England is forcasting bleak days for her Church. It seems that one of the hindrances of growth for the Church of England is the fact that the Muslims implement an actual heritage within their belief, whereas Christianity’s heritage is now so shallow that it is laughable. David Voas, a professor of population studies at the Institute for Social Change at the University of Manchester, said:
“The difficulty is in retaining the children who have churchgoing parents. So long as churchgoing is something that gets you laughed at, so long as there is a social stigma attached to being a churchgoing young person, it will be difficult to reverse the trend.” He said that young Muslims operated in a different environment. “Being religious is a way that you show you are different, that you are proud of your heritage. One of the ways young Muslims assert their identity is by being more observant than their parents.“
In order to grow the kingdom to the extent of finally overcoming Islam, it is clear that we must begin to emphasis the visible Church and her call to take dominion over all spiritual realms, as the book of Genesis clearly commands. Enough with the Gnostic notions of piety and doctrinal prestige! We need the faith of our fathers that once proclaimed a realistic “religion.” Here is an example of our current downward spiral within the realm of spiritual dominion and religion as well our leanings toward Evangelicalism (site):
“People who don’t go to church may be turned off by a recent trend toward more utilitarian church buildings. By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio over any other option, unchurched Americans prefer churches that look more like a medieval cathedral than what most think of as a more contemporary church building.”
The first article I quoted moves on to state that Evangelicalism is obsorbing much of the Church growth. This explains much of the loss of cultural identity within England (America, likewise). Christians that adhere to the more Evangelical worldview can not be dignified in the culture, because they simply do not have one. To them, the Christian faith is about the invisible but not the visible, which in turn brings us to a Gnostic faith that is not true to the Lord’s Prayer of having God’s “kingdom come… on earth as it is in heaven.” God wills for us to take action in every area of our faith and life. There is no neutrality! There is no aspect of life that is off limits to God’s will; be it liturgy, architecture, music, art, or overall vocation.
To build a Christian heritage, and pass this heritage down to children that can be dignified through it, means embracing a faith that actually makes itself known here on earth. The early Church helps us to understand just what this looks like, and the medieval Church helps us understand what has developed from the early Church. But the modern Church is no longer drinking from this well, and insists on creating new traditions of multiculturalism and relativism. No longer is the Anglo-Catholic culture meaningful to today’s Christian; the very tradition that founded America itself.
This reluctance to administrate the Anglican culture may very well be due to the fear of it being rejected by more third-world types of culture. But countries such as Africa and Mexico are completely eager to embrace the Anglican culture. Neutral Evangelicalism seeks to be the answer to this pre-fabricated fear of man! But not only is Evangelicalism fighting its own arson, but the deterrent they are using is also a phoney - it is not nearly as neutral as they think! They are not neutral but rather they are modernists, embracing nearly every post-Christendom culture that they possible can in order to supposedly be “all things to all people.” When St. Paul made this statement, he was not referring to our faith at large, but rather his apologetic (theological tactics to persuade) as well as his overall demeanor.
O Gracious Father, we humbly beseech thee for thy holy Catholic Church; that thou wouldest be pleased to fill it with all truth, in all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, establish it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of him who died and rose again, and ever liveth to make intercession for us, Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen
Systematic doctrine is almost never enough. Here is a poetic stance on the crucifixion, sent by our Cantor, Jeff Holston.
___________________________________
Philosophers have measured mountains,
Fathomed the depth of seas, of states, of kings,
Walked with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them: Sin and Love.
Who would know Sin, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through every vein.
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
Something that I have noticed within many Protestant circles is that theological discussion - especially in the “Bible only” camps - can sometimes actually be an hindrance for the Christian’s sanctification. Yes, that’s right! What happens is that the groups of Christians thrive on reinventing the wheel, becoming preoccupied with “wrestling with the Scriptures,” and such, rather than living and believing the Scriptures. It becomes a sort of legalism, where one feels sanctified because they are “in the Word.” I hate to say this, but you are not in the Word just because you are in a wrestling match with the Bible. The Word is the logos, the living being of Christ that involves the spiritual formation of souls. The Word is not God reduced to the English or even Greek and Hebrew vocabulary. The Word of God is His revelatory will for mankind found within the Scriptures, but as they illuminate themselves through the authority of His Church, not as they illuminate themselves through Nelson Printing Press, or any other schmo that takes his own authority to become the standard-bearer.
The Word of God is what the Bible is saying and doing, not just what the Bible said or once said. Some theology-buffs may now be howling outside their windows through the authority of what their seminary teacher taught them about hermeneutics, so please allow me to qualify: Certainly there is a place for what is called The Grammatical-Historical Hermeneutic, but what happens is that this form of studying the Bible is often not properly embraced, even by seminarians, and one suddenly becomes a theologian overnight from proof-texting verses; then goes to his friends and spreads this germ, and born is a Bible study.
This sounds like your typical overzealous Baptist/Evangelical, right? Yes, but it is within the higher churches, also, just on a more sophisticated level. What happens here is that rather than wrestling with Bible verses, they wrestle with theological positions that have not yet blossomed. They create false dichotomies of argumentation by splitting a traditional doctrine in two and then pitching them against each other. One perfect example of this would be the “Law and Gospel” debate; as if the Gospel does not include Law and the Law does not include Gospel. Or how about this one: The Five Points of Calvinism; not that the Five Points are heretical, but the five points cannot be understood very easily outside the context of many other biblical concepts; and after one understands these concepts, the Five Points begin to look like unreasonable dichotomies. Yes, that is right. When something so powerful like the Gospel is reduced to five propositions, mass friction is bound to happen, resulting in explosion.
If you are looking for dogma, as you should be, then look no further than the ancient creeds, as well as the catechism and Canons of the Church, which will lead you to all sorts of ethical and soteriological standards, including standards of worship. But, if you are not looking for dogma, and you simply want to feel like a theologian, then there is always a divisive debate-circle or modern/independent church, just waiting to suck you in.
The doctrine of purgatory has fueled some of the most passionate division amongst Catholics and Protestants ever since the Reformation. But with a closer look at the doctrine and its different latitudes of dogma within the history of the Church, we may be able to put to rest the two extremes that continue to battle against each other.
I recently heard a very popular Evangelical pastor preach a very common message on the radio. He said (and I have heard Reformed say this) that we should be always ready to give our testimony to others. What is a “testimony?” Ever since the days of the Enlightenment, and likely even before then, Christians have equated the Gospel with some sort of ethical conversion, “I was once that and now I am this.” Now, I am all for giving glory to God in what he does, and what he has done in the saints, this is why I like to celebrate the feast days. But to equate the Gospel to ethical conversion is a serious mistake.
Any self-help group can take a drug-addicted or other socially oppressed person off the streets and “clean up their life.” In fact, the world has a better track record, in these modern days, of doing such a thing. As a former minister to homeless and incarcerated, I witnessed much of this sort of secular rehabilitation: Many people could not decide between the rehabilitation of the Church or the rehabilitation of the cult of the state (the state issues them license to minister), because they are both able to help.
Change in social and civil ethic is certainly a result of the Gospel taking root in a person, but it is not the essence of the Gospel. The essence of the Gospel, in regards to the change in the elect, is the change in which what the new Christian worships. The new Christian is now no longer an idolater! Now, the new Christian worships the living God! But, this worship is not primarily ethical in the social and even personal sense. This worship that the new Christian begins to give themselves to is corporate and ceremonial. The new Christian is now identified with what Christ spoke about: The Eucharist, Baptism, and the Church in its entirety.
The temptation within the Church has been to begin to act like God, proclaiming who is and is not elect on the basis of one’s inner morality and, as we have discussed, their outward ethics. But we do not know the heart like God knows that heart. We only know what we have been given; the outward workings of Christ: The Eucharist, Baptism, and the Church as a whole. We have not been given jurisdiction of the heart, as judge.
By teaching the testimony doctrine, Evangelical theology has been teaching, not that we are idolaters, but that we are simply breaching modern ethics. With this doctrine anyone can be a Christian that lives a moral life and inserts the name of Jesus in their life. Proper and submissive worship is not vital in this doctrine.
The drastic change in the Christian life can be seen IN THE VERY WAY AND FREQUENCY THAT THEY WORSHIP! Is the Christian in submission to Godly forms of worship, or is the Christian desiring “worship” that appeases their flesh through modern worldliness? Worship involves the “evolving” manner of the liturgical actions as first portrayed by Christ and his Apostles. You will be judged in the end by this Christological standard. So my question is: Why would one risk all of this by worshiping within the context of modern paradigms, presuppositions, and culture? My other question is: Could many be deceived into thinking they are “saved” because they have reached a higher level of morality but not a higher level of worship?
Why would one want to leave a life of fleshly entertainment just to enter a ceremony of fleshly entertainment, such as found in most Evangelical churches? How much has really happened in our hearts if we cannot leave the worlds liturgy to the world?
Roman Catholic spirituality differs from Protestant spirituality in a number of ways, including the obvious cases of ecclesiology and soteriology. But what else defines the spirituality of the Roman Church? I would like to draw the attention of my reader to that of the more mystical side of the Roman Church which includes monasticism, spiritual giftedness and other more mystical avenues of grace, in order to give a concise and positive outlook of Roman spirituality.
To obtain a humble and contrite heart one must lean on the external of humility itself. What this means is that doctrinal study and even prayer itself are not adequate measures, for these two matters are meant to lead to a greater plain within our lives: sacrifice. In order to be humble we must first be humbled. Metroplotitan Nafpaktos Hierotheos in Orthodox Psychotherapy (p. 180-189) quotes the Fathers :
Heartache is necessary because even the strictest ascetic life is bogus without it…Many people have worked and continue to work without pain, but because of its absence they are strangers to purity and out of communion with the Holy Spirit, because they have turned aside from the severity of suffering…’We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God’ (Acts 14, 220).’…Drench your cheeks with the weeping of your eyes…St. Neilos the Ascetic teaches us to pray first for the gift of tears. Likewise if we pray with tears all we ask will be heard…The Fathers teach that we are cleansed from the passions “either through voluntary sufferings of through involuntary misfortunes…When the voluntary ones come first, involuntary ones do not follow.”
The Lenten season is approaching us! It would be an honoring thing to begin to pray about just what we will be “giving up” for Lent. This is not some sort of sacrifice offered to God, rather it is a sacrifice offered unto our souls; a fast, in order that we may obtain a contrite heart.
Do you reward yourself with much luxury? Do you do it even in the name of God (using His name in vain) by claiming that this luxury that you have bought is for your family or ministry - ultimately blessing yourself? I pray that we would examine ourselves as to whether or not we are living our lives according to how St. Paul has instructed us: by presenting our bodies as living sacrifices (Romans 12:1). Through the pain of fasting we can find ourselves (through God, of course) and thus this pain eventually turns to joy (Psalm 126:6). Do you have no pain? If not, obtain it! Do you have pain? If so, rejoice in it! If we cannot find pain to purify us, God will certainly find some for us, and this is not likely to be a pleasant surprise. In fact, it will be gut-wrenching as we not only repent of our uncleanliness but also our unwillingness to become sacrificial.
As we become sacrificial in our lives, we ultimately become “unsacrificial” in our attitudes. In other words, what we formally called sacrifice we will now call pleasure. The sacrifice is no longer sacrifice to our souls and thus we grow deeper in our sacrificial relationship with God. We are now strengthened to go deeper in battle without being maimed; or, as Jacob experienced: hip out of joint!
This leads us to the doctrine of penance, a post for another day.
I have found over the last few years I almost stop even talking about Calvinism. Yeah, I believe it but I started thinking about the role of the church and the role of people in salvation. I guess, in seed form I was becoming more catholic in my understanding of salvation. More of a corporate aspect than the individual aspect. More of the BODY and less of the middle toe aspect of things.”
This quote was from a recent dialog I had with a friend. It sums up the typical mind of a Christian that is outgrowing the Evangelical and even the Reformed faith.
Salvation has everything to do with the Church and how God uses the Church to bring us to Him and His eternity. Salvation does not come from nature, although God uses nature for His purpose. Salvation does not come from invisibleness of some sort, even in doctrinal format. “Salvation” comes from God transcending to His people in way of Covenant!
Some may say that that is “covenantal doctrine.” It is, but it is not the doctrine in and of itself that saves us. Yes, Paul says that faith comes by “hearing” the Word of God: God’s covenantal faithfulness and how we become a part of His plan, despite us being law-breakers. That is a humbling thing, but it is not our humility that saves us. Our humility is a result of our salvation rather than a cause. The real cause of our salvation is Christ’s willingness to die for His people!
Doctrine verifies what God is doing in our lives! Yes, in OUR lives, in the world He gave US. This great people that God has put together under the reign of His son gives us faith, which is necessary to be a part of this salvific plan. But it is God’s grace that brings us to this point; His mercy in action; His eschatological placement of us in an eternal plan, as opposed to the temporal plan of life on earth that results in death.
The preaching of the word, evangelistically speaking, verifies what God has already begun in the heart of the recipient. Our doctrine only points to a greater reality, a reality that cannot be summed up in “Five Points” or one or two sentences, or even sermons. Our doctrine is merely a tug on the garment to turn around and look at the bigger picture of what God has already been doing. This is something that I have been convicted of through the past couple years. I came to a point in my studies, as a Presbyterian, to where I could really go no further, doctrinally speaking. Certainly there was a point of arrogance there, too: that I had arrived. Then the catholic reality hit me! I could study doctrine my whole life but miss the main point of God and His people. After all, didn’t Christ say that the real summary of His entire Law was to “love thy neighbor?” My Christian brother is my neighbor, in the fullest sense.
Doctrine is necessary to protect God’s people from heresy and to free their minds to be “lead by the Spirit,” as Paul says in Galatians 5:25. Doctrine gives us the ability to crucify the flesh so that we can walk in the Spirit. It does not give us a mental library so that we can show God at the end of our days all the knowledge we have stored. In fact, St. Paul says that knowledge puffs up (1 Cor. 8:1). This does not mean that we learn doctrine and then purposefully forget about it. This means that we learn doctrine and then purposefully move on to love our neighbor.
If, for instance, you are not a part of Christ Church then you do not love your neighbor. In fact, you hate them! Jesus says that a there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for his friend (John 15:13). If you have been in a scuffle with a person at church and you have fallen away from Christ’s Church because of that, then you hate that person (not to mention Christ). You should “lay down your life” for that person by doing everything possible to help them, even if it means dying.
This type of Anglican theology reminds me of the movie The Mission. The first part of the movie shows a priest floating down a river to his death because he chose to love those that were called to the kingdom. This is the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ! You can take your Bible and worship it all you want, and you can hang your theological degrees on your front porch, but you are nothing if you are not laying your life down for your neighbor (Church - visible or invisible).
Here is a great example of Anglican theology. Dr. Peter Leithart, (currently) a Presbyterian that has been heavily influenced by Eastern Orthodoxy, and has even been caught teaching in Anglican establishments, writes this in his book Against Christianity:
“Paul did not agree that the gospel would be true even if no one lived out the gospel. Paul’s gospel had an empirical test built into it; if no one was transformed, then the message that announced the transformation could not possibly be true. The first and chief defense of the gospel, the first “letter of commendation” not only for Paul but for Jesus, is not an argument but the life of the Church conformed to Christ by the Spirit in service and suffering. A community of sinners whose corporate life resembles Christ - that is the Church’s first apologetic. The very existence of such a city is our main “argument.”
What does salvation actually look like? It looks like the people of God conforming to Christ’s image [I took the word obedience out so I would not stumble those that are nervous about RC and Arminian theology]! Salvation is not the Bible, nor is it the vocabulary in the Bible. It is not a one time emotional experience. Salvation is God’s good grace: His mercy in action. It is what God has done and is doing for His people - changing their lives and producing life. Salvation is eschatological; it revolves around the very foundation of the creative order and its redemption, and the time that it takes to redeem this creative order. Salvation is completely inclusive to God working in history and making His elect a part of this redemptive history! His plan did not start in the 60’s Jesus movement. It did not start in the Reformation. God’s plan of salvation started in the Garden of Eden and extended through creation from there. From the birth of Seth, God’s people “began to call upon the name of the Lord.”
How is this Via Media? This theology is Via Media because it describes not just an institution in and of itself as salvific, but it describes an entire people, including but not limited to ages of people such as the Reformation. This theology is both ecclesiastical as well as spiritual, and symbolic as well as doctrinal. Anglican theology is (or should be) influenced from both sides: Roman/Eastern, as well as “American” (Catholic/Orthodox as well as Protestant). It is, as my mentor/pastor says, “the best of both worlds.”
Contents:
- Background of The Apocrypha
- Canonical Development of The Apocrypha
- Historical Development of The Apocrypha
- Anglicanism and The Apocrypha
- Conclusion
The Eucharist has been a hot point of controversy ever since the Reformation. 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.
That title should get the attention of quite a few Anglicans as well as Presbyterians. I have nothing substantial to say about the relation between Anglicanism and theonomy in this post, other than the fact that something needs to be said about their relation. The Church of England was, and still is in many ways, theocratic. I intend to research this in 2008 and hope to have a fine 20 page-or so article on it sometime in the Spring.
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?
Click here to listen to an interview with Bishop N.T. Wright. If you do not know who he is, you should, since not only is he the third ranking Bishop of The Church of England, but he has proven to be highly influential to the smallest of Evangelical congregations in America. I suspect God will continue to use him mightily to douse the violent flames of the radical sectarians and fundamentalists.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for dispensational believers to begin to understand the more historic and Anglican (Reformed Catholic) view of theology is their insistence on clinching tightly to, what I call, proof-text theology. Proof-text theology has, like all theological camps, its own hermeneutic. Its particular hermeneutic involves…yes, you guessed it, proof-texting. I’m sure you have heard, when discussing theology with your dispensational friends, how this particular theology is not found in the Bible and that particular theology is not found in the Bible and that there simply is not enough “scriptural support” for your Anglican argument.
This is a paper I wrote some time ago against a popular error that states we must preach to ourselves because we are always in a state of legalism. I completely and emphatically disagree with this. In fact, I think it is a form of bondage and that it brings a Christian into, what many call, hyper Calvinism.