A Living Text

In Acts 15 the Jerusalem Council criticizes early Christians who taught with no commission from the Church: 

…we have heard that some persons from us have troubled you with words, unsettling your minds, although we gave them no instructions.

We can infer from this that to teach and preach authoritatively in those days, you needed instructions from the Church. Further, as Paul and Timothy visited churches in various cities, they “…delivered to them for observance the decisions which had been reached by the apostles and elders who were at Jerusalem.” The Church had authority, what she decided was promulgated to the churches throughout the world, with the inference that it was to be obeyed. 

These facts should have implications for the Church today. Her authority cannot be grasped by the self-appointed, and her decisions must have force on the individual, so long as they do not contradict the already revealed will of God.

Is there anything more touchy-feely liberal than a bunch of groups “listening” to each other at Lambeth? Suppose this was the Arian crisis and the church of that day had just stopped to listen to each other rather than being nasty and mean with those troublesome doctrines. What would the results have been? Certainly we don’t have to fight over everything, but when the church cannot fight over basic principles, it has become the anti-church.

Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says of G.K. Chesterton:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts of Catholicism are relived not to have to defend Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time-servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you’re new to mail.

Rod Dreher (Orthodox via the Catholic Church) comments on this:

Boy, does this feel familiar to me, and I can see now (from my own experience) why converts tend to wear on cradle believers (and vice versa: little exasperates a convert more than a cradle believer’s apparent inability to get excited about the Amazing Wonderful Church). Again, I can’t discern the justice of Gopnik’s judgment re: Chesterton’s writing, because I’ve never read enough of his apologetics to know. But this feels right to me. It also gives me insight into why I don’t have and never had that convert’s glow about Orthodoxy. I didn’t believe when I left it that Catholicism was a jury-rigged makeshift system, nor did I believe that Orthodoxy was a uniquely fabulous thing. I’m glad not to have those illusions about either faith, but it does take some of the romance out of the thing.

Here it is.

For some time I have had a vision, which is the founding of an intentionally Anglican city or community. A place where worship and life are mixed, people live next to one another, and things like a University exist to further a Western, Protestant vision of the Christian life.

Several months ago Professor Stephen Lake contacted me because he shares a version of the same vision. This added to my excitement and we talked about next steps. From these discussions has come a new blog:

Anglican Community Project

This blog is initially being written by Professor Lake and myself, and is open to contributions from other like-minded individuals. Please check it out and contribute your thoughts. Perhaps someday it will lead to the actual creation of such a community - this is my fervent hope.

The article is called Splitting Up, and says in part:

Last year the Church of the Resurrection in suburban West Chicago closed its doors and put its building up for sale. The Episcopal congregation had suffered membership losses 14 years earlier when some conservative members left to start their own church, also called the Church of the Resurrection, in nearby Glen Ellyn. The new congregation later aligned itself with the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMIA), which is connected to the Anglican Church in Rwanda.

The new Church of the Resurrection later experienced its own split, with some members leaving to launch the Church of the Great Shepherd—also affiliated with AMIA—in Wheaton. The Church of the Great Shepherd eventually closed its doors, but not before a 2004 split led to the formation of the Church of the Savior back in West Chicago. During this time the ranks of St. Mark’s, an Episcopal congregation in Glen Ellyn, had been swelling—until the Episcopal Church consecrated an openly gay bishop in 2003, whereupon many St. Mark’s members left to form All Souls, still another AMIA church, in Wheaton. Meanwhile, another split at the original Church of the Resurrection in West Chicago, which had experienced renewed growth, led to the creation of the Church of the Resurrection Anglican, a church which is overseen by the archbishop of Uganda. So now there are two Resurrection churches in the area, both formed in exodus from the original—now defunct—Church of the Resurrection, and both affiliated with African Anglican bodies, not with the Episcopal Church in the United States, sometimes abbreviated as TEC.

This is unsettling. I think that the opposition to TEC is the only thing uniting AMiA/CANA and others. You can see from this article that on women’s ordination we are fractured. Obviously on the ground we are
fractured. And I don’t see any way for Anglo-Catholics and Reformed Anglicans to get along in the long run - the doctrinal differences are real, and cannot be hidden.

The author asks: “The question for the Anglican Mission in the Americas is whether antagonism toward the Episcopal Church is enough to shape a coherent Anglican identity in a complex global setting.”

I would answer, “no.” There is no way that antagonism is enough of an identity. The identity is to be found in Biblical saturation and a mature theology as articulated by early Anglican divines - but where is that happening?

We had the privilege of having Bishop Alexis worship with us on Sunday, as he passed through the area. He is preparing for GAFCON, I meeting that I have doubt about. My doubts are in the vein of why have another meeting that does nothing to sever the ties to heretics? But Bishop Alexis said GAFCON will not be about the debates and arguments, he said “Either you believe the Bible, or you don’t. Either you accept the Apostles Creed, or you don’.”

In effect, no more arguments, it’s settled. He says GAFCON will be about future direction, mission, and planting churches. Praise God for that!

In the latest issue of First Things is a long letter from N.T. Wright to the magazine responding to some comments made by Fr. Neuhaus. Within this long letter, Wright makes some very telling observations on two churches. First, on Rome, Wright says:

…the “centering authority” in the most ancient church was of course Jerusalem; and then the five great sees, working together; and only gradually, and for a long time controversially, Rome.

Then, discussing the new heavens and new earth that will come when Jesus returns, and Neuhaus’ knock on Wright as sounding like Joseph Smith, Wright says:

I suspect that one of the reasons the Mormons were able to gain credence for their very concrete eschatalogical expectation was that the Western Protestant church, precisely at that period, was eliminating the ancient concrete eschatalogical expectation.

Writing about Richard Hooker and his conception of the Church of England, C.S. Lewis says:

The prince as ‘Supreme Head’ of the Church is, in fact, the bottle-neck through which the decisions of the local Church-Nation pass in order to become law. And that Nation-Church owes an allegiance to the universal Church: yet the universal Church might swerve from scripture and we should then have to disobey her. (That is, all parts of her, except ourselves, might conceivably become ‘unsound’.) Where then does ultimate sovereignty lie? I think Hooker would answer, ‘Nowhere except in Heaven’. He allows no unambiguous sovereignty on earth either civil or ecclesiastical. Judged by the standards of Austin and of modern Catholicism, the church and state which Hooker welds together are both headless. And I do not think this is an oversight. Hooker felt no need either for omnicompetent prince or for infallible Pope. He was much more afraid of tyrannies and idolatries than of ambiguities and deadlocks.

Last night Bishop Thad Barnum preached at our church, and it was one of those knock your socks off, challenging sermons. All it did was reiterate the Gospel, and the fact that we are called to serve, but it did so with intensity and clarity, in such a fashion that it made you think “oh yeah, that’s what it’s all about.” We’ve had several of these sermons lately, that are on core issues and serve as sharp reminders to wake up and renew what we have. In the middle of the weekly scrum, the preaching has served to re-focus me on what is important, and I think that is what good preaching should do. 

Mankind is all too frail, and we forget quickly. I usually can’t remember what a sermon was about two weeks after it was preached, and I think that is normal. That is why sermons have to recur every week, and why they have to cycle back to the core things over and over again. If not, we lose sight of what we thought and felt when we first started walking with Jesus, we forget. It is perhaps daunting to the preacher to cast his words upon the waters, knowing that they will be mostly forgotten. But the affect is what matters, and the affect over the course of a lifetime, is enormous. 

So, thank you Bishop Barnum for brining it yesterday, and casting clarity on the main thing - Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected.