I’m currently looking for a few out of print books, if anyone knows where I can find them. If you can’t post because of my website problem, you can email me at MIKESPRENG AT MSN DOT COM . I had to spell it like that so the spam terrorists would not notice.
Here are the books I am looking for:
Treaties of Erastus
Works of John Hooper
The Works of John Lightfoot
The Eucharist has been a hot point of controversy ever since the early Church. The quotes below represent the “high church” Anglican expression of the Eucharist, during the Reformation. I would say that they produce a very orthodox example of the Anglican via media. I hope you thoroughly enjoy them. All, except the first one, were taken from Brian Douglas’s pre-publication of Ways of Knowing in the Anglican Eucharistic Tradition.
A few days ago, I wrote on the secularist attacks on the celebration of Christmas. Yet they are not the only ones who have a problem with the Church deciding to celebrate Christ’s birth on that day. In some of the more sectarian regions of fundamentalism, you will see the same thing. Every year as the Christmas season looms, they repeat the imperative first uttered by the Dr. Seuss character the Grinch: “I must stop Christmas from coming, but how?”
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O GOD, who makest us glad with the yearly remembrance of the birth of thine only Son Jesus Christ; Grant that as we joyfully receive him for our Redeemer, so we may wit sure confidence behold him when he shall come to be our Judge, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world with out end. Amen.
Collect for Christmas Day - Book of Common Prayer 1928
According to the 2001 Census, more than seven in ten people in England consider themselves Christian. But a recent church census by Christian Research found that fewer than one in ten of the population actually go to church.”
The Church and her ceremony are vital, even to salvation. In all the confusion about who is in the covenant and who is out, who is of God and who is not, we must not be tempted to draw a line based on our sins against man, as if people who practice a lesser kind of sin against man were in and people who practice a greater kind of sin against man were out. Regarding justification, sin is sin; all sin, no matter what the severity, separates us from God’s redemption. To determine who is in need of salvation and who is not, we must determine who or what a person is worshiping. We should not discern the need of salvation by a person’s degree of sin against man but by their degree of sin against God. The sin I’m referring to is idolatry. But is there a litmus test to determine whether or not a person is in a lifestyle of idolatry and not worshiping God?
It is the Christmas season and along with decorations, carols, and long lines in the shopping malls comes the medial blitz trumpeting something that casts doubt on orthodox Christianity. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious rallying point - I thought they might be poised to annoint the movie based on the atheist “children’s fantasy” The Golden Compass, but it appears that debacle will join Heaven’s Gate and Waterworld in the special class of movies that end the careers of anyone associated with it. Apparently, atheism is so trendy in Hollywood that no one in a position of authority bothered to read the book and grasp the idea that it’s lifeless message would have little appeal before sinking $200 million into it. It will be even better when the second Chronicles of Narnia film rakes in the dollars upon its release. Yet despite such a setback, I am confident that by December 25 a numnber of major media outlets will have recovered from this disappointment and made their own contributions to throwing water on the yuletide fire.
While Matthew’s account of Jesus’ words at Caesarea Philippi (discussed earlier) is the most commonly cited passage by Catholic apologists to defend the institution of the papacy, the passage concerning the “Council of Jerusalem” in Acts is most frequently cited to point to the exercise of papal authority. The setting was the controversy over St. Paul’s mission to the gentiles - particularly his insistence that they need not become Jews to follow Christ. This was anathema to some among the Jewish followers of Jesus and the resulting friction between the two factions necessitated a meeting among the leaders of the fledgling Church.
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The one thing I love so much about the Anglican church is that it actually has a standard: The Book of Common Prayer. I first began my more serious studies at a very staunch Reformed Presbyterian seminary that taught the validity of the Old Testament laws and their application to modern times - via New Covenant philosophy of course. But the irony of this particular theology is that it holds to no standard of worship! They speak of what is called the Regulative Principle, which essentially teaches that if it is not found in the New Testament it cannot be practiced. But this would limit the theology of worship to a completely fragmented state (also it would mean that no musical instruments could be used). The New Testament was not given to us in a propositional form. There is no New Testament Leviticus. The truths of the Bible were meant to be handed down to bishops and pastors, as St. Paul explains. Like all modern ethics, there must be a theological standard set in order for the standard to maintain its form through generations. And it was precisely the bishops and pastors of the Church of England (with the help of other Reformers) that were able to set this standard for us in these confusing times of moral relativism.
The question is: Does your church have a theological standard for worship? Or, can the pastor make up whatever he wants, whenever he wants? Is he bound to the history of the Church? Or, can he submit to the trends of modernity? If he can’t conform to modernity, who says that he can’t? Is there any historical succession of ethical standard within your authority structure? What will happen to your movement in three or so generations from now? Will your “conservative” worship survive?
To conclude, I would like to refer my readers to what I believe is the result of standardless worship in the Church, known as the Emergent movement.
Anglican theology centers around church unity. Holding to the via media (both pre-reformation as well as post-reformation tradition), Anglicanism seeks to be a part of the entirety of God’s plan unfolding. Anglicanism fragments very slowly; much slower than any substantial Protestant movement. It took much longer for the liberals to break the walls of the Anglican church than the other movements within Christendom. This is an example of the stability that the Anglican faith offers. Many of us believe that the unity that God speaks of in John 17:11 and Ephesians 4:13; 5:27, will involve, at the very least, the format of the Anglican movement: ancient faith coupled with future faith!
From my experience and research within Anglicanism, I have found that the oldest and seemingly most stable Continuing Anglican movement, is the Reformed Episcopal Church. With that said (and I respect any disagreements on that statement), I would like to present the REC’s format for adopting other churches outside of the Anglican faith. It is not a model that requires a seeker group of people to just drop everything and cause chaos within their current congregation, but it is a model of courtship, one that involves discipleship and charity! This link will take you to the REC document that describes this process.
Having in the previous pat of this essay summarized the beliefs of the Catholic Church concerning the papacy and pointed out where Anglicans would disagree, I will now move to the consideration of the most common passage used to support Catholic teaching on the subject and take a close look to see if the claims meet a reasonable standard of evidence.
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As an Anglo-Catholic, I am quite accustomed to being tagged with the moniker “Catholic without a pope”. While it is certainly true in one sense, there is an underlying assumption that the papacy is of the essence of catholicity and the rejection of the papal office is somehow a deficiency of Anglicanism in this regard. At the heart of this issue is what does it mean to be catholic and can there be a “reformed catholicism”? We can argue about Mary, purgatory, ad infinitum but no question is more at the heart of the issue than that of the papacy. If what Rome claims for its see is true, then all the other questions fall into place simply because Rome says so. If what Rome says is not true, then while the papacy may be an instrument of unity, this unity could maintain error as well as truth. What then does the evidence say?
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In this article, Metropalitan Hierotheos S. Vlachos speaks of how Christianity is a type of psychotherapy; how certain liturgical aspects of the faith heal the soul and conform us into the image of Christ!
If liturgy is a type of psychotherapy, then what type of psychotherapy would one want to embrace? Would one really want to embrace a psychotherapy that involves modern concepts brought about by hippies and overzealous and undereducated converts? Or, would one want to embrace a psychotherapy that involves ancient concepts from “canonical times,” brought about by those who were the very inventors of biblical theology?