Since Anglican churches still maintain a loose connection to Christianity, wishing holiness on a competing religion’s ritual seems a little odd. Anglicans normally reserve the attribute of holiness for gay marriages.
Much like watery Anglicanism, ISIS wishes you a holy Ramadan, too; except, if your children don’t comply, they will be crucified. ISIS, as far as I am aware, has yet to wish anyone a Merry Christmas.
From here:
I would describe myself as a secular Christian in the same sense as secular Jews have a feeling for nostalgia and ceremonies,” said Dawkins.
[….]
Dawkins grew up in the Anglican faith but became atheist in his teens. Last year, he said in an interview with The Spectator that he could be described as a “cultural Anglican”.
Someone claiming to be a secular Christian is about as sensible as someone claiming to be a boiled kipper.
The fact that Dawkins also sees himself as a “cultural Anglican” appears – to me, at least – rather less oxymoronic since the recent divorce between Christianity and Western Anglicanism; it’s common knowledge that many North American Anglican bishops believe themselves to be boiled kippers.
Huron College used to be an Anglican theological college. The college’s current Faculty of Theology features Ingrid Mattson as the Chair of Islamic Studies, a discipline that I expect will increasingly find a natural home within Western Anglicanism.
Anglican Primate Fred Hiltz, unable to contain his enthusiasm at the prospect of Islamic Studies being taught in a once Anglican college, endorsed Mattson’s appointment:
“In establishing the “London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies”, Huron College is on the cutting edge of interfaith dialogue. With delight I endorse the appointment of Dr. Ingrid Mattson as the first occupant of that chair. She is a highly respected scholar and widely published. She is well known for her leadership in nurturing Muslim-Christian relations. The College and Community will be blessed by Dr. Mattson’s academic qualifications, and her capacity to engage people in dialogue, mutual learning and public witness to the values we hold in common as people of faith.”
The Most Reverend Fred Hiltz
Archbishop and Primate
The Anglican Church of Canada
The engaging “people in dialogue, mutual learning and public witness to the values we hold in common as people of faith” hasn’t worked out quite as well as Hiltz hoped: a non-Muslim student has been removed from one of the Islamic courses because he is not a Muslim. Ironically, the course is on Islamic Preaching – to the already converted, it seems.
As Hiltz notes, “Huron College is on the cutting edge of interfaith dialogue.”
From here:
A London, Ont., university is defending its decision to restrict access to a course that teaches Muslims how to proselytize.
The Huron College course — The Muslim Voice: Islamic Preaching, Public Speaking and Worship — was, according to the syllabus, “open to Muslim men and women who offer religious leadership and/or speak publicly about Islam on behalf of their communities.”
The school allowed a non-Muslim to enrol in the course, but then kicked him out because, they said, they didn’t want to open the course to auditors. That student, Moray Watson, is an accountant who says he is an opponent of Islamic extremism and enrolled in the course partly to test the prerequisite in the syllabus.
“I’m not allowed to take the course because I’m not a Muslim”
“[The school] gets $6.5-million [from the government]. Some of it is mine and I’m not allowed to take the course because I’m not a Muslim,” he said.
There can be little that is more insulting to a belief system than to be a champion for its antithesis while claiming to be a product of its cultural charm.
In his debate with Rowan Williams, Richard Dawkins has restated that he is “a cultural Anglican”, implying that Anglicanism bears no relation to Christianity – which Dawkins hates – whatsoever. In Dawkins’ eyes and in the eyes of many others, to be Anglican is nothing more than to maintain a veneer of benign, doddering, civilising gentility over a society that openly ridicules what it once stood for.
From here:
Early in his address, Prof Dawkins made a provocative comparison between Christian and Islamic traditions, describing himself as a ”cultural Anglican”.
”I’m grateful, by the way, to be a cultural Anglican when you think of the competition,” he added.
”If I were a cultural Muslim, I would have something to say about that faith’s appalling attitude to women and various other moral points.”
The Anglican Consultative Council is meeting in New Zealand: it is rather like an Entmoot, except it moves more slowly and is more firmly rooted in fantasy.
Considering Rowan Williams – when not waxing eloquent on sharia law and dressing as a Druid – has spent his entire tenure on attempting to find a middle ground between irreconcilable opposites, perhaps I should have made the headline “Galloping Hegelianism….”. No matter. Rowan is still at it and is joined by General Secretary Canon Kenneth Kearon, who says:
Speaking at the first plenary session of ACC15, the Canon Kenneth Kearon told delegates assembled in Auckland’s Holy Trinity Cathedral, that Anglicanism at its best “reaches out to those with whom we differ, recognising that together we will come to a deeper and far richer understanding of God than any of us could do on our own or if we only share the company of like-minded people.”
This only works if the non-like-minded people, at a minimum, hold to the truth of the basics of Christianity. As it is, the liberals Kearon is suggesting might provide a “far richer understanding of God” routinely deny the uniqueness of Christ, his divinity, his Virgin birth, his atoning sacrifice on the cross and his physical Resurrection: they believe in a different God. There is no possibility whatsoever that listening to heretics expound on false gods will shed any illumination on the objectively real God that has been worshipped by Christians for the last 2000 years.
Kearon would have us sit down with the least like-minded person we could find – Richard Dawkins, say – “reach out” to him, have endless dialogue and triumphantly emerge with a synthesised faith of – agnosticism.
I met Kearon in 2010 and suggested to him then that Anglican Communion meetings move so slowly that, by the time anything is done, there will be no Anglican Communion – in the West, at least. He stared past my head with watery blue eyes and intoned in a mild Irish brogue: “no, no, things move slowly but it will last longer than that”.
One thing is certain: when the lights finally go out at Lambeth, there will be a few dust encrusted clerical relics – eyes slowly closing, beards unkempt and stiff with congealed spittle – still having conversations on “continuing Indaba, ecumenical dialogues and inter faith issues.”
From here:
Lord Blair, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, will say rebelling against the status quo is “triumphantly admirable”, in a speech for Lent to be broadcast on Radio 4 this week.
The practising Anglican emphasises conflict as an “essential part of natural and human progress”.
Anglicans are testing this theory so enthusiastically that, in the West, they have almost progressed to the state of non-existence.
From here:
The first ever official count of the gay population has found that only one in 100 adults is homosexual.
The figure explodes the assumption – long promoted by social experts and lobbyists – that the number is up to ten times higher than this at one in ten.
The Office for National Statistics said 1.3 per cent of men are gay and 0.6 per cent of women are lesbian.
Another 0.5 per cent consider themselves bisexual, according to the figures gathered from questions put to nearly 250,000 – the biggest survey possible outside a full national census.
This means that, in total, around 1.5 per cent of the population is either homosexual or bisexual.
There isn’t much reason to suppose that the percentages would be substantially different in North America. I strongly suspect that the percentage of homosexual Anglican priests is much higher, though.
Other than the attraction of dressing up in robes, I can’t think of any convincing reason for this: it does help to explain the obsession that the Anglican church has for what it calls “the full inclusion of gays”. It has more to do with self-interest than anything else.
From here, where he had this to say about those speaking out against the Islamization of the West and the ground-zero mosque:
There is this idea floating around that those who are speaking up about Islamic radicalism must be bigots and therefore they must be ignorant. Ironically the loudest critics of Islam are usually the ones who have studied the fundamentals of Islam the most rigorously. Those crying “bigot” can be the most ignorant, and will come up with absolute howlers, real nonsense, spoken with a poker face as it were the most serious thing in the world. They decry accurate and reliable information about Islam as “Islamophobic facts,” just as the Soviet courts used to reject what they called “calumnious facts.”
When non-Muslims go into interfaith dialogue without a good understanding of Islam, they are severely handicapped. The dialogue can easily be manipulated to become an exercise in da’wa, or proclaiming Islam. A good example is the label “Abrahamic faith.” This is a Koranic term, and in Islam it stands for the idea that Abraham was a Muslim. According to the Koran, the faith of Abraham is Islam. Getting Jews and Christians to speak about “Abrahamic religions” has been a great coup – it is a manifestation of the Islamization of our religious discourse.
The problem of dialogue is especially acute if your Muslim counterpart subscribes to the doctrine of taqiyya, which favors the use of misleading impressions, or even direct lies. Everyone involved in interfaith dialogue with Muslims needs to understand that under certain circumstances – for example, if Muslims feel threatened – giving a misleading impression could be regarded as a righteous act. Not all Muslims will go down this track, but for some it is a real option, and there are plenty of clear examples of it happening all around us. In The Third Choice I give a very clear explanation of the doctrine of taqiyya, and explain how it arises in Islamic theology, how it is being taught by Muslims, and how it is being applied today.
So perhaps the suspicion that the cultural centre cum Anglican Ladies Tea-room is really just a cover for a victory mosque isn’t so far off the mark. Shocking.
A baby girl was baptised at St. Hilda’s ANiC this morning. Her mother is a young Christian woman who has been attending St. Hilda’s during the last year or so. A little less than ten years ago, every Friday lunchtime she used to walk from the high-school she attended to St. Hilda’s building for a free lunch at Freebie Friday. Part of the free lunch is a short talk on the Gospel by St. Hilda’s Pastor Paul; seeds sometimes fall on fertile ground, take root and grow, resulting in a saved sinner and great joy in heaven. The student who used to come for free lunches is now a fine young Christian who has baptised her baby and brought other Freebie Friday alumni to Sunday worship.
The last court ruling on the dispute between the Diocese of Niagara and St. Hilda’s ANiC, was that – until final ownership of the building is settled – the building must be shared between the diocese and St. Hilda’s. The diocese was given the Sunday morning time slot, so St. Hilda’s is meeting in a school gymnasium for Sunday worship. But St. Hilda’s ANiC is still present in the church building during the week and, for the moment, Freebie Friday continues.
Freebie Friday began just over ten years ago. St. Hilda’s building is located close to a high-school; every lunchtime there was a steady trickle of children past the church on their way to the mall. We wanted to try and convey to the children the idea of the free gift of salvation that Jesus offers us as the result of his atoning death on the cross: just as salvation is free, so is lunch.
The lunch is run and paid for by volunteers from St. Hilda’s and it quickly became popular: there are two sittings which attract about a hundred children every Friday. The principal of the high school regularly expresses his gratitude for this ministry.
The children sponsor two World Vision kids with their own money and buy yearly Christmas gifts for them. Recently they paid for three wheelchairs for the Free Wheelchair Mission, an organisation that provides wheelchairs as a gift of mobility for the physically disabled poor in developing countries.
Which brings me to the reason why we are fighting in the courts to keep our building. The diocese of Niagara has a congregation of about five people using St. Hilda’s building; it is managed by two priests. If they win ownership of the building, Freebie Friday, along with other ministries will stop. St. Hilda’s ANiC would not be able to continue it because it has to take place at a location close to the school; the diocese will not continue it because, even if they had the inclination, they do not have the people needed to keep the building open, let alone engage in time consuming ministries. Even their own priests admit that their congregation is not viable.
If the diocese wins the court battle for the building, after a decent interval it will be sold and bulldozed; God’s work in that place will cease.
This is why we fight.
From the Anglican Journal
Conservative Anglicans determined to stay within church
About 50 conservative Anglican leaders, including eight young theological students, gathered in Toronto for a one-day consultation on Nov. 25 and emerged with a determination to remain within the Anglican Church of Canada. They came from 16 dioceses across the country.
Rev. Brett Cane of St. Aidan’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg is chair of Anglican Essentials Federation who was quick to point out that the organization is going through a name change. He said that the “Essentials” label has negative connotations in some parts of the country. He said that the federation is loosening its connection to the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC). “We will still maintain links of fellowship with the network but we will not be organizationally tied together.”
The “Essentials” moniker does indeed have a bad reputation – amongst heretics posing as believers in the ACoC. One can only assume from this that Brett feels more at home with the heretics, so long as they are part of the Canadian Anglican establishment. But to soften the blow for those in ANiC with fragile sensibilities he says this:
Mr. Cane said that the federation will continue to meet together with those involved in ANiC, “being together in preaching, youth work and mission.” “We are all still brothers and sisters in Christ; we need to recognize their pain because it isn’t easy to leave the denomination you love.”
He said that the one day consultation dealt with “reformulating our vision” rather than issues around structure. He said he saw this conservative federation as more of a movement within the Anglican Church of Canada than an organization.
Looking forward to seeing the “reformulated vision”, Brett; although I do wonder how one can reformulate something that was never there in the first place. And I can’t help feeling that calling the Federation a “movement” is akin to calling a tortoise a Ferrari.
The concerns of conservative Anglicans reach beyond the blessing of same-sex unions, he said. There is a need for theological reflection on the uniqueness of Jesus, biblical interpretation, marriage, and the rights of children. Mr. Cane says the federation – whatever its new name – will be encouraging theological students to become engaged in these conversations.
We’re on the right track, then: more reflection and conversations; oh joy.
He said there are five key areas on which the federation will focus: giving voice to the issues at various meetings of dioceses and synods, continuing to network with other conservative organizations and denominations in Canada, international representation (Mr. Cane says he will attend the Common Cause Partnership meeting in December as an observer), encouraging conservative theologians to meet and work on the issues, and working with theological students and others under age 40 to “help the rest of the church affirm authentic Anglicanism.”
Yes, but what are you actually going to do?
Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, sent a lengthy pastoral letter to the consultation in which he acknowledged differences in biblical interpretation and expressed appreciation for the fellowship’s determination to work within the Anglican Church of Canada.
Only on Anglicans would the irony of having to have determination to stay within one’s own denomination be lost.
In his letter, the primate said that “the St. Michael Report itself acknowledges that ‘the interpretation of scripture is a central and complex matter’ and that, at times in the church’s history, ‘faithful readings have led to mutually contradictory understandings, requiring on-going dialogue and prayer toward discernment of the one voice of the gospel.’
Another example of foggy Fred’s fuzzy logic. A “faithful reading” must surely be an accurate one; so how can two faithful readings of scripture be contradictory? They can’t except in Fred’s miasma clouded little dream-world.
Mr. Hiltz said he was “deeply mindful of your conscientious struggle over this matter. I acknowledge with deep gratitude your faithfulness to Christ. I recognize your commitment to remain within the fellowship of the Anglican Church of Canada, to support its witness to the gospel and to take your place in its councils. I assure you that there continues to be a place for your voice at the table. That assurance is in keeping with an abiding conviction that as Anglicans we value the comprehensiveness so long a characteristic of our history and tradition as a church.”
To translate: we have no interest in your opinion but we’re glad you’re staying because we need your money. You’re welcome to sit in at our synods, but we will ignore you because you’re a bunch of antediluvian fundamentalist throwbacks.
