Ministers in Skirts

This article should be required reading for the new ACNA – especially the priests and bishops. An excerpt:

But the existence of debate within the Church tells us far more about the muddiness of our hearts than it does about the obscurity of any text. Those Christians who do see what these passages say will frequently be sucked into a tactical debate because they foolishly believe that their opponents have accepted the authority of the text. But this is not the case at all. Evangelical feminists have not accepted the (patriarchal) authority of the text; they are simply at that early stage of subversion where open defiance would be counterproductive of their purposes.

This should be a litmus test for all new ordinations to the diaconate and priesthood in ACNA – where do you stand on women’s ordination? Pro-WO folks should be resisted and told to go to TEC or elsewhere (ELCA, RCA, etc.).

African priests in America

The Roman Catholic Church is experiencing something like what Anglicans are. See this story.

True Happiness

…true happiness is to be united to God by a virtuous life, whereas the only true cause of misery is to be separated from God.

-Jean-Claude Larchet, The Theology of Illness

Merry Christmas!

Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king’s son.
He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment.
The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness.
He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor.
They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure, throughout all generations.
He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth.
In his days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth.
He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.
They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his enemies shall lick the dust.

Browsers

So is anyone out there on a Mac using Flock, Camino or Opera and willing to tell me about them? Are they worth trying? I’m sort of tired of Safari and Firefox.

As We Forgive

Rachel and I finally sat down to watch As We Forgive this week. It’s a movie made by Laura Waters Hinson, a great Christian that we know in Washington, D.C. We’ve been waiting to watch it for a long time, but finally bought it last week. 

The movie is about reconciliation. It is a documentary about two women in Rwanda and two men. The men were killers during the genocide of the 1990s. The women are victims, they lost many family members to these men. Rwanda was ripped apart as murder covered the country. Thousands and thousands of men were imprisoned after the genocide. But years later there was a huge backlog of court cases and these men were still rotting in jail. The government decided to release the murderers if they confessed their crimes and reconciled.

So the murderers went home. And this is the story of two of them and how they try to reconcile with the families of those whom they killed. It is short, about an hour. It is moving, you will probably cry. It is challenging, you think, ‘could I do that?’ Something like this could probably not happen in America. Rwandans still live in an agrarian society where they know all of their neighbors and have to see each other every day. When a killer returns, he doesn’t get to live in an anonymous townhouse, he has to live next to the people whose lives he destroyed. 

Ultimately, this movie is a vivid, vivid picture of the tangible grace of God in Jesus the Messiah. What enables forgiveness to happen in these murder victims is the reality that God forgave, so they must forgive. I don’t know that there is a more real testimony on the earth today to the forgiveness of God for us than the people of Rwanda. Watch this movie!

 

Where to?

I get the feeling that things are going to wind down in the AMiA and CANA now. They’ll go on, but some of the wind is out of the sails. Things may wind down.

In some ways this is a good thing. Hopefully the impetus will really be mission now. The conservative, suburban churches can get past the fascination with politics, meetings, Lambeth conferences and machinations of the liberals. We are back to just plain doing church, getting in the trenches and getting on with things. Or at least we should be.

The initial revolution is over, now it is time for a real Reformed Anglicanism to take root. I propose that it is focused on the good life as defined by Aquinas and the Biblical witness. It should emulate what Jones and Wilson lay out as Medieval Protestantism:

…a love of beauty, an Augustinian appreciation for the sovereignty of God, the chasm between pagan and Christian, the centrality of laughter, the importance of celebration, a covenantal wholeness of family and society, a submissive hierarchicalism, respect for good traditions, sphere sovereignty, anti-papalism, a harmonization of technology and humanity, an agrarian calm, disciplined silence, the glory of a unified Holy Church, a skepticism of novelty, and a triumphant, peaceful hope for the future of Christendom.

We cannot be content with a tepid, Maranatha praise and worship, 1970′s, liturgy-lacking Anglicanism. We will need Bishops and leaders who are rooted in good theology. We must reverse women’s ordination, we must evangelize the marginalized. It’s time to move on and get busy.

Medieval Protestantism

In the book Angels in the Architecture, Doug Jones and Doug Wilson offer a summary of a Protestant vision for middle earth which is a good starting point for Anglicans and all other Protestants. They say:

…a love of beauty, an Augustinian appreciation for the sovereignty of God, the chasm between pagan and Christian, the centrality of laughter, the importance of celebration, a covenantal wholeness of family and society, a submissive hierarchicalism, respect for good traditions, sphere sovereignty, anti-papalism, a harmonization of technology and humanity, an agrarian calm, disciplined silence, the glory of a unified Holy Church, a skepticism of novelty, and a triumphant, peaceful hope for the future of Christendom.

The new reading plan

I am endlessly frustrated by the stacks and stacks of books that are unread in my house. So, I have devised a new reading plan: just like debt, I will snowball it. Start with the smallest books and move up to the bigger ones before finally tackling things like “The Existence and Attributes of God” by Charnock.

This week, my new plan paid its first dividend as I finished The End of the Historical-Critical Method by Gerhard Maier. 1 down, 3,458 to go.

John C. Wright interview

John C. Wright is a sci-fi writer, a technical writer, and one cool dude. Read his stuff if you like good books. Here is a great interview about his newer work.