi to write in protest to the Archbishop of Canterbury, describing the decision to reject Ashey as ‘nothing short of an imperialistic and colonial decision that violates the integrity of the Church of Uganda.’

Mark Thompson:

We have once again been shown how firmly apostasy and deception is embedded in the international structures of Anglicanism. There is no hope for the future there. Generous-hearted faithful Anglicans have been willing to keep trying for a resolution through those structures and once again they have been betrayed at the highest level. The goodwill of faithful men and women has been presumed upon and taken as a sign of weakness or a lack of resolve. We need to pray for those who have been so seriously disillusioned this week.

It goes on and on. However, the Canadian delegate has this to say:

Well, we did it! As most of you know, I’m a process person, and would have not believed it possible. But today we did superb work and ended up with the resolutions on both the Windsor Continuation Group and The Anglican Communion Covenant.

An assessment so radically different from almost everyone else’s, that it’s hard to believe she was at the same meetings. I fear it’s the euphoria that accompanies getting one’s own way: no 4th moratorium on the lawsuits, no teeth left in the Covenant draft – actually no Covenant at all. A monumental waste of time except for the ACoC and TEC delagates who, when this is over will write the victor’s history, a fantasy awash with delusion and hypocrisy – just like the churches they will be returning to.

Why I am an Anglican

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In 1978 I became a Christian. A number of things conspired to push me over the edge: some who were close to me were healed after prayer; a nagging desire to make sense out of the universe refused to leave me alone; I had everything I needed or wanted, was not satisfied and yet the allure of more of the same held little promise. So after a week of wracking my brains on my place, if any, in the cosmos, I concluded that the question of whether Jesus is who he claims to be was somehow central to everything.

After another week of wracking my brains to decide if Jesus’ claims about himself held water, I decided to pray to a God whom I thought might not be listening to persuade me one way or the other. The next day I woke up convinced that Jesus is God and that he died for my sins; a conclusion based on the subjective, but I was as subjectively convinced of this reality as I was of the chair I was sitting on. I also woke up a non-smoker; I had smoked – anything that would ignite – for many years and had become an expert in quitting since I had tried so many times. This seemed to me to be an added seal of authenticity of the influence of someone outside myself; I awoke with no desire to smoke.

The closest church to my house was an Anglican church so I decided to talk to its rector. I was under few illusions about the Anglican church: in the light of my new-found fervour it seemed a tepid, pale imitation of what I was looking for. Nevertheless, St. Hilda’s was within walking distance, so I decided it was worth a look.

I made an appointment to see the rector and had decided that if he was too ecclesiastically sophisticated to be anything other than amused when I told him I had been born again, I would move on. He took me seriously, so I stayed.

Since then I have confirmed that much of the broader Anglican Church in the West espouses positions that I am diametrically opposed to. Social issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage; political views such as its anti-Israel stand and pro-left agenda; its pretence of inclusivity while excluding those with whom it disagrees; even its theological views on the resurrection, virgin birth, Christ’s atoning sacrifice and so on – in all these cases I have a differing view. In fact, we have reached the point where the Anglican Church has become a litmus test that assists me in coming to an opinion on current affairs: if the Anglican church agrees with something, I know I probably won’t.

I have been following the Anglican Consultative Council meetings taking place in Jamaica with some interest. Amongst the chaos, one thing is crystal clear: in spite of the pretensions of employing  consensus forming indaba groups, what is really going on are intense political machinations designed to impose a particular stamp on the Anglican future. Unsurprisingly, the TEC seems to be most adept at this; if they have their way, hyper-liberalism will dominate. As things stand now, I suspect the liberal juggernaut will thunder on in North America unimpeded, until it collapses in on itself and  disappears with a final whimper. Lawsuits, same-sex blessings, the ordination of gay clergy, the erosion of orthodox biblical Christianity will all continue for the moment.

When all is said and done, I have little interest in being Anglican. I have absolutely no interesting in church polity (a word that is now number 3 on my most detested words list), conversing with those who pervert the gospel to come to an agreed middle ground, diversity, inclusion, dialogue, discernment groups or indaba groups; all are vanity. I do have a great deal of interest in being Christian, even though I am a flawed and stumbling specimen. Nevertheless, the body of Christ I happen to find myself in is Anglican, I find the 39 articles are propositions I can, for the most part, go along with, I have come to appreciate the combination of structure and freedom to be found in the Anglican liturgy and finally, the Anglican Church of Canada has declared that ANiC is not Anglican.

Since I belong to an ANiC church, by the litmus test I mentioned above, I must be Anglican.

Who wants to go to a heaven full of clerical flotsam?

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I disagree with most of this article in the Irish times, but it makes some amusing points.

THERE IS no such thing as a Divine Being. So get a life, Dermot, or at least stop trying to foist your beliefs on everyone else.

I should apologise for that unseemly outburst: I’ve really no fixed view on whether or not there is a God, and neither could I care less one way or the other.

Which means, of course, if there is a Hell then I’m destined for it. And that’s fine by me. Who in their right mind would want to be stuck forever with the religious crowd anyway?

What could possibly be worse than having to spend eternity in the company of ayatollahs, archbishops, pontiffs, preachers, and their legions of glass-eyed, po-faced acolytes?

The big mistake the author is making, of course, is that the place he is happy to be destined for in the next life will probably be chock full of the clerical salmagundi he, understandably, wants to avoid in this.

I have a soft spot for Anglicanism, and not just because I’m a nominal member. It must be the only Christian denomination where, at least until recently, you didn’t even have to believe in God. Try to live up to the teachings of Jesus and nobody within the Anglican Communion cared whether you were a believer or not just so long as you didn’t make too much noise about it.

Anglicanism, the religion for the nominal atheist.

Is anyone listening?

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I remember in the 1990s I ran a program on my PC for SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence).

The idea was that SETI was listening to electro-magnetic energy from space to find intelligent life outside of earth; the program I ran was also running on many other PCs and analysed the data looking for a pattern.

This search for intelligent life is the origin of Rowan William’s Listening Process:

That the Instruments of Communion commit themselves to a renewal of the Listening Process, and a real seeking of a common mind upon the issues which threaten to divide us.

The problem is the inverse of SETI: anyone saying anything intelligible is ignored. Yet, this is Rowan’s hope for containing the chaos threatening the Anglican Communion. It is in vain: the ACoC and TEC are snakes and they are not listening: Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear. Ps 58:4.

Why the Anglican Communion Covenant is not going to work

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There may be none left who doubt that, but for those who do, the following is instructive:

Canon Kearon stated that Rev Ashey was not qualified as his membership of the Church of Uganda was as a result of a cross-border intervention by the Church of Uganda in the United States, a practice which had been consistently disapproved of by the instruments of communion since 2004.

So far so clear. However, it was also drawn to Canon Kearon’s attention that another infringement of the requirements of the instruments of communion had been the continuance of the lawsuits against orthodox churches in North America by TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada. The cessation of these lawsuits was a requirement of the Dar-es-Salaam Primates Meeting in 2007 as part of the compliance required of TEC and the ACoC with the Windsor Report and thus a condition for the re-entry of TEC and ACoC delegates to the Councils of the Communion ( they had been asked to withdraw from ACC 13 at Nottingham, but attended as visitors). How was it that TEC and ACoC had not complied with a requirement of the instruments of communion, yet had been readmitted, and that Uganda was not complying with the embargo on cross-border jurisdiction and yet its selected delegate was barred? The answer given that Uganda as a province had not been barred, only its delegate who was a product of cross-border intervention.

What comes across in all this is the lack of fairness and even handedness. TEC and ACoC are in constant breach of Lambeth 1.10, and by the secretary general’s own admission at the Saturday press conference, had in some cases continued to authorize same-sex blessings in defiance of the moratorium. They have not complied with the Primates’ call from Dar-es-Salaam to desist from lawsuits, but instead have increased them. Yet they are readmitted to full membership.

The group that is to decide on whether the covenant is to be adopted has made “cross border interventions” the unforgivable transgression in the mess that bedevils the Anglican Communion. The fact that the ACoC and TEC have not lived up to their part of the bargain by stopping the lawsuits and stopping the authorising of same-sex blessings is glossed over: also missing is the acknowledgement that the latter is what caused orthodox parishes to seek shelter in a different province in the first place.

The bias of the Anglican Consultative Council is clear: the ACoC and TEC receive a get out of jail free card.

Considering the duplicitous and slippery nature of both the ACoC and TEC, what is to stop them signing the Covenant while having no intention whatsoever of adhering to it? After all, that is how they have treated the moratoriums: they break them and attempt to conceal the fact by crouching behind meaningless concepts like “experiential discernment”; and the ACC smiles upon them benignly.

Why would we expect anything different with a signed Covenant? The best response we could hope for from the ACC would be a few tut-tuts, and then back to the main business of eco-justice networking, prophetic gender equality and singing appalling hymns.

Anglican eco-bigotry

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The Anglican church, ever willing to bend to the latest fad, has declared that the environment is a top Anglican priority:

Secondly, we want to try our best to make sure that all Anglicans see this (the environment) as their primary work because some people don’t think it is.

Oops, forgot about the Gospel – better mention it otherwise people will say we are no longer a church:

They actually think that somehow preaching the Gospel – which, of course, is our number one task – makes this work of a lesser importance. It’s one of the five marks of mission of our church, and safeguarding the integrity of creation is a core Gospel issue.

We all know what this is really about, though – nudge, nudge: Down with Capitalism! Workers of the World Unite! Viva Che!

In addition to that, I’m here to emphasize that the economic crisis the world is facing at the moment is an environmental opportunity because we actually can redirect our priorities. Clearly, the old capitalist system has failed and we don’t need to actually go back to it.

How can I join this Angli-Gaia revolution? You need an Internet connection, even though it was spawned from the evil, carbon belching, capitalist, military-industrial complex ARPANET:

Q: What would membership entail?

A: First, the person has to be able to connect to the Internet. We can’t really communicate with people successfully without using it.

In case anyone has any doubts that this is a totalitarian junta, be aware that, once in control, they will dictate what you sing:

every parish is required to do an environmental audit, which has to do with what they teach, what they preach, what they sing,

What you drive:

what cars they use, whether they could change their cars,

And even when you are singing in the celestial choir, they will be fiddling with your grave:

Graveyards, particularly, can be little oases of the protection of threatened species.